Turning Back the Sun(57)
After dark Rayner climbed into a top bunk and lay close beneath the static fan-blades. They were black with dead mosquitoes. For the first time he felt the slight, listless fever which his patients had reported. He slid a hand between his shirt buttons and tracked the trickle of disruption over his ribs. But soon afterwards he must have fallen asleep, because an hour later he awoke in pitch dark to a strange stillness and silence. The train had stopped.
He dropped softly to the floor and leaned out of the window. Opposite was a wall of mountain, overhung with stars. Hurricane lamps dithered up the track, and faint voices sounded where the engine threw two blobs of light into nothing, and three or four men were trying to pull something from under the cowcatcher.
Rayner remembered that in twenty-four hours he must report for the military expedition. He enjoyed the thought of blamelessly missing it. He could not be court-martialled for a railway accident. Then he fell asleep again, and was woken in harsh daylight from a dream of Zo? by the shudder of the train stirring into life. They were already ten hours behind schedule, and for another five they gasped up the watershed of the massif. They saw no person, no building; only, here and there, the graves of convicts who had died constructing the railway thirty years before.
Then suddenly they were descending, and everybody sensed a change. The air became closer, the sun fiercer. But the blinds flew up and the passengers kept peering out in anticipation until the mountains loosened and began to release them. Then, at last, they glimpsed below, and far beyond, the brilliant, sun-struck wilderness. It spread to a trembling skyline. And Rayner saw, with a surge of relief, that the whole sky above it, from horizon to horizon, was hung with a streaming concourse of clouds.
By the time they had descended to the plain and crossed the empty cattlelands to the suburbs, it was evening. The light and heat had mellowed together. Outside the carriage window the bungalows went by in a mélange of corrugated iron and pink-tiled roofs, among scarlet bursts of flame trees. The train reached the station and the friendships of the journey ended. The financier was met by a business colleague, the conscript by an army sergeant, the schoolmistress by nobody.
In the familiar streets the shopping crowds jostled with workers going home. Two of Rayner”s patients greeted him in passing, and wondered where he”d been. He asked news of the town, but nothing had changed, they said, except the sky. Yet the air was gentler, he felt, and an intangible burden seemed to be lifting. Perhaps the rains would even cleanse away the disease! He started to sing tunelessly to himself. In his absence the landmarks he passed had acquired a little strangeness: the Doric pilasters of the Municipality were sturdier, the mine”s flotation mills huger, even the St. Vincent de Paul charity shop appeared quainter. At the bottom of his street, the children”s roundabout looked more bright and minuscule than before, with its little painted cabins empty.
His own house, when he entered it, might have been abandoned years before. Zo?”s rugs and hangings had gone, and the walls rose stark. He found himself staring at things in momentary bewilderment: at the charred circle in the annex rug, the empty cupboard where her costumes had hung, the stuffed armadillo in its alcove. Everything looked clean and incomplete. Yet only two weeks” mail was in the box, with a notice of confirmation that the army expedition would leave at dawn tomorrow.
He walked back through the rooms, through his own self-inflicted desolation, and once or twice glanced at his face in the mirror as if it must have changed. In one corner of the kitchen he came upon a box which Zo? had packed with five mugs, and left behind. It was as if she had abandoned it there on purpose—like a last, tentative foothold in their union. Tomorrow, or soon after, she would arrive to retrieve it with some blithe allusion to her forgetfulness, and carry it away—if he allowed her—pretending that it had meant nothing.
Then he was engulfed by a confused elation. One by one, he pulled the mugs from their wrappings and hung them back in their places on the dresser. He was glad that she could not see his trembling. Walking through the rooms again, he spread her hangings back on the walls in his imagination, and relaid her rugs over the floors. He pictured her presence there (the house had always been too big for him); he returned her to the sitting room among her plants, to her dance studio, to the bedroom. In the garden room he even imagined—as naturally as if they were waiting—successors to her lost child.
By now it was dark outside. She must be at the club, he knew, but he gathered up the gifts which he had bought for her and went out into the streets. A light wind was driving new clouds over the stars. Already the pavements had emptied, and the noise of late cars was fading. The distinctive crunch and drag of his own footsteps was the loudest sound he heard. Once a pair of vigilantes crossed the road to stare at him, and a patrol car slowed uncertainly before moving away.
The street where she lived was almost unlit. A single lamp stood like a lighthouse in a sea of dark. He padded across the intervening garden to rap on her flat door. He noticed his hand quivering. But nobody answered, and the windows were curtained. He put his gifts at the base of the doorstep, then did not know what to do. He wanted to wait for her here, to listen for the tap of her approaching feet, and call to her from the trees. But it was two hours before she would return. Her cat appeared in one window and stared at him.
He ripped a piece of paper from his notebook, meaning to post it through her letter box, then realized he did not know how to write what he wanted to say. He sat down on her doorstep, while the wind sifted through the garden. Tentatively he began: “These gifts …” but stopped, and crumpled up the paper. The returning fever throbbed in his eyeballs. He tore another sheet from the notebook, and inscribed in a hard, clear hand, as if some valve of love in him had opened: I”ve come back. Forgive me.