A Man of Genius (21 page)

‘Perhaps if we had prepared for this we should have brought along a mule to carry bedding,' he said. ‘If they had no cart to lend us, they might have had a mule.' Was she supposed to smile at this? She never quite knew with Aksel Stamer.

Soon it was dark, no reason not to take off her baggy man's trousers and lie beneath her cloak. It was clammy underneath, but throwing it off would expose her to the biting insects of the night and, if by amazing chance she slept into the dawn, to the stranger's gaze.

Long before morning the slight chill made her draw the cloak close round her. Still exhausted, she slept again.

Already when the light came Aksel Stamer was standing, silhouetted against the dawn. She couldn't tell whether his eyes were on her or were just looking out to where the sea would be, watching an egret on a protruding rock. He was like a stone statue, set up to guard the living. She realised he'd lain only partly protected and comfortable to leave her the snug place.

Her ankle throbbed just a little but she wouldn't complain. Bats were circling back to their caves.

By early afternoon it was hard to remember that it had ever been chill. These September days still boiled at the zenith. The air grew heavy and humid and the sandy earth fluffed and swelled hotly about her feet. A cricket chirped incessantly.

It would be nearly autumn in England. What was it here? In these slopes of dry flowers that looked like spent dandelions. Apart from the crossing, this night had been the only time of real discomfort on the trip and he'd eased it as far as he could. Still, she felt dishevelled. Would she ever be really at ease again – back in the world of eating and sleeping on down, washing, sewing and chatting, with protocols of politeness and all the proper defences of clothes and manners against the other sex?

26

T
he man – she thought of Aksel Stamer as this now, not Robert – strode ahead. He'd told her to take even longer strides while she was in male attire, there was no need to mince as a woman must. But she couldn't easily adjust further. Her body held its residual pains.

Despite the discomfort, the oddness of it all, there was magic too. Sometimes distant voices and cattle bells dented the stillness.

They came in time to a little chapel in some woods with a cave nearby, a special cave. Of course a hermit's cave.

‘Look,' he said.

‘How did you know it was here?'

‘I told you. I came this way once. Come, look.'

The cave was of soft stone. It seemed to mingle shells and dust. Someone had carved grotesque faces or skulls on the wall, one face simply an oval with a great gaping mouth in perpetual howl. She could hear water dripping in distant caverns into pools she'd no wish to see. Were there blind white creatures there?

‘There must have been rituals, ceremonies here, something secret with the dead,' she said.

Aksel Stamer shrugged. ‘There was perhaps some mystery,' he said, ‘or perhaps just a private place where men hid while their enemies sought them.' He turned away.

She wished she'd not spoken. Such gothic imagining had annoyed Robert. Perhaps had helped drive him mad. She chastised herself. She would never again use that word so lightly. It was not ‘madness' in him. He had never been mad. If anyone had been it was she.

A wooden bench was set against the old stones of the chapel. It had gaps in the slats where the wood had rotted and weeds grown
through. Aksel Stamer sat down and encouraged her to sit beside him. For a while in the dappled shade they sat together companionably like a long-married couple. She thought once he looked towards her as if he would speak, but he said nothing. She had no urge to chatter as she'd so fatally had with Robert. No need to push this man on to say something. His silence was unthreatening, part of a laconic self. At times like this, his quiet strength was comforting.

He stood up too soon. She was still tired as they began walking once more. The air smelled of rosemary.

There was a poplar in the path. Surely she could lean on its smoothness just for a moment. The tree almost invited her back to rest. But on he went ahead of her. As she looked towards him she saw a black-and-orange butterfly just to his left as if leading him forward. He brushed it aside. Others came to join it.

He said something, she didn't hear. She tried to catch up but failed. Then he turned and said
‘Aglais urticae.
'

Did men always know the names of things? Aksel Stamer and the butterfly, Giancarlo Scrittori and the lagoon birds, Robert and his pots, Gilbert and the shells. Was that their power? She tried to press Robert into generic men. But he resisted.

On they trudged. Aksel Stamer making distance between them, then slowing as she struggled to keep up, despite the longer strides she was forcing herself to take.

Now the trees were looming in the dusk. Everything ached about her: blisters welled up on her feet, first one then both. The lady's boots were not stout enough, intended for stone pavements and city halls not for this tramping over uneven ground. She steadied herself with a sapling, a feathered branch. She would not ask the man to slow down. For, underneath all, there was only one thing that mattered, that Aksel Stamer be there, that he not disappear, that he not abandon her.

But then, as she looked up from keeping her eyes on the uneven ground, he really wasn't there. Her stomach rose to her mouth. She sat down on a stone to swallow and catch her breath. To be abandoned here in this wilderness.

Then he appeared to the side of her through a grove of olive trees,
carrying his leather bottle with its metal cup dangling from the rim. ‘Here is apple juice,' he said. He unhooked the cup and poured out the liquid. It was yellow-green, with a frothed top. It was cool and delicious.

Then suddenly it was Robert's constricted throat that was trying to drink. She felt the juice fall from a coloured glass into that mouth. Tears sprang to her eyes. She could swallow no more. Yet what she'd drunk still kept its delicious, delicate taste.

Aksel Stamer saw her emotion. He looked away. She hoped he'd simply judged her tired.

A little breeze came down through the olive trees and holm oaks and tugged at her straight, now straw-like hair. It was short but perhaps not short enough. For it flapped against her flaking face. Appearance was nothing, sensation everything.

A spasm of self-contempt overwhelmed her as she thought of what she, like other women, had once feared of men – a rape, an attack, for God's sake, even an intimate robbery. What was there about her things or her person to take now? Was there anything that anyone would want?

She got up and handed the leather bottle back to Aksel Stamer. He drank the rest. She heard the liquid pass down his throat.

Soon they came out of the dark green, almost indigo canopy of the shore pines and into an area of sand and scrub intersected with shallow rivers and rivulets. The few freshwater ponds were almost dry, as was the salt marsh with its white powder shining with crystals. There was again the faint smell of rosemary.

Venice with its wet floors and dripping walls, its endless tides over slippery feet, its humid sultry air and floppy gulls, was far from this thirsty scrub. It didn't call her back.

The stern back almost faded into the undulating dunes as she tried harder to hasten her aching legs. Follow, always follow.

‘We are nearly there,' he said over his shoulder.

What if, when they got to the other coast, no boat came? What if
it happened as it had when they first landed, that nothing was as he expected? What if there had never been a boat? What if Aksel Stamer too was mad and they were walking into a desert? Where was this place?

Would she never learn just to obey – or not to follow?

The dunes stretched on, in and out of headlands. A stray juniper interrupted the waste, a few sandy thickets. On the ground were pieces of bare distorted wood. The few growing things were stunted.

‘How will we know where we should be?' she asked as she caught up with him.

He didn't answer. Of course not. She spoke to hear a voice in this emptiness.

What was the matter with him? He didn't seem like a human being with ordinary emotions.

At last they saw the sea. It was still, almost thick, substantial.

‘We must wait by three huts on the promontory. There is only one place like that.'

She could have wept with relief at his words. Yet she made no sense of them. This was like Giancarlo Scrittori with the lamb and goose in San Marco so very long ago. But that had been playful. She looked at Aksel Stamer with incomprehension. He caught the look but didn't interrogate it. Then he spoke again slowly, gravely as if talking, any talking, used too much energy and he feared to expend it. ‘We have to find the place, Ann.'

He used her Christian name as he had on La Giudecca. Was it still her name? She was unsure. Her old passports were in her bag under her clothes. They had her name – her two names – on them.

When the stream they had crossed so much earlier – then re-crossed repeatedly as it meandered, following some hardly defined path – entered the sea, they waded through the shallow water holding their boots. The sand below was light brown and blue catching the whiteness of the sandy beach beyond as well as the light azure of the sea. Ann felt herself black and parched as she looked down at her bare feet. Like pieces of chipped wood.

They couldn't drink the water: it had become salty.

‘When we meet people from now on, it's best if I say you are my sister,' he said, with the slightest pause before the last word. ‘Please put back your skirt when we stop.'

‘But our ages are different.'

At last he smiled, or rather his face creased just a little. ‘Not so different. I had . . .' He hesitated and looked pensive, then added, ‘And do we not look somewhat alike?'

She caught his eye. Her mind tumbled over its half-realised thoughts. Why did he not say ‘daughter'? Would that not be more reasonable, more suited to their years? And why the pause? She was sure she'd discerned it.

She wouldn't ask. He would never respond.

By now she felt weary beyond the bodily weariness of aching legs, sore feet, sprained ankle and burnt skin, even beyond the weariness of worrying about how she'd be answered. A new anger was starting to seep through her at this man who was taking such immense, peculiar trouble to save her. From what now? They were well away. She was filling with fatigue and fury.

She sat, then lay down.

Then he was rubbing her ankle, pressing in crevices with his thumb. She felt comfort steal up her legs.

