AND THEN A STRANGE thing happened. She entered the false lull that sometimes follows upon shock. She did not go home. She did not want to go home. By staying there she did not have to face calamity. She neither thought her son was dead nor was alive. She thought nothing. 'I'll stay one more day,' she would say, and mean it, but next day she was uttering the same thing. It was like being another person. She did not struggle. In the numbness of her flesh she could feel no reaction except a new and fanatic urgency to get sunburnt. She was the first out each morning, hurrying through the twilight of trees to sink on to the mattress which she had permanently booked. A few feet from the water. She had only to stretch her toe for the water to curl over it. An Arab with treacherous black-eyed cunning went by selling goat-skins, but never troubled her; another man came with dampened red roses in tight bunches of probably a dozen, and a third carried English papers and called out their names, but she bought nothing. She said nothing. When the English group smiled at her she looked abstracted. The woman with the lorgnette had grown tired of propositioning. They were merely living ghosts to Ellen. She'd bought new sunglasses with deep-blue tinted lenses and the effect was like being enclosed and swimming in an underground grotto with the soft noise of eddying water to lull the senses. No trouble from people. Once the glasses slipped down on her nose and she caught sight of a Scottish girl with a black crescent on her pink and freckled arm where teeth had sunk in. She'd seen the girl hover around the violinist in the lobby at night and heard her address him in garbled French. When Ellen saw that bite she felt distaste and, recalling the crudeness of day-to-day encounters, she quickly restored her glasses, retreating back to the safety of her grotto. The sun, the numbing sun was all she craved. Stretching her legs full length she would close her eyes and let it soak into her and pray for it to get stronger and stronger so that all the other people would flee and it would focus on her alone. She believed other people's presence was taking some of the fire from her. It was not enough that her outer skin should be burnt, she wanted it to penetrate right through her, to flow into her limbs as pure fire and become part of her energy. She talked to no one now, she looked at no one; sometimes through her lenses she would see people going by, shadows that came between her and the sun, and she never even speculated whether they were men or women. Gradually she altered. Her skin changed to red-gold, the colour deepening each day and at night she would go to sleep thinking only of the morning and the next day's baptism of fire. She ought to be feeling sad. She ought to be going home. She ought to be weeping. But she refused to think outside the environment of white, wan, listless-making heat.
Sometimes of course thoughts forced through, like damp seeping through stone walls or weeds bursting out of a slate roof. Then it hit her. She saw him, felt him, heard his voice:
'The most bloodthirsty animal is one and a half inches long. It is the common shrew.'
This and many scraps of knowledge like confetti fluttering around in his busy scatter-brain. They all spoke to her. A succession of his voices as they changed through the years: when he couldn't pronounce R, the lisp when he lost a tooth, the big, portmanteau words he loved, whispers of little feats to George in bed at night. The time he'd said, 'George is having a high and mighty piss contest,' and checked her face to find traces of anger, and seeing none went on repeating the word 'piss' with the jubilance possible only to the very innocent. She had horror images of his body in pieces all over the road and his arms wrenched off and thrown there. Then in her mind she would try screwing the arms back on as if they were dolls' arms. Piecing him together.
But that was to be expected.
On the whole she managed. She ate quite well and did not over-drink.
One late afternoon as she lay on the mattress, she felt, though her eyes were closed, that the someone standing over her was not one of the passing people. She stiffened. Her husband. Catching her out. How could she sit up and say, 'I am not malingering, I am getting some streng before I come face to face with it,' and looking through her lenses she saw that the man's face looming over her appeared to be smiling.
