Beginnings for an erotic conversation.
A turn of exasperation seized him. She was leaning on the red arm of a pine tree which stood by itself outside the wood, a crooked blue mushroom moulded by the wind. The scent from its cap mixed with the smell of wind off the tide-stripped rocks.
“Now you see why that cup upset Felix? If it is anything, it is only a Keltic mass-cup. And that, perhaps, is not certain. I don’t think you do see. As Felix would say: ‘I don’t blame you.’ But an american poet said: ‘Memory, you have the key.’”
“I have no memories,” said Carston.
“We are all wishing we hadn’t; because memory produces imagination, and imagination is a state by itself. Memory was the Muses’ mother, and the muses are nine names of the imagination. I told you you’d see some fun. Now I must go over to the coast-guards and order a car. We want to take you somewhere to-morrow. See the thunder clouds banking up? I must get back before the rain.”
Carston thought: ‘Getting rid of me. In an instant she would be off like a hare.’ He said:
“Stay a minute. Maybe it’s because I have no memories, but I don’t see where the fun comes in.”
“Don’t you call it fun to watch how violently, strangely and in character people will behave? Watch Ross, watch Clarence. Watch me.” He was watching her. Green, pointed feet in plaited shoes, bare arms, pointed breasts under a dress full of air. Blow away the morning dew. That was remembering something. Like open fir-cones dipped in fire and cream, the thunder-clouds were piling up the sky. Mounting the hills, a wing of them rising out of the sea. Inshore, a breath of wind clashed the pine needles.
Another memory.
Love only me.
Donna Lombarda.
Love only me.
Love only me. Because the tune was what the needles brushed out, and the words the wish that made his body ache.
“Can I come with you?”
She looked at him candidly. She wanted to be alone. “I must go to the farm as well; I do the housekeeping at this time. It’s a hot flat walk. The others have gone down to the rocks to fetch a drift-wood log. If you liked to help them to get it up. It’s bleached white, and when it burns it will go up in blue and green sparks.” He saw that there was something pathetic in the way they made a game of their poverty.
“I’ll go to them,” he said, “but you haven’t explained what the american poet meant when he said that memory had the key?” She had moved away from him.
“He said:
And called it: The last twist of the knife. Adieu.”
The log, as he expected, was large and most unwilling to be moved; the cliff-path more a gesture in broken clay than an ascent.
He saw her in his mind, dew blowing away over burnt, empty grass towards a formidable other world, its edges drawn in fire, the thunder-clouds now half-way across the sky.
Before dinner, he remembered the library, the middle room of the house. Alone there, he looked for something, not Tennyson, to enlighten him. He found a book, and sat in a window with it. Presently he noticed the entrance, one after the other, of Clarence, Felix, and Ross, and that they all went, reticently but eventually, to the same gap in the shelves.
Chapter VII
They dined without Picus or Scylla. He saw Clarence, uneasy, and heard that Picus had gone out alone because the doctor had told him to take walks. The earth was now closed in a hot, purple air-ball, the lightning flicking on and off. Without any regard for the weather, Ross arranged their chairs in the verandah while the storm banged about. Carston was silent. He was not accustomed to invite the lightning to visit him under trees. And Clarence seemed fatuous to him when he turned on the gramophone to play against the sky. They were not disturbed about Scylla, who might be out walking alone in the livid night. Apparently the farmer had an old father who gave her beer and told her ghost stories. It was Clarence who swung up and down, turning disks, and saying teasings that were brittle and raw, in his rich, sad voice, tortured and made petulant by the uproar through which his friend’s feet could not be heard coming through the wood.
Carston thought that it was like the place to leap up from its equivocal quiet into an orgy of cracking and banging. He wanted to go and meet Scylla. To see her safely home. Why were they so careless of their women? She had told him that love had left them. Had courtesy? She might come a hundred ways. It was the same as on the night when the men had been lost. They had come back safe from adventure. He wanted her to enter with him. He was an american gentleman in an uneasy place. Yes, he would go at once and fetch his young hostess. A proper thing to do. He felt at ease for the first time.
Ross advised not: “She knows her way. You’d never find it. It will rain in a minute. You’ll see to-morrow morning the freshest earth there is.”
For the freshest earth there is. ‘Phat’ went a raindrop on a flag, and a double uproar began. For an hour it rained, through sheet lightning, and thunder like a departing train, the hills calling to one another. The gutters of the roof rushed and sang and leaked, single notes from which the ear eventually picked out a tune. Syncopation, magic, nature imitating Mozart? Carston came to hear it as an overture, for some private earth-life, mercifully and tiresomely apart from his.
Things going on singing, not to him. Escaping also, not finishing, or finishing somewhere else. Beginning again, to enchant him with fragments. He admitted that he was enchanted— When would Scylla wind up the charm by coming through the wood?
The storm tuned up again, the rain striking in rods, filling the air with fine spray. The others were enjoying it, the first row of the stalls for a nature-play. Discussing other spectacles. Then he saw Scylla and Picus run out of the wood and across the lawn, laughing, wet as dogs. He heard Clarence order Picus upstairs to change, to be ignored, while Scylla squeezed out her hair.
“We ran back together. It was too good to miss. Tell me, Carston, does the lightning get you when you’re under a tree, or when you’re not? We tried both.”
That was all there was to it. But how had they met? All prearranged he supposed. No, Picus had done it. Loped off another way to meet her at the farm. She was saying: “You’re lucky that you didn’t come with me. Admit you’d have hated it?” Was that flirting with him? He asked her what she meant. “Storms aren’t in your schedule.” So wet they both seemed naked. They all went in. He made hot grog for her over the wood fire, the acid smoke bringing water to his eyes. They looked like real tears to Ross, who wondered. Scylla came down in blue, her hair tied up in a gold cloth, unable to stop laughing. Clarence followed her. Ross said: “Got Picus to bed?”
“No: insists on shaving, and to spite me stands about in his skin.” There was more behind what he said than self-pity, yet Carston felt that Clarence had better have hit them in his exasperation than have pitied himself. Why, he wondered? Scylla had said that goodwill had left the earth, but he had noticed that they were compassionate. Perhaps it was that they knew pity’s value and feared a sudden demand. At the same time he had no sympathy for Clarence, and they had, who were looking askance at him as though he had said a tactless obscenity. Scylla was saying: