【有声英语文学名著】英国病人 97

 I dressed. My clothes dry and brittle 1 from the heat in the stones. My linked hands made a saddle for her to rest on. As soon as I reached the sand I jostled her around so her body was facing back, over my shoulder.( I was conscious of the airiness of her weight. )I was used to her like this in my arms, (she had spun 2 around me in my room like a human reflection of the fan —her arms out, fingers like starfish. )We moved like this towards the northeast gully, where the plane was buried. I did not need a map. With me was the tank of petrol I had carried all the way from the capsized truck. Because three years earlier we had been impotent without it. 

 
 
“What happened three years earlier?” Caravaggio asked.
 
 
“She had been injured. In 1939. Her husband had crashed his plane. It had been planned as a suicide-murder by her husband that would involve all three of us. We were not even lovers at the time. I suppose information of the affair trickled 3 down to him 
somehow.” 
 
 
“So she was too wounded to take with you.” 
 
 
“Yes. The only chance to save her was for me to try and reach help alone.” 
 
 
(In the cave, after all those months of separation and anger, they had come together and spoken once more as lovers, rolling away the boulder 5 they had placed between themselves for some social law neither had believed in. In the botanical garden she had banged her head against the gatepost in determination and fury. Too proud to be a lover, a secret. There would be no compartments 6 in her world. He had turned back to her, his finger raised, I don’t miss you yet. 
 
 
You will. 
 
 
During their months of separation he had grown bitter and self-sufficient. He avoided her company. He could not stand her calmness when she saw him. He phoned her house and spoke 4 to her husband and heard her laughter in the background. There 
was a public charm in her that tempted 7 everyone. This was something he had loved in her. Now he began to trust nothing. He suspected she had replaced him with another lover. He interpreted her every gesture to others as a code of promise. She gripped the front of Roundell’s jacket once in a lobby and shook it, laughing at him as he muttered something, and he followed the innocent government aide for two days to see if there was more between them. He did not trust her last endearments 8 to him anymore. She was with him or against him. She was against him. He couldn’t stand even her tentative smiles at him. If she passed him a drink he would not drink it. If at a dinner she pointed 9 to a bowl with a Nile lily floating in it he would not look at it. Just another fucking flower. She had a new group of intimates that excluded him and her husband. No one goes back to the husband. He knew that much about love and human nature. He bought pale brown cigarette papers and glued them into sections of The Histories that recorded wars that were of no interest to him. He wrote down all her arguments against him. Glued into the book—giving himself only the voice of the watcher, the listener, the “he.” During the last days before the war he had gone for a last time to the Gilf Kebir to clear out the base camp. Her husband was supposed to pick him up. The husband they had both loved until they began to love each other. Clifton flew up on Uweinat to collect him on the appointed day, buzzing the lost oasis 10 so low the acacia shrubs 11 dismantled 12 their leaves in the wake of the plane, the Moth 13 slipping into the depressions and cuts—while he stood on the high ridge 14 signalling with blue tarpaulin 15. Then the plane pivoted 16 down and came straight towards him, then crashed into the earth fifty 
yards away. A blue line of smoke uncoiling from the undercarriage. There was no fire. 
A husband gone mad. Killing 17 all of them. Killing himself and his wife—and him by the fact there was now no way out of the desert. Only she was not dead. He pulled the body free, carrying it out of the plane’s crumpled 18 grip, this grip of her husband. )