Daniel Martin (85 page)

Now very near the Camp, they passed a collapsed temple some forty yards to their right. It was no more than a gigantic pile of rubble. Huge squared stones, drums of fluted columns, fragments of carved cornice and capital, stone foliage and volutes, lay massed as they must have fallen in some earth-tremor centuries before. But across the sand there seeped a sound from it: a whimpering, an unhappiness from the very beginning of existence. Involuntarily they stopped, puzzled, then Dan—almost with impatience, as if even distraction was an insult to his mood—walked to where the first stones had spilt out across the desert. Then he saw the source of the sound.

Two dun-coloured puppies stood at the mouth of a dark crevice in a conglomeration of cornices and column-drums littered against part of the temple platform. They were very young, evidently only just able to walk; too young to fear, since they stared at Dan from their hole without retreating as he went a step or two closer, though they fell silent. He looked back at Jane. She had stopped a few feet behind him, to one side. She too stared at the puppies, her hands in her pockets, as if she did not like being so close.

He said, ‘The last inhabitants.’

Jane nodded to the left of the mound of debris, then said in a flat voice, ‘Their mother’s over there.’

He looked. A mangy bitch had appeared some sixty yards away, watching silently back at them; grey-black, of indeterminate breed. She loped a few paces across the sand; then stood and watched again. She was miserably thin, the ribs stood out over the swollen dugs—the size of a small greyhound, an air of being both cowed and vicious.

Watching the puppies again, Dan said, ‘Better not come nearer’.

Jane did not answer.

He glanced back. She had turned away, as if out of boredom, and was walking slowly back across the sand towards the track they had left. He followed, came beside her.

‘Poor little sods.’

There was a movement of her head, a cursory ghost of a smile, as if, in spite of appearances, to acknowledge this tiny incident. But her head stayed down, her hands in her pockets; she walked now like someone about to stop at every step. He touched her arm.

‘Jane?’

But she shook her head: it was nothing. They walked a few steps more. This time he took her arm more firmly and stopped her.

‘Jane.’

Again she shook her head, almost as if to drive him away. But he saw her bent face, and put an arm across her shoulders. For a moment they stood like that. Then, slowly, she turned against him, her face to his shoulder. It was so contrary to his mood that it took him foolishly by surprise. His other hand moved almost gingerly to pat her back. He looked across the sand to where the bitch stood. The animal at last allowed itself a more normal canine behaviour. The muzzle lifted, scenting. He bent his head.

‘Tell me what’s wrong.’

But her only answer was a pent-up expulsion of breath. Still she stood with her hands in her pockets, unwilling, unable to give; able only to cry. He embraced her more tightly, kissed the top of her head, but did not try to calm the sobs. She held herself so stiffly, and they seemed to force their way out of her, as out of a child. He divined, he did not know how, that gods take strange shapes; find strange times and stranger climates for their truths; and knew that all he had felt and thought for that last three quarters of an hour was also sand.

Beneath all her faults, her wrong dogmas, her self-obsessions, her evasions, there lay, as there had always lain—in some analogue of that vague entity the Marxists call totality, full consciousness of both essence and phenomenon—a profound, and profoundly unintellectual, sense of natural orientation… that mysterious sense he had always thought of as right feeling. But he had also always thought of it as something static and unchanging—and conscious, even if hidden; when of course it had always really been living, mobile, shifting and quivering, even veering wildly, like a magnetic needle… so easily distorted, shaken out of true by mind, emotion, circumstance, environment. It had never meant that she could see deeper. In a way it must be a thing that limited and confused rational vision, that would provoke countless errors of actual choice. Followed, it would always run her against nature, the easy courses of society; disobeyed, it would create anxiety, schizophrenia. It was simply that she felt deeper; and eternally lost conscious course because the unconscious knowledge of the true one always lay inexorably underneath. Mankind may think there are two poles; but there is, morally as magnetically, only one in the geography of the mind’s total being; and even though it is set in an arctic where no incarnate mind can exist.

