He groped for matches, found them, lit the lamp at his bedside, saw the flame flicker behind the glass, then grow into a perfect roseate globe as he turned up the brass rod that operated the wick. He was wide-awake and radiant with purpose. He felt a sudden need to tell Edith of his decision. He got up, crossed the room, holding the lamp in one hand. He tapped at the door that connected their two rooms, heard nothing, opened the door, and intruded head and lamp. He called his wife’s name, saw her form stir under the bedclothes. “I’m sorry to wake you,” he said. “I felt that I needed… I have decided something.”
He advanced, set the lamp down on the floor, and sat on the edge of the bed, near the foot. “I didn’t want to wait till morning,” he said, feeling some compunction now as he saw her sit up, raise her hands to her hair, which she had untied for the night and reached down to her shoulders. The lamplight fell softly on her bare arms as she made this instinctive gesture, a response to exposure, in which, however, there was perfect precision, half asleep as she was. There was a bowl of flowers on the table beside her, long-stemmed dark blue anemones and the narcissus that came in early spring, single white flowers edged with crimson. Knowing her love for flowers, people who worked in the house would gather them on the stream banks and bring them for her. The shortness of the season made them precious to her. She arranged them herself and always perfectly.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
Edith drew the sheet up over her chest, as if cold. “What is it?” she said. “Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing wrong, it’s just that I’ve come to a decision and I wanted to tell you about it.”
“In the middle of the night?” There was a softness of tone in this, and it came to him with some surprise and a certain stirring of excitement that she might have misunderstood his purpose and not been displeased. She had always valued alacrity of feeling, setting it above what was cautious and considered, both in herself and in others; there had been little enough of it between them of late. But he knew that it had not been the sort of impulse she would value that had brought him here. Not impulse at all in fact: He had wanted to confide his decision to her so as to make it irrevocable, prevent him—under pain of her scorn—from changing his mind in the cold light of day. He would never be able to tell her this or she to imagine it, let alone sympathize. She could support strength with all the strength of her being, but she could not support weakness, not in men—in women it was to be expected.
“I wanted you to know of it,” he said. “There are always other people round in the mornings.”
Edith reached for the woolen wrap on the chair beside her and settled back against the pillow, actions that conveyed more clearly than any words could have done that she had revised her first idea of the purpose of his visit.
He told her then what his restraint had only allowed her to surmise before, his worries about the encroaching railway; he told her of the map Jehar had presented to him that very morning. It was easier to talk of it, now that the former paralysis of divided feeling was no more; she would not have understood how he or anyone could half desire defeat as a release from struggle. So as not to alarm her he said nothing about the financial difficulties that were facing him. Keeping his face at first turned away, he described the recent discoveries they had made, which pointed to something momentous, something that could make his name, make this site famous in the annals of Mesopotamian archaeology, bring great financial reward and an assured career in the future.
He had spoken with increasing passion, and now he turned and looked at her. In Constantinople were the blinkered ones, the British authorities who sat at their desks and allowed this monstrous thing to happen. Letters were no good. He would go in person; he would confront these people. He and the present ambassador had been at school together; it counted for something. He would make them see that it was not just a mound of earth that was in jeopardy but a part of the story of humanity. He would show them that he was no mere futile dabbler but someone to be reckoned with, someone who would not take this outrage lying down.
He raised his head and fixed her with his eyes. His voice was vibrant with the passion of his rage, released now after long repression. He saw that her eyes were bright and she was flushed.
“But it is splendid,” she said, and quite unexpectedly, in the midst of his fury, he was carried back in memory to the May evening four years ago, when they had met for the first time.
He had talked about an excavation at Tell Barsip on the Euphrates, from which he had just returned. He had spoken with enthusiasm and had seen the warmth of this reflected in her face. Encouraged, he had confessed to her his intention of leading an expedition himself after these years as an assistant, and putting all he had into it. “But how absolutely splendid!” she had said. Looking at her across the table, at her bright eyes, her mouth that smiled upon him, he had felt they were both bathed in a visionary light. There were others there at the restaurant table, but they were in some area of dimness, excluded. Pagani’s, the restaurant—all the rage in those days. They had been to hear a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society given by the American explorer Robert Peary, who had reached the North Pole in the previous year. She had been disappointed in Peary, he remembered now; he had not lived up to her expectations, he had spoken in an ordinary kind of way, making the whole thing sound more like a well-organized business trip than a feat of endurance. Indignation in her voice. It had occurred to Somerville later—considerably later, when that light no longer enveloped them—that he had been lucky in the occasion; he had served to repair this disappointment, restore her faith in the heroic ideal…
“You will prevail, I know it,” she said. “You speak as you did when you first told me of your decision to give up that dreary business and venture everything on your dream of exploration and discovery.” She sat forward a little now, and the wrap fell from her shoulders. “You are still that man. Nothing and no one can withstand you when you are truly yourself.” She held out her arms to him. “My love, come here beside me.”
Her body radiated heat; the skin of her face and arms was hot to his touch as if she were burning with his own fire of purpose. Her will, her wish for him to conquer and triumph, fastened on him now again, proof against all disappointment. But he knew, as she panted beneath him, as his own excitement mounted, that the man lying between her thighs had ceased very early in their life together to be truly himself with her and would never now be able to find the words to explain why this was so.
5.
“Yes,” the Ambassador said, “he and I were at school together. In point of fact he fagged for me in my last year there. He reminded me of it in his telegram. Naturally, it makes a difference.”
“Naturally.” Lord Rampling looked straight before him through the widely opened windows of the veranda, across the ruffled, glittering expanse of water. The Bosporus was almost at its narrowest here, the landing stages and gardens of the houses opposite, on the Asian side, clearly visible. He knew which school it was, having spent some time prior to this meeting in reading a summary of the Ambassador’s career, but he could not for the life of him see what difference it made. “In days gone by,” he said, “in the old days of the Padishah, the ladies in their private boats would make assignations with their lovers across the water by using a system of signals based on the tilt of their parasols, left, right, straight up. Married women, you know—they had to be careful. I’ve always regarded it as an example of the way restrictions increase ingenuity, sharpen the brain and the senses. I don’t know what the code was, of course, but I have always taken it for granted that the vertical position was crucial. You couldn’t be more definite than that, could you?”