Return of the Sphinx, page 7
In the prison camp after Alan was released from the hospital he and Gabriel had come to know one another and had uttered things that normally two men like them would never have said. Gabriel told Alan of his English wife and said their marriage had been a mistake, simply sex and an incompatibility so fundamental he dreaded returning to her after the war was over. Alan said quite simply, one night after dark when they were speaking in whispers while the others slept, that Constance had been his salvation. “Without her I’d have cracked up long ago. It was wicked of me to have gone to the war and left her. Why did I do it? Why do I do so many of these things I do?”
Also he had spoken of Canada in a homesick way full of a curious mixture of longing and deprecation. He wanted it to be so much more than it was. Apparently he had been all over the vast land. He spoke about the thousands of empty lakes in the north and the sense of infinity that lies in a hush over the deltas of huge northern rivers, the deltas swarming with millions of wild fowl, of prairie sloughs ringing with bird songs after the snow melts in the spring, and he wondered if the people would ever become worthy of a land like that. He told Gabriel about one of his early training lights in the west. It was winter and he had flown east against the direction of the sun, and after sunset the plane was in a limbo between day and night. Ahead was night, but behind the plane the western sky was a deep, dense band of orange-red between the purple of the upper darkness and the whiteness of the snow-covered earth, the scene below as empty as the frozen Arctic Ocean, the prairie a sea of snow stained faintly orange from the band of light in the west. Then suddenly, majestically, there appeared a many-pointed, star-shaped brooch in the sea of snow, all of it bronze-gold and shining, and it was the city of Winnipeg. The plane flew on; the city passed below in slow motion; the star-shaped brooch of the city receded into the west as though it were moving and the plane were still, and then there was nothing underneath the aircraft but scattered pin-pricks of light. “Farmers milking their cows in barns. Housewives in their kitchens. Soon there was nothing at all.”
That same night in the prison camp in Germany he talked about the son who had been born after he had gone away. He talked of him wonderingly as though he could not really believe that he had a son.
How to assess a man like this? As Gabriel saw Ainslie, he was too many-sided to be absolutely solid in anything. Almost a writer, but never a professional one. An apparently brilliant career in External Affairs thrown away because he had suddenly believed there was more urgent work outside of it. An excellent editor, yet all the time he was running the magazine he had known that the American stranglehold on advertising revenues in his own country was sure, ultimately, to starve it out of existence. To Gabriel, he seemed to love this huge, mostly unknown country as some people love the idea of growth in a child, and in this respect Gabriel believed he was much closer to what the politicians called “the people” than any of the professional politicians could ever be. He wondered if Alan understood the real difference between his love of the country and theirs – that they loved it mainly for the opportunities it gave them to practice their trade.
Gabriel finished his drink, hesitated about another but did not take it. He put the decanter away, took his glass out to the kitchen and rinsed it, turned off the record-player and left the house to eat his dinner in a small restaurant nearby. Liquor was not much good to him any more.
THREE
Haze of a summer twilight hot and heavy; remnants of a sunset smoldering behind Mount Royal but the city purplish and unnaturally livid; streets all-but-empty caverns charged with hot, humid air contaminated by carbon monoxide; a sports car with two crew-cut boys and two girls roaring up the curve of the street with screaming tires and the girls’ pony tails flying out like pennons. History was a pursuer, a slow but inexorable pursuer moving heavily from continent to continent. Out of France before Hitler, out of Saigon before the Japanese, out of the youthful Australia through the youthful Canada into an England fighting for nothing more than her life, then back in Canada again, and was history once more on the point of hunting him down? The heat and the humidity, even the hour of the day, took his mind back to the evening when he had been shipwrecked outside the Malacca Strait and he and the retired English colonel, who had boarded the ship at Singapore less than two days earlier, were talking together as though they had known one another for years, both of them leaning against the railing while they watched the twilight deepen over a glassy sea.
