Heroes and Villains (23 page)

‘I don’t know. It fell off.’

‘In that case, how can you expect me to trust you?’

Since he reconstructed the world solely in terms of imagery, she
found it hard to understand him. When they got back to the camp, he carried out all his promises to Donally. He burned the books, emptied the drugs, burned the herbs and destroyed every relic which the Doctor had left behind. It was indeed a dead snake, and stuffed. He took it from its cage and cut it open so the sawdust spilled out in front of everybody before he burned it. The books opened and blackened in the flames like trapped crows and the feather robe took wings and flew away on fire. All that remained of Donally was dust and ashes. The sullen puzzlement of the tribesmen lent their silence a new and terrible quality.

‘Soon they’ll start making the sign against the evil eye when they see you,’ said Marianne.

‘Then I shall begin to exercise authority,’ he replied.

‘He’s out of his mind,’ said Mrs Green as if she hoped the reason was as simple as that. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s doing.’

‘They think I’ve bewitched you,’ said Marianne. ‘You’ve put us both at risk.’

He filled a sack with Donally’s pots and messes and took it down to the stream, where its contents followed the chain to the bottom. The bonfire was still smouldering when the tribe took to the road about the middle of the day, when his house-cleaning was finished. Wherever Jewel went, that day, he had a brother on either side of him and they looked like a bodyguard. Precious was too ill to ride on horseback and lay stretched out, bandaged, beside Mrs Green in her cart, moaning at the jolts and now and then becoming delirious but Mrs Green was happy to have another child again. Marianne walked beside them but continually refused to climb up out of the dirt. The wind grew cold, fresh and very lively; it blew white gusts of seagulls who gave forth mysterious cries above them.

‘What is the sea like, Mrs Green?’

‘A whole lot of empty water, shifting up and down twice a day. Otherwise, much the same as anywhere else. But it is too far to reach the fishing village, today, owing to his being so late in starting out, due to his whims. We shall have to camp somewhere along the road.’

They came to an artificial gulley of pocked stone with, on either side, some low, grey, stone buildings with several rooms still solid enough to shelter them. Bushes and trees now grew where the rails had been.
There was a room full of rusted levers with a clock stuck in the wall; its glass face hung loosely away from a dial all woven over by spiders. The door of this room lay flat on the broken paving stones before it but the roof was still sound. Night came; that confusion between need and desire against which she had been warned consumed her. If it was only that she desired him, then it became a simple situation which she could perfectly resolve while continuing to despise him. But if he was necessary to her, that constituted a wholly other situation which raised a constellation of miserable possibilities each one indicating that, willy nilly, she would be changed. As a result of this infuriating confusion, she raked her nails across his back with such insensate vehemence she broke the skin deeply in several places, as if trying to tear the picture off his back. She dipped her fingertips in the deep, blood-filled runnels and twisted round to taste the blood; it tasted much like any other blood, no especial flavour.

‘What else did you expect?’ he demanded.

He lay as still as the clock which had not ticked for more years than he had been alive, or his father before him, but she knew he was not asleep. She wondered if he was waiting for somebody to creep up and knife him in the night but nothing moved; only the dry twigs rustled where the trains had run. She kept to her own side of the mattress and did not sleep, either; she held her hands against her belly and tried to feel the shape of the child down there which knitted its flesh and blood out of her own in the artificial night of the womb while there was nothing she could do about it. After a long time, Jewel got up and pulled on his clothes. She waited until he reached the door before she said:

‘Where are you going?’

He started visibly in the colourless starlight. She saw the whites of his eyes.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To the sea.’

‘How far is it?’

‘Over the hill. I’ve been here before.’

It had now become very cold and she furred herself up to go out with him but they both went barefoot. They threaded their way past tents of skin and dead fires of black sticks and stepped over the stretched
bodies of sleeping dogs. Blue was on guard outside the camp but lay asleep under a blanket with his arms around a girl.

