The Past Read Free Page B

rumours all the same. I heard years later from people that hardly knew Rene at all that in fact she wasn’t her mother’s child but was born of a liaison between her hero of a father, dead years by then, and a south of England music-hall artiste or some such figure and was being kept in trust. But take it from me, that’s all nonsense, she was born of Una in your postcard paradise, she was her father’s child.’

    SOMETHING HAPPENS TO him. He loses his will and gains it. He discovers that part of himself later to become the whole of himself, the self of indomitable will, of odd humanity and gentleness that we know, Lili, from the history books. His mind becomes glazed, he interprets this as weakness. Certain thoughts obsess him, not in the logical, forward manner in which he had been schooled, but they recur eternally, come to no conclusion, seep through his perceptions to disturb him and then vanish before he can order them. He thinks of death and the soul, of a mystical order that seems to have begun with him, that will end with him. He longs to resume his studies again, the world of books, legislature and ordered reading, a longing that he feels in his stomach at times like a knot of physical pain. But the other element saps his will, seduces him. He orders books from London and leaves the packets unopened behind the desk
downstairs. He wakes one night well past midnight and is unsure whether he is awake or dreaming because instead of sitting in her chair and smoking beside him she is asleep, her six-months’ stomach curving upwards, her eyelids slightly open. Her eyes are like needles underneath the lids. He raises his head and stares at the slivers of light, barely revealed under her drawn lids, the source of which is somewhere beyond her dilating nostrils and her closed mouth. With each breath she takes her head moves slightly on the pillow and the lights move too until he stares at her, hypnotised by them and the rainbows round his own lashes. Her breath rises with the sadness of death and with each wave he is carried further from those points of her eyes until he is seeing them across aeons of distance, two barely visible specks of light. It is his own death he is swimming in and the feeling of unearthly ease, of buoyancy, lulls him like a massaging hand, irresistibly. He thinks, I can return or stay here. And his will expands then like a rearing horse, mighty, more than irresistible and bears him back. She is sleeping still, with her eyes now fully closed.
    Meanwhile the winter is beginning, the dry cold wind from the Azores whipping spray along the promenade, dispersing hillocks and ripples of sand over the austere tiled pathway. He leaves her around twelve, ignoring the wind. The sun is shining independently of it and but for the cold biting into the cheekbones, eyelids and fingers one could imagine the promenade crowded with its quota of summer strollers. It is empty though, as if the weak sun shines only for him. He grips his overcoat tightly around him and imagines that he feels neither wind nor cold but that just what he sees is real—the bright sunshine, like a blessing, clear and even sharper than in heat, over the pier, the iron chairs, the strand and sea, the canvas whipping round
the few remaining bathing shelters. He thinks sunshine and emptiness are his element and so familiar seems the scene that he almost misses the one obtrusive shape—the girl standing in the shadow the bathing hut throws towards the sea.
    He saw her from behind and then she vanished, or seemed to. He walked by the tottering structure of painted canvas and saw her again, in a discoloured fawn coat, looking at the sea. From her stillness and her pose, the way her fawn coat merged with the sand and then her head and shoulders glowed against the lime-grey sea, he knew that she had seen him. He stopped and heard the silence of his absent footsteps against the tiles. He looked at the sea with her, its