Against the cerise pall of the dusk, the angular building rose into the air like a white bird.
In the students’ gallery hung the fading reproductions of a dozen schools of painting, for the most part images of worlds without meaning. However, grouped together in a small alcove Halliday found the surrealists Delvaux, Chirico and Ernst. These strange landscapes, inspired by dreams that his own could no longer echo, filled Halliday with a profound sense of nostalgia. One above all, Delvaux’s ‘The Echo’, which depicted a naked Junoesque woman walking among immaculate ruins under a midnight sky, reminded him of his own recurrent fantasy. The infinite longing contained in the picture, the synthetic time created by the receding images of the woman, belonged to the landscape of his unseen night. Halliday found an old portfolio on the floor below one of the trestles and began to strip the paintings from the walls.
As he walked across the roof to the outside stairway above the auditorium music was playing below him. Halliday searched the faces of the empty hotels, whose curtain walls lifted into the sunset air. Beyond the Fine Arts School the chalets of the students’ quarter were grouped around two drained swimming pools.
Reaching the auditorium, he peered through the glass doors across the rows of empty seats. In the centre of the front row a man in a white suit and sunglasses was sitting with his back to Halliday. Whether he was actually listening to the music Halliday could not tell, but when the record ended three or four minutes later he stood up and climbed onto the stage. He switched off the stereogram and then strolled over to Halliday, his high face with its slightly inquisitorial look hidden behind the dark glasses.
‘I’m Mallory – Dr Mallory.’ He held out a strong but oblique hand. ‘Are you staying here?’
The question seemed to contain a complete understanding of Halliday’s motives. Putting down his portfolio, Halliday introduced himself. ‘I’m at the Oasis. I arrived this evening.’
Realizing that the remark was meaningless, Halliday laughed, but Mallory was already smiling.
‘This evening? I think we can take that for granted.’ When Halliday raised his wrist to reveal the old 24-hour Rolex he still wore, Mallory nodded, straightening his sunglasses as if looking at Halliday more closely. ‘You still have one, do you? What is the time, by the way?’
Halliday glanced at the Rolex. It was one of four he had brought with him, carefully synchronized with the master 24-hour clock still running at Greenwich Observatory, recording the vanished time of the once-revolving earth. ‘Nearly 7.30. That would be right. Isn’t this Columbine Sept Heures?’
‘True enough. A neat coincidence. However, the dusk line is advancing; I’d say it was a little later here. Still, I think we can take the point.’ Mallory stepped down from the stage, where his tall figure had stood over Halliday like a white gallows. ‘Seven-thirty, old time – and new. You’ll have to stay at Columbine. It’s not often one finds the dimensions locking like that.’ He glanced at the portfolio. ‘You’re at the Oasis. Why there?’
‘It’s empty.’
‘Cogent. But so is everything else here. Even so, I know what you mean, I stayed there myself when I first came to Columbine. It’s damned hot.’
‘I’ll be on the dusk side.’
Mallory inclined his head in a small bow, as if acknowledging Halliday’s seriousness. He went over to the stereogram and disconnected a motor car battery on the floor beside it. He placed the heavy unit in a canvas carryall and gave Halliday one of the handles. ‘You can help me. I have a small generator at my chalet. It’s difficult to re-charge, but good batteries are becoming scarce.’
As they walked out into the sunlight Halliday said, ‘You can have the battery in my car.’
Mallory stopped. ‘That’s kind of you, Halliday. But are you sure you won’t want it? There are other places than Columbine.’
‘Perhaps. But I take it there’s enough food for us all here.’ Halliday gestured with his wristwatch. ‘Anyway, the time is right. Or both times, I suppose.’
‘And as many spaces as you want, Halliday. Not all of them around you. Why have you come here?’
‘I don’t know yet. I was living at Trondheim; I couldn’t sleep there. If I can sleep again, perhaps I can dream.’
He started to explain himself but Mallory raised a hand to silence him. ‘Why do you think we’re all here, Halliday? Out of Africa, dreams walk. You must meet Leonora. She’ll like you.’
They walked past the empty chalets, the first of the swimming pools on their right. In the sand on the bottom someone had traced out a huge zodiac pattern, decorated with shells and pieces of fractured tile. They approached the next pool. A sand dune had inundated one of the chalets and spilled into the basin, but a small area of the terrace had been cleared. Below an awning a young woman with white hair sat on a metal chair in front of an easel. Her jeans and the man’s shirt she wore were streaked with paint, but her intelligent face, set above a strong jaw, seemed composed and alert. She looked up as Dr Mallory and Halliday lowered the battery to the ground.
‘I’ve brought a pupil for you, Leonora.’ Mallory beckoned Halliday over. ‘He’s staying at the Oasis – on the dusk side.’
The young woman gestured Halliday towards a reclining chair beside the easel. He placed the portfolio against the back rest. ‘They’re for my room at the hotel,’ he explained. ‘I’m not a painter.’
‘Of course. May I look at them?’ Without waiting she began to leaf through the reproductions, nodding to herself at each one. Halliday glanced at the half-completed painting on the easel, a landscape across which bizarre figures moved in a strange procession, archbishops wearing fantastic mitres. He looked up at Mallory, who gave him a wry nod.
‘Interesting, Halliday?’
‘Of course. What about your dreams, doctor? Where do you keep them?’
Mallory made no reply, gazing down at Halliday with his dark sealed eyes. With a laugh, dispelling the slight tension between the two men, Leonora sat down on the chair beside Halliday.
‘Richard won’t tell us that, Mr Halliday. When we find his dreams we’ll no longer need our own.’
This remark Halliday was to repeat to himself often over the subsequent months. In many ways Halliday’s presence in the town seemed a key to all their roles. The white-suited physician, moving about silently through the sand-filled streets, seemed like the spectre of the forgotten noon, reborn at dusk to drift like his music between the empty hotels. Even at their first meeting, when Halliday sat beside Leonora, making a few automatic remarks but conscious only of her hips and shoulder touching his own, he sensed that Mallory, whatever his reasons for being in Columbine, had adjusted himself all too completely to the ambiguous world of the dusk line. For Mallory, Columbine Sept Heures and the desert had already become part of the inner landscapes that Halliday and Leonora Sully still had to find in their paintings.
However, during his first weeks in the town by the drained river Halliday thought more of Leonora and of settling himself in the hotel. Using the 24-hour Rolex, he still tried to sleep at ‘midnight’, waking (or more exactly, conceding the fact of his insomnia) seven hours later. Then, at the start of his ‘morning’, he would make a tour of the paintings hung on the walls of the seventh-floor suite, and go out into the town, searching the hotel kitchens and pantries for supplies of water and canned food. At this time – an arbitrary
