Gabriel's Moon, page 19
He slept badly, as usual, and he felt rough and fretful in the morning. He didn’t arrive at his culvert hiding place until well after nine. To his surprise the Austin Cambridge had gone but Faith’s Mercedes was still parked by the front door. An hour later she emerged and drove off. Forty minutes later she returned with one shopping bag. Had the man gone? That might prove an agreeable bonus, yes. He cycled back to Southwold. He would return at night – that would provide the telling evidence.
After dark, he sat in the empty bus stop for an hour, swigging from a quarter-bottle of whisky. Buses passed, infrequently, slowed at the stop, and then, when they weren’t hailed, drove on. He wondered why there was a bus stop placed here as in his hours of surveillance he’d never seen a single person occupying it, waiting for a bus – or, indeed, anyone stepping off from a bus, and heading for home.
The lights were on in the bungalow but there was still no Austin Cambridge. He felt a kind of enjoyable, panicky elation fill him. Perhaps this wasn’t a wild goose chase, after all. Maybe she was alone – maybe this man had gone back to his job, or had been summoned by a family crisis, or whatever, leaving Faith behind. Maybe, Gabriel thought, he could actually plot and curate a ‘surprise’ meeting. ‘My God, Faith! What’re you doing here? How amazing!’ It almost brought tears to his eyes.
Later, having finished his quarter-bottle, he crossed the road and walked past the house a few times as if he were a casually passing pedestrian. The curtains in the downstairs living room had been badly drawn and on one of his passages past the bungalow he caught sight of Faith in the gap, lit by a yellow light, standing, with a drink, lost in mid-thought, her other hand on the top of her head. The pose was so innocent, so guileless, that he felt the heart-thump of . . . Of what? he asked himself. Love, lust, loss?
The next time he walked past the house the curtains were pulled tight. He collected his bike from behind the bus stop and cycled back to the Albion. It was only nine o’clock – he had plenty of time to get even more drunk.
The next morning, when he told the landlord of the Albion that he was going to leave a day earlier than planned – that he had to return suddenly to London – the landlord, a genial man called Neil Truelove, had said he would still have to pay for the night he had booked, whether he stayed in the room or not.
‘I’ve turned away potential customers because I assumed your room was booked and that you would be in it, Mr Dax.’ He smiled. ‘Your premature departure would leave me out of pocket.’
Gabriel agreed to stay on the extra day.
He went for a walk to Walberswick, crossing the turbid Blyth at the harbour over a footbridge. He found a pub called the Anchor and ate a couple of pickled eggs along with his pint of Adnams Ale. Then he had another pint and, still hungry, a cheese-and-ham sandwich, and wandered back to Southwold where he sat on the beach by the bright bathing huts, close to the lifeguard station, notebook in hand, and tried to plot a new itinerary for Rivers. Now that the Berlin Wall had gone up the year before he’d abandoned his plans for the Volga and the Danube. He was risk averse, these days, after his torrid adventures in Spain; whatever reassuring claims that Bennet Strum had made about how Interzonal ’s sway and influence could guarantee him safe passage through the Communist world.
He wandered down the beach and looked out at the North Sea – grey and choppy with a thick, pewter canopy of clouds – rain imminent – and felt that the scene in front of him ideally reflected the state of his life and his current joie de vivre. Close to nul, he thought: grey, grey, grey. And then he rebuked himself for his self-pity. Self-pity: the most indulgent of human emotions, someone had written. Who? Michel de Montaigne? Thomas Browne? Emily Dickinson? He sighed. What was wrong with him? Faith Green was wrong with him. It was as simple as that.
He wandered back up the beach, thinking, trying to drive her out of his mind. A beach, he thought, was like the hyphen between Terra and Aqua – Terra-Aqua, neither land nor water, neither solid nor fluid. Nothing grew on this beach, either, it was like a strip of desert, a no man’s land between the green unmoving earth and the grey shifting sea, though it had the usual litter left by its neglectful human visitors – cigarette butts, crumpled tissues, empty bottles, ice-lolly sticks, a broken purple plastic toy spade, a single apple-green baby’s shoe.
