Turning Back the Sun(55)
The nurse opened the door to him. She said, “A Mrs. Miriam Eliade called to see you. She said she”d be back in an hour.”
So she was coming. He sat down on a chair in the hall and stared into the mirror opposite. He saw a tanned, shriven face with a fierce chin and sensuous mouth. Already small lines were tearing its forehead and pinching the corners of its eyes. And his hair was receding in two shallow bays. He had hardened, he knew, and perhaps coarsened. Yet he found himself hoping sentimentally that Miriam would be unaltered, that he would be confronted by the vibrant girl he remembered. He went upstairs and changed his shirt. He laughed at himself a little as he combed his hair sideways, like a schoolboy preparing for a date.
When the knocker sounded he sauntered downstairs, restraining his nerves, and opened the door. Then he stood frozen by surprise. He might have opened a door onto the past. It was almost shocking. She stood there in a white dress. The same dark eyes were smiling at him from her brown face. The familiar curls shifted round her shoulders. The same brimming figure radiated health.
For a moment he just stared at her. “You must be immortal!” Then he burst into laughter and his hands lifted to his own face. “My God, I look bad.”
She kissed him. “It doesn”t matter for men!” But he could feel her gaze raking over him, trying to disinter the nineteen-year-old boy from the thirty-four-year-old man.
His aunt was sleeping, so they sat in the room full of mirrors and faded sun. Her unchangedness mesmerized him. Her skin had kept the glow and clarity of a girl”s. The brown vigor of her body seemed to be pouring health into it even as she sat there. From the dive-boat he had carried away an image of this summer skin—a lemony, translucent tissue above pretty blue veins—and had imagined he”d exaggerated it. But here it was, amber against her white dress, a hand”s touch from him. He grinned bemusedly at her. Whenever she smiled at him and her eyes crinkled in their short, black lashes, time concertinaed helplessly and they were kissing in the city park again.
But what had happened to her, he demanded, and why hadn”t she written?
Well, why hadn”t he written? He knew she was a hopeless letter writer. And oh, what had happened to her? Everything. She”d got married, had a child, been divorced.
“I was a perfect idiot to marry him! Everybody told me so. But you know me!” Her laughter bubbled up unbidden, and the old vivacity lit her face. “He was a horse-breeder from the Djaban region. Can you imagine it? Me sitting out there! Ennui! We had bags of money, of course, but nowhere to go and nothing to do. I don”t want to see another horse as long as I live. And I still can”t tell a palomino from an Arab. In the end I just couldn”t stand it.” “Didn”t that hurt?”
“I didn”t let it! Anyway, it was a good experience. I don”t think you should regret any experience. It”s hopeless looking back, isn”t it?” She touched her heart. “I maintain things like that don”t just happen. Nothing”s wasted! Do you think?”
“God knows why things happen.” In the alcove where they sat facing one another, he could see her head and his multiplied in the mirrors behind each of them, on and on through the distilled sunlight in the tarnished glass. Every time she moved a fraction, the shimmer of her curls thronged into infinity, while his craggy face swarmed in between, until they dwindled and sickened into a greenish distance caused by his aunt”s never cleaning her mirrors.
He said, “What happened then?”
“I came back and lived here,” she said. “Where else can one go? Now I look after my daughter, who”s a monster. Adorable, but a monster. If only she sat still occasionally like my ex-husband, that brute scarcely moved! But she takes after me.” Her body wriggled in its low-cut dress.
“What about our old friends?”
“Oh I never really got on with Jarmila, she”s too selfish. But I see Leon sometimes.” A small frown crossed her face. “He”s a dear, but so introspective …” Her eyes glittered at him. “How strange to see you! All those years ago! Do you remember the picnics above the cliffs? And the diving?”
“Of course I do. Diving was the last time I saw you, when we used each other”s regulators.”
“Wasn”t it fun?” She shot her ebullient smile. “Do you remember the reef shark we saw? And those horrible manta rays. And oh yes, exchanging regulators. Such a peculiar feeling. It was like breathing each other”s air, wasn”t it?”
“Yes, it was.”
“Once I was doing that with Gerhard and the regulator tore itself out!” One hand fluttered from her mouth. Through the mirrors her fingers multiplied and wavered like seaweed in a drowning green current. “I haven”t gone diving for years. Have you?”
“There”s nowhere to dive out there. You”re on the edge of desert.” The only deep water was the lake, where Zo? and he had swum and made love.
“Oh yes, I heard about the trouble you”ve been having. What”s been done about the savages now?”
“You can”t do much. They make their own rules. You just pray for the autumn rains. They”ve lost a lot of cattle.”
A cloud settled over her determined brightness. He saw, of course, that even she was not quite ageless. When she drew in her chin to laugh, a tiny slackness flickered there, and a ghostly pair of crow”s-feet teased her eyes. Yet like the city she remained inexplicably the same. He recalled the pattering and precise rhythm of her talk, and the way laughter suffused it. But she was no longer memory.