Turning Back the Sun(17)
Then her chin lifted and she walked down the plant-lapped path to the dining room with a trace still of the ballerina”s turned-out step, and her hand on Rayner”s arm. As they threaded between tables toward one overlooking the lake, and people turned to assess them, Rayner felt bemused that her fear of crowds and her defiance of them went hand in hand. Her way of coping was to re-create herself for them. It seemed neurotically brave.
A three-piece orchestra was playing Glinka and Borodin on a dais, and a few couples were dancing. The women”s hair was stuck with the little gold combs fashionable that year. The men”s white dinner jackets were buttoned tight at the waist, and a few were still stitched with campaign ribbons from the Great War twenty years ago, when the nation was a colony.
Already Zo?”s high spirits were discovering a humorous variety show in the people near them when somebody called out, “Rayner!”
Her heart must have sunk as his did. She said, “Oh bloody hell. It”s Ivar and Felicie.”
They were sitting alone at a table for four, wanting company. Ivar spread out his arms in amused welcome. At that moment his urbanity, his inability to be surprised by human affairs, came as a relief. He merely kissed them both perfunctorily and said, “How good to find friends!”
But Felicie flung her arms furiously around Zo?. “You cheat! You didn”t tell me.” She turned to Ivar. “She tells me she needs a holiday but never says where or who with.”
“You never listen,” said Zo?.
Felicie said, “But I”d have listened to that!”
So they settled at the table and lapsed into the ease of old friends. Their meal came and went, and they were left drinking the rough local wine from the hills. Rayner felt happy, and for the first time in years he drank too much. Felicie poured out news at Zo? as if they”d been parted six months, telling anecdotes, soliciting approval, and scattering all her chatter with reflex self-criticism. “I”m so forgetful, I … I”m so stupid, I … I …” Her voice fluted and piped. Rayner, watching from the corner of his eye, found the two laughably different. Mist-haired Felicie gave an illusion almost of transparency, while beside her Zo? was all color and bite. Several times it occurred to him that Felicie was some sort of ghost. In her irrecoverable loss of self, he thought, she was the person whom Zo? was refusing to become.
Ivar was saying, “I thought they”d have wanted you in town now.”
“You mean the disease?” Rayner shook his head. “We can”t treat it. We can pretend, of course, we always do. But basically we don”t know anything.”
Ivar said levelly, “You”ll be able to track it down in the end. How many cases are reported now? Eleven?”
“We”d be able to trace it better if we knew what it was. But we”ve taken blood and urine tests and come up with nothing at all. We”ve even X-rayed for cancer, but … nothing.”
“You think it”s infectious?”
“I don”t know. Nothing”s shown up in the blood.”
He said, “Well then, the people who”ve caught it can be monitored. There must be some common factor.”
“They”re all sorts. Both sexes, old, young. Two are miners, one”s an optician. A bank clerk …” The school medical officer—Rayner”s amateur analyst—had even reported the rash on a child of six.
Ivar said, “How strange,” but he said it reluctantly, acknowledging only a temporary barrier which would soon be cleared away. That was typical, Rayner thought. Ivar had always spread this calm of logic and reasonableness about him, which left no place for the unknown. Now he added, “People say it”s a savage”s disease—even that they”re spreading it on purpose.”
“There”s no evidence for that!” It was maddening, Rayner thought, how Ivar could voice a piece of pure speculation, and in his measured tone the idea would take on sanity. Whereas Rayner, when he refuted it, sounded harshly precarious.
Ivar said, “I”d have thought it permissible, under the circumstances, to take in a few of the local savages for medical inspection.”
“It”d be harder to diagnose in natives than in anybody.” Rayner remembered the blotched torso of the old man at the holy site. “I think they generally suffer the opposite complaint. Skin depigmentation. And apart from discoloration the only symptoms are vague. Just a general malaise. And some patients complain of aching eyeballs.”
“Did you know,” Ivar said, “that during the last savage troubles fourteen years ago they systematically poisoned the town”s water supply?”
“I never heard that.”
“Well, they did—”
Felicie broke in, “Ivar thinks the savages are “racially inferior.” “ Her head wobbled like a flower. “Do you?”
Rayner laughed (it seemed the only thing to do). “Genetics isn”t my subject.” But when he thought about the natives, he felt a confused disquiet. Between them and the whites there seemed to lie some absolute divide, as if they inhabited another stratum of time. He said, “I suppose they”re inferior when they”ve had to adapt to our way. We”d be, if we had to adapt to theirs.”
He did not want to talk about it. Through a window behind Ivar”s back he saw that the moon had risen out of the hills. He wrenched himself to his feet and walked out onto the terrace. The wine had gone to his head. In front of him only the lake and the moon seemed to exist in the simplifying night. He even fancied that this was where the moon came from, out of the lake. He was reminded of the seacoast near the capital on other summer nights, of Miriam, of phosphorus water in the rock pools. The restaurants in the capital, he thought, did not have to strain for effect as this one did, with its pretentious chandeliers and fake leather upholstery.