When my daughter was a little girl she suffered from insomnia, especially in the weeks around midsummer, and sometimes, in desperation, mine and hers, late in those white nights I would bundle her in a blanket into the car and take her for drives northwards along the back roads by the coast, for we were still living by the sea then. She enjoyed these jaunts; even if they did not make her sleep they induced in her a drowsy calm; she said it felt funny to be in the car in her pyjamas, as if she were asleep after all and travelling in a dream. Years later, when she was a young woman, she and I spent a Sunday afternoon retracing our old route up that coastline. We did not acknowledge to each other the sentimental implications of the journey, and I made no mention of the past—one had to be careful of what one said to Cass—but when we got out on that winding road I think she no less than I was remembering those nocturnal drives and the dreamlike sensation of gliding through the greyish darkness, with the dunes beside us and the sea beyond them a line of shining mercury under a horizon so high it seemed it must be a mirage.
There is a place, quite far north, I do not know what it is called, where the road narrows and runs for some way beside cliffs. They are not very high cliffs, but they are high enough and sheer enough to be dangerous, and there are yellow warning notices at intervals all the way along. That Sunday, Cass made me stop the car and get out and walk with her on the clifftop. I was unwilling, having always been afraid of heights, but it would not have done to refuse my daughter so simple a request. It was late spring, or early summer, and the day was brilliant under a scoured sky, with a warm blast of wind coming in off the sea and the sting of iodine in the salt-laden air. I took scant interest in the sparkling scene, however. The look of the swaying waters far below and of the waves gnashing at the rocks was making me nauseous, though I kept up as brave a front as I could manage. Sea birds at eye-level and no more than a few yards away from us hung almost motionless on the updraughts, their wings trembling, their screeches sounding like derisive taunts. After some way the narrow path grew narrower still and made an abrupt descent. Now there was a steep bank of clay and loose stones on one side and nothing on the other save sky and the growling sea. I felt giddier than ever, and went along in a dreadful funk, leaning in towards the bank on my left and away from the windy blue abyss to the right. We should have gone in file, the way was so narrow and the going so treacherous, but Cass insisted on walking beside me, on the very edge of the path, with her arm locked in mine. I marvelled at her lack of fear, and was even starting to feel resentful of her insouciance, for by now my own fright was such that I was sweating and I had begun to tremble. Gradually it became apparent, however, that Cass too was terrified, perhaps more terrified than I was, hearing the wooing wind crooning to her and feeling the emptiness plucking at her coat and the long fall that was only the tiniest sidestep away opening its arms to her so invitingly. She was a lifelong dabbler in death, was my Cass—no, she was more, she was a connoisseur. Striding along that cliff-edge was for her, I am sure, a sip of the deepest, most darksome, brew, the richest vintage. As she held on tight to my arm I could feel the fear thrumming in her, the thrill of terror twitching along her nerves, and I realised that, perhaps because of her fear, I was no longer afraid, and so we went on briskly, father and daughter, and which of the two of us was sustaining the other it was impossible to say.
If she had jumped that day, would she have taken me with her? That would have been a thing, the pair of us plummeting down, feet first, arm in arm, through the bright, blue air.
The private hospital to which they rushed the comatose Dawn Devonport—by helicopter, no less—stands in handsome grounds, amid a broad sea of closely barbered, unreal-looking grass. A creamy-white and many-windowed cube, it looks like nothing so much as an old-style ocean-going luxury liner viewed head-on, complete with big flag whipping importantly in the breeze and air-conditioning vents that might be smoke-stacks. Since childhood I have secretly entertained the idea of hospitals as places of romantic enchantment, an idea which no number of drear visits and more than a few brief but unpleasant stays have managed to disabuse me of entirely. I trace this fancy to an autumn afternoon when I was five or six and my father took me on the bar of his bicycle to the Fort Mountain outside our town, where we sat in the bracken on a steep slope eating bread-and-butter sandwiches and drinking milk from a lemonade bottle that had been corked with a screw of greaseproof paper. The TB hospital loomed high up behind us, cream-coloured also, and also many-windowed, on the unseen terraces of which I imagined neat rows of pale girls and neurasthenic young men, too refined and fastidious to live, reclining on extended deckchairs under bright-red blankets, drowsing and fitfully dreaming. Even the smell of a hospital suggests to me an exotically pristine world where specialists in white coats and sterile masks move silently among narrow beds overhung with phials feeding priceless ichor drip by drip into the veins of fallen moguls and, yes, afflicted film stars.
It was pills Dawn Devonport took, a whole bottle of them. Pills are, I note, the preferred choice among our profession, I wonder why. There is a question as to the seriousness of her intention. But an entire bottle, that is impressive. What did I feel? Dread, confusion, a certain numbness, a certain annoyance, too. It was as if I had been strolling unconcernedly along an unfamiliar, pleasant street when suddenly a door had been flung open and I had been seized by the scruff and hauled unceremoniously not into a strange place but a place that I knew all too well and had thought I would never be made to enter again; an awful place.
When I first walked into the hospital room—crept, would be a better word—and saw this hitherto so vivid young woman lying there still and gaunt my heart gave a gulp, for I thought that what they had told me must be mistaken and that she had succeeded in what she had set out to do and that this was her corpse, laid out ready for the embalmers. Then she gave me an even greater start by opening her eyes and smiling—yes, she smiled, with what at first seemed to me pleasure and genuine warmth! I did not know whether to take this for a good sign or a bad. Had she lost her reason to desperation and despair, to be lying there in a hospital bed smiling like that? Looking closer I saw, however, that it was less a smile than a grimace of embarrassment. And in fact that was the first thing she said, struggling to sit up, that she felt embarrassed and disgraced, and she put out a trembling hand for me to take. Her skin was hot, as if she were running a fever. I set up her pillows for her and she lay back on them with a groan of anger against herself. I noted the plastic name-tag around her wrist, and read the name on it. How tiny she looked, tiny and hollowed out, propped there weightless-seeming as a fledgling fallen from the nest, her enormous eyes starting from her head and her hair lank and drawn back and her sharp bones pressing into the shoulders of the washed-out, drab-green hospital gown. Those big hands of hers appeared bigger than ever, the fingers stubbier. There were flakes of dried grey stuff at the corners of her mouth. What turbulent depths had she leaned out over, what windy abyss had called to her?
‘I know,’ she said ruefully. ‘I look like my mother did on her deathbed.’
I had not been at all sure that I should come. Did I know her well enough to be here? In such circumstances, where cheated death lingers rancorously, there is a code of etiquette more iron-bound than any that applies outside, in the realm of the living. Yet how could I not have come? Had we not achieved an intimacy, not only in front of the camera but away from it, too, that went far beyond mere acting? Had we not shared our losses, she and I? She knew about Cass, I knew about her father. Yet there was the question whether precisely this knowledge would hover between us like a troublesome, doubled ghost, and strike us mute.
What did I say to her? Cannot think: mumbled some trite condolence, no doubt. What would I have said to my daughter if she had somehow survived those slimed, rust-coloured rocks at the foot of that headland at Portovenere?
I drew a plastic chair to the bedside and sat down, leaning forwards with my forearms on my knees and my hands clasped; I must have looked a father-confessor to the life. One thing I was certain of: if Dawn Devonport mentioned Cass I would get up from that chair without a word and walk out. Around us the many noises of the hospital were joined together in a medleyed hum, and the air in the overheated room had the texture of warm damp cotton. Through the window on the far side of the bed I could see the mountains, distant and faint, and, closer in, an extensive building site with cranes and mechanical diggers and many foreshortened workmen in helmets and yellow safety-jackets clambering about in the rubble. It does not know how heartless it is, the workaday world.
Dawn Devonport had withdrawn the hand that she had briefly given me and it lay now limp at her side, pallid as the sheet on which it rested. The name on the plastic identity bracelet was not hers, I mean the name that was printed there was not Dawn Devonport. She saw me looking and smiled again, grimly. ‘That’s me,’ she said in a Cockney voice, ‘my real name, Stella Stebbings. Bit of a tongue-twister, ain’t it?’
