The Haunted Storm (3 page)

“I was on my own on the moor – because behind the house and the church the moor comes right down, and you can leave our garden and walk straight on to it – I was on my own because it was a fine day and I was doing nothing, so I went out on to the moor to get away from things, and I was quite happy at last. Then – well, there he was. I don’t know where he appeared from. He might have come out of a cloud. I thought he was a workman, because he was dressed in rough clothes and he seemed coarse, not coarse spirited but coarse-bodied, as if he just used his body and never enjoyed it. Without one word said we were lying down together and we made love, or rather – I did nothing at all and he made love to my body while I, the central part of me, watched and watched and kept watching to see that – to see that he didn’t hurt himself, or demean himself in any way – I would have protected him, because already I was in love with him.

“Probably that means very little to you. Probably you’ve never known what it is to set eyes on someone and fall immediately in love so deep that you’d give them anything straight away, without even speaking. You’d let them do anything to you. You’d prostitute yourself and care only that they didn’t hurt themselves or shame themselves in what they did. What happens to you – hurt or shame – doesn’t matter a bit anymore; and you’re no more important than a speck of dust. Suddenly you’re outside yourself and scattered, and the most important thing there is, is this stranger.”

He had been concentrating on her words, puzzled beyond measure by what she was saying and why she was saying it, and her leg lay forgotten under his hand. Now he thought of it again and felt it wet and warm where his hand had been; but an inch away, the flesh was cold. He stroked her shin, and the softness of her calf where his fingers brushed it made his body run like water inside with lust for her. She saw it in his eyes, and in the middle of her words she smiled at him. He tried to smile back, but too many emotions got into the smile and spread it out in a foolish grin, and he looked away with embarrassment. On the underside of her right knee, where his hand rested, he could feel a small pulse throbbing like a tiny bird.

Now they were both insulated from the storm. Even the rain that fell on their bare heads did not really touch them; and in the fastness of the mental ark that had formed around them, they faced each other intently. Matthew sensed that she was about to speak again. Down on the Spur, the boat lay stranded; but he had forgotten it.

“So that was what I did. Or what I set out to do in the first few seconds. But something else happened and I found it all very different – all of it from the uttermost tiny thoughts in my head to the distant things like the horizon or a lark high above me. It was that suddenly I was thrown – no, I don’t mean quite that – I suddenly found it to be a whirlpool, you know, but it was
in nothingness
and it produced matter. Not nothingness – the spirit, rather. But it threw out matter and all matter was somehow generated in this whirlpool that I was in. I don’t know if you understand what I’m getting at. But I don’t suppose it matters. Only about three things matter at all –
matter
– that’s the word. Do you see? And now there’s a sort of mixed-up area between us, that includes all the beach and storm and sky and all that you bring to it – to me – and all of what I’m saying – it’s all mixed up now – I did so want it to be clear – oh God; it’ll come clear in a minute.”

An extraordinary ambivalence, like a fiery two-edged sword, came from this girl and pierced Matthew to the heart. All questions such as “who was she? where did she come from?” were torn away on the wind and lost in the dark sky, and all that was left was the fact of her. And this fact affected Matthew in two ways, making him a total slave to her – in much the same way as she had described her own relation to her lover – and also a wise and kindly father confessor, anxious to hear, comfort, and forgive. Yet as far as
she
was concerned, he might have been a brother – or a guardian angel – because she would at times look at him to see, not if he was listening, but if he was agreeing, as if she were recounting the history of something common to them both. And such a passionate sensual-mystical mood now lay about them, and so charged was the air, that it seemed only proper to move his hand from her shin and caress the inside of her left thigh.

“Love inside my body and brain; that’s what it was – I’m just rambling now. No, I’ll try harder. He was middle height with blond hair. His hands were rough and dirty. He was quite stocky – very strong – and his eyes were absolutely still – powerful – iron! Do you know what they contained? – And for the matter of that –” she leaned forward and put her face close to his; Matthew felt his jaw trembling – “what yours contain? Morality!” She leaned back again, and stretched her right leg out in front of her. Matthew’s hand was moving up and down the inside of her thigh. “It was like an extra kind of vision that he had that showed him good and evil. He never said a word about it but I could see in his eyes the split-second he saw evil or good in the world. As for me… I just melted, all the rigid ness of me, twenty-two years of it; I’d never had a lover before and I’d grown hard. No! No-one had made love to me! I hated it! I hated it because it seemed to be so gross and earth-like and I was completely, oh, utterly spirit! What’s spirit? It’s everything that isn’t matter. It’s dreams and ideas and feelings – ghosts – devils – fear and love, too, though I didn’t know anything about love. Anyway, I was spirit and I hated matter and then, meeting him, I suddenly changed and started to yearn for matter, still being spirit. Because now I was bereft of something. For a minute I’d been at the centre of the matter-creating whirlpool, and then I was thrown out of it. I wanted to cuddle matter, like a baby. I wanted to feed it at my breast. I was pregnant with it, I, the transparent one, the tenuous vaporous empty one, the one the wind blew through and the stars shone through! I was bearing matter in my womb and then it was taken from me. I was robbed of my baby the world… All this is very roundabout… It’s not feminine, is it. All this image-making, I mean; I ought to be giving facts and dates. But I know them all right. Do you think I haven’t remembered the date I first met him? March the twenty-fourth! And every single date since then, like a schoolgirl. Oh, yes, but the
central
thing is this loss…”

Her voice became wistful, and her eyes softened; she looked down at the shingle. After the initial shock of finding her there and the confusion of emotions afterwards, Matthew found one feeling now predominating, and that was nothing more or less than total identification with her. He
knew
with his body and mind exactly what she meant when she talked about matter; the same obsession troubled him. He too felt hollow, transparent and lost in what she called the spirit, and had the same doubleness of feeling towards matter – that it was hateful, and that it was infinitely desirable and to be cherished. Slowly the odd suspicion grew that this passionate and spirit-dominated girl was his own shadow, his doppelganger, come to warn him of death. And again came the crazy drift of suspicion as to her sex.
Was
it a girl? Yet the infinite softness of her thigh against his palm, and the subtle warmth of her belly, were intensely female. He strained to listen; she was talking again.

“It was just before Easter; and now I haven’t seen him for six weeks. He left. But the yearning for matter and the loss of it – that’s been going on for months. Only the first time, I was really there, and perhaps once or twice at other times, because he had a special touch that could bring me to it – oh, to what I mean by matter – not just a climax but a general sort of penetrating, uniting, completely, I felt complete – oh, that’s nonsense; no, I
didn’t
feel complete but I felt alive at least and with matter, the solid earth, flesh, skin, bone, blood, grass, wood, stone, matter! It was friendly and not alien! Then I drifted – oh, what’s going on down there?” she interjected suddenly. Matthew was staring at the boat down on the Spur; he was not sure, but somebody seemed to be moving on the deck. The waves continued to crash against the far side and break streaming over the top. The girl twisted her head round momentarily; “what’s going on?” she said. “Is it important?” Matthew shook his head. He squeezed the flesh of her left thigh with his palm, and pressed the back of his fingers into the softness of the other. He was poised, balancing carefully, between three forces: her flesh; her words: and the boat. By pursuing any of these too far he would lose all of them. He had somehow to maintain this balance and let all three carry him to – well, to whatever pitch he was destined to reach. The simple motion of his fingers pressing in and out of the flesh of her thigh made him tremble with lust. He leant forward to listen carefully and concentrate on what she was saying.

“I saw something – I forget what it was – a bottle or something like that – shake and shake, just because he wanted it to. He – it was in his room, that’s right, he had a room in the town and I stayed a few times with him and slept with him. It was empty, I mean he had no luggage or belongings or anything except a few books. They were mostly about economics. He knew all about politics. He belonged to a party. I don’t know which one; I don’t think it was the Communist party but I don’t know… politics, oh it’s so earthly too – not earthly in the sort of precious, you know aesthetic sense – no! – but there’s a harshness and solidity about it, and earthiness; yes, really it’s the highest phase of matter, I suppose, where matter’s densest.”

