Air and Fire (29 page)

‘Would you make me some of your tea?'

She was not convinced of the healing properties of the drink, but she knew that Imelda took great pleasure in preparing it, and the taste had become a source of amusement to them both. It was another way of setting Imelda's mind at rest, a touchstone for a mood. She listened to the girl's light footsteps dwindle.

The argument came back to her. The anger – his, then hers.
Why is there always something to forgive?
She had left the bed without another word. Sat at her dressing-table and searched the mirror for her face. All the lamps had been extinguished; moonlight would have to do. Some powder first, to give her skin a shocked and ghostly look. A dab of rouge to strengthen
it. She knew he was standing somewhere behind her, looking on in utter disbelief. Well, good. She took her time over the jewellery, changing her mind more than once. At last she settled on a necklace of emeralds and pearls, three amber bracelets and a cameo brooch. Touching perfume to the inside of her wrists, her throat, the lobes of her ears, she rose from the stool and left the room. Her performance only lasted until the moment when she closed the bedroom door behind her. Then she sank down on the floor. She was exhausted, bored. She had wanted him to follow her, but she had suspected all along that he would not. Not a sound carried through the door to where she sat. She did not even hear him undress, climb into bed. At last, surrendering, she lay down in the corridor, her head cushioned on the loose sleeve of her robe.

She heard Imelda mounting the stairs with her herb tea. She climbed to her feet. Her head felt like a dead weight on her shoulders, dull as a pumpkin. In the bedroom she poured water into her china bowl and began to wash the rouge and powder from her face. Imelda entered the room behind her. The chink of a cup and saucer on the dressing-table, a sigh as that day's clothes were laid across the bed.

When she walked into the parlour, Théo was smothering a yawn. She wondered if the clink and jangle of her bracelets had kept him awake; she must have tossed and turned on that hard wood floor all night. But he greeted her as if nothing had happened. All but asked her how she had slept. This ability of his to forget any unpleasantness, though something of a relief on this occasion, she often took to be a form of cowardice. It occurred to her that he must have stepped over her to reach the stairs that morning. She was beneath contempt, quite literally. She felt her anger flare, as sudden as a struck match. She was surprised that it had lasted through the night, surprised that she had slept at all with such a simmering below her skin. But then it died away again, blown out by weariness. She sat down at the table. She poured some coffee, spooned a few thin slices of fruit on to a plate.

‘There's a letter,' Théo said, ‘from Monsieur Eiffel.'

‘What does he say?'

‘Shall I read it to you?'

In this simple question, she heard his desire for a truce, his longing to restore the balance.

‘If you like,' she said.

She knew that Monsieur Eiffel would serve as his apologist. Their marriage might be disintegrating, but otherwise, in all other fields of
endeavour, Théo was excelling himself. So, actually, everything was all right. The letter could not have arrived at a more appropriate time.

Théo began to read, his voice lowered, his eyes avoiding hers. It was as she had anticipated. Eiffel praised him for his efforts in the most testing of conditions; he had every confidence in Théo's ability to complete the assembly to the satisfaction of everyone concerned. He mentioned several projects that were presently engaging his attention: a proposal for a Paris Métro, based on the London model; an observatory intended for the summit of Mont Blanc; an underwater bridge to cross the Channel. There followed a brief discourse on buoyancy and equilibrium. Her eyes moved to the window. Vultures paddled in the air above the ridge. She did not notice when it was that Théo stopped reading, only that he had. He was looking where she was looking.

‘Something must have died,' he said.

‘Yes,' she murmured. ‘Something did.'

She could see his mother, during one of her frequent visits to their house on the Rue de Rivoli. Madame Valence had an invulnerable air about her, the effect, perhaps, of the severe dresses that she favoured, steel-grey and veiled in crêpe. She resembled an engine of war that could be wheeled on to any battlefield and would always find the weakest point. Her eyes closing in on Théo, her only son, as, studying his hands, he said, ‘We are trying, mother.' ‘Trying?' Madame Valence's gaze shifted to her daughter-in-law. ‘Is something wrong?' ‘Nothing's wrong, Madame,' Suzanne replied. She saw Madame Valence tighten her lips, signalling her scepticism, and arch her pencilled eyebrows slightly as she returned to her embroidery.

