Dancing Girls (11 page)

I want to tell him now what no one’s ever taught him, how two people who love each other behave, how they avoid damaging each other, but I’m not sure I know. The love of a good woman. But I don’t feel like a good woman right now. My skin is numb, bloodless as a mushroom. It was wrong of me to think I could ever accommodate; he’s too human. “I’ll walk you to the subway.” He can’t cope with it, he doesn’t believe in talking it through, he wants me out of the way. He won’t come near me, touch me, doesn’t he know that’s all he needs to do? He’ll wait for me to cool off, as he puts it. But if I go away like this I won’t be back.

Outside I put on my sunglasses, though the sun has gone in. I walk severely, not looking at him, I can’t bear to. The outlines are slipping again, it’s an effort to press the sidewalk down, it billows under my feet like a mattress. He really is going to take me to the subway and let me disappear without making any effort to stop me. I put my hand on his arm.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“You just want out,” he says, “and you’re using this as an excuse.”

“That’s not true,” I say. “If I’d wanted that excuse I could have used it before this.” We turn off towards the small park where there is a statue on horseback with a lot of pigeons.

“You’re making too much of it,” he says. “You always exaggerate.”

“Oh, I think I know more or less what happened. You had a few drinks and felt horny, that’s all.”

“Very perceptive of you,” he says. He isn’t being ironic, he thinks I’ve had a genuine though rare insight. He leans forward and takes off my sunglasses so he can see me.

“You can’t hide behind those,” he says.

The sun gets in and I squint; his face swells, darkens, a paper flower dropped in water. He spreads tendrils; I watch them creeping over my shoulder.

“I wish I didn’t love you,” I say.

He smiles, his hair scintillating in the parklight, his tie blossoming and receding, his face Oriental, inscrutable as an eggplant. I grip the handles on my black bag, force him back to snapshot dimensions.

He kisses my fingers; he thinks we have all been cured. He believes in amnesia, he will never mention it again. It should hurt less each time.

I’m happier though as I go down the stairs to the ticket window. My hands function, exchanging round silver disks for oblong paper.
That this can be done, that everyone knows what it means, there may be a chance. If we could do that: I would give him a pebble, a flower, he would understand, he would translate exactly. He would reply, he would give me.…

I ponder again his need for more glasses and consider buying him a large bath towel. Once on the train though, I find myself being moved gradually, station by station, back towards the 7-B greenhouse. Soon I will be there; inside are the plants that have taught themselves to look like stones. I think of them; they grow silently, hiding in dry soil, minor events, little zeros, containing nothing but themselves; no food value, to the eye soothing and round, then suddenly nowhere. I wonder how long it takes, how they do it.

T
here are a couple of false alarms before we actually get there, towns we pass through that might be it but aren’t, uninformative stores and houses edging the road, no signs. Even when we’ve arrived we aren’t sure; we peer out, looking for a name, an advertisement. The bus pauses.

“This has to be it,” I say. I have the map.

“Better ask the driver,” he says, not believing me.

“Have I ever been wrong?” I say, but I ask the driver anyway. I’m right again and we get off.

We’re in a constricted street of grey flat-fronted houses, their white lace curtains pulled closed, walls rising cliff-straight and lawnless from the narrow sidewalk. There are no other people; at least it isn’t a tourist trap. I have to eat, we’ve been travelling all morning, but he wants to find a hotel first, he always needs a home base. Right in front of us there’s a building labelled
HOTEL
. We hesitate outside it, patting down our hair, trying to look acceptable. When he finally grits up the steps with our suitcase the doors are locked. Maybe it’s a pub.

Hoping there may be a place farther along, we walk down the hill, following the long stone wall, crossing the road when the sidewalk disappears at the corners. Cars pass us, driving fast as though on their way to somewhere else.

At the bottom of the hill near the beach there’s a smattering of shops and a scarred, listing inn. Radio music and hilarious voices from inside.

