Nightshades Read online

The sea was stealthily abandoning the shore. He walked after it, a bottle in either hand.

  He finished the first bottle and slung it out to sea.

  He was, after all, leaving her. He could travel all night and fetch up God knew where and get some train and beat it, and this time not oh Christ not come back. He pulled the loosened cork of the second bottle. Dionysos, he thought, god of wine. He had eaten nothing all day and was already drunk.

  Abruptly there was a noise of war in the sky overhead.

  Lightning shrilled across the ribbing of the waves. Rain fell to meet them.

  All at once he visualized her seated alone in the beach house while the storm tore at it. The cold water slapped him across the face as if trying to sober him. 'Help me,' she had said to him. He recaptured suddenly how she had clung to him in the wild olives, how she had looked in the aftermath of sex, as if she had fallen from a great height and lay dashed on the ground. A wash of pity did after all well up in him.

  He turned and half ran up the sand to the villa.

  The room was deserted. Her hat lay on the ground where she had let it fall, the wine stood pristine in her glass on the table.

  'Sovaz!' he shouted.

  She did not answer.

  He went to the wooden stairway and ran up it. A whitewashed bedroom exploded in the bomb blast of the lightning.

  He went through the door. She stood brushing her hair at a glass, long rhythmic strokes.

  He said hoarsely, 'Didn't you hear me calling you?'

  She turned. She seemed strangely puzzled.

  'The rain,' she said, 'I didn't hear you above the rain.'

  The relief of finding her, engaged in such a relatively normal action as brushing her hair, made him feel ill. He leaned by the door and waited for the feeling of illness to abate. The storm was already dying, but lightning still flashed on and off inside his head.

  Then looking at her, he saw the most extraordinary phenomenon of weeping he had ever witnessed. For her wide-open eyes seemed to fragment in tears, and the tears themselves gushed forth like the water that falls from the urns or breasts or dolphins' mouths of fountains.

  At sunrise the tide returned gently to the beach. The waves, each overtaking the other, ran up into the morning, and opened in slow platinum fans, like the glissandi of successive harps.

  Dawn woke Sovaz, dawn softly rupturing the parchment blinds of the villa windows. Opening her eyes, she was for a moment unnerved by the pale window spaces, by all her surroundings.

  She lay quite still, faintly hearing the harp notes of the waves, and watching their reflective patterning cast upwards on the ceiling by a freak of angle and light. Memory came into her conscious brain in similar gentle rushes, one upon another, and, like the beach, she received them.

  How strangely easy it was now to look back into yesterday, at all she had felt and done, unmoved, as if looking at some other person. But

  then, each sleep being a sort of death, each waking therefore a definitive of birth, yesterday's Sovaz was indeed no longer herself.

  That woman, sloughed like the skin of a snake, might be observed without prejudice. The new Sovaz, reincarnated, was at her beginning.

  Never before had she experienced this sense of absolution and hope.

  A creature of night, she had seldom woken to sunrise.

  Yet something in her warned her how fragile the moment was. She lay still, afraid of cracking the delicate glass that encased her.

  Yesterday she had been an old woman.

  She had moved through a terrible timelessness, that anaesthetic suspension which before had sometimes overcome her for an hour or so, which all at once had swallowed her whole. Events and people had beaten on her numbed flesh and spirit like hail on stone. She did not precisely know what had happened to release her. A storm - she had begun to cry. She had not cried, had she, for seven years.

  Then the presence of the young man made itself known to her. Of his troubled and uncertain comforting she was not conscious, nor of his murmured entreaties that she stop crying, tell him what was wrong, let him in some way help her.

  The last orchestral violence of the storm faded over the sea. The storm of her pain faded also. Soon the need to comfort and be comforted exchanged itself in both of them and merged with an inevitable progression. Not speaking, they made love, and presently slept, only to wake again to each other thirstily at intervals through the black, sea-breathing night, sleeping still locked, as if they were indeed only a twin machinery of desire. In this manner, she lost her identity, her sense of past or role. She woke at dawn, the old skin seeming sloughed, to a day seen through crystal, a day for the moment novel as the first morning of the world.

