Turning Back the Sun Read online

  They confused her dance with striptease. At several tables the men were growing restless. Somebody shouted up: “Get yer clothes off!”

  Rayner wondered why the club engaged her, unless as a foil to the strippers. In this underworld of spangled G-strings and rouged nipples, she emerged as an enigma, only half tamed. She”d somehow got away.

  Rayner said: “She doesn”t seem to care about her audience.”

  “She cares all right,” Ivar said, “but she”s self-centered.” His lips compressed sourly. Rayner thought he detected a hint of hurt pride, which in Ivar was odd. Zoë was the only performer on whose body he passed no judgement. Perhaps, Rayner thought, he was too familiar with it.

  “She got left behind,” Ivar laughed, “like the savages.” “Left behind?”

  “Yes, this place started up ten years ago as a satirical cabaret. Pretentious stuff. Can you imagine it, in this town? And of course nobody came. The government didn”t even bother to close it down. It just faded out. Felicie”s father bought it for a song, and the old troupe gave up. All except Zoë. She never accepts anything. The club kept her on as “something different.” “ He sounded slightly bitter. “One day she”ll dance herself to death.”

  In the middle of Zoë”s act, Felicie returned to their table. Rayner went on staring at the stage, refusing to comment on her singing, but Ivar told her, “You”re beautiful.”

  She smiled and followed Rayner”s gaze. She said, “I can”t stand Zoë when she”s like this. She”s so cold.”

  By now the spectators, in their lethargic way, were reacting as never before. Their dislike arose not in shouted abuse but in a diffused murmur of resentment which came welling up out of the dark. It was extraordinary. By her dance”s end an almost tangible wave of anger was beating against the stage. After the strippers” open thighs, this other performance struck the half-drunk audience as an insult. The girl was flattering herself instead of them, making shapes with her too-independent body. And her inaccessibility was unbearable.

  Her only concession to eroticism happened a minute before she ended. Then she literally let down her hair. It fell brown and shining to her waist. It transformed her. It lengthened and gentled her face. And all at once she looked unsure. To Rayner it seemed as if this was her way of undressing—a way more self-exposing than any of the others”. She no longer looked like a woman, but a young girl. She finished in stillness, but the eyes staring out between the frame of hair were now tentative, and seemed suddenly to need the audience”s applause, which did not come.

  Even Rayner”s lonely clapping sounded not for her pastiche dance, but for the courage with which she had invested it. She left him vaguely confused. He had misjudged her. After a while he got up to leave. Ivar had turned moody, Felicie was drunk, and the rest of the audience were concentrating on another stripper, as if Zoë”s dance was no more than a failed version of this one. And maybe it was, Rayner thought. He was always laying his own meanings on simple things, he knew. And perhaps Zoe was as empty as Felicie in her way: just an exuberant girl, dancing.

  CHAPTER

  4

  What do you mean when you say you”re “cut off?” “ But Rayner did not know. Perhaps to feel cut off was to have grown up. He said, “I don”t feel I belong here.”

  The man said, “I”m not sure that anybody does. This is such a peculiar place.”

  “Other people accept it,” Rayner said. He glanced at the man, wondering how recent an immigrant or exile he was. “But I can”t put down roots here. I want to, but I can”t.”

  “Does that hurt?”

  He said, “Enough to convince me that I have to go somewhere else—but I don”t know how.” He met the analyst”s gaze, but could not read it. “I wouldn”t have come to you if it weren”t a professional requirement.”

  If the man felt affronted, he did not show it. In this country, as elsewhere, anyone seeking psychiatric training had to submit to analysis himself. Yet the town contained only this school medical officer, whose own grounding went little deeper than a dabbling in books sent from Europe.

