So this was what Ben had been working on. A shiver of revulsion passed through her. And yet the beauty—the strange, overwhelming beauty of it. She shook her head, not understanding, then stood and went out into the kitchen, afraid for him.
BEN FOUND HER in the rose garden, her back to him, staring out across the bay. He went across and stood there, close by her, conscious more than ever of the naked form of her beneath the soft gauze dress she wore. Her legs were bare, her hair unbraided. The faintest scent of lavender hung about her. "What's up?" he asked softly. "Didn't you like it?"
She turned her head and gave a tight smile, then looked back. It was answer enough. It had offended her somehow.
He walked past her slowly, then stopped, his back to her, his left hand on his hip, his head tilted slightly to the left, his right hand at his neck, his whole body mimicking her stance. "What didn't you like?"
Normally she would have laughed, knowing he was ragging her, but this time it was different. He heard her sigh and turn away, and wondered, for a moment, if it was to do with what had happened in the night.
She took a step away, then turned back. He had turned to follow her. Now they stood there, face-to-face, a body's length separating them. "It was . . ." She dropped her eyes, as if embarrassed.
He caught his breath, moved by the sight of her. She might have died. And then he would never have known. He spoke softly, coaxingly, the way she so often spoke to him, drawing him out. "It was what?"
She met his eyes. "It was frightening." He saw her shiver. "I felt . . ." She hesitated, as if brought up against the edge of what she could freely say to him. This reticence was something new in her and unexpected, a result of the change in their relationship. Like something physical in the air between them. "Shall we walk? Along the shore?" She hesitated, then smiled faintly. "Okay."
He looked up. The sky was clouding over. "Come. Let's get our boots and coats. It looks like it might rain."
An hour later they were down at the high-water level, their heavy boots sinking into the mud, the sky overcast above them, the creek and the distant water meadows to their left. It was low tide and the mud stretched out to a central channel which meandered like an open vein cut into a dark cheek, glistening like oil whenever the sun broke through the clouds.
For a time they walked in silence, hand in hand, conscious of their new relationship. It felt strange, almost like waking to self-consciousness. Before there had been an intimacy, almost a singularity about them—a seamless continuity of shared experience. They had been a single cell, unbreached. But now? Now it was different. It was as if this new, purely physical intimacy had split that cell, beginning some ancient, inexorable process of division.
Perhaps it was unavoidable. Perhaps, being who they were, they had been fated to come to this. And yet...
It remained unstated, yet both felt an acute sense of loss. It was there, implicit in the silence, in the sighs each gave as they walked the shoreline.
Where the beach narrowed, they stopped and sat on a low, gently sloping table of gray rock, side by side, facing back toward the cottage. The flat expanse of mud lay to their right now; while to their left, no more than ten paces away, the steep, packed earth bank was almost twice their height, the thickly interwoven branches of the overhanging trees throwing the foot of the bank into an intense shade. It could not be seen from where they sat, but this stretch of the bank was partly bricked, the rotting timbers of an old construction poking here and there from the weathered surface. Here, four centuries before, French prisoners from the Napoleonic Wars had ended their days, some in moored hulks, some in the makeshift jails that had lined this side of the creek.
Ben thought of those men now. Tried to imagine their suffering, the feeling of homesickness they must have felt, abandoned in a foreign land. But there was something missing in him—some lack of pure experience—that made it hard for him to put himself in their place. He did not know how it felt to be away from home. Here was home and he had always been here. And there, in that lack of knowledge, lay the weakness in his art.
It had begun long before last night. Long before Meg had come to him. And yet last night had been a catalyst—a clarification of all he had been feeling.
He thought of the words his father had quoted back at him and knew they were right. Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access to through experience one has no ear for.
It was so. For him, at least, what Nietzsche had said was true. And he had no access. Not here.
He was restless. He had been restless for the past twelve months. He realized that now. It had needed something like this to bring it into focus for him. But now he knew. He had to get out.
Even before last night he had been thinking of going to College in the City. To Oxford, maybe, or the Technical School at Strasbourg Canton. But he had been thinking of it only as the natural path for such as he; as a mere furthering of his education. Now, however, he knew there was more to it than that. He needed to see life. To experience life fully, at all its levels. Here he had come so far, but the valley had grown too small for him, too confined. He needed something more— something other—than what was here in the Domain.
"If 1 were to . . ." he began, turning to face Meg, then fell silent, for at the same time she had turned her head and begun to speak to him.
They laughed, embarrassed. It had never happened before. They had always known instinctively when the other was about to speak. But this ... it was like being strangers.
Meg shivered, then bowed her head slightly, signaling he should speak, afraid to repeat that moment of awkwardness.
Ben watched her a moment. Abruptly, he stood and took three paces, then turned and looked back at her. She was looking up at him from beneath the dark fall of her hair.
"I've got to leave here, Meg."
He saw at once how surprised she was; how much it meant to her. There was a momentary widening of her eyes, the slightest parting of her lips, then she lowered her head. "Ah . . ."
He was silent, watching her. But as he made to speak again, she looked up suddenly, the hurt and anger in her eyes unexpected.
"Why? Is it because of last night?"
He sighed and shook his head. "It has nothing to do with us, Meg. It's me. I feel constrained here. Boxed in. It feels like I've outgrown this place. Used it up."
As he spoke he stared away from her at the creek, the surrounding hills, the small, white-painted cottages scattered among the trees. Overhead, the sky was a lid of ashen gray.
"And I have to grow. It's how I am." He looked at her fiercely, defiantly. "I'll die if I stay here much longer, Meg. Can't you see that?"
She shook her head, her voice passionate with disagreement. "It's not so, Ben. You've said it yourself. It's a smaller world in there. You talk of feeling boxed in, here, in the Domain. But you're wrong. That's where it's really boxed in. Not here. We're outside of all that. Free of it."
He laughed strangely, then turned aside. "Maybe. But I have to find that out. For myself." He looked back at her. "It's like that business with memory. I thought I knew it all, but I didn't. I was wrong, Meg. I'd assumed too much. So now I've got to find out. Now. While I still can."
Her eyes had followed every movement in his face, noting the intense restlessness there. Now they looked down, away from his. "Then I don't understand you, Ben. There's no hurry. Surely there's no hurry?"
"Ah, but there is."
She looked up in time to see him shrug and turn away, looking out across the mud toward the City.
The City. It was a constant in their lives. Wherever they looked, unless it was to sea, that flat, unfeatured whiteness defined the limits of their world, like a frame about a picture or the edge of some huge encroaching glacier. They had schooled themselves not to see it. But today, with the sky pressed low and featureless above them, it was difficult not to see it as Ben saw it—as a box, containing them.