He stared at the water. For a splintering second, he could see nothing but the swell of a great liquid mirror. He was alone in the universe, because life had decided to wait for him no longer. Then suddenly Barbara’s head broke the surface, and drops of water fell from it like dying stars. And he was no longer alone.
He wanted to call out to her, but the words would not come—not the right ones. Instead he began to tear feverishly at his clothes and shoes, hysterically afraid that he would lose something he had not even had time to know that he had found.
Avery ran down to the water, plunged in and began to swim towards her. She seemed to think it was some kind of game, for she dived away from him and was lost under the mirror. The water came up a little above his waist. He stood there uncertainly, wondering where she could be.
Barbara surfaced behind him. He spun round and gripped her shoulders. A look told her, even before he did. A strange look. An angry tenderness….
‘I love you!’ he cried in a loud and surprised voice. ‘I love you! I love you!’ He felt like a blind man with the sudden, terrible gift of sight.
‘Darling,’ whispered Barbara. ‘Oh, darling.’ She clung to him with a great fierceness, as if there was much pain to be driven away by sheer pressure before they could hold each other gently and in peace.
Presently, he carried her back to the beach. It was not a time for words. They lay down and made love with more joy than passion.
Then they talked.
And presently, Barbara said: ‘Darling…. Darling…. Love me again—please.’
And this time the passion was as great as the joy.
At first, they wanted the night to have no ending. At first, they wanted to smash the invisible glass of time with a tremendous hammer blow of love. But then it came upon them—a discovery that seemed, itself, to be time-shattering—that love need not end with the night, that it could rise with the sun, blaze radiantly at noon, stir mysteriously and darkly with the shadows of evening.
They discovered, as for the first time, the impossible unending promise of tomorrow.
Presently, aching with all the pleasurable aches of passion, dazed and even joyously hurt with the sharpness of their love, they managed to get as far as the sleeping bag—and then shared and joined and finally demolished the two separate lonelinesses of their lives, in the short remaining hours of darkness.
TWENTY
Avery and Barbara got back to Camp Two just before sunset on the third day. They came back from the opposite direction in which they had set out. Avery had proved his pet theory that they were living on an island.
But the trip had been a journey of exploration in more senses than one; for he and Barbara had found each other. After months of sharing the same predicament, the same uncertainties and achievements—and the same tent—they had become so familiar with each other that familiarity itself had become a barrier. Familiarity and the unseen presence of Christine.
Not that the memory of Christine was now dead. But it was no longer a private thing. It was a small, enclosed world that Avery at last wanted to share—a poignant fragment of history that belonged to Barbara as much as to him. It belonged now to Barbara because it belonged to her understanding of him. It had dominated his life, had helped to make him what he was; and because of that it would become part of their shared life also.
There was so much now to share, and they were hungry for sharing. They wanted to know about each other’s childhood, each other’s work, each other’s ambitions. They wanted to capture the essence of all the separate years there had been before those curious crystals, lurking in a winter landscape, had started the sequence of events that brought them together on a world beyond the world’s end.
For them, love had been a kind of explosion. They were suffering from a spiritual concussion; and they knew, happily, that it would be a long time before they could settle down to accept it calmly.
However, the shared delirium did not hinder them from carrying out Avery’s original project. It merely turned it into a different kind of adventure—a double exploration.
That first morning they slept until the sun was well above the horizon; and, on waking, their first need was to make love again—perhaps to assure themselves that the discoveries of the night had not ended with the night.
It was a different kind of lovemaking. The physical desire was not so great. It was a lovemaking with much affection and much tenderness. They talked and even made fun of each other. Only at the climax, when they both seemed to be briefly lost inside a warm, bouncing ball of darkness, were they silent. Immediately afterwards, there was laughter and light.
‘Darling, we shall have to stop this,’ panted Avery. ‘Otherwise we shall be crawling back to Camp Two on our knees and with our tails between our legs.’
‘With your tail between my legs,’ said Barbara impishly. ‘I don’t ever want to stop. Nobody told me it could be this nice…. Maybe that’s because nobody knows.’
But they did manage to stop—by a great effort of willpower. Avery found some fruit, and they had breakfast— still naked, still unable to resist touching each other. Despite the fruit, they were very thirsty; but they did not find any drinking water until they had travelled two or three miles.
They marched conscientiously until after the sun had passed its zenith. Then they had another meal, and the heat of the afternoon provided an excuse for a siesta; and the siesta provided an excuse for more lovemaking.
They were bathed in sweat. Their sweat mingled. They gasped with the lovely, compulsive exertion; and the mingled scent of their bodies became an overwhelming aura; itself the most subtle of all aphrodisiacs.
As soon as the sun was touching the seaward horizon, they went down to the water and lay in the shallows for a while, hand in hand, recovering themselves. Then with the coming of twilight, they resumed the journey.
So far they had seen no trace of the golden people and very few animals—none of the dangerous ones. Perhaps it was, as Barbara had suggested, that, for once, a benevolent deity had carefully arranged matters for their benefit, as a form of compensation for past ordeals. They seemed to be truly alone in a world that had been specially created to allow men and women to discover each other.
As they walked at a very leisurely pace through the early evening, Avery began to have a mild and halfhearted attack of conscience. He felt, as he put it, that they really ought to have been ‘a trifle more scientific’ about the whole project.
‘I thought we were being scientific,’ said Barbara wickedly. ‘We have just about tried every reasonable position that comes to mind.’
‘Darling, you’re sex-crazed. You know damn well what I mean…. We should have done about three miles on the coast, then a mile inland, then another three along the coast, and so on As it is, I don’t even know how far we’ve come.’
‘As it is,’ retorted Barbara, ‘I don’t even care.’
But their carefree attitude nearly led them into trouble. They had been strolling lazily along the coast for about four hours—with occasional rests—when they rounded a small headland. They were both being drawn into an almost hypnotic state by dancing patterns of moonlight on the sea; and so they did not notice the camp of the golden people until they were within fifty yards of it. If there had not been a fire to attract their attention, they might either have missed it altogether or walked straight into it.
Avery saw the fire a split second before Barbara. There was no need to tell her what to do. Half-crouching, they backtracked and then made for the cover of the nearby cliff. Its base was strewn with slabs of rock and large boulders. It was not a high cliff, and it did not seem difficult to climb. Avery had an idea.