The Sunlight on the Garden (19 page)

Later, after they had made love, Tony scrambled off the bed and looked down at Abdul's still naked body. ‘Oh, if only I had a photograph of you! If only I had a camera! My friend Mark was always the photographer on our expeditions.'

‘You want photograph?'

‘Oh, yes, yes! So that when I'm back in England, I can look at you.'

‘I bring photograph. Tomorrow. French friend take photograph. I bring.' Tony felt a wasp sting of jealousy. ‘French friend? What friend?

Do you mean lover?'
Abdul laughed. ‘Not what you think! Married. Travel on cousin's

felucca, wife, children, two children.'
Tony did not believe him. But he no longer cared.
When the dawn was about to break, Abdul said that he must

go. Otherwise the police might see him. Hurriedly he dressed. Then,

careful to make no sound, he opened first the door to the balcony

and next the wire screen. Tony held out the handful of ten-dollar

notes that he had fetched from his room safe while Abdul had

been dressing.
‘No, no!'
‘Yes. Please! I want you to have this.'
Without any further hesitation Abdul took the money and tucked

it into a pocket inside the voluminous djellabah. ‘See you again.'
‘See you tomorrow. Same place. Eleven.'
They kissed. Then kissed again and yet again.
‘Don't forget the photograph.'
‘Photograph – yes, remember, remember!'
‘Promise!'
‘Promise. Abdul always keep promise.'
Tony craned his head to watch as, with extraordinary agility,

Abdul swung himself up from the balcony and on to the roof. For

a moment the boy stood there, outlined against a sky now streaked

with the pale yellow of the dawn just breaking. The air was chill.

He waved, smiled, waved. Then he was gone.
Tony remained on the balcony in only his pyjama trousers. He

clutched its rail, looked down. Suddenly, a grey streak seared his

eyeballs, moving at extraordinary speed across the dim garden

below. He thought: the dog!
Then he heard the shot. It was followed by three more.

‘I should have gone down,' Tony later told an elderly, military-looking gay man, also on holiday alone at the hotel, when they had struck up a conversation by the pool.

‘What would have been the point? He was dead. You would have been implicated. They might have arrested you. They'd have certainly questioned you. You might have missed the plane back to England.'

‘I should have gone down. It was a kind of betrayal.'

‘Don't be silly.… But what a crazy thing for him to do. Guards everywhere. Armed. Nervous. Trigger-happy. Crazy.'

‘It was my fault. My fault. I'll never forgive myself.'

After dinner, while the elderly man sat in the library rereading one of his guidebooks, Tony restlessly wandered the garden. He half hoped and half feared that he would once again see the jackal-like dog. But there was no sign of it. Three policemen sat round the pool, each with a gun across his knees. They were talking in low voices, punctuated by boisterous laughter. Perhaps it was one of them who had killed Abdul.

Tony decided to go up to his room. As he entered the lift, his two American neighbours staggered into it after him. This was not the first time when he had seen them drunk after dinner. They greeted him cheerfully and the man said: ‘Having fun?'

Tony merely shrugged.

As the three of them walked down the corridor, the American woman said: ‘You remember those shots last night? Apparently it was someone trying to break into the hotel. That receptionist – the one with the squint – just told us. We're not supposed to know, of course. The authorities are trying to hush it up. Might put off tourists.'

‘It makes one nervous,' the man took up. ‘ He could have been a terrorist. He could have blown us all to hell.'

As he put his key in the door, Tony heard the sound of splashing. Had he left the shower on? Hurriedly he opened the bathroom door. The light was on, the floor was awash, as it had been on that night when he and Abdul had stood clutching each other under the battering of the water. But the shower was now off.

Puzzled and in growing apprehension, he left the bathroom and went into the bedroom. The window to the balcony and the wire screen were open. Then he realised that there was something on his pillow. He went over and stooped to pick it up. It was a snapshot of Abdul standing nude by open French windows, with the out-of-focus blur of a tree beyond him. Under the tree there was an amorphous grey shape. Was it – could it be – that jackal-like dog crouching there? Tony stared down at the photograph for a long time. He could not be sure.

