Olura (17 page)

Philip wheeled the body along a rough path which ran between the edge of the old quarry and the fence round the new workings. We were very close to men stoking the furnaces, but on so rackety a
night we should never have been noticed if Philip had not been very nearly killed by a landslide. The men heard the stones crashing on the floor of the quarry and heard me scream and came, as they
thought, to help. We were very lucky to get clear away with Livetti and the barrow.

So we still had him; and there was nothing we could do except drive off quickly before police and officials came out to investigate the cause of the disturbance. Philip absolutely refused to put
the body back in the boot. All the time he was thinking of me and of the horror and disgust which I ought to have been feeling and was by now too desperate to feel.

He sent me into Pobeña to wait for him while he wheeled Livetti over the hill which lay between us and the sea and dropped him down the chute which the iron company used for loading ore
into ships. When he came back to me, I was tortured by conscience and pity. His hands were raw and bleeding, and he was plastered with dripping mud. And still it was only me he thought of,
horrified because my clothes were in rags and I had a cut or two from stones and old iron. I had been tangled up in a rubbish tip when I tried to lead the quarrymen away from us.

It was over. I felt as if I had recovered from high fever—weak, frightened, thankful, passionately looking forward to resuming normal life, especially since I didn’t want it to be
normal. All the same, I did remember how I had always thought that rescued damsels in the nursery stories tended to fall in love rather easily. Are we so primitive that we have to believe that the
rescuer has charm and character as well as courage? But then Philip had.

I persuaded him that we should attract less notice if we returned to the Hostal de las Olas at an hour when people were freely going in and out. Meanwhile we drove slowly through the great
hills, where first the turf and then the trees turned from grey to green. When the sun rose into a great gap in the Pyrenees, like a huge, warm ruby deep in the V of black velvet, we got out of the
car—the heater and our drying clothes had made it as fuggy as a linen cupboard—and revelled in the air and the coming day. Philip, who had walked all over that country when he was
staying at Eibar, said that we were near to a spectacular spring where we could clean ourselves and the car.

Iturrioz was an exquisite, lonely place, approached by a deep cart-track just wide enough for the car. The water trickled down from one rock pool to another through a miniature grove of tall,
white heather. Below the pools was a natural ford with a hard rock bottom, and there Philip cleaned out the car—purified was the word I felt—while I went upstream to the pools.

The cool water resurrected me. Blood and mud and the brown stains of iron vanished in the effervescence of the little falls, taking a part of myself with them and leaving only my longing for
Philip. I could not be as open and sincere as I wished, for I was still not sure what picture he really had of me. Yet I had to sweep him off his feet. Philip being Philip, he would chivalrously
decide that after such a night I could not bear to be made love to.

I ought to be ashamed of calculating—far from coldly—what his reactions were likely to be. But he was sensitive to what he chose to consider immodesty. So I created for him a shy and
radiant nymph of Iturrioz, inadequately held together by safety pins. Why not? I cannot see that composing the stuff which poetry is made of is any different to writing it. And I couldn’t
help being aware as I parted the long, soft spires and came towards him that I had an affinity to white heather.

I tell you all this because I want you to understand Philip and me together as one person made of two utterly different halves. You must not ever think that I was seduced by him in typically
masculine triumph, though I would rather you believed that than what you used to suspect about me.

And anyway it wasn’t then and there. Olura—that old Olura—was disintegrated, weeping with joy and astonishment at herself and at being over fastidious at the same time. The
rocks were so cold and damp, and the car was vulgar. But I knew that it didn’t matter, that I belonged to Philip for as long as he should ever want me and that if my ‘not now’
sounded as alarmed as he tells me it did, it was because I longed to give myself to him in my own time and my own way—not clumsily, but free, free, free.

It was strange that he did not know that as confidently as I did. But he still did not understand me. When I had to pretend to be leaving Spain next day with Leopold, he believed every word of
it, the poor darling!

But I must explain what happened. We returned to the hotel about breakfast time and cheered up Leopold, who had worked himself into such a state of anxiety that he had been on the point of
asking Gonzalez to call in the police and the army to look for us. Then we got out first real sleep for forty-eight hours.

In the evening I could see that the holiday had been too exhausting for Leopold and that he was ready to return to London and on to Africa at the end of the week. I did not think I had any right
to persuade him to stay, so I arranged to drive him and Gonzalez to the airport and gave them the impression that I intended to go home by road.

I could not admit to Philip that I should drive straight back to him, in case he started to look happy and mysterious; also I felt it would be slightly discourteous to Leopold if I let him know
that I meant to stay on after he had left. There was no question of deceiving either of them; it was just that tact prevented me being completely frank. So not until the very last moment did I tell
Philip that I should be back and that he was to order lunch for me here.

I took the room where you found me. You were surprised at its simplicity. But what else could I want? It is Philip, not I, who cares for comfort and wouldn’t be content long with Love in a
Cottage. Bread and cheese and sleeping in the open—all that he would accept unhesitatingly (so long as he had some wine) for the sake of knowledge, but not for me—I mean, not
naturally.

My only rival is Comparative Philology. That, next to me, will always be the most important thing in his life. I don’t accept it, but I cannot argue. I once told him that our duty is not
to learn but to serve. He replied that service without knowledge was no bloody use at all.

That obsession of his makes him impatient; of such altruists as Cyril who do good instinctively and at any cost and have no need of a lot of facts. The only quarrel we ever had was over Cyril. I
didn’t know I could be so angry. Olura wrecked the bedroom door just like a wife in a farce who finds her husband unfaithful. And then both of us were in fits of laughter. I cannot bear it.
Remembered laughter brings tears far more helpless than those of remembered misery.

Whatever happens, I must thank God for a week of such unimaginable sweetness. I see it as a unity of sun and passion and joy, yet I can sit here and count on fingers every separate hour and
recall what we did with it and where. I could give you those times and dates so exactly, but they are not what you want.

What have I written? I have just read it all through, and it seems to me—except when I draw Philip to me by describing him—just a story of mistakes, of follies which can never happen
again. I might merely be saying like you.
A fine mess you’ve got yourself into now!
but without the tenderness in your voice. My dear, no mess, as you call it, would be enough to
make me choke with misery. I told you why, and you said all the things you thought you ought to say. Now I tell you again, because once and for all you must understand. I love Philip. I love him so
much that far more than my own private world is changed. Even such tiny universes must radiate when they collide and become one.

I know so little of your youth. But you must have loved as you have lived, eagerly and with all your heart. Remember it! Remember it for my sake! A woman’s love is as impetuous as your
own. I did not know it. All I read and heard made me feel it was a tender, consenting sort of thing, however jealous, however sensual. I thought that men must love more desperately, more
passionately, more blindly, though perhaps not so long. That is not true. I know that my love for Philip is as whole and luminous as his for me. In that alone he is not my superior. I love like a
man. I love like a woman. My breasts ache for him as if a newborn child had been torn from me. My body is hungry for him. I am in darkness without the only companionship which can ever matter to
me. I love.

I had to write that. Forgive me! It is just a woman crying on your shoulder, and soon over. I will go back to dates and times.

All this cruelty began on the First of August. I was sitting on the little wall in front of the terrace—I could see from there a corner of the Hostal de las Olas—and swinging my legs
like a child and eating my breakfast. A car with two men drove up, and I was very surprised to see Lieutenant Gonzalez get out of it. He asked me if there were some quiet place where we could talk.
For a moment I thought I must have made an unexpected conquest.

I took him into the bar, which was always smelly and empty at that time of day. With hardly any preliminaries he asked me what Philip had been doing in my car on the night of the twenty-first
July. Everything which had happened in my other lonely life seemed so remote and unreal that my apprehension of danger was not sharp at all. I assumed that his enquiry had something to do with
tourist regulations and that Philip should not have been driving a car which did not belong to him. That stupidity was lucky, for I must have looked completely innocent. A second later, when I had
realised that they might be on the trail of Livetti, I was halfway through my reply and my expression just carried on. I said that I had given Philip leave to drive it whenever he liked, and that I
didn’t know where he had gone.

Gonzalez thanked me and let it go at that, but kept on talking and talking about our Group and Cyril and Civil Disobedience, and seemed to know something about our ideals. Were we really
prepared, he asked, to go to prison for what we believed? I left him in no doubt at all that we were.

He was so enthusiastic that I thought I had made a convert. But he did not think our methods would work in Spain, because the people would just laugh at non-violence when they had such a
tradition of rising in arms. While he was only Leopold’s shadow, I had not realised that he had a mind of his own. One wouldn’t expect to find an intellectual in Franco’s secret
police.

Then he told me that he needed a few details to round off his report on the Prime Minister’s short stay. Who had recommended the Hostel de las Olas, and was it widely known that the visit
was planned? I replied that Prebendary Flanders had arranged it, and that I personally had not talked about it but that the Prebendary might have done. He probably did. Much as I admire him and
although I know that I am wrong, he sometimes seems to me too boastful. He might very well have been elequent about our influence over Leopold and held me up as an example of devotion and
liberal-mindedness.

When Gonzalez had gone, I ran up to my room to change for Philip and the beach, and got the impression that my shoes had been moved. There was nowhere convenient to keep them, so I had
distributed them between a suitcase and the bedside cupboard. I couldn’t be sure. I thought that Leopold might have put the idea into my head. He was uneasy about our footprints in the mud of
the quarry, and had packed the shoes which we were wearing. It was possible for the driver to have searched my room while I was engaged with Gonzalez downstairs, and the chambermaid was looking
uncomfortable and would not meet my eyes. It must be very difficult for a criminal to know whether he is panicking or is really under suspicion.

When I met Philip on the sands of our private river, he was less worried then I. He told me that he had been questioned at the same time and given more or less the same answers. I did not bother
to let him know of my success in making the lieutenant a bit ashamed of his disreputable profession, for I knew what he would say—that if I wanted to hold prayer meetings I had better start
with the Pentagon or something Philipish of that sort.

In the evening Gonzalez picked us both up and questioned us. Because of my suspicion that my shoes had been examined I was not so startled as Philip when Gonzalez suddenly asked us what we had
been doing at Pobeña, and I invented a story that Philip had abducted me from Amorebieta with intent to ravish. He backed me up with a lot of detail which was far too convincing and must
have been drawn from some sordid personal experience.

That we had been in Pobeña was all Gonzalez knew, and he only knew so much because some wretched little official wandered about taking the numbers of cars. It must be disgusting to live
in a police state where one’s private movements are recorded. Philip annoyed me by refusing to take my indignation seriously. He pronounced with his best Senior Common Room irony that we had
been copped by the correlation of useless statistics, and he only hoped British police were equally efficient.

For two last days, madly happy in spite of our uneasiness, the police left us alone. Philip disliked this silence; it meant, he said, that enquiries were continuing and that the next time we
were interrogated we should be in serious trouble—especially if a magistrate took us separately. It was curious that I should be conscious only of innocence and helplessness, while he felt
guilty and determined. He piled up all the evidence against us which might come out, using sheets of paper and headings and sub-headings.

It all led him to the conclusion that we must try to reach France, and that we had no chance of being allowed to cross the frontier legally. I didn’t believe this until I saw how oddly and
sadly dear Elena was behaving. We had only bits of a common language, but she once seized my hands and cried that they all knew I was innocent. I guessed that she was being pestered by the police
and had orders to telephone them if I looked like packing and leaving.