“It seems local,” I say, pleased.

“What does ‘Inn’ mean here?” he asks, but I don’t know. He goes in to see; then he comes out, dispirited. I’m too tired to think up solutions; I’m scarcely noticing the castle on the hill behind us, the sea.

“No wonder he drank,” he says.

“I’ll ask,” I say, aggrieved: it was his idea, he should do the finding. I try the general store. It’s full of people, women mostly, with scarves on their heads and shopping baskets. They say there is no hotel; one woman says her mother has some rooms free though, and she gives me directions while the others gaze pityingly, I’m so obviously a tourist.

The house, when we find it, is eighteenth-century and enormous, a summer residence when the town was fashionable. It offers Bed and Breakfast on a modest sign. We’re glad to have something spelled out for us. The door is open, we go into the hall, and the woman emerges from the parlour as though startled; she has a forties bobby-soxer hairdo with curious frontal lobes, only it’s grey. She’s friendly to us, almost sprightly, and yes, she has a room for us. I ask, in a lowered voice, if she can tell us where the grave is.

“You can almost see it right from the window,” she says, smiling – she knew we would ask that – and offers to lend us a book with a map in it of the points of interest, his house and all. She gets the book, scampers up the wide maroon-carpeted staircase to show us our room. It’s vast, chill, high-ceilinged, with floral wallpaper and
white-painted woodwork; instead of curtains the windows have inside shutters. There are three beds and numerous dressers and cupboards, crowded into the room as though in storage, a chunky bureau blocking the once-palatial fireplace. We say it will be fine.

“The grave is just up the hill, that way,” she says, pointing through the window. We can see the tip of a church. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.”

I change into jeans and boots while he opens and closes the drawers on all the pieces of furniture, searching for ambushes or reading matter. He discovers nothing and we set out.

We ignore the church – he once said it was unremarkable – and head for the graveyard. It must rain a lot: ivy invades everything, and the graveyard is lush with uncut grass, succulent and light green. Feet have beaten animal-trail paths among the tombstones. The graves themselves are neatly tended, most of them have the grass clipped and fresh flowers in the tea-strainer-shaped flower holders. There are three old ladies in the graveyard now, sheaves of flowers in their arms, gladioli, chrysanthemums; they are moving among the graves, picking out the old flowers and distributing the new ones impartially, like stewardesses. They take us for granted, neither approaching nor avoiding us: we are strangers and as such part of this landscape.

We find the right grave easily enough; as the book says, it’s the only one with a wooden cross instead of a stone. The cross has been recently painted and the grave is planted with a miniature formal-garden arrangement of moss roses and red begonias; the sweet alyssum intended for a border hasn’t quite worked. I wonder who planned it, surely it wouldn’t have been her. The old ladies have been here and have left a vase, yellowish glassware of the kind once found in cereal boxes, with orange dahlias and spikes of an unknown pink flower. We’ve brought nothing and have no ceremonies to perform; we muse for an acceptable length of time, then retreat
to the scroll-worked bench up the hill and sit in the sun, listening to the cows in the field across the road and the murmur of the ladies as they stoop and potter below us, their print dresses fluttering in the easy wind.

“It’s not such a bad place,” I say.

“But dull,” he answers.

We have whatever it was we came for, the rest of the day is our own. After a while we leave the graveyard and stroll back down the main street, holding hands absentmindedly, looking in the windows of the few shops: an overpriced antique store, a handicrafts place with pottery and Welsh weaving, a nondescript store that sells everything, including girlie joke magazines and copies of his books. In the window, half-hidden among souvenir cups, maps and faded pennants, is a framed photograph of his face, three-quarters profile. We buy a couple of ice-cream bars; they are ancient and soapy.