“Odd to think it’s all over,” the colonel was saying. “Very difficult to believe, actually. Your chaps packing up in Indo-China now, ours in the F.M.S. tomorrow. India’ll be the next to go. But she’s not gone yet and I’ve made arrangements for one more pig-sticking party up country before the Monkeys come in and the curtain falls for good. Why don’t you join me?”
Gabriel told him he’d never done any pig-sticking.
“I’ve always said you Frenchmen never quite understood how to enjoy your colonies. I suppose you went for tiger. I did too, at first, but after my first pig, never again. A hundredweight and a half of wild pig, when he breaks” – the colonel sighed. “It’s a damned shame, really. The Huns, the Ruskies, the Yanks and the Monkeys, they’ll never enjoy their colonies. They’ll upset and ruin the natives – mark my words you’re going to live to see them do it. The Ruskies’ll turn them into factory hands and the Yanks’ll have them all drinking Coca-Cola. They’ll never even bother to learn how to enjoy a colony.”
The colonel had a bristly white moustache and white hair, protuberant front teeth and an expression of rare sweetness in a face so florid he reminded Gabriel of a badger dipped in tomato juice. He was almost too perfectly cast to be real and Gabriel, thinking of his father, felt very tender toward the old man. This English colonel was still boyish at seventy; his own father, the French colonel, had probably ceased being boyish at ten. Yet both of them could shake hands in heaven if there was one.
“Has it ever occurred to you,” the colonel asked him, “that everything on this blasted ship is just a little too exaggerated to be true?”
“The first time I saw her in Saigon I was almost afraid to board her. She looks like something out of a Conrad novel.”
“Never read Conrad but I dare say you’re right. This captain now – I’ll wager you half a guinea that when he left Belgium the police were after him.”
Gabriel agreed that this might well be true. The captain shaved only when he felt like it, he smelled sourly of opium and he punctuated the day by unnecessary announcements delivered from the bridge by megaphone. The decks and even the companionways of the ancient vessel were jammed with Europeans who had been in the East so long they could imagine themselves living nowhere else. They had come to the end of the meaning in their lives and they knew it – they could even read it in each other’s faces – but they all assured each other they would come back to their plantations and businesses when the troubles blew over. The ship was bound for Calcutta and Gabriel told the colonel that as soon as he got there he intended to enlist in the RAF if they would take him.
“They’ll take you all right,” the colonel said gloomily. “Those RAAF types will take anyone they can get these days. It’s going to be their war, I’m afraid.” The colonel perked up a little. “I’ve not entirely given up hope of getting into it myself, you know. I know India jolly well and don’t you believe all this you hear about them lying down if the Monkeys come in. If the Monkeys come in, the Indians are going to fight them.”
They never reached Calcutta. The captain had been jittery ever since leaving Saigon. “He’s afraid the Monkeys are going to take away his pipe,” the colonel explained. And when he sighted the ugly silhouette of a Japanese heavy cruiser against the sunset he changed course and ran for cover behind some small islands on his port bow. “Bloody fool!” was the colonel’s comment on this. “The worst possible thing to do. Never turn tail to a tiger, a fighting pig or a native.” In the shallow water behind the nearest island the ship ran over a submerged rock which slit her bottom as neatly as a fisherman’s knife guts a codfish. The captain then lost his head entirely and announced over his megaphone that he was putting back to Singapore for repairs. They foundered at midnight out of sight of any kind of land and the ship went down so levelly that the boats floated off the deck by themselves, the crew cutting the ropes with axes because all but one of the davits were locked fast in rust. Afterwards they rested the night on an ocean velvet-soft, gently undulant and profound with the luminosity of millions of stars. All responsibility was gone. Without a single thing left to which he could sensibly attach his loyalty, with nothing he could even imagine himself doing to help anyone or anything, Gabriel felt a mysterious peace. Odors of spice trees drifted to them across the water and he almost fell asleep. The bodies of graceful girls floated through his mind and were pleasant to contemplate because he knew now that he would never meet any of them. He was back-to-back with the colonel, half-dozing with his hand trailing overside in a milk-warm sea, when he heard the colonel’s voice.
