He and his wife were also waterlogged, two flooded chambers, two leather water-bags. Nothing in the world concerned them any more. They’d never crave a song or cigarette or making love again. At least their deaths had coincided. There can be nothing lonelier than to outlive someone you are used to loving. For them, the comedy of marriage would not translate into the tragedy of death. One of them would never have to become accustomed to the absence of the other, or need to fix themselves on someone new. No one would have to change their ways.
This was not death as it was advertised: a fine translation to a better place; a journey through the calm of afterlife into the realms of instinct and desire. The persons had not gone elsewhere, to blink and wake, to sleep and salivate in some place distinctly other than this world, in No-reality. They were, instead, insensible as stones, imprisoned by the viewless wind. This was the world as it had always been, plus something less which once was doctors of zoology.
By Wednesday noon, a gloomy day, their bodies were as stiff as wood. A full day dead. They had discoloured, too. The skin was piebald. Pallid on the upper parts. Livid on the undersides. What blood remained had gravitated downwards to suffuse their lower vessels with all its darker wastes. Celice, her nose still pressed against the grass, was purple-faced. Her downward-flexing knees and upper thighs were black as grapes. Her buttocks were as colourless as lard.
Joseph, dead on his back, was white-faced and purple-shouldered. His lips, though, were drawn and blue, his gums had shrunk, so that his teeth appeared to have grown a centimetre overnight. His nose had sunk into his face. His tongue was also blue — the child in him had sucked its pen. Already he was losing form, though not enough, just yet, to make him animal or alien. Had anybody stumbled through the dunes and half glimpsed the bodies there, they might still have thought the couple were only sleeping, as lovers do, and hurry on, not wanting to look back on such a private place.
The light of day had thinned the rain, though there was almost uninterrupted drizzle until the afternoon. The storm had shifted sand during the night and banked it up against the bodies on one side. Already they were sinking in. Celice’s discarded shoes and Joseph’s remaining clothes were soaked and almost buried. The wind had lifted his shirt and carried it along the dune gully and into the stretched branches of a sea thorn. It was their flag.
By four the rain had stopped, although the sky stayed overcast and dull. Again the crabs and rodents went to work, while there was light, flippantly browsing Joseph and Celice, frisking them for moisture and for food, delving in their pits and caverns for their treats, and paying them as scant regard as cows might pay a turnip head.
So far no one had even missed Joseph and Celice. They were not expected back at work till Thursday. Their daughter, Syl, would not phone until the weekend, if she remembered. The neighbours were used to silence from the doctors’ house. So their bodies were still secret, as were their deaths. No one was sorry yet. No one had said, ‘It’s such bad luck.’ They’d perished without ceremony. There’d been no one to rub their skin with oils or bathe and dress the bodies as they stiffened. They would have benefited from the soft and herby caresses of an undertaker’s sponge, the cotton wool soaked in alcohol to close the open pores. No one had plugged their leaking rectums with a wad of lint, or taped their eyelids shut, or tugged against their lower jaws to close their mouths. No one had cleaned their teeth or combed their hair. The murderer, that good mortician, though, had carried out one duty well. He had removed their watches and their jewellery. There was a chance, depending on the wind and sand, that even their bones might not be found or ever subjected to the standard rituals and farewells, the lamentations, the funeral, the head-stones and obituaries. Then they’d not be listed with the dead, reduced by memory and legacies. They’d just be ‘missing’, unaccounted for, absent without leave. His hand could hold her leg for good.
10
Joseph rose early on the first morning of the study week, even though he’d only slept since three. He could easily manage on four or five hours of rest a night. He was used to making up the loss during the day, often napping with a newspaper on weekend afternoons or, at the Institute, snacking on sleep while other students were at lunch, in bars. He was not comfortable in bars.
He meant to catch the rising tide on a gently sloping beach. He had to hurry. High water was at eight. He hardly washed — just his face with cold tap water and dish soap at the kitchen sink. He pulled on — for luck — his fieldwork T-shirt with Dolbear’s formula (for estimating air temperature by the frequency of insect stridulations) emblazoned on the chest and back.
He cleaned his teeth with his forefinger, drank cold coffee from one of last night’s cups, and went noiselessly outside in semi-darkness. He was as furtive as a burglar, and with good reason.
Joseph had only to cut across the flagstones to the gate in the study-house yard, ten metres at the most, to find the steps and path down to the coastal track and make his escape without disturbing any of the sleepers with his footsteps. But he was tempted by a longer route, to walk through the unattended ferals of what once had been a fine maritime garden and circle the house from the rear. He wondered what the women looked like, sleeping.
Festa did not interest him. She was a trinket. Just the woman to divert the dull and photogenic men who would share his bunk room for the week — if, that is, they could control their first-night appetites for drink and village life. But the taller one — Cecile? Celice? Cerice? a French name anyway — was not their sort. They’d find her odd. And she would find them tedious, he hoped. But, surely, she’d be Joseph’s natural ally. She was a stray, like him. Strays pack with other strays.
Joseph had never been a flirt. Not once. ‘I’m far too short to flirt.’ So he was surprised how much this woman had enthralled him in those few minutes when they’d met the day before. He admired the way she dressed, the boots, the jeans, the dissident hair. He liked her face, her unmasked skin, her unplucked brows, her gallery of battlemongering frowns and winces, which seemed to hold a private dialogue with him. He’d leaned against the doorway to the common room, making too much fuss about his hardly injured back, so that he would have the excuse to stand and watch her while she put her clothes and books away, while she stretched to hang her coat or bent to close a drawer. Her heavy, shapely thighs were centimetres from his waist. She wasn’t beautiful. She was provoking, though. She was, he knew instinctively, his only chance.
Joseph should have introduced himself at once. She seemed ready to be spoken to. She had challenged him several times to contribute some small remark, just by looking at him steadily — if such a shifting face as hers could be described as steady — when he must have seemed rudely silent. But he would not, and could not, compete with such unfettered, garrulous companions. He knew his weaknesses: his looks, his social skills, his impatience. He knew his strengths as well. He’d bide his time. He’d take her by surprise.
His was the grandest vanity. He thought she’d be attracted to him more if he stayed out of sight. She’d find his faked indifference a magnet and a challenge. So he didn’t speak to her on that first afternoon. He lay down on his bunk and napped. He didn’t go with them on their shopping expedition to the village or — an easy sacrifice — to the bar. He was not there when the women came back to the study house that night. He’d forced himself, despite the cold and dark, to walk down to the shore, dead at that hour, and then, on his return, to invent moths, foxes, owls and sea bats to justify his curious excursion. And now he wouldn’t be there when his five colleagues got up in the morning. So he would make a mystery of himself, and she would need to solve him.