The Cleft (22 page)

‘It's our place, you've destroyed our place.'

‘But Maronna, there are better places. I keep telling you. There is a much better place a little further along. We've just passed it.'

‘We've been here always, always. We are born here. You were born here. You were born in that cave up there.' And now she began to sob pitifully, her rage abating, and he loosely held her, and thought that he would never understand females. Why had Maronna, or some previous Maronna, not moved long ago?
This shore had always been cramped and crowded. And if they moved just a little way … it was a good thing The Cleft had been blown up if that meant the women would at last have a decent beach.

‘Come on, Maronna, you can't stay here,' and he summoned his young men by pointing along the shore behind him. They understood him, because they had all many times discussed how foolish the women were not to move to a more spacious shore.

With his arm round Maronna, Horsa led the company, quite a large one we have to deduce, of the mateable women, who would soon be mothers again, and just behind them were the little boys rescued from the cave, as close to Maronna as they could get: they had forgotten, in all those months of being so much with men, that women did mean comfort, warmth, kindness. Behind them came the three girls who had run here from the forest: they had not told Maronna about the bad things on the trip. All the women wept and looked back at their desecrated shore. Then they were not looking back: the sea was no longer white, but blue with a white film, and then it was itself, its own colour. They had left the world of powdered bone behind. At once all the women plunged into the sea, their element, their mother – at least so some of them believed – and they emerged glistening like healthy seals. And here we have another little clue as to how they looked. ‘They stood wringing out their
long hair.' The males stood watching, and then at once began the long-awaited mating. Maronna and Horsa went ahead down the beach. For how long? For how far? ‘It was quite a distance' is what we have. And, ‘A comfortable walk for healthy women.'

Horsa pulled Maronna to stand with him on rocks so similar to the ones they had left behind – for ever. Rocks, and rock pools and lively splashing waves and beyond them a long shining beach of clean white sand: there was no beach at the women's old shore.

‘And look,' said Horsa, pointing up at the cliffs that overshadowed this beach. ‘Caves. Just as good as the ones you used.'

Maronna, who after all had all the qualities that enabled her to rule the women, stood silent, looking at the beach: she understood very well what advantages were there.

The rescued little boys, having washed themselves, came running up to Maronna and Horsa.

But, as we know, there were few of them.

Maronna stepped back from the shelter of his arms and said, ‘Where are the other boys? When are they coming?'

And here it was, the dreaded moment. Horsa stood in front of his accuser, head bowed, his arms loose at his sides, palms towards her – and this posture told her what she would hear. Horsa trembled as he stood, and his crutch, the stick, shook too.

Maronna was already tearing her wet hair with both hands. Remember, she usually had hair ‘piled on top of her head'. Now it flowed down, excepting for where the white powder clogged it. She tugged and tore at it, trying to make this pain bad enough to still the anguish she felt.

‘Where are they, Horsa, where?'

He shook his head and she screamed, ‘They are dead, then? You have killed our little boys. Oh, I might have known. What did I expect, really? You are so careless, you don't care …' And so they stood, facing each other, on the edge of the splendid beach which would soon house all the women and the children and the visiting men too. She was so full of anger, while he stood there, limp, guilty, in the wrong. Maronna screamed and went on screaming, and at last her voice went hoarse, and she stood silent, looking, but really looking at him. He was trembling, he was limp with the grief he now genuinely did feel, because her agony of grief was telling him what an enormity he had committed. And she saw this, understood it. She saw, and really took in that pitiful leg, the shrivelled, twisted leg.

Tenderness is not a quality we associate easily with young men. Life has to beat it into us, beat us softer and more malleable than our early pride allows. Horsa saw Maronna, as he had not before. Perhaps he had felt her more than seen her, as an always accusing
critical presence. He saw this trembling girl, still streaked with the white powder, though her face was washed with tears. She was in such distress, so helpless: he grew up in that moment, and stood forward to take her in his arms as she opened her arms to him. ‘Poor child,' she was whispering. ‘Poor boy,' she crooned, and now he broke down and wept and the great Horsa was a little boy again. It was sweet, yes, I am sure I may safely say that. To become a little child in your mother's arms, petted and forgiven … and for all we know, or they knew, Maronna was Horsa's mother.