We reach the bottom of the winding hill and decide to walk along to his house, which we can see, an indistinct white square separated from us by half a mile of rough beach. It’s his house all right, it was marked on the map. At first we have no trouble; there’s a wide uneven pathway, broken asphalt, the remains or perhaps the beginning of a road. Above us at the edge of the steep, leaf-covered cliff, what is left of the castle totters down, slowly, one stone a year. For him, turrets are irresistible. He finds a scrabbly trail, a children’s entrance up sheer mud.

He goes up sideways, crabwise, digging footholds with the sides of his boots. “Come on!” he shouts down. I’m hesitant but I follow. At the top he reaches his hand to me, but, perpendicular and with the earth beside me, afraid of losing my balance, I avoid it and scramble the last few feet, holding on to roots. In wet weather it would be impossible.

He’s ahead, eager to explore. The tunnel through the undergrowth leads to a gap in the castle wall; I follow his sounds, rustlings,
the soft thud of his feet. We’re in the skeleton of a garden, the beds marked by brick borders now grass-infested, a few rose bushes still attempting to keep order in spite of the aphids, nothing else paying any attention. I bend over a rose, ivory-hearted, browning at the edges; I feel like a usurper. He’s already out of sight again, hidden by an archway.

I catch up to him in the main courtyard. Everything is crumbling, stairways, ramparts, battlements; so much has fallen it’s hard for us to get our bearings, translate this rubbish back into its earlier clear plan.

“That must have been the fireplace,” I say, “and that’s the main gate. We must have come round from the back.” For some reason we speak in whispers; he tosses a fragment of stone and I tell him to be careful.

We go up the remnants of a stairway into the keep. It’s almost totally dark; the floors are earth-covered. People must come here though, there’s an old sack, an unidentifiable piece of clothing. We don’t stay long inside: I’m afraid of getting lost, though it’s not likely, and I would rather be able to see him. I don’t like the thought of finding his hand suddenly on me unannounced. Besides, I don’t trust the castle; I expect it to thunder down on us at the first loud laugh or false step. But we make it outside safely.

We pass beneath the gateway, its Norman curve still intact. Outside is another, larger courtyard, enclosed by the wall we have seen from outside and broken through; it has trees, recent trees not more than a hundred years old, dark-foliaged as etchings. Someone must come here to cut the grass: it’s short, hair-textured. He lies down on it and draws me down beside him and we rest on our elbows, surveying. From the front the castle is more complete; you can see how it could once have been lived in by real people.

He lies down, closing his eyes, raising his hand to shade them from the sun. He’s pale and I realize he must be tired too. I’ve been
thinking of my own lack of energy as something he has caused and must therefore be immune from.

“I’d like to have a castle like that,” he says. When he admires something he wants to own it. For an instant I pretend that he does have the castle, he’s always been here, he has a coffin hidden in the crypt, if I’m not careful I’ll be trapped and have to stay with him forever. If I’d had more sleep last night I’d be able to frighten myself this way but as it is I give up and lean back on the grass beside him, looking up at the trees as their branches move in the wind, every leaf sharpened to a glass-clear edge by my exhaustion.

I turn my head to watch him. In the last few days he’s become not more familiar to me as he should have but more alien. Close up, he’s a strange terrain, pores and hairs; but he isn’t nearer, he’s further away, like the moon when you’ve finally landed on it. I move back from him so I can see him better, he misinterprets, thinking I’m trying to get up, and stretches himself over me to prevent me. He kisses me, teeth digging into my lower lip; when it hurts too much I pull away. We lie side by side, both suffering from unrequited love.

This is an interval, a truce; it can’t last, we both know it, there have been too many differences, of opinion we called it but it was more than that, the things that mean safety for him mean danger for me. We’ve talked too much or not enough: for what we have to say to each other there’s no language, we’ve tried them all. I think of the old science-fiction movies, the creature from another galaxy finally encountered after so many years of signals and ordeals only to be destroyed because he can’t make himself understood. Actually it’s less a truce than a rest, those silent black-and-white comedians hitting each other until they fall down, then getting up after a pause to begin again. We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction. I wonder if they ever came here while he was still alive.