In Another Country (4 page)

They were still in the sun, but not for much longer. She watched him eyeing the shadow. She wanted him not to worry. I see it will be cold, she said. But it isn't now. So they ate and drank on the ledge, without haste. But then he was brisk, stood up, said they must get ready, and walked away, round that edge of the cave out of sight, she supposed to pee. She went round the other corner, taking her washbag, and met him back at the stream where it toppled over, and face to face across the water they cleaned their teeth. Very domestic, he said. Then back in their alcove he said she must put on everything she had with her, which she did, or almost. And when they were on her rug and under his blanket, lying on ferns and their heads on the rucksacks, and the wren chirred loudly against the steady engine of the cave, she said, Funny how I put on clothes to go to bed with you. Then she added, I'll tell you something, though my big sister told me I shouldn't. Why did she tell you you shouldn't? Owen asked. She said I'd be more in your power if you knew. I see, said Owen. Don't tell me then, if you believe what she says. But you're not in my power, I don't want that power. Whether or not, said Lou. It's nothing much, only silly. Before I come and see you, because I never know what we'll do, I always go and buy myself something pretty, just in case. Like your red dress? No, for underneath. I see, said Owen. But you don't, said Lou. The thing is you don't. No, I never do, he said. Now, for example, said Lou, I'd freeze to death if you did. All the same, said Owen. What else does your sister say? She says I should ask you if you are serious. But you know that I'm serious. That's what I tell her, said Lou. I tell her you are
very
serious.

Night moved in quietly and very gradually. The evening let go its colours, their great variety, into the state of pallor into which the dark could seep. Stars flowered delicately on a fainter and fainter wash of blue and pink and green; then hardened, began to glint and pulse, on the risen tide of their own element, blackness. Under a house roof or under the street lamps you never see them coming into their energy. You have to be out, lying under them, aware of the thinness of the habitable skin of the earth, and the stars in a dome come crowding over you and the spaces between them fill with black infinity.

Sheltered from half the sky under their eave of rock, Owen and Lou had the cave behind them. They lay in the mouth of it as though in the bowl and under the lid of a half-open shell, and the din of the engines of water, as everything else was hushed, entered their consciousness through tunnels in the rock and tunnels in their ears, totally. Lou doubted whether thoughts and the unspeaking voice you employ within your head would be at all effective, as a self-assertion, against that constant pulse. She understood why the boy Owen had fled and wondered where out of earshot he had gone and shivered. Her face was cold but in his arms under the blanket in all her clothes the rest was warm. After a while she said, My sister says we never do anything ordinary. She says it's not grown-up to only do extraordinary things together. Your sister…, Owen began. Then he asked had she, Lou, ever been underground, really underground, in a deep cave, and put the lights out? Because if she hadn't, they could do that together one day, if she liked. He knew somebody who would take them down. I mean so you can see a true darkness. Really underground with the lights out you can't see the hand in front of your face, put it as close and stare at it as hard and for as long as you will. Lou said no thank you, where they were now, together with the noise of it, was dark enough. Owen agreed. I thought I had to, he added, for my work. I was with someone who knew about the creatures that can live in dark like that. They are white and don't have any eyes. I thought I ought to see them so he took me down and showed me how they live. You and your work, said Lou. Yes, said Owen, and the reason I wanted to hear this cave again is so that I won't forget how much there is on earth we'll never see.

Lou wanted him to say that her being there with him was some consolation, at least, for what he couldn't see; but he stayed silent, the silence filled up with the noise and soon she said, You see a lot, you understand the way life hangs together. I hadn't thought much about the web of life till I met you. It's torn, he said, it's tearing worse and worse before my eyes, day and night, we mend what bits we can but it's all a rearguard fighting, little halts we make now and then that feel like victories, but the way is hurrying to ruin as everyone in the business, whichever side they're on, knows very well. His voice was level; a level sadness. And in the end what does it matter? That in there, that machine, will go on in some shape or form whatever we do. When the accident of our being here is cancelled out, what's left will start up again without us, by the old laws. Which is another reason for always being able to hear that noise. They are the mechanics that will survive us when by our doing
—
melting the ice, raising the seas, opening the deluges of the firmament
—
we have helped them wipe us out. And there we are.