At noon a maid had discovered her in the bedroom of her hotel suite at Ostentation Towers, the curtains drawn and she sprawled halfway out of a disordered bed with foam on her lips and the empty pill bottle clasped in her fist. I could see the scene, blocked out in classic fashion, under, of course, in my vision of it, the suggestion of a proscenium arch, or in this case, I suppose, within the rectangle of a sombrely glowing screen. She did not know why she had done it, she said, reaching out her hand again and fixing it on my clasped fists, as it was broad enough to do—they must be her father’s hands she has. She supposed, she said, that she had acted on impulse, yet how could that be, she wanted to know, when it had taken such an effort to swallow all those pills? They were a very mild dose, otherwise she would certainly be dead, the doctor had assured her of it. He was an Indian, the doctor, mild-mannered and with such a sweet smile. He had seen her as Pauline Powers in the remake of Bitter Harvest. That had been one of her father’s favourite pictures, the original version, though, with Flame Domingo playing Pauline. It was her father who had encouraged her to be a film actress. He had been so proud to see his daughter’s name in lights, the very name he had dreamed up for her when she was a fleet-footed prodigy in cellophane wings and a tutu. The shell of her hand tightened over both of mine, and I unclasped my fingers and turned up one of my hands and felt her palm hot against mine, and as if this touch between us were scalding she snatched her hand away again and sat forwards, making a tent of her knees, and looked out of the window, a moist sheen on her forehead and her hair hooked behind her ears and that penumbral down on her skin all aglow and her eyes lit with a fevered gleam. Sitting there like that, so erect and stark with her profile etched against the light, she had the look of a primitive figure carved from ivory. I imagined tracing the line of her jaw with a fingertip, imagined placing my lips against the side of her smooth, shadowed throat. She was Cora, Vander’s girl, and I was Vander: she the damaged beauty, I the beast. We had been acting their savage love for weeks now: how could we not in some way be them? She began to weep, the big glistening tears making grey splashes on the sheet. I pressed her hand. She should go away, I told her, in a voice thick with an emotion I was too moved to try to identify—she should have Toby Taggart call a week-long, a month-long halt to the filming and get away from everything altogether. She was not listening. The far-off mountains were blue, like motionless pale smoke. My lost girl, Vander calls her in the script. My lost girl.
Careful.
In the end we had not much to say to each other—should I have given her a stern talking-to, should I have urged her to cheer up and look on the bright side of things?—and after a short while I left, saying I would come again tomorrow. She was still far away in herself or in those far blue hills and I think she hardly noticed my going.
In the corridor I encountered Toby Taggart, loitering uneasily, fidgeting and biting his nails and looking more than ever like a wounded ruminant. ‘Of course,’ he burst out straight off, ‘you’ll think I’m only worried about the shoot.’ Then he looked abashed and set to nibbling again violently at a thumbnail. I could see he was putting off going in to see his fallen star. I told him of how when she had woken up she had smiled at me. He took this with a look of large surprise and, I thought, a trace of reprehension, though whether it was Dawn Devonport’s hardly appropriate smile or my telling him about it that he deplored I could not say. To distract myself in my shaken state—I had a fizzing sensation all over, as if a strong electric current were passing along my nerves—I was thinking what a vast and complicated contraption a hospital is. An endless stream of people kept walking past us, to and fro, nurses in white shoes with squeaky rubber soles, doctors with dangling stethoscopes, dressing-gowned patients cautiously inching along and keeping close to the walls, and those indeterminate busy folk in green smocks, either surgeons or orderlies, I can never tell which. Toby was watching me but when I caught his eye he looked aside quickly. I imagine he was thinking of Cass, who had succeeded where Dawn Devonport had failed. Was he thinking too, guiltily, of how he had sent Billie Stryker to lure her story out of me? He has never let on that he knows about Cass, has never once so much as mentioned her name in my presence. He is a wily fellow, despite the impression he likes to give of being a shambler and dim.
There was a long rectangular window beside us affording a broad view of roofs and sky and those ubiquitous mountains. In the middle distance, among the chimney pots, the November sunlight had picked out something shiny, a sliver of window-glass or a steel cowling, and the thing kept glinting and winking at me with what seemed, in the circumstances, a callous levity. Just to be saying something I asked Toby what he would do now about the film. He shrugged and looked vexed. He said he had not yet told the studio what had happened. There was a great deal of footage already in the can, he would work on that, but of course there was the ending still to be shot. We both nodded, both pursed our lips, both frowned. In the ending as it is written Vander’s girl Cora drowns herself. ‘What do you think?’ Toby asked cautiously and still without looking at me. ‘Should we change it?’
