Night Street (12 page)

‘Can I look?' he asked.

She was rather embarrassed by the morning's painting, not used to producing scenes so resplendent, so very unambivalent.

The light already hot, the sun was lifting over a beach. There was a touch of green, but you were mainly aware of a bright flood of oranges, reds, yellows—sumptuous colour soaking sky and sand, everything liquefied, no terra firma and the horizon irrelevant, arbitrary. A figure in a bathing suit stood to one side, long, thin, featureless, neither quite man nor woman, overwhelmed by radiance.

He would think it showed their coming together. It did, of course, and more particularly, her physical ripeness; it was all sensation, a sort of wholeness, a victorious flush. She had omitted guilt or ignored it and this made her blush, now, echoing the painting, but also making it sordid. There was no denying the thing had come from her. Arthur did not comment. After a moment, looking down at the hot canvas, he briefly described his idea. She consented immediately, avoiding thought, her head turned so that she could not see Ada. They would no doubt be missed. That was the price.

He waited a way off with folded arms and a vaguely studious attitude, while she went into her tent, supposedly for a cardigan in case it turned blowy but really to gather herself; crawling on all fours, she had a sense of alarm at not being able to predict the weather.

When she re-emerged, Ada was gone, having removed herself as unobtrusively as she had earlier filled the space. They saw no one else as they walked briskly along the cliff-top path, away from camp and the beaches where most of the painters worked. It was important not to run into anyone. To someone watching from the beach below—seeing two silhouettes suddenly invading the frame of a landscape, hastening across it—if not recognisable, they would certainly appear furtive.

They kept up a strong pace for a time, marching dumbly along in an almost military fashion. Her shoes were covered in sandy soil, as if they had become extraordinarily old, relics. The sun burned her hands; the cardigan would be useless or she could put it under her head. Beyond the circle of her hat's brim was a great incandescence that was most intense over the ocean, which could not be stared into.

When they were distant enough from the campsite, they slowed. Their silence grew more comfortable but then somehow argumentative. Flirtatious.

She was dazed by the sun and had no idea where they would find shelter. The only vegetation was a low, thick marine heath unbroken but for the path. How long had the path existed? As far as she could see ahead, there was no change; nothing would offer concealment. On what was probably a fool's errand, they continued doggedly.

‘I have to see you more,' he said at last, offering this impossibility with an irritable tone. ‘I think of you constantly.'

‘Did you expect you would stop thinking of me, after a while?'

‘No. I didn't mean that.' He turned away and when he looked back at her his face was pink. They were both perspiring heavily. ‘I never let myself expect anything.' He did not ask what she had expected or expected now. Perhaps he did not dare.

‘You expected . . . nothing?'

‘Oh, I don't know. But I'd do anything to be with you all the time.'

‘Anything but.'

He grunted, but she was only stating, not reproaching him. She had never demanded anything, never been tempted to. There was no shared life to envisage. What they might have been together, out in the open, was hollow potential, a half-formulated question. Arthur had changed towards her: his opinion of himself was sullied; he had grown cynical.

‘When I look down there at the water, I get a bit of vertigo,' he said angrily. ‘I was afraid of heights as a kid. Less so as an adult, but it stays with you. I get it from my old mum, who had a pathological fear of them. She wouldn't even get up on a stool.' Reluctantly, he added: ‘I'm nervous up here. Nauseous—I feel dwarfed.'

Clarice was interested. ‘Dwarfed?'

‘It's a sensation like being about to die.' He was quiet for a moment. ‘How I imagine it, anyhow. Like thinking you're about to die.' He paused again. ‘I've been coming here at night.'

‘Why? Why did you want to come here today, then?'

‘In the dark, it terrifies me. Even if I stay on the path, well back from the edge.'

Seeming a veiled message, this annoyed her. She could not stop herself. ‘Martyrdom?'

‘You must hate me and sometimes I hate you.' She thought he was both relieved and appalled to have blurted this. He waited a little too long before clarifying: ‘I love you so much I hate you.'

She stopped walking. It was the first mention of love. ‘We have a lot going against us, but we have an advantage. We have honesty. I prefer you to be horribly honest. You seemed so lucid to me, when I first met you.' It was hard for him, she knew. He was not a hypocrite: he was a free being restricted by a fully shaped life. He had a flair for improvisation which he was not at liberty to exercise.

He tried to draw her to him. She did not open her arms; she was not ready.

His hands fell to his sides. He said, ‘You keep yourself apart.'

‘Physically?'

‘No—in all ways.'

But if she was aloof, it was not just because she was jealous of her privacy. It was also on account of Bella's face, which could appear in her mind, smiling a gentle elastic smile. A confusing vision that turned her cold; their physical bond should not have admitted this interference.

‘Let's stay here,' she suggested, wanting to prove him wrong.

He was taken aback.

No one in view in any direction. It was not out of the question that someone might come along, but they were going to risk it. The alternative to taking risks was paralysis. She began to undress right there, fast, before she could think better of it. She stepped out of her skirt and laid it out on the path, ludicrously crouching to smooth it, as though it were a cloth on a table she was setting for a special occasion.

Arthur waited, but then he untucked his shirt. Clarice continued undressing under the harsh sun. She had not showed him her body completely before and never like this, in daylight. He watched her remove her underwear, exposing herself. She was curious about her own pale forms, the pinkish areas and the patch of dark hair. Her comically gangly knees. Her head cast a shadow when she looked down that gave her the feeling of being two people, one taller and foreboding. The hours of work had left her neck wooden. She loosened her hair. The air and sun on her nudity were dreamlike or potently real.

His face alert, he moved towards her, but she gestured for him to finish undressing. She sat down on her skirt, listening to the waves and half closing her eyes against the light's assault. There was titanium white on the fingernails of her left hand, cadmium yellow on a few matted strands of hair falling into her eyes. She felt strangely sure of herself, insightful.

Their accumulated time alone together over the past months did not add up to much. The handful of times they had been intimate, it had tended to begin beautifully, but her pleasure was painfully short-lived, anticlimactic. After, she retracted into herself.

Arthur's clothes were scattered haphazardly around him. Even naked, he held himself confidently. His body was compact. She looked at it, at his silky shoulders and muscular, imposing hands, solid legs and slender buttocks, brown neck and face, long, unexpectedly delicate feet and queer, soft masculinity. He remained unknown. A pattern to be puzzled over.

He sat opposite her cross-legged, with a pleasant sort of pride, but needing her approval. They were both rather stunned and incredulous to find themselves in this situation. She chuckled. His discontent had receded to somewhere remote, letting him be childlike.

He grinned hesitantly and lowered himself with clownish gravitas so that he lay on the earth, drawing her down with him. She acquiesced, finally, and stretched out, though when he brought his body over hers, she shifted away. She wanted them to lie side by side. This disoriented him. She cupped her hand against the side of his face to shade his eyes; they were both half blinded by sun. Squinting hard, she found a trace of his work—burnt umber on his cheekbone. Her artist. She kissed his temple fondly as if they were old lovers, their bodies entirely accustomed to mutual adoration and coupling.

‘What did
you
paint today?'

‘Hm? Oh, those rock formations at the end of the beach.'

‘And?' He was hard on his own efforts; she had to inquire about them discreetly.

‘I was floundering around. Thinking about you. I'm always scared you won't like what I do.'

As she had done with Herb, she tried to avoid commenting on his art. ‘I do like what you do. Your landscapes have weight to them.' He was a new painter, but some of the authority that surrounded him in his public life, that lawyerly clout, maybe, was finding its way onto his boards. He too had not been able to resist starting early on landscapes. His scenes were straightforward, grounded. You felt their materiality. Or she felt it because she was his lover, her body knowing the hands that had made them. His skies, though, were not convincing—he never really took grey on and his clouds were small and well behaved. So your eyes stayed low in those earthly landscapes.

‘I'd love to make you happy,' he said.

‘You can't paint to make people happy.'

‘Can you make people happy with love?'

‘You'd like to think so. I don't know.'