  Later, the light upon the blinds turned golden. Sovaz rose on her elbow. She had fallen asleep once again. The magic of the dawn was over; now she could move without shattering the glass - the warmth of the sun had melted it.

  Adam lay, still asleep, turned on his side towards her. She studied him gravely, as if seeing him properly for the first time.

  Sleep had both accentuated his youth and curiously dispensed with it.

  He too had a timelessness. She was put in mind of the marble statues of renascent Italy, the slumbering heroes carved on mausoleums.

  Having accepted sleep in its aspect of death this did not chill her.

  As she leaned looking at him, as if responding to her mood even in sleep, he opened his eyes. At once he smiled at her.

  'Sovaz…'

  She put out her hand and stroked his hair, and he lay, still smiling, his eyes shut in pleasure at her touch.

  She lay down and drew him into her arms. His sleepy happiness seemed to soak into her, by a method of osmosis.

  He turned suddenly and sat up, looking down at her as she had looked at him.

  'You are so beautiful,' he said to her, 'and you look like you were about fifteen years old.'

  He seemed as if about to speak to her with an earnest seriousness from which she withdrew.

  'Adam,' she said, 'open the blinds, the sun is so lovely, and it's not even hot yet.'

  A shadow crossed his face. Then he grinned, and swung out of bed.

  The blinds flicked their tassels like the tails of obedient horses and ran up the windows.

  He stood looking out at the sea and sky.

  Watching him, the play of gold on his blond hair and amber skin, entranced by his physical splendour and prepared abruptly to adore him for it, she felt young indeed, perhaps for an instant even as young as he had said.

  With all her lovers she had sought youth. Thinking it to be their youth she sought, she herself felt, with each of them, far older than she was. The image of the rich and desolate matron with her creased skin, her toppled breasts, and her gigolo, lay always in her mind's eye. She had seen these women years before through the green and ruby windows of the great library, walking in the squares below.

  Painted wizened monkeys with their handsome boys strolling like expensive dogs at their sides. Now an emerald monkey, tapping her cigarette on its green metal case, now a scarlet dog rearing acrobatically on its hind limbs to light it for her.

  It had never occurred to Sovaz, until this moment, that it was not after all the youngness of her lovers that attracted her to them. It was her own youth she hankered for, freely expressed, untrammelled, in their bodies. She was a victim of the bizarre juxtaposition which made a woman imagine she had fallen in love with a man, when in fact she had actually fallen in love with the masculine facet of her own self as projected in this man's image. The heart of the timid and puritanical virgin was inflamed by the daring and libidinous pirate in the universal myth. But the cutlass thrust through his belt was as much the symbol of her own unrealized potential, of the castration of her mental bravura, as it was the emblem of the male phallus. In reality she did not yearn for the pirate's embrace, she yearned to become the pirate. The frigid strength of Kristian then was something Sovaz had not w
orshipped but jealously burned to possess for herself.

  For herself the anchor of his wealth, his iron and impervious will, what she saw as his emotionlessness. Kristian would always perhaps be her torment. She could not devour him.

  But Adam, Adam who, more than all the others, was her beauty, her sweetness, her youth, Adam it seemed she could love, at least for a little space.

  The woman came from the town. They heard her, in a hoarse voice, singing snatches of Tosca.

  When they went down, she brought them hot rolls, peaches, and fresh coffee, to a table laid for them on the veranda. The man, whistling tunelessly, had begun to clean the white sports car. He gnawed used matches as he worked and, occasionally emerging to cross in front of the veranda to the side door of the villa, would grin at Adam a macabre grin of filbert teeth and matchsticks protruding between them like the limbs of tiny prey.

  The beach house, in the honey sun, was warm and friendly, the stretching glittering sand like powdered topaz, the surf rolling in in lazy gusts of white smoke and blue fire.

