When she woke, she picked up a pair of scissors out of the porcelain bowl, leaned over and began to cut her hair, not concerned with shape or length, just cutting it away – the irritation of its presence during the previous days still in her mind – when she had bent forward and her hair had touched blood in a wound. She would have nothing to link her, to lock her, to death.
Three flutes of champagne in the early afternoon anchored by the weight of nine oysters.
You did not speak for some time. You felt safer that way.
Could you waste your life on a gift? If you did not use your gift, was it a betrayal?
During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed. So our job becomes to keep peace with enemy camps, eliminate the chaos at the end of Jacobean tragedies, and with ‘the mercy of distance’ write the histories.
Not that we are touched by such things as concern, even if false, when we are young. But now, in retrospect, I am touched.
Fenelon-Barnes wanted the fossil trees he discovered to bear his name. He even wanted a tribe to take his name, and spent a year on the negotiations. Then Bauchan outdid him, having a type of sand dune named after him. But I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from. By the time war arrived, after ten years in the desert, it was easy for me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone, to any nation.
In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.
She thrilled to open space and weather nights, as if she could never be contained or fully revealed there.
I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book. I don’t believe in permanence, in relationships that span ages. I was fifteen years older. But she was smarter. She was hungrier to change than I expected.
She and I had lost each other long ago in those confusions and silences. But now, beside this infant, we were within an intimacy, as when sweat covered her face after a seizure and I would hug her to me. When being wordless had been best.
What had our relationship been? A betrayal of those around us, or the desire of another life?
Quite early on I had discovered the overlooked space open to those of us with a silent life. I didn’t argue with the policeman who said I couldn’t cycle over a certain bridge or through a specific gate in the fort – I just stood there, still, until I was invisible, and then I went through. Like a cricket. Like a hidden cup of water.
There were nights when Cullis would lie beside her, barely touching her with the tip of his finger. He would move down the bed, kissing her brown hip, her hair, to the cave within her. When they were apart he wrote how he loved the sound of her breath in those moments, the intake and release of it, paced and constant, as if preparing, as if knowing there was to be long distance ahead. His hands on her thighs, his face wet with the taste of her, her open palm on the back of his neck.
The youth felt this was his first conversation in years.
Bridge depends on character. Your character and the character of your opponents. You must consider the character of your enemy. This is true of bomb disposal. It is two-handed bridge. You have one enemy. You have no partner. Sometimes for my exam I make them play bridge. People think a bomb is a mechanical object, a mechanical enemy. But you have to consider that somebody made it.
Everyone has their own marriages, she thinks.
During our evenings in borrowed buildings, she would wake suddenly from a deep sleep, see me watching her, and release a guilty and delicious smile. I suppose that was the moment I felt I belonged most to her.
But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn’t understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot – see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes.
Wherever Hana is now, in the future, she is aware of the line of movement Kip’s body followed out of her life. Her mind repeats it. The path he slammed through among them. When he turned into a stone of silence in their midst. She recalls everything of that August day – what the sky was like, the objects on the table in front of her going dark under the thunder.