‘Caught red-handed stealing his peculiar honey,’ said Jewel and made to wake him but Marianne put her hand on his arm and stopped him, for the young man and girl, sleeping, seemed to her such a peaceful and beautiful sight that nothing under the moon which saw them would want to harm them. Although this might not be what she really believed; she might wish, in her heart, for the Out People or Soldiers or wild beasts to arrive in packs and overwhelm the sleeping camp, and her sudden access of sentimentality serve only as a screen to conceal this real motive from herself. She wondered if this was the motive Jewel imputed to her; or if it was also his, for he shrugged and they left the illicit pair as they had found them.

He went off before her over the tussocky grass. She could only see him dimly like his own shadow, as he went up the hill-side and then his outline, against the sky. She followed him and found the grass ended and the sand-dunes began. She had never seen or touched sand before and scooped up a handful to sniff it. It smelled dry and unnatural. Her shifting footsteps slurred and whispered. The dunes exuded a pale radiance of their own; their low, round shapes, sprouting here and there a little coarse grass, were so suggestive of the forms of life they might at any moment shake themselves into one giant elemental of unknown voluptuousness. The thin crust of sand crumbled beneath her bare feet; spiny thistles so small she could not see them in the dark pricked her feet. Jewel appeared again on the crest of a dune; he chinked. When she arrived where he stood, she saw the sea.

Quilted flats of shining sand stretched before her, for the tide was out, and, retiring, had left behind it at high-water line, just beneath them, ankle-deep heaps of weed, beds of broad, dirty shells as large as a hand, driftwood and all manner of marine detritus. Jewel ran forward, down the side of the dune, across the beach and out towards the distant corrugations of sea, in which the little new moon moved. He stopped where the small waves broke with a secret sound. Less impetuously, Marianne followed him.

Before them and around them were all the wonders of the seashore, to which Marianne could scarcely put a single name, though everything
had once been scrupulously named. The fans, fronds, ribbons, wreaths, garlands and lashes of weed had once been divided into their separate families, wracks, tangles, dulses, etc. Purse sponge, slime sponge, breadcrumb sponge, blood red sponge; tube sea squirt, rough sea squirt, gooseberry sea squirt, star sea squirt (or golden star). Rag worms, lug worms, tube worms. The soft corals and sea anemones, known as dead men’s fingers, snake locks, wartlet or gem anemone, the globehorn, the daisy anemone, cup coral, sea firs, sea oaks. The spiny skinned family of echinoderms, which include the brittle stars, feather stars, the sea cucumbers with their mouth fringe of whispy gills and the sea lilies which have ten feathery arms waving in the water. The jellyfish. And innumerable other names.

Losing their names, these things underwent a process of uncreation and reverted to chaos, existing only to themselves in an unstructured world where they were not formally acknowledged, becoming an ever-widening margin of undifferentiated and nameless matter surrounding the outposts of man, who no longer made himself familiar with these things or rendered them authentic in his experience by the gift of naming. Jewel and Marianne walked along the beach of this wide, unfrequented bay not as if they were discovering it, or exploring it, but like visitors who have arrived too late, without an introduction, are unsure of their welcome but, nevertheless, determined to brave it out.

So they made their way towards the jutting spit of land at the tip of the crescent of sand. Marianne trod in his crisply delineated footprints, which were already filling with water. If he and she left the tribe, they would become Out People and surrender to namelessness, if the worst came to the worst; but, at best, they might begin a new subspecies of man who would live in absolute privacy in secret caves, accompanied only by danger of death, imbibing a suitable indifference to the outside with its mother’s milk. This fearless and rational breed would eschew such mysteries as the one now forcing her to walk behind the figure on the shore, dark as the negative of a photograph, and preventing her from returning home alone. Therefore she might not be able to teach his children how to be absolutely indifferent, since she herself was so bad at it, and her whole plan crumbled to nothing. She began to speak with considerable bitterness.