  Sheltered by a bay, the villa was remote, without another habitation nearer than two miles away. The shore blazed, deserted under the sun. After they had walked leisurely along the rim of the sea for a while the house was out of sight. Adam discarded his clothes and swam out into the silken water.

  Sovaz, who could not swim, seated herself. The sand was voluptuously warm, even so early. The sun, the caress and colour of it, soothed her, seemed to penetrate into her bones. She stretched and dreamed in it, unafraid. And although she had put on again the black straw hat, the black and white chiffon was now tied about it. She wore a knee-length white dress, which also left her throat and arms bare.

  (She did not recall how Leah had taken off the rubies in her black bedroom, and then locked them in the ivory box. How Leah had looked doing it, how she, Sovaz, had stood in petrified terror at this omen. No doubt Kristian had given instructions. Before she had gone to meet Adam, almost inadvertently - for she was then still a stone with only hail beating on it - she had bound her neck with the chiffon, rather tightly, as if to staunch a flow of blood.)

  It was easy to follow Adam's progress through the sea. He was gold, the water cobalt. The simplicity of it pleased her. Shortly she saw the gold flash as he turned and came back to her.

  Wading up out of the waves, metallically naked, he resembled something archaic and fabulous.

  He lay down beside her on the beach, shading his eyes with one hand.

  'It must be wonderful to swim so strongly,' she said.

  'It's great. Why don't I teach you?'

  'Oh no. I should be dreadfully afraid.'

  That's OK. It's easy when you know how.'

  'You learnt when you were a child, I expect.'

  'It doesn't make any difference, Sovaz. I wouldn't let you drown.'

  She smiled drowsily. Although envious of his ability in the water, she had basically no desire to emulate him.

  'No. I enjoyed watching you.'

  'You should have thrown me a stick,' he said, with an unexpectedly acid humour.

  He drew her into his arm and her heart began at once to drum excitedly as her skin encountered the texture of his, for she was adoring him. Each new mannerism which she had not seen before, each new message of his thought, seemed wonderful to her. They made love in a languorous slow motion induced by the sun and the rhythm of the sea.

  Looking down at her afterwards, he noticed the absence of that expression of bewilderment - of fright almost - that he had seen on her face the first time.

  He touched her cheek gently with his mouth, and she smiled. Her eyes were closed against the sun, the hat fallen away, the ebony glissade of her hair spread like an enchanted net on the sand.

  It was impossible to associate with this day the day which had preceded it. Even less than she did he understand what had broken the spell on her. Some old guilt and pain, this much he had guessed, had been expunged in tears. All dread of her had vanished with her alteration. Now he felt only her warmth, her actual youth, what seemed to him her profound and innocent sweetness, those things which, as she had vaguely known, sprang from her chameleonism, her ability to become a mirror. Kristian, when he thought of him, was even more a figure of sick disgust. Kristian was the sorcerer. He wanted to free her from Kristian. Adam was impulsive with this desire, yet the calmness of the day somehow restrained him. There seemed time for everything.

  About two o'clock they walked down the baked road to the little town, and ate omelettes and wine at one of the cafes whose tables now sprawled in the open under eau-de-Nil umbrellas. When they had finished eating, they progressed carelessly and unhurriedly about the winding streets. On the highest level of the town they found a market with goats and sheep in pens and bright birds in cages. The heat of the day had come, and fell in white squares between the stalls.

  Sovaz paused among tubs of hyacinths and other flowers, fingering their clusters lightly. Adam instinctively recognized the ingenuous almost naive signal of a woman who has no money of her own but for whom everything she requires is bought. So he bought her

  flowers, though not with Kristian's money.

  Sovaz fastened the stems of the yellow and blue flowers into the band of the scarf so that the heads spilled along the brim of her black hat.

  She laughed as she did so, as a child laughs. She did indeed look very young, he thought, the same age as himself. He caught her hand and they walked on palm to palm, as any pair of lovers might have done.

