The Man Who Was Left Behind by Rachel Ingalls

Author:Rachel Ingalls [Rachel Ingalls]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571299799
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

St. George and the Nightclub

After dinner we decided to have coffee in the town and to walk around for a while. It was still light outside, although the sun was gone. Dusk was just beginning to accumulate, making the distances look different. And sounds, especially footsteps, were altered and had an echo as they do early in the morning. My wife buttoned her cardigan at the neck, but didn’t put her arms in the sleeves.

We walked around the little garden plot outside the hotel and after we had gone by I remembered that I had meant to take a closer look at the statue in its centre. We passed the old graveyard where some of the tombstones were crowned by turbans and the grass was growing wild. Then we came to a place where it looked as though a new villa was about to go up.

“You don’t think it could be an excavation of some kind, do you?” she said.

“I don’t think so, but you can never tell around here. Might be.”

We turned the corner and came to the building whose function I hadn’t been able to guess. It was stucco and had arches cut into the sides, which lent it a South-of-the-border look. I still couldn’t determine whether it was the post office or the jail. In any case, no one was on duty.

We came out into view of the harbour. Two large tourist cruise boats were tied up at the quay. There were people strolling around between the beds of hibiscus flowers, and three taxicabs still parked to the side of the café, with about a dozen men standing near them and talking.

I stopped, and tried to figure out the view we had had from the beach that morning. If you had your back to the sea, you could look towards the harbour and see a mass of houses and other buildings. That was what we had seen when we stood up to leave the beach before lunch, and then we had watched a large schooner, white as a swan, come sailing in from the ocean towards the buildings. It had looked just as though it was going to crash into them, but as we watched, it went straight through the middle and you could see that there must be water between the houses. It was one of the most extraordinary tricks of eyesight I had ever experienced. From where we stood we had seen the white sails riding serenely forward above the rooftops. It was as if I had been on the way to my job in the middle of the city and seen a few streets off a boat sailing past the office where I worked. Just to see such a phenomenon, to have had the ability to see it, convinced me for a moment that I had participated in the workings of the supernatural. It had made me feel transported, as though I had seen into another dimension, or been granted a special freedom or a miraculous talent not normally available to mankind.

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