“That reminds me. A crossword clue. I saw it months ago. Ready?” I nodded. “'All mixed up, but the better part of Nicholas’… six letters.”
I worked it out, smiled at her. “Did the clue end in a full stop or a question mark?”
“It ended in my crying. As usual.”
I said, “If only life was as simple as an anagram.”
And the bird above us sang in the silence.
We set off down. As we came lower, it grew warmer and warmer. Summer rose to meet us.
Alison led the way, and so she could rarely see my face. I tried to sort out my feelings about her. It irritated me still that she put so much reliance on the body thing, the shared orgasm. Her mistaking that for love, her not seeing that love was something other the mystery of withdrawal, reserve, walking away through the trees, turning the mouth away at the last moment. On Parnassus of all mountains, I thought, her unsubtlety, her inability to hide behind metaphor, ought to offend me; to bore me as uncomplex poetry normally bored me. And yet in some way I couldn’t define she had, had always had, this secret trick of slipping through all the obstacles I put between us; as if she were really my sister, had access to unfair pressures and could always evoke deep similarities to annul, or to make seem shallow, the differences in taste or feeling.
She began to talk about being an air hostess; about herself.
“Oh Jesus, excitement. That lasts about a couple of duties. New faces, new cities, new romances with handsome pilots. Most of the pilots think we’re part of the aircrew amenities. Just queueing up to be blessed by their miserable old Battle-of-Britain cocks.”
I laughed.
“Nicko, it’s not funny. It destroys you. That bloody tin pipe. And all that freedom, that space outside. Sometimes I just want to pull the safety handle and be sucked out. Just falling, a minute of wonderful lonely passengerless falling…”
“You’re not serious.”
She looked back. “More serious than you think. We call it charm depression. When you get so penny-in-the-slot charming that you stop being human any more. It’s like… sometimes we’re so busy after take-off we don’t realize how far the plane’s climbed and you look out and it’s a shock… it’s like that, you suddenly realize how far you are from what you really are. Or you were, or something. I don’t explain it well.”
“Yes you do. Very well.”
“You begin to feel you don’t belong anywhere any more. You know, as if I didn’t have enough problems that way already. I mean England’s impossible, it becomes more honi wit qui smelly pants every day, it’s a graveyard. And Australia… Australia. God, how I hate my country. The meanest ugliest blindest…” she gave up.
We walked on a way, then she said, “It’s just I haven’t roots anywhere any more, I don’t belong anywhere. They’re all places I fly to or from. Or over. I just have people I like. Or love. They’re the only homeland I have left.”
She threw a look back, a shy one, as if she had been saving up this truth about herself, this rootlessness, homelandlessness, which she knew was also a truth about me.
“At least we’ve got rid of a lot of useless illusions as well.”
“Clever us.”
She fell silent and I swallowed her reproach. In spite of her superficial independence, her fundamental need was to cling. All her life was an attempt to disprove it; and so proved it. She was like a sea anemone—had only to be touched to adhere to what touched her.
She stopped. We both noticed it at the same time. Below us to our right, the sound of water, a lot of water.
“I’d love to bathe my feet. Could we get down?”
We struck off the path through the trees and after a while came on a faint trail. It led us down, down and finally out into a clearing. At one end was a waterfall some ten feet or so high. A pooi of limpid water had formed beneath it. The clearing was dense with flowers and butterflies, a tiny trough of green-gold luxuriance after the dark forest we had been walking through. At the upper edge of the clearing there was a little cliff with a shallow cave, outside which some shepherd had pleached an arbor of fir branches. There were sheep droppings on the floor, but they were old. No one could have been there since summer began.
“Let’s have a swim.”
“It’ll be like ice.”
“Yah.”
She pulled her shirt over her head, and unhooked her bra, grinning at me in the flecked shadow of the arbor; I was cornered again.
“The place is probably alive with snakes.”
“Like Eden.”
She stepped out of her jeans and her white pants. Then she reached up and snapped a dead cone off one of the arbor branches and held it out to me. I watched her run nakedly through the long grass to the pool, try the water, groan. Then she waded forwards and swanned in with a scream. The water was jade green, melted snow, and it made my heart jolt with shock when I plunged beside her. And yet it was beautiful, the shadow of the trees, the sunlight on the glade, the white roar of the little fall, the iciness, the solitude, the laughing, the nakedness; moments one knows only death can obliterate.
Sitting in the grass beside the arbor we let the sun and the small breeze dry us and ate the last of the chocolate. Then Alison lay on her back, her arms thrown out, her legs a little open, abandoned to the sun—and, I knew, to me. For a time I lay like her, with my eyes closed.
Then she said, “I’m Queen of the May.”
She was sitting up, turned to me, propped on one arm. She had woven a rough crown out of the oxeyes and wild pinks that grew in the grass around us. It sat lopsidedly on her uncombed hair; and she wore a smile of touching innocence. She did not know it, but it was at first for me an intensely literary moment. I could place it exactly: England’s Helicon. I had forgotten that there are metaphors and metaphors, and that the greatest lyrics are very rarely anything but direct and unmetaphysical. Suddenly she was like such a poem and I felt a passionate wave of desire for her. It was not only lust, not only because she looked, as she did in her periodic fashion, disturbingly pretty, small breasted, small waisted, leaning on one hand, dimpled then grave; a child of sixteen, not a girl of twenty-four, but because I was seeing through all the ugly, the unpoetic accretions of modern life to the naked real self of her—a vision of her as naked in that way as she was in body; Eve glimpsed again through ten thousand generations.
It rushed on me, it was quite simple, I did love her, I wanted to keep her and I wanted to keep—or to find—Lily. It wasn’t that I wanted one more than the other, I wanted both, I had to have both; there was no emotional dishonesty in it. The only dishonesty was in my feeling dishonest, concealing… it was love that finally drove me to confess, not cruelty, not a wish to be free, to be callous and clear, but simply love. I think, in those few long moments, that Alison saw that. She must have seen something torn and sad in my face, because she said, very gently, “What’s wrong?”
“I haven’t had syphilis. It’s all a lie.”
She gave me an intense look, then sank back on the grass.
“Oh Nicholas.”
“I want to tell you what’s really happened.”
“Not now. Please not now. Whatever’s happened, come and make love to me.”
And we did make love; not sex, but love; though sex would have been so much wiser.
Lying beside her I began to try to describe what had happened at Bourani. The ancient Greeks said that if one slept a night on Parnassus either one became inspired or one went mad, and there was no doubt which happened to me; even as I spoke I knew it would have been better to say nothing, to have made something up… but love, that need to be naked. I had chosen the worst of all possible moments to be honest, and like most people who have spent much of their adult life being emotionally dishonest, I overcalculated the sympathy a final being honest would bring… but love, that need to be understood. And Parnassus was also to blame, for being so Greek; a place that made anything but the truth a mindsore.