The Breaking Point (23 page)

Deborah ran out of the room and down the stairs. Somewhere somebody called - Roger, perhaps, it did not matter - and Patch was barking; but caring nothing for concealment she went through the dark drawing-room and opened the french window on to the terrace. The lightning searched the terrace and lit the paving, and Deborah ran down the steps on to the lawn where the turnstile gleamed.

Haste was imperative. If she did not run the turnstile might be closed, the woman vanish, and all the wonder of the sacred world be taken from her. She was in time. The woman was still waiting. She held out her hand for tickets, but Deborah shook her head. ‘I have none.’ The woman, laughing, brushed her through into the secret world where there were no laws, no rules, and all the faceless phantoms ran before her to the woods, blown by the rising wind. Then the rain came. The sky, deep brown as the lightning pierced it, opened, and the water hissed to the ground, rebounding from the earth in bubbles. There was no order now in the alley-way. The ferns had turned to trees, the trees to Titans. All moved in ecstasy, with sweeping limbs, but the rhythm was broken up, tumultuous, so that some of them were bent backwards, torn by the sky, and others dashed their heads to the undergrowth where they were caught and beaten.

In the world behind, laughed Deborah as she ran, this would be punishment, but here in the secret world it was a tribute. The phantoms who ran beside her were like waves. They were linked one with another, and they were, each one of them, and Deborah too, part of the night force that made the sobbing and the laughter. The lightning forked where they willed it, and the thunder cracked as they looked upwards to the sky.

The pool had come alive.The water-lilies had turned to hands, with palms upraised, and in the far corner, usually so still under the green scum, bubbles sucked at the surface, steaming and multiplying as the torrents fell. Everyone crowded to the pool. The phantoms bowed and crouched by the water’s edge, and now the woman had set up her turnstile in the middle of the pool, beckoning them once more. Some remnant of a sense of social order rose in Deborah and protested.

‘But we’ve already paid,’ she shouted, and remembered a second later that she had passed through free. Must there be duplication? Was the secret world a rainbow, always repeating itself, alighting on another hill when you believed yourself beneath it? No time to think. The phantoms had gone through. The lightning, streaky white, lit the old dead monster tree with his crown of ivy, and because he had no spring now in his joints he could not sway in tribute with the trees and ferns, but had to remain there, rigid, like a crucifix.

‘And now . . . and now . . . and now . . .’ called Deborah.

The triumph was that she was not afraid, was filled with such wild acceptance . . . She ran into the pool. Her living feet felt the mud and the broken sticks and all the tangle of old weeds, and the water was up to her armpits and her chin. The lilies held her. The rain blinded her. The woman and the turnstile were no more.

‘Take me too,’ cried the child. ‘Don’t leave me behind!’ In her heart was a savage disenchantment. They had broken their promise, they had left her in the world. The pool that claimed her now was not the pool of secrecy, but dank, dark, brackish water choked with scum.

‘Grandpapa says he’s going to have it fenced round,’ said Roger. ‘It should have been done years ago. A proper fence, then nothing can ever happen. But barrow-loads of shingle tipped in it first. Then it won’t be a pool, but just a dewpond. Dewponds aren’t dangerous.’

He was looking at her over the edge of her bed. He had risen in status, being the only one of them downstairs, the bearer of tidings good or ill, the go-between. Deborah had been ordered two days in bed.

‘I should think by Wednesday,’ he went on, ‘you’d be able to play cricket. It’s not as if you’re hurt. People who walk in their sleep are just a bit potty.’

‘I did not walk in my sleep,’ said Deborah.

‘Grandpapa said you must have done,’ said Roger. ‘It was a good thing that Patch woke him up and he saw you going across the lawn . . .’ Then, to show his release from tension, he stood on his hands.

Deborah could see the sky from her bed. It was flat and dull. The day was a summer day that had worked through storm. Agnes came into the room with junket on a tray. She looked important.

‘Now run off,’ she said to Roger. ‘Deborah doesn’t want to talk to you. She’s supposed to rest.’

Surprisingly, Roger obeyed, and Agnes placed the junket on the table beside the bed. ‘You don’t feel hungry, I expect,’ she said. ‘Never mind, you can eat this later, when you fancy it. Have you got a pain? It’s usual, the first time.’

‘No,’ said Deborah.

What had happened to her was personal. They had prepared her for it at school, but nevertheless it was a shock, not to be discussed with Agnes. The woman hovered a moment, in case the child asked questions; but, seeing that none came, she turned and left the room.

Deborah, her cheek on her hand, stared at the empty sky. The heaviness of knowledge lay upon her, a strange, deep sorrow.

‘I won’t come back,’ she thought. ‘I’ve lost the key.’

The hidden world, like ripples on the pool so soon to be filled in and fenced, was out of her reach for ever.

The Archduchess

T
he principality of Ronda, in southern Europe, has been a republic now for many years. It was the last country to throw off the chains of the monarchical system, and its revolution, when it came, was a particularly bloody one. The
volte face
from dependence on the rule of one leader, the Archduke, whose family had been in power for nearly seven hundred years, to the enlightened government of the Popular Front, or P.F. Ltd, as it came to be known - it was a combination of big business and communism - shook the rest of the western world, which had long since recognized the red light and given way to expediency, packing off the remaining monarchs on an endless cruise in a giant ocean liner. Here they lived very happily together, enjoying perpetual intrigues, intermarrying, and never setting foot on land to bring strife again to the freed people of Europe.

The revolution came as a shock, because Ronda had been for so long not only the butt of the democratic states, but also a favourite playground for tourists. Its attraction was understandable. The very smallness of Ronda made it unlike any other country. Moreover, although it was so minute, it had everything the heart could desire. Its one mountain, Ronderhof, was twelve thousand feet high, the summit accessible from all four faces, and the skiing on the lower slopes was the best in Europe. Its one river, the Rondaquiver, was navigable to the capital, and the lower reaches, dotted with islets each boasting its own casino and bathing-beach, drew thousands of tourists in the warm season. And then there were its waters.

The famous springs were in the hills behind the capital, and it was really these which had constituted the greatest asset of the reigning family throughout the centuries, for they possessed extraordinary, even unique, properties. For one thing, used in conjunction with a certain formula they bestowed perpetual youth. This formula was the secret of the reigning Archduke, who, on his death-bed, handed it on to his heir. Even if it could not keep the last enemy at bay for ever - since even princes must die - the waters of Ronda did at least ensure that the Archdukes were laid in their graves without wrinkles and without grey hairs.

This formula, as I have said, was known only to the reigning prince, who alone benefited from it; but the natural waters could be drunk by any tourist who visited the principality, and had a marvellously revitalizing effect. Certainly until the revolution they flocked to Ronda in their thousands, men and women from all over the world, who wished to take back with them, into their humdrum lives, something of the elixir that the waters contained.

It is hard to define, in so many words, what Ronda did to the tourists. They were easily recognizable, on their return, by the very special bronze on the skin, by the dreamy, almost faraway expression in the eyes, and by the curious attitude to life that nothing mattered. ‘He who has been in Ronda has seen God,’ was the well-known phrase, and indeed the shrug of the shoulder, the careless yawn, the half-smile on the faces of those whose winter or summer vacation had been spent ‘across the border’ suggested some sort of other-world intimacy, a knowledge of secret places denied to those who had remained at home.

The effect wore off, of course. The factory bench claimed the worker, the office desk the administrator, the laboratory the chemist; but sometimes, during the brief moments when they had time to reflect, these tourists who had been to Ronda thought of the ice-cold water they had borne away from the springs in the high mountain, of the islets in the Rondaquiver, of the cafés in the great square of the capital city, dominated as it was by the palace of the Archduke - now a museum, hung with trophies of the revolution, and dull as ditchwater.

In old days, when the palace was guarded by members of the Imperial guard in their splendid uniform of blue and gold, and the royal standard - an emblem of the water of life against a white field - flew from its flag-pole, and the Imperial band played the haunting Rondese folk-songs that were half-gypsy and half-chant, then the tourists would sit in the square after dinner and wait for the Archduke to appear on the balcony. It was a great climax of the day. To anyone who had climbed the Ronderhof or swum in the Rondaquiver, and had also drunk the elixir from the spring, this appearance of the reigning monarch somehow epitomized all that the visitor felt about the duchy, whether he had come to scoff or to admire. A little intoxicated, because the wine made from the Ronda grape is potent and very dry, a little full, because the flesh of the fish from the Rondaquiver is rich, a little sad, because the gypsy-chant music touches forgotten memories, the visitor was therefore prepared, despite his more rational self, for some sort of picturesque dénouement; yet even so he was always surprised, and later moved.