  Perhaps it was because Rayner felt no respect for the officer—an angular, puzzled-looking man—that he expressed his alienation in irate bursts. “I feel I”m wasting away here.” He felt this almost physically sometimes. “I can”t even do a real job … Sometimes I wonder if I”m treating human beings at all. Days go by without my patients asking me a single question about their condition, why they”re suffering—nothing. I might as well be treating cattle. This sounds harsh, but that”s how it is … and the hospital”s hopelessly short of specialists. I”ve found myself doing jobs I”m virtually unqualified for. An ordinary doctor in the capital would never be sewing up some of the wounds which I”ve sewn. But here it”s common practice.”

  The man said: “I suppose it”s practical, country medicine.”

  “It”s terrifying.”

  “But you”re needed here, aren”t you? Respected.”

  “Am I?” Rayner laughed, but with a trace of bitterness. “That just lowers my respect for others.”

  The officer asked, “But where do you want to go?”

  Rayner answered with faint surprise, “The capital.” Where else, he wondered, did anyone want to go? Recently he had published some articles on psoriasis, the skin disease—the hospital laboratory had rudimentary facilities for analyzing it—and he still hoped for a transfer to the dermatology unit in the capital. He”d take any job they offered.

  “The capital …” The analyst started jotting things on his pad. “You were born in the capital?”

  “Yes.” Rayner became mesmerized by the man”s forehead as he wrote. Its dust of greying hair receded in uneven clumps, as if it had been swept by a bush fire. He imagined the swarm of trite thoughts that might be entering it, and said curtly, “My childhood was happy. It was just too brief.”

  “Your parents …”

  “My father died when I was fourteen, my mother five years later. In a car crash. That”s how I got this.” He flourished his twisted foot.

  The analyst, he knew now, would edge him towards his childhood. Yet this did not spring up in the simple, sharp pictures which the man must want, but in composite images accrued over months and years—images which seemed to stand surety, by their very ordinariness, for a whole season, or place, or person.

  In the summer of his fifteenth birthday his mother had rented a villa by the sea, but his memories of it had resolved into pictures from which everything temporary—all movement, guests, bird flight—had been eliminated, like a camera shot on so long an exposure that only the essential and permanent ingrained itself. He could remember the jagged circle of every rock pool which perforated the shore at low tide, and each item of the villa”s furniture. Yet in his memory the place was unpeopled. Where had his mother been? He did not know. His images of her now were pathetically selective and few. And the effort to preserve these remnants had turned them too familiar, blurred by use, not memories of a woman anymore, just memories of memories.

  He did not know how much of his mother he could accurately reproduce for the analyst. But the man said, “Tell me what she was to you. Her reality to you.”

  But even then she did not appear easily. He remembered her as a pervasive presence more than a physical fact. He had been a solitary child, and he perceived this mother of his boyhood not as a spectator or confidante, but as a benign voice offstage. Of her real life at this time, he could piece together almost nothing.

  “Who do you prefer,” she had once asked him, “your father or me?” and the fact that he remembered this question, and the intensity in her soft, sallow face, was a little strange. But he was only five, and he answered, “You.”

  Later she became fixed more securely in his memory, inseparable from the big, airy house with its bleached furnishings and feel of internal sunlight. Its dreamy spaces suited her. She was absent-mindedly tender. After his father”s death, the flushed cheeks and dishevelled hair of her occasional dri
nking touched him with alarm. Perhaps they had become too used to happiness, he thought, because he did not know this other woman.

  “Until then I hadn”t thought of understanding her.”

  The analyst did not answer.

  Rayner said irritably, “I suppose this is somehow meant to affect my relationships with women now.”

  The man inclined his strange head, as if listening.

  Yet when Rayner thought of these relationships, they seemed too amorphous to describe. However impassioned—and some had preoccupied him for years—they had been conducted in the knowledge that one day he would leave here. His final commitment was to somewhere else. He said, “I haven”t found anyone right for me.” He sounded apologetic, even to himself. “Perhaps I”ve unconsciously chosen women unsuitable to marry … because I know I won”t stay.”

