Daniel Martin (83 page)

Two dishes of yoghurt followed, and a bowl of oranges; then Turkish coffee. They discussed tomorrow with the driver. He wanted to be on his way back by midday. There was the museum to see, the baths, the tombs, the dead city itself.., too much, they must rise with the dawn, at seven, if they wanted to see it all. He had heard a weather report on the wireless. The mist was not expected, but there would be cloud, perhaps rain. Tomorrow seemed already fraught with the press of time, with duty and gloom, by the time he had finished. Then he mentioned that there was an old French guide they could read if they wanted. He made the old man find it.

They retreated with the dog-eared pamphlet to their sofa behind the stove. His table cleared, Labib stayed where he was and began some kind of backgammon game with the cook. They played not with dice, but cards. The other two men moved and watched, made quiet comments; the occasional small clack of moved counters. Meanwhile Jane translated the guide book for Dan’s benefit, as if glad of this excuse to take sanctuary in something third, pedantic, stale; as if this small service might forgive her her sins. He listened to her voice, not what she was saying. If one part of him felt inclined to snatch the guide out of her hands and throw it across the room, yet another was in some way tranced by the strangeness, the suspense, the being there. He glanced at his watch. It was still not nine. It seemed they had been there for days, not in fact, less than three hours. She came to the end of her reading. There were exclamations from the four men, grins—some coup, some stroke of luck, for the cook against Labib; a new game was begun.

‘Shall we take a sniff outside?

‘If you like. It is rather overpowering, this heat.’

They stood, and Jane went through to their bedrooms while Dan explained to Labib what they intended.

The driver pointed. ‘Not that way. In ruin. Bad dogs.’ And he bit fingers against a thumb, to show what he meant.

‘That way?’ Dan pointed towards the road. That way, it seemed, was all right. Labib spoke to the younger man, who went and fetched a torch.

Dan found Jane with her Russian coat on, tying a headscarf, in the doorway of her room. There was a reek of paraffin.

‘Oh Christ.’ He went past her, into the stench. ‘You can’t sleep in this.’

‘It’ll be all right. I’ll open the window.’

‘And freeze to death.’

‘Not with all those blankets.’

Outside they found the wind had dropped, although a bitter dankness hung in the air. In spite of Labib’s reported forecast, the mist had descended. Serpentine swathes of it wafted in the torch-beam, impelled by some ghostly breath. They moved past the black shape of the Chevrolet and down back towards the road, speculating about the mysterious dogs… perhaps he had meant jackals, neither of them was quite sure if they were found here. Dan had intended to argue again, but changed his mind; for her, now, to speak. But it was soon clear that she did not want to return to that.

Nor would she allow silence. She played the perfect travelling companion again: set the immediate between them.

To the north the sky remained faintly lighter, but around them brooded darkness and the scattered, veiled debris of a lost civilization: crumbled walls, a colonnade, a bank littered with shards. It was the weather, they decided; it took all the serene aura out of classical antiquity, reduced it to its constituent parts, its lostness, goneness, true death… and the contrast of the reality with the promise of the name: Palmyra, with all its connotations of shaded pools, gleaming marble, sunlit gardens, the place where sybaritic Rome married the languorous Orient. It was much more like Dartmoor, Scotland; the Connecticut where Jane and Nell had spent their schoolgirl wartime years.

They came to the harder surface of the road from Horns and walked a little way down that, but the vapour-laden cold was terrible. Somewhere in the mist to their right a sharp-eared dog, invisible but seemingly quite close, perhaps the same one they had heard earlier, began to bark with intense suspicion. They turned, defeated, menaced by the canine voice. It followed them sporadically, a soul caught between anger and despair, all the way back to the Hotel Zenobia.

The men looked up grinning from their game, as if amused to see these foreigners so soon thwarted and brought to sanity. Jane stood warming herself at the stove, while Dan exchanged a few words about the dogs. They were domestic ones gone feral, it seemed, breeding in holes in the ground, in the ruins. Their waiter at supper raised hands, aping a rifle and pressing a trigger; something, perhaps merely humour, yet which appeared vaguely sinister, glistened in his eyes. He said something in Arabic in a low voice, and the other men smiled.

‘What did he say, Labib?’

‘He say, like Israel men. When he shoot dogs.’

Dan gave the upturned faces a circumstantial smile. ‘They’ll wake us?’

‘Sure. Seven o’clock.’

He turned back to Jane. ‘Unless you want to sit and read?’

‘No.’ She turned from the stove.

‘Let’s swap rooms.’

‘No, really…’

‘You can’t sleep in that stink.’

‘Then why should you?’

She said goodnight to the men, and he added his own raised hand, then they went through into the corridor. She stopped at the closed door of her room, head half-down: as if she knew nothing she might say would be adequate.

‘At least let me turn the damn thing out for you.’

She hesitated, then nodded and opened the door. The smell hit them at once. He drew a breath, then squatted beside the ancient stove and turned a tap on a fuel-pipe. It was wet with leaked paraffin. Another cogged wheel: the flame shone white a moment, then began to phut and smoke. He grimaced back up at her.

‘Do let me get them to open another room.’

She was staring down at the floor, her hands in her pockets. He stood and went in front of her.

‘Jane.’

Very slowly her gloved hands came out of her pockets, then timidly reached for his. Her head, the green scarf she still wore, remained bowed as if ready to butt him away. He took the hands. Her voice was so low that he could hardly hear it.

‘It wouldn’t change what I said.’

‘But in spite of that?’

‘I feel so cold, Dan.’

He smiled, the statement was almost insulting, as if this fraught giving-way was a matter of temperature and quite beyond his powers of remedy.

‘Any warmth. In a wasteland.’

She stayed, as if already frozen; but then the gloved fingers clenched against his.