  They talked a good deal. At least, he talked and she responded, prompting him. She did not seem to want to talk about herself, only about him. He spoke of New York, the cryogenic winters, the dry-as-dust summer madnesses, the parties and the drawing office, his mother with her chain-smoking affairs, the unborn yet often conceived and aborted book. He was neither self-conscious nor flattered at being made to tell her all these things. It seemed natural that she should have the groundwork of his life upon which to stand when later she might wish to reveal her own.

  He mentioned the incomplete notation he had written, attempting to describe her. She laughed again. Her face seemed all the beauty of the day held in crystal. He was, without understanding it, experiencing the joy of the artist who has made, even if inadvertently, something fine. For he had given her this life.

  Abruptly the sun went down, dusk washed over the streets.

  The sky was brilliant with enormous stars as they strolled back again, still hand in hand, towards the shore, and about the wild tamarisks at the roadside fireflies winked their tiny neons.

  Nevertheless, with the resurrection of night, some indefinable unease stole over Adam.

  They did not at once return to the villa, but moved slowly, following the pale contours of the beach. Suddenly she said: Today has been wonderful, Adam.'

  'It isn't the last day,' he said. 'Sovaz,' he said, 'why do you stay with him, with Kristian? You can't live like that for ever.'

  The moment he had given in to the irresistible demand to say this, he regretted it. He saw everything at once in total proportion. He felt ashamed of speaking to her in such a way. She was a woman used

  only to certain modes of existence. He could not maintain her financial standards, had nothing to offer her. The atmosphere of the hothouse might limit the scope of the orchid, but take it outside into the intemperate world and it would die. Truly, she could live like that for ever, and in no other fashion.

  As for Sovaz, a strengthless exhaustion overcame her at the thought of leaving Kristian.

  The exhalation of night pressed suddenly on her.

  'Adam,' she said, 'why should Thettalos loan you a house?'

  'What?' Startled by the unexpected question - he had been expecting almost any other reaction from her - Adam let go her hand.

  Thettalos would never do such a thing,' Sovaz said. Her voice was light and cool. She stared out at the sea. 'Why should he? He only aids and abets in orde
r to win Kristian's approval and custom, and he would know there would be no need for you to ask anyone other than Kristian for money.'

  Adam swallowed. He was at a loss. Seeing she had realized the truth, it seemed better to concede the facts. In any case, it was such a stupid, irrelevant lie.

  'OK, Sovaz. Krsitian's renting the house. Does it matter now?'

  'No, Adam. Of course it doesn't matter in the least.'

  He took her hand again. This time her hand was cold.

  'Look,' he said impractically, 'tomorrow we could go someplace else…'

  'Where?' she said. Her voice said, Kristian is here with us after all.

  He is, as I had always thought, omnipresent. Where could we go to escape him?

  But Adam, Adam her youth - there was no strength to be found in him, no individual impulse of action. He, too, was part of Kristian's plan to be tidily rid of her until she might be purged and refashioned and returned to him in the mood of dull bored serenity with which she left all her lovers. All. Adam only one with all the rest. Her dog on a leash. Whose wages were not even paid by herself, but by her husband.

  Reaching the villa, they ate a little of the cold food laid out for them, drank the wine, and later went to bed and made love together. Yet it was all done in an oddly wooden and desultory manner. They were trying to continue, unchecked, the happiness of the day, but now their actions had become imitative.

  The tide retreated from the shore, and Sovaz, who did not often recollect her dreams, dreamed vividly a dream which woke her.

  In the dream she had already woken.

  The room was a black box, the windows oblongs of paler black, casting no light inwards, and she was alone. Around the house she heard soft footfalls circling on the sand.

  In the way of dreams, not meaning to, she found herself at a window, looking out. The scenery was altered. The beach house -if house it still was - was perched on the crest of a sweeping broken hill, a hill roped with vines and ivies. The sky above was no longer black, but black-red, a sky of funeral fires, and green smoke, like the smoke of a volcanic altar, was rising up into it in places from fissures in the ground. On this ground were also other things. Euripides' bacchantes had recently passed this way in their frenzy, leaving the earth littered with the ribs of cattle and flags of flesh caught on trees.