‘Who are you? We were in the barn together. Your hair is still shaved, but your eyes are beautiful. They’re burning me. Somewhere in my memory is a story of burning – but what it is I cannot remember. Perhaps I never knew, perhaps it is only a memory that never existed except in my own mind – or something that Fuchsia . . .’
Titus closed his eyes to recall the sister who could only love with her whole being, and then only a few chosen people, and of the few, her brother most of all. ‘I’ll never see her again – I’ll never know again the ardour of a love that knows no physical desire.’
Daylight shone through the small latticed window, and it seemed as though there was nothing in the room but those two huge identical midnight pools of water, with twin half-circles of light that searched him out. The light from the pools shone with such brightness that Titus could not but be charged by them. The eyes continued their search and found his face and his eyes, so different, so knowledgeable. He wanted them to smile, and he wanted the smile to be returned. Four eyes searching.
Why was it that now, as he lay immobilised, his past returned to him in the memory of a girl called ‘Black Rose’? She was a victim, and she shared the same look, the translucent skin and enormous black globes, and who, he had been told, died as her head touched the white pillow, and her emaciated body lay between virgin sheets. Titus asked himself if he would for ever only be able to see things present in terms of his own past. Would he never free himself?
Those black brilliant eyes hunted him out, concentrating on him like the sun’s rays burning a piece of glass. He felt his cheeks flush, his mouth open, and a spasm of desire rendered him nearly insensible.
‘My name is Titus,’ he said in a cracked voice.
The eyes continued without blinking to search his face.
‘I am Titus Groan.’
‘I am Titus – I am Titus,’ and his voice became shrill with impotence.
He pushed all the bed coverings away from him in a determination to move. He looked at himself and did not recognise what he saw. Two stick insects to support his torso, and at their furthermost end a pair of feet, white, unused and wrinkled. He threw the insects over the bed and, as his feet touched the cold stone, he fell ignominiously. There was no strength in him.
He raised his head to the eyes that were impelling him – the head raised upon an arm so thin that he knew his own incarceration was as nothing compared to what had reduced the once-rounded whiteness of flesh to the pathetic bone-covered skin he saw opposite him.
He had intended to violate that flesh. He had wanted to hurt, because of his own hurt, but his weakness forbade him, and instead of the insolent virility of young manhood, he felt his body rendered down to the feebleness of age, and he no longer cared that he was a ludicrous sight.
5
As the Spring Awakes, So Do the Two Strangers
SUNLIGHT, AN INTRUDER in the solitary room, rippled on the bare walls, mysterious and beautiful. Time had ceased to have meaning. The old woman who was both nurse and maid fed Titus and his companion. As the food became more solid, so Titus felt his strength returning.
He had ceased to call out his name, and had used the long hours of silence to return over and over again to his childhood, and to his more immediate past, conscious always of the dark beauty watching him. There was no communication, only silence, which he realised was no longer lonely. He learned to enjoy the quiet but his youthful spirit could not be damped down or put out like the dying embers of a fire. He longed to rejoin life, to tread the perilous path of the living.
There came a day when the old toothless woman placed in front of him food that he was to tackle himself. Like a clown, she mimed the movements of eating and as she watched his clumsy, inelegant jostling of food into his mouth, she nodded her head with pleasure. A great soft cream paw laid itself gently on his knees, and he saw what he must have heard when he was lifted out of oblivion: a huge but gentle dog. A soft, sensuous muzzle nudged his cheek, yelped a little and nestled under his chin.
I am me . . . I am alive . . . I am beginning again.
‘Who are you?’ he shouted, knowing that his question would remain unanswered. ‘What can I do to bring life into these limbs?’
As Titus pushed back the coverings of his pallet bed, this time his two sticks felt a quiver of sentience in them. He was careful – he knew that it was only time that would bring back to him the movements he had always taken for granted.
The dog bounced excitedly, like a child filled with joy at the promise of a feast and his eyes turned expectantly on Titus.
A door was open and through it came a world from outside, a mild sun, a small breeze, a gentle tongue that licked his cheeks and his unused legs.
Oh, I want to live. I want to be alive.
Longing to stretch from foot to crown, Titus launched himself on to the stone floor and this time he did not fall. He had somewhere to go. Although his movements were that of an old man, his brain, and all his stirrings – his body and its needs – were those of a young man, deprived for too long of its necessities.
He clung to the huge dog, his arms round its neck, as it propelled him, screaming inwardly with desire, towards the bed opposite. The limping journey from pallet to pallet seemed to take an eternity.
He lay, panting, at the foot of her bed. The dog whined as Titus tried to stand, trod on its front paw and fell across the bed. ‘I want you.’ He lay across the tiny limbs, sighing. Frustrated tears streamed down his cheeks. ‘Who are you?’ Beneath the bedclothes was the faintest stirring. Was it a hand? The flutter of a butterfly traced its wings across his eyelids, down his hollow cheeks, on to his thin lips and over his chin, and stayed itself round the unshaven neck.
Adventure had begun again. He had awakened to a new life.
6
Awakening Is Sweet Sorrow
THE DOOR WAS wide open. Whiteness had given place to the brilliant green that presages the torrent of living. Sounds of humans: a horn, unlike the haunting alarms at sea, echoed around the mountains, sweet, deep and eloquent. Through the open door poured sunlight of such intensity that Titus was impelled to shriek, as a baby new born hails its own entrance into the world.
He saw a movement across the room – everything was awakening. He heard birdsong – he heard sounds that he could not place – muscular, masculine sounds. A saw cutting through logs – a double-edged saw – voices shouting to each other with the glory of sunshine.
He wished to be at one with those voices and his determination took him stumbling, crawling, undignified to the open door.
He gazed, as one who had been blinded, at the stupendous beauty of nature. His eyes could only take in so small a part of what there was to be seen.
He might have toppled over the mountains that surrounded him, as he drank in the air, the sky, the deep green of the trees, but for arms that held him and laid him gently on a bench, roughly hewn, and placed in his hand a mug that was lifted to his lips and, as he drank, his body and his mind were suffused with gratitude.
At his feet lay the warmth that had nestled him and nursed him through the months of cold fatigue. He glanced down and a paw, gentle and huge, laid itself upon his knee. He turned his head to the right and a thrill like a shriek of lightning coursed through his body, as he saw beside him those dark eyes devouring him.
Titus knew now that speech was no longer efficacious. He put down the mug, and found a hand, ready to take his own – a gentle, frail and blue-veined hand, which clung to his as though it had been stitched by a surgeon on to his.