In Another Country (3 page)

Supper was cooking. Lou heard Owen on the telephone in the kitchen. He seemed to be making an arrangement. She stood by the hearth and looked at the two photographs that were the only things on the mantelpiece: two young women, one from many years ago, in a loose dress patterned with what might be jasmine; the other modern, in the same style of dress, doubtless from a charity shop. Owen came in. Have you had to rearrange your evening because of me? she asked. Yes, he said, and I'm glad. I was supposed to be keeping watch tonight, but I've swapped my shift, I'll do it tomorrow. Keeping watch? The lady's slipper, he said. There's a patch not far from here, I'll show you in the morning if you like. The last, or the first, it depends. We have to guard them all day and at nights. People know and would come and dig them up. So you lie out under the moon and stars and keep watch? It's my job, he said. Sort of. Once it was ospreys, now it's the lady's slipper. I see, said Lou.

Then Owen said, Can you see any family resemblance? He nodded at the photographs. Yes I can, said Lou. The smile, their eyes. The two women, side by side, looked out hesitantly and confidently, as though fearful of their own appeal, at whoever would look at them. They are both very beautiful, Lou said. She could remember Maya in that look, too beautiful, nervous at the power of it. Yes, said Owen. They are both eighteen. That one's my mother sixty years ago. The other's my daughter twelve years ago. Lou looked closely, from the photographs to him and back again. Yes, she said, I do see the likeness. And where are they now? My mother is in Manchester, I see her once a fortnight. Natalie, I don't know where she is. I never see her. Never? I did three times in the year of that photograph. I stood outside her college and watched her go in. But never since. I was afraid she would notice. Nor could I bear it. And I promised, you see. She's not allowed to know. I promised her mother. She thinks the man at home is her father. He thinks so too. I see, said Lou.

Owen gave her some wine. We don't know much, do we? About one another, I mean. We don't ask, said Lou. I would always tell you if you asked. But saying that she thought, I'm an entrance into nothingness so put your questions softly or the earth will open up. But you, she said. I always supposed you must be very deep and now you tell me there's a grown-up daughter in you, so I was right. Owen shrugged. Except she's not, he said. Her absence is. I like you in that dress.

That night Lou couldn't sleep. The house was friendly, all its small noises were kind, the village felt homely, she could hear a stream, finding down to the river below. All evening he had been gentle, they were easy with one another, their talk went to and fro quietly and clear. Everything was kind. But the sadness came back on her, sadness and terror. She saw the two young women, girls of eighteen, the mother, the daughter, hesitant but sure of themselves, fearful of their beauty but trusting it, looking out. And herself she saw whirling in panic through a hole in the years into loveless space. She lay in the neat white bed in the hospitable room and shook from head to toe, she writhed, she dug her nails into her palms. Then she said aloud, This is foolish, he is my friend, I am sure of that at least, he will not take it amiss. She got out of bed and viewed her ghost in the long mirror naked, white, thin, clutching its shoulders. And at that she slipped on the red dress and went in to him. He was asleep. She woke him. Owen, she said, let me be with you, please. I can't sleep, I'm shaking to bits again. Hush, he said. Hush now. What is it? Come in here, we'll sleep.

 

In the bare landscape, in the expectation of the particular place ahead of her, Lou's feelings rose and widened. Between the two simple planes of earth and sky she entered a happiness she imagined most people had enjoyed, and many could still go back to, in childhood. The ground delighted her, the rock so evident through its pelt of grass, the blood-red cranesbill, the tufts of thyme and many more such graces over the vast deposits of sea-lily stone. And the sky, as a child might paint it, white clouds pasturing on blue, larks dangling. There's something else you don't know about me, she said. Owen waited. I was in the Bach choir once. Prove it, he said. Stand there on that pulpit stone and sing. Lou stood, folded her hands like a penitent, looked up to heaven and sang:

 

When I was a bachelor, I lived all alone,

I worked at the weaver's trade

And the only, only thing that I ever did wrong

Was to love a fair young maid.

I loved her in the wintertime

And in the summer, too

And the only, only thing that I ever did wrong

Was to keep her from the foggy, foggy dew.

 

One night she came to my bedside

As I lay sound asleep.

She laid her head upon my breast

And she began to weep.

She sighed, she cried, she damn near died,

She cried, What shall I do?

So I took her into bed and I covered up her head

Just to keep her from the foggy foggy dew.

 

There she halted. Owen's look halted her. In the silence they heard the larks again, the irrepressible leaps and falls and leapings again of song. And something else, still faintly, ahead of them on the higher ground, they heard water.

They climbed. Soon the way levelled across a broad terrace where it was damper and there were orchids, tight magenta spires, and also the yellow bog myrtle; and this moistening, where the water sank, was the sign that they were getting closer to the place itself, the cave, where the water issued. Owen's few words ceased altogether. Lou paused to let him go ahead. He shrugged, made a little gesture of apology and helplessness. He was hauling back the years in broad daylight, even before they reached the cave the boy he had been was repossessing him. But Lou was not put out, she gathered her own happiness down from the sky and off the open country into this young course of water that they were climbing to the cave, its place of issue, that Owen had remembered and wanted her to know. She waved him ahead, content being in herself. The water babbled and sparkled, this was its phase of passage under the sun and moon, after the cave and before the yellow and verdant and magenta dampness, the sink. She followed Owen, who had more years in him, she watched his stepping up and up against the water hurrying down at him, higher and higher he stepped, to the cliff itself, over which the water leaped and offered itself as a rope, a silver ladder, for him and her to climb. She would always see it thus: the clear hank of living water let down over the scar for her to climb, to the phenomenon the man she loved remembered and had wanted her to see.

Owen stood up on the brink. From the last foothold, splashed by the toppling water, Lou got two good handholds, two good grips, each into wet clefts, her fingers feeling rock under the moss, and heaved herself up and through in one quick movement of pure ability and lightness. And there they stood, on a broad and stony and flowery ledge, the water sliding fast towards them, towards its fall, and nothing now ahead of them but the cave.

The cave stretched all across and came down at either end. Naturally, it resembled a mouth, but not one screaming, it was not open wide enough for that; but sighing, gasping, moaning, in pain or pleasure, yes, open that wide. The breaths coming out of it were cold. Even where she stood, on the brink with Owen, where the stream hurried over, Lou felt the cold breath of the cave. Doubtless it carried on the cold slide of water. She and Owen had that water between them, steadily fast, sliding between them to the edge, only a narrow divide they could have taken hands across. She turned from facing the cave to facing him, and saw that he was watching her very closely. They were high up, they might have relaxed side by side, looking back down the way they had come, all the way down to where the path went into the dark foliage and dived as a stream bed, dry or damp or flowing, steeply back into the river-level town. Instead, he stood staring at her, waiting, and Lou understood they had not yet arrived. The cave was astonishing in its spread, the water hurrying out of it was lucid and beautiful, the climb had been a joy; but still they were only on a threshold. Listen, he said. Then she listened to what she had been hearing, without knowing, for some minutes or perhaps for years: the sound of the cave, audible outside in the sunlight but coming from far, far in, from inside, in the immeasurable bulk of limestone behind and beyond the cave, from deep in there. That's what I heard when I came here on my own, he said. In a way I've been hearkening for it ever since. And I wanted you to hear it and myself to hear it again now with you. Then he reached across, handed her over the fast shallow stream, to his side, and led her in, under the quite abruptly downsloping roof of the cave, in till they stooped, in till they crouched, and where they could go no further, in the angle of roof and floor, there at the slit, the flat aperture, where the water emerged, they made themselves small and sat.

Though you could hear nothing else, the water behind the slit was not deafening, not at all; its force lay in the certainty that its origins were remote. When you see a star, you know that its light has travelled years to your eyes. Similarly this noise, to their ears: from remote space and time. So the commotion they could hear was the long-after sound, carrying in it the remembered horror of the making. The water, that, far back, had been in there at the making, slid out in absolute silence, shallow, clear, very fast, and bubbles rode on it, clear domes travelled out of a zone of utter darkness into the cave-light on a sliding fast surface and very soon, silently, popped, and the air in them joined the air that Owen and Lou, bowed over them, watching intently, breathed.

