He laughed, gave me a long look over the swiftly lowered camera, and then I stood up to my knees in the white pulpy straw in order to reach down the wooden rake, dragged a bottomless iron bucket from under the straw, and hauled from beneath the oxcart a great leather skein of primitive mildewed harness. And thanks to my own patient industry and quickening interest, and also to Hugh’s sweating inventiveness, we managed that day to photograph our smallish naked girl holding the rake, holding the bucket, managed to photograph her with the entire length and weight of the crusty black leather harness draped over one narrow shoulder so that, front and back, it hung down stiffly as far as the bare feet.
“The pants,” he whispered. “Give her the pants.”
The girl watched my every move, the small red eyes of the sheep were filled with ruby-colored supplication. And of course I found the cotton underpants lying in a heap beside the alpine pack. I picked them up, turned to the girl, and between thumb and first finger of both hands held out the underpants in a cheerful and magnanimous display. Her eyes tightened, the camera clicked.
But what was wrong?
Silence. The clicking had stopped, the agonized camera was silent. And then Hugh moaned.
“What’s wrong?”I whispered. “For God’s sake, what’s the matter?”
At a glance it became apparent to me that Hugh lay there in the grip of something serious. He was not moaning in the throes of a pseudosexual climax resulting, say, from the many photographs he had taken of a girl who was, after all, young, naked and a stranger to us both. The hunching shoulders, the forgotten camera, the single hand driven against the center of his bony chest, the apparent sapping of that little color usually evident in the long thin granite face, the fact that he was frowning and that his usually crafty eyes were suddenly wide open and staring at what I was sure was nothing — all this told me that Catherine’s husband was sprawled motionless before me not in the aura of trivial physiological reaction, but in pain. He appeared to be thinking about some deeply unpleasant subject, the hand was trying to dig its way inside his chest.
I knelt beside him, I was concerned. But my life had not attuned me to medical emergencies and now, kneeling at Hugh’s side, large but at the same time trim with an excellent health I was unable to share, I did not know whether to touch him, to seize his gigantic deformed shoulders in my own enormous gentle hands, or leave him alone. Or should I shoot into his dry mouth a jet of the dark wine? Raise him to a sitting position? Go for help? Carry him in my two arms back to our wives?
“Heart attack,” I whispered. “Is it a heart attack?”
He moaned, licked the small wispy wings of his mustache with the tip of his tongue, finally glanced up at me. “Hand of death inside my chest, that’s all. But it doesn’t last…”
He winked, I felt relieved, already the shadows were massing in interesting patterns once more down the length of his rock-colored grainy face. He sighed, pushed himself up with his good arm. And yet for all my relief, and even as I was helping myself to a long curving drink from the wineskin, I could not help thinking that my preoccupied friend was dangerously ill and that this kind of collapse, along with his collection of “peasant nudes,” probably did not bode well for Fiona. If mere photographs had led in some devious way to this kind of prostration, what would happen to him when Fiona finally managed to gather him into her lovely arms? And did Fiona know already what she was up against? It would be my lot, I knew, to warn her.
When, blinded and laughing, Hugh and I stumbled out of the barn together, Hugh’s good arm resting powerfully and in unadmitted necessity on my own broad shoulders, and the straps of all three cameras and the alpine pack held firmly in my own left hand, I noticed that the girl was once more fully clothed and at work in the field. I knew that I would see her again, but also knew more immediately that in only a matter of minutes Hugh’s black flapping dog would race out yapping to welcome us back to villas, children, wives already involved in the pursuit of nudity, passion, love.
But when I finally did return alone to the little ceramic farm and to Rosella (for of course it was she), I returned only to procure for myself a silent companion willing to cook my meals and clean my cold villa. Thanks to Hugh, Rosella became mine, so to speak, along with the best of the photographs. And Hugh? Better for Hugh had he died at a blow of his black fist or whatever it was. Much better.
IN THE MIDDAY BRIGHTNESS, LYING NEAR OUR LITTLE WELL house on an old settee over which she had tossed one of her white percale sheets, and with her feet bare and her torso also bare, dressed only in her sky-blue slacks that she pulled on like a pair of dancing tights, and looking up at me with one long finger marking her place in the slender book and her other hand thrust into the open slacks — in this attitude she appealed to me with somber eyes, low voice, unhappy smile: “Baby, he says I’m Circe all over again and that he’s the only man left in the world who can resist my charms. What’ll I do?”
“I warned you a long time ago. Remember?”
“I remember.”
Hands in pockets, standing over her, smiling down at Fiona stretched out in one of her rare half-hours devoted to a kind of personal cessation that came as close as she was capable of coming to inertia, suddenly and with my lips so much thicker than hers I made a few silent kisses and sat down on the edge of the settee so that our hips rolled together and I could smell her breath. On the other side of the cypresses all was even more quiet than usual at this time of day, and I wondered what Hugh had done to muzzle the dog, the twins, the constantly accusing and complaining Meredith. I heard the little desolate rustling sound of the book landing beside the settee.
“Cyril is virile. Remember when I told him, baby?”
I nodded, slowly removed my eyeglasses and folded them, stuck them under the settee for safekeeping.
“And it’s so true. Oh, it’s so true.”
One of her rare half-hours of self-surrender. And yet the casualness of bare feet and partially unzipped slacks, the personal disregard expressed in the naked breasts, stomach, arms, the thoughtless and candid position of the hand thrust into the little blue open mouth of the slacks — all of this was rare and yet characteristic too, almost as characteristic as the familiar sight of Fionda smothering or sculpting her breasts in hands whose supple grip and long white fingers never failed to excite my admiration.
“You're wearing your magic pants again,” I whispered, and her body rippled against me. She bent her outside leg at the knee and allowed her tight blue knee, bent leg, to list away from me slightly in the direction taken by the now disregarded book. With two long fingers of her free hand she began to stroke the white naked heel that she had just drawn into sensitive proximity to those hard blue buttocks which at the moment I could not see but only imagine. She pursed her lips and, despite the still considerable space between us, began to blow a deliberate breath up toward my weathered bland expectant face.
“And you’re wearing your magic pants too, baby, aren’t you,” she said in that willowy voice which, no matter how soft, suggestive or dreamlike, never allowed for contradiction.
“Sure,” I murmured. “Of course I am.”
“Maybe I’ll steal your magic pants. For him. OK?”
The shadow of the thin Byzantine cross of rusted iron on top of the conical well house now lay directly in the center of her naked chest, and it amused me to think that sometime within the next half-hour the cross would lie not on Fiona’s chest but in the middle of my broad back. All around us the little orange marguerites had never been more profuse, more deeply orange, more innocent.