The Summer Before the Dark (15 page)

“Why?” he enquired, cold.

Less than twenty-four hours after their arrival in Spain, they were again on a bus, rolling up the coast—north, and against the tides that flooded south. They were on their way to the unspoiled village. Not so much a village, he said, as half a dozen houses used by fishermen whose wives were happy to welcome travellers, and had to be persuaded to take money. They reached the place in late afternoon, to find a large new hotel, and the beach swarming.

Jeffrey, who had slept all the way, his head on her shoulder—a fact which she took care he did not suspect—regarded this scene without comment and got back onto the bus.

“But where are we going?”

“Up the coast. There is another place.”

“Shouldn’t we have supper first? Or perhaps go on in the morning?”

“No, no, no, it’s just near here, it’s only twenty miles, come on!”

He jumped back onto the old bus, now nearly empty, for it had already shed its load of working people who were going back to their homes across fields.

On they went. Down below, on their right, the Mediterranean’s
blue curved and looped against the brown coast, against the pale beaches which for mile after mile were filled with bodies.

Sometimes a woman who had been somewhere to visit a relative or for a day’s shopping got in with a full basket. Children got in at one little town and got off an hour later on a hillside where there was not a house or even a light to be seen. They ran off into the dark holding hands, exchanging loud comments or information—the Spanish words, like unknown birds, flew away over the sea.

Jeffrey slept. At midnight they reached the end of the bus’s journey. They were past Almeria, in a small town, a mile from the coast. There was a hotel which had not been done up for the tourist trade. The man behind the desk watched them register, but did not comment, and then showed them to the dining room where local travellers, not tourists, were still eating dinner. Jeffrey ordered one heavy dish after another, frowned as he lifted his fork in an attempt to convey the food to his mouth, but as the smell of it came to his nostrils, laid the fork down again. It was as if he had never heard of illness, or of the condition of being nauseous. He looked worried: why was it that his hand, as it were of its own accord, kept returning the laden fork to his plate? When the dessert came, he ate some peaches and called for more. She, having eaten well, this being her first meal of the day, watched him gulp down a fifth peach, and then bolt from the dining room.

She found him collapsed on the bed, the light glaring down on his face. His hand shaded his eyes as if he was in sunlight. Seeing her, his frown deepened. She saw herself in a green dress that left her white arms and legs showing, she saw her heavy curve of red hair, her warm brown eyes.
From under his hand he frowned at the stranger who stood smiling at the bottom of his bed.

“Jeffrey!”

“What do you want?”

“You need a doctor.”

He turned his face over to one side, like a soldier ordered to look
Right!
and lay with his arms down at his sides, rigid. Then he flung his body over, dragging the sheet up over him as he did so. He was fully dressed still, even to his shoes. As for her, she was asleep at once, having slept so little the night before.

She woke early; he was up, throwing the pills the chemist had given him into his mouth in handfuls. At seven she was confronted by an efficient young man who said, “We’ll go inland to Granada. We’re close.”

She agreed, of course.

But while she drank coffee and ate sugared rolls, and watched the wasps at work in apricot jam, he was avoiding the dining room, was standing with a glass of soda water in his hand conferring with Reception. No bus left here direct for Granada. They would have to return to Almeria, and find another bus. A full day would be needed for the journey.

He came to the door of the dining room to call her out: he was, she could see, protecting all his senses from the presence of food. He had decided to go on up the coast. There was a good place further on; he remembered it well. Obviously, the effort of returning to Almeria in one bus, and then hanging about to wait for another, and then a day’s journey inland—all this was too much. Yet he had to be in movement. That was what he needed, she could see.

“We’ll go to Granada later,” he announced, and carried
her suitcase and his to the bus that stood waiting to go north, up to Alicante, which city it would reach about three in the afternoon. But they would not actually get to Alicante, for the village he remembered came before Alicante.

This bus was full of the country’s inhabitants, not of tourists, though there were one or two young people from the coasts, travelling cheap. It was a gay companionable busload; people talked and exchanged news, though of course she could not understand, she understood nothing. It really was the oddest experience, odder even than the absurd situation she was in with this young man whom she could not leave because he was ill, or breaking down or something, and who was obviously determined to go on riding north indefinitely along the garlanded summer coast: for weeks, a period which had ended two days ago, as she had to keep reminding herself, since it seemed such a long time ago, she had been like a multilingual machine, and all the languages, or most of them, spoken around her had been like doors or panes of glass. Before she had arrived in Spain she had even imagined that the competence of the world of conferences would follow her, would have imbued her in some way, so that she would find herself effortlessly speaking Spanish; but she was like someone waking from a dream in which she has been flying, unable to believe that in reality she can’t just step into the air and soar off and away. It seemed almost as if she
did
understand it; as if she had at one time understood, and was suffering temporary amnesia. On a smile from a woman across the aisle of the bus, or when the driver came around to collect fares, she opened her mouth to speak—her brain shuffled the phrases of other languages to find a useful one, her tongue was useless in her mouth. She had to stretch the muscles
that moved her lips into a smile to communicate willingness to love and share. And she sat listening, listening, to the heavy sounds that would not give up their meaning—until she turned to look, taking in meaning as it was easy to do, from gesture, and from the set of a head, a shoulder. Meanwhile, as she sat like an invisible person in this chattering and laughing crowd, Jeffrey, who had gone to sleep again at once, slid down in his seat and lay heavy against her.

At midday the bus allowed a longer pause than usual so that passengers could get a drink or a sandwich. She left him lying there, found herself lemonade, smoked a cigarette, and returned to find the driver examining the sleeping young man. He pointed down at him, indicating his sick look. She nodded, and smiled, her tongue paralysed, her ears
almost
receiving. With a final shake of the head the driver went back and started the bus. It was abominably hot now. Everything shimmered and dazzled and both she and Jeffrey were soaking. His sweat had a sallow smell to it, and he was very pale, with a yellow tinge. Jaundice? But with his colouring he would be bound to look yellow in illness.

They reached Alicante in mid-afternoon and Jeffrey woke. He was wet with sweat, and shivering. But he was determined to continue north. She took him by both shoulders and said, “You are sick. Do you hear me? You are ill. You’ve got to let me put you into bed and get you a doctor.”

He pulled himself away, as if she were a spider web he had walked into, or a snag of wood he had caught a sleeve on. He walked to a bus that stood nearby and got into it, without looking to see where it was going. She stood wondering whether she should call for help—who? The police?

Instead she lifted the suitcases that now stood on the curb, their bus having turned itself around to return along the way they had come, and carried them to the second bus. The fact that this super-polite American had let her carry heavy suitcases and had not even noticed it said everything about his state.

The bus had a board which had a name on it; she had no idea where it was going, or how far. But did it matter? She bought soda water from the café and took it to the bus. Jeffrey drank the liquid, but in the now familiar way of someone with a connection arrested in his brain, like an animal at the same time very hungry and conditioned to find food disgusting or dangerous. He kept bringing the glass up to his lips in a frantic thirsty way, swallowing without thought—then holding the water in his mouth with a look of agonised suspicion. He swallowed the water as if trying to remember what he had been told about it—something terrible!—then his hand took the glass up to his lips again, fast, desperate. In this way the soda water got drunk, and he did not bring it up. So he wouldn’t collapse of dehydration, that was something. He fell back into the seat. It was even hotter now. The streets were empty, for it was siesta time; the cafés, and the benches around a dusty square, were full of somnolent people. The town was crushed by the weight of heat, and when the bus started it was almost empty.

Now Jeffrey sat limply jerking and sliding with the movements of the bus. It had resumed a northwards progress, but after half an hour, it turned inwards from the coast. It seemed that he did not notice the Mediterranean no longer accompanied them. But after a time he said with a pleased smile, “Oh yes, this is the way, I remember, the village is here.” The bus was driving through flattish land
which was lightly cultivated. Then it began to climb through low hills. Now that they were lifted up the sea appeared behind them, a distant blue plain. Then it was gone, the hills concealed it. They were on a rough unmade road on the side of a hill, winding up. Jeffrey sat jogging, jerking, dozing. She kept her arm around him to keep him upright. Once he woke, not out of the sullen personality of a sick man, but having returned in sleep to an earlier one, who had chosen her as a companion. He smiled delightfully into her face and said, “Kate! Isn’t this just great? Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it just …” But he drooped off to sleep again.

The sun was coming into the front part of the bus. What passengers there were moved back, and the driver was trying to keep his head shaded by lifting it and holding it back in the shade under the roof, his chin up: he looked as if he were holding it out to receive a blow.

The sun went behind a range of hills, much higher than those they were driving through. It was already early evening. At a village that looked as if it might be in North Africa—poverty-cracked houses, poverty-shaped people—the bus stopped, dropped a wire cage with some thirst-crazed fowls, a barrel of sardines in oil, a crate of oranges. It picked up two nuns, who looked fatigued to the point of illness by the heat, and waited for Kate to return from a café with more soda water for Jeffrey. Then it drove on into the interior.

Kate was now quite passive. Quite soon, clearly, this awful journey would end. Not because Jeffrey wanted it to end: he needed to move, to be going somewhere, to be travelling—she could feel that, understand it. But he was by now a bit lightheaded: he kept waking into moments of gaiety, he chattered, he giggled, then fell abruptly into
a doze. Even he would soon be forced to see that he was ill and must stop. Or some driver would refuse to take them on any farther. At eight in the evening, with a moon swelling towards full flooding everything, they stopped in a village square. It was a small place. There was a fountain trickling some dispirited water into a basin that had a cracked white china cup, lying on its edge. There were some dusty trees. A building across the square looked as if it might be a café; there was a large window covered across from inside by some material, to exclude the sun, and two tables stood outside where men sat drinking. There was also a solid-looking old-fashioned building that said it was a hotel. She found the village on her map. They were about fifty miles inland.

She left Jeffrey sitting in the bus neither asleep nor waking, and went into the hotel. The manager came out of the dining room where he had been at table; she indicated in various languages that she was travelling with her husband, who was ill. French released her, and Señor Martinez came with her to the bus, and helped her pull Jeffrey out. It was like handling a bundle of clothes damp from the washing machine: he was so wet that his hands were slippery and his hair was soaked to his head. They supported him upstairs—there was no lift—and laid him on a small bed in a room of the kind common anywhere in Europe. It had a double bed for mamma and papa, and three smaller ones, for the children.

Señor Martinez went out and returned in a moment with a bottle of mineral water: a good family man, he did not have to be told that this young man was in danger of dehydration. He supported Jeffrey, and she held glass after glass of liquid to his lips. He drank avidly, but with a look of furious distaste.

Señor Martinez departed to say he would try and reach a doctor.

“But you must understand, madame, il faut que vous comprenez, oui? This is a small village, it is a place without resources, we do not have a doctor here—pas de medicin, oui?—he comes from twenty miles away and perhaps he is on holiday, I do not know. But I will do my best.”

He descended to the office and she sat on a hard chair by a window through which again she watched a wide starry sky and roofs and trees white with moonlight from a hot and stuffy room. Jeffrey spoke sternly of the necessity of getting onto another bus at once, then laughed at something funny he remembered from the day’s bus ride, but which he did not succeed in telling her about before he fell asleep again. Señor Martinez returned to say that the doctor’s aunt reported he would be back in three days: if affairs were urgent, it would be best to contact the nuns.

“This is a small place, you understand? They are poor people. When the doctor comes it is for a serious illness. The nuns at the convent attend to small sicknesses.”

They stood on either side of the bed, and looked down at the invalid, whose clothes were sticking to him, whose skull was shaped by dank strands of hair.