The questions had begun six months after the wedding, when Suzanne showed no signs of having conceived. ‘And when shall we see a little one?' Madame Valence would ask, her light-hearted words masking an interest that was gruelling, that could, on occasion, seem like greed. As the years passed, the mask was dropped, all semblance of light-heartedness abandoned. A kind of quiet panic took its place. Suzanne did her utmost to ignore it – but sometimes she dreamed that Madame Valence had devoured her children.

Her eyes still fixed on the ridge, she pictured the horse's corpse with vultures hooked into its flanks, their wings spread wide for balance. Their beaks lurched downwards, ripped ungainly holes in the glossy coat and then jerked sideways, trailing bowels and intestines on the ground. The stench of blood had reached her nostrils. She brought her fan up to her
face and moved the air away.

Théo was reading the letter again, in silence now. As he neared the end, he looked up.

‘He mentions you, Suzanne.'

‘What does he say?'

He took out his watch. ‘It's getting late,' he said. ‘I must go. Here.' Handing her the letter, he excused himself and, rising from the table, left the house.

His haste seemed natural until her eyes fell on a sentence close to the bottom of the page:
I have no doubt but that your decision to take Madame Valence with you has by now been vindicated, and that she has proved herself a most worthy and beneficial addition to the community.
She came close to laughing out loud. Such savage irony. No wonder Théo had not read the letter to the end. No wonder he had left the house with such alacrity.

And yet, a moment later, she found herself curiously touched by the words. There was someone who believed in her, someone who thought she was of value. She read on:
I remember well that, during the construction of the Douro Bridge in 1876, I travelled to Portugal myself, together with my wife, and stayed in a villa on the outskirts of Oporto. It is a time that I still think of to this day with great fondness.
His wife had died, of course, some few years later, and he had never married again. He had come to rely more and more on the company of his faithful eldest daughter, Claire.

Two summers ago Suzanne and Théo had been invited to spend a week at Monsieur Eiffel's house in the South of France, the Villa Salles at Beaulieu-sur-Mer. She remembered walking in the gardens with him one afternoon, through cloisters, between clipped hedges, past stone lions, the scent of lemon and hibiscus sharpening the air, sunlight on the lawn, fountains of bougainvillaea. He had always treated her with the utmost courtesy, and his sober and impassive features, which you saw in photographs and which so many people feared, would soften whenever he set eyes on her. In private he was self-effacing, genuinely unimpressed with his achievements; he did not act the famous man at all. That afternoon, in the gardens of the villa, he had entertained her with stories from his youth – dancing the quadrille with English girls, swimming across the Seine at night. His most humiliating year, he said, was 1860, when four girls, three of them blonde, rejected his proposals of marriage, all in the space of seven months. They laughed together over his misfortunes, dwarfed as they were by what had happened to him since.

‘They did not know what they were turning down,' she said.

He fixed her with his blue eyes, the fingers of one hand moving thoughtfully among the silver threads of his goatee. ‘Do you think that would have made a difference? If they had known?'

She smiled. ‘It's hard to say. If you cannot see something, then perhaps it is not for you.'

This must have sounded a little sententious, yet he indulged her. She could tell that she amused him, that he was stimulated by her company, and she sometimes wondered if he did not see in her some incarnation of his previous desires.

A knocking reached down to where she was, among her memories.

‘Imelda?' she called out.

There was no reply. Imelda would be elsewhere in the house, making the beds upstairs or in the kitchen hut, preparing lunch. She rose from her chair and opened the door herself. Montoya was standing on the veranda. It seemed that every time she answered the door she answered it to him. He must have waited until Théo left for work. He must have been watching the house.

