Turning Back the Sun(23)

A phantom smile came to the major”s lips. He said, “Those women … they”re not my sort, doctor,” then he too started to laugh in a deep, gusty release of nerves, and the room relaxed. The lieutenant”s soft mouth snickered, while his eyes watched. Rayner went on chortling. Even the surgeon coughed into the palm of one hand.

In this jittery bloom of laughter the major got to his feet restored. “Thank you.” He buttoned his jacket firmly, walked to the front door and clasped their hands. It was as if laughter had cleansed away not only their mutual tensions, but the whole native threat, and the epidemic itself. Yet Rayner had simply confirmed what the major had feared, that this was “the savage plague.” For the moment, it was in abeyance. But what it would become, he could not assess. Perhaps it would remain as it was, an enigmatic mark, whose slight, accompanying malaise would fade away.

As they left, the lieutenant said, “You understand the need for secrecy on this, doctor?”

“Patients” complaints are always confidential.”

The subaltern went silent, then said, “But this is exceptional. If it became known, it would destroy confidence.”

Rayner said irritably, “Perhaps.” In fact he felt that if the major were publicly to admit to the disease, it would lessen its stigma. He curtly said goodnight. He had a sense that the lieutenant was trying to coerce him in some way, to occupy his conscience, and he felt vaguely contaminated. Because the lieutenant insisted on it, the silence he would keep no longer seemed quite moral.





CHAPTER

10

They went round and round. Outside the window of their airborne car the funfair lights and the lights of the city streamed together. They huddled inwards, as if at the vortex of a whirlpool, clasping hands. Their knees touched. Because his father was laughing, Rayner imagined that this was his earliest memory; he could not remember his father laughing afterwards. But he was sure of the sound even now—it was guttural, like his own—and the three pairs of linked hands were vivid in his mind. Beyond the lace cuffs fashionable then, the sheen of his mother”s fingernails covered his palm, and he recalled the black hairs dusting the back of his father”s fist as it enclosed his, and thinking about the mystery of being adult. Probably they circled no more than two meters up in the air, but to him they were spinning into night. A trinity of hands.

“How fast are we going? A hundred kilometers!” And he heard his scream of excitement, because it was dangerous, and he was safe.

The analyst asked, “Your father wasn”t a happy man?” Rayner, surprised by his own answer, said, “I don”t know.” If only he had lived a few years longer—but he”d died with his enigma intact. “I think he was happy in his work. He was a dour man. Twenty years older than my mother. He always seemed very assured. I expect he calmed my mother just by being himself. I remember our home as very placid, yes, happy, I think …”

The man asked, “You had other relatives?”

“Only one. My father”s sister.”

But the house had not been empty, exactly. It had seemed to be visited by people half sketched-in. It was irritating how dimmed they were: family friends, honorary relatives. Nobody important. Except perhaps “Uncle” Bernard. And even him Rayner remembered as a shadowy habitué rather than a distinct presence. He looked a little like his father but kindlier, weaker; and Rayner recalled the gifts he gave more clearly than the man himself: a wooden engine and four carriages with a guard at the back waving a flag; a clockwork acrobat who sprang from his feet to his hands like a jumping bean, until one day he stayed bent double.

“Poor fellow,” said Uncle Bernard. “I think he”s dead.”

Then, to console him, Bernard showed Rayner conjuring tricks. Perhaps that was his job, the boy thought, he seemed to have no other. Sometimes he spent whole afternoons at their house.

“Look! Do you see this penknife? Watch carefully. Now where”s it gone? … You”re sure? … No, here!”

For that hour he transfigured himself into a wizard. He poured rice out of empty bowls and described the card which the boy held hidden in his hand. But it was the handkerchiefs which Rayner remembered most distinctly. Did the boy know, asked Uncle Bernard, that his mother was haunted by beautiful colors? He pulled back the sleeves theatrically from his thin hands. Rayner”s mother was sitting between them in a summer dress. She was always animated when Bernard came, and now she was laughing in advance.

“There! … There! … and there!” He plucked them from her ears, from her hair, from the nape of her neck: brilliant-colored satin kerchiefs which dropped in the boy”s lap. It was mesmerizing. Rayner could scarcely track the fingers flashing back and forth. Nor could his mother. Her hands followed Bernard”s, trying to stop him, but her laughter bubbled up as if she were being tickled. She looked beautiful, he thought.

Even Bernard seemed carried away. “And there”s one scarf left. The blue one! Where does she keep the blue one?”

Then, out of the gentle cleft between her breasts, he pulled a stream of silk turquoise. “There!”

The boy simply gazed. He could not understand. Suddenly his mother seemed awesome to him, different. Bernard might be a wizard, but the repository of magic, of all these secret colors, was she. Why was Bernard the only one who knew that she carried this beauty with her? Had she not told his father? He fingered the satins on his knees. They seemed real. Even the turquoise one; but how did Bernard know she kept it there?