Elementals by A.S. Byatt Read Free Book Online

fountain to fountain, crocodile to clocktower, Memnon’s head to the naïf bronze lovers. She avoided the Arènes, as usual. In the evening the town was packed with crowds of festive Nîmois; there were bursts of music and fireworks. Patricia avoided it all. She was not in that world. She looked in the restaurant and the garden for Nils Isaksen, and he was nowhere to be seen. On the first day she thought easily that she could wait – time had become a coloured cave of light in which planets rolled like plates, and fish leaped, and toothed reptiles floated and paddled. On the second day she thought once or twice that she saw him at street-corners, but it was always other tall men in straw hats or linen jackets. She tried sitting in the garden, but that too was full of aficionados, drinking cocktails, discussing
faenas
, moving naked bronzed shoulders gracefully under the great linen parasols. On the second evening she saw Nils Isaksen, but he did not see her. He was quarrelling with the receptionist. It might have been the kind of quarrel guests have, when they have been politely requested to pay bills they cannot pay. The old Patricia, sharp as a needle, would have picked up a clue from an intonation, or a gesture. The new one, floating largely in some other dimension, registered the quarrelling with difficulty, and was about to approach Nils, to whom she needed to speak, to whom she now needed very much to speak, when she registered dimly that he was drunk. His arms and legs and head were not working together, his voice was loud and uncontrolled, his face was hot. She backed away. She went up in the lift, and lay on the bed. She ordered supper through room service, and it took a long time to come, because of the eddying tauromanic crowds in the body of the hotel. On the third evening of the corrida she made her way past the Bar Hemingway to see whether Nils was on the terrace, or alternatively whether there was a quiet table where she could sit and watch the fountain. The fountain had been turned up, perhaps in honour of the matadors. What used to be a bubbling aquamarine cube of suspended liquid was now a high spraying column, flailing a little in the air, like a turning horsetail, throwing bright droplets and white shoots of wet over the grass. At the far end of the terrace, she saw, through the real glass wall of the Bar Hemingway and the molten glass cocoon of her own consciousness, a struggle round one of the dinner tables. She could hear shouting, but no words. There was a group, like Laocoön and the serpents, one figure rising above a mass, holding above his head what seemed to be a silver buckler, and a flashing bottle. It was Nils Isaksen, his blue-green jacket stained with what could have been blood, or could have been red wine, his hair dishevelled and his mouth open in a roar, fighting off a cohort of white-aproned waiters led by the maître d’hôtel in his uniform. One or two dark Spaniards stood close, involved but not active. The mass of men swayed this way and that; the plume of water swayed this way and that in the dark garden; Nils Isaksen felled the maître d’hôtel with what Patricia could now clearly see to be a heavy silver dishcover, and was himself brought down, more or less pinioned with napkins and tablecloths, and half-led, half-carried, still struggling, into the hotel. Patricia turned to the barman, and ordered an
eau-de-vie framboise
, on ice. She sat down, inside the glass wall, and stared at the cubes of ice. The barman was explaining the disturbance to a young couple.
    ‘Nothing serious. No, no. He criticised the
spectacle
. Not a wise thing to do in Nîmes, certainly not during the fte.
    ‘What displeased him?’ asked the young husband, laughing, his arm round his wife’s silky brown shoulder. ‘The quality of the bulls, or the art of the torero?’
    ‘The
mise à mort
,’ said the barman. ‘He comes out of the North, somewhere. They don’t understand the death of the