The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2. Adam Thirlwell

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ sodas. And some more chairs. Where’s Mrs Gifford?’

      He glanced up at Mechippe when he failed to reply. Briefly their eyes met, in an instant of absolute clarity. Fifteen years earlier, when Gifford had come to the delta with his first archaeological expedition, Mechippe had been one of the junior camp-followers. Now he was in the late middle age of the Indian, the notches on his cheeks lost in the deep hatchwork of lines and scars, wise in the tent-lore of the visitors.

      ‘Miss’ Gifford – resting,’ he said cryptically. In an attempt to alter the tempo and direction of their dialogue, he added: ‘I tell Mr Lowry, then bring whiskies and hot towel, Doctor.’

      ‘Okay, Mechippe.’ Lying back with an ironic smile, Gifford listened to the head-boy’s footsteps move away softly through the sand. The muted sounds of the camp stirred around him – the cooling plash of water in the shower stall, the soft interchanges of the Indians, the whining of a desert dog waiting to approach the refuse dump – and he sank downwards into the thin tired body stretched out in front of him like a collection of bones in a carpet bag, rekindling the fading senses of touch and pressure in his limbs.

      In the moonlight, the white beaches of the delta glistened like banks of luminous chalk, the snakes festering on the slope like the worshippers of a midnight sun.

      Half an hour later they drank their whiskies together in the dark tinted air. Revived by Mechippe’s massage, Charles Gifford sat upright in the stretcher-chair, gesturing with his glass. The whisky had momentarily cleared his brain; usually he was reluctant to discuss the snakes in his wife’s presence, let alone Lowry’s, but the marked increase in their numbers seemed important enough to mention. There was also the mildly malicious pleasure – less amusing now than it had been – of seeing Louise shudder at any mention of the snakes.

      ‘What is so unusual,’ he explained, ‘is the way they emerge on to the banks at the same time. There must be a precise level of luminosity, an exact number of photons, to which they all respond – presumably an innate trigger.’

      Dr Richard Lowry, Gifford’s assistant and since his accident the acting leader of the expedition, watched Gifford uncomfortably from the edge of his canvas chair, rotating his glass below his long nose. He had been placed downwind from the loose bandages swaddling Gifford’s foot (little revenges of this kind, however childish, alone sustained Gifford’s interest in the people around him), and carefully averted his face as he asked: ‘But why the sudden increase in numbers? A month ago there was barely a snake in sight?’

      ‘Dick, please!’ Louise Gifford turned an expression of martyred weariness on Lowry. ‘Must we?’

      ‘There’s an obvious answer,’ Gifford said to Lowry. ‘During the summer the delta drains, and begins to look like the half-empty lagoons that were here 50 million years ago. The giant amphibians had died out, and the small reptiles were the dominant species. These snakes are probably carrying around what is virtually a coded internal landscape, a picture of the Paleocene as sharp as our own memories of New York and London.’ He turned to his wife, the shadows cast by the distant refuse fire hollowing his cheeks. ‘What’s the matter, Louise? Don’t say you can’t remember New York and London?’

      ‘I don’t know whether I can or not.’ She pushed a lock of fraying blonde hair off her forehead. ‘I wish you wouldn’t think about the snakes all the time.’

      ‘Well, I’m beginning to understand them. I was always baffled by the way they’d appear at the same time. Besides, there’s nothing else to do. I don’t want to sit here staring at that damned Toltec ruin of yours.’

      He gestured towards the low ridge of sandstone, its profile illuminated against the white moonlit clouds, which marked the margins of the alluvial bench half a mile from the camp. Before Gifford’s accident their chairs had faced the ruined terrace city emerging from the thistles which covered the ridge. But Gifford had tired of staring all day at the crumbling galleries and colonnades where his wife and Lowry worked together. He told Mechippe to dismantle the tent and turn it through ninety degrees, so that he could watch the last light of the sunset fading over the western delta. The burning refuse fires they now faced provided at least a few wisps of motion. Gazing for hours across the endless creeks and mud-banks, whose winding outlines became more and more serpentine as the summer drought persisted and the level of the water table fell, he had one evening discovered the snakes.

      ‘Surely it’s simply a shortage of dissolved oxygen,’ Lowry commented. He noticed Gifford regarding him with an expression of critical distaste, and added: ‘Jung believes the snake is primarily a symbol of the unconscious, and that its appearance always heralds a crisis in the psyche.’

      ‘I suppose I accept that,’ Charles Gifford said. With rather forced laughter he added, shaking his foot in the cradle: ‘I have to. Don’t I, Louise?’ Before his wife, who was watching the fires with a distracted expression, could reply he went on: ‘Though in fact I disagree with Jung. For me the snake is a symbol of transformation. Every evening at sunset the great lagoons of the Paleocene are re-created here, not only for the snakes but for you and I too, if we care to look. Not for nothing is the snake a symbol of wisdom.’

      Richard Lowry frowned doubtfully into his glass. ‘I’m not convinced, sir. It was primitive man who had to assimilate events in the external world to his own psyche.’

      ‘Absolutely right,’ Gifford rejoined. ‘How else is nature meaningful, unless she illustrates some inner experience? The only real landscapes are the internal ones, or the external projections of them, such as this delta.’ He passed his empty glass to his wife. ‘Agree, Louise? Though perhaps you take a Freudian view of the snakes?’

      This thin jibe, uttered with the cold humour which had become characteristic of Gifford, brought their conversation to a halt. Restlessly, Lowry looked at his watch, eager to be away from Gifford and his pathetic boorishness. Gifford, a cold smirk on his lips, waited for Lowry to catch his eye; by a curious paradox his dislike of his assistant was encouraged by the latter’s reluctance to retaliate, rather than by the still ambiguous but crystallizing relationship between Lowry and Louise. Lowry’s meticulous neutrality and good manners seemed to Gifford an attempt to preserve a world on which Gifford had turned his back, that world where there were no snakes on the beaches and where events moved on a single plane of time like the blurred projection of a three-dimensional object by a defective camera obscura.

      Lowry’s politeness was also, of course, an attempt to shield himself and Louise from Gifford’s waspish tongue. Like Hamlet taking advantage of his madness to insult and cross-examine anyone at will, Gifford often used the exhausted half-lucid interval after his fever subsided to make his more pointed comments. As he emerged from the penumbral shallows, the looming figures of his wife and assistant still surrounded by the rotating mandalas he saw in his dreams, he would give full rein to his tortured humour. That in this way he was helping his wife and Lowry towards an inevitable climax only encouraged Gifford.

      His long farewell to Louise, protracted now for so many years, at last seemed feasible, even if only part of the greater goodbye, the vast leave-taking that Gifford was about to embark upon. The fifteen years of their marriage had been little more than a single frustrated farewell, a search for a means to an end which their own strengths of character had always prevented.

      Looking up at Louise’s sun-grazed but still handsome profile, at her fading blonde hair swept back off her angular shoulders, Gifford realized that his dislike of her was in no way personal, but merely part of the cordial distaste he felt for almost the entire human race. And even this deeply ingrained misanthropy was only a reflection of his own undying self-contempt. If there were few people whom he had ever liked, there were, equally, few moments during which he had ever liked himself. His entire life as an archaeologist, СКАЧАТЬ