  “What do you mean “unsuitable to marry?” “

  Rayner was ashamed of this. But he blundered on. “They”ve been much older, or had a different education—or were married already …” He disliked the person saying this. Even at the outset of these affairs, he”d been dogged by this betrayal, the knowledge of their transience. Yet he had gone on with them. Several of these women had come to love him, as he cooled towards them. In a town like this, they continued like ghosts: the secretary in the office window whose eyes still followed him in the street; Xenia, greying now, turning her face feverishly away from him at parties; Myra, who still sold scarves on the mall.

  The man said, “Have you ever felt committed to anyone?”

  “I fell in love in the capital. But I was only nineteen.”

  He had known her since childhood. She was one of the small band with whom he”d grown up: children marked out by a modest privilege of which they were scarcely aware. The letters from these friends had petered out years ago, but he sometimes wondered what had become of them: the gifted and melancholy Leon, who must surely be an artist or writer by now (although he”d heard nothing of him); and Gerhard, pushy and handsome, a friend of Ivar”s. The girls were such close friends that they seemed to partake a little of one another”s aura, of the same optimism and clarity. At least in retrospect, they were beautiful, with their blue and hazel eyes and blonde or fair-streaked hair. They emanated laughter and trust, and a little vanity. Even Adelina, whose features were so irregular, partook of this mutual glamour with her long, slender legs and innocent haughtiness.

  But Miriam”s attraction was different. She had dark hair and dark eyes. Even as a boy he”d known why the other girls appealed to him; but with Miriam he was unsure. While the others were expressed by their faces—pretty, even beautiful faces—Miriam”s personality stirred in her whole body, which was vigorous and full.

  In the brief months between his car crash and his transfer from the capital, he had fallen in love with her. Later he wondered if this love had been ignited by her radiant health, viewed from his sickbed through weakened eyes. But they never slept together. The capital was a puritan city. They lived under public scrutiny, in clubs and restaurants. In the gang of their friends, they did not noticeably pair off. The group held its members in common. Now he could not even be sure how exclusive he had been to her, but remembered their lovemaking as a glory of nervous, adolescent exploration in the evening in parks during autumn.

  They used to go diving together on the coral west of the capital. After his discharge from hospital he forced himself to do this again, but one morning he found to his horror that he could not squeeze his damaged foot into his flipper. For several minutes he stood up in the boat, furious with humiliation, while the others went overboard; and when at last he dropped into the water and descended the anchor chain behind Miriam, the divemaster never noticed that he was barefoot.

  Rayner did not know it then, but this would be the last time he would see her. He felt a little sick. The rasp of a strong current clouded the water with a dust of coral fragments. Miriam swam ahead of him with languid undulations of her flippered feet. The compressed-air cylinders obscured her back. All familiarity seemed gone from her, because she had dyed her dark hair pale—a smoky gold color, which flowed out behind her. Even when she turned, her face floated enigmatic behind its mask and regulator, washed by this flaxen strangeness.

  He came alongside her with strenuous thrusts of his unaided feet. The others were ahead, oblivious of them. The current had eased now, and the water cleared. In a dreamy unison they glided together abreast, as if flying, while the coral steepened into miniature crags around them.

  Then came the moment by which he remembered their love. He reached out and took her hand. Behind its mask her face looked startled for a moment, then she pulled his hand towards her and held it clenched against her breast. The next instant, teasingly, she had taken the regulator out of her mouth and was holding it towards him. So he removed his own and gave it to her, and childishly, a little dangerously, breathing from each other”s cylinders, they swam on for a full two minutes, locked side by side. It was a moment of perfect trust. They went in slow motion, weightless. They might have been breathing through each other”s lungs. She still clasped his hand. They must have looked like one creature, he later thought—but an inept mutant, doomed to perish. Yet it was an instant of such eerie, unaccountable union that he imagined it afterwards more complete than the sexual coupling they had never known, and as if to illumine the moment”s strangeness, great drifts of damselfish, confined in the coral valley, came flickering and brushing against them like cold gems.

  “When did you leave?” The analyst”s pen shifted over his notepad.

  “Just three days later. I”d been assigned here after my exam results.” He laughed a little bitterly. “The results weren”t good. The car crash interfered with my studies.”

  His friends had gathered on the station platform to say farewell and fill his arms with small gifts. But the conventional words of parting—”Until next year!” or “Come back and see us!”—never reached their lips. There was no such hope of return. So they spoke about small, immediate things: the appearance of his fellow passengers, the sudden rain. Nobody could face forever. Their ebullience had shrunk to helplessness. Jarmila and Adelina cried a little, and Leon was biting his lip.

  Only Miriam was not there. Again and again he scrutinized the platform for her. The doors were clunking shut all along the train. The men clasped his hands. Then, at last, he realized that she would not come, and understood. Among this crowd of friends, the gap that she created—her inability to endure this last farewell—was more eloquent than any words she might have spoken. None of the others mentioned her. It was as if they conspired in the knowledge that her presence would be unbearable.

  For months afterwards he imagined her face as an oval gap in that platform crowd. He could not bear to write, and nor did she. After a year she had retreated to a cell somewhere in the back of his memory, and he slipped into the arms of the girl who sold cheap scarves on the town”s mall.

  CHAPTER

  5

  The partition wall in Rayner”s clinic gave out a relentless thudding, as if someone were beating it with his fist. From the far side he heard the voice of his colleague Leszek, raised in anxiety. But the thudding went on like a threatened heartbeat, and beneath it the voice of a man: “I want to know. I have the right to know.”

  Rayner tried to concentrate on his own patient, a four-month-old baby who had spewed up all night, his mother said. The woman”s voice was gravelly, suspicious. The baby had not been registered. The thudding next door continued, but the talking had died. His examination cleared the baby, but disclosed quinsy in the mother. The thudding rose to a crescendo. There was a noise of splintered glass.

  When he flung open his door onto the reception area he saw the usual listless quadrangle of patients, sitting on quilts against the walls, waiting. But in his partner”s room a coarse, heavy-built man hovered tempestuously above the examination couch, where a broken glass had fallen or been dashed from somebody”s hand. His fist still belabo
red the wall, but it was impossible to tell if he were threatening or protecting the woman who lay there. She stared at the ceiling with a face of abject tiredness.

  Leszek looked at Rayner with open relief, and turned to the man. “This is my partner. He will give you a second opinion.” His voice trembled. “Really, I can”t say anything more, because I simply don”t know. We will have to carry out tests.”

  “Tests?” The man looked as if he were being cheated. “What in hell can they tell you that you don”t know already?”

  Leszek took off his glasses as if he no longer wanted to see. He touched Rayner”s shoulder. “The patient complains of intermittent fever and lassitude. I”ve carried out my examination, and taken a blood sample. There”s nothing obviously wrong. The patient has a skin discoloration, which is causing her husband concern. She”s noticed it for six weeks …”

  Rayner leaned over to examine her. The husband”s stare dug into the back of his neck. She was one of those townswomen whose faces had outrun their bodies, leaving her features lined and sallow above a still young figure. Her arms were crossed over her breasts in embarrassment. She whispered, “It”s disgusting.”

  Rayner eased her hands to her sides, then stifled his surprise. Between her breasts and out from her armpits spread a dark pigmentation which he”d never seen before. It looked like liquid chocolate. Its edges ended abruptly, leaving nothing between itself and the whiteness of the normal skin.

  He did not know what to say. It did not look like a fungal disease, but he asked, “Have you felt any irritation?” The woman was silent. “Does it itch?”

  The husband said, “Of course it itches.”

  “Let her answer.” Rayner excluded him with his back.

  But the woman only echoed wanly, “Of course it itches.”

  No wonder, Rayner thought. Either she or her husband had lacerated its whole surface, as if with sandpaper. “You should have left this alone.”