He goes up sideways, crabwise, digging footholds with the sides of his boots. “Come on!” he shouts down. I’m hesitant but I follow. At the top he reaches his hand to me, but, perpendicular and with the earth beside me, afraid of losing my balance, I avoid it and scramble the last few feet, holding on to roots. In wet weather it would be impossible.
He’s ahead, eager to explore. The tunnel through the undergrowth leads to a gap in the castle wall; I follow his sounds, rustlings, the soft thud of his feet. We’re in the skeleton of a garden, the beds marked by brick borders now grass-infested, a few rose bushes still attempting to keep order in spite of the aphids, nothing else paying any attention. I bend over a rose, ivory hearted, browning at the edges; I feel like a usurper. He’s already out of sight again, hidden by an archway.
I catch up to him in the main courtyard. Everything is crumbling, stairways, ramparts, battlements; so much has fallen it’s hard for us to get our bearings, translate this rubbish back into its earlier clear plan.
“That must have been the fireplace,” I say, “and that’s the main gate. We must have come round from the back.” For some reason we speak in whispers; he tosses a fragment of stone and I tell him to be careful.
We go up the remnants of a stairway into the keep. It’s almost totally dark; the floors are earth-covered. People must come here though, there’s an old sack, an unidentifiable piece of clothing. We don’t stay long inside: I’m afraid of getting lost, though it’s not likely, and I would rather be able to see him. I don’t like the thought of finding his hand suddenly on me unannounced. Besides, I don’t trust the castle; I expect it to thunder down on us at the first loud laugh or false step. But we make it outside safely.
We pass beneath the gateway, its Norman curve still intact. Outside is another, larger courtyard, enclosed by the wall we have seen from outside and broken through; it has trees, recent trees not more than a hundred years old, dark-foliaged as etchings. Someone must come here to cut the grass: it’s short, hair-textured. He lies down on it and draws me down beside him and we rest on our elbows, surveying.
From the front the castle is more complete; you can see how it could once have been lived in by real people.
He lies down, closing his eyes, raising his hand to shade them from the sun. He’s pale and I realize he must be tired too. I’ve been thinking of my own lack of energy as something he has caused and must therefore be immune from.
“I’d like to have a castle like that,” he says. When he admires something he wants to own it. For an instant I pretend that he does have the castle, he’s always been here, he has a coffin hidden in the crypt, if I’m not careful I’ll be trapped and have to stay with him forever. If I’d had more sleep last night I’d be able to frighten myself this way but as it is I give up and lean back on the grass beside him, looking up at the trees as their branches move in the wind, every leaf sharpened to a glass-clear edge by my exhaustion.
I turn my head to watch him. In the last few days he’s become not more familiar to me as he should have but more alien. Close up, he’s a strange terrain, pores and hairs; but he isn’t nearer, he’s further away, like the moon when you’ve finally landed on it. I move back from him so I can see him better, he misinterprets, thinking I’m trying to get up, and stretches himself over me to prevent me. He kisses me, teeth digging into my lower lip; when it hurts too much I pull away. We lie side by side, both suffering from unrequited love.
This is an interval, a truce; it can’t last, we both know it, there have been too many differences, of opinion we called it but it was more than that, the things that mean safety for him mean danger for me. We’ve talked too much or not enough: for what we have to say to each other there’s no language, we’ve tried them all. I think of the old science-fiction movies, the creature from another galaxy finally encountered after so many years of signals and ordeals only to be destroyed because he can’t make himself understood. Actually it’s less a truce than a rest, those silent black-and-white comedians hitting each other until they fall down, then getting up after a pause to begin again. We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction. I wonder if they ever came here while he was still alive.
Right now though there’s neither love nor anger, no resentment, it’s a suspension, of fear even, like waiting for the dentist. But I don’t want him to die. I feel nothing but I concentrate, somebody’s version of God, I will him to exist, right now on the vacant lawn of this castle whose name we don’t know in this foreign town we’re in only because dead people are more real to him than living ones. Despite the mistakes I want everything to stay the way it is; I want to hold it.
He sits up: he’s heard voices. Two little girls, baskets over their arms as though for a picnic or a game, have come into the grounds and are walking towards the castle. They stare at us curiously and decide we are harmless. “Let’s play in the tower,” one calls and they run and disappear among the walls. For them the castle is ordinary as a backyard.
He gets up, brushing off bits of grass. We haven’t visited the house yet but we still have time. We find our break in the wall, our pathway, and slide back down to sea level. The sun has moved, the green closes behind us.
The house is further than it looked from the village. The semi-road gives out and we pick our way along the stoney beach. The tide is out; the huge bay stretches as far as we can see, a solid mud-flat except for the thin silty river that cuts along beside us. The dry part narrows and vanishes, we are stranded below the tide line, clambering over slippery masses of purplish-brown rock or squelching through the mud, thick as clotted cream. All around us is an odd percolating sound: it’s the mud, drying in the sun. There are gulls too, and wind bending the unhealthy-coloured rushes by the bank.
“How the hell did he get back and forth?” he says. “Think of doing this drunk on a dark night.”
“There must be a road further up,” I say.
We reach the house at last. Like everything else here it has a wall; this one is to keep out the waves at high tide. The house itself is on stilts, jammed up against the cliff, painted stone with a spindly-railed two-decker porch. It hasn’t been lived in for many years: one window is broken and the railings are beginning to go. The yard is weed-grown, but maybe it always was. I sit on the wall, dangling my legs, while he pokes around, examining the windows, the outhouse (which is open), the shed once used perhaps for a boat. I don’t want to see any of it. Graves are safely covered and the castle so derelict it has the status of a tree or a stone, but the house is too recent, it is still partly living. If I looked in the window there would be a table with dishes not yet cleared away, or a fresh cigarette or a coat just taken off. Or maybe a broken plate: they used to have fights, apparently. She never comes back and I can see why. He wouldn’t leave her alone.
He’s testing the railing on the second-storey porch; he’s going to pull himself up by it.
“Don’t do that,” I say wearily.
“Why not?” he says. “I want to see the other side.”
“Because you’ll fall and I don’t want to have to scrape you off the rocks.”
“Don’t be like that,” he says.
How did she manage? I turn my head away, I don’t want to watch. It will be such an effort, the police, I’ll have to explain what I was doing here, why he was climbing and fell. He should be more considerate. But for once he thinks better of it.
There is another road, we discover it eventually, along the beach and up an asphalt walk beside a neat inhabited cottage. Did they see us coming, are they wondering who we are? The road above is paved, it has a railing and a sign with the poet’s name on it, wired to the fence.