There would be silence. The lights in the square dimmed. Then, softly, the Imperial band began to play the national anthem, the first line of which, roughly translated, ran, ‘I am that which you seek. I am the water of Life.’Then the windows of the palace opened, and a figure in a white uniform appeared on the balcony. Bats or airy-mice, symbolizing dreams, were at the same moment let loose from the royal belfry, and the effect was weird and oddly beautiful, the night creatures flying blindly in ever widening circles round the shining head of the Archduke - the Archdukes of Ronda were always blond - and no sound but the beating of innumerable tiny wings. The Archduke would remain motionless on the balcony, lit by arc lights concealed in the stonework of the balustrade, the red ribbon of the Order of the Just the only patch of colour on the white uniform. Even at a distance the figure was appealing, giving the hardiest republican tourist a reactionary lump in the throat. As a well-known foreign journalist put it, the first glimpse of the Archduke of Ronda awoke the protective instinct in man lying dormant beneath the surface, that instinct which, he continued, for the safety of the human race is better extinguished.

According to those who were lucky enough to have seats near the palace, and were themselves bathed in the glow from the arc lights, the most extraordinary thing about these nightly appearances was the fact that they never varied.The precision and timing were perfect, and the Archduke really did have the miraculous beauty of eternal youth.There was a breath-catching quality about the radiant figure with his hands clasped on his sword, alone there on the balcony, and it was no use for the scoffers to remind their neighbours that the Archduke was now in his nineties and had been doing this for years, long before many of those present were born; nobody cared or even listened. Each appearance was, in a sense, an incarnation of that original prince who had appeared to the people of Ronda after the great flooding of the Rondaquiver in medieval times, when three-quarters of the inhabitants lost their lives, and suddenly in their midst, as Rondese history has it, ‘The waters subsided, all but the springs from the mountain face, and a prince came forth bearing the chalice of immortality, and he ruled over them.’

Modern historians, of course, say all this is nonsense, and claim that the original Archduke was not miraculous at all, but a goatherd who, after the disaster, rose up to lead and encourage the few exhausted and despairing survivors. Be that as it may, the legend dies hard, and even now, when the Republic is of many years’ standing, the older people treasure little ikons that, they whisper, were blessed by the hand of the late Archduke, before the revolutionaries hung him by the heels in the palace square. But I anticipate . . .

Ronda, as you have learnt, was a country given over to pleasure, to healing, to peace. There man found his heart’s desire.Volumes have been written about Rondese women. They are, or were, shy as squirrels, beautiful as gazelles, and with the grace of Etruscan figurines. No man ever had the luck to bring back a bride from Ronda - marriage outside the country was forbidden - but love affairs were not unknown, and those fortunate tourists who hazarded rebuff, and were not killed by angry fathers, husbands or brothers, used to swear, on returning to their own enlightened land, that never until the day they died would they forget what it had meant to lie in the arms of a Rondese woman, and experience the extraordinary intoxication of her caress.

Ronda had no religion, as such. By that I mean no dogma, no State Church. The Rondese believed in the healing waters from the spring and in the secret formula of eternal youth known to the Archduke, but other than this they had no place of worship, no Church dignitaries; and oddly enough the Rondese language - which sounds like a mixture of French and Greek - has no word for God.

It has altered a lot, though, that’s the pity. Now Ronda is a republic all sorts of other western words have crept into the common speech, words like weekend and Coca-Cola. The marriage barrier has broken down - you can see Rondese girls on Broadway and in Piccadilly, hardly distinguishable from their companions. And the customs that were so essentially Rondese in the days of the Archdukes, such as fish-spearing, fountain-leaping and snow-dancing, have all died out.The only thing about Ronda that cannot be spoilt is the contour of the land - the high mountain, the winding river. And of course the light, the clear radiance that is never overcast, never dull, and can only be compared to the reflection from purest aquamarine. The light of Ronda can be seen by a departing aircraft - for there is an airport now, built soon after the revolution - long after the take-off, when the aircraft is already many miles across the frontier.