“I’d take my hand out of the water if I were you.”
“But it’s very comfortable in the water.”
“Make a recce over the side, my boy.”
Gabriel did so and stared into the slit eyes of a tiger shark that was nuzzling the boards of the lifeboat.
The next day a Dutch steamer picked them up and took them slowly to Australia, where Gabriel still found himself when the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor.
All this had happened years ago, but on this tropical night in Montreal the memory of it seemed more real than his present life. He kept passing people fanning themselves with folded newspapers, the people sitting on doorsteps which only two months ago had been crusted with snow and ice. The humid heat had brought out trillions of insects that swarmed and incinerated themselves in death-dances about the hot glass of the street lamps so that the coverings of all the lights were like quivering brown mats. The new skyscrapers on Dorchester Street were alight and the searchlights on the top of the most ambitious among them revolved over the city like the spokes of a turning wheel three miles in diameter. A thin-buttocked boy in jeans and a fat-buttocked girl in leotards embraced each other frantically in the entrance to a closed office building and soon he was passing the long stone wall enclosing the gray-stone edifice of Le Grand Séminaire des Messieurs de Saint-Sulpice and he saw in the lighted frames of the windows the black outlines of the heads and shoulders of student priests staring out into the tropic night. His suit was damp when he reached home so he undressed and showered for the fourth time that day, put on freshly laundered pajamas and settled into his usual chair with a book.
It had been such a long time, it had been such a flash of time, that nothing real seemed to have happened since 1945. Here he sat. The peak in Dauphiné which one of his aunts, the mad one, had told him was the dying Negro Warrior, the huge Negro Warrior who had turned into a cliff above the valley where they lived, with his shoulders propped against the sunsets looking down on everyone who had ever been there – on Caesar’s legions marching to Geneva through the land of the Allobroges, on Napoleon riding north for his last gamble, on the maquis who had come down out of the high valley behind the Negro to blow up the German lorries in 1943 – that Negro Warrior who would still be there after the bombs were dropped and the memories extinguished forever. Gabriel heard the noise of insects mating in the garden, the heavy slither under the jungle fronds of a hamadryad hunting rats in the night; he smelled the fragrance of the white nicotianas which had opened wide in the dark, and then the doorbell, sudden and fierce as a dentist’s drill, brought him up with a jerk and he rushed to the cupboard and put on a light cotton dressing gown over his pajamas. He opened the door and Chantal Ainslie stood there.
FOUR
“Gabriel, please forgive me for breaking in on you like this. I know I should have telephoned first.” Noting him in dressing gown and pajamas, she added, “Were you just going to bed?”
His heart gave a flip of joy and he said, “Chantal, how lovely to see you! And how sweet of you to think of coming at all! I’ve just been sitting here half-asleep from boredom, hoping for a miracle.”
She laid a small handbag on a table near the door, gave a touch to her hair and extended her cheek for him to kiss. “How could I have known there wouldn’t be somebody else here before me?” she said.
“Well, now you know there isn’t.”
“I’ve been worried about you, Gabriel. You’re never seen out with anyone any more. I’ve heard you’re living like a dormouse.”
He turned on another light but she asked him to shut it off, saying that the room seemed cooler in semi-darkness. She moved lightly about and came to rest beside a high, dark armoire where he kept his china and liquor, and passed her hand over wood satin-smooth from the polishing of three centuries of human hands.
“How I crave this old furniture of yours, Gabriel!”
“Too many memories about it, Chantal. Sometimes I wish I’d left it in France.”
She went to the open door and stood breathing in the fragrance of the flowers.
“Are those little white stars out there nicotianas?”
