The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2

Louise slowly shook her head. ‘Do you have to, Charles? Without him we’d be in rather a spot, you know. I don’t think you’re being very fair.’

‘Fair?’ Gifford repeated the word with a grimace. ‘What are you talking about? For God’s sake, Louise.’

‘All right then,’ his wife replied patiently. ‘I don’t think you should blame Richard for what’s happened.’

‘I don’t. Is that what your dear Dick suggests? Now that this thing is beginning to smell he’s trying to throw his guilt back on to me.’

‘He is not –’

Gifford petulantly thumped the wicker elbow rest. ‘He damned well is!’ He gazed up darkly at his wife, his thin twisted mouth framed by the rim of beard. ‘Don’t worry, my dear, you will too by the time this thing is finished.’

‘Charles, please …’

‘Who cares, anyway?’ Gifford lay back weakly for a moment, and then, as he recovered, a curious feeling of light-headed and almost euphoric calm coming over him, began again: ‘Dr Richard Lowry. How he loves his doctorate. I wouldn’t have had the nerve at his age. A third-rate PhD for work that I did for him, and he styles himself “Doctor”.’

‘So do you.’

‘Don’t be a fool. I can remember when at least two Chairs were offered to me.’

‘But you couldn’t degrade yourself by accepting them,’ his wife commented, a trace of irony in her voice.

‘No, I could not,’ Gifford attested vehemently. ‘Do you know what Cambridge is like, Louise? It’s packed with Richard Lowrys! Besides, I had a far better idea. I married a rich wife. She was charming, beautiful, and in a slightly ambiguous way respected my moody brilliance, but above all she was rich.’

‘How pleasant for you.’

‘People who marry for money earn it. I really earned mine.’

‘Thank you, Charles.’

Gifford chuckled to himself. ‘One thing, Louise, you do know how to take an insult. It’s a matter of breeding. I’m surprised you aren’t more choosy over Lowry.’

‘Choosy?’ Louise laughed awkwardly. ‘I hadn’t realized that I’d chosen him. I think Richard is very obliging and helpful – as you knew when you made him your assistant, by the way.’

Gifford began to compose his reply, when a sudden chill enveloped his chest and shoulders. He pulled weakly at the blanket, an immense feeling of fatigue and inertia overtaking him. He looked up glassily at his wife, their bickering conversation forgotten. The sunlight had vanished, and a profound darkness lay over the face of the delta, illuminated for a brief interval by the seething outlines of thousands of snakes. Trying to capture the image in his eyes, he struggled forward against the incubus pressing upon his chest, and then slid backwards into a pit of nausea and giddiness. ‘Louise … !’

Quickly his wife’s hands were on his own, her shoulder supporting his head. He vomited emptily, struggling with his contracting musculature like a snake trying to shed its skin. Dimly he heard his wife shout for someone and the cradle topple to the ground, dragging the bedclothes with it.

‘Louise,’ he whispered, ‘one of these nights … I want you to take me down to the snakes.’

Now and then, during the afternoon, when the pain in his foot became acute, he would wake to find Louise sitting beside him. All the while he moved through ceaseless dreams, sinking from one plane of reverie to the next, the great mandalas guiding him downwards, enthroning him upon their luminous dials.

During the next few days the conversations with his wife were less frequent. As his condition deteriorated, Gifford felt able to do little more than stare out across the mud-flats, almost unaware of the movement and arguments around him. His wife and Mechippe formed a tenuous bridge with reality, but the true centre of his attention was the nexus of beaches on to which the snakes emerged in the evenings. This was a zone of complete timelessness, where at last he sensed the simultaneity of all time, the coexistence of all events in his past life.

The snakes now made their appearance half an hour earlier. Once he caught a glimpse of their motionless albino forms exposed on the slopes in the hot noon air. Their chalk-white skins and raised heads, in a reclining posture very like his own, made them seem immeasurably ancient, like the white sphinxes in the funeral corridors to the pharaonic tombs at Karnak.

Although his strength had ebbed markedly, the infection on his foot had spread only a few inches above the ankle, and Louise Gifford realized that her husband’s deterioration was a symptom of a profound psychological malaise, the mal de passage induced by the potently atmospheric landscape and its evocation of the lagoon-world of the Paleocene. She suggested to Gifford during one of his lucid intervals that they move the camp half a mile across the plain into the shadow of the ridge, near the Toltec terrace city where she and Lowry carried out their archaeological work.

But Gifford had refused, reluctant to leave the snakes on the beach. For some reason he disliked the terrace city. This was not because it was there that he had inflicted on himself the wound which now threatened his life. That this was simply an unfortunate accident devoid of any special symbolism he accepted without qualification. But the enigmatic presence of the terrace city, with its crumbling galleries and internal courts encrusted by the giant thistles and wire moss, seemed a huge man-made artefact which militated against the super-real naturalism of the delta. However, the terrace city, like the delta, was moving backwards in time, the baroque tracery of the serpent deities along the friezes dissolving and being replaced by the intertwined tendrils of the moss-plants, the pseudo-organic forms made by man in the image of nature reverting to their original. Kept at a distance behind him, as a huge backdrop, the ancient Toltec ruin seemed to brood in the dust like a decaying mastodon, a dying mountain whose dark dream of the earth enveloped Gifford with its luminous presence.