An ancient fellow in a wheelchair was bowled past, white-haired, soldierly, one eye bandaged and the other furiously staring. The wheels of the wheelchair made a smoothly pleasant, viscous whispering on the rubber floor tiles.
My daughter, I said, used to make jokes about killing herself.
Toby nodded absently, as if he were only half listening. ‘It’s a shame,’ he said. I do not know if he was speaking of Cass or of Dawn Devonport. Both, perhaps. I agreed that, yes, it was a shame. He only nodded again. I imagine he was still brooding on that ending. It was a tricky problem for him. Yes, suicide, even if only the attempt of it, does make for awkwardness.
When I got home I went into the living room, to the telephone extension there, and, pausing only to make sure that Lydia was nowhere in earshot, called Billie Stryker and asked if she would come and meet me, straight away. Billie at first sounded unwilling. There was a racket going on behind her; she said it was the television set but I suspect it was that unspeakable husband of hers, berating her—I am sure I recognised the combination of menace and whine that is his characteristic tone. At one point she put her hand over the receiver and shouted angrily at someone, which must have been him. Have I mentioned him before? A frightful fellow—Billie retains even yet a sallow trace of the black eye she had when I first met her. There were more raised voices and again she had to cover the receiver, but in the end, in a hurried whisper, she said that she would come, and hung up.
I tiptoed out to the hall again, listening still for Lydia, and took my hat and coat and gloves and slipped out of the house again as nimble and soft of step as a cat-burglar. In my heart I have always fancied myself a bit of a cad.
It occurs to me that of all the women I have known in my life I know Lydia the least. This is a thought to stop me in my tracks. Can it be the case? Can I have lived all these years with an enigma?—an enigma of my making? Perhaps it is only that, having been for so long in such close proximity to her, I feel I should know her to an extent that is not to be achieved, not by us, that is, not by human beings. Or is it just that I can no longer see her properly, in a proper perspective? Or that we have walked so far together that she has become merged with me, as the shadow of a man walking towards a street light gradually merges with him until it is no longer to be seen? I do not know what she thinks. I used to think I knew, but no more. And how should I? I do not know what anyone thinks; I hardly know what I think myself. Yes, that is it, perhaps, that she has become a part of me, a part of what is the greatest of all my enigmas, namely, myself. We do not fight, any more. We used to have seismic fights, violent, hours-long eruptions that would leave us both shaking, I ashen-faced and Lydia mute and outraged, the tears of fury and frustration spilling down her cheeks like runnels of transparent lava. Cass’s death conferred, I think, a false weight, a false seriousness upon us and our life together. It was as if our daughter by her going had left us some grand task which was beyond our powers but which we kept on aspiring to fulfil, and the constant effort goaded us repeatedly into rage and conflict. The task I suppose was no more and no less than that of continuing to mourn her, without stint or complaint, as fiercely as we had in the first days after she was gone, as we had for weeks, for months, for years, even. To do otherwise, to weaken, to lay down the burden for the merest moment, would be to lose her with a finality that would have seemed more final than death itself. And thus we went on, scratching and tearing at each other, so the tears would not cease nor our ardour grow cool, until we had exhausted ourselves, or got too old, and called an unwilling truce that nowadays is disturbed by no more than an occasional, brief and half-hearted exchange of small-arms fire. So that, I suppose, is why I think I do not know her, have ceased to know her. Quarrelling, for us, was intimacy.
I had arranged to meet Billie Stryker by the canal. How I love the archaic sunlight of these late-autumn afternoons. Low on the horizon there were scrapings of cloud like bits of crinkled gold leaf and the sky higher up was a layering of bands of clay-white, peach, pale green, all this reflected as a vaguely mottled mauve wash on the motionless and brimming surface of the canal. I still had that agitated sensation, that electrical seething in the blood, that had started up in me at Dawn Devonport’s bedside. I had not felt like this for a very long time. It was the kind of feeling I remembered from when I was young and everything was new and the future limitless, a state of fearful and exalted waiting like that into which, all those years ago, Mrs Gray had stepped, crooning distractedly under her breath and twisting that recalcitrant curl behind her ear. What was it today that had tapped me on the shoulder with its tuning fork? Was it the past, again, or the future?