He turned and looked out over the choppy water, gulls yelping mockingly overhead. ‘The unresting sea’ – the phrase came to mind. Who had said that? Herman Melville, John Keats, Algernon Swinburne? Why was he thinking of writers? Maybe there was a book there – a book about the great seas of the world: the Mediterranean, the Black, the Caspian, the Red, the Sea of Azov, the White Sea, the Dead Sea, the Barents . . . He felt stimulated by the idea – he must write the notion down, perhaps the perfect follow-up to Rivers. He felt a small elation fill him. His mind was working. He hadn’t thought about Faith Green for twenty minutes.
That evening, in the Albion’s small dining room, he ordered a prawn cocktail, a gammon steak with chips and a bottle of Chianti. It was his last meal – go out with a bang, not a whimper, he thought to himself. He decided to forgo the treacle tart and the apple crumble and went instead for the cheese board: mousetrap cheddar and Danish Blue with some crackers. Somewhat annoyingly, drinking an entire bottle of wine seemed to have had no effect on him, so he returned to the bar for a digestif or two.
He sat there with his brandy, smoking a Gitanes, staring at his notebook with its list of seas as if it contained some encrypted solution to his problems and, weirdly inspired, he wondered suddenly if he could retrieve his abandoned career as a doctor. Perhaps that would make him a different person, he thought, give his life more meaning, working in a caring profession. Everything in his current situation would be—
Faith Green came into the Albion bar and looked around.
She saw him and came over. She sat down.
‘What an amazing coincidence,’ she said in her flat, dry voice.
‘My God,’ Gabriel said. ‘How astonishing! What’re you doing here—?’
‘I saw you last night, walking past the house about a dozen times.’
‘It wasn’t me.’
She leant forward. Her voice was low.
‘What the fuck’s going on, Gabriel? I assume it was also you in the house, prowling around. Moving things about.’
He noted the expletive. It was the first time he had heard her swear. But how could she have known? Procedure, he told himself. Of course. Things left in a precise just-so position. Don’t pick up a book and put it down. He still had a lot to learn.
‘I apologize. I felt I had to see you.’
‘Has something gone wrong? Are you in trouble?’
‘No.’ He paused. ‘I just – you know – I just felt I had to see you.’
There, he thought: the declaration.
She sat back and looked at him through narrowed eyes.
‘Aren’t you going to buy me a drink?’
She asked for a Dubonnet, of course, and he replenished his brandy. They talked idly for a few minutes about the pleasures of Southwold until the Last Orders bell was rung.
‘Do you want to come back with me to the house?’ she said. ‘I’ve got a bottle of whisky at home.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Excellent idea.’
8.
It Happened One Night
The next day, on the train back to London, and subsequently, Gabriel spent many hours running through what had taken place that night, realizing that the Chianti, brandy and whisky had blurred his recall somewhat. He had a series of images in his mind, snatches of conversation as well as moments of intense emotion. As he concentrated they began to fill out – with textures, nuances, ambivalences, subtexts. Anamnesis. Facts established.
They started in the sitting room of the bungalow, drinking whisky – Johnnie Walker Red Label, he remembered – as she grilled him about his time in Southwold and what he had seen and how long he had been watching her. He confessed everything. How he had searched for her in Southwold, spotted the car, and then told her about the culvert stake-out, the bus stop, the binoculars.
‘Peeping Tom?’ she said.
‘No. As soon as I saw you were with someone I knew I had to keep my distance.’ He shrugged.
‘Where has he gone, by the way?’ he asked, idly. Gone back to his job in Djakarta or Melbourne or Buenos Aires, he hoped.
‘Family wedding. His mother is getting remarried.’