Then he became aware of a stickiness on his forefinger and middle finger, and at the same time saw that something had been written across the bottom of the snapshot in Arabic.

He examined his fingers with a mixture of amazement and mounting terror. They were sticky with blood. He put the fingers to his mouth and sucked them. The blood tasted strangely metallic and bitter. He felt that he was about to retch. It might have been a poison.

Of course the elderly man had his brusque, matter-of-fact explanation. He was a man who always did.

For some reason – probably the sort of blockage that constantly occurred with Egyptian plumbing – the water from the shower that Tony had taken before dinner had been regurgitated up the waste pipe. Or perhaps one of the floor staff had decided to take a shower while Tony was at dinner.

And the photograph? Well, it was not impossible that that same member of the floor staff had been a friend or even a relative of Abdul and so, having known of the affair, had decided to leave that image of the dead man on Tony's pillow. Why not? It was just the sort of sentimental gesture one might expect from an Egyptian.

And the blood? Oh, it could be that the person who had left the photograph had not, after all, been a member of the staff. Perhaps, instead, it was the ‘cousin' who had driven them in the mini-bus. In that case, he might have climbed into the room as Abdul had climbed into it and had then somehow cut his hand while doing so. Wasn't that a possibility?

But obstinately Tony kept shaking his head. ‘ No, no,' he said. Then loudly and decisively: ‘No!'

Back in Brighton, Tony showed the photograph to the Algerian lover of a friend of his. Could he translate the inscription?

The Algerian peered down, then looked up. ‘Oum Khaltoum,' he said. He went on to explain that the words were from a song made popular by the most famous of Arab singers of her time.

‘What do they say?'

The Algerian pursed his lips and frowned. Then he ventured: ‘Death conquers life. But love conquers death.'

Tony gave a little gasp and raised a hand to his eyes, as though to shield them from a sudden glare.

The Algerian again peered down at the photograph. ‘ There's something else here. The writing is bad. An uneducated man must have written it. Yes.' He himself was an educated man, a radiologist. He peered again. ‘With my love. Forever. And signed,' he added ‘Signed ‘‘Abdul''.' He looked up, laughed. ‘ Who is this Abdul? A boy-friend?'

At first Tony kept the photograph on his bedside table, in a frame specially bought for it. Then, when he looked at it – which he did less and less – he noticed that it was beginning to fade. The sun must be causing that, he decided, and placed the photograph in a Florentine tooled leather box in which he kept such things as studs, cuff links, collar-stiffeners and safety pins. On the rare occasions that he had recourse to the box he realised with a mingling of dismay and bewilderment that the fading was continuing.

Seven months later, having just returned from what he was later to describe as an ‘utterly blissful' holiday in Thailand, Tony was dressing to go to Glyndebourne with a party of friends. He opened the Florentine leather box to get out a pair of cuff links and studs for the old-fashioned dress shirt that he now so rarely wore. To his amazement he then found that the surface of the snapshot had become little more than a blank, milky expanse. How could that have happened? As with the dog on that horrible night in Luxor:
Now you see it, now you don't
.

Oh, probably the man who had printed the snapshot had used some primitive process, he hastily told himself, that resulted in rapid fading.

But then – the thought suddenly came to him – why had both the bloodstain and Abdul's scrawl also vanished?

His lips trembled. The hands holding the snapshot began to shake uncontrollably. He rarely now thought of Abdul. When he did so, it was without any of the old anguish of recollection and frustrated longing. Abdul was now one with Mark. Nothing lasted. Nothing. That was the hellish thing about life. And love.

With a single convulsive movement he tore the snapshot into two and then, in mounting frenzy, into innumerable tiny scraps.

I
t is the break and ache of day. Yesterday I awoke to those words. They were a fragment of some monument that all through the night I had been struggling to build. The words were no longer only in my mind but now also on my lips. I whispered them.
It is the break and ache of day
. But of the complex construct of which all through my sleeping hours they had been merely a tiny part, I now remembered nothing.

