Finally she opened an eye to squint at him. Her husband was a shining, haloed silhouette. His body half obscured the sun. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. Her voice had hardly changed in thirty years.
‘Come on, let’s make the most of it. It’s such a waste,’ he said again, as if she hadn’t already heard his aggravating little phrase. ‘Sit up. There’s tea. It’s warm outside.’
‘It’s warm in here.’
This, he knew, was not an invitation to get in. He wanted her to sit up in the bed. He hoped that if she did, she might stretch her arms, straight out from her shoulders in a crucifixion mime and make a little strangulated cry, a seagull yawn, to wake herself and clear her throat. Her nightdress sleeves were always loose — she did not like the claustrophobia of hugging clothes — and Joseph knew that when she stretched she’d make an open, hanging corridor of cloth below her arm for anyone to hold their breath and view her snubby breasts. He’d seen her do exactly that so many times before. He’d learned the trick of waiting with her breakfast at the bedroom door and calling her name. Sex was so underhand. He knew exactly where to stand to catch the light. She’d wake and stretch her unsuspecting arms for him. She did not disappoint him now. Stolen glimpses of his wife.
So there was Joseph on the morning of his death, flushed already by the early sun and by the prospect of an outing with Celice, looking down along the cotton and the flesh towards the hollows and the beacons of her armpits and her chest, her blemishes, her moles, the rib bones of a woman thin with age, the smell of her — bedclothes and sweat — the smell of breakfast on a tray, her body sliced up by the sun into jagged bands of shade and light. He must have wanted there and then to pass his body down the sleeve and press his lips into her shadows and her silhouettes. He’d have to wait.
22
Baritone Bay and its backdunes were never popular with townies. That’s why the campaign to prevent the building of Salt Pines was bound to fail. Who cared about this odd and unattractive coast? The swimming there was dangerous: cross-tides and undertows. The winds were unpredictable. Either they were bursting from the sea, wet, salt-laden, cold, uncomfortable, or they were twisting with the contours of the coast to sandblast anybody mad enough to picnic on the shore or take their sweaters off. Even walkers kept away. Why make the detour over boulders, pebbles and dunes when the earth-packed coastal path was more direct and prettier? Families and swimmers would rather drive out to the city beach the other side of town, where there were strings of scalloped coves, soft sands, lifeguards, some timber restaurants and an attendant forest of cool pines where they could park their cars, ride bikes and horses, erect their tents, and light their barbecues. And where, of course, the only sounds were of people having fun.
In recent years even the peace and quiet of Baritone — its one undisputed attraction — had been destroyed by advances at the airport. Now there were jumbos coming in and out each day across the coast, and scatty little jets. They’d opened up a private field, for businessmen and amateurs. At weekends leisure pilots made a nuisance of themselves daredevilling the ocean and the sands. The spoilt and wealthy residents of Salt Pines would need tree screens and muffler windows or nerves of steel. The guards, the gatehouse and high walls could not keep out the din of aircraft.
But before the extensions to the runways in the early nineties the only passenger planes that could get in were Stols and Trilanders, light-bodied craft that needed only two hundred metres to take off, and less to land. The coast was quieter then.
Nevertheless, the rumbling that Joseph and Celice could hear, that morning almost thirty years ago when they crept from the study house for their first tryst, must be, they thought, a plane, a low and heavy one. And one so close to them as they walked out across the shore, the sprayhoppers flying at their feet, their footprints belching air and water in their wake, that its roaring engines seemed to come out of the dunes. They tried to spot some movement in the clouds, the tell-tale, sleepless winking of the plane’s red eyes. The grey straight ruler of a wing. They turned their heads and whirled about in the shallows to fix co-ordinates of sound and find the source of that low noise.
The plane did not pass over them. It stayed and grumbled in the dunes. Its engines idled, then picked up and roared again whenever there was any wind. The nearer that Celice and Joseph got to the jutting foreland of the bay the louder it became. Of course, they realized quite soon what they were witnessing. Not an aeroplane. It was the celebrated baritone, the voice that everybody said could bring bad luck. Someone’ll die. There’ll be a month of gales and rain. There’ll be a ghost.
Celice and Joseph were bombarded by a hundred sounds. The deeper that they got into the dunes the less the roar resembled aircraft engines and the more it shaped itself like fire or hymns or thunder. Each step produced new scenes. First there was a furnace blast, and then the foghorn of a grounded ship, a sonic boom too soon for superjets, a pair of warring clouds. Finally the air drift picked up speed and steadied long enough for the sound that gave the bay its name to settle in — the humming fugue of men in churches, exercising their voices before a funeral or tuning up their instruments, choir practice from an organ loft. Celice and Joseph thought the sea was booming, that the baritone was coming off the tide, but when they climbed a dime peak to look, the sea was flat and quiet. Yet the higher they climbed the louder were the notes, and every time the wind picked up the lower was the compass of the song. This was the baritone of mourning and of saxhorns, sepulchral, pessimistic, deep. If they’d had any sense, if they had been less scientific and self-occupied, they would have run, as any small child would. They would have run upwind across the open shore and then uphill towards the safety of the study house to wrap their sleeping-bags around their ears.
But Joseph and Celice were scientists in love. They would not run away, with superstition at their heels. Their hearts were set on lesser things. They knew it would not be a grand enough response to crooning landscapes just to say, as almost doctors of zoology should feel obliged to say, ‘There is a natural explanation for the voices that we hear. There’s no such thing’ — that reassuring phrase again — ‘as bad luck in a natural world’. But they thought it just the same. The baritone might be a proper subject for scientific study, but it was not unnatural. They were not the types, even in their current, heightened mood, to be impressed or daunted by the portent readers and the phenomenologists who made false patterns out of chaos, who said, for instance, ‘If there’s a heavy dew tonight, there’ll be fine weather in the morning.’ Or, ‘When the sapnut trees are cropping heavily it means the coming winter will be punishing, hard winds, long storms, deep frosts.’ Or that expressions on the face of the moon presaged the fortunes of the infants born that night. A frowning moon would produce a class of melancholic kids. Or that the baritone meant death or gales or ghosts.
Our doctors of zoology or anybody who understands the mundane manners of the world, its rigid, sequenced protocols, would counter with the dulling truth that dew, sapnuts, the faces of the moon, can only show conditions that have passed. The earth is not a visionary and can’t be blamed for what’s ahead. It is retrospective, like the lovers would become, in those long years before the two of them were dead and dying in this place, before they were required to pay a heavy price for their nostalgia. It is the past that shapes the world. The future can’t be found in it. So heavy dews will indicate only that the sky has been clear and conditions favourable for the deposition of dew. A glut of sapnuts is a sign of nothing more than that the preceding spring and summer were good for Juglans suca trees. And so it is with singing salt dunes. They do not predict the fast-advancing misfortunes of the world. They merely say, ‘Conditions are correct for singing.’