Turning Back the Sun(24)
Long afterwards he wondered how deeply Uncle Bernard had dipped his fingers into his mother”s cleft, but he could not be sure. And now Bernard was asking, “Will you be a conjuror when you grow up?”
But Rayner was already stubborn. It was a private vow with him to be a lawyer. He whispered this out.
“So he wants to follow his papa!” There was a glint of mockery in the voice. “Is he more like his papa or his mama?” Bernard”s face came circling round Rayner”s. “I think you should follow your mother. She”s a conjuror too, you know!” He took her hand, lifted it into the air, and as if from her fingertips there bloomed a silver cigarette case. “I think he”s more like his mother!”
“That”s enough, Bernard,” she said.
In Rayner”s memory the wonder and oddness of all this held a tinge of distress. He felt he was being moved against his father, against his will. He decided he did not like Uncle Bernard anymore. In those days his family could still afford a nurse, and he was glad, for once, when she was summoned to take him for a walk.
Rayner said: “It was just harmless fun, of course. And soon afterwards Uncle Bernard faded out.”
“Faded out?”
“Yes, people did that in my parents” world.” It was the analyst”s silence which irritated him, Rayner thought. The man just sat there. “In any case, I realize now that my mother was not an attractive woman.”
The analyst joked for the first time. “That”s always a matter of opinion!”
“And after my father”s death she simply caved in. She didn”t seem to have anything left. She started drinking. It was pathetic, I know, but a sign of her love.”
The man did not answer. His pen dangled over his notepad. He did not direct Rayner, did not suggest explanations, in fact never said anything definite at all. If he were not the only doctor practicing therapy in the town—psychoanalysis was such a young science here—Rayner would have gone elsewhere. “You may want a trauma from my childhood,” he said, “but I”m hard put to find you one. The nearest thing was a fire. When I was five we had a fire outbreak in the house one night. My father was away on business and my mother had to rescue me. I was dreaming I was on a railway station, but there was real smoke in my nostrils.”
He was woken by his own coughing and by a woman howling somewhere. It was pitch dark, but he felt a new presence in the room: thick and pungent. He reached for his bedside lamp and as he switched it on the door flew open. The whole room seemed to be hung with gauze, and on the far side, a long way away, she was standing with her hands at her throat. She appeared as if she had already been through flames. Her hair hung wild, her clothes crumpled and her face and hands looked stained with soot. He began to cry. Then she came toward him, as if parting the gauze, and held out her arms. Her voice was husky with smoke. “Come to me.”
The analyst was watching him. “So your mother rescued you.”
“Yes. I can”t remember what happened after that…. We never spoke about it in the family afterwards.” “Why not?”
“I don”t know … I can”t remember.”
But his memory was like that; it splintered even recent events. Sometimes he could remember nothing of an encounter except a vivid, trivial detail. The whole heart and importance of the episode would have disappeared, leaving behind the nicotine on a man”s fingernails or the color of a child”s eyelashes. Only in remembering his absent friends did the details synthesize into full portraits, as though their minutiae had overlaid and reinforced one another. So Leon, with his delicate lips and rounded paleness, and fine-boned Jarmila in her fair waterfall of hair, assembled easily in his mind.
And, of course, Miriam.
The analyst, who normally let him ramble, asked, “What was so distinctive about this girl?”
“She was very warm,” Rayner said at once. “It was expressed in her body. She was brown, vital.” His hands unfurled from his chest. “She had this special gift for drawing out … I can”t exactly explain.”
“First love.” The doctor”s gaze was fixed on the wall beside him. “Very potent.”
“Yes, and the place was right,” Rayner said forcefully. “I was brought up there. She belonged to that world. It was natural to us.” He did not know where the man”s hometown was, but he added austerely, “I think it”s simply better than anywhere else.”
The analyst did not answer.
Rayner wished he could articulate precisely what he felt, but he only said, “I think you belong with your past,” and the words, as he spoke them, became true. He was thinking, curiously, of the church at the end of their street in the capital, the whitewashed and pinnacled sanctuary in whose graveyard his parents were buried. Whether or not you believed (and Rayner did not), the building seemed to hold in focus all the social unity, the flow of past into future which he had lost. He knew it by heart: the plaster Virgin in her field of tapers; the Christus Victor on the altar; the memorial plaques to soldiers and priests (and even a state councillor): “Revered Memory … Prudens et Fidelis—the bones of … Vitae Morumque Exemplar …” it was the church of Miriam, Leon and Adelina. They”d been confessed and confirmed there as a row of giggling children. There he had lost his faith insidiously, without pain. But now that he was exiled in this pragmatic, near-atheist town, he realized that his childhood church had gathered up its citizens—dark-clothed and formal—and pointed them in a direction which had nothing to do with the town”s pragmatism. It looked out onto otherness, mystery.