Turning Back the Sun(47)

He said, “It wasn”t always like that.” But she went on fingering through the album, perhaps trying to understand, and he began to feel ashamed as these revelations of beauty and privilege unfolded before her, because her youth had not been like that. She had rebelled. But she looked at the photographs more in bemusement than in envy. Their world seemed far away to her; her nostalgia for the city, if that is what it was, had been severed from reality. Several times she pointed to people and asked who they were: Jarmila, Leon, Adelina smiled at the tip of her finger.

“Who”s that?”

She was staring at Miriam on a picnic in a summer frock, pretending to be drunk. It occurred to Rayner that the irreverent photograph could have been of Zo? herself, ten years younger and more expensively dressed. But Miriam looked less real, ethereal almost, enclosed forever in that time and place. Zo? said wanly, “She”s attractive.” “Yes.”

“I suppose they”re all rather grand, those people, and rich.” Her voice glinted with rebellion, but her face looked pale. As she leafed through four more years, she turned rather quiet, then closed the album up. She shot him her old look of intensity, of tenderness. “Can you find that again?”

Then she stood up, as if to resume her packing, but instead faced him almost formally and said, “I didn”t mean to talk like that last night.”

He touched his hands to her shoulders. “It doesn”t matter.”

“It does matter.” She drew back from him, not in coldness or in anger, but to finish unimpeded what she had to say. “I don”t think much about the capital anymore. I”ve got bad memories. But it matters to you.” Her voice trembled a little. “For all I know, I”m running away. Perhaps the city would accuse me, because I”ve come down in the world. I never fulfilled my ambitions there, you see, all that ballet stuff. It was in the capital I first saw Swan Lake.” She pointed her balletic feet in an odd, cynical nostalgia. “My parents would despise me now, if they knew.”

Rayner did not know what to answer. He felt perversely saddened that she did not long impossibly to follow him.

She went on, “I didn”t want you to think I despised you for going. On the contrary.” She picked up the photograph album, carried it across the room and replaced it in the drawer where she had found it, as if she were burying something. She said simply, “You”re better than me.”

He scowled. “No …”

But she laughed at his expression. “Anyway, the capital”s just not my kind of place any longer. I couldn”t last there.” She wriggled her shoulders as if reviving her circulation. “I can manage here, even if that club does depress me sometimes.”

She stared out of the window into darkness, keeping her back to him so he could not see her expression, then said clearly, as if in words she had practiced, “You”ve got every right to leave.” He saw her fingers tighten on the sill. “We never promised each other anything.”

For Rayner, watching her slight figure against the darkness, this was more unbearable than anything the night before. It wrenched him back to her, and filled him with a sad, furious frustration. But he did not know whether this anger was directed at himself, or at the intransigence of state law which would separate them, or at Zo? for her disruptive courage. He came behind her and linked his hands round her waist and kissed her.

She demanded whimsically, “Shall I yell or plead? Then you can despise me.” She swivelled round in his arms and waggled her head comically in front of him. She was trying to drown her own grief as well as his. “No, I”ll torture you with the memory of my beautiful unselfishness.” Gently she unlocked his fingers round her, stepped away and began lifting down the pictures of owls she had hung near the bed. “But I”m not leaving these. I can imagine your ritzy girlfriend in the capital asking, “Who on earth gave you those vulgar birds?” “ She laid them in the case. “But I like them.”

“So do I.”

“Well you can”t have them. You”re so serious, I”m going to leave you something absolutely useless, to do you good.” She closed the case and pretended to ponder. “The stuffed armadillo, I think.”

There was no more packing to do. The room looked bare, as if it had already been abandoned. Its ceiling fans rustled unevenly. In the square of night beyond the window, the red and amber lights of the smelter stack shone like planets fallen off course. Rayner was conscious of a hovering uncertainty in Zo?”s movements, as well as in his own. He turned off a light, rearranged some books, removed his watch. When his eyes met hers, he did not know what to say. Out of his need and love for her, however constrained, and out of a sudden compassion which she would have hated, he wanted to make love to her again. But he had no right to ask, and his gaze swerved away from her. It was she, standing almost shyly on the far side of the bed, who said in a small, defensive voice, “Do you still want me?” “Of course I do.”

She did not look at him, but released her hair and dress almost in one movement. Then he took her in his arms and she buried her lips in his neck. Once, as they lay together on the bed, she grimaced at the blemish trickling from her armpit, and murmured something in the lilting cadence of the capital which sometimes returned to her when they were making love. Softly he lifted her arm from the rash and kissed it.

In the past, he knew, she had sometimes separated his daytime presence from her nighttime lover, closing her eyes and telling him not to speak, as if sex had to be anonymous. But recently this had changed, and she had looked and spoken back to him in this softened voice. It was as though the two parts of him—or of herself—were becoming one to her, and this private wound, which she could not explain, was healing.