‘Dead,’ he said. He cleared his throat and gave himself a sort of heave as if he were shifting a weight from one shoulder to the other. Dead, yes; her cold hand in his, like a little bundle of brittle twigs wrapped in tissue paper; how much smaller than herself she had seemed, like a carved figurine, a memento of herself she had left behind. ‘My mother,’ he said. Sophie turned her face to the view again and stood still. ‘A long time ago.’ He nodded slowly, thinking. ‘Remarkable, that girl …’
Another silence, longer this time. With the covert flourish of a conjuror she produced her camera from somewhere under her arm. He fidgeted, and she laughed.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I have not come to photograph people, only ruins.’ She focused on his desk, the back of his chair, the window-sills. He listened with faint pleasure to the repeated grainy slither of the shutter working. ‘I am making a book,’ she said. ‘Tableaux morts: that is the title. What do you think?’
He had stopped listening again.
‘Have you known him for a long time?’ he said.
She glanced at him, then shook her head.
‘He was at the hotel last night,’ she said, ‘and afterwards on the boat. Why?’
He shrugged.
‘I thought you knew him,’ he said. ‘I thought …’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I do not know him.’
Thus they converse, haltingly, between long pauses. Behind the language that they speak other languages speak in silence, ones that they know and yet avoid, the languages of childhood and of loss. This reticence seems imperative. Both are thinking how strange it is to be here and at the same time to be conscious of it, seeing themselves somehow reflected in each other. That must be how it is with humans, apart and yet together, in their world, their human world.
Far thunder at dead of night, I wake to it, a low rumble along the horizon, the air crumpling. I imagine what it must be like out there, out beyond the land, where the humped sea hugely heaves, black as oilskin, under a bulging, clay-dark sky; I imagine it, and I am there. In these waters there are dolphins, I have seen them; uncanny creatures, with their rubbery grins and little mewling cries. It is said they save men from drowning. Would they save me, I wonder, if I came plummeting down and disappeared under the waves with a hiss? I live among ghosts and absences. A nightbird flies past, I hear the rapid whirr of wings, and down in the direction of the stream suddenly something gallops away. A horse? There are no horses here. A donkey, perhaps. I hear it, clear as anything, the unmistakable sound of hoofbeats. Who is the horseman?
Life, life: being outside.
Night and silence and
Oh life!
And I in flames.
I HAD HARDLY been a week on the island before I found myself a widow-woman. At least, I am sure that is how they told it hereabouts, where it seems every other cottage harbours a canny bachelor on the look-out for a secondhand mate, one already well accustomed to the bit, as Mr Tighe the shopman put it to me wheezily the other day, leaning over his counter on one elbow and giving me a large, lewd wink. My widow even had a few acres of land. She lived above us here on the ridge, in a rain-coloured cottage backed up crookedly against the massy darknesses of the oak wood. She kept chickens, and a goat tethered to a post in the front yard. Odd objects lay here and there about the place, as if they had become bogged down on their way elsewhere. There was a bright-red plastic baby-bath, a car tyre, a rusty mangle, and something that looked like a primitive version of a washing machine. The first time I went up there it was a brumous evening, more like November than May, with a solid blare of wind out of the west and the sea lying flat in the distance like a sheet of rippled steel. The front door stood open but there was no one to be seen. I approached cautiously, unnerved by the look of that dark doorway; I am always wary of strange houses. The goat, chewing on something with a rapid, sideways motion, eyed me with what seemed a sardonic smirk, while the chickens gave their goitrous croaks of complaint. I knocked and waited, and had to knock again, and at last there was a scuffling sound and she appeared, rising up suddenly in the dim doorway with her medusa-head of tangled hair and her unnerving, bleached-blue eyes. She said nothing, but stood with her hand on the latch and looked at me with a sceptical air, as if she did not really believe I could be real. She was a tall, spare figure with arthritic hands and a fine, long, ravaged face, handsome and yet curiously indistinct: when I think of her I always see her in profile, upright, archaic, noble, as if on the side of a worn silver coin. Everything about her was faded, her skin, her old skirt, her bird’s nest of ash-coloured hair, and I had the notion that if I reached out to touch her my hand would encounter only shadowed air. For a moment I could think of nothing to say, then asked lamely if she would let me have a few eggs, since that was mainly what we were living on here at Château d’If and the hens that week had taken it into their heads to stop laying. She waited a moment, pondering, and then turned without a word and went away to the back of the house. I peered greedily through the open doorway: that’s me always, hungering after other worlds, the drabber and more desolate the better, God knows why: so that I can fill them up, I suppose, with my imaginings. There was a table with a plain cloth, a rocking chair, a black stove; the walls and the concrete floor were bare. At the back dimly I could see a lean- to kitchen, with a roof of transparent corrugated plastic from which there sifted down an incongruously lovely, peach-coloured light such as might bathe a domestic interior by one of the North Italian masters. When she returned with the eggs in a paper bag I offered to pay for them but she shrugged and said she had more of them than she could use. Her voice was so distant and light I could hardly hear it, a sort of dry, papery rustling. I was halfway down the hill again before her accent registered.
She was not a native of these parts. Her name was Mrs Vanden. The islanders called her the Dutchwoman, but she might have been South African; I never did find out what her true nationality was. She had lived in many places abroad — her husband had been a colonial official of some sort. She rarely talked about the past, and when she did her voice took on a weary and faintly irritated edge, as if she were a historian describing an important but not very interesting period of antiquity. The late Mr Vanden hardly figured in this all-but-vanished age, and perhaps it was because I know so little about him that he has assumed in my imagination the outlines of a legendary figure, a Stanley or a Mungo Park, with pith helmet and swagger stick and enormous moustaches. How his widow ended up here I do not know. When I ventured to ask her, she said she had come to the island to get away from the noise; I presume she meant noise in general, the hubbub of the world. She was a great one for silence; it seemed a form of sustenance for her, she fed on it, like a patient on a drip. Sometimes when I visited her, as I did with increasing and, it strikes me now, surprising frequency over the weeks that I knew her, she hardly spoke a word. Perhaps Mr Vanden had been a talker? They did not seem rude, these silences. Rather, I took them as a mark of, not friendliness, perhaps — I would not describe our relations as friendly, no matter how close they might have been — but of toleration. She suffered me as she did those things in the yard, the odds and ends that just happened to have come to rest there. I suspect she never did manage to believe that I was entirely real. At times, if I were to say something after a long pause, or otherwise make my presence unexpectedly felt, a look of startlement tinged with dismay would cross her face, as if some comfortably inanimate presence had suddenly sprung to troublesome life before her eyes.