At a table outside a different café from the one where they had sat the day before and the days before that, Paul and Urchin sipped slowly at two glasses of vin blanc cassis . They had chosen -- or rather, Paul had chosen -- the other café as the least frequented of the many facing the harbour. When they had come out this morning, they had found it shuttered, its season finished. The sight had hit Paul like a blow; the strange new wind had seemed to speak to him, wheezing jeers that each blended into a contemptuous laugh.
-- Tomorrow, this one closed up. The day after, all of them?
Their road had come to an end here not because he chose the spot -- be had never heard of Louze before signposts named it for him -- but because it was in this town they had to start living off the car.
Somehow he had stretched his money through a summer pilgrimage. Urchin's first pure delight at simply being free of Chent had quickly been alloyed with dismay; discovering passports, frontier regulations, hotel registration, all the invisible shackles the world of her adoption used to bind its citizens, she was horrified, doubting her ability ever to endure such interference with her right of choice. Ashamed for his fellow creatures, Paul determined to show her another side of the picture, and displayed for her the charm, the magnificence and the luxury his own world had to offer: the cliff-hung gem of Rocamadour, the medieval walls of Carcassonne, the fortified cathedral of Albi fantastic in its rose-red sunset garb, the fashionable expensive coast resorts where a single drink might wipe out their budget for the day, the winding rocky corniches around the Estérel . . .
Eventually he would have to choose between crossing another frontier, which so far he had been afraid of doing in case the deception he had put over on the passport authorities had been reported, and taking steps towards a permanent residence here -- equally dangerous. But not today. Perhaps next week.
He had let his beard grow, and it suited him, giving a new strength to the bones of his forehead and the deep-sunk pits of his eyes -- deeper still now, for he had long lost the first contentment which had carried him through the hottest summer days. Always, at the beginning, there had been the force of passion to blot out the inevitability of the future; they had made love more often than he had dreamed possible, nightly in cheap routiers hotels, by day in the shade of trees or on the rocks of river-banks, drawing on the free energy of the sunlight to restore them when their spirits flagged.
Urchin exquisite in the skimpiest bikini she could find for him to buy, the envy of men on the most fashionable beaches, wondered aloud with a hint of sadness how anyone could be so foolish as not to swim naked -- so he found her a cove where there was no one to see and complain, but she cut her foot on a sharp stone scrambling down to it. He had thought of l'Ile du Levant, but the French Navy had claimed it for a base and closed the camp-sites down. . . .
-- There is no perfection anywhere in this my world. In Llanraw there has been no war for centuries; they would not know the purpose of a weapon.
There had been the four beatniks they met in a tiny resort as unrenowned as Louze, pleased at having evaded the immigration authorities' ban on visitors with no visible means of support by wearing presentable clothing through the customs at Boulogne, then selling what they had on and hitching south in torn jeans and sandals. They planned to sleep that night on a beach outside the town boundary; Urchin, delighted at meeting people not fettered to the law and by-law of this unfamiliar world, had insisted on keeping company with them, and to please her he had bought them food, wine and a bottle of rough brandy. So there had been a night under warm stars when he had thought the girl who came swimming fish-pale through the shallows to embrace him must be Urchin, but was not, and the next time was again not, but the first's companion, and in the morning Urchin was singing and glowing and he was afraid of himself and the days to come.
"It was almost like Llanraw," she said to explain her satisfaction, and, hearing her invoke the magic name, he had been unable to express his own unease: this other world not being like Llanraw at all.
-- I brought her away from Chent at the cost of a life's ambition and hard work because she is the only free person, free in the mind where it counts, whom I have ever met. But in my world who is freest? The rich man who can buy what he wants, up to and including immunity from the law, as witness Newton Swerd and my child (son? daughter?) gone down an impersonal drain. Perhaps the day will come when the free rich irresponsible bastard with the Ferrari and the limitless horizons . . .
That was one of the thoughts the mistral brought chill from the sea, which yesterday had smiled, now glowered at him grey with frills of white froth.
Another: -- In all these months, not once blood on the spear. I asked; she evaded; I listed the technical words, lectured, gave a course in female biology, and she evaded again. The virgin's breasts, so small my hand engulfs them, the hips of a boy not a girl despite the narrowness of the waist which makes them seem feminine in proportion, imply a freedom Iris would envy her. I think . . .
Against this one, alcohol, blessing the liberal laws of France compared to the time-now-gentlemen- if-you-please of the Needle in Haystack, but it stole through anyway and put on words like clothing.
-- I think Urchin, in whose face you can read experience and wisdom enough for her to borrow Iris's passport age of twenty-six, is in her body a prepubescent child. And sterile.
What he would have done faced with the imminence of a baby under these circumstances, he had no idea. All consequent thoughts were formless, looming at the back of his mind like thunderclouds seen lately on the horizon of this balmy sea. Before he could discern their actual nature, there would have to be a rebirth of Paul Fidler as total as that which had preceded his departure from home, work, and ancient hopes, and he shrank from that second reconstructive agony.
-- Tjachariva. Let it not happen. Let it drift on, somehow, by a succession of miracles, till I no longer care, till I have been reworked into a new strange person whose core of being is not shaped around a certain incredible girl.
And here, as of today because he had heard a chance remark from a couple passed on the way to this café, was the latest of the disturbing points he shied away from: a girl, her accent suggesting she might be German, had said to her French boy-friend in the latter's language, "J'espčre que ça n'arrive pas!"
-- And Shoemaker the philologist told me about a girl who claimed to understand Martian, only it was bastard French.
He gulped the rest of his drink angrily, as though the idea were a fire in his belly and he could put it out with liquor. Urchin's glass was still half full; as was his usual habit, he reached for it to finish it. But her hand caught his wrist to prevent him.
"I want it," she said.
He looked at her. There was an expression on her face which frightened him. Lately, since he had had to explain about getting rid of the car so that they would have enough money to carry on with, she had been drinking nearly as much as he was.
-- Why? If I knew I think I would refuse to tell myself.
He made no demur. He was coming to realise that he was always afraid of this inexplicable person to whom he had chained his life, then thrown away the key. A week or so ago he had had the first of what now amounted to almost half a dozen nightmares, different in details, sharing always the common image of her turning on him as she had turned on Faberdown, on the nurse at Blickbam, on Riley and at last on Maurice Dawkins, making some sudden hurtful move that be was powerless to guard against, leaving him sprawling on the pound while she . . . went away.
Risking it, he had traded on his British medical degree, vouched for by his passport, to obtain some sleeping tablets, and last night he had been free of the bad dreams, but at the cost of being logy this morning.
"I'd like to go for a swim," she said abruptly. "I like a rough sea."
"Go ahead, then," he muttered.
-- It would help if I could find some single physical thing I could do better than she does. While I paddle awkward in the shallows, she
goes out of sight, her stroke peculiar, a little like a crawl but with a different rhythm, or dives from rocks that make my nape crawl and explores the underside of them until I'm ready to believe she's hit her head and drowned. And as to what I've learned from her in bed . . . She'd have learned to drive equally quickly, I'm sure, but I clung to an excuse about foreigners having too much trouble with red tape when she asked about it, certain this would make her drop the suggestion. Although now we've lost the car, what difference does it make?
She had drained her glass, but made no move to go for the swim she had talked about. Across the promenade from where they sat, a policeman was strolling at leisure, swinging a long baton, his eyes on the boats in the harbour and not on them. Nonetheless Paul flinched. Some day soon there might be a hand on his shoulder; he had compounded his offences when he sold the car.
There was no market for it through regular channels. Apart from the need to get official clearances, which would have meant too many bureaucrats examining his papers, thanks to Britain's stupid insistence on driving on the left the car's controls were wrong for Continental use, and this reduced its price to a fraction of its value at home.
At last a man he suspected of being a petty criminal, met at the casino here in Louze, had made him an offer the night his plan for keeping them going let him down. He had heard from one of Iris's wealthy friends about the professional gamblers who can survive a whole season at Monte Carlo on their daily winnings, never trying to stretch their luck beyond the budget for the day's food and lodging. He had been looking presentable enough on their arrival at Louze to ask for a visitor's ticket at the casino, his beard by then being long enough to comb into neatness. Applying what he had learned of the professionals' caution -- backing only the opposite colour after a run of five or six the same, doubling up if he did not win the first time -- to Urchin's admiration he won enough to pay for their room and meals for six successive days. Then he grew overconfident, fell down on a freak run of eleven blacks, and lost even the sum he needed to renew his membership.
So the car went for a pittance to this sympathetic fellow gambler.
Leaving . . .
"Are we going to sit here all day?" Urchin demanded petulantly.
"I feel a bit dopy," Paul told her. "Go for your swim and let me sit here a while longer."
A couple of young men, in sweaters against the cool wind, walked past. They whistled at Urchin, who was wearing only a hip-long beach-wrap over her bikini. She smiled and got up, crossing the road towards the beach. Paul kept his eyes on the young men to see if they would follow her, but they walked on.
Alone, he brought out from under the table Urchin's portfolio with the handle of braided string. It contained what he hoped might be the key to getting out of his present mess. He had thought of teaching English to earn some money, but so had everyone else, and his French was poor; he had inquired about casual work, and found out about labour permits and other alarming rigmarole, and decided he dare not expose himself to the investigation of the French authorities. But there was one unique secret he shared only with Urchin.
He had employed it as armour against his fearful forebodings since a night shortly after leaving England when he had been plagued by a fit of panic over what he had done. On impulse he had brought away with him Maurice's clock, and it had been carried into each of their overnight rooms to supervise their love-making. Looking at it, he had been reminded of Llanraw. He had soothed Urchin into trance almost without intending to, and found solace in what she told him of that miraculous land.
Since then he had grown to crave it like a drug, although he tried not to make it an imposition on Urchin. When he detected resentment in her face at what he could make her do -- for the months of reinforcement of the hypnotic state had enabled him to put her under with a single word -- he postponed the moment. To console himself he one day wrote down what he could recall of the descriptions she had given, and from that conceived the idea of writing a book.
-- That'll put Soppy Al's nose out of joint! But I daren't use my own name, or Urchin's; I'll have to change everything so that it's unrecognisable, but at least no one else has ever heard of Llanraw . . .
Daydreams blossomed as he leafed through the sheets he had filled with notes: Llanraw's customs, geography, clothing, art, even a sketch for an understanding of the language. He had tried to make Urchin teach him to speak it, and had been impressed by its logic compared to the ambiguity of English, but he was a poor student and had learned only a few phrases when he desisted for fear of angering her with such drudgery. Nonetheless the directness implied by their common greeting, not "How are you?" but straight out "Who are you?" seemed infinitely desirable beside the mealy-mouthed forms of his own mother tongue.
Since taking the giant step of running away with Urchin, he had escaped some of his recurrent visions of disaster, and in their place was able to enjoy periods of optimism whose wildness did not seem in the least incongruous. Now, with the pages before him on which he had caught at least a pale reflection of Llanraw, he imagined a publisher trembling with delight, writing a huge cheque on the spot, telephoning daily to know how soon the manuscript would be ready, setting up press conferences, selling screen rights . . .
Beyond that: critics raving, readers queueing to learn about the ideal world from which Urchin hailed, clubs and societies forming to try and enact in their members' lives the ideals to which Llanraw was dedicated . . . By then he would be beyond reach of the consequences of his earlier acts; he would pay some fines, perhaps, for putting Urchin on his passport under a false name, but the judge would weep as he pronounced sentence, mourning the shortcomings of his country and assuring Paul that if only it had been like Llanraw this farce would have been unnecessary.
He slowly realised that on the other side of the road the policeman had reappeared, and his gaze now was fixed on this café. A tremor crept down Paul's spine. He called for his bill, shut up his notes in the portfolio, and walked as steadily as he could manage in the direction Urchin had taken.
He found her on the beach with the two young men who had whistled at her earlier, wrestling each in turn to fall on the sand. They had warmed up with the exercise and taken off their sweaters, and Urchin shouted in delight as her arms locked around their sun-tanned muscular bodies.
*41*
The prospect of having a row with Urchin made him terrified. Rows were something that belonged to the epoch Paul-and-Iris, not the epoch Paul-and-Urchin; at the back of his mind, too deeply buried for him ever to have expressed the thought in words, lay the assumption that Urchin would understand the magnitude of the sacrifice he had made for her sake and devote herself to him as though he had purchased her.
He fought it, daylong; moody over their noontide meal he thought of lean carefree youths attuned to leisure, safe from problems that made him a worrisome companion, and said little; later he summoned energy and they walked to the camp-site and back in the clumsy grip of the mistral. He thought by then he had evaded the risk of what he feared, and at dinner was almost his normal self.
But that night, when Urchin lay back naked on the bed contemplating the ceiling and he was at the wash-basin noisily scrubbing the taste of the day's cigarettes away with a minty paste -- she had confided that she found the stale smoky tang unpleasant, the first fault she had ever admitted in him -- she said suddenly, "I think I like most that one Armand."
"What?" He turned, mopping at white foam drooled down his chin.
"Armand." She gave the name almost exactly the terminal sound of Llanraw, and the expression of dreamy pleasure on her face made his heart sink. "You know -- the taller one with brown eyes."
"I didn't get close enough to find out what colour his eyes were," Paul told her curtly.
She gave a sweet lascivious smile and closed her eyes as if to visualise Armand. She said, "You will if you wish. I think he is a little like the ones we met at -- what was the place called? I forget. The two men and the two girls we spent the nig
ht with. Such people remind me so much of Llanraw. Tomorrow I will see him without his friend Henri -- I promised. And tomorrow night, if you like, I will teach you a . . ." She hesitated, her eyes blinking open again. "A custom? A . . . No: more like a game we have there."