Owen was a long time silent. They both were. The pulse of inhuman life in total darkness continued unperturbed. Lou began to be very fearful. Something more cavernous than he seemed to have any inkling of was opening up in her, as she had feared it would. But then in the same level voice against the cold breathing of the cave he said, And of course it's loveless. That's why I came to listen to it again. Beautiful it may be, intricate and powerful beyond our imagining
—
but loveless. It is sentient life that loves, in varying degrees, we humans most. Every creature fears and in various ways, many finer than ours, they know. But we love most and know most, the most connectedly. We know the damage, for example. So we can't watch ourselves, the accident, hurrying to ruin without grief. Going back by the old mechanics into the old chaos of fire and flood, is sad to watch. No other thing on earth feels sad like that because nothing else on earth can know and love the way we do.

Frightened by a gap in speech, because it filled up with the churning of the waters behind the cave, Lou asked Owen what he knew of his daughter. Nothing, he said. Her mother stopped writing to me twelve years ago. Really I don't even know whether she's alive or dead. Did you love Natalie's mother? Yes I did. And did she love you? She said she did. But she wouldn't leave and come away with you? She had one child already and she loved her husband. So you love your daughter and you never see her? Yes. And can you do anything for her? Her mother wouldn't let me. She said Natalie must never know. Not even when her mother and father and the man she thinks is her father are dead must she ever know. But those photographs on your mantelpiece? They're not there usually. I only put them out every now and then. And when you appeared so suddenly that day I left them there for you to see. No one else sees them.

Lou dwelled on Natalie, on her mother and on the man she called her father. She felt anxious for them, as though they had been entrusted into her thinking, and were vulnerable. They floated on a lie, the truth, falling from heaven, would sink them. Lou imagined them floating on the surface of the underground roaring in a bubble. And bubbles in hundreds meanwhile rode out through the slit on the cold rapid slide of water, lasting in the lighter darkness until they popped. And warm against the man, Lou must have slept and breathed with him a little of the air shipped out from inside in those hemispheres.

Some while later, sleeping very near the surface and the waters under the earth seeming louder and louder, Lou became aware that Owen was speaking, but to whom, if anybody, and whether in his sleep or waking she could not have said. The voice was close and rapid and even if she were indeed the one addressed, still it felt like eavesdropping. She could not unhear it, any more than she could unsee the sight of him through the garden window the day she suddenly appeared; the words and the sight accrued to her like a power she had not sought but could not disavow. Perhaps he had been speaking for some time and only now, surfacing through their broken sleep, could she hear and understand. I was very young, he said, and perhaps when she said she would keep the baby a secret, though I did love her, in some part of me I thought this lets me off, I can start again and live my life on my own and no harm done. I suppose a woman always knows how much she will love her baby but perhaps a man does not, even if it's a love child, perhaps he can't imagine how he will love his child and be loved by her or him and be fastened in lifelong. Or perhaps he can, said Lou. Perhaps he sees as well as the woman he slept with sees. And so you didn't insist very much when she said the best for all concerned would be you keep her secret and go away. We kept in touch, she wrote me letters once a year at least. And then soon after Natalie's eighteenth birthday came that photograph and a note she was starting art school in Newcastle on a certain day. I stood five mornings there, it was only on the third I saw her and on the fourth and fifth again. That last day was very bad. I saw her and it went through me. I thought will I ever see the girl again? I left the place, I was almost running down the street, away, and then I stopped and turned and walked very slowly back and there she was, coming out again through the big glass doors, with a look on her face as though she had forgotten or remembered something. And stood on the top step looking down at me, into my eyes, in a puzzled sort of shock. And when I think of it now there was nobody else around, only her and me, and the noise of the street or in my heart and head was like the noise in there, in the dark, behind that slit. After that her mother never wrote to me again and I kept my side of the bargain and never tried to learn about her further life. Funny to think of her, said Lou, going her ways in the world and you going yours and never crossing. If there was a god with nothing better to do he might have amused himself with your lines of life. Yes, said Owen, I read of a man who met his daughter abroad somewhere and fell in love with her and neither knew. They slept together on an island for a week or so and he begged her to marry him and it was only when she agreed and they went home that piece by piece the evidence of who they were came in. Is that what you're frightened of? Lou asked. You've seen her, you've got her photograph, it could never happen. Not like that, it couldn't, not like the man on the island, said Owen. Not in ignorance.