Billie Stryker was in her accustomed rig-out of jeans and worn running shoes, the lace of one undone and straggling, and a short, shiny black leather jacket over a too-small white vest that was moulded like a second skin around her bosom and over the two puffy pillows of flesh into which her stomach above her belt was bisected by a deep, median wrinkle. Her hair, since I had seen her a couple of days before, had been dyed orange and violently cropped, by her own hand, I judged, and bristled in stubby clumps as if her skull were studded all over with tufted darts. She seems to derive a vengeful satisfaction from cultivating her unloveliness, pampering and primping it as another would her beauty. It is sad how she mistreats herself; I should have thought her horrible husband could be depended on to do that for her effectively enough. Over these past weeks of plodding and repetitious make-believe I have come to appreciate her for her stolid practicality, her doggedness and disenchanted resolve.
That husband. I find him a peculiarly unappetising specimen. He is tall and thin, with many concavities, as if slices had been taken off him at flanks, stomach, chest; he has a pin-head and a mouthful of rotting teeth; his grin is more like a snarl. When he looks about him the things his eye falls on seem to quail under his tainting glance. Early on he took to hanging about the set, so that Toby Taggart, soft-hearted as ever, felt compelled to find odd jobs for him. I would have had him seen off the premises, with threats, if necessary. I do not know what he does for a living otherwise—Billie is evasive on this as on so much else—but he gives an impression of constant busyness, of significant doings about to begin, of grand projects that at a word from him will get under way. I am sceptical. I think he lives on his wits, or on Billie’s, which are bound to be sharper. He gets himself up like a workman, in bleached-out dungarees and collarless shirts and boots with rubber soles an inch thick; also he keeps himself very dusty, even his hair, and when he sits down he does so at a weary sprawl, an ankle crossed on a narrow knee and an arm hooked over the back of his chair, as if he had finished a punishingly long stint of work and had stopped now briefly for a well-earned break. I confess I am a little afraid of him. He surely hit poor Billie and I can easily see him swinging a fist at me. Why does she stay with him? Futile question. Why does anyone do anything.
I said to Billie now that I wanted her to track down Mrs Gray for me. I said I did not doubt she would succeed. Nor do I. A pair of swans approached upon the water, a pen and her mate, surely, for are they not a monogamous species? We stopped to watch them as they came. Swans in their outlandish and grubby gorgeousness always seem to me to be keeping up a nonchalant front behind which really they are cowering in a torment of self-consciousness and doubt. These two were skilled dissemblers, and gave us a speculative stare, saw our hands were empty of crusts, and sailed onwards with a show of cool disdain.
Billie, tactful as ever, did not enquire as to why I should be suddenly so eager to trace this woman from my past. It is hard to guess what Billie’s opinion is on any matter. To talk to her is like dropping stones into a deep well; the response that comes back is long-delayed and muted. She has the wariness of a person much put-upon and menaced—that husband again—and before speaking seems to turn over every word carefully and examine it from all sides, testing its potential to displease and provoke. But she must have wondered. I told her Mrs Gray would be old by now or possibly no longer living. I said only that she had been my best friend’s mother and that I had not seen her or heard anything of her for nigh-on half a century. What I did not say, what I emphatically did not say, was why I wished to find her again. And why did I?—why do I? Nostalgia? Whim? Because I am getting old and the past has begun to seem more vivid than the present? No, something more urgent is driving me, though I do not know what it is. I imagine Billie told herself that my age allowed of quixotic self-indulgence, and that if I was prepared to pay her good money to trace some old biddy from my young days she would be a fool herself to question my foolishness. Did she guess my doings with Mrs Gray involved what I had heard her at other times refer to scornfully as hanky-panky? Perhaps she did, and was embarrassed for me, fond old codger that I must appear in her eyes, and that I appear, indeed, in my own. What would she have thought if she knew what thoughts I was thinking about that stricken girl lying in her hospital bed as we spoke? Hanky-panky, indeed.
We walked on. Moorhens now, a hissing stand of reeds, and still those little gold clouds.
