“We’ll sit down in a minute,” he said as if in answer.
She didn’t see any place they might possibly sit. They were walking now through a field of tall weedstalks whose stiff dried branches scraped against them as they passed: goldenrod, teazles, burdocks, the skeletons of anonymous grey plants. The burdocks had clusters of brown burrs and the teazles their weathered-silver spiked heads but otherwise nothing interrupted the thin branching and re-branching monotony of the field. Beyond it on either side rose the walls of the ravine. Along the top now were houses, a line of them perched on the edge, careless of the erosion gullies that scarred the ravine-face at irregular intervals. The creek had disappeared into an underground culvert.
Marian looked behind her. The ravine had made a curve; she had walked around it without noticing; ahead of them was another bridge, a larger one. They kept walking.
“I like it down here in winter,” Duncan’s voice said after a while. “Before I’ve only been down here in summer. Everything grows, it’s so thick with green leaves and stuff you can’t see three feet in front of you, some of it’s poison ivy. And it’s populated. The old drunks come down here and sleep under the bridges and the kids play here too. There’s a riding stable down here somewhere, I think what we’re on is one of the bridle paths. I used to come down because it was cooler. But it’s better covered with snow. It hides the junk. They’re beginning to fill this place up with junk too, you know, beginning with the creek, I wonder why they like throwing things around all over the landscape… old tires, tin cans…” The voice came from a mouth she couldn’t see, as though from nowhere; it was foreshortened, blunted, as if it was being blotted up, absorbed by the snow.
The ravine had widened out around them and in this place there were fewer weeds. Duncan turned off the path, breaking the crusted snow; she followed him. They plodded up the side of a small hill.
“Here we are,” Duncan said. He stopped and turned, and reached a hand to draw her up beside him.
Marian gasped and took an involuntary step back: they were standing on the very edge of a cliff. The ground ended abruptly beyond their feet. Below them was a huge roughly circular pit, with a spiral path or roadway cut round and around the sides, leading to the level snow-covered space at the bottom. Directly across from where they were standing, separated from them by perhaps a quarter of a mile of empty space, was a long shed-like black building. Everything seemed closed, deserted.
“What is it?” she asked.
“It’s only the brickworks,” Duncan said. “That’s pure clay down there. They go down that road with steam shovels and dig it out.”
“I didn’t know there was anything like that in the ravines,” she said. It seemed wrong to have this cavity in the city: the ravine itself was supposed to be as far down as you could go. It made her suspect the white pit bottom also; it didn’t look solid, it looked possibly hollow, dangerous, a thin layer of ice, as though if you walked on it you might fall through.
“Oh, they have lots of good things. There’s a prison down here somewhere, too.”
Duncan sat down on the edge, dangling his legs nonchalantly, and took out a cigarette. After a moment she sat down beside him, although she didn’t trust the earth. It was the kind of thing that caved in. They both gazed down into the gigantic hole scooped into the ground.
“I wonder what time it is,” Marian said. She listened as she spoke: the open space had swallowed up her voice.
Duncan didn’t answer. He finished his cigarette in silence; then he stood up, walked a short way along the brink till he came to a flat area where there were no weeds, and lay down in the snow. He was so peaceful, stretched out there looking up at the sky, that Marian walked over to join him where he was lying.
“You’ll get cold,” he said, “but go ahead if you want to.”
She lay down at arm’s length from him. It did not seem right, here, to be too close. Above, the sky was a uniform light grey, made diffusely bright by a sun concealed somewhere behind it.
Duncan spoke into the silence. “So why can’t you go back? I mean, you are getting married and so on. I thought you were the capable type.”
“I am,” she said unhappily. “I was. I don’t know.” She didn’t want to discuss it.
“Some would say of course that it’s all in your mind.”
“I know that,” she said, impatient: she wasn’t a total idiot yet. “But how do I get it out?”
“It ought to be obvious,” Duncan’s voice said, “that I’m the last person to ask. They tell me I live in a world of fantasies. But at least mine are more or less my own, I choose them and I sort of like them, some of the time. But you don’t seem too happy with yours.”
“Maybe I should see a psychiatrist,” she said gloomily.
“Oh no, don’t do that. They’d only want to adjust you.”
“But I want to be adjusted, that’s just it. I don’t see any point in being unstable.” It occurred to her also that she didn’t see any point in starving to death. What she really wanted, she realized, had been reduced to simple safety. She thought she had been heading towards it all these months but actually she hadn’t been getting anywhere. And she hadn’t accomplished anything. At the moment her only solid achievement seemed to be Duncan. That was something she could hang on to.
Suddenly she needed to make sure he was still there, hadn’t vanished or sunk down beneath the white surface. She wanted verification.
“How was it for you last night?” she asked. He had not yet said anything about it.
“How was what? Oh. That.” He was silent for several minutes. She listened intently, waiting for his voice as though for an oracle. But when he spoke at last he said, “I like this place. Especially now in winter, it’s so close to absolute zero. It makes me feel human. By comparison. I wouldn’t like tropical islands at all, they would be too fleshy, I’d always be wondering whether I was a walking vegetable or a giant amphibian. But in the snow you’re as near as possible to nothing.”
Marian was puzzled. What did this have to do with it?
“You want me to say it was stupendous, don’t you?” he asked. “That it got me out of my shell. Hatched me into manhood. Solved all my problems.”
“Well…”
“Sure you do, and I could always tell you would. I like people participating in my fantasy life and I’m usually willing to participate in theirs, up to a point. It was fine; just as good as usual.”
The implication sank in smoothly as a knife through butter. She wasn’t the first then. The starched nurse-like image of herself she had tried to preserve as a last resort crumpled like wet newsprint; the rest of her couldn’t even work up the energy to be angry. She had been so thoroughly taken in. She should have known. But after she had thought about it for a few minutes, gazing up at the blank sky, it didn’t make that much difference. There was the possibility also that this revelation was just as fraudulent as so much else had been.
She sat up, brushing the snow from her sleeves. It was time for action. “All right, that was your joke,” she said. She would let him wonder whether or not she believed him. “Now I’ve got to decide what I’m going to do.”
He grinned at her. “Don’t ask me, that’s your problem. It does look as though you ought to do something: self- laceration in a vacuum eventually gets rather boring. But it’s your own personal cul-de-sac, you invented it, you’ll have to think of your own way out.” He stood up.
Marian stood up too. She had been calm but now she could feel desperation returning in her, seeping through her flesh like the effects of a drug. “Duncan,” she said, “could you maybe come back with me and talk to Peter? I don’t think I can do it, I don’t know what to say, he’s not going to understand…”
“Oh no,” he said, “you can’t do that. I’m not part of that. It would be disastrous, don’t you see? I mean for me.” He wrapped his arms around his torso and held on to his own elbows.
“Please,” she said. She knew he would refuse.
“No,” he said, “it wouldn’t be right.” He turned and looked down at the two imprints their bodies had made in the snow. Then he stepped on them, first on his own and then on hers, smearing the snow with his foot. “Come here,” he said, “I’ll show you how to get back.” He led her further along. They came to a road which rose and then dipped. Below was a giant expressway, sloping up, and in the distance another bridge, a familiar bridge with subway cars moving on it. Now she knew where she was.
“Aren’t you coming with me even that far?” she asked.
“No. I’m going to stay here for a while. But you have to go now.” The tone of his voice closed her out. He turned and started to walk away.
The cars rocketed past. She looked back once when she had trudged halfway up the hillside towards the bridge.