For the last part of the journey he took her hemp bag on his back again and found her a stick which he peeled with his hunting knife, so she could limp just a little and take the weight off the foot with the weak ankle.

They stopped for her to change back into woman's clothes. The stays of the bodice rubbed unfamiliarly against her healed ribs.

Let it not rain, please let it not rain! The sandy rubble would become mud and squelch over and into her ageing boots. The skirts she had now to wear would be a weight of wet. She half-closed her eyes from weariness and the sun, and saw instead a sea of shining mud. But it didn't rain.

Then there, just before the huts and at the edge of the promontory, they spied a man sitting on a pile of broken wall, the remains of a ruined house.

‘Stay here,' said Aksel Stamer pointing to the ground. She could have been a spaniel. ‘Just come when I beckon to you.'

She obeyed. She'd almost forgotten how much she disliked obeying, but not quite, the feeling was still there, intact. She stood as she'd been told, and waited.

The two men came together. She saw them nod, but didn't see whether they shook hands or not. They were of equal height. Not so. Aksel Stamer was taller. She had remarked his height earlier. He was not broad, just tall. They were talking now. Then they looked back at her. The man wiped his brow and stared again. Aksel Stamer showed him a paper and the man took it, glanced and gave it back. He shook his head. Why was Aksel Stamer doing this? Could such a man read?

Again they both looked at her.

After a while Aksel Stamer came towards her and nodded for her to move forward. Before she reached the stranger, he whispered in her ear, ‘You will have to be what name I say you are. We have no passports for this part of the journey.'

‘But I have my old papers,' she protested. Then her cheeks grew hot. She remembered why they were journeying in this tortuous way.

‘I have sold them,' he said curtly. ‘You are better without them.' Then he shrugged. ‘They were no use in any case.'

He must have taken them from her bag when she wasn't looking – or sleeping. She had not given them to him, she knew that. Did he think he simply owned her? Was it to do with her ‘crime'? So she would never again bear that incriminating ‘married' name? Yet how on earth could people on this forsaken shore know anything of what happened so long ago in Venice? And what
had
happened there?

‘You have yours, though?'

He shrugged again and walked ahead to the man, not turning round.

The boat they aimed for would be a sizeable one, suitable for crossing the open water. It lay further down, south of the promontory. The stranger had given directions, but would not accompany them. They had to reach it by themselves.

It was hard to do this when, after a short pause, her body expected rest. As if she'd promised it to her recalcitrant legs and was now forsworn.

They continued trudging over the dunes, a few shells cracking as they walked. The sharp edges almost punctured the thinning soles of her boots. The frayed silk scarf she used now against the sun was caught by the low thorny bushes as they passed.

She slowed down again, so that Aksel Stamer went on way ahead of her. She saw he was sitting upright on a rock protruding through the sand. The sun shone on his old leather jacket, making its dark folds look silky. She reached him and sat down beside him on the dry sand, exaggerating their difference in height.

In silence he pulled out a small piece of dry bread, some olives and a thimble size of goat's cheese, then poured from his leather bottle half a tin mug of warm water.

She put small bits of each in her mouth. They tasted of heaven.

‘Those plants we passed earlier are asphodel,' he said. ‘They flowered long ago. Here they eat the root.' He paused. ‘Children heat it sometimes and explode it like fireworks.'

What was he talking about?

To lie in asphodel.

‘That man you spoke to,' she said, ‘what could he be doing here? There's little farming. A few goats are all I've spied these past days. Is he a fisherman?'

Aksel Stamer stared out towards the sea. ‘He was a miner,' he said at last. ‘Now he owns boats.'

‘Mining for what? There's nothing here.'

‘They mine for lead.'

How does he know these things?

He surmised her question. ‘I told you. I have been here before.'

‘Why, when?'

‘I was travelling.'

As earlier, the rest made the aching more palpable, her sore feet more demanding. But still she stood up and went on, hobbling, lurching over rivulets.

Finally they saw it round the low dunes. A large old fishing boat with wet black nets coiled on its deck. In it two men sat waiting, quite still.

Was it a small thing for these men to carry to sea a suspected murderess and her protector, neither with papers for the foreign land? Or was this their traffic: ferrying fugitives back and forth?

Was her life more ordinary than she'd supposed?

When they arrived near the French coast, one of the men rowed them ashore in a sort of India dinghy. He set them down on a deserted inlet by a village called Cassis, he said. Aksel Stamer handed over more money in silence. No one noted their arrival.