‘I’ll come in a minute.’

He leant and kissed the top of the scarf, squeezed the leather fingers back in return; then left and went to the bathroom. Her door was shut when he returned down the corridor. His own room also smelt of paraffin, but not nearly so acridly as hers; and it was warm now. He stooped to turn the stove out, then changed his mind, undressed, switched off the light, got into the cold bed. The sheets felt rough, un-ironed, distinctly damp. A phosphorescence shone on the ceiling from the blue flame of the stove. He heard Jane go along to the bathroom, then back to her room. Her door closed, and there was silence. He thought of Jenny, betrayal; bridges, brinks, wastelands. The silence went on too long. It was five minutes now since she had gone back to her room across the corridor, far more than she could have needed to undress, and spoke a terrible reluctance. He began to dread some change of mind. He saw her sitting on the side of her bed, with all her clothes on, unable to move.

He decided to give it a minute more; began to count; but then her door opened and closed very quietly. She came in. He leant up on an elbow, and at first sight thought, since she still wore her outdoor coat, that she had come to say she could not; then realized, as she turned to close the door, that it was being worn as a dressing-gown. She came quickly to the bed and in one swift movement discarded the coat and threw it over his own clothes on the one chair. A moment later she had slipped under the bedclothes he held extended. Her face sank against his neck as he immediately strained her close against him; and suddenly, in that first naked contact, although he also knew, something in that buried head, that he was being allowed this body, not given it, there was no time, no lost years, marriage, motherhood, but the original girl’s body. He had an acute and poignant memory, re-experience, of what it had been like, once, before so many other undressings and goings to bed had numbed it, to drop like this out of the intellectual, the public, into the physical and private… the strange simplicity of it, the delicious shock, the wonder that human beings bothered with any other kind of knowledge or relationship.

They lay embraced like that for half a minute or more, then he kissed her. She responded, yet he felt, if not a physical shyness, a reserve still. He released her a little and they lay like two children, noses almost touching.

‘What took you so long?’

‘When I was a Catholic, we used to call it praying.’

But there was a smile in her eyes and mouth, and he smelt perfume as well, a more secular vanity.

‘For both of us?’

‘Mainly for you.’

He smoothed down the side of her body beneath the bedclothes. ‘You’re still so nice like this. You haven’t changed.’

‘No memory.’

‘Every memory.’ He found a hand, laced fingers through it. ‘Haven’t you?’

‘Not physically.’

‘Emotionally?’

She stared for a long moment into his eyes.

‘Do you remember that night at Tarquinia? When we had our night-bathe and all had to sleep in the same room?’

‘Very vividly.’

She looked down.

‘I remembered it then.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I knew I was still in love with you.’ Her eyes stayed down. ‘I tried to tell Anthony when we got home. But I couldn’t. Then to confess it. But I couldn’t do that, either. I couldn’t decide which was the worse sin. Still feeling it, or thinking it a sin to feel it.’

She looked up into his eyes again then, with a strange mixture of gravity and timidity, almost as if Dan were the Anthony, or her unsought priest, of that time; and he knew that for some incomprehensible reason this was not a secret that brought them together, but remained a barrier; as if what was once suspect and illicit must always remain so.

The wretched dog began barking again somewhere outside, and he thought once more of T. S. Eliot: oh keep the Dog far hence… but couldn’t stop to remember how it went on, conscious only of this oddly virginal, willing-unwilling body he felt and held; held against so many recent contradicting public images of her—the don’s wife, the poised, the discreet, the middle-aged Englishwoman… and now so disconcertingly reduced to a nakedness in more ways than the literal.

‘The sheets are damp.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Do you want me just to hold you?’

The head shook, and she closed her eyes. Her feet did feel cold, but not the rest of her body. She let herself be pulled to him, her head once more buried against his neck. In spite of her passivity he sensed an inner turmoil, a teeming race in the darkness of her mind. Half a minute passed, but then, in response to a movement he did not try to control, her hand slipped from his waist to the small of his back, and a moment later her head shifted, lifted, for him to kiss her; and she was no longer virginal. She yielded, at least to Eros; to being kissed, caressed, aroused, rediscovered. Somewhere beneath them a tired bedspring creaked, when he came on top. She let her arms fail sideways, but a leg bent, tenting the bedclothes, then splayed a little as Dan crushed her; as if there was indeed a physical longing for this, but her arms and hands could not sanction it.

It seemed to him, as they let sexual feeling dominate the next few minutes, that someone else was aroused, had taken over her body. It was not that she remained passive; the arms did rise and the hands caressed in return; but that in some paradoxical way made it seem a ritual, a concession to physical convention. For once in his life he would have liked his partner to talk, to know what she felt. He had pushed back the bedclothes and his own eyes, now accustomed to the dark, kept searching her face for answers; and even when they were joined, failed to get them. Her body excited him more than he expected—in the dim light from the fire it still looked, was young: slender-armed, small-breasted… and that side of it came almost as a last secret she had kept, an added unfairness.

Yet it did not take place as he had dreamed, did not reach that non-physical climax he wanted, fused melting of all further doubt. She had been wiser in not expecting it; though he still felt obscurely cheated by her not trying to create what she had not expected. But nor, finally, was she merely indulging him, comforting him. For a brief while she was the female animal; possessive, wanting possession to endure. It came to him, immediately afterwards, when he was still lying half across her, that the failure could have been put in terms of grammatical person. It had happened in the third, when he had craved the first and second.

It left, too, a sad, sour little presentiment of age, of the death of the illusion that they could find each other as simply as this. It was too small, too short, too childlike a thing. Perhaps that was why he had always preferred, in more recent years, younger women: Jennies too green not to stay one with the myths of their bodies.