Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

‘Better than Mama Vum Buá?’ She was smiling at him across the rim of her glass. He could feel the beauty rising off her face like heat.

‘There’s no comparison,’ he said, lowering his eyes, ‘though I do enjoy the company of her children.’

‘How many children does she have?’

‘Eight, I think. You can never be sure with her. She had four more that died.’

Suzanne’s face dipped, and she was silent.

‘Have you got any children, Wilson?’ she asked eventually.

‘Not that I know of.’

She smiled again, her face still dipped, one finger pushing grains of salt across the table. ‘Have you ever been married?’

‘Still waiting for the right girl, I guess.’ He heard his voice across a distance, steady and light. His words were not his; they belonged to someone else.

She looked up, her cheeks flushed with the wine that she had drunk. Her eyes flashed and glinted, like earth when it is strewn with mica.

‘But you have been in love,’ she said, ‘surely?’

He did not want to answer her. He did not see how he could talk of other women in her presence. He had the feeling that it might debase him in her eyes. That it might cheapen him, and spoil everything.

He shifted on his chair.

If he was to mean anything to her, he should now be telling her that he had never loved anyone — shouldn’t he? It would prepare the way for his love for her. No past. No history. No seeds sown in him by any face but hers.

His love for her, which stretched in both directions, past and future. A love which overflowed the banks of the present to flood his entire life. What people called eternal.

So, yes. Deny the past, what little there was of it. Then maybe she would understand his love for what it was — unique, unparalleled, beyond compare.

He glanced at her — a quick, guilty look. She was still watching him, still smiling.

And suddenly he knew that he had got it wrong. The stories he did not want to tell her, she would eke them out of him. He saw that now. She would eke them out of him because he wanted more than anything to please her — even if it meant that he was sacrificing some pleasure, some ambition, of his own.

And something else. There had been his promise, hadn’t there. Lightly given, lightly accepted — yet firm, remembered, serious.

‘Surely,’ she repeated, waiting.

He leaned forwards, let out a sigh.

Once, he told her, a long time ago in Monterey, he had loved a girl who had red hair.

As Suzanne passed through the screen door and into the house, the darkness suddenly closed in, wrapped around her head, and she had to rest one hand upon the banister. She had drunk too much wine. She was not accustomed to drinking, and certainly not during the day, but the spontaneity and ease with which she had improvised the lunch had induced in her a kind of recklessness. She did not move again until there was light in the hallway, until she felt that she could see.

Upstairs in the bedroom she reached into the bottom of her trunk and found her paint-box bound in a scarf of crêpe-de-Chine. She had been intending simply to show Wilson the paints, but now she had another idea. She took a vase from the table and filled it from the water jar.

When she returned to the veranda, the sun seemed to have fallen in the sky. The shadow of the house sprawled below, warped by the uneven slope of the terrain; the edge of the shadow rippled, reminding her of flags in wind. At the foot of the hill lay the sea. It stretched away to the horizon in alternating shades of lavender and jade. The American was sitting where she had left him, in an upholstered cane chair, his hands folded across his waistcoat, his hat pulled level with his eyebrows.

‘Wilson?’

He tipped his hat back and sat up straighter. ‘I was dreaming there for a moment,’ he said. ‘Must be the wine.’ He leaned forwards. ‘What’s that you’ve got?’

She handed him the paint-box. ‘It was given to me when I was a child,’ she told him. ‘Before that, it belonged to my mother.’

He admired it slowly, turning it in his rough hands, making it seem, for the first time, a thing of delicacy.

‘Are you going to paint something?’ he asked her.

‘Yes, I am.’ She smiled. ‘I’m going to paint your foot.’

His look of alarm pushed her smile over into laughter. ‘Look at it,’ she said. ‘It’s so dull. It needs some decoration.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Now what shall it be? A flower? An animal? Some gold at the end of a rainbow?’

‘I don’t want everyone to know my secret.’

‘I guess not.’

He looked at her, one corner of his mouth curling humorously upwards.

‘It’s American,’ she said. ‘I learned it from you.’

At length they decided on a flower. But which kind? He let her choose. Then it would be a rose, she said. A red rose. And, propping his foot on a stool, she dipped her brush in the vase of water and set to work.

‘Saffron,’ she mused. ‘It’s a strange name for a girl with red hair.’

Wilson thought for a while. ‘I believe her father was in the business of spices.’

She laughed; the stem of the rose jumped sideways. Sometimes his answers were so crooked and unlikely that she thought she must have misunderstood, but one look at his face would tell her she had not. It was only that he himself had no sense that what he was saying was anything other than commonplace and everyday. They were things that had happened to him, and that was how he passed them on — as fragments of a life, as facts. As she began to outline the petals of the rose she let her mind wander back through the story of the red-haired girl. Her father must have had some premonition of her effect on men, for she seemed to have lasted in Wilson’s memory in the same way that a certain fragrance lingers in the place where spices have been stored — though she could not now remember what saffron smelled like, or even if it smelled at all.

‘Did you ever see her again?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I never did.’

‘Did you look for her?’

‘I passed through Monterey a few years later. Somebody told me she’d got married. Maybe it was that man who came out of the fog.’ He laughed quickly.

‘Has there been anyone else?’ She felt she could ask him almost anything, so long as she used the voice he used, and did not look up from her work. The truth could only be drawn from the thorns and petals of the rose.

His eyes explored the air above her head. ‘No.’

She had embarrassed him, but she talked on through his embarrassment as if she had not noticed. They were doing favours for each other without acknowledgement, which was ground on which friendship could be built.

‘But it must be lonely,’ she said, ‘when you are always travelling from one place to another.’

‘You don’t travel by yourself. Mostly you team up. Especially if you’re heading into dangerous territory.’ Wilson sat back in his chair, easier now.

He told her about a trapper, name of Mickey Noone. They were riding across the prairies of West Texas together. Noone was after hunting beaver on the Colorado River, the Gila too, but the beaver were strictly incidental. He just seemed to have a natural bent for killing things. His rifle always lay in his arms, one restless finger in the region of the trigger. One day Wilson had asked him what he liked killing best. Noone shrugged. ‘It don’t matter what,’ he said, ‘though, on general principles, I’d prefer an Indian.’

‘I think I’d rather travel alone,’ Suzanne exclaimed, ‘than travel with such a man.’

‘I don’t believe he ever killed an Indian in his life.’ Wilson smiled down at her. ‘He was a terrible shot. Once I saw him miss a jack rabbit from six feet away.’