‘You are the most remarkable thing I ever saw in all my life. Not even in pictures had I seen anything like you, nor read your description in books, you with your jewels, paints, furs, knives and guns, like a phallic and diabolic version of female beauties of former periods. What I’d like best would be to keep you in preserving fluid in a huge jar on the mantelpiece of my peaceful room, where I could look at you and imagine you. And that’s the best place for you, you walking masterpiece of art, since the good Doctor educated you so far above your station you might as well be an exhibit for intellectuals to marvel at as anything else. You, you’re nothing but the furious invention of my virgin nights.’

He allowed her a single, curious smile but said not one word in reply and they reached the headland while she nagged him as cunningly as she could. But she fell silent when she saw what lay beyond the headland.

Here was a time-eaten city up to its ears in the sea, its towers, domes and roofs so mingled with their own shadows and reflections that all seemed to hang in mid-air, among clouds of night and waning stars. Long ago the sea wrenched apart the massive blocks of an esplanade, though these were tons in weight and clasped together; then the sea swirled through the abandoned thoroughfares nibbling, gobbling, gulping and digesting stone, brick, stucco, metal and concrete. Now incurious fish swam in bedrooms where submerged mirrors reflected faces no more, only the mazy dance of wrack and wreckage; fish swam through ocean-gone ovens and out again, uncooked; fish in their native element went gaping through ballroom, store and hotel in this town which had once been a resort built for purposes of pleasure. Since the wind had dropped during the night, the waves made no more noise than their own breathing.

Prominent among the minarets, spires and helmets of wrought iron which protruded from the waters was an enormous clock whose hands stood still at the hour of ten though it was, of course, no longer possible to tell whether this signified ten in the morning or ten at night. This clock was held in the arms and supported on the forward-jutting stomach of a monstrous figure in some kind of plasterwork which appeared to spring on tiptoe from the lagoon like the
genius loci
, since the plinth which bore it was completely submerged. It was the figure of a luxuriously endowed woman scantily clad in a one-piece bathing costume which, at the top,
scarcely contained the rising swell of mountainous breasts in the shadowy cleft of which sea birds nested so the whole figure was splashed with white droppings. In daylight, this woman’s garment still retained streaks of the cheerful blue with which it had been painted, just as the flesh was still stained here and there a vivid pink, but night bleached these colours out. The head, equipped with exuberant, shoulder-length curls, was thrown back in erotic ecstasy and, though partially worn away by the salty winds, the face clearly displayed a gigantic pair of lips twisted in a wide, joyous smile revealing a fine set of plaster teeth. The eyes used to shine since blue electric light bulbs had been set in the sockets and bulbs of different colours had also surrounded the clock but these were now memories which nobody remembered. Near this figure, the uppermost part of a wheel of gigantic size rose above the smug and serene sea.

Beyond the drowned town, the land grew high and there towered a cliff so tall it would be many centuries before the sea subdued it though, in course of time, this was bound to happen, as the breakers hurled themselves against its face. The grey sea horses which now looked so quiescent would grow violent in the equinoctial storms; they would assault the cliffs not merely with their own impetus but also with missiles concealed inside them, boulders, pebbles and abrasive sand. They would drive the air before them and force it against the cliff; even the air was its enemy, for, released by the sea, it exploded, ripping parts of the cliff away. The waves would in this way undermine the cliffs until the upper part finally collapsed.

But this date was well in the future and, upon the cliff, a white tower glistened like a luminous finger pointing to heaven. It was a lighthouse. Its light was put out, like the woman’s eyes, but here it stayed and if there were no longer any storm-tossed mariners to give thanks for its helpful beams, yet, functionless as it was, it was intransigent. To Marianne, it looked the twin of the white tower in which she had been born and she was very much moved for, though neither tower any longer cast a useful light, both still served to warn and inform of surrounding dangers. Thus this tower glimpsed in darkness symbolized and clarified her resolution; abhor shipwreck, said the lighthouse, go in fear of unreason. Use your wits, said the lighthouse. She fell in love with the integrity of the lighthouse. It did not occur to her that her companion
might regard her as more representative of the culture of the carrier of the defunct clock nor could she have understood how this was possible, for the psychology of the outcast was a closed book to her and, besides, he had never learned to write.