Elementals (2 page)

Breakfast was on a terrace, sheltered by a glass wall, under a canopy. Beyond the terrace was the walled garden, with sandy paths, the bubbling fountain in its stone-rimmed pool, and a huge stone bowl overflowing with ivy-leaved geraniums, scarlet, crimson, pink. There were tall cedars and pointed yews; there was a group of silver olives, and cypresses. There was bright light, shade. It was the South. Under one of the cedars a man was writing at a folding table. He was a blond man, with a head of glittering pale curls. His long legs encompassed the little table. He wore white trousers, and a pale, blue-green linen jacket.

After breakfast Patricia went out. The hotel looked across the Quai de la Fontaine to the Jardin de la Fontaine, a landscaped eighteenth-century space, with orderly terraces, stone stairs, balustrades and carved fauns and nymphs. The houses along the quai are dignified, heavy, eighteenth-century, barred and shuttered. A wide channel of green water runs under bridges, under high plane trees, along the quai. In the distance a fountain rose and shone in a high foaming spray. Patricia turned the other way, into the narrow streets, crossing a wide boulevard. The buildings are close together, made of warm cream and gold stone, with roofs of overlapping terracotta tiles. Patricia walked. She walked between heat and shade, from cool stony courts to sudden bright squares, between heavy carved doorways into white spaces where she blinked and saw water. She saw many fountains, pouring from huge stone mouths, trickling over stones, bubbling in circular pools around bronze figures or flowing along channels. Once she saw a high sculpted crested monumental spout in the centre of a grassy place she did not cross, turning back into the small streets. She began also to notice crocodiles on bronze studs in the streets, the reptile chained to a palm tree. The same motif was repeated in windows, on street signs. A life-sized bronze monster crawled over the edge of a fountain in a quiet square. She sat beside the water, under a parasol, and ordered a coffee. She was a girl, a girl on her first solitary trip abroad. She stared at the energetic bronze claws and curving tail, as she had stared at the golden stones and the blue sky and the shadows, curious and indifferent. ‘Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun: so is your crocodile.’ He had played Lepidus. He had wanted to play Antony but had had to be content with Lepidus. She remembered, with her fingertips, smoothing artificial sun-tan into his white English tennis-playing thighs, sinewy and pale. She remembered the toga. She stood up again, leaving her coffee untouched, and began to walk. She stepped lightly, like a girl.

She shopped. She bought a pair of flat white sandals, two pairs of linen trousers, and some floating dresses in airy cotton, painted with dark purple grapes on a yellow that was French, a mustardy ochre-yellow, not like the daffodil-yellow of the bright suit she had travelled in. In the Rue de l’Aspic she found an elegant bathroom boutique and spent time in front of mirrors holding up lawn nightshirts printed with seashells, gowns sprigged with mimosa on glazed cotton, a classical column of falling white silk jersey pleats, which she bought, adding a pretty pair of golden slippers, and a honeycomb cotton robe, in aquamarine. These things gave her pleasure. She told the proprietor, an elegant young woman with dark hair and eyes, and a Roman nose, that she herself was in the business. She spoke a slow, clear, grammatical French. She had meant to be a theatre designer; they had all been theatre-mad, at university; but she had made a success of Anadyomene instead. She admired a treasure-cavern full of translucent beakers in sand-blasted glass, rosy, nacreous, powder-blue, duck-egg. She bought a gold-and-silver striped toothbrush. She went out and walked. She went back to the hotel, and ate lunch on the terrace, in the dappled garden, listening to the steady plash of the fountain. She went upstairs, arranged her purchases in cupboards and drawers, closed out the afternoon heat with the heavy shutters, and slept, curled on the counter-pane. In the evening she took a bath, dressed in her new dress, and went down to dine on the terrace. There were stars and a new moon in an indigo sky. The fountain was lit from underneath, like a moving cube of glass or ice, white with blue shadows. An owl called. She had a floating candle on her table in a tall-stemmed glass cup. She saw these things with the pleasure of a post-war girl. She ate a salad of avocados and
fruits de mer
, arranged like an open flower; she ate
loup de mer
, a small silver square of fish criss-crossed with golden lines, on a bed of melting fennel; she ate red berries in a bitter chocolate cup; she drank Pouilly-Fumé. There was an excess of pleasure in the simplicity: stars, flames, water, the scent of cedars and burned fennel, the salt of olives, the juicy flakes of the fish, the gold wine, the sweet berries, the sharp chocolate, the warm air. She ate ceremoniously. There were other murmuring diners. At the other end of the terrace was the long man with the mass of blond hair. He was bent at an angle, holding a book to the light of his candle. She thought: tomorrow I will get a book. She thought slowly: getting a book was a pleasure proposed, like the purchase of the nightdress. After dinner, she went upstairs, bathed again, slowly, in the circular bath with its Provençal sprigged curtains, put on the pleated nightdress, and slept. A crocodile slipped through a dream, and went under the surface as she woke. She breakfasted on the terrace, and went out again to walk in the little streets.