Our daughter’s death was made so much the worse for her mother and me by being, to us, a mystery, complete and sealed; to us, though not, I hope, to her. I do not say we were surprised. How could we have been surprised, given the chaotic state of Cass’s inner life? In the months before she died, when she was abroad, an image of her had been appearing to me, a sort of ghost-in-waiting, in daytime dreams that were not dreams. You knew what she was going to do! Lydia had cried at me when Cass was dead. You knew and never said! Did I know, and should I have been able to foresee what she intended, haunted by her living presence as I was? Was it that, in those ghostly visitations, she was sending me somehow a warning signal from the future? Was Lydia right, could I have done something to save her? These questions prey upon me, yet I fear not as heavily as surely they should; ten years of unrelenting interrogation would wear down even the stubbornest devotee of an absconded spirit. And I am tired, so tired.
What was I saying?
Cass’s presence in Liguria
Cass’s presence in Liguria was the first link in the mysterious chain that dragged her to her death on those bleak rocks at Portovenere. What or who was in Liguria for her? In search of an answer, a clue to an answer, I used to pore for hours over her papers, creased and blotted wads of foolscap sheets scratched all over in her minuscule hand—I have them somewhere still—that she left behind her in the room in that foul little hotel in Portovenere that I shall never forget, at the top of the cobbled street from where we could see the ugly tower of the church of San Pietro, the very height she had flung herself from. I wanted to believe that what looked like the frantic scribblings of a mind at its last extremity were really an elaborately encoded message meant for me, and for me alone. And there were places indeed where she seemed to be addressing me directly. In the end, however, wish as I might, I had to accept that it was not me she was speaking to but someone other, my surrogate, perhaps, shadowy and elusive. For there was another presence detectable in those pages, or better say a palpable absence, the shade of a shade, whom she addressed only and always under the name of Svidrigailov.
Flung herself. Why do I say she flung herself from that place? Perhaps she let herself drop as lightly as a feather. Perhaps she seemed to herself to be drifting down to death.
‘She was pregnant, my daughter, when she died,’ I said.
Billie took this without comment, and only frowned, protruding a pink and shiny lower lip. These frowns of hers give her the look of a vexed cherub.
The sky was fading and a chilly dusk was coming on, and I suggested we should stop at a pub to have a drink. This was unusual, for me—I could not remember the last time I had been inside a public house. We went to a place on a corner by one of the canal bridges. Brown walls, stained carpet, a huge television set above the bar with the sound turned down and sportsmen in garish jerseys sprinting and shoving and signalling in relentless dumbshow. There were the usual afternoon men with their pints and racing papers, two or three spivvish young fellows in suits, and the inevitable pair of gaffers sitting opposite each other at a tiny table, smeared whiskey glasses at hand, and sunk in an immemorial silence. Billie looked about with sour disdain. She has a certain hauteur, I have noticed it before. She is, I think, something of a puritan, and secretly considers herself a cut above the rest of us, an undercover agent who knows all our secrets and is privy to our tawdriest sins. She has been a researcher for too long. Her tipple, it turned out, is a splash of gin drowned in a big glass of orange crush and further neutralised by a hefty shovelful of groaning ice cubes. I began to tell her, nursing a thimbleful of tepid port, which I am sure she thought a sissy’s drink, how Billy Gray and I in time discovered that we preferred gin to his father’s whiskey. It was as well, since the bottle we had been winkling out of the cocktail cabinet had over the weeks become so watered down that the whiskey was almost colourless. Gin, quicksilver and demure, now seemed to us altogether more sophisticated and dangerous than whiskey’s rough gold. In the immediate aftermath of my first frolic in the laundry room with Mrs Gray I had been in deep dread of encountering Billy, thinking he was the one, more than my mother, more than his sister, even, who would detect straight off the scarlet sign of guilt that must be blazoned on my brow. But of course he noticed nothing. Yet when he came and leaned down to pour another inch of gin into my glass and I saw the pale patch on the crown of his head the size of a sixpence where his hair whorled, a sense of uncanniness swept over me so that I almost shivered, and I shrank back from him, and held my breath for fear of catching his smell and recognising in it a trace of his mother’s. I tried not to look into the brown depths of those eyes, or dwell on those unnervingly moist pink lips. I felt that suddenly I did not know him, or, worse, that through knowing his mother, in all senses of the word, ancient and modern, I knew him also and all too intimately. So I sat there on his sofa in front of the flickering telly and gulped my gin and squirmed in secret and exquisite shame.