The wind shook a patch of sere foot-high thistles that stood between them and the dog; and as if it brought a stronger scent, the animal loped obliquely back another twenty yards—then once more stood and watched: the two bipeds as one, frozen, a hundred yards away. At last Jane managed to speak.

‘Oh Dan.’

He kissed the head again. ‘It will come. It will come.’

Her face still buried, she was silent for a long moment. There was another sob, almost of disgust. ‘You must hate me so.’

‘That’s also a symptom.’

‘I don’t know how you can stand me.’

‘Because you’re such a clown.’

‘Alias ghastly neurotic female.’

‘I don’t know how you can’t read this place. What it really means.’

‘It feels so without hope. Those puppies.’

He held her closer to him. ‘Then why do you reject all warmth?’ She shook her head against him; she didn’t know. ‘It’s our stupid, one-dimensional age, Jane. We’ve let daylight usurp everything, all our instincts, all we don’t know in ourselves. When we’re still just as much animals as that poor creature over there.’ He raised a hand and pressed the back of her head. ‘It felt so right last night. Afterwards. Just holding you. Your being there.’

She moved a little, and one of her hands went up to her face. There was a last small shudder of breath.

He said, ‘Didn’t you feel that?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘Then why did you run away?’

‘Because I felt I’d done something dreadful. I didn’t know where I was, who we were. How it could have happened.’ She sighed. ‘It suddenly seemed exactly as it was before. A sort of madness. A blindness to all the realities.’

‘Except the one you’ve just felt.’

She stood slightly away, though her bent head rested against him and he still held her; as if somewhere he was still rejected… or not him now, but any consolation. She took a breath, but this time it was more banal, of apology.

‘I don’t seem to have brought a handkerchief.’

So Dan released her, and made the oldest male gesture in the world. She would not look at him, but after a moment she turned and glanced over her shoulder back towards the dog.

‘Why did she leave her puppies like that?’

‘Why do you always jump to the wrong conclusions?’ He took her shoulders and made her turn fully, then held her back against him, spoke in her ear. ‘It’s not a lack of love, Jane. It’s a well-known trick. What biologists call distraction behaviour. Birds do it as well. She’s offering a trade. To be hunted and shot, if we’ll spare her young. That’s why she’s standing just out of gunshot. To lure us away.’

She stared, curiously and touchingly like a small girl facing up to adult reason and life without tears.

‘I thought she was just frightened.’

‘If she was just frightened, she’d be like you. Streaking for the horizon.’

They watched, the bitch watched back across the sand.

She said slowly, ‘I should never have left the Church.’

‘You should never have gone into it in the first place.’

‘It’s designed for people like me.’

‘Who won’t believe in love?’

‘Who fear it so much.’

The bitch circled again, then disappeared behind the mound of stone.

‘Will she go back?’

‘Of course. As soon as we’ve gone.’

She took another deep breath, as if unable to face such simple optimism; looked down at the ground for a moment. Then one of her hands came up and touched one of his where it still lay on her shoulder.

‘Dan, I want to be left alone here for a minute. Would you start walking back? I’ll catch up.’

He was disconcerted, as much by a shyness in her voice as by the unexpectedness of the request.

‘Why?’

‘I want to do something. Alone. It won’t take a moment.’

‘You mustn’t go near the puppies. She might—’

‘I know.’

He tried to read the profile of her face from behind, but it revealed nothing. He pressed her shoulders, then began to walk away, slowly, towards the distant low speck of the hotel. He felt curious, and curiously embarrassed; but after thirty or forty yards he could not resist a glance back. To his astonishment she was sitting on the sand: her back to him, propped on an arm, her legs curled to one side, looking down at something in front of her. He stopped, infinitely puzzled—assumed some sort of prayer, a being too shy to kneel formally when he might turn like this and see her.