The next few days she repeated. She ate, she slept, she walked, she shopped. She learned the little streets, and arrived from many narrow openings at the heavy, high pile of the Arènes. It was a closed golden cylinder, made of tiers of immense arches. She avoided it. She swung back into the narrow streets. They brought her out to the Maison Carrée, a severe cube with tall pillars, ancient in its sunny space, and to its elegant shadow, the Carré d’Art, a vanishing and beautiful series of cubes of silver metal and grey-green glass. She went into neither. In a bookshop she bought a guide to Nîmes, a town plan, a dictionary and the three Pléiade volumes of
A la recherche du
temps perdu
, in French. It would be her project. She began to read in the after-lunch hush, and soon saw that her dictionary was inadequate. She returned to the bookshop, and bought their largest. Her French was not good enough to read Proust. She had to look up twenty or thirty words on each page, so that she pieced together the world of the novel in slow motion, like a jigsaw seen through thick, uneven glass, the colours and shapes hopelessly distorted, the cutting lines of the pieces the only clear image. This difficulty encouraged her to persist. She would learn good French, and then she would see Proust. She could not, she thought, sustain an interest in anything easy, a detective story or anything like that. A project was good. She bought a notebook and made a patient and lengthening list of words she couldn’t understand in Proust. She sat in the walled garden of the Hôtel Impérator Concorde, under the cedars, at a wrought-iron table. Scented gum dropped on the pages of
Du côté de chez Swann
. Mosquitoes hummed like wires. Under another tree the blond man read and wrote furiously. His wrist-movements were ungainly. He rocked the table as he wrote.

She had her hair cut. Her English waves became a close shining cap. ‘I am reading Proust,’ she told the hairdresser, a young man in black, with the Roman nose of the Nîmois. ‘That will take a very long time,’ he observed. In the little guidebook, studied over coffee in the Place de l’Horloge, and the Place d’Assas, she had discovered that the ubiquitous emblem of the crocodile chained to the palm tree derived from an Augustan coin, dug up in the Renaissance, with crocodile, palm and the phrase, COL NEM, Colonia Nemausis. It was believed that Nîmes had been peopled by Augustus’s legionaries, to whom he had given the land in gratitude for their victory over Antony and Cleopatra, on the Nile. François I of France had granted the city the same coat of arms, in perpetuation of the myth. The guidebook said there was no reason to believe the story. Patricia, sitting by the solid and gleaming bronze crocodile in the Place de l’Horloge, had a sudden vision of Tony in a toga, white against the white light and the white spray of the fountain. They had met through student theatre, a classical world of greasepaint and sewn sheeting and Shakespearean rhythms and clarity and ferocity. He had been Lepidus, and she had sewn and fitted the sheets. Later he had graduated to Hector in
Tiger at the Gates
, and she had made him a scarlet cloak and a crested Trojan helmet; she had fitted thonged sandals round those stalwart legs. The student theatre was a dark, hot box, peopled by flitting ghosts, too puny for their lines, but fiery, all the same. It was hard to remember, here in this square, where the stones were Roman stones, the spotlit flaring passion of that imaginary wooden box. He had called her Patra, and she had called him Antony, in those days, in secret. Large, kind Tony, through whom Shakespeare’s lines spoke strong and clear, and to her. They had whispered them to each other. ‘I’ll set a bourn how far to be belov’d.’ ‘Then must you needs find out new heaven, new earth.’ They had appropriated what many had appropriated. He wanted passionately to be an actor, for a year or two, and then gave up the idea, quite suddenly. So that the singing words and the brighter light of the dark box became less interesting than the complicated light of common day, so that the drama of international negotiation took over from the eloquent simplicities of love and death and power. But he could always make her smile by calling her Patra. It was a joke and not only a joke. All this she acknowledged and did not acknowledge, seeing and not seeing the lines of Hector’s harness, the folds of Lepidus’s toga on thin air and trickling water, beyond the dark crocodile.

