Sylvie Germain - Magnus

With these words she falls silent, standing behind her chair, her hands resting on the back of it. She stands there very erect, with a fixed stony gaze, lost in a vision that envelops her in a bluish light — the scene brought to life by the declaration of non-love their two crazed voices delivered a moment ago is suffused with the same light as on the day it actually took place, out on the cliff-tops.

On the towering chalk cliffs overlooking the English Channel, white rock and grey waters with reflections of steel blue, purple and silvery green, up there, where the view is so extensive, where you can breath a sense of unlimited space. Some evenings, when the weather is clear, you can see France on the other side of the Channel. Up there, where the wind blows free, carrying sea, sky and forest smells, gulls nest on the crags, black-headed sheep graze level with the sky.

Up there, a couple went walking one spring morning. It is this couple that Peggy can see, that she watches, unblinking, so intensely that Magnus too can see the scene in that steady gaze.

And the past invites itself into the dining room, and takes its place at the table between the two who are dining together.

Two figures walk with slow measured steps. They seem to glide through the grass rippling in the wind. Sometimes one of them stops, and the other turns to face the one who has stopped, then the couple resume their progress.

A man and a woman, they walk side by side but do not take each other’s arm or hold hands. They brush shoulders, and yet there is a sense of insuperable distance between them. Their mere presence on the cliff-top is enough to harden the morning light, erode the peacefulness of the place, circumscribe the immensity of space and reduce it to a stage set.

They have reached the edge of the cliff. They face each other, less than a metre apart. The sun is still weak, the sky a milky blue, the sea a pinkish grey, darkening on the horizon. The woman speaks without raising her voice, but the wind that steals everything — pollen, dust, sand and leaves, smells and sounds — snatches her words and carries them off in its invisible folds to sow them in another place, at another time.

Standing there stiffly, with her hands stuffed into the pockets of her raincoat, the woman says, ‘I’m bored with you, bored to death. I don’t love you. I’ve never loved you and never will. There is nothing about you that I love, neither your voice, your body, your skin, nor your smell. Everything about you is repellant and unbearable to me. I wish you’d disappear. But even that wouldn’t be enough. I wish I’d never met you. Never.’

The man says nothing. He is dazed by these words that require no answer, that nullify anything he might say. He recoils a few steps under this verbal assault.

He is standing on the very edge of the cliff, and the void to which he has his back turned stealthily wraps itself round his heels, creeps up his legs, swirls in his knees and surges up to the back of his neck in an icy rush. He has no need to see the void, his whole body can sense it, as it would sense the presence of a wild animal crouched at his heels. He is seized with terror and cannot move. He casts an imploring glance at the woman, not for her to say some tender words at last — he is at that moment well beyond, or well short of, any hope of love. He is incapable of any sentiment, utterly overcome with vertigo, with pure, thoroughly physical panic. All he expects is a gesture, an extended hand to wrest him from the pull of the void. But the woman remains impassive, with her hands in her pockets, and the look she darts at him has the brutality of a slap in the face. Nevertheless he clings to that look, spiteful as it is, it is his only lifeline, helping him to keep his precarious balance.

Has she understood his plea? She turns her head away, lets her gaze wander elsewhere, indifferent. Oh, look, the sea over there has turned a shade of turquoise, and there’s a seagull flying beneath the clouds, screaming its hunger, and there’s a ferry sailing by, a fast-moving little black speck, like a scuttling beetle. She smiles and her smile is carried away by the wind.

She hears a slight sound. She turns round. There is no one there. The man has disappeared. That’s what she wanted, isn’t it? A few seconds go by, longer than a lifetime, and another sound can be heard, a distant thud, ghastly in its brevity and flatness.

She walks off, quickening her step so much she is almost running. She is not thinking at all, she refuses to think. She is a rolling stone, and there was another stone that fell, that dropped into the water with a horrible dull sound. Why would she be thinking, or how? She has just shed her humanity.

A heath.

KENT: Who’s there, besides foul weather?

GENTALMAN: One minded like the weather, most unquietly.

KENT: I know you. Where’s the king?

GENTALMAN: Contending with the fretful elements;

Bids the wind blow the earth into the sea,

Or swell the curled waters ’bove the main,

That things might change or cease…

LEAR: My wits begin to turn.

Come on, my boy. How dost, my boy? Art cold?

I am cold myself…

FOOL: He that has and a little tiny wit

With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain –

Must make content with his fortunes fit,

Though the rain it raineth every day.

William Shakespeare

King Lear, Act III, scenes (ii) and (iii)

Magnus has told no one of what happened at Peggy’s, and before that on the cliffs of Dover. To Peggy herself he said nothing at the end of that dinner to which Timothy invited himself, like some freakish prompter hidden in his prompt-box supplying the text of a completely different play from the one being staged. When she had finished her impromptu reenactment of the scene forced on her, Peggy sat down and slowly drained her glass. Her features were drawn, there were yellow-tinged rings round her eyes. Then she rose again and began to clear the table. She went to fetch a large plastic bin bag from the kitchen, and threw into it the remains of the meal, the paper plates and crystal glasses. She bundled up the damask cloth and stuffed that into the rubbish bin as well. She seemed to have forgotten her guest, carrying on with tidying the dining room as if she were alone. Magnus dismantled the trestle table and returned the two chairs to the small garden on the other side of the bay window. A very fine rain fell silently, barely wetting the leaves of the bushes. From one of the neighbouring gardens came the plaintive and monotonous hooting of an owl.

When everything was in order, Peggy lit a cigarette which she smoked pacing the empty room. She continued to ignore Magnus’s presence. Then he asked her where she planned to sleep; she couldn’t spend the night in that empty house. She shrugged her shoulders by way of response. As he persisted in staying on she said, ‘Go away now. I don’t need you. I’m leaving tomorrow morning. Everything’s ready.’ He left but remained for a long time standing in the street, opposite her house. He saw her come out, put the rubbish bin on the doorstep, lock the door, then walk away. He followed her without her noticing. She walked to a main road, where she hailed a taxi. And she disappeared.

He returned to the house, opened the bin and removed the damask tablecloth stained with wine and sauce. He folded it up and took it away, along with one of the two glasses, the one that was just barely chipped, the other having shattered.

She has been gone five months now. She sent Magnus a postcard with seasonal greetings at the end of the year but giving no details at all of her life in Vienna. Else does not hear much more from her.