In the way that human beings are bound to, Lou was thinking, What is this like? And ideas came to mind, rough gestures towards the thing itself: like a heart and a pulse, though not of any beast she knew; like an engine, the thrumming of a steady
—
but varied
—
working; like an oven, a furnace, if you could think of its cold as heat. But it was easier to compare this thing whose utterance was close and that was really of the earth, to phenomena she would never be anywhere near and was at liberty merely to imagine. The background noise of space, for example, the aural context of all the galactic debris still dispersing. So Lou spun ideas, as any human would, to try to say what the sound of the cave was like; but in the midst of her ideas, despite their interference, she knew with a thrill of horror, that what she was listening to, though nameless, was familiar. So reading a poem, often what dawns on you is a thing you knew already but had forgotten or didn't know well enough and now the lines with a vengeance will remind you and make you know it this time close and true.

Owen looked mesmerized, entranced, as though his first and remembered deep impression was deepening further now and more than he could bear. Lou touched his arm, and he started. She pointed towards the daylight at the mouth of the cave and after a little moment, which seemed not a reluctance but a coming to, he nodded and followed her. They went out to the brink and sat there looking over the open land, still sunny, down to where the little town must be.

What did you do when you came here last time, Lou asked, all those years ago? I ran away, said Owen. I wanted to sleep in the cave, I had ideas of that sort. But as soon as I lay down there was only that noise behind that slit. I couldn't bear it, so I decamped. Lou said nothing. After a while Owen said, I was going to ask what you would like to do. If we left now we could be back in town before dark and perhaps find a train or a bus. Is that what you want? Lou asked. If you were here on your own again, what would you do? I don't think I'd be here on my own, said Owen. But if I were, I think I should try to stay. Then we'll stay, said Lou.

Where they sat, the water toppling over made quite a loud and cheerful noise; but behind them, as they watched the shadow extending slowly over the open land towards their heights, the noise inside the cave became, if not louder, certainly more insistent. Why did you want to listen to it again? Lou asked. Because, Owen answered, I've often
—
and in some periods constantly
—
wanted to live as though I could always hear that cave. I don't want to live forgetting there's a noise like that. I mean, in some ways it isn't so very mysterious. Somewhere inside there must be a waterfall, quite a big one. Very beautiful no doubt, if things are beautiful that nobody can see. And what we can hear is the chute, the impact, the milling, the overflowing of water through tunnels till it finds that slit. All magnified, echoing, distorted. After heavy rain it would sound different. After no rain different again. But essentially the same, for all its variations, and always strange. Like the flight of the stuff of the universe: you might grasp the principle, but the act of it, the working out, is infinitely strange. But I can talk like this because we are sitting here together facing away and the sunlight will last a while longer. Up close, in the dark, when I was a boy I understood nothing at all, I heard the noise, only that. And it would be the same today, I guess, up close in there on my own. I thought we'd sleep in the mouth, said Lou, nearer the open air. I thought the same, said Owen. Still it will be cold and loud.

The shadow was climbing. They moved along to the far corner of the cave where, as you might say, upper lip and lower met. Owen dug out from his rucksack first a bag of food, then an old army blanket. This latter resource Lou smiled at. I've got something similar, she said. From Marks & Spencer's. Not so serious, but very handy. She produced it. We can lie on that and have yours over us. She went back to the stream, filled her water bottle, and returning saw, first, that he had also fished out a bottle of wine, and, secondly, that, above his head, under the coping of stone and fern and moss, a wren had gone in to nest. The smallness of the bird
—
she could almost feel its heartbeat
—
and the constant booming and droning from in the cave, the two together, brought a rush of tears to her eyes, and she knelt down by Owen in a state he could perhaps only guess at, to take the cup of wine.