He would never forget that extraordinary, almost surrealist sight: the bitter wind ruffling the fur collar of her coat and an end of her headscarf, the desolation, the hills behind with their grim watchtowers, the silent back, her sitting as if before an invisible picnic lunch; in the strangest echo, like Jenny, that day on the other side of the world at Tsankawi, pursuing Pueblo Indian shards. But that at least had been a rational pose, and one with movement. Jane seemed transfixed. It was like a supremely bizarre cinema still, of the kind that evoke far more than the film they transiently appeared in.

He went on another slow dozen steps or so; then looked back again. She was already on her feet and walking towards him. He waited, trying to tell from her face what she had been doing. But it was without expression until she was close, when she made a little grimace; stopped.

‘Do my eyes look awful?’

He shrugged and smiled. ‘The wind.’

She extended her hand before she reached him, to make him walk on. He waited for some explanation, both in the particular and in the general: what she had been doing there, what resolution, in both the decisive and the musical sense, they were brought to. But all he was granted was the hand. They walked fifteen or twenty steps in silence, then she pressed his.

‘Tell me about distraction behaviour.’

‘That’s a perfect example of it.’

His hand was pressed again.

‘Talk about anything, Dan. But not me.’

Half an hour later, when they were sitting and having a second coffee in the hotel, he was no wiser as to what was going on inside her. On the way back they had talked, in the end, about the site: the things they had not said before. Tourists again, old friends, at Oxford together—or so it had seemed to him, still bewildered by that enigmatic image of her sitting figure, by the emotion that had preceded it, by the speed of the recovery. It was almost as if she had made a resolution of a much more ordinary sort as she sat: not to bother him again with her ‘ghastly female’ neuroses. Yet there was no attempt to restore the dreadful distances of earlier that morning; if anything, they seemed to have returned to the Nile, to mere close companionship. Labib, the other men, were in the room, so one was forced to play a role; but she seemed retreated beyond the need of that. He felt that needle still shivering, and was wise enough not to demand where it now settled.

It was to continue, as Labib drove them around. First into the shabby little oasis, where the museum was; he returned to the car, once he had put them in the hands of the guide who was to accompany them for the rest of the morning. A wizened old man, cramped in a threadbare suit, but who spoke a fluent, old-fashioned French. He knew his stuff, even had a certain dryness about it, which they shared, faced with the endless stone heads the ancient citizens of Palmyra had liked on their tombs: wall upon wall of them, in serried rows, ludicrously smug and Victorian; so many dignified Roman dowagers got up in their best jewellery, so many earnest gentlemen aping Cato and Mr Gladstone. Dan watched yet another return in Jane, of her Egyptian self; even an amused response to one or two comments from the guide.

Un beau visage d’entrepot, N’est-çe-pas, madame?

A nice eternal middleman’s face.

Next they were taken to a clay hut beside the ancient site; and suddenly found themselves, another bizarre moment, in what seemed more like a football changing-room than anything else: a stinking steam, pegs of clothes, men in towels, laughter. They descended dank steps to an extraordinary basin of pale green soup, one of the warm subterranean sulphur baths that had attracted the Romans in the beginning. Another dozen men, in white drawers, coffee-coloured torsos, stood in the steaming water. Some smiled at the two foreigners, one or two turned their backs. Modern Syria, it seemed, still retained its sybarites, even if only underground.

Dan was to keep only the vaguest memories of those two or three hours. He would happily have foregone the tour, in fact. It was Jane who now seemed to want it—to be her housewifely self again, not to be short-changed of what had been paid for. In some atavistic way he did not really want to be put out of his uncertainty; perhaps still the victim of his love of loss, he secretly enjoyed prolonging it a few hours more. He avoided her eyes, rather than she, his. Twice, when they were in the car, her hand felt for his, but as it had at the Krak des Chevaliers, to comfort, to give patience. It was almost as if he were being obscurely teased, made to wait till they returned to Beirut for a full explanation. Now it was the tears that had never taken place, as earlier it had been the night.