‘Do you feel well enough to move on?’ Louise asked Gifford when they had received no word of Mechippe’s messenger after a further week. She gazed down at him critically as he lay in the shade under the awning, his thin body almost invisible among the folds of the blankets and the monstrous tent over his leg, only the arrogant face with its stiffening beard reminding her of his identity. ‘Perhaps if we met the search party halfway …’

Gifford shook his head, his eyes moving off across the bleached plain to the almost drained channels of the delta. ‘Which search party? There isn’t a boat with a shallow enough draught between here and Taxcol.’

‘Perhaps they’ll send a helicopter. They could see us from the air.’

‘Helicopter? You’ve got a bee in your bonnet, Louise. We’ll stay here for another week or so.’

‘But your leg,’ his wife insisted. ‘A doctor should –’

‘How can I move? Jerked about on a stretcher, I’d be dead within five minutes.’ He looked up wearily at his wife’s pale sunburnt face, waiting for her to go away.

She hovered over him uncertainly. Fifty yards away, Richard Lowry sat in the open air outside his tent, watching her quietly. Involuntarily, before she could prevent herself, her hand moved to straighten her hair.

‘Is Lowry there?’ Gifford asked.

‘Richard? Yes.’ Louise hesitated. ‘We’ll be back for lunch. I’ll change your dressing then.’

As she stepped from his field of vision Gifford lifted his chin slightly to examine the beaches obscured by the morning haze. The baked mud slopes glistened like hot concrete, and only a thin trickle of black fluid leaked slowly along the troughs. Here and there small islands fifty yards in diameter, shaped like perfect hemispheres, rose off the floors of the channels, imparting a curious geometric formality to the landscape. The whole area remained completely motionless, but Gifford lay patiently in his stretcher-chair, waiting for the snakes to come out on to the beaches.

When he noticed Mechippe serving lunch to him he realized that Lowry and Louise had not returned from the site.

‘Take it away.’ He pushed aside the bowl of condensed soup. ‘Bring me whisky soda. Double.’ He glanced sharply at the Indian. ‘Where’s Mrs Gifford?’

Mechippe steered the soup bowl back on to his tray. ‘Miss’ Gifford coming soon, sir. Sun very hot, she wait till afternoon.’

Gifford lay back for a moment, thinking of Louise and Richard Lowry, the image of them together touching the barest residue of emotion. Then he tried to wave away the haze with his hand.

‘What’s that –?’

‘Sir?’

‘Damn it, I thought I saw one.’ He shook his head slowly as the white form he had fleetingly glimpsed vanished among the opalescent slopes. ‘Too early, though. Where’s that whisky?’

‘Coming, sir.’

Panting slightly after the exertion of sitting up, Gifford looked around restlessly at the clutter of tents. Diagonally behind him, emerging from the lengthening focus of his eyes, loomed the long ridges of the Toltec city. Somewhere among its spiral galleries and corridors were Louise and Richard Lowry. Looking down from one of the high terraces across the alluvial bench, the distant camp would seem like a few bleached husks, guarded by a dead man propped up in a chair.

‘Darling, I’m awfully sorry. We tried to get back but I twisted my heel –’ Louise Gifford laughed lightly at this ‘– rather as you did, now that I come to think of it. Perhaps I’ll be joining you here in a day or two. I’m so glad Mechippe looked after you and changed the dressing. How do you feel? You look a lot better.’

Gifford nodded drowsily. The afternoon fever had subsided but he felt drained and exhausted, his awareness of his wife’s chattering presence only stimulated by the whisky he had been drinking slowly all day. ‘It’s been a day at the zoo,’ he said, adding, with tired humour: ‘At the reptile enclosure.’

‘You and your snakes. Charles, you are a scream.’ Louise paced around the stretcher-chair, downwind of the cradle, then withdrew to the lee-side. She waved to Richard Lowry, who was carrying some specimen trays into his tent. ‘Dick, I suggest we shower and then join Charles for drinks.’

‘Great idea,’ Lowry called back. ‘How is he?’

‘Much better.’ To Gifford she said: ‘You don’t mind, Charles? It will do you good to talk a little.’

Gifford gestured vaguely with his head. When his wife had gone to her tent he focused his eyes carefully on the beaches. There, in the evening light, the snakes festered and writhed, their long forms gliding in and out of each other, the whole darkening horizon locked together by their serpentine embrace. There were now literally tens of thousands of them, reaching beyond the margins of the beach across the open ground towards the camp. During the afternoon, at the height of his fever, he had tried to call to them, but his voice had been too weak.