A Sparrow Falls

  Mother’s touch had quelled the shouts of anger, and now the boy was smacking his lips and making little anticipatory hunger grunts and pawing demandingly at Storm’s bosom.

  The child had a fine golden cap of hair, through which Mark could see the perfect round of his skull and the little blue veins under the almost translucent skin. Now that the furious crimson tide of anger had receded from his face, Mark saw how beautiful was the child, as beautiful as the mother – and he hated it, he hated it with a bitter sickening feeling in his stomach, and a corrosive taste in his mouth.

  He moved closer, watching Storm wipe a dribble of saliva from the child’s chin and hoist up his napkin to his waist.

  The child became aware of a stranger. He started and lifted his head to stare at Mark, and there was something hauntingly familiar in that face. The eyes that looked at him had looked at him before, he knew them so well.

  ‘You should not have come,’ said Storm, busy with her baby, not able to lift her eyes to him. ‘Oh God, Mark, why did you come?’

  Mark went down on one knee and stared into the child’s face, and it reached out towards him with a pair of plump hands, dimpled and pink and damp with spit.

  ‘What is his name?’ Mark asked. Where had he seen those eyes? Involuntarily, he extended his forefinger and the child grabbed it with a fat little chuckle and tried to stuff it into his mouth.

  ‘John,’ Storm answered, still not looking at him.

  ‘John was my grandfather’s name,’ Mark said huskily.

  ‘Yes,’ whispered Storm. ‘You told me.’

  The words meant nothing for a moment, all he was aware of was that the hatred he felt for this little scrap of humanity slowly faded. In its place there grew something else.

  Then suddenly he knew where he had seen those eyes.

  ‘Storm?’ he asked.

  Now she lifted her head, and stared into his face. When she replied she was half proud and half defiant.

  ‘Yes!’ she said, and nodded once.

  He reached for her clumsily. They knelt facing each other on the monkey-skin kaross, and they embraced fiercely, the child held awkwardly between them, gurgling and hiccuping and drooling merrily as it chewed Mark’s finger with greedy toothless gums.

  ‘Oh God, Mark, what have I done to us?’ whispered Storm brokenly.

  Baby John woke them in the silvery slippery-grey light of before dawn. Mark was grateful to him, for he did not want to miss a minute of that coming day. He watched Storm light the candle and then work over the cradle.

  She made small soothing sounds as she changed the baby, and the candlelight glowed on the sweet clean lines of her naked back. Dark silky hair hung over her shoulders, and he saw that childbirth had not thickened her waist, it still had the flared graceful line, like the neck of a wine bottle above the tight round double bulge of her buttocks.

  At last she turned and carried the baby to the bed, smiling at Mark as he lifted the blankets for her.

  ‘Breakfast time,’ she explained. ‘Will you excuse us, please?’ She sat cross-legged in the bed, and she took one of her nipples between thumb and forefinger and directed it into the open questing mouth.

  Mark drew as close as he could and placed one arm around Storm’s shoulders. He watched with total fascination. Her breasts were big now, and heavy, jutting out into rounded cones. There was a pale blue dappling of active veins deep below the skin, and the nipples were the colour of almost ripe mulberries, with the same rough shiny texture. The child’s tugging induced a sympathetic blue-white drop of milk to well from the tip of her other breast. It glistened there like a pearl in the candlelight.

  John fed with tightly closed eyes and piglet grunts and snuffles. The milk ran from the corners of his mouth, and after the first pangs of his hunger were appeased, Storm had to prod him to keep him from falling asleep again.

  At each prod, his jaw worked busily for a minute or so, and then the level of activity slowly declined until the next prod.

  Storm changed him from one breast to the other and laid her own cheek gratefully against the hard lean muscle of Mark’s chest.

  ‘I think I am happy,’ she murmured. ‘But I’ve been unhappy for so long that I am not quite sure.’

