Turning Back the Sun(21)
Ridiculous and touching in the magenta bathing cap, she eased into the water and started to return the way she had come.
After a while Rayner too swam to the shore. His damaged foot had started to ache, throbbing as if the bone marrow were filled with nerves. He lay down and heaped the soft earth into a cushion beneath it. When Zo? found him, he was fast asleep.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
She stood gazing down at him. She looked as he most loved her to look. From time to time, as now, something ignited in her this glow of tenderness. Even at meals, she might reach out with a sensitivity strange after her withdrawal, and cup his face in her hands to steady it, before settling to gaze at him. So now her eyes had gone gentle and alert, and she sat down and tentatively touched his foot. So that was it: his foot.
She said, “You never talk about it, so I don”t know when it”s hurting.”
“I don”t think about it much.”
She ran her fingertips over the permanently swollen ankle. “But it must remind you.”
“Yes, of course it does.” Some roughness reentered his voice. “I don”t mean it reminds me of the accident. I had amnesia. But it reminds me of my mother”s death. It”s like carrying it about with you.” And the end of your youth too, he thought angrily, and your exile to this bloody place. “You imagine that if it wasn”t there, you”d forget.” But of course you wouldn”t, he knew. He sat up and stared down his body with distaste. “Zo?, you and I should have a pact to ban pity.”
She said, “Why should we be frightened of it, d”you suppose?” She lifted his wrenched foot to her lips. Its bones stuck out like harp strings. She kissed them one by one.
He said, “I”m not frightened.”
She answered astonishingly, “I am.” Her fingers trickled over his foot. “If I thought you were sorry for me, I”d start to feel pitiful. Then I”d lose myself.”
In the sunless day the only sign of dusk was an overall dimming, as if a great lamp had been turned down behind the sky.
She said, “We should go soon.”
They wandered back to dress for supper. Zo? remade her face. When it was done, she went on glaring longer than usual into the mirror, hunting for any fissures in her immaculacy. Rayner studied her, wondering; he wanted to touch her, but did not.
“It”s our last evening.”
Then she entered the dining room in the tight black dress which reminded him of her leotard—the high breasts and slender body attracting the attention she craved like a defiant child. And back in their villa the whole charade was washed away. But she answered his lovemaking with a self-obliterating need, her eyes clenched shut, and fell asleep with her fingernails still sharp in his back. For a long time afterwards he lay awake, and at midnight went out onto the verandah to look at the lake. But it was invisible in haze.
When he returned he stood watching her in the faint light, as if in sleep she might divulge some clue to herself. She lay on her side. From her rather small face the hair streamed back over the pillows, and her right arm was extended in front of her as if hunting for him (or someone) on the other side of the bed. Sleep had withdrawn her into herself. She breathed heavily. And as she lay there, her mouth”s curves faintly smiling, she seemed in her privacy to be integrated at last—this harlequin woman who maddened and touched and puzzled him—as if all the disparate threads of her had been drawn together by sleep, and no longer needed explanation.
CHAPTER
9
The latent disquiet which had trickled through the town began to spread out in a miasma of rumor and fear. The insidious advance of the disease—and it became “common knowledge” that it was bred by the savages—spilled into Rayner”s clinic in a spate of false alarms. Along with the genuine cases—a bank clerk and an eleven-year-old girl—his workload was doubled by healthy people who complained of malaise or eye-ache, or imagined that their skin moles had changed texture and were spreading.
Rumors grew that the savages were infiltrating the town at night, and were exacerbated by the murder of a man in an alley just off the mall. The multiple injuries to his head had been inflicted by axe blows, and he was half stripped. There were whispers of other murders which the authorities had covered up to forestall panic.
Rayner”s apprehension at the natives descended on him again. But one night, too, he woke up from a nightmare of white killers flowering all over the town, as people deflected suspicion by murdering one another with axes. Outside his windows he could see the natives” fires still burning along the river, but the police had stepped up their patrols, and often moved in threes along the bank now, flashlights in hand, while their ghostly launch cruised behind.
Fewer people went out at night. On the outskirts, thick padlocks hung from the compound gates, and more dogs than before had been released into the arid gardens. By day the signs of unease were growing. The public benches and doorways were still scattered with natives, but outside private offices and shops the warning notices multiplied: “No waiting on steps,” “No lingering.” From time to time, as if to show that something was being done, one of the younger savages would be arrested in the street and taken off for questioning.
Remembering what the old native had said, Rayner prayed only that the rains would come and fill up the water holes. But every morning revealed the same sultry sky. It seemed to wrap the earth in gauze. Even the birds which flew in it looked suffocated. Rayner, whose foot injury had barred him from military conscription, was liable instead to emergency secondment in the medical corps, and several times found himself attached to jeep patrols among the outlying farms. He saw nothing but sere grass and haggard cattle. Most of the water holes had been sucked dry, and even the streams shrivelled. The only savages he glimpsed were stick figures on the horizon, grazing their bullocks in the thorns.