Turning Back the Sun(4)
He had started to drink a bit, whisky mostly. Returning late from his evening rounds he”d thought, I must watch this. But his one glass had become two, then three. His mother had drunk too. But there was too much of his father in him, he thought, to let it go that far; and one day, as if in his father”s honor, he simply stopped.
But the episode left him uneasy. He could no longer quite predict himself. Soon afterwards, coming upon some photographic portraits in his desk, he found himself hunting them for an explanation. But his parents stared back at him out of another age. The cut of his father”s hair and lawyer”s dress looked austerely archaic; and his mother”s face was cradled in the side curls fashionable twenty years ago. And her dress—did they still dress like that in the capital?
Yet he thought of his parents” traits as alternating in him. Even their faces. He recognized his father”s features in his own harsh cheeks and hectoring eyes. They shared the same angry, overhung brows. But when he looked in the mirror he saw, between his father”s nose and firm chin, his mother”s mouth smiling. And in calmer moods, as if it superposed itself at moments of his father”s inattention, he would sense the whole stamp of his expression overcast by hers.
There were times when he could not disentangle in himself his father”s solitude and ferocious spirit of enquiry from his mother”s sentimental longings and compassion. Often now he was flooded by an incontinent sympathy for people as he talked with them—for a patient, a girlfriend, or just an acquaintance—and after they had left him he would clean forget them. He saw himself oscillating between pity and isolated indifference. He expended more energy on the town than almost anyone he knew: he had even started an advisory service to the more distant cattle stations, and his voice over the shaky radiotelegraph must have saved women in childbirth from fatal septicemia. Yet for all his apparent commitment, his energy, a profound inner betrayal separated him off.
He wanted to return to the capital.
Nowadays the car crash which had killed his mother and maimed his own foot, together with his exile from the capital—all within three months—struck him as a severance from any understanding of himself. He had never afterwards seen himself a continuous person. His first nineteen years seemed to have been lived dreaming. Sometimes he fancied that his parents had died with the secret of him, and that if only he could return to the capital he might recover it.
CHAPTER
3
People say the savages have this idol out in the desert, where there”s a freshwater spring. They pretend it talks to them.”
Rayner said, “We pretend God talks to us.”
“I think you do.” Ivar looked at him in a way which merged scorn with affection so indissolubly that Rayner could not be annoyed. He remembered this derisive fondness from their schooldays in the capital: Ivar, stocky in his green neckscarf and jumper, saying, “Come on, Rayner. Are you one of my gang or not?”
They sat in a cave of dimmed light and music. It was rather a ritzy nightclub for a town like this, Rayner thought. It sported a cabaret with striptease, and four or five hostesses of various appeal. The waitresses, including a sad, sexless transvestite, glided between the tables in high-collared jackets and fishnet tights. Rayner wondered who came here. They seemed mostly to be young businessmen and a few army officers like Ivar.
Rayner said vaguely, “I”ve usually met women without all this paraphernalia.” The place reeked of something new to him (but anything new in this town was a relief): an ambience of the sin market, of sexual peril. It was fleetingly provocative.
Ivar said, “They”re a decent lot of girls here. And you don”t pay them, remember, you give them presents.”
Rayner laughed uneasily. “You do, I go home.”
From time to time Ivar and he indulged the uncritical friendship of old schoolmates. Yet they also held off from one another. They were too deeply unlike. Ivar”s features smoothed into one another like cement. He seemed to spread calm about him. His low-lidded eyes held an intelligence unconfused by passion or (Rayner suspected) much conscience. It was the face of a man inspecting an orderly room; whereas Rayner”s glared into chaos. Rayner seemed to conduct a running quarrel with the world in which Ivar was at home. They slightly tantalized one another.
But Ivar was also a source of information. He was second-in-command of the garrison here: a callow-looking company of the Fourth Field Army in what the military still called a “key frontier town.” And Rayner could not resist leaning forward under the din of the music and saying, “Did they find out anything about the murders?”
Ivar said, “That was a police job.”
“But you”ve increased your patrols, haven”t you? Or is all that driving about in jeeps just to reassure us?”
Ivar looked at him in a way which Rayner remembered, with the watching smile of someone who uses intimacies like a weapon. Even in their schooldays, Ivar had been the wielder of secret knowledge. Now he said, “There”s been another killing. Just this morning. An old man in one of those smallholdings. Had a spear in the side. They just took his cattle food and wireless. And that was just four kilometers from here.”
Rayner said, “It must be the failed rains. Perhaps they”re getting desperate.”
Ivar shook his head. “I think they enjoy killing. They kill for almost nothing.” He said in the same level, comfortable tone, “If we adopted their code, they”d be rounded up tomorrow and eliminated.” “You talk as if you want to.”