  John lay in a puddle of sea water two inches deep. He was stark naked and brown all over to prove this was no unusual state. He slapped at the water with both hands, and it splashed into his face so that he gasped and blinked his eyes and licked his lips, uncertain whether to be angry or to cry. Instead he repeated the experiment with exactly the same consequences, and he spluttered sand and sea water.

  ‘Poor little devil,’ Storm watched him. ‘He has inherited the Courtney pride and stubbornness. He won’t give up until he drowns himself.’

  She lifted him from the puddle and there was instantly such a howl of protest that she had to return him hurriedly.

  ‘I am sure if you went to the General — with John,’ Mark preserved.

  ‘You don’t really understand us Courtneys.’ Storm sat back and began to plait her hair over one shoulder. ‘We don’t forget or forgive that easily.’

  ‘Storm, won’t you try it? Please go to him.’

  ‘I know exactly how he is, Mark. Better than you, better than Daddy knows himself. I know him so well as I do myself, because we are one person. I am he, and he is me. If I go to him now, having done what I did – having insulted him, having destroyed all the dreams he wove about me — if I go now, when I am destitute of pride and honour, if I go as a beggar, he will despise me for ever.’

  ‘No, Storm, you are wrong.’

  ‘On this I am never wrong, Mark darling. He would not want to despise me, just as he does not want to hate me now, but he would not be able to help himself. He is Sean Courtney, and he is trapped in the steel jaws of his own honour.’

  ‘He is a sick man – you must give him the chance.’

  ‘No, Mark. It would kill him. I know that — and it would destroy me. For both our sakes, I dare not go to him now.’

  ‘You don’t know how much he cares for you.’

  ‘Oh I do, Mark. I also know how much I care for him – and one day, when I am proud again, I will go to him. I promise you that. When I know he can be proud of me, I will take him that as a gift—’

  ‘Oh damn you and your stiff cruel pride, you nearly destroyed us with it also.’

  ‘Come, Mark,’ she stood up. ‘Take John’s other hand.’

  They walked the child between them along the firm wet sand at the edge of the surf. He hung on their hands, leaning forward to watch his own feet appear and disappear magically below him, and he let out great shouts of triumph at his accomplishment.

  The day was bright and clean, and the gulls caught the wind and rode above them on smoky white wings, answering the child’s shouts with their own harsh cries.

  ‘Oh, I had so many fine clothes and fancy friends.’ Storm watched the gulls. ‘I sold the clothes and lost the friends, and found how little any of it really meant to me. Look at the gulls!’ she said, head thrown back. ‘See the sunlight through the spread feathers. I was so busy that I never had time to see clearly before. I never saw myself, nor those around me. But now I am learning to look.’

  ‘I saw that in your painting,’ Mark said, and lifted John to his chest, delighting in the hot restless little body. ‘You are painting different subjects.’

  ‘I want to be a great artist.’

  ‘I think you will be. That Courtney stubbornness again.’

  ‘We don’t always get what we want,’ she told him, and the spent surf came sliding up the beach and creamed around their ankles.

  The child slept face down on the monkey-skin kaross, exhausted with sun and sea and play, his belly bulging with food.

  Storm worked at the easel under the window with narrowed eyes and cocked head.

  ‘You are my favourite model,’ she said.

  ‘That’s just because I’m so cheap.’ And she laughed lightly.

&n
bsp; ‘With what I pay you, I could be rich,’ she pointed out.

  ‘You know what they call ladies who do it for money?’ Mark asked lazily and relapsed into silence, giving himself up to the full pleasure of watching her and they were silent for nearly an hour — silent but close and spiritually in tune.

  Mark spoke at last. ‘I know what you mean by seeing more clearly now. That one,’ he pointed at one of the larger canvases against the wall, ‘that’s probably the best thing you’ve ever done.’

  ‘I hated to sell it – the man who bought it is coming tomorrow.’

  ‘You’ve sold some of your paintings?’ He was startled.

  ‘How do you think John and I live?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He hadn’t thought about that. ‘I supposed your husband.’

  Her expression changed, darkening swiftly. ‘I want nothing from him.’ And she tossed her head so that the braid of hair flicked like the tail of an angry lioness. ‘I want nothing from him, and his friends, and my loving friends, all those nice loyal people who stay away from me in droves now that I am the scarlet divorcée. I’ve learned a lot since last I saw you, and especially I have learned about that kind of person.’

  ‘They are rich,’ Mark pointed out. ‘You once told me how important that is.’

  The dark anger went out of her, and she drooped a little, the brush falling to her side.

  ‘Oh Mark, please don’t be bitter with me. I don’t think I could stand that.’

  He felt something tear in his chest, and he rose swiftly and went to her, picked her up with a swing of his shoulders and carried her high, through the curtained doorway into the small cool dark bedroom.

  It was strange, but their love-making was never the same, always there were new wonders, new accords of desire, the discovery of some little things that excited them both beyond all relation to its apparent significance.

  Repetition could not weary nor dull the appetite they had for each other, and even as that appetite was totally satiated, so the endless well of their mutual desire began to fill again.

  It would start again immediately with the lazy touch of fingers as they lay curled together like sleepy puppies, the sweat of their loving cooling on their skin, raising little goose bumps around the dark rosy aureoles of her nipples.

  A finger drawn lightly down his cheek, rasping on the sandpaper of his beard, and then pushing lightly between his lips, making him turn his head for another gentle kiss, a mere touch of lips and the mingling of their breath so that he could smell that peculiar perfume of passion from her mouth, a smell like newly dug truffles, a mushroomy exciting smell.

  She saw the new spark of interest in his eyes and drew softly away to chuckle at him, a throaty sensuous sound, and she drew one sharp finger-nail swiftly down his spine so that little sparks of fire flew along his nerves and his back arched.

  ‘I am going to claw you because you deserve it, you randy old tomcat.’ She made a growly sound in her throat and curled her nails into a lion’s claw, drawing it lightly across his shoulder, and then hard down his belly, so that her nails left red lines against the skin.

  She studied the red lines, with her lips parted and the tip of her pink tongue touching her small white teeth. The nipples of her breast swelled as she watched, growing like new buds, as though they were about to burst. She saw the direction of his eyes, and she put her hand behind his head, drawing him down gently, pulling back her shoulder so that the heavy rounded bosom was offered like a sacrifice.

  Mark took some of the big scaly crayfish from the lowtide pools, and they smelled of kelp and iodine, thumping their tails furiously in his grip, snapping their legs and bubbling at the small mouths with their multiple mandibles.

  Mark rose, streaming salt water, from the depths of the pool and handed them up to Storm, who squealed with excitement on the rocky edge of the pool and took them gingerly, using her straw hat as a glove against the spiky carapace and waving legs.

  Mark built a fire in a scooped fireplace in the sand, while Storm held John on her lap and fed him through a discreetly unbuttoned blouse, offering advice and ribald comment as he worked.

  Mark threw wet seaweed over the coals, put the crayfish on top of that and covered them with another layer of seaweed, topping it off with a final layer of sand, and while they waited for the crayfish to cook and John to finish his noisy guzzling, they drank wine and watched the setting sun turn the sea clouds into a brilliant display.

  ‘God, Nature’s an old ham. If I painted like that, they’d say I had no sense of colour, and I could go work for a chocolate company painting boxes.’

  Afterwards, Storm laid John in the apple basket that served as a portable cradle and they ate crayfish, pulling the long luscious sticks of white meat from the horny legs and washing it down with the tart white Cape wine.

  In the darkness the stars were stark pricks of brilliant white, and the surf boomed in long soft phosphorescent lines.

  ‘It’s so wonderfully romantic.’ Storm watched it, sitting hugging her knees, and then turned her head and smiled wickedly. ‘And you can take that as a hint, if you want to.’

  On the rug together she said, ‘Do you know what some people do?’

  ‘No, what do some people do?’ Mark seemed more interested in what he was doing than the actions of the nameless somebodies.

