Elementals - A. S. Byatt [18]
Patricia waited. The black birds circled.
‘She had not known who I was for five years. I did everything. I washed her. I clothed her. My aunt sat and smiled and sang. Sometimes she cried. Then she too – deteriorated. I had to give up my teaching because I had two old women in wheelchairs in one house, nodding and babbling, and shouting too, they could get very angry, they got very angry with each other . . . Then my mother died. My aunt and I buried my mother in the churchyard. The labradorite stone is a story I told myself, when I found a little piece in a shop, and it reminded me of the North.’
‘And then your aunt died?’
‘No. Then, Mrs Nimmo, I packed suitcases, and sold the house, and wheeled my aunt on to the train and went south to Oslo. And from there I took her to Stockholm. There is a famous clinic there, a neurological clinic. I took her in there, Mrs Nimmo. I had not made any appointment. We were not particularly remarkable. The clinic was full of people like us. We met nurses in the corridors, and my aunt raised her hand to them, like a queen, and they smiled. I walked up and down, quite quickly, looking for a long line of people. There was one outside the pharmacy, everyone waits there. I put my aunt in her chair, in this queue, in the hospital corridor. She was smiling at everyone, she usually did, she was a nicer woman than my mother. Then I left, Mrs Nimmo. I had premeditated my act like a criminal. There is nothing in my aunt’s clothing, or her handbag, to say who she is, or that she came from the North. Then I came here. By hazard, as you did, as you told me you did. I got on trains and travelled south. Europe is one, now, my movements were unremarkable. I had all my money with me. It was very premeditated, Mrs Nimmo.’
‘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