This pleasant mnage a trois was to last for three months. During this time the dusk line advanced another half mile toward Columbine Sept Heures, and at last Mallory and Leonora decided to move to a small refinery town ten miles to the west. Halliday half expected Leonora to stay with him at Columbine, but she left with Mallory in the Peugeot. Sitting in the back seat, she waited as Mallory played the last Bartok quartet in the auditorium before disconnecting the battery and carrying it back to the car.
Curiously, it was Mallory who tried to persuade Halliday to leave with them. Unlike Leonora, the still unresolved elements in his relationship with Halliday made him wish to keep in touch with the younger man.
‘Halliday, you’ll find it difficult staying on here.’ Mallory pointed across the river to the pall of darkness that hung like an immense wave over the town. Already the colours of the walls and streets had changed to the deep cyclamen of dusk. ‘The night is coming. Do you realize what that means?’
‘Of course, doctor. I’ve waited for it.’
‘But, Halliday…’ Mallory searched for a phrase. His tall figure, eyes hidden as ever by the dark glasses, looked up at Halliday across the steps of the hotel. ‘You aren’t an owl, or some damned desert cat. You’ve got to come to terms with this thing in the daylight.’
Giving up, Mallory went back to the car. He waved as they set off, reversing onto one of the dunes in a cloud of pink dust, but Halliday made no reply. He was watching Leonora Sully in the back seat with her canvas and easels, the stack of bizarre paintings that were echoes of her unseen dreams.
Whatever his feelings for Leonora, they were soon forgotten with his discovery a month later of a second beautiful neighbour at Columbine Sept Heures.
Half a mile to the north-east of Columbine, across the drained river, was an empty colonial mansion, once occupied by the manager of the refinery at the mouth of the river. As Halliday sat on his balcony on the seventh floor of the Oasis Hotel, trying to detect the imperceptible progress of the terminator, while the antique clocks around him ticked mechanically through the minutes and hours of their false days, he would notice the white faades of the house illuminated briefly in the reflected light of the sandstorms. Its terraces were covered with dust, and the columns of the loggia beside the swimming pool had toppled into the basin. Although only four hundred yards to the east of the hotel, the empty shell of the house seemed already within the approaching night.
Shortly before one of his attempts to sleep Halliday saw the headlamps of a car moving around the house. Its beams revealed a solitary figure who walked slowly up and down the terrace. Abandoning any pretence at sleep, Halliday climbed to the roof of the hotel, ten storeys above, and lay down on the suicide sill. A chauffeur was unloading suitcases from the car. The figure on the terrace, a tall woman in a black robe, walked with the random, uncertain movements of someone barely aware of what she was doing. After a few minutes the chauffeur took the woman by the arm, as if waking her from some kind of sleep.
Halliday watched from the roof, waiting for them to reappear. The strange tranceljke movements of this beautiful woman — already her dark hair and the pale nimbus of her face drifting like a lantern on the incoming dusk convinced him that she was the dark lamia of all his dreams — reminded Halliday of his own first strolls across the dunes to the river, the testing of ground unknown but familiar from his sleep.
When he went down to his suite he lay on the brocaded settee in the sitting room, surrounded by the landscapes of Delvaux and Ernst, and fell suddenly into a deep slumber. There he saw his first true dreams, of classical ruins under a midnight sky, where moonlit figures moved past each other in a city of the dead.
The dreams were to recur each time Halliday slept. He would wake on the settee by the picture window, the darkening floor of the desert below, aware of the dissolving boundaries between his inner and outer worlds. Already two of the clocks below the mantelpiece mirror had stopped. With their end he would at last be free of his former notions of time.
At the end of this week Halliday discovered that the woman slept at the same intervals as he did, going out to look at the desert as Halliday stepped onto his balcony. Although his solitary figure stood out clearly against the dawn sky behind the hotel the woman seemed not to notice him. Halliday watched the chauffeur drive the white Mercedes into the town. In his dark uniform he moved past the fading walls of the Fine Arts School like a shadow without form.