  ‘You don’t expect me just to say it out like that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s rude.’

  ‘All right, so whisper it.’

  So she whispered it, but she was giggling so much that he was not sure he had heard right.

  She repeated it, and he had heard right. He was truly stunned, so that he found himself blushing in the dark.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ he answered huskily. ‘You would never do that!’ However, he was over the first shock, and the idea intrigued him.

  ‘Of course not,’ she whispered, and then after a silence, ‘Unless of course you want to.’

  There was another long silence during which Storm made some investigations. ‘If I’m any judge, and I should be by now, you want to,’ she stated flatly.

  Long afterwards, naked in the dark, they swam together out beyond the first line of breakers. The water was warm as fresh milk and they trod water to kiss with wet salty lips.

  On the beach Mark built up the fire and they sat close to it, cuddled together in the yellow light of the flames, and they drank the rest of the wine.

  ‘Mark,’ she said at last, and there was a sadness in her voice that he had never heard before. ‘You have been with us two days now, which is two days too much. Tomorrow I want you to go. Go early before John and I are awake, so we don’t have to watch you.’

  Her words struck like a lash so that he writhed at the sting. He turned to her with a stricken face in the firelight.

  ‘What are you saying? You and John are mine. We belong together the three of us, always.’

  ‘You didn’t understand a word of what I was saying, did you?’ she asked softly. ‘You didn’t understand when I said I must rebuild my pride, refashion my honour?’

  ‘I love you, Storm. I have always loved you.’

  ‘You are married to somebody else, Mark.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ he pleaded.

  ‘Oh yes, it does.’ She shook her head. ‘And you know it does.’

  ‘I will leave Marion.’

  ‘Divorce, Mark?’

  ‘Yes.’ He was desperate. ‘I’ll ask her for a divorce.’

  ‘That way we can both be truly proud. That will be a fine way for me to go to my father. Think how proud we will make him. His daughter, and the son he never had, for that’s the way he thinks of you, both of them divorced. Think of baby John. How high he will hold his head. Think of us — what a noble life we can build on the misery of the girl who was your wife.’ Looking into her eyes in the firelight, he saw that her pride was iron and her stubbornness was steel.

  Mark dressed quietly in th
e dark, and when he was ready he groped his way to the cradle and kissed his son. The child made a little whimpering sound in his sleep, and he smelt warm and milky, like a new-born kitten.

  He thought that Storm was sleeping also as he stooped over her, but then he realized that she was lying rigidly with her face pressed into the pillow to stifle the harsh silent sobs that convulsed her.

  She did not lift her face to him and he kissed her hair and her neck, then he straightened up and walked out into the dark. The motorcycle started at the first kick and he wheeled it out into the lane.

  Storm lay in the dark and listened to the sound of the engine die away into the night, and afterwards there was only the lonely mournful sound of the surf and the clink of the tree frogs outside the window.

  Mark sat on the carved wooden stool in the sunset, in front of Pungushe’s hut, and he asked for the first time something that had been in his mind since their first meeting.

  ‘Pungushe, tell me of the time when the Jackal pulled the Ngaga from the flooding river.’

  And the Zulu shrugged. ‘What is there to tell? I found you caught in the branches of a flooded tree on the edge of the river – and if I had sense, I would have walked away, for you were clearly a very dead Ngaga and the brown water was washing over your head.’

  ‘Did you see how it was that I fell into the river?’

  There was a pause, while Pungushe steeled himself to admit ignorance. ‘It seemed to me that you had been blinded with fever and fallen into the river.’

  ‘You did not see the man I killed, nor the man that fired at me with a rifle?’

  Pungushe covered his amazement nobly, but shook his head. ‘A little time before I found you in the river I heard the sound of guns, four, perhaps five shots, from up the valley. This must have been you and the one who hunted you, but I saw no man and the rain washed away all sign, before the next morning. The flood waters would have washed the dead man away and the crocodiles eaten him.’