‘Right. I didn’t want your, you know, your professional world to intrude into your holiday.’
‘We are human beings, Gabriel, you may be surprised to learn. We have a life outside the Institute.’
‘Of course. And I was respecting that.’
‘While you spied on me. Us.’
‘May I ask who that man was?’
‘You may not, but I will tell you. He’s a friend, a close friend.’
Gabriel paused, sipped whisky, enjoying the mellow throat-burn. Yes, he was definitely fairly drunk by now. So much the better – he felt emboldened.
‘Is he in our world?’
‘No. He’s a chartered surveyor, as it happens. I was having some building work done on my house. That’s how we met.’
Gabriel felt immoderately cheered by this news. A chartered surveyor? Faith Green’s lover? Don’t make me laugh.
‘What’s his name?’
‘None of your business. Another drop of Scotch?’
When she’d entered the pub she’d been wearing one of those dark green waxed shooting jackets. When she came into the bungalow she hung it up and he saw she was in a coral dress, close-fitting, in some sort of stretchy jersey fabric, hugging her figure.
She picked up his glass and went into the kitchen where the whisky bottle and the ice were. He stood and followed her in.
‘I want to apologize,’ he said. ‘I was well out of order, as they say.’
‘No need. Just don’t do it again.’
Her back was turned to him as she wrestled with the lever on the ice tray, muscles flexing beneath the jersey material. He reached out and placed his palms on her shoulder blades, smoothed his hands wide to grip her shoulders.
She froze. And then turned.
‘Gabriel, don’t . . .’ she said.
And then he kissed her.
Try as he might, there was a period of memory-blur afterwards that he couldn’t clarify. Perhaps the whisky. Maybe he couldn’t believe this was actually happening, that it was some kind of dream-fantasy. It seemed to him they had kissed a lot in the kitchen. A lot of fumbling, a lot of caressing. Then they broke apart and went back to their seats and drank their whisky, slowly, not speaking, a bit discombobulated, looking at each other.
‘What do we do now?’ he remembered saying.
Then there was a jump in time and they were in bed, naked. He saw his book on the bedside table before she switched the lights out – she wanted darkness. He was incredibly aroused. Just their nakedness, just holding her in his arms, feeling her breasts flatten against his chest, kissing her neck, feeling her hand grab his hair at the nape.
He eased himself on top of her. Then the pragmatic recoil.
‘Have you a condom?’
‘What?’ he said. ‘No.’
‘Hold on a second.’
She slipped out of bed and went into the bathroom, returning seconds later with the little foil envelope. She handed it to him.
‘Or would you like me to put it on for you, monsieur?’
The next morning, when they woke, warm and fuddled, they had sex again. He was suffering from a mild headache but it soon cleared. Then he went downstairs and made them coffee and brought the steaming mugs back to the bedroom. She refused to allow him to smoke a cigarette.
‘Why not? A post-coital cigarette is one of life’s great pleasures.’
‘Because neither Vivian nor I smoke and it would be a bit of a giveaway if he smelt French cigarettes in our bedroom. Mmm? Go and smoke in the garden if you must. Disgusting habit.’
‘Vivian? What kind of name is that for a man?’
‘Don’t be absurd. Vivian, Evelyn, Hilary and Jocelyn are all acceptable names for men.’
‘Still, you know, it’s sort of odd. Do you call him Viv?’
She punched him quite hard in the shoulder.
He went back down to the kitchen and made them more coffee and toast and marmalade. When he came up with the plates and the two mugs on a tray he found her reading his book, with a smile on her face.
‘I’m enjoying this book of yours,’ she said. ‘But it is a bit over the top.’
‘I resent that. In what way?’
‘Listen to this.’
She read an extract.
‘As I walked down the hill to the village in the honeyed, half-darkness of dusk the trees leant in to me and whispered, “Stay, stay, stay.” I looked at the wave-worn stones of the harbour and the tumbled white houses of the port where the windows now smiled orange eyes at me. I smelt the liquorice, briny smell of the Mediterranean and dreamily felt the heart-yearn of exile from all that was familiar, tired and used.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ Gabriel said, a bit offended.