It was intolerable, of course – and yet she did not feel that it was intolerable. There was no conviction in this thought of hers. It seemed passed on, second-hand; it might have belonged to someone else. Suddenly she felt as if nothing could disturb or worry her. She thought she owed this new strength to the letter she had just read and the memories that it had provoked.

But she had been slow to break the silence that lay between them. He spoke first.

‘I wanted to apologise for my behaviour last night.'

Appearing in person like this was an impertinence, she decided, in that she could not simply ignore it, as she might have ignored a letter or a note. It forced her to be civil, diverted her from any blunt response. Appearing in person was a form of manipulation, nothing less. It was clever of him, she had to admit; she almost admired him for it. Though she doubted that he knew what he was doing.

‘I behaved disgracefully. Will you forgive me?'

She let her eyes drift beyond him, out to the west, where the vultures would still be feasting. Of the two events, his shooting of the horse and his arrival at her front door, it would have been hard to say which was the more unlikely.

‘I would like to recompense you.'

His forehead shone. Her continuing silence had brought perspiration to the surface. But why should she make things easy for him? She owed him nothing.

‘To recompense you for any distress you might have suffered by inviting you to accompany,' he was beginning to stumble over the words, ‘accompany me on a cruise in my submarine.'

‘Submarine?' she said. ‘I don't think so.'

‘We'll be leaving at eleven o'clock, from the south quay.'

She looked into his face. His eyes were as soft as a dog's. He was begging for lenience.

‘You killed your horse,' she said.

‘The south quay,' he said. ‘At eleven.' And, removing his plumed hat and bowing low, he turned away from her and walked back to his waiting carriage.

Wilson did not want to set eyes on Santa Sofía again until the church was finished and those responsible for it had boarded a steamer back to Paris. He would spend the time examining his map, trying to read some significance into its markings, giving it one last chance to prove itself. If he had found nothing after a month he would return to the town. He would burn the map and make a parcel of the ashes, then he would set out for America. His first destination would be his father's grave in Silver City. The parcel would be opened there, the ashes scattered. He would also change the inscription on the stone. Strike out ‘STILL' and put ‘DONE' in its place. ‘DONE LOOKING'.

A few miles out of San Bruno he came across a band of Indians. They were heading north. They had heard that white men were handing out free houses and asked if Wilson knew anything about it. He tried to warn them that the houses were not free, that they were only given in return for labour, but they could not understand his medley of signs and dialect. He was able to buy food, though, trading his hunting-knife for a few strips of sun-dried beef and a sack of hard biscuit known as
pinole.
This would keep him going on the journey west. He could supplement the diet with prickly pears, which would soon be coming into season, and any fresh meat that he could kill – snake or bat or lizard.

At Comondú, he rested for a day. He climbed down to the bottom of the canyon where a black stream ran over smooth stones and tropical plants grew, green and secretive. He washed his clothes and laid them out to dry on slabs of lava. He found a scorpion that was the colour of grass when it decays. It did not move all morning; it seemed pinned to the rock like a brooch. He bathed in a deep pool, his eyes drifting up the sheer sides of the gorge to the sky above. He willed himself to think only of what he could see: the plants, the rocks; that strip of sky. He resisted memory. It was like a kind of hunger, the hollowness that he began to feel. He filled the
bota
on his saddlebow with water. On he rode, the trance holding.

Then things began to go awry.

First his mule split a hoof. The next day, as he rode through a viznaga grove, one of the curved thorns ripped his sack of
pinole
from ear to ear; he lost more than half the contents before he noticed. There was nothing for it. Hauling on the reins, he headed north-east, back towards the coast.

His mule grew steadily more lame. In the end he had to lead the beast. It was the middle of June. The sun dropped on the land like a weight; the air crumpled in front of him. Luckily the moon was full. He could walk all through the night in a bright, metallic daylight, but as soon as a thin wedge of colour opened on the horizon he began to look for shade. He would wake in the early afternoon with flies camping in his nostrils, on his lips. He could find nothing to eat, and his supply of water was running low. He had heard of men lost in the deserts of New Mexico who cut their mules' ears off and sucked the blood. He hoped it would not come to that.