Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

Then he lay down on his bed and slept.

It was long ago, somewhere in Paris. There were chestnut trees, their branches weighed down with pale blooms. She noticed the fragrance pausing at their table, then its absence as the wind blew. She watched her two hands taking one of his. His hand that could lift her trembling to the surface of her skin, then sink her deeper than she had ever been. And she could hear her voice.

‘I love you, Théo. I really do.’

‘Yes, yes.’ His hand withdrew.

The strength of what she felt embarrassed him.

A gust of wind; the fragrance of the blossom gone.

There had only been a few who had not been impelled by her into some needless hostility or withdrawal, and she had thought him one of them — but he was not. There was Monsieur Épaules, if that was truly his name. She was always returning to him, perhaps because she had never been able to. That sense of life falling short, an incompleteness that would last for ever. She could see him climbing the stairs with his burden of water. Tilting in the silver pails, solid and opaque, like ancient coins or medals. And his secret vial on a cord inside his shirt. That bitter taste. That promise of a future.

But this was not a good time to be thinking of him.

‘No,’ she murmured, ‘it is not a good time for that.’

She looked around. Orange boulders littered the ground. The air stood tall and still. She had no hat, no parasol. She had no water.

She pulled on the reins; the hoofs stopped. Flies settled on her face, the backs of her hands. She tore a square piece out of her skirt. Placing it over her head, she tied the two ends beneath her chin. A simple headscarf. It would afford her some relief. She had to keep going, though. Inland, always inland. Sooner or later she would reach the mission at San Ignacio. Sooner or later she would drink from the cool green waters of Kadakaamana. Two days’ ride, she remembered. But how long had she been riding for already? She could not recall how many times the darkness had come down, or even if it had at all. She laid her hand against the horse’s neck.

‘I’m sorry, Normandy,’ she whispered.

She shook the reins and they moved on. Through fields of boulders and cactus. Past trees with pale-green trunks and spindly branches of grey and amber. Towards the volcano. Its flanks of charcoal and violet, moulded like the muscles on the haunches of a lion. This was where the makings of her nerve remedy were gathered. Under whose influence her dream had been delivered in its entirety. Not what she would have called a peaceful night. No source of peace to her at all. Though still some distance off, the mountain rose so high, it made her feel giddy. She had to look away.

There came a time when she could only think of things that made her weep. Monsieur Épaules, alone in the darkness of the stairwell, his silver buckets empty. Théo with his back turned late at night. Wilson Pharaoh playing the piano in the rain, his fingers slipping on the keys. And her own two children, who had never even drawn a breath. Her first child, burned in a ragman’s brazier at a crossroads in Les Halles. Her second, two inches long and lying on her palm. That seedling eye, those streaks of redness. No he, no she. Just something that had failed.

Her tears scalded her face.

And the brown pelican which flew so close to the water that its shadow almost touched its belly.

Her tears.

That barrenness inside had led her to believe that nothing could be changed, inside or out. His love was weak and hers would never be enough. Nothing between them could be sustained. Everything between them died.

Yet there was still the memory of setting sail from Le Havre. That crisp December morning, ice and sunlight gilding the handrail as she climbed aboard. It was her first time on a steamboat, unless you counted that trip down the river the summer before, when they had moored at the Pont du Jour and dined on fried gudgeon and the sour green wine of Surèsnes. The open sea delighted her. She had looked back on her life — the dances, the opera, the races — and wondered how it had been possible to breathe at all. She remembered taking Théo’s arm. They stood on deck and watched the spray rise off the waves.

‘So,’ he said. ‘You’re happy now.’

She had laughed. The word did not do justice to her feelings. ‘You were so selfish,’ she said, ‘to try and keep me from all this.’

It was not a reprimand, of course, but an expression of her elation and he had taken it as such, smiling down at her, moving his hand to cover hers, then lifting his eyes to the horizon and filling his lungs with clean, cold air.

Moving his hand to cover hers.

The sun stared into her eyes. The horizon duplicated itself in the heat like a stack of plates. From a distance the orange boulders looked as if they might all be the same size, but up close every single one was different.

‘How can you bear it?’ she had asked him recently, in the calmest voice that she could muster.

Théo glanced up from a list of the church’s components. ‘Bear what, my dear?’

‘The fact that all the parts are the same. All perfectly identical. Every section the same length, every hole drilled to within a millimetre. Every time.’

He was smiling. Though she was attacking him she could see that he was flattered by her familiarity with his work.

‘You’re talking about perfection,’ he said. ‘If it’s attained, it should be celebrated, admired. It’s not something that you have to bear.’ And he looked at her in that quizzical way he had, as if he suspected that she might be teasing him.

She raised her eyes from the coarse hairs of the horse’s mane. The sky was one exhausting wash of light. She had tried thinking a woman’s thoughts, which were always, it seemed to her, excuses or apologies: he has his work; he is making discoveries; he needs my understanding. But a cry had always risen up in her: Discover me. Perhaps she should have made small parcels of her love, been miserly with it. Perhaps she should only have offered it when it was wanted. Begged for. Earned. But how could she, with her feelings for him so generous inside her? You might as well tell trees not to blossom in the spring, a river not to flood its banks. You’re talking about perfection, he had said. Was her love so imperfect, then?

There was a ridge ahead of her. She could not tell how far away it was, but it seemed to her that beyond it she would find the mission. She would pause on the crest of the ridge, her face bathed in the last soft light, and she would look down and there it would be. One hundred thousand palm trees. The cool green waters. Kadakaamana. There, as promised. What relief there would be in that still moment. What peace.

The horse stumbled, dropped its head. She could feel its bones stagger in its skin. She shook the reins with the little strength that she had left. She touched its flanks with the heels of her boots. She could hardly speak because her lips had turned to stone.

‘Normandy,’ she whispered. ‘We’re almost there.’

The party that had gathered outside the main office of the mining company to wish Wilson Pharaoh well was necessarily small, owing to the lateness of the hour and the pressure of events. Of the four people present, only Monsieur Castagnet appeared calm. Monsieur Valence paced up and down, the cinders crackling beneath his polished shoes. Madame Bardou stood close by, her face so drained of colour that her lips looked as dark as an invalid’s. It was not just Suzanne’s disappearance that had upset her. Late that afternoon the Bardous’ house had been broken into, and more than a dozen of the doctor’s waistcoats had gone missing. Clinging to Madame Bardou’s arm, and flushed with the drama of the situation, was Madame de Romblay. As Wilson mounted the mule that Valence had commandeered, she spoke to him, her eyes dilated, almost gloating.