Turning Back the Sun(16)
Rayner said, “Are you feeling unwell?”
“I get bad from the hot heat.” The man spread his hand over his chest. “And sometimes in my left eye, if I looking at my hand, I see two hands, one top, one bottom.” He did not try this. “But I”m okay most days. My daughter gets medicine grass and sometimes whitefeller stuff. I”ve been lucky in my living, not like some.”
He became silent. Rayner went on hearing the clack-clack of the loom. Through the hut opening, beyond the girl”s back, he glimpsed their possessions: a skin rug, some articles of western clothing, and in the center, incongruously beautiful, the carved headrests on which these mysterious people slept. At the girl”s feet were a few bowls of roots and tubers, and a little beyond, exorcised of any threat, a short-handled axe.
Rayner wondered what the girl would do after her father had died. He badly wanted to give them something. He felt suddenly, illogically grateful to them—simply for their difference, their enigma. But as he got to his feet he realized he had nothing useful to give.
He took the old man”s arm. “Next time you”re in the town, you come and see me. I”m a doctor.” He printed out his address on a scrap of paper. “You show this to people, they”ll tell you where to come.”
The man laid the paper flat on the palm of his hand, then turned without a word into the hut.
Rayner scrambled up the slope to his car. It was already dusk. The wilderness seemed to be sucking the light out of the sky. As he drove back, the lamps of the mines ascended in front of him in constellations of white and amber, and the mammoth smelting chimney, picked out in red against the stars, still spread its waste in a long, fine dust across the night.
CHAPTER
8
Rayner found himself saying things to Zo? which he had never intended. Often when they were together her stare fell on him like a vivid but innocent searchlight, and he was touched by a kind of impetuous tenderness. They had slept with one another after only their second evening together, and within two weeks, a little bewildered at himself, he had asked her to join him on holiday. It was the animal exuberance of her, he thought, which was so elating, mixed with an intangible sense of suffering. Her vitality struck him as a kind of courage. For all her frankness, he felt he did not know her.
He chose the town”s most sophisticated resort—a lake in the northern hills—because he imagined that she was urban. But during their few days” holiday neither of them entered the little casino or nightclub, and it was she who sank into a dream by the water, and seemed physically to imbibe its colors and changes. For hours she would paddle along the shore in one of his shirts and a straw hat, then lie spreadeagled on a rock under the flailing sun, with her hair swept over her face. She said that it reminded her of home, and certainly the lake was so huge—on hazy days the farther shore vanished altogether—that it resembled some tideless stretch of the north coast where she was born.
There was nothing like it for hundreds of kilometers. Through the naked hills it lay in a sheet of brilliant blue, death-still. Under its near slopes, fed by small streams, the littoral burst into a rain forest of mangrove and silkwood trees, where parasite ferns ran amok and hundreds of pale trunks leaned askew. The resort”s villas were nestled privately among them along a near-empty beach. Even in June it was silent. Out on the water only a few transparent-looking islands interposed themselves between the shore and the far hills, and occasional flights of duck gashed the surface.
Rayner usually avoided such resorts. During the Great War the place had been reserved for the local government élite and senior army and intelligence officers. Now it was patronized by executives and businessmen. After a day dispersed along the shore or among the islands, they converged on the dining room with their wives or mistresses, and the place became a microcosm of the town. It drank and danced and gossiped. To Rayner, who couldn”t dance and scarcely drank, all the place”s pleasure lay in Zo?. If any medical colleagues happened to be here, he decided, they could think what they liked. He was not ashamed of her. He felt proud, rather, of her public face: the slightly arrogant beauty of her, which seemed to be defying the world to uncover any weaker woman beneath. People in the town were so various now—the strata of the old society breaking up all over the country—that you”d expect nobody to trouble any longer about who consorted with whom. But you would, of course, be wrong. And the dining room by the lake was riddled with a cross fire of stares and inquisition.
So at evening, after their amphibious hours along the shore, they had to reenter the town”s orbit. Zo? prepared for this as if she were going to war. Sitting at her dressing table, applying her fawn-colored foundation cream and diffusing over her eyelids the specks of rouge which mysteriously heightened her eyes” blue, she talked about creating her face as if none had been there before. Then came the matching lipstick and the small false eyelashes and the drawing-back of the hair from her highlit features. Without this, Rayner came to realize, she felt bared, whittled away. So each night she produced a version of herself which was at once emphatic, theatrical and a little poignant. He was reminded of the dancer who had gyrated on the nightclub stage, demanding recognition of herself, but only on her own terms.
“Do I look all right? I think I look a mess.” In the long mirror the girl could not decide, and turned to Rayner.
“You look good.”