Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

Then came the decisive moment, at five o’clock that morning, when he snapped awake to see his father raise the stakes so high that all the players had dropped out but one, and that one player paused and then reached down, not for a gun, as might have been expected, but for a roll of parchment that had been sealed with wax and tied with black ribbon.

‘I’m using this to match your stake,’ the man said.

His father frowned. ‘What in hell is it?’

‘It’s a map.’ The man smiled. ‘It could be worth more than all the money on the table. All the money in this room, for that matter. It’s up to you.’ The man leaned back, put two fingers to his jaw and waited, the same curious smile on his face, a bystander’s smile, as if he were outside the game, as if it amused him to know what the outcome might be.

Smoke rose from seven motionless cigars.

The man did not look like a gambler. He wore no long-tailed coat, no white shirt with ruffles. There was no pearl-handled Colt revolver lying on the floor beside his chair. All the same he had an air about him.

It was as if the man knew his father, Wilson thought, shifting on his gilt chair in the corner. As if he were some kind of doctor and had diagnosed the fever that had brought them to the town. He was offering a piece of parchment instead of money, and he knew that Arthur Pharaoh would accept it. Maybe it was the inevitability of it all that amused him.

But his father was smiling too, a smile of recognition. He fanned his cards out on the table. Three queens. The stranger had nothing but a pair of tens. His father had won the hand.

Though there was more than eight hundred dollars in the pot, it was the map that his father reached for first. He turned to Wilson with the scroll clutched in his fist.

‘This,’ he said, ‘is why we came.’

His father had astonished himself that night. He had become something that he had never dared to dream he might become, something that he had been known, in his fear, to scorn: a man who could cut the cloth of his existence and turn it into a suit of clothes that he might wear.

It was morning by the time they climbed the stairs to their room. Outside, the street stank of hogs and vomit but the map, it seemed, could sweeten any air. They spread it out on the table, weighed down with mining tools. It followed the outline of Lower California, from the Mexican border to the tip of the peninsula. Three women stood in the sea, below the Colorado river. They had brown skin and pointed breasts, and they wore skirts that were made of black stones hung on bits of string. Halfway down the east coast, just to the right of a grove of palm trees, the land was covered with a flurry of markings that looked like the transcript of someone’s excitement. His father read anything that was legible out loud. The names of islands, towns and bays dropped into the still air of the room and sent out ripples.

‘The Sea of Cortez,’ his father breathed.

His eyes gleamed. There might already have been gold stacked in the room. His eyes were just reflecting it.

‘And this is the same map?’ Suzanne bent over the parchment, her face lit with the secrecy of it. Her hair had come unpinned. One curl hung against her cheek like the spring inside a watch.

‘The very same,’ he said.

‘So you know where the gold is?’

He shook his head. ‘I’ve no idea.’

‘But the map — ’

‘There are sea serpents and women in black skirts. There are volcanoes. But I don’t see any gold, do you?’

She leaned down, frowning.

‘It’s like wearing a cross,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t mean that God exists. It just means that you believe He does.’

It was as they sailed past San Bruno, close enough to notice the bell suspended in the tower of the church, that the feeling came flooding into her. A sense that she had been left to fall into ruin, to decay. A sense that everything was over. She could see that girl, standing in a pool of ashes and champagne, the smoke still rising from her clothes. There were rooms in her and all the doors were open. Dead leaves blew across the floor. She could feel their gentle scraping against the inside of her skin.

She watched the village slip by, with a kind of desperation, as if by noticing it in all its detail she could save herself and break free. Those children poking among the fallen palm branches and the shells of crabs, those children turning to stare and then waving their thin arms. The boats drawn up on a strip of olive silt, their hulls as fine and curved as melon rinds. The church, pain-white against a cloudless sky. But she could not gather it; it would not wait for her. The view was a dismissive river. It just moved on past.

She did not know why. Perhaps it was the beauty and contentment of the day. The battle between Namu and the fish, a meal eaten by the sea. So much new knowledge. And she had found her beauty and contentment in the company of an Indian fisherman and a gold prospector from San Francisco. Imagine Madame de Romblay’s face if she ever learned of that. Imagine Théo’s.

A moment opened in her memory, its petals lifting to reveal a poisoned heart. How she looked up and out across the banqueting table on the SS Providencia and saw Théo distancing himself from her, disowning her. And how, later, as they rode home in the carriage, he held a silence that was heavy with rebuke and then, at last, and without looking at her, said, ‘You should not have talked that way.’ Should not. Later still, close to the house, he had added something kinder, a few words that sounded like advice. It astonished her how easily he could achieve distance from almost anything. They could have been two virtual strangers who would shortly separate and make their way to different houses for the night. They had no longer seemed to be linked by any bond or understanding. If they seemed close, it was only because they were sharing the same carriage. It was no more than geographical coincidence. Like statues in a park. Like planets.

The empty house; deserted rooms.

They shared a bed, and yet they hardly seemed to touch. His work. Responsibilities. The heat. It was love that was leaving, or had left. Not hers for him, she thought, but his for her. She was trying to gather it in, and it was slipping through her hands, like ice. The tighter she held on, the faster it melted. And when it was gone there would be nothing. No, less than nothing. Emptiness that once contained something always felt much emptier than emptiness that had never been otherwise.

She glanced up. The children, the boats, invisible. The spire almost gone. Tears were coming to her now. The sky, the land, the water, blurred. She wiped her eyes, and then looked round. She had not been observed.

‘Wilson?’

He looked up, his hat pushed to the back of his head.

‘I wish we didn’t have to go back,’ she said. ‘I don’t want the day to end.’

He was smiling, but he did not speak. Sometimes she would see him keep something to himself, not through want of a desire to offer it, but because it might be spoiled by words.

‘Promise me something,’ she said.

She saw that this would not be difficult for him.

‘Promise me that we can do something like this again. Not this exactly. Just something like this.’

He gave his promise easily. Not lightly, but easily. And she knew that she could rely on him.

But what should it be? She recalled a tedious conversation with Florestine Bardou. The doctor’s wife had mentioned the Misión San Ignacio which was, she claimed, one of the finest churches in Lower California. It had been established by the Jesuits in 1728 and completed, by the Dominicans, she thought, in about 1786.