"I don't know," the girl mused. "He doesn't look the right build to me."
"You know he isn't!" Maria cried, her hands grasping darkness. "His clothes are wrong! Please help me look for Tony!"
"Don't get involved," the girl's escort hissed. "You can see how she is."
"I think we've all had enough," the guide said. "Are you going to take care of him or not?"
"Just let me have your torch for a minute," Maria sobbed.
"Now I couldn't do that, could I? Suppose you dropped it?"
Maria stretched her hand towards the torch, still torn by hope, and a hand fumbled into hers. It was the blind man. "I don't like all this noise," he said. "Whoever you are, please help me."
"There you are," the guide rebuked, "now you've upset him. Show's over. Everybody out." And he lit up the gaping tunnel.
"Wonder what she'd have done with the torch?" "The blind leading the blind, if you ask me," voices chattered in the passage. The guide helped the blind man through the mouth. Maria, left inside the vault, began to walk into the darkness, arms outstretched to Tony, but immediately the dark was rent and the guide had caught her arm. "Now then, none of that," he threatened. "Listen, I brought thirty down and thirty's what I've got. Be a good girl and think about that."
He shoved her out of the tunnel. The blind man was surrounded. "Here she is," said someone. "Now you'll be all right." Maria shuddered. "I'll take him if you don't feel well," the guide said, suddenly solicitous. But they'd led the blind man forward and closed his hand on hers. The guide moved to the head of the party; the tunnel mouth darkened, was swallowed. "Tony!" Maria screamed, hearing only her own echo. "Don't," the blind man pleaded piteously.
She heard the river sweep beneath the bridge, choked with darkness, erasing Tony Thornton. For a moment she could have thrust the blind man into the gulf and run back to the vault. But his hand gripped hers with the ruthlessness of need. Around her faces laughed and melted as the torch passed. They'd conspired, she told herself, to make away with Tony and to bring this other forth. She must fall in with them; they could leave her dead in some side tunnel. She looked down into the river and saw the sightless eyes beside her, unaware of her.
The guide's torch failed. Daylight flooded down the hillside just beyond. Anonymous figures chewed and waited at the hamburger-stall. "All right, let's make sure everybody's here," the guide said. "I don't like the look of that sky." He counted; faces turned to her; the guide's gaze passed over her and hurried onward. At her back the cave opened inviting, protective. "Where are we?" the blind man asked feebly. "It feels like summer."
Maria thought of the coach-trip ahead; the Chinese and the girl unsure but unwilling to speak, the bearded woman looking back to disapprove of her, the boisterous couple discussing her audibly—and deep in the caves Tony, perhaps unconscious, perhaps crawling over stone, calling out to her in darkness. She thought she heard him cry her name; it might have been a bird on the hill. The guide was waiting; the party shuffled, impatient. Suddenly she pushed the blind man forward; he stumbled out into the summer day. The others muttered protests; the guide called out—but she was running headlong into darkness, the last glint of sunlight broken by her tears like the sea beneath the tower, the river rushing by beneath. As the light vanished, she heard the first faint patter of the rain.
At First Sight (1973)
'To you,' someone said.
Valerie squirmed. Across the pub table they were swapping jokes, dirtier and funner. At her side Len looked embarrassed. When they'd all met from the office to celebrate Tony's twenty-first they'd paired off outside the pub; seeing Valerie unescorted, Tony had called Len, who'd been trying to merge with the mist of this last night of October. He'd sat with her for two hours, but the third time he'd rammed his finger through a beer-mat her smile of encouragement had drooped. Val was a mirror; if someone stood before her mute then her tongue would fail her too. She looked away from the dulled diamond facets of the tankards multiplied into the froth, beneath the second ceiling of smoke, to the clock above the bar: only five minutes to go, thank God. Someone knocked a table; glass shattered. She regarded the mist which breathed on the panes, and from the corner of her eye saw something rising, falling back.
'To you,' he said.
At last her eye caught his; he was seated at a table near the bar, and as she looked he rose and lifted his glass to her. Dark sleek hair straight as his comb's teeth, dark intense eyes, swarthy face ten years older than her own, black belted raincoat; the brass-buttoned leather teenagers at his table stared and laughed. Val saw the black glove which raised the glass toward her, and stood up. 'To you,' she responded.
Around her smoke puffed out and curled, mixed with laughter; she sensed Len looking up at her, looking away.
The man reached behind him, gripping the table with his other black-gloved hand. 'To us,' he called.
Val hesitated. Behind her Len said: 'Look, can anyone do this?' flipping a beer-mat high with his fingers, catching it in mid-air. 'To us,' she called, and behind the man saw the teenager lean forward, catch his glove and start to pull it free, shouting 'What's this then, mate, Marks and Spencer's?' Her heart throbbed; her skin iced. The man turned, put down his glass and gripped the boy's wrist. The boy looked up, and his face drained. The black raincoat swallowed him like fog; the barman doused the lights to move the drinkers; three men staggered to the bar for a last order. The lights blazed. The man and the boy were gone. The two remaining teenagers exchanged glances, then made for the door, which was swinging itself into place. Outside the disturbed mist swirled and closed again.
When Val returned to the flat she ripped October from the calendar. Each month was an overlapping pictured strip; from January fragments of cardboard flesh had matured into a girl, and in June fingers had begun to take shape around her. Val knew that in December great male hands would clutch her, carrying her into an unknown New Year. For a week in February she'd meant to tear up the calendar; now, still remembering whose present it had been, she treasured it to show that she'd survived. She leaned on a creaking cane chair and said goodnight to Mick Jagger on the wall, to the tambourine hanging above the tv set.
Jane was asleep. Val drew the curtains softly to admit intimations of light. As she undressed she remembered meeting Jane. A party somewhere, each room with its function, drinking in the kitchen, dancing in the lounge which led to the bedroom; she'd glanced in at the dancing silhouettes and recoiled, terrified because she would never know them. She'd retreated to the kitchen, looking for a glass, and Jane had found her one, saying: 'You must be like me—a friend of a friend of a friend.' On the pillow Jane's face lay, smoothed out like Val's sheets. Two boys had hurried into the kitchen, glasses at the ready. 'My God, she was randy,' one was saying. 'She really was. Bloody randy.' 'I think I'd better go,' Val had said. 'My parents will be wondering.'
'Mine too,' Jane had replied. 'And I'm at the University, for heaven's sake. If only I could find someone to share a flat—'Val had thought of her parents; they'd retreated behind solidified homilies, she no longer knew them—at least something between them reflected back her determination to preserve her identity, whatever that might be. 'I might,' she'd told Jane.
As Val stood at the window for a last taste of the night she looked up at the next house: one floor above, a man's silhouette moved in a bright frame. He might be reflected from the flat upstairs—but no, impossible, that flat was empty; he was beyond a door in the building opposite. Val intended to explore upstairs some day in daylight. She crept into bed, thinking momentarily of Len in the pub: a suburban home, early to bed except when he was reading books on office management and economics. He'd no doubt go far, she thought. And the dark man, where was he?Kicked by the teenagers, he might have crawled home to his flat, a whisky from the cabinet to steady him, standing perhaps on a Persian carpet. But something told her he wasn't the one who'd been hurt. He'd beckoned her to worlds of night, cars sweeping down still lanes to a golden country club, and onward to a city glimpsed from a hill at midnight, swarming with far neon fireflies. She was envious, but she slept.