Turning Back the Sun(46)
He asked, “What will you do?” as if she might somehow change course.
“I suppose I”ll go on in that place, dancing.” Then she added, “But you won”t be there.” She seemed to have to remind herself of this, cruelly, out loud. “I expect I”ll start to hate it, remembering what you thought of it. If only there were windows down there. But there”s no light. And it”s true, they”re pathetic, those girls, Felicie and the rest. They”re ill half the time, all just hoping for a break one day, a decent man, or any man. There”s not one of them happy. But they seem to need me, and I try to like them …”
She was talking of her loneliness, but too proud to give it that name.
“I”m sorry.” He”d never heard her speak so sadly of her work.
“If you were sorry, you”d stay.” She said it bleakly, drained of resentment. Just a fact. Then she stood up. “I”m going home.”
The word “home,” as she spoke it, was filled with a bitter self-comforting. “Home” before had always meant here.
“You shouldn”t go back alone.”
“Who”s going to bother me?” She tried to joke. “An old woman with a cat.” Her voice choked. “Better leave me alone. I am alone.”
Rayner watched her pick up her bag and the cat, then hesitate, as if these were too few, and there was something she had forgotten.
Then she left.
CHAPTER
20
The next morning a cloud appeared in the sky. The first in four months, it hung alone in the hazy blue. People poured into the streets to gaze at it, or emerged exclaiming onto their rooftops. How had it arrived? Where was it going? Above the smoke pall, it hovered crisp-edged and immaculate, and its solitude lent it the strangeness of a portent.
But little by little its silhouette smudged and it began to disperse into the suffocating ether. By noon it was no more than a vapor inexplicably blurring the sky, and soon afterwards it had gone.
At first it left in its wake an extraordinary depression. Staring up at it, people had entertained an idea that it might expand or multiply, then darken into rain. Now they just said, “It”s gone,” and were struck by an irrational hopelessness. But later, hours after it had vanished, they were still scrutinizing the sky for signs. Their gloom at the cloud”s evaporation was slowly replaced by the memory of its mysterious arrival, and they began to say, “It”s got to mean something. There must be more.”
Soon after dawn Rayner had noticed it sailing like a sign above the wilderness. It seemed to exonerate him: he was leaving the town with hope. Bruised by thoughts of Zo?, he planned the day as a mass execution of duties. Everything must be clean and fast. He did not want to encounter friends or even walk down the mall. So he kept his mind on practical things: seeing his sickest patients, telegraphing his aunt, booking tomorrow”s rail ticket, briefing the locum who would replace him for two weeks. All day he consciously excluded from his mind anything which might touch him with regret. He wanted nothing to dim the elation of his going.
He tried to be brusque even with Leszek, but failed. When he told him that he intended to accept a post in the capital, the old man smiled with a faraway recognition. He”d have liked to retire there himself, he said—to the restfulness, the clement weather—instead of dying out here. But he said this without rancor, and Rayner realized that the concept of returning anywhere had faded in him. His past was too brutalized.
It was late by the time Rayner started home. He thought without nostalgia of his villa above the river. He would sell it back to the cooperative in two weeks” time. Only the return of Zo?”s things would be bitter. He did not want to think about that. And as he approached the house he saw a rectangle of light suspended above the frangipani trees, and realized that she must be back.
Downstairs she had already gathered up most of her crockery and hangings, but left others among his, perhaps forgotten, or simply because they fitted there. Her bright wall carpets were folded up on the kitchen floor. He wondered if she was angry. Then, on the table, he saw among his mail an envelope bearing the state military seal. The letter required him to report for a four-day expedition which would start the day after he returned from the capital. It was signed by Ivar. Rayner thought: so this is my punishment for getting away. He thrust it angrily into his pocket, then started inwardly to laugh. He did not mind. He did not mind anything Ivar did now.
Upstairs, Zo? had laid a few of her clothes in a case, then abandoned them. She had come across one of his old photograph albums, and was sitting on the bed, leafing through it. She smiled at him, composed. She said, “I was beginning to think you”d gone already.”
“No, tomorrow.”
She was still fiercely made up from the club, her hair pressed back shining above her nape. A smear of glitter dust winked round her neck.
“Did you make your arrangements?”
“Yes.” He sensed that she had gathered herself together for him, in pride or shame. “You found my photo album.”
“I was looking at where you were going.”
He sat beside her, his hand on her knee. The album spread open on high, balconied houses and green parks behind wrought-iron railings, on friends dancing, or diving, or on picnics together. They were embalmed, of course, in perpetual summer, and everyone was smiling.