“My landlady says she planted them specially for me because they’re night flowers and I’m only here at night.”
“She sounds a lovely person for a landlady.”
“She is. Now, what would you like to drink?”
“I’d adore a gin and tonic if you have one. I almost never drink after dinner, but this is a very strange night.”
As he got out the bottles and glasses he said, “I met a man this afternoon who very much admires you. His name’s Tarnley.”
“How old was he?”
“Closer to seventy than sixty, I’d guess, though he doesn’t look it.”
“That must have been the father,” she said without interest.
“He told me you’re a friend of his son.”
“I haven’t seen Guy for months. He’s a nice boy in an ineffectual way.” She turned to him. “Did you ever see that old play Outward Bound? That’s how I feel in all this queer heat. The city’s very strange suddenly. It reminds me of a puritan when the bottom falls out of his character and all those polypy things that are inside of puritans come crawling out for a Mardi Gras. I’m not exaggerating, Gabriel. I just saw a naked Negro.”
“You shouldn’t go to those places alone, Chantal.”
“He wasn’t in one of those places. He was right on a corner of Sherbrooke Street. He wasn’t entirely naked, of course, but he was certainly stripped to the waist and he was holding his shirt in his hand, just standing there. He was covered with tattoos and he was glistening all over in the lights as though he’d oiled himself.”
“He sounds like a snake-handler in the circus – if you didn’t just imagine him.”
“I certainly did not imagine him. He was too obscenely huge for anyone to imagine him. There was a funny jungle smell about him too, I thought.”
“How do you know what a jungle smells like?”
Gabriel prepared the drinks and she sat on the edge of his largest chair, a throne of a thing from the days when chairs were intended to denote gradations in rank. She told him his drink was à point and began talking in French without even noticing that she had switched her languages. He went to an easier chair and watched her pass a slender hand over hair which most people called blonde but which he thought of as French-blonde because its basic chestnut was highlighted with pale-silver in a way he associated with girls of northern France. Her mother’s hair had been ebony against a very white, soft skin. Chantal was not as handsome as her mother had been; her mouth was wide and her nose was somewhat snubbed, but she moved with her mother’s grace and was so supple she seemed double-jointed. She could be as practical and clearheaded as most French girls – at the moment she was running a small art gallery for somebody else – but there were times when the Celtic feyness she had from her father, or at least the Celtic unease in life (for her father never seemed fey to Gabriel), came to the surface and this seemed to be how she was now. Gabriel loved the straight line of her back when she sat. Her mother had taught her that.
“Do tell me something I have to know, Gabriel. Do you feel any older than the first time we met?”
“Years older.”
“You don’t look it, you know. You were thirty then, weren’t you?”
“That would be about right. Why?”
“Because it’s just occurred to me that at last I’ve caught up with you. For all practical purposes you and I are the same age now. I don’t know what it is about my generation, but ever since I was eighteen the boys of my own age have seemed like children to me. As for the ones younger than them –” Her face changed sharply. “By the way, have you seen anything of Daniel lately?”
He shook his head. “He’s been on my mind for months. I’ve been intending to ask him to lunch, but something always seems to turn up at the last moment the way it does in this city, and the few times I called your house there was no answer.”
“I’m not surprised at that. Nobody’s ever home any more.”
The world which only a few minutes ago had seemed like the dream of a tired man now was alive for him again. He really did adore this daughter of his best friend and there was an understanding between them so natural he thought it must be instinctive. Even as a very little girl, as a child, she had given him the feeling that she knew everything about him that mattered to himself even though, so far as the facts were concerned, she knew virtually nothing. They could sit together for long periods without talking, or with one of them talking and the other only half-listening. Now as she spoke of various small things his mind wandered off while his soul was totally conscious of her. He began wondering about time and how deceptive it was. For him it had passed in such a blur since the war that it did not seem to be passing at all. For Chantal, in those years, every two months must have been the equivalent of twelve months with him.
