Elementals - A. S. Byatt [3]
She had booked to Paris, but she got out at Lille. She bought a ticket to Nice, and climbed into a TGV, going south. It was now evening. Lille station was darkening. She remembered early versions of the imagined escape. The young bride’s version, standing solitary on the heaving deck of the cross-Channel steamer, a vision complete with wake, spray, crying gulls, and the moving troughs on the surface of the salt deeps under which she had just shot, sitting in her dark glasses by her brightly lit window. The successful woman’s version, the rising nose of the aircraft breaking through the white froth of cloud into clear blue and sunlight, the space of creamy-curded water-vapour, the silver purr. Anywhere, at the end of it. Anywhere, nowhere, somewhere. The train was without shock. But quick. The darkening fields flung past, unreadable indicators hissed past, the sky went turquoise, Prussian blue, indigo, rusty black in the lights of the way. She slept. She dreamed, and when she woke, remembered that she had dreamed something she didn’t want to remember. Her mind ran loose and nauseous, for a moment, and then she began to worry about credit cards, about whether they could or would trace credit cards. The world was small now, which was good, you could move in it with ease. But everything was linked to every other thing, and that wasn’t good.
She got out at Avignon, several hours later, and took a train to Montpellier and Barcelona. Shortly after Avignon, the train stopped at Nîmes, and there she got out, it was perhaps the coincidence, the almost coincidence, of the names, Nîmes, Nimmo, that decided her. It wasn’t a city she knew anything about. No one would look for her there, for that reason. She set off, in the warm southern darkness, on the high-heeled sandals in which she had come down that staircase, carrying her bag. The city has big boulevards, with plane trees, and she kept to these, walking briskly, past cafés spilling light on to dark pavements, past squares, past alleys. She followed signs to ‘Jardin de la Fontaine’ because that sounded like a refuge, and thus found herself outside the Hôtel Impérator Concorde, which looked, and was, large and comfortable. She went in, and booked a room. The room was curtained and shuttered. There was a large bed, with a sprigged Provençal quilt, rose and gold on cream, to match the curtains, which she pulled back, revealing tall, sun-blistered shutters and a small balcony. She looked out; below was a walled garden, full of trees, cypresses and olives, and with a fountain bubbling in golden light in a pale green-blue pool. She closed the shutters again. She found she had a semicircular bath in tawny pink, tiled round with eighteenth-century birds in pink on white glaze. She bathed, and put on her nightdress. She put out the lights and got into the large bed. She remembered briefly, the windbreak and the painted avalanche, broken trees and dislodged rocks in the arrested crush of carefully painted snow. She thought she would move money, tomorrow, out of the Jersey account, and then move it again, and then move it again. The bed was like a nest, the pillows frilled, the sheets crisp. She was afraid of not sleeping, but slept. In the morning there were bright needle-stripes of light in the shutters. When she opened them, there was the blue sky, full of pale yellow light.
Breakfast was on a terrace, sheltered by a glass wall, under a canopy. Beyond the terrace was the walled garden, with sandy paths, the bubbling fountain in its stone-rimmed pool, and a huge stone bowl overflowing with ivy-leaved geraniums, scarlet, crimson, pink. There were tall cedars and pointed yews; there was a group of silver olives, and cypresses. There was bright light, shade. It was the South. Under one of the cedars a man was writing at a folding table. He was a blond man, with a head of glittering pale curls. His long legs encompassed the little