J. Ballard - The Drowned World

Beatrice tossed her long black hair over one shoulder. "I'll keep the door locked, Colonel."

Irritated, Kerans snapped: "For God's sake, Beatrice, what are you trying to prove? These self-destructive impulses may be amusing to play with now, but when we've gone they won't be so funny. The Colonel's only trying to help you-he doesn't really give a hoot whether you stay behind or not."

Riggs let out a brief laugh. 'Well, I wouldn't say that. But if the thought of my personal concern worries you so much, Miss Dahl, you can just put it down to my over-developed sense of duty."

"That's interesting, Colonel," Beatrice commented sarcastically. "I've always understood that our duty was to stay on here as long as possible and make every sacrifice necessary to that end. Or at least-" here the familiar gleam of sharp humour crossed her eyes "-that was the reason my grandfather was given when the government confiscated most of his property." She noticed Riggs peering over his shoulder at the bar. "What's the matter, Colonel? Looking for your punkahwallah? I'm not going to get you a drink, if that's what you're after. I think you men only come up here to booze."

Riggs stood up. "All right, Miss Dahl. I give in. I'll see you later, Doctor." He saluted Beatrice with a smile. "Some time tomorrow I'll send the cutter over to collect your gear, Miss Dahl."

When Riggs had gone Kerans lay back in his chair, watching the helicopter circle over the adjacent lagoon. Now and then it dived along the water's edge, the down-draught from its rotor blades beating through the flapping fronds of the fern trees, driving the iguanas across the rooftops. Beatrice brought a drink from the bar and sat down on the chair at his feet.

"I wish you wouldn't analyse me in front of that man, Robert." She handed him the drink and then leaned against his knees, resting her chin on one wrist. Usually she looked sleek and well-fed, but her expression today seemed tired and wistful.

"I'm sorry," Kerans apologised. "Perhaps I was really analysing myself. Riggs' ultimatum came as a bit of a surprise; I wasn't expecting to leave so soon."

"You are going to leave then?"

Kerans paused. The automatic player in the radiogram switched from Beethoven's Pastoral to the Seventh, Toscanini giving way to Bruno Walter. All day, without a break, it played through the cycle of nine symphonies. He searched for an answer, the change of mood, to the sombre opening motif of the Seventh, overlaying his indecision.

"I suppose I want to, but I haven't yet found an adequate reason. Satisfying one's emotional needs isn't enough. There's got to be a more valid motive. Perhaps these sunken lagoons simply remind me. of the drowned world of my uterine childhood-if so, the best thing is to leave straight away. Everything Riggs says is true. There's little hope of standing up to the rainstorms and the malaria."

He placed his hand on her forehead, feeling her temperature like a child. "What did Riggs mean when he said you wouldn't sleep well? That was the second time this morning he mentioned it."

Beatrice looked away for a moment. "Oh, nothing. I've just had one or two peculiar nightmares recently. A lot of people get them… Forget it. Tell me, Robert, seriously-if I decide to stay on here, would you? You could share this apartment."

Kerans grinned. "Trying to tempt me, Bea? What a question. Remember, not only are you the most beautiful woman here, but you're the only woman. Nothing is more essential than a basis for comparison. Adam had no aesthetic sense, or he would have realised that Eve was a pretty haphazard piece of work."

"You are being frank today." Beatrice stood up and went over to the edge of the pool. She swept her hair back off her forehead with both hands, her long supple body gleaming against the sunlight. "But is there as much urgency as Riggs claims? We've got the cruiser."

"It's a wreck. The first serious storm will split it open like a rusty can.

Nearing noon, the heat on the terrace had become uncomfortable and they left the patio and went indoors. Double venetian blinds filtered a thin sunlight into the low wide lounge, and the refrigerated air was cool and soothing. Beatrice stretched out on a long pale-blue elephant-hide sofa, one hand playing with the fleecy pile of the carpet. The apartment had been one of her grandfather's _pied a terres_, and Beatrice's home since her parents' death shortly after her birth. She had been brought up under the supervision of the grandfather, who had been a lonely, eccentric tycoon (the sources of his wealth Kerans had never established; when he asked Beatrice, shortly after he and Riggs stumbled upon her penthouse eyrie, she replied succinctly: "Let's say he was in money") and a great patron of the arts in his earlier days. His tastes leaned particularly towards the experimental and bizarre, and Kerans often wondered how far his personality and its strange internal perspectives had been carried forward into his granddaughter. Over the mantelpiece was a huge painting by the early 20th century surrealist Delvaux, in which ashen-faced women danced naked to the waist with dandified skeletons in tuxedos against a spectral bonelike landscape. On another wall one of Max Ernst's self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles screamed silently to itself, like the sump of some insane unconscious.

For a few moments Kerans stared quietly at the dim yellow annulus of Ernst's sun glowering through the exotic vegetation, a curious feeling of memory and recognition signalling through his brain. Far more potent than the Beethoven, the image of the archaic sun burned against his mind, illuminating the fleeting shadows that darted fitfully through its profoundest deeps.

"Beatrice."

She looked up at him as he walked across to her, a light frown crossing her eyes. "What's the matter, Robert?"

Kerans hesitated, suddenly aware that, however brief and imperceptible, a moment of significant time had elapsed, carrying him forward with its passage into a zone of commitment from which he would not be able to withdraw.

"You realise that if we let Riggs go without us we don't merely leave here later. We _stay_."

Berthing the catamaran against the landing stage, Kerans shipped the outboard and then made his way up the gangway into the base. As he let himself through the screen hatch he looked back over his shoulder across the lagoon, and caught a brief glimpse through the heat waves of Beatrice standing at her balcony rail. When he waved, however, she characteristically turned away without responding.

"One of her moody days, Doctor?" Sergeant Macready stepped from the guard cubicle, a trace of humour relaxing his beak-like face. "She's a strange one, all right."

Kerans shrugged. "These tough bachelor girls, you know, Sergeant. If you're not careful they frighten the wits out of you. I've been trying to persuade her to pack up and come with us. With a little luck I think she will."

Macready peered shrewdly at the distant roof of the apartment house. "I'm glad to hear you say so, Doctor," he ventured noncommittally, but Kerans was unable to decide if his scepticism was directed at Beatrice or himself.

Whether or not they finally stayed behind, Kerans had resolved to maintain the pretence that they were leaving-every spare minute of the next three days would be needed to consolidate their supplies and steal whatever extra equipment they required from the base stores. Kerans had still not made up his mind-once away from Beatrice his indecision returned (ruefully he wondered if she was deliberately trying to confuse him, Pandora with her killing mouth and witch's box of desires and frustrations, unpredictably opening and shutting the lid)-but rather than stumble about in a state of tortured uncertainty, which Riggs and Bodkin would soon diagnose, he decided to postpone a final reckoning until the last moment possible. Much as he loathed the base, he knew that the sight of it actually sailing off would act as a wonderful catalyst for emotions of fear and panic, and any more abstract motives for staying behind would soon be abandoned. A year earlier, he had been accidentally marooned on a small key while taking an unscheduled geomagnetic reading, the departure siren muffled by his headphones as he crouched over his instruments in an old basement bunker. When he emerged ten minutes later and found the base six hundred yards away across a widening interval of flat water he had felt like a child parted forever from its mother, barely managed to control his panic in time to fire a warning shell from his flare pistol.