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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 oncerevolving 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 recharge, 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 sandfilled 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 interval he imposed on the neutral landscape — he would keep his back to the eastern sky, avoiding the dark night that reached from the desert across the drained river. To the west the brilliant sand beneath the over-heated sun shivered like the last dawn of the world.

At these moments Dr Mallory and Leonora seemed at their most tired, as if their bodies were still aware of the rhythms of the former 24-hour day. Both of them slept at random intervals — often Halliday would visit Leonora’s chalet and find her asleep on the reclining chair by the pool, her face covered by the veil of white hair, shielded from the sun by the painting on her easel. These strange fantasies, with their images of bishops and cardinals moving in procession across ornamental landscapes, were her only activity.

By contrast, Mallory would vanish like a white vampire into his chalet, then emerge, refreshed in some way, a few hours later. After the first weeks Halliday came to terms with Mallory, and the two men would listen to the Webern quartets in the auditorium or play chess near Leonora beside the empty swimming pool. Halliday tried to discover how Leonora and Mallory had come to the town, but neither would answer his questions. He gathered only that they had arrived separately in Africa several years earlier and had been moving westward from town to town as the terminator crossed the continent.

On occasion, Mallory would go off into the desert on some unspecified errand, and then Halliday would see Leonora alone. Together they would walk along the bed of the drained river, or dance to the recordings of Masai chants in the anthropology library. Halliday’s growing dependence on Leonora was tempered by the knowledge that he had come to Africa to seek, not this white-haired young woman with her amiable eyes, but the night-walking lamia within his own mind. As if aware of this, Leonora remained always detached, smiling at Halliday across the strange paintings on her easel.

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.