Elementals - A. S. Byatt [8]
‘I am sorry. About your wife. I have just lost my husband.’
‘And you do not wish to speak of this. I understand. I do not intend to speak of Liv. Do you find much to interest you in Nîmes, Mrs Nimmo?’
‘I somehow haven’t done the things one should do. I haven’t walked in the Jardin de la Fontaine. I haven’t been into the Maison Carrée, or the Carré d’Art.’
‘Or the Arènes?’
‘Or the Arènes. I find that rather horrifying. I don’t like the idea of it.’
‘I don’t like it either. But I go there, often. I sit there, in the sun, and think. It is a good place to think, for a man from the north who is starved of sun. The sun pours into it, like a bowl.’
‘I still don’t think I’ll go. I find all this – ’ she gestured at the photographs of bulls, matadors, Hemingway and Picasso – ‘simply unpleasant. The English do.’
‘You are temperate people. I, too, find it unpleasant. But it needs to be understood, I find. Why does an austere Protestant city go mad every year, for blood and death and ritual?’
He bent his pale head towards her. His pale blue eyes shone. His bony white hands were still on the table, on each side of his ice-misted glass. She said:
‘I hope you do come to understand it. I shan’t try.’
After this they had several more brief drinks together, in the evenings, which were getting hotter, and heavier. Patricia did not think she liked Nils Isaksen, and also felt that this simply did not matter. The nerve-endings with which she had once felt out the shape of other people’s feelings were severed or numbed. She got no further than acknowledging to herself that he was in some way a driven man. His reading and his writing were extravagant, his concentration theatrical, his covering of the paper – wrong somehow, too much, or was it that she felt that any effort, any energy, was too much? The pleasure was going out of A la recherche, though she persisted, and her French improved. They talked about Nîmes. He told her things she hadn’t wanted to know, hadn’t been at all anxious about, which nevertheless changed her ideas. He told her that the city and the water of the fountain, Fons Nemausis, were one single thing; that this closed, walled collection of golden houses with red-tiled roofs in a dustbowl in the garrigue had been built because of the presence of the powerful source. That the god of the town, Nemausus, was the god of the source. That under and beyond it were gulfs, caverns, galleries of water in the hill. That there had been a nunnery on the hill above the fountain, around the temple of Diana, from the year 1000 to the Renaissance, whose abbesses had claimed ownership of the water. He spoke of excavations, of pagan antiquities, of religious wars of resistance to Simon de Montfort, to Louis XIV, to the Germans. He spoke of the guillotine in the Revolution, and the gibbet in the Second World War. Patricia listened, and then went shopping, or wandering. She thought, if he talked much more, or overstepped some boundary, she would have to move on. But she did not know where she would go. The weather was getting hotter. The weather-map on the television in her room showed that Nîmes was almost invariably the hottest city in France, uncooled by coastal breezes, or mountain winds, a city on a plain, absorbing heat and light. She took longer walks, for variation. She went into the Jardin de la Fontaine in the midday heat, stared into the green troubled depths, climbed the unshaded, formal staircase with its balustrades, observed a crocodile made of bronze-leaved plants in a bed of rose and white flowers, curving its tail over its back, yawning vegetably, in the dancing bright air. Nils Isaksen told her she shouldn’t go out without a hat. She wanted to reply that she didn’t care. She said ‘I know’ but did not buy a hat. Let it bake her brain, something said.
One evening Nils Isaksen broke his cautious bounds. Patricia was very tired. She had taken three eaux-de-vie