The greater the capitulation to the female, the greater there will be the recoil: and I have to write this, too. Who has not seen it, known it, understood?

There, in Maronna's arms, loved and forgiven, somewhere in Horsa's restless mind had started the thought: Tell her about the wonderful place I found, yes I will. She'll want to see it too, I am sure of it. She will understand, yes, she'll come with me, we'll go together, I'll make a ship better than any we've made, and we'll land together on that shore and …

I had not expected to say any more on this subject, for one thing I am old now, and the scholarly life is not easy for me. But the eruption of Vesuvius has made me think again about The Cleft, and its comparatively
modest explosion. Vesuvius killed people at a great distance from it, as far away as Pompeii, and it seems a noxious powder was the cause. Nothing survives its touch. But The Cleft too had poisonous fumes, and its outburst of whitish powder killed no one. Yet The Cleft was quite close to the shore where the women and children were. This in itself must surely provoke questions? There is a great deal it seems we do not know, though we Romans like to behave as if we know everything. Pliny, my old friend, was in pursuit of knowledge – and died for his efforts. For some days the sea near the women's shore washed in waves crusted with bone dust, on rocks that acquired a hard patina which did not disappear, so the records say. And a little further down the coast the sea ran in blue and clean. A pretty minor affair, the destruction of The Cleft – and yet it leaves questions that in their own way are as difficult as the ones we ask over the great volcano, which we must assume will one day blow again.

The white rocks near The Cleft looked as if they had been covered with guano, and it occurs to me now to wonder if a careful search around all the coasts of the islands of our sea might reveal once whitened rocks that we would agree were the site of that old story, Clefts and Monsters. But the outburst of Vesuvius tells us we may not assume permanence for the coastlines of islands or even the islands themselves. And suppose we did decide that this set of bleached rocks was what we were after – this would be of only a sentimental interest. Those historians – and they called themselves so, seeing themselves
as the recorders of the very long ago – wrote from their villages in the forests as of chronicles of events that had their end when The Cleft exploded. (Villages – how many? Where? Of how many people?) The village historians wrote with charcoal sticks on the inside of bark. They no longer spoke their stories into receiving ears. None of these old bark records remain, but what followed them, marks on reed scrolls, still remain – a few. The explosion of The Cleft is both the end of a tale and the beginning of the next. Historians who wrote long ages before me agreed on that – and so let it be.

NOVELS
The Grass is Singing
The Golden Notebook
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
The Summer Before the Dark
Memoirs of a Survivor
Diary of a Good Neighbour
If the Old Could …
The Good Terrorist
Playing the Game: a Graphic Novel (
illustrated by Charlie
Adlard
)
Love, Again
Mara and Dann
The Fifth Child
Ben, in the World
The Sweetest Dream
The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot
and the Snow Dog

‘
Canopus in Argos: Archives' Series
Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five
The Sirian Experiments
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
Documents Relating to the Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire

‘
Children of Violence' Novel-sequence
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
The Four-Gated City

OPERAS
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five
(Music by Philip Glass)
The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (Music by Philip Glass)

SHORT STORIES
Five
The Habit of Loving
A Man and Two Women
The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories
Winter in July
The Black Madonna
This was the Old Chief's Country (Collected African Studies, Vol. 1)
The Sun Between Their Feet (Collected African Studies, Vol. 2)
To Room Nineteen (Collected Stories, Vol. 1)
The Temptation of Jack Orkney (Collected Stories, Vol. 2)
London Observed
The Old Age of El Magnifico
Particularly Cats
Rufus the Survivor
On Cats
The Grandmothers

POETRY
Fourteen Poems

DRAMA
Each His Own Wilderness
Play with a Tiger
The Singing Door

NON-FICTION
In Pursuit of the English
Going Home
A Small Personal Voice
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
The Wind Blows Away Our Words African Laughter
Time Bites

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Under My Skin: Volume 1
Walking in the Shade: Volume 2

Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au

Canada
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900
Toronto, ON, M5R, 3L2, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz

United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk

United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com