Lou pondered this; the cave too, so it seemed, mulled the business over, but indifferently, only as an engine, on and on. Like bubbles riding out on the fast cold water, the image of the girl looking down and the man looking up, both seeing deep into one another's eyes, became very clear to Lou and she said, perhaps aloud, perhaps already asleep and to a man asleep, Like falling in love, I suppose, there and then, the way it happens to some people, the lightning, so go your separate ways and trail the earth apart and you will never forget her nor she you. She slept in Owen's arms, the furnace of cold in the innermost heart of rock continuing to roar and to breathe little bubbles into the human world. Meanwhile outside, above, the stars pulsed on their black infinity.

Sleeping, Lou acknowledged more thoroughly than she would have cared to do in daylight that she and the noise in the dark behind the cave were old familiars. Owen had said he needed to hear it again, to be reminded that such undergound noise was there; but Lou, brought to the site by him, lay sleeping-listening to a thing she had known for years, and what appalled her now was how much deeper into it a soul might go. Suppose, she thought, or thoughts took hold of her and swirled her round and sent her out under the squeeze of rock as bubbles into the world where humans live, suppose it's all like that, only a mechanism and whether we live or not it will go on and on and whether he loves me or not is neither here nor there and I might as well be the water falling from a terrible height that he says must be beautiful, if something nobody sees can be called beautiful. Dread filled her up, the trembling took hold of her, deeply asleep she felt even closer to the noise, deeper down in it, staring to see and seeing nothing, eyes wide open and seeing not a thing but knowing that creatures were in there with her, white as death, white as the underbelly of a flatfish, big, flat, fast and blind, their eyes over millions of years of useless effort having evolved away. Lou tried her best to answer back, she babbled all she knew by heart and many good new things occurring to her while she slept, she pitched them all in her small human voice against the never-to-be-exhausted fund of noise within the cave. Then failing, so she felt, defeated, she gave up making sentences and screamed, widened her eyes and screamed and screamed.

Hush, Owen said, hush now, nothing's amiss. It's only the noise. We're safe out here under our blanket, you and me. Feel my heart, she said. Whirring like a wren. Was it like that night in my house when you couldn't sleep? he asked. Worse, said Lou. Your lovely house, I could hear a little stream falling down to the river by the bridge where I asked the gossipy women how to find you. But in me nevertheless in your friendly house, to my shame, oh it was very bad. She was quiet, she listened to the noise, the churning, milling, steady mechanical cold breathing. Was I talking? she asked. Yes. Could you understand? The words, I could. What words? What did I say? I'll tell you one night when we are quiet, if you want to know. Sleep now.

Sleep rose and fell in her, in levels and layers with the noise of the underground waters. Sometimes her sleep felt threadbare, and she shivered with cold; but in other passages, Owen wrapping her more tightly perhaps, she went deeper under, and found it not only warm but strangely tranquil too. Later, when she thought of this sleeping with him, these depths of warmth and tranquility seemed to her quite peculiarly blessed. Hopeful too, that she could sleep with him like that. And another thing: every time she surfaced and said a few fragments more on subjects troubling her, he answered at once, just where she would have wished him to, so that her feeling, later, was that he had been attentive all night long, not awake necessarily, but so tuned to her sleeping, its rise and fall, its shallows, depths, fretfulness and calm, that whenever she needed him listening and answering, there he was. She remembered very little of what in the latter part of the night they had exchanged in the way of words, but the sense of it all, of their embracing and sleeping and speaking while the vast heart of the back and beyond of the cave pulsed, throbbed, thudded and dispatched its flotillas of bubbles into their breathing space, the sense of all that, she would never forget.