My presence on the hill was attracting mosquitoes, which were whining unpleasantly around me, so I hurried back to where I had left the car, walking briskly through the town itself to get to the other side. The stillness had been an illusion, and bright colors cut the air.
At the entrance to the parking lot I noticed two suitcases standing together, and I thought how odd it was of someone to have left them there. I found the Renault, opened the door.
“Richard! Richard!”
She was running between the cars, dodging around them, her hair flying about her face. I felt the sense of unreality lifting from me, and all I thought was how much she looked the same, how like herself she was. Holding her again, feeling her willowy body against mine, I loved the familiarity of her, and how natural it was to have her in my arms.
XII
Driving southwest, the windows open against the heat, leaving the Riviera behind:
“How did you find me?”
“Just luck … I was about to give up.”
“But why that place?”
“You’d mentioned it, I knew you would go there. I arrived last night, and I’ve been hanging around all day.”
We were looking for somewhere to stay, somewhere to be alone together. She had been on buses for three days, traveling from one place to another, running low on cash, trying to save enough for the journey home. Niall had given her some money, she said, but he was broke too. It hadn’t been how she expected.
We stopped in Narbonne and checked into the first hotel we found. Sue plunged into the bath, and I sat on the side of it looking down at her. I noticed she had a bruise on her leg, one that had not been there before.
“Don’t stare at me.” She slumped low in the water, raising a knee to conceal her crotch from me but bringing the bruise fully into view.
“I thought you wanted me to.”
“I don’t like being looked at.”
Something had changed; I had always looked at her before. I left the tiny bathroom, pulled off my clothes and lay on the bed. I listened to Sue splashing around, then draining the water. A long silence, followed by the rustle of a paper tissue as she blew her nose. When she appeared, she had put on panties and a T-shirt.
Glancing down at me she prowled around the room, stared out through the window at the yard below, fidgeted with her clothes on the top of her suitcase. Finally she came to sit on the end of the bed, where I could not reach her without sitting up and stretching toward her.
“Where did you get that bruise?” I said.
She turned her leg to look at it. “A sort of accident. I fell against something. There’s another.” She twisted around and pulled up her T-shirt to reveal a second dark bruise on her back. “They don’t hurt,” she said.
“Niall did that, didn’t he?”
“Not really—it was an accident. He didn’t mean it.”
Because of the distance between us, I knew that she had resolved nothing, but I was glad just to have her back and said nothing. After a few minutes we dressed and walked into the town for a meal. I hardly registered the surroundings; I was travel-fatigued, had been in too many different places. And Sue preoccupied me. Narbonne felt real and alive, was not a tableau, but she distracted me away from it.
Over dinner, she at last gave me a full account of what had happened.
Niall’s friends were staying outside Saint-Raphael itself, in a converted farmhouse. Niall was not there when she arrived; she was told he was away on a trip. She waited for a day and a half, torn between having to wait and abandoning him altogether. When Niall turned up he was in a group of five people—another man and three young girls. No one said where they had been or what they had been doing. There were now nine people, including Sue, crammed into the house, and regardless of any other considerations she had been forced to share a bed with him. He was in a jumpy, violent mood at first, making Sue assume that something had been going on with one of the girls. There was an argument. The next day Niall vanished again, taking one of the cars. Sue decided to leave to join up with me, and got as far as packing her bags but Niall returned in time to stop her. She told him about me, and he started to beat her up. The others pulled him off her, and Niall’s mood immediately changed: first he became melancholy and clinging—in a way Sue said she knew how to deal with—but then changed again, saying that if she had made a decision then he would not stand in her way.
“This is what made it difficult,” she said to me. “If he had gone on acting badly I could have walked out on him. Instead, he pretended he didn’t care any more.”
“But at least you’re here,” I said. “Surely that’s all that matters?”
“Yes, but I don’t trust him. He’s never acted like this before.”
“What are you saying? That he might be following you?”
She was looking tense, fidgeting with the cutlery on the table. “I think it’s more likely he was sleeping with one of those girls and couldn’t be bothered.”
“Can we forget him now?” I said.
“All right.”
We went for a walk around the town after the meal, but our real interest was in each other and we soon returned to the hotel. We went up to the room, opened the windows wide to the warm night and closed the curtains. I took a bath and lay in the water staring blankly at the ceiling, wondering what to do. Nothing seemed to appeal, not even getting into bed with her. The bathroom door was open and I could hear her moving about, hanging up clothes, opening and closing the wardrobe door. At one point I heard her bolt the main door to the room. She did not come in to see me, and it meant nothing that she did or did not. We appeared to have reached a sort of sexless familiarity, one in which we shared a room, undressed in front of each other, slept in the same bed, yet were still separated by Niall.
When I had finished I went into the bedroom. Sue was sitting up in bed, looking through a magazine. She was naked. She put the magazine aside as I climbed in beside her.
“Shall I put out the light?” I said.
“Last week, when we were in Nice, you said something to me. Did you mean it?”
“That depends what it was.”
“You said you loved me. Was that true?”
“It was at the time,” I said. “I loved you then more than anyone I have ever known. In fact, there never has been anyone else.”
“That’s what I thought. What about now?”
“It’s not a good time to ask. I’m feeling alienated.”
“Then it’s the best time to ask. Do you love me?”
“Of course I do. Why do you think all this matters so much?”
She shifted down in the bed so her head was on the pillow. “That’s what I wanted to hear. Don’t put out the light. I hate making love in the dark.”
XIII
Collioure was a fishing village on the extreme southwesterly coast of the Mediterranean. It was built on a small bay, with a fort and a cluster of stone cottages, and was surrounded by rocky hills, brown-green under the blaze of the sun. As soon as we arrived I was struck again by a quality of frozen timelessness, that there was an unchanging life here that we could pass into and through, yet never really penetrate. It reminded me of the stasis of Aigues-Mortes, and my realization that the distractions of Sue made me unable to see properly.
But because I was with Sue, at last truly with her, I felt able to deal with this, realizing that both she and the village were different aspects of my perceptions. If I allowed them to, each one could interfere with the other, but now for the first time I was relaxed and very happy. We had no more discussions of ourselves.