‘I mean, come on. It’s a bit lush, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘This is how most travel writers write,’ he said, somewhat feebly. ‘You have to give the full vicarious pleasure to the non- or would-be traveller. Otherwise what’s the point?’
He told her of his time working in the bookshop in South Kensington and how he had been drawn to certain travel writers. T. E. Lawrence, Charles Doughty, H. V. Morton, William Sansom, Lawrence Durrell, James Morris, Laurie Lee.
‘Well, look, take Lawrence Durrell,’ he said, still bridling at her quiet mockery. ‘I’m a huge admirer, by the way. He said that when you were writing about travel and foreign lands, you had to give it the “full plum-pudding”. So I do.’
‘Brandy-soaked, sultana-stuffed, blazing with pale blue fire,’ she said, turning back a few pages. ‘This is even better. Listen to this.’
She read another extract.
‘The broad valley lay before me, swart and dry, baking silently in the gold radiance of the dying day. A vermilion stripe lay on the horizon, brooding, minatory. A multitude of voices fought within me, striving for expression. By the river’s lazy sprawl, lamps were glowing in the nomads’ camp, white and shifting, calling to me. A night-bird shrieked and I smelt the tarry, brackish smoke of the turf fires.’
She looked at him, holding her laughter back as best she could.
‘My God. Over the top doesn’t come close!’
He had to smile.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I confess. I seem able to churn this stuff out by the yard, it comes easily to me – like turning on a tap – but I’m not going to apologize.’ He wagged a finger at her. ‘Mock all you like. It’s the name of the game. Admit it – you now have a sense, a feeling, of that place, these places you’ve never been to, and will never go to. Have you heard of a writer called Lucian Applegate?’
‘Rings a bell.’
‘He’s my model. He’s the one I read first. I saw the way ahead. You should read Applegate. I’m positively monosyllabic beside him.’
She laughed out loud and put the book back down on the table and turned to him.
‘It’s not fair to tease you,’ she said, reaching to touch his cheek. He kissed her fingertips. ‘I am enjoying it,’ she added. ‘Really.’
The morning sun was shining through the curtains now and he could see her, clear and focused. He kissed her lips, kissed her breasts, with their pert, perfectly round, small brown nipples.
‘What are those marks?’ he said, putting his finger on tiny white patches on her breasts and shoulders, randomly placed, paler than her pale skin. He hadn’t noticed them in the night. ‘Chickenpox?’ he asked.
She pulled the sheet up to cover herself.
‘No,’ she said, the look on her face changing, tightening. ‘They’re . . .’ She paused and looked him in the eye. ‘Old cigarette burns. Something that happened to me. In the war.’
‘What? My God—’
‘Yes. It was terrible. Awful. The worst thing that’s ever happened to me. I was tortured. Captured and tortured.’
‘What are you saying? You were tortured?’
Then she told him the story, unemotionally, in her flat voice.
As a young woman, in her early twenties, she had been recruited by the Special Operations Executive in 1943. Her mother was French; she, Faith, spoke fluent French. After a period of training, in early 1944 she had been landed clandestinely in France, by a Lysander aircraft, and had joined the resistance group CHOUCAS in Paris. She worked as a courier and a radio operator, but the group had been betrayed by an informer and in August ’44 the members had all been rounded up and incarcerated in the Fresnes Prison south of Paris. Except for Faith who was taken to the infamous house – number 84, Avenue Foch.
‘I think they had begun to suspect I was English, but I was saved by the bell,’ she said. ‘I was interrogated – by cigarette burns – for two nights. And on the third night, every German SD, SS and Gestapo man and French Milice collabo had gone – run for the hills. It was the twenty-fifth of August. Paris was liberated.’