She was getting thinner. She ate, but she got thinner. Other guests came and went, but she stayed. So did the blond man in the blue-green jacket. He had bought a straw hat, like the hat in which Van Gogh painted himself in the days of his madness in the fields of light around Arles. The hats were sold around the Arènes, by itinerant pedlars, woven domes ending in ragged spikes of reeds. It perched on his tough blond curls without denting them. She began to lose her sense of the businesswoman she had been, was. She walked the streets more purposefully as her sense of purpose wavered. Her French was improving rapidly. She would stop and read the local newspaper, the
Midi Libre
, which was set out on polished wooden rods, in the hotel salon. Most of the contents of this paper concerned bull-fighting. She realised slowly that she was in a bull-fighting hotel; on the walls of the bar were photographs of Hemingway and Picasso who had stayed here to admire the skills of the shining pigtailed dolls, with their braid and gilt and cockades. Later she noticed that the bar itself was called the Bar Hemingway. In the newspaper also were accounts of other kinds of combat, in which the heroes were the bulls, whose more complex rushes were rewarded with standing ovations and renderings of
Carmen
. There was almost no foreign news in this journal; what there was was North African, bombs in Algiers, tourists attacked in Egypt. And local news: school concerts, the building of cisterns, the pollution of rivers. She read it all, for the French language. One evening she sat on a sofa in the shade and worked her way through it. ‘Yet another traffic accident on the road to Uzès. A man was killed by a speeding car, as he stood on the edge of a vineyard. His body was found by a cyclist. From the marks on the road it was clear that the killer had made off immediately, without stopping to offer help, or to ascertain whether his victim was dead. This is the third such accident in the region this year. The police are searching . . . ’

Patricia began to weep. She thought of the unknown dead man in the road, and tears poured down her face. She moved no other muscles; she sat on the camel-coloured sofa, a dignified ageing woman, with the newspaper in her lap, and her tears splashed on to it, darkening the newsprint, the grainy dark photographed bulls, the catalogue of accidents. She could not move. She could not see. She could not imagine a moment when the tears would stop, or she would be able to stand. She suppressed all sounds; not a whiffle, not a sniff, not a whimper. Just salt water.

After a long time, certainly a very long time, she heard a voice.

‘
Excusez-moi, madame, est-ce que je peux vous
aider
?’ She did not move. The tears ran.

He knelt at her feet, in his blue linen coat, clumsy on one knee. His French accent was clumsy, too. He changed to English, the excellent English of the Scandinavian North.

‘Please forgive me, I think you need help.’

‘No.’ Her voice came from far away. She was not even sure she had spoken.

‘Maybe I can help you to your room? Bring you a drink, perhaps. I cannot watch – I cannot watch – I should like to help.’

‘You are kind,’ she said, and swayed. His words were kind, but his voice was a harsh voice, a cold voice.

‘You have a great grief,’ he said, still harshly. She heard it harshly.

‘It doesn’t matter. I must. I should.’

He put a hand under her elbow and helped her to stand.

‘I know your room,’ he said. ‘Come. We will go there, and then I will send for a drink. What would you like? Tea? Coffee? Something stronger, for the shock? Cognac, perhaps?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come.’

He supported her to the lift. He called it. It was a gold-barred lift, an old, creaking, handsome lift, like a bird-cage. He managed the doors, he held her elbow, he led her to her room, he supported her. He sat her in her armchair, with its rosy chintz frill, and looked into her swollen eyes. His face swayed before her, a white face, with ledged blond brows, a large ugly nose, blue, blue eyes in deep hollows above jutting cheekbones, a wide, thin mouth with a white-blond moustache.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘Let me call for a drink. I think cognac would be best.’

She inclined her head. He used her phone, he called room service. He said: