Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice Read online

  ‘But understandable. You were at the end – at the end – under terrible strain.’

  ‘It was wrong. We both know that. I had a Calvinist upbringing. I burn already,’ said Nils Isaksen, gaunt and hunched under the fiery disc of the Mediterranean sun over the stone skeleton of the amphitheatre.

  ‘I think perhaps you did the best you could – ’

  ‘I did not tell you this sorry story in order to hear you say that, Mrs Nimmo. I told it to hear it told aloud. Now, if you will excuse me, I have things to do.’

  He stood.

  ‘Will you be all right?’

  ‘It is no concern of yours. But thank you. And yes, I shall be all right.’

  He walked away, into the tunnelled arch, not looking back.

  That night, she dreamed. She was in the arena, sitting where she had sat with Nils Isaksen (who had not been at dinner, or in the bar). The sky was black night, and starry, in the dream, but the sand of the arena was shining with sunlight. In its closed bright circle, two men fought. They wore unbleached white canvas or linen suits, like professional fencers, and wore also fencing masks. They had an extraordinary arsenal of weapons heaped around them. Trident, the retiarius’s weighted net, short swords, long swords, heavy long swords, stilettos, poniards, mace and battle-axe. They went at each other, gracelessly and doggedly, with all these things in turn, inflicting dreadful dints, and savage thrusts, so that the canvas became crisscrossed with slits, and great gouts and gashes of blood spouted from both hidden bodies and soaked into the cloth and into the bright surrounding sand. Blood poured, too, out of the blank wire faces of the masks. First one, and then the other, were beaten to their knees, and hacked at horribly from above and below. It all took a very long slow time, and Patricia was not permitted to turn her eyes away, or leave her stony seat, or speak, or wake. When they were at a standstill, a strange thing happened. All the red blood, in which terrible strips and slivers of flesh, external and internal, floated and stuck, turned back. All the carnage flowed back, quickly, into the two men, peeling off the sand, shrinking and vanishing in stains on the buckram, so that they were again fit, pale figures, surrounded by gleaming pristine blades. And then they bowed to her, turned somersaults in the swept sand, and began all over again, hacking, thrusting, bleeding.

  She noticed, in the way of dreams, that someone was sitting next to her, had perhaps been there all the time. It was Tony, looking solid and well, leaner than on that last day, and smiling. He did not speak. The bloody men had been real and inescapable. She wanted Tony to stay. She was dreadfully happy to see his living face, the wrinkles at the corner of his eyes, the kink in his left brow, the warm lips. She knew then that this very real man was not real, and felt anguish. He would go, and she would wake. She said:

  ‘Why are they doing that?’

  He smiled, as though the slaughter was normal and agreeable. He did not speak. He put a warm hand on her knee. This made her cry, and she woke.

  The next day, she saw Nils Isaksen in his usual corner on the breakfast terrace. She walked straight over to him. He did not stand to greet her. She asked him if she could sit down, and he made a grudging gesture of assent. She said:

  ‘I have decided to go back to England, Mr Isaksen. Not permanently. Just to see what they have done with him.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘My son and my daughter.’

  ‘You did not speak of them.’

  ‘They would not have wanted – to have to worry about me.’

  ‘You have made sure they must,’ said Nils Isaksen, with a touch of ice.

  ‘I wondered,’ said Patricia, ‘if you would – care to – accompany me?’ She was thinking in French, voudriez-vous m’accompagner? Her English sounded odd. He asked, unsmiling,

  ‘What had you in mind?’

  ‘Mr Isaksen, I must see where my husband is buried. I should not have left him. Beyond that, I don’t know.’

  ‘I have nothing in the world to do, Mrs Nimmo. I will come with you.’

  Some days later, they found Tony’s grave, in the churchyard near Benjie’s weekend cottage, in Suffolk. The church was one of those towered East Anglian flinty bastions. Benjie’s children had been christened there. The churchyard was walled, and grassed over, with yews and cedars. Patricia had supposed that it was too early for any memorial to have been put up – there were problems, she believed, with the settlement of the soil – so she missed the grave for some time, looking for recent digging, a temporary wooden marker. It was Nils Isaksen who found Tony, all staring white, a cruciform white marble head-stone standing at one end of a white marble-bordered rectangle full of glittering white marble chips. He called to Patricia, ‘Here is Nimmo,’ and she came along the path, and read the incised grey writing. Anthony Piers Nimmo. His dates. Beloved father of Benjamin and Megan. There were no flowers. Patricia had brought anemones, crimson, purple, dark blue, wax-white. She stood there, holding them, and Nils Isaksen found a jam jar, and filled it at a tap by a kind of gardener’s shed. Patricia put the jar of flowers carefully at the foot of the stone. She stood there, listening to an invisible blackbird and the soft wind in the branches. Nils Isaksen stood at a distance, not pretending not to be there, not ostentatiously doing something else, but at a distance. Patricia opened her handbag and took out a dark eyebrow pencil. She wrote across the top of the stone, in careful capital letters, smaller than the incised ones:

  THE ODDS IS GONE

  AND THERE IS NOTHING LEFT REMARKABLE

  BENEATH THE VISITING MOON.

  She said to Nils, who came up to read her graffito, ‘When I first knew I loved him, I was terrified he would die. I would lie awake at night, muttering these lines to myself. You get drunk on unreal sadness, but I was truly afraid he would die.’

  They stood together. The earth smelled strongly of mould, and humus, and the energy of decay. Patricia said:

  ‘I hate this sort of thing. The chips, the square bed, all that. I like the earth, you know, a sort of slow vanishing. This is vulgar.’

  ‘It has a certain splendour. It reminds me of snow and ice and the North.’

  ‘I should telephone Benjie and Megan. You are right, I have treated them badly. They must know I’m alive and not ill, the bank will have said . . .’

  ‘You could send them a postcard.’

  ‘A postcard?’

  ‘For a beginning. You could send it from Oslo or Stockholm. Or Trondheim.’

  ‘You are going back?’

  ‘Not permanently. Just to find out – what became of the old lady.’

  Patricia had not been quite sure until that moment that the old lady was not an invention. She stood in the green English churchyard, staring at the glittering expanse of white chips framed in a white stone square. She remembered Nîmes, like a hot blue and golden ball, containing creamy stone cylinders and cubes. She thought of the unknown North, the green fjords, the ice, the lights, the one tree. She said:

  ‘You would like me to accompany you?’

  Nils Isaksen shuffled his ungainly feet on the moist path.

  ‘I would not take up too much of your time. But yes, I should be grateful. Then – in that case – it becomes possible.’

  ‘Then I will come,’ said Patricia Nimmo.

  They walked slowly away, side by side.

  A Lamia in the Cévennes

  Sirène, Henri Matisse, 1948

  A Lamia in the Cévennes

  In the mid-1980s Bernard Lycett-Kean decided that Thatcher’s Britain was uninhabitable, a land of dog-eat-dog, lung-corroding ozone and floating money, of which there was at once far too much and far too little. He sold his West Hampstead flat and bought a small stone house on a Cévenol hillside. He had three rooms, and a large barn, which he weatherproofed, using it as a studio in winter and a storehouse in summer. He did not know how he would take to solitude, and laid in a large quantity of red wine, of which he drank a good deal at first, and afterwards much less. He discovered that the effect of the air and th
e light and the extremes of heat and cold were enough, indeed too much, without alcohol. He stood on the terrace in front of his house and battled with these things, with mistral and tramontane and thunderbolts and howling clouds. The Cévennes is a place of extreme weather. There were also days of white heat, and days of yellow heat, and days of burning blue heat. He produced some paintings of heat and light, with very little else in them, and some other paintings of the small river which ran along the foot of the steep, terraced hill on which his house stood; these were dark green and dotted with the bright blue of the kingfisher and the electric blue of the dragonflies.

  These paintings he packed in his van and took to London and sold for largish sums of the despised money. He went to his own Private View and found he had lost the habit of conversation. He stared and snorted. He was a big man, a burly man, his stare seemed aggressive when it was largely baffled. His old friends were annoyed. He himself found London just as rushing and evil-smelling and unreal as he had been imagining it. He hurried back to the Cévennes. With his earnings, he built himself a swimming-pool, where once there had been a patch of baked mud and a few bushes.

  It is not quite right to say he built it. It was built by the Jardinerie Émeraude, two enterprising young men, who dug and lined and carried mud and monstrous stones, and built a humming power-house full of taps and pipes and a swirling cauldron of filter-sand. The pool was blue, a swimming-pool blue, lined with a glittering tile mosaic, and with a mosaic dolphin cavorting amiably in its depths, a dark blue dolphin with a pale blue eye. It was not a boring rectangular pool, but an irregular oval triangle, hugging the contour of the terrace on which it lay. It had a white stone rim, moulded to the hand, delightful to touch when it was hot in the sun.

  The two young men were surprised that Bernard wanted it blue. Blue was a little moche, they thought. People now were making pools steel-grey or emerald-green, or even dark wine-red. But Bernard’s mind was full of blue dots now visible across the southern mountains when you travelled from Paris to Montpellier by air. It was a recalcitrant blue, a blue that asked to be painted by David Hockney and only by David Hockney. He felt something else could and must be done with that blue. It was a blue he needed to know and fight. His painting was combative painting. That blue, that amiable, non-natural aquamarine was different in the uncompromising mountains from what it was in Hollywood. There were no naked male backsides by his pool, no umbrellas, no tennis-courts. The river-water was sombre and weedy, full of little shoals of needle-fishes and their shadows, of curling water-snakes and the triangular divisions of flow around pebbles and boulders. This mild blue, here, was to be seen in that terrain.

  He swam more and more, trying to understand the blue, which was different when it was under the nose, ahead of the eyes, over and around the sweeping hands and the flickering toes and the groin and the armpits and the hairs of his chest, which held bubbles of air for a time. His shadow in the blue moved over a pale eggshell mosaic, a darker blue, with huge paddle-shaped hands. The light changed, and with it, everything. The best days were under racing cloud, when the aquamarine took on a cool grey tone, which was then chased back, or rolled away, by the flickering gold-in-blue of yellow light in liquid. In front of his prow or chin in the brightest lights moved a mesh of hexagonal threads, flashing rainbow colours, flashing liquid silver-gilt, with a hint of molten glass; on such days liquid fire, rosy and yellow and clear, ran across the dolphin, who lent it a thread of intense blue. But the surface could be a reflective plane, with the trees hanging in it, with two white diagonals where the aluminium steps entered. The shadows of the sides were a deeper blue but not a deep blue, a blue not reflective and yet lying flatly under reflections. The pool was deep, for the Émeraude young men envisaged much diving. The wind changed the surface, frilled and furred it, flecked it with diamond drops, shirred it and made a witless patchwork of its plane. His own motion changed the surface – the longer he swam, the faster he swam, the more the glassy hills and valleys chopped and changed and ran back on each other.

  Swimming was volupté – he used the French word, because of Matisse. Luxe, calme et volupté. Swimming was a strenuous battle with immense problems, of geometry, of chemistry, of apprehension, of style, of other colours. He put pots of petunias and geraniums near the pool. The bright hot pinks and purples were dangerous. They did something to that blue.

  The stone was easy. Almost too blandly easy. He could paint chalky white and creamy sand and cool grey and paradoxical hot grey; he could understand the shadows in the high rough wall of monstrous cobblestones that bounded his land.

  The problem was the sky. Swimming in one direction, he was headed towards a great rounded green mountain, thick with the bright yellow-green of dense chestnut trees, making a slightly innocent, simple arc against the sky. Whereas the other way, he swam towards crags, towards a bowl of bald crags, with a few pines and lines of dark shale. And against the green hump the blue sky was one blue, and against the bald stone another, even when for a brief few hours it was uniformly blue overhead, that rich blue, that cobalt, deep-washed blue of the South, which fought all the blues of the pool, all the green-tinged, duck-egg-tinged blues of the shifting water. But the sky had also its greenish days, and its powdery-hazed days, and its theatrical louring days, and none of these blues and whites and golds and ultramarines and faded washes harmonised in any way with the pool blues, though they all went through their changes and splendours in the same world, in which he and his shadow swam, in which he and his shadow stood in the sun and struggled to record them.

  He muttered to himself. Why bother. Why does this matter so much. What difference does it make to anything if I solve this blue and just start again. I could just sit down and drink wine. I could go and be useful in a cholera-camp in Colombia or Ethiopia. Why bother to render the transparency in solid paint or air on a bit of board? I could just stop.

  He could not.

  He tried oil paint and acrylic, watercolour and gouache, large designs and small plain planes and complicated juxtaposed planes. He tried trapping light on thick impasto and tried also glazing his surfaces flat and glossy, like seventeenth-century Dutch or Spanish paintings of silk. One of these almost pleased him, done at night, with the lights under the water and the dark round the stone, on an oval bit of board. But then he thought it was sentimental. He tried veils of watery blues on white in watercolour, he tried Matisse-like patches of blue and petunia – pool blue, sky blue, petunia – he tried Bonnard’s mixtures of pastel and gouache.

  His brain hurt, and his eyes stared, and he felt whipped by winds and dried by suns.

  He was happy, in one of the ways human beings have found in which to be happy.

  One day he got up as usual and as usual flung himself naked into the water to watch the dawn in the sky and the blue come out of the black and grey in the water.

  There was a hissing in his ears, and a stench in his nostrils, perhaps a sulphurous stench, he was not sure; his eyes were sharp but his profession, with spirits and turpentine, had dulled his nostrils. As he moved through the sluggish surface he stirred up bubbles, which broke, foamed, frothed and crusted. He began to leave a trail of white, which reminded him of polluted rivers, of the waste-pipes of tanneries, of deserted mines. He came out rapidly and showered. He sent a fax to the Jardinerie Émeraude. What was Paradise is become the Infernal Pit. Where once I smelled lavender and salt, now I have a mephitic stench. What have you done to my water? Undo it, undo it. I cannot coexist with these exhalations. His French was more florid than his English. I am polluted, my work is polluted, I cannot go on. How could the two young men be brought to recognise the extent of the insult? He paced the terrace like an angry panther. The sickly smell crept like marsh-grass over the flower-pots, through the lavender bushes. An emerald-green van drew up, with a painted swimming-pool and a painted palm tree. Every time he saw the van, he was pleased and irritated that this commercial emerald-and-blue had found an exact balance for the difficult aquamarine
without admitting any difficulty.

  The young men ran along the edge of the pool, peering in, their muscular legs brown under their shorts, their plimsolls padding. The sun came up over the green hill and showed the plague-stricken water-skin, ashy and suppurating. It is all OK, said the young men, this is a product we put in to fight algae, not because you have algae, M. Bernard, but in case algae might appear, as a precaution. It will all be exhaled in a week or two, the mousse will go, the water will clear.

  ‘Empty the pool,’ said Bernard. ‘Now. Empty it now. I will not co-exist for two weeks with this vapour. Give me back my clean salty water. This water is my life-work. Empty it now.’

  ‘It will takes days to fill,’ said one young man, with a French acceptance of Bernard’s desperation. ‘Also there is the question of the allocation of water, of how much you are permitted to take.’

  ‘We could fetch it up from the river,’ said the other. In French this is literally, we could draw it in the river, puiser dans le ruisseau, like fishing. ‘It will be cold, ice-cold from the Source, up the mountain,’ said the Émeraude young men.

  ‘Do it,’ said Bernard. ‘Fill it from the river. I am an Englishman, I swim in the North Sea, I like cold water. Do it. Now.’

  The young men ran up and down. They turned huge taps in the grey plastic pipes that debouched in the side of the mountain. The swimming-pool soughed and sighed and began, still sighing, to sink, whilst down below, on the hillside, a frothing flood spread and laughed and pranced and curled and divided and swept into the river. Bernard stalked behind the young men, admonishing them. ‘Look at that froth. We are polluting the river.’