It is in words, not images, that I now almost invariably dream. All my life I have been, above all, a wordsmith. When so many other, less important, of my attributes have vanished or are vanishing, that still remains. In consequence, I am becoming more and more like that old man, a famous jeweller, who was my neighbour in Japan some forty years ago. He could not remember his wife's or children's names or, often, even his own. He could not remember how to knot a tie or fasten his shoelaces or pour a glass of iced tea or find his way to the primitive privy in a wooden shed at the bottom of his narrow, overgrown garden. But each day he sat at his work-bench in a contented abstraction not merely from the world but also from an eighty-three years accumulation of memories, now inaccessible to him, while he still fashioned, with all his old consummate artistry, some broach, bracelet or necklace. Fascinated and admiring, I used to watch him. Occasionally, he would look up and across at me and give me a vague, happy smile.

But this morning it was different. I had dreamed not in words but in images. One of those images remained with me, so vivid that I still saw it in every minute detail even as I felt the battering of the alarm clock and opened my eyes. The image is of a wave-like curve of balcony, constructed of wooden slats, many of which have rotted. It overlooks a cliff-like incline, so that the tops of trees all but brush one's feet as one looks over it. Its railings are a greenish blue, the paint cracked and peeling. Behind it is the low annexe to the farmhouse, with its identical rooms each with its French windows. The paying guests in the annexe usually keep their curtains drawn even in daytime, since otherwise anyone on the balcony can glance in on them.

With an effort, I banish the image, so seductive and yet potentially so dangerous. Then I fall, rather than clamber, out of bed and, hand to banister to steady myself, creak down to the kitchen to make my wife's morning tea. Some months ago she moved to the bedroom on the floor below mine to avoid being kept awake by my muttering in my sleep of those innumerable words that all through the night jostle for attention in a fatigued, failing brain craving only for the respite of silence. ‘ How did you sleep?' She stares up at me, as though a stranger were asking some obtrusive question. ‘Oh, you know how it is.' Yes, I know how it is, having so often heard how it is. The restless legs. The nag of pain in the back. The mosquito whine of tinnitus in her left ear.

Instead of at once shaving and taking my bath, I return to my bedroom and lie out on the bed. I do not bother to pull the bedclothes over me. I am unaware of the cold. I close my eyes. I entreat the banished memory of my balcony dream to come back to me …

On that balcony a boy of thirteen is sitting on a folding canvas chair. It is afternoon. He can hear, in the distance, his mother tinkling at the upright Pleyel piano in the Ardennes farmhouse. She often complains, even to the Belgian farmer and his wife, that the piano is out of tune. They look bewildered, as though they did not understand her, even though she has spoken in perfectly correct French, albeit with a heavy English accent. Then one or other of them shrugs, smiles and says something like ‘
Eh bien, madame
…' They will do nothing about the piano, just as they will do nothing about the dripping tap of her wash-basin or the curtain that, missing a ring, lets in a narrow wedge of light to prod her awake far too early every summer morning of that holiday. The boy's older brother is out, gun at the ready, with the bearded, taciturn farmer. They will usually return each with at least a brace of rabbits. The boy hates the rabbit casserole that everyone else finds so delicious. He eats a mouthful or two, then pushes it to one side – ‘I'm not really hungry' he tells his mother in a fretful voice when she enquires why he isn't eating.

Now, on the balcony, he is halfway through the
Collected Works
of Tennyson, in a leather-bound copy that belonged to his recently dead father. If his rather were still alive, they would be staying in some elegant hotel and not in this farmhouse, recommended to them as ‘amazing value' by one of his mother's bridge-playing friends. Already he recognises in Tennyson someone who is obsessed with words – their appearance on the page, their subtle gradations of meaning, above all their initial sounds and then the other sounds that resonate on and on from them – even as he himself is already obsessed with words. His brother, seventeen years old and about to become a Sandhurst cadet and eventually to be killed on a Normandy beach, laughs at this passion for Tennyson. He puts on a voice, melodramatic and comically cockney, as he intones: ‘
Come into the garden, Maud
.' There is something ludicrous about the name Maud, even the boy can see that.