CHAPTER III

 

April 30^th 1933

 

From the flat roof of the house the eye was drawn first towards the west, where the pines slanted down to the sea – a blue Mediterranean bay fringed with pale bone-like rocks and cupped between high hills, green on their lower slopes with vines, grey with olive trees, then pine-dark, earth-red, rock-white or rosy-brown with parched heath.  Through a gap between the nearer hills, the long straight ridge of the Sainte-Baume stood out metallically clear, but blue with distance.  To north and south, the garden was hemmed in by pines; but eastwards, the vineyards and the olive orchards mounted in terraces of red earth to a crest; and the last trees stood, sometimes dark and brooding, sometimes alive with tremulous silver, against the sky.

      There were mattresses on the roof for sun-bathing; and on one of these they were lying, their heads in the narrow shade of the southern parapet.  It was almost noon; the sunlight fell steep out of the flawless sky; but a faint breeze stirred and died and swelled again into motion.  Lapped in that fitfully tempered heat, skin seemed to acquire a livelier sensibility, almost an independent consciousness.  As though it were drinking a new life from the sun.  And that strange, violent, flamy life from outer space seemed to strike through the skin, to permeate and transmute the flesh beneath, till the whole body was a thing of alien sun-stuff and the very soul felt itself melting out of its proper identity and becoming something else, something of a different, an other-than-human kind.

      There are so few possible grimaces, such a paucity, in comparison with all the thoughts and feelings and sensations, such a humiliating poverty of reflexes, even of consciously expressive gestures!  Still lucid in his self-estrangement, Anthony observed the symptoms of that death-bed in which he also had his part as assassin and fellow-victim.  Restlessly she turned her head on the cushions, this way, that way, as though seeking, but always vainly, some relief, however slight, some respite, if only for a moment, from her intolerable suffering.  Sometimes, with the gesture of one who prays despairingly that a cup may be removed, she clasped her hands, and raising them to her mouth gnawed at the clenched knuckles or pressed a wrist between her parted teeth as if to stifle her own crying.  Distorted, the face was a mask of extremest grief.  It was the face, he suddenly perceived, as he bent down towards those tormented lips, of one of Van der Weyden's holy women at the foot of the Cross.

      And then, from one moment to the next, there was a stillness.  The victim no longer rolled her tortured head on the pillow.  The imploring hands fell limp.  The agonized expression of pain gave place to a superhuman and rapturous serenity.  The mouth became grave like that of a saint.  Behind the closed eyelids what beatific vision had presented itself?

      They lay for a long time in a golden stupor of sunlight and fulfilled desire.  It was Anthony who first stirred.  Moved by the dumb unthinking gratitude and tenderness of his satisfied body he reached out a caressing hand.  Her skin was hot to touch as fruit in the sun.  He propped himself up on his elbow and opened his eyes.

      'You look like a Gauguin,' he said after a moment.  Brown like a Gauguin and, curiously, it struck him, flat like a Gauguin too; for the sunlight suppressed those nacreous gleams of carmine and blue and green that give the untanned white body its peculiar sumptuousness of belief.

      The sound of his voice broke startlingly into Helen's warm delicious trance of unconsciousness.  She winced almost with pain.  Why couldn't he leave her in peace?  She had been so happy in that other world of her transfigured body; and now he was calling her back – back to this world, back to her ordinary hell of emptiness and drought and discontent.  She left his words unanswered and, shutting her eyes yet tighter against the menace of reality, tried to force her way back to the paradise from which she had been dragged.

      Brown like a Gauguin, and flat ... But the first Gauguin he ever saw (and had pretended, he remembered, to like a great deal more than he actually did) had been with Mary Amberley that time in Paris – that exciting and, for the boy of twenty that he then was, extraordinary and apocalyptic time.

      He frowned to himself; this past of his was becoming importunate!  But when, in order to escape from it, he bent down to kiss Helen's shoulder, he found the sun-warmed skin impregnated with a faint, yet penetrating smell, at once salty and smoky, a smell that transported him instantaneously to a great chalk pit in the flank of the Chilterns, where, in Brian Foxe's company, he had spent an inexplicably pleasurable hour striking two flints together and sniffing, voluptuously, at the place where the spark had left its characteristic tang of marine combustion.

      'L-like sm-smoke under the s-sea,' had been Brian's stammered comment when he was given to flints to smell.

      Even the seemingly more solid fragments of present reality are riddled with pitfalls.  What could be more uncompromisingly there, in the present, than a woman's body in the sunshine?  And yet it had betrayed him.  The firm ground of its sensual immediacy and of his own physical tenderness and opened beneath his feet and precipitated him into another time and place.  Nothing was safe.  This living skin, this present skin; but it was nearly twenty years since Brian's death.

      A chalk pit, a picture gallery, a brown figure in the sun, a skin, here, redolent of salt and smoke, and here (like Mary's, he remembered) savagely musky.  Somewhere in the mind a lunatic shuffled a pack of snapshots and dealt them out at random, shuffled once more and dealt them out in different order, again and again, indefinitely.  There was no chronology.  The idiot remembered no distinction between before and after.  The pit was as real and vivid as the gallery.  That ten years separated flints from Gauguins was a fact, not given, but discoverable only on second thoughts by the calculating intellect.  The thirty-five years of his conscious life made themselves immediately known to him as a chaos – a pack of snapshots in the hands of a lunatic.  And who decided which snapshots were to be kept, which thrown away?  A frightened or libidinous animal, according to the Freudians.  But the Freudians were victims of the pathetic fallacy, incorrigible rationalizers always in search of sufficient reasons, of comprehensible motives.  Fear and lust are the most easily comprehensible motives of all.  Therefore ... But psychology had no more right to be anthropomorphic, or even exclusively zoomorphic, than any other science.  Besides a reason and an animal, man was also a collection of particles subject to the laws of chance.  Some things were remembered for their utility or their appeal to the higher faculties of the mind; some, by the presiding animal, remembered (or else deliberately forgotten) for their emotional content.  But what of the innumerable remembered things without any particular emotional content, without utility, or beauty, or rational significance?  Memory in these cases seemed to be merely a matter of luck.  At the time of the event certain particles happened to be in a favourable position.  Click! the event found itself caught, indelibly recorded.  For no reason whatever.  Unless, it now rather disquietingly occurred to him, unless of course the reason were not before the event, but after it, in what had been the future.  What if that picture gallery had been recorded and stored away in the cellars of his mind for the sole and express purpose of being brought up into consciousness at this present moment?  Brought up, today, when he was forty-two and secure, forty-two and fixed, unchangeably himself, brought up along with those critical years of his adolescence, along with the woman who had been his teacher, his first mistress, and was now a hardly human creature festering to death, alone, in a dirty burrow?  And what if that absurd childish game with the flints had had a point, a profound purpose, which was simply to be recollected here on this blazing roof, now as his lips made contact with Helen's sun-warmed flesh?  In order that he might be forced, in this midst of this act of detached and irresponsible sensuality, to think of Brian and of the things that Brian had lived for; yes, and had died for – died for, another image suddenly reminded him, at the foot of just such a cliff as that beneath which they had played as children in the chalk pit.  Yes, even Brian's suicide, he now realized with horror, even the poor huddled body on the rocks, was mysteriously implicit in this hot skin.

      One, two, three, four – counting each movement of his hand, he began to caress her.  The gesture was magical, would transport him, if repeated sufficiently often, beyond the past and the future, beyond right and wrong, into the discrete, the self-sufficient, the atomic present.  Particles of thought, desire and feeling moving at random among particles of time, coming into casual contact and as casually parting.  A casino, an asylum, a zoo; but also, in a corner, a library and someone thinking.  Someone largely at the mercy of the croupiers, at the mercy of the idiots and the animals; but still irrepressible and indefatigable.  Another two or three years and the Elements of Sociology would be finished.  In spite of everything; yes, in spite of everything, he thought with a kind of defiant elation, and counted thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five ...