The Tuileries. Paris. The part near the English bookshop. All the white gravel. Where she collected chestnuts and made a bag out of her scarf. Paris. It wasn’t fair.
Her mother.
Questions hung like shadows behind Scully’s head. His thoughts went everywhere and no place. Blasts, flickers, comets of thought. A miscarriage, a bleed contained. Missed calls and telegrams. Had she wired every Amex office in Europe to find him? Was she frightened and desperate, circumstances piling up, fear taking her whole body? Could she perhaps believe for a moment that he mightn’t come? That he’d passed a point somehow. Oh God, was she feeling pain and panic like him, aching even in sleep for a break in the smothering static, simply not knowing? Chasing them? How little had they missed each other by? How would they find the distance to laugh about this later, at the comic weirdness of it, taking for granted the great terrifying leaps they’d come to so casually make from time zones and continents, seasons, languages, spaces. You forget so quickly the teetering bloody peril of movement, of travel. The lifting of your feet from the earth.
He flickered on in the wake of his own mind. A jilting, maybe. A thing, an attachment come unstuck. A mistake, a human fuck- up of the heart she’d suddenly seen. In ten days? Or some medical thing, like a blood test, an x-ray she couldn’t bring herself to tell about until now. In Ireland he was so cut off, so bloody preoccupied with physical, urgent things, and his own sad-sack loneliness, for pity’s sake. He wasn’t paying enough attention. Should have called every second day, kept up with progress. Some terrible family thing maybe she’d kept from him all these years for his own sake. Or some… some development, some new coming to terms, some change of heart, some Road-to-Damascus experience, as the Salvos called it. Religion even. Or Art. Some blinding light, some stroke of luck or genius or force — who knows — even a simple, mawkish explanation would do him. A scalding blast of hatred. News of another man, a whole new life — he really felt he didn’t care, that he could take it between the eyes. Because all he could hold in the spaces of his brain for longer than a second was her standing there in boots and a coat, her scarf like an animal round her neck. There on the arid geometry of the Tuileries. Bare trees, low sky. And only steaming breath between them.
He looked up to see Billie press out through the glass doors. He snatched up the telegram and surged out into the street after her.
‘Billie!’
She was doll-like, her hands slack at her sides as she stumped along the cobbles, ankles tilting madly in her riding boots. The street was heady with coffee and cigar smoke.
He drew up beside her, laid a hand on her shoulder. She wrenched aside and kept walking.
‘Billie.’
What if she wants me? Billie thought. You only get one mother.
‘Billie, stop. What about the doctor?’
‘I’ll scream,’ she said hoarsely. ‘If you touch me, if you talk to me I’ll scream and police’ll get me. They’ll take me off you.’
He stood there, stunned. Cars and cobbles shone in a drizzle he hadn’t even noticed. She wiped her face on the dewy arm of her jacket and with a sobering visible force of will she straightened her back and pulled out the wad of lire he had left on the counter.
‘Just don’t talk,’ she whispered.
And they said not a word between them all through the streets to the hotel and the station and the night train to Paris.
Thirty-four
SCULLY PROPPED HIMSELF UP in his bunk to watch the lights of the Italian Riviera peel by. Boats were stranded stars out in the low darkness. Tunnels tipped him into roaring space and gave him gooseflesh. He couldn’t see beaches but in the unlit gaps, in places no steel or concrete would fit, he sensed them out there. Palm-lined boulevards, stretches of sand. Breaking waves.
He recalled that weekend at St Malo in Brittany, the sight of a beach after so long landlocked in London and Paris. The wind off the channel was vile. The sand was ribbed by the outgone tide. It was so strand-like, so strange. In boots and coats the four of them belted up the shoreline, running in the wind, beneath the medieval ramparts of the old city. You could imagine Crusaders on this beach as easily as Nazi soldiers. Protected by a tidal spit, a fortress stood out in the sea as an advance guard. It wasn’t much of a sea but it sharpened his homesickness all the same. Inside the rampart walls overlooking the channel, built into their very cavities, was a labyrinth of marine aquariums, a discovery that delighted him. While the other three charged on through, gasping and nudging on ahead with their girlish voices reverberating in the subterranean dankness, Scully lingered at every tank, studying fish he did not recognize.
It was a good weekend, a relief from Paris. Of all their Parisian friends Dominique was the one Scully came closest to relaxing with. There was no sexual brittleness between her and him, no vast cultural gap. She carried her Leica everywhere, that weekend. Along the waterfront, in the strange old cemetery, in cafés and wintry streets. In the deserted hotel they played pool downstairs and drank hot chocolate and calvados. The sound of the shutter clunking away. Pool balls socking into cushions. The channel wind outside. And sea.
Scully opened the train window and felt the frigid blast on his cheeks.
Paris. This time he’d get the best of the bloody place. This time he was free, just passing through. And he wasn’t as green as he used to be. No pouting landlords to deal with, no scaly ringworm ceilings of the rich and tightarsed, no looks down the Gallic nose that he’d once had to take humbly, thinking of payday. The drudgery and anxiety of illegal work was gone — nights lying awake stinking of turps with fists like cracked bricks. This time he’d kiss no bums. No apologies for his hideous French or his hopeless clothes. No reason why he couldn’t enjoy himself. This time he was taking no prisoners.
He slid the window back down and felt the pleasant numbness of his face. There was no fear tonight, just a wild anticipation. Anything was better than not knowing.
• • •
BILLIE WRUNG THE BLANKET AT her chest as the black tunnel of night blasted by her head. Look at him tonight, like Quasimodo up in the bells. That smiley shine on his face reflected in the glass. His knees up. Like the hunchback kicking the bells, right inside himself, setting bells going that he can’t hear. She pulled the bedclothes up over her head and smelt the sourness of her breath. The train lurched and bucked. It felt like it wanted to leave the rails. Right there with the sheet between her teeth and the blanket like a fuggy tent above her head, Billie prayed for an angel, for a whirlwind, a fire, a giant crack in the world that might save them from tomorrow, from the other side of the cloud.
• • •
IN THE ZIRCON GLARE OF Indian Ocean water — reef water, bombora water, shark water — Scully saw a furrow. He paused at the gunwhale stinking of mackerel blood and running sweat. He peered. A wake, a flat subsurface trail that made him think of dolphins. But this swimmer had limbs. He saw it now — the outline of legs, arms, a kelp fan of hair — and she surfaced beneath him in the clear shade of the boat, naked and slick, breasts engorged, belly huge. Jennifer. Laughing, calling, buoyant. He didn’t even hesitate. He went over the side in his sea-boots and heavy apron, the gloves greedily sucking water at his elbows, and he sank like a ballasted pot, roaring down in a trail of bubbles to the hairy, livid base of the reef where Billie waited smiling, her face ragged from sharks, her body breaking up and the shadow of the swimmer on the surface passing over like the angel of death.