Their skin was roasting and this might have been true freedom, nakedness against a backdrop of breaking waves. Modern life appeared to have been obliterated and they were reduced—or was it enlarged?—to simple inhabitants of nature. She would have liked all her skin to peel right off, to be a blinking newborn animal. This, she thought, could have been what attracted her to him: he tugged her down, as his paintings did the eye, into her body, her animal self.

Though he had not hurt her, there had been moments in their lovemaking at Anglesea when she had sensed Arthur barely holding himself back from brutality; rage simmered in him and her sensibility was repelled, could not link with his. She was stranded in the wasteland between her fantasies and the world they moved in. Reality became thin, full of holes.

But that afternoon in the sun, perhaps because they understood that this could not last much longer, their minds were soft and able to lean in the same direction. Pressing her thumbs to his hipbones, she kissed him again, on the mouth, and desire twitched awake in her.

Her eyes were open, which was new. She had never looked into the face of sexual pleasure for more than a moment or two, unsettled by how it undid the countenance. Watching Arthur now, she saw him unstitched. Still thinking coherently, though not for long, she marvelled at this liberation, the discarding of the pretence of integrity. It seemed that in love, if you were fearless enough, you could admit you were coming apart—you could come quite apart.

He was beaded with sweat, bright and astounding. Ambitious, afraid, mortal. And she saw it all split wider open, her own consciousness narrowing to a taut tunnel; the jolt of the end ended nothing and everything. The sun was soporific and hot, as hot as the colours in the painting that had foretold or conjured this.

Darkness. Darkness perfumed with salt and some unidentifiable green growth. Heat, all through her skin.

The sun had set; Clarice panicked. ‘Arthur!' She shook him. ‘Arthur, we fell asleep!'

He clutched at her with a truncated groan, then shrank away and was on his feet. His body in the dark, driven by fear, was still graceful.

Her heart had accelerated uncomfortably and she clambered onto her knees. There seemed to be live flames running beneath her skin; it was sore to touch—she realised that their tanned hides would be a kind of scarlet letter. He was dressing chaotically, half asleep. The quiet wellbeing was fractured.

‘How long do you think we slept?'

She tried to make sense of the garment she was holding. ‘A long time, by the look of it. I don't know how we could have.'

Once dressed, they straightened each other up as best they could, brushing off invisible sand. Then they were almost running, retracing their steps. It was a long and unfamiliar journey back. They stumbled here and there, breathless, mortified. At last, the camp was close.

Stopping, they listened. From the rumble of voices and tinny clatter of pots and pans, dinner was being prepared.

He hissed, ‘We can't go straight back. I left the car down at the beach. I'll have to go for it. I'll say . . .' He exhaled heavily. ‘I'll say I took a siesta and just woke up.'

‘Well, that would be true,' she said, befuddled, unable to decide if this was an adequate excuse. ‘What will
I
say if someone sees me?'

‘Lord.' He was flailing. ‘I don't know. I don't know if we should split up here.' She did not want to. They were fully awake and entirely concentrated now, yet their mental faculties remained groggy, uncooperative. ‘Why don't you come down to the beach with me? I'll drive you back, drop you off at the road near camp. If anyone sees you getting out, we'll say I passed you on the road. You wandered off sketching and lost track of time. That's believable. Maybe better than being seen coming back from this direction. In the dark.'

‘Is it believable?' The plan seemed illogical, though she could not put her finger on why. She was silent for a moment. ‘I don't have my sketchbook.'

‘It doesn't matter. Everyone'll be around the fire eating, anyhow. No one will notice us arrive. I'll go and see'—he sighed again—‘how she is.'

‘Bella.'

‘Yes. And you'll go and join the others. Or wait for a bit in your tent first. Whatever you want.'

Whatever she wanted. They gave the camp area a wide berth, at one point suddenly glimpsing the vivid light of the fire from which they were exiled and distinguishing loud, jokey voices. The voices dropped as someone started singing a song in Spanish. An ardent, revolutionary song. Clarice and Arthur moved away from the music. For several awkward minutes, they were a little lost among unfathomably twisted trees. But they found their way down—miraculously, never once losing their footing—and came out not far from the river that led like an elegant arrow to the sea.