The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2. Adam Thirlwell

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СКАЧАТЬ you think they’ll send an aeroplane?’ Louise asked after breakfast the next morning. ‘There was a noise then …’

      ‘I doubt it,’ Lowry said. He gazed up at the empty sky. ‘We didn’t ask for one. The landing field at Taxcol is disused. During the summer the harbour drains and everyone moves up-coast.’

      ‘There’ll be a doctor, surely? Not everyone will have gone?’

      ‘Yes, there’s a doctor. There’s one permanently attached to the port authority.’

      ‘A drunken fool,’ Gifford interjected. ‘I refuse to let him touch me with his poxy hands. Forget about the doctor, Louise. Even if someone is prepared to come out here, how do you think he’ll manage it?’

      ‘But Charles –’

      Gifford gestured irritably at the glistening mudbanks. ‘The whole delta is draining like a dirty bath, no one is going to risk a stiff dose of malaria just to put a splint on my ankle. Anyway, that boy Mechippe sent is probably still hanging around here somewhere.’

      ‘But Mechippe insisted he was reliable.’ Louise looked down helplessly at her husband propped against the back of the stretcher-chair. ‘Dick, I wish you could have gone with him. It’s only fifty miles. You would have been there by now.’

      Lowry nodded uneasily. ‘Well, I didn’t think … I’m sure everything will be all right. How is the leg, sir?’

      ‘Just dandy.’ Gifford had been staring out across the delta. He noticed Lowry peering down at him with a long puckered face. ‘What’s the matter, Richard? Does the smell offend you?’ Suddenly exasperated, he snapped: ‘Do me a favour and take a walk, dear chap.’

      ‘What –?’ Lowry stared at him uncertainly. ‘Of course, Doctor.’

      Gifford watched Lowry’s neatly groomed figure walk away stiffly among the tents. ‘He’s awfully correct, isn’t he? But he doesn’t know how to take an insult yet. I’ll see that he gets plenty of practice.’

      Louise slowly shook her head. ‘Do you have to, Charles? Without him we’d be in rather a spot, you know. I don’t think you’re being very fair.’

      ‘Fair?’ Gifford repeated the word with a grimace. ‘What are you talking about? For God’s sake, Louise.’

      ‘All right then,’ his wife replied patiently. ‘I don’t think you should blame Richard for what’s happened.’

      ‘I don’t. Is that what your dear Dick suggests? Now that this thing is beginning to smell he’s trying to throw his guilt back on to me.’

      ‘He is not –’

      Gifford petulantly thumped the wicker elbow rest. ‘He damned well is!’ He gazed up darkly at his wife, his thin twisted mouth framed by the rim of beard. ‘Don’t worry, my dear, you will too by the time this thing is finished.’

      ‘Charles, please …’

      ‘Who cares, anyway?’ Gifford lay back weakly for a moment, and then, as he recovered, a curious feeling of light-headed and almost euphoric calm coming over him, began again: ‘Dr Richard Lowry. How he loves his doctorate. I wouldn’t have had the nerve at his age. A third-rate PhD for work that I did for him, and he styles himself “Doctor”.’

      ‘So do you.’

      ‘Don’t be a fool. I can remember when at least two Chairs were offered to me.’

      ‘But you couldn’t degrade yourself by accepting them,’ his wife commented, a trace of irony in her voice.

      ‘No, I could not,’ Gifford attested vehemently. ‘Do you know what Cambridge is like, Louise? It’s packed with Richard Lowrys! Besides, I had a far better idea. I married a rich wife. She was charming, beautiful, and in a slightly ambiguous way respected my moody brilliance, but above all she was rich.’

      ‘How pleasant for you.’

      ‘People who marry for money earn it. I really earned mine.’

      ‘Thank you, Charles.’

      Gifford chuckled to himself. ‘One thing, Louise, you do know how to take an insult. It’s a matter of breeding. I’m surprised you aren’t more choosy over Lowry.’

      ‘Choosy?’ Louise laughed awkwardly. ‘I hadn’t realized that I’d chosen him. I think Richard is very obliging and helpful – as you knew when you made him your assistant, by the way.’

      Gifford began to compose his reply, when a sudden chill enveloped his chest and shoulders. He pulled weakly at the blanket, an immense feeling of fatigue and inertia overtaking him. He looked up glassily at his wife, their bickering conversation forgotten. The sunlight had vanished, and a profound darkness lay over the face of the delta, illuminated for a brief interval by the seething outlines of thousands of snakes. Trying to capture the image in his eyes, he struggled forward against the incubus pressing upon his chest, and then slid backwards into a pit of nausea and giddiness. ‘Louise … !’

      Quickly his wife’s hands were on his own, her shoulder supporting his head. He vomited emptily, struggling with his contracting musculature like a snake trying to shed its skin. Dimly he heard his wife shout for someone and the cradle topple to the ground, dragging the bedclothes with it.

      ‘Louise,’ he whispered, ‘one of these nights … I want you to take me down to the snakes.’

      Now and then, during the afternoon, when the pain in his foot became acute, he would wake to find Louise sitting beside him. All the while he moved through ceaseless dreams, sinking from one plane of reverie to the next, the great mandalas guiding him downwards, enthroning him upon their luminous dials.

      During the next few days the conversations with his wife were less frequent. As his condition deteriorated, Gifford felt able to do little more than stare out across the mud-flats, almost unaware of the movement and arguments around him. His wife and Mechippe formed a tenuous bridge with reality, but the true centre of his attention was the nexus of beaches on to which the snakes emerged in the evenings. This was a zone of complete timelessness, where at last he sensed the simultaneity of all time, the coexistence of all events in his past life.

      The snakes now made their appearance half an hour earlier. Once he caught a glimpse of their motionless albino forms exposed on the slopes in the hot noon air. Their chalk-white skins and raised heads, in a reclining posture very like his own, made them seem immeasurably ancient, like the white sphinxes in the funeral corridors to the pharaonic tombs at Karnak.

      Although his strength had ebbed markedly, the infection on his foot had spread only a few inches above the ankle, and Louise Gifford realized that her husband’s deterioration was a symptom of a profound psychological malaise, the mal de passage induced by the potently atmospheric landscape and its evocation of the lagoon-world of the Paleocene. She suggested to Gifford during one of his lucid intervals that they move the camp half a mile across the plain into the shadow of the ridge, near the Toltec terrace city where she and Lowry carried out their archaeological work.

      But Gifford had refused, reluctant to leave the snakes on the beach. For some reason he disliked the terrace city. This was not because it was there that he had inflicted on himself the wound which now threatened his life. That this was СКАЧАТЬ