The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2. Adam Thirlwell
first true dreams, of classical ruins under a midnight sky, where moonlit figures moved past each other in a city of the dead.
The dreams were to recur each time Halliday slept. He would wake on the settee by the picture window, the darkening floor of the desert below, aware of the dissolving boundaries between his inner and outer worlds. Already two of the clocks below the mantelpiece mirror had stopped. With their end he would at last be free of his former notions of time.
At the end of this week Halliday discovered that the woman slept at the same intervals as he did, going out to look at the desert as Halliday stepped onto his balcony. Although his solitary figure stood out clearly against the dawn sky behind the hotel the woman seemed not to notice him. Halliday watched the chauffeur drive the white Mercedes into the town. In his dark uniform he moved past the fading walls of the Fine Arts School like a shadow without form.
Halliday went down into the street and walked towards the dusk. Crossing the river, a drained Rubicon dividing his passive world at Columbine Sept Heures from the reality of the coming night, Halliday climbed the opposite bank past the wrecks of old cars and gasoline drums illuminated in the crepuscular light. As he neared the house the woman was walking among the sand-covered statuary in the garden, the crystals lying on the stone faces like the condensation of immense epochs of time.
Halliday hesitated by the low wall that encircled the house, waiting for the woman to look towards him. Her pale face, its high forehead rising above the dark glasses in some ways reminded him of Dr Mallory, the same screen that concealed a potent inner life. The fading light lingered among the angular planes of her temples as she searched the town for any signs of the Mercedes.
She was sitting in one of the chairs on the terrace when Halliday reached her, hands folded in the pockets of the silk robe so that only her pale face, with its marred beauty – the sunglasses seemed to shut it off like some inward night – was exposed to him.
Halliday stood by the glass-topped table, uncertain how to introduce himself. ‘I’m staying at the Oasis – at Columbine Sept Heures,’ he began. ‘I saw you from the balcony.’ He pointed to the distant tower of the hotel, its cerise façade raised against the dimming air.
‘A neighbour?’ The woman nodded at this. ‘Thank you for calling on me. I’m Gabrielle Szabo. Are there many of you?’
‘No – they’ve gone. There were only two of them anyway, a doctor and a young woman painter, Leonora Sully – the landscape here suited her.’
‘Of course. A doctor, though?’ The woman had taken her hands from her robe. They lay in her lap like a pair of fragile doves. ‘What was he doing here?’
‘Nothing.’ Halliday wondered whether to sit down, but the woman made no attempt to offer him the other chair, as if she expected him to drift away as suddenly as he had arrived. ‘Now and then he helped me with my dreams.’
‘Dreams?’ She turned her head towards him, the light revealing the slightly hollowed contours above her eyes. ‘Are there dreams at Columbine Sept Heures, Mr –’
‘Halliday. There are dreams now. The night is coming.’
The woman nodded, raising her face to the violet-hued dusk. ‘I can feel it on my face – like a black sun. What do you dream about, Mr Halliday?’
Halliday almost blurted out the truth but with a shrug he said, ‘This and that. An old ruined town – you know, full of classical monuments. Anyway, I did last night …’ He smiled at this. ‘I still have some of the old clocks left. The others have stopped.’
Along the river a plume of gilded dust lifted from the road. The white Mercedes sped towards them.
‘Have you been to Leptis Magna, Mr Halliday?’
‘The Roman town? It’s by the coast, five miles from here. If you like, I’ll go with you.’
‘A good idea. This doctor you mentioned, Mr Halliday – where has he gone? My chauffeur … needs some treatment.’
Halliday hesitated. Something about the woman’s voice suggested that she might easily lose interest in him. Not wanting to compete with Mallory again, he answered, ‘To the north, I think; to the coast. He was leaving Africa. Is it urgent?’
Before she could reply Halliday was aware of the dark figure of the chauffeur, buttoned within his black uniform, standing a few yards behind him. Only a moment earlier the car had been a hundred yards down the road, but with an effort Halliday accepted this quantal jump in time. The chauffeur’s small face, with its sharp eyes and tight mouth, regarded Halliday without comment.
‘Gaston, this is Mr Halliday. He’s staying at one of the hotels at Columbine Sept Heures. Perhaps you could give him a lift to the river crossing.’
Halliday was about to accept, but the chauffeur made no response to the suggestion. Halliday felt himself shiver in the cooler air moving toward the river out of the dusk. He bowed to Gabrielle Szabo and walked off past the chauffeur. As he stopped, about to remind her of the trip to Leptis Magna, he heard her say, ‘Gaston, there was a doctor here.’
The meaning of this oblique remark remained hidden from Halliday as he watched the house from the roof of the Oasis Hotel. Gabrielle Szabo sat on the terrace in the dusk, while the chauffeur made his foraging journeys to Columbine and the refineries along the river. Once Halliday came across him as he rounded a corner near the Fine Arts School, but the man merely nodded and trudged on with his jerrican of water. Halliday postponed a further visit to the house. Whatever her motives for being there, and whoever she was, Gabrielle Szabo had brought him the dreams that Columbine Sept Heures and his long journey south had failed to provide. Besides, the presence of the woman, turning some key in his mind, was all he required. Rewinding his clocks, he found that he slept for eight or nine hours of the nights he set himself.
However, a week later he found himself again failing to sleep. Deciding to visit his neighbour, he went out across the river, walking into the dusk that lay ever deeper across the sand. As he reached the house the white Mercedes was setting off along the road to the coast. In the back Gabrielle Szabo sat close to the open window, the dark wind drawing her black hair into the slipstream.
Halliday waited as the car came towards him, slowing as the driver recognized him. Gaston’s head leaned back, his tight mouth framing Halliday’s name. Expecting the car to stop, Halliday stepped out into the road.
‘Gabrielle … Miss Szabo –’
She leaned forward, and the white car accelerated and swerved around him, the cerise dust cutting his eyes as he watched the woman’s masked face borne away from him.
Halliday returned to the hotel and climbed to the roof, but the car had disappeared into the darkness of the north-east, its wake fading into the dusk. He went down to his suite and paced around the paintings. The last of the clocks had almost run down. Carefully he wound each one, glad for the moment to be free of Gabrielle Szabo and the dark dream she had drawn across the desert.
When the clocks were going again he went down to the basement. For ten minutes he moved from car to car, stepping in and out of the Cadillacs and Citroëns. None of the cars would start, but in the service bay he found a Honda motorcycle, and after filling the tank managed to kick the engine into life. As he set off from Columbine the sounds of the exhaust reverberated off the walls around him, but a mile from the town, when he stopped to adjust the carburettor, the town seemed to have been abandoned for years, his own presence obliterated as quickly as his shadow.
He drove westward, the dawn rising to meet him. Its colours lightened, the ambiguous contours of the dusk giving way to the clear outlines of the dunes along the horizon, the isolated watertowers standing like welcoming beacons.
Losing his way when the road disappeared into the sand sea, Halliday drove the motorcycle across the open desert. A mile to the west he came to the edge of an old wadi. He tried to drive the cycle down the bank, then lost his balance and sprawled onto his back as the machine leapt away and somersaulted among the rocks. Halliday trudged across the floor of the wadi to the opposite bank. Ahead