Turning Back the Sun(27)

The sweat started trickling from Rayner”s forehead into his eyes. By the time he had finished, he felt unnaturally exhausted. He packed his implements back into his case without a word.

The lieutenant said, “We know we can count on your discretion.”

Rayner snapped, “You”re lucky you can.” But he realized that the statement was meaningless. Nobody in the town would care what happened in this prison, and some would feel a secret pleasure. He wiped the sweat from his lips and touched the prisoner”s shoulder, uncomprehended.

“Rest now.”

The same staff car was waiting outside to drive him back. The streets were deserted. Their few lamps spread dangerous pools of light in the dark. The whole town had gone silent, locked in its private dreams and nightmares. A three-quarter moon hung overhead, and a few of the desert deer had strayed in and were grazing on the verges.

Rayner must have let out an involuntary groan, because the driver turned round and said, “Are you all right, sir?”

“Yes,” he said. “I”m all right.”

The sweat had dried on his forehead, and even his anger had ebbed. But he pulled the towel from his case and wiped his hands, his neck, his lips, over and over. He just wanted to get out of here.





CHAPTER

12

Rayner”s villa had subtly transformed. During the seven years he had lived there, it had continued to look bare, cool and too big for him, as if briefly rented. It resembled, in fact, the place of transition he believed it to be.

But Zo? vitalized it. She came and went between the villa and her flat, borrowing his books and bringing back textiles or rugs which she hung on the offending blank walls. He enjoyed the way she moved so easily in and out. They seemed to have an unspoken treaty not to coerce one another. Sometimes she would stay for a few hours, sometimes for several days. He never knew. But where previous girlfriends had tried to feminize the villa, suggesting prettier curtain designs or buying him vases and ornaments, Zo? left behind a bright, personal trail of things she had forgotten or wanted him to keep, and spread a kind of zany Bohemia. It was oddly uninvasive. She would appropriate a wall or an alcove, impatient with its starkness, then forget whatever she had put there—a copper bowl, a flowering shrub, a stuffed armadillo—and sometimes replace it later as if it had been his. At other times she would discover mementoes and photographs which he had stowed away in the louvered cupboards, and would impudently set them up on view. “There! Why do you hide your past from me?” And he would find himself living with his parents again in the inaccessible capital.

Little by little, to his secret pleasure, her possessions intermingled with his. Her novels and yoga manuals became incorporated among his medical texts, histories and travel books, and his classical records were infiltrated by jazz. In the bedroom cupboards her summer dresses came to hang among his drab jackets, and a flotilla of small shoes appeared; and when he hunted the bathroom shelves for razor blades he found her setting-pins and tweezers instead.

Usually she brought her cat with her: the only guarantee of an overnight stay. It was mercurial, independent and a little fierce, like her. Its variegated coat, he told her, was a symbol of her personality, and depending on her mood he would lift the creature up in front of her and point to an area of fur—black, brindled, white or furious orange. He had come to sense when she wanted to be alone by the preoccupied way she moved about; then he would simply lift up the cat, point to black fur and disappear into his study or the garden. Her moods, he sensed, were a part of her self-reassurance. They were saying, “I do not belong to him.” They made him perversely sad. He loved her independence; but it unnerved him.

Their working hours were at odds. In the morning, after finishing her dance exercises, Zo? went out to teach yoga to bored businessmen”s wives, who averted their collective gaze from what she did in the evening, but who all wanted to look like her. At dusk, just as he returned, she would be gone, and he would enter rooms in which the musty odor of his own solitude had been replaced by the smells of her day: nail varnish, vegetarian cooking, cat food, and the sweetish scent of her sweat after exercise. And on the bed two or three of her costumes would lie discarded in a shimmering pile of lamé, aigrette and batwing sleeves.

On one of these evenings he returned to a letter from his aunt in the capital. The writing on the envelope had become a tremulous mockery of its old self, but the message inside retained the austere factuality of his father”s sister. “My health has declined,” she wrote, “and I am arranging for the eventual disposal of this house. As you are my closest surviving relative, it will pass to you, and I will inform you when the lawyers need your attendance. Your temporary residence permit here can be arranged.”

He tried to imagine her. Even fifteen years ago, when he”d last seen her, she had looked formidably old. After his father”s death she had continued to come to lunch on most Sundays—to his mother”s distress—wearing a brown bombazine dress, long out of fashion. A quaint toque hat generally roosted on her head, he remembered, but this was the only ridiculous thing about Aunt Birgit. The moment she removed it, you were confronted by a face of white, aquiline power.

Rayner”s sudden elation had nothing to do with the money. It was the prospect of the capital which filled him with impatience.

“Who is this aunt?” Zo? asked.

“She”s my father”s younger sister. She never married. But everything I heard about her came from my parents, and that wasn”t much. So when you ask who she is, I realize I don”t know. As a boy I was a bit in awe of her.” His childhood had been full of people like that, he remembered: people of whom “Who is she?” died on the lips. “I could never picture her young.”