Matthew, balancing, took his eyes off her and looked down the beach again. It was not easy; in motion, and especially when she was searching for the right phrase to describe what she meant, her face was so animated, and with such a passionate withdrawn mystery struggling in it – the very same, identically the same mystery, he was convinced, which ravished him – that he was in love, and so deep that he could not move or look away without an effort. But when he did, he saw movement on the beach. A hundred yards or so to his right, lit by the omnipresent lightness of things themselves under the gloom of the streaming sky, he could make out six or seven men struggling along against the wind towards the Spur. They did not seem to be on the same beach; hardly on the same planet. There was no question of acknowledging their presence, far less of trying to conceal what he was doing. He watched them come, and continued to caress her, moving his hand gradually closer and closer to the top of her thighs, and to listen intently to what she was saying.

“I’ll tell you about when he met my parents. It was in May. My mother – oh she’s so secret and possessive and deathly proud about me! – wanted to meet him and she made me ask him to supper, though I didn’t want them to meet. But she insisted and when he came I’d just had a row with my father and we were all tense; and he hardly said a word until suddenly, out of the blue, he said to my father ‘I hear you’ve discovered a well.’ And it was just as if he knew it was the worst thing in the world he could have said, because the well is my father’s secret really and he was furious when it came out in the local paper about him – the well proves something important in his system of religion – oh God;” and she shivered as if with a great effort, “help me get to it.

“So we all went quiet. And my father said yes, he had, and what about it. And my lover said ‘l want it; that’s all.’ Just like that, as calm as you please; but I knew from his expression that he was – throwing acid in my father’s face; that’s what it came to. And my father went as white as a sheet and asked him in a sneering sort of way what he wanted it for. My head was spinning, but I had to side with my lover! I had to champion him! He wanted it for his party, he told me later, but I never found out why.

“And my father was getting frightened. He was so strong, my lover, so – implacable. It got worse and worse and then we were all talking together; my father got to his feet and then he started shouting and told him to go, and forbade me to see him again; but I ran out of the house and as I caught him up he was calm, so calm, and smiling gently – I was trembling, wild and upset – he smiled gently and told me where to meet him, and left without another word.”

While she said this the girl sat quite still, with her eyes closed and her face tense and stiff. Matthew left his hand where it was, with the knuckles pressed against her belly, and strained to listen. He was absorbed in it all to the point where he forgot even to ask “why? what’s the meaning of all this? who is she and who’s this lover of hers?”

And when she stopped for a moment and opened her eyes, he saw that there were tears in them. It wasn’t the rain, because the instant the eyelids opened and the dark eyes looked at his, they brimmed over with moisture that ran down her cheeks, running swiftly from rain-drop to rain drop where they lay on her skin. She smiled at the same moment, a brilliant and rueful smile that admitted everything, admitted the tears, admitted the openness of her body to him, and admitted the fact that the two of them had now, on this Plutonian shore, become united in a firm and dreamlike closeness.

As for him, he longed with all his soul to hold her close to him and to go much further than the conditions he’d accepted allowed; but he saw clearly that the whole encounter was based on extraordinary conditions, of the earth itself and of its atmosphere as much as anything else, and so he stayed where he was without moving.

But just beneath his hand there was the opening into her body, and he could, perhaps, let something of his love into her through his fingers. He pressed gently into her belly with his knuckles and ran his fingers along inside the elastic of her panties to loosen it; the thin nylon caught on a rough fingernail. At the same time he lifted his head and looked at the beach below. The men he had seen approaching were now – though, seemingly, at a vast distance – at the foot of the Spur, buffeted by the wind and busying themselves with ropes. He could hear snatches of shouting above the roar of the waves.

He turned back to the girl; and she, when his fingers reached their goal, smiled and laid her head on one side as if it were on his shoulder, and he could feel the tenderness and confidence of the gesture across the cold, rain-dashed air between them as if there was nothing there but a pillow.