I told Billie Stryker that I would be going away for a time. To this also she offered no response. She really is an incommunicative young woman. Is there something I am missing? There usually is. I said that when I went I would be taking Dawn Devonport with me. I said I was counting on her to break the news of this to Toby Taggart. Neither of his leads would be available for work for a week, at least. At this, Billie smiled. She likes a bit of trouble, does Billie, a bit of strife. I imagine it makes her feel less isolated in her own domestic disorders. She asked where it was I was going. Italy, I told her. Ah, Italy, she said, as if it were her second home.
A trip to Italy, as it happens, was prominent on the list of things that Mrs Gray had longed for and felt she should have by right. Her dream was to set out from one of those fancy Riviera towns, Nice or Cannes or somesuch, and motor along the coast all the way down to Rome to see the Vatican, and have an audience with the Pope, and sit on the Spanish Steps, and throw coins in the Trevi Fountain. She also desired a mink coat to wear to Mass on Sundays, a smart new car to replace the battered old station wagon—‘that jalopy!’—and a red-brick house with a bay window on the Avenue de Picardy in the posher end of town. Her social ambitions were high. She wished her husband were something more than a lowly optician—he had wanted to be a proper doctor but his family had been unable, or unwilling, to pay the college fees—and she was determined that Billy and his sister would do well. Doing well was her aim in everything, giving the neighbours one in the eye, making the town—‘this dump!’—sit up and take notice. She liked to daydream aloud, as we lay in each other’s arms on the floor of our tumbledown love nest in the woods. What an imagination she had! And while she was elaborating these fantasies of bowling along that azure coast in an open sports car swathed in furs with her husband the famous brain surgeon at her side, I would divert myself by pinching her breasts to make the nipples go fat and hard—and these, mark you, were the paps that had given my friend Billy suck!—or running my lips along that pinkly inflamed, serrated track the elastic of her half-slip had imprinted on her tender tummy. She dreamed of a life of romance, and what she got was me, a boy with blackheads and bad teeth and, as she often laughingly lamented, only one thing on his mind.
She never seemed so young as when she was weaving these happy fantasies of success and moneyed opulence. It is strange to think that I was less than half as young as she while she was not much more than half the age that I am now. The mechanism of my memory has difficulty grappling with these disparities, yet at the time, after the initial shock of that rainy afternoon in the laundry room, I began to take it all blandly for granted, her age, my youth, the unlikeliness of our love, everything. To me, at fifteen, the most implausible thing had only to take place more than once to become the norm. The real puzzle is what she thought and felt. I cannot recall her ever acknowledging, aloud, the disproportion and incongruity of our—I still do not know quite what to call it; our love affair, I suppose I must say, though it rings falsely to my ear. People in the stories in the magazines that Mrs Gray read, or characters in the films that she went to see on Friday nights, they had affairs; for me, as for her, what we did together was far more simple, far more elemental, far more—if I may employ such a word in this context—childish, than the adulterous doings of adults. Perhaps that is what she accomplished for herself through me, a return to childhood, not the childhood of dolls and hair ribbons, however, but of swollen excitements, of sweaty fumblings and happy dirt. For my goodness but she could be on occasion a naughty girl.
There was a river in our wood, a secret, brown, meandering stream that seemed to have got diverted into this bosky glade on the way to somewhere far more important. In those days I had a deep regard for water, a reverence, even, and would still if it were not so grimly associated in my mind with Cass’s death. Water is one of those things that are everywhere present—air, the sky, light and darkness, these are others—that nonetheless strike me as uncanny. Mrs Gray and I were very fond of our little river, stream, brook, freshet, whatever to call it. At a particular spot it made a loop around a clump of alder trees, I think they were alders. The water was deep there and moved so slowly it might not have been moving at all were it not for the small telltale eddies that formed on the surface, formed and dissolved and formed again. There were trout sometimes, speckled wraiths barely to be made out near the bottom, poised in stillness against the current yet so quick when they took fright that they would give a quiver and seem to vanish on the spot. We spent happy hours together there, my love and I, in the balmiest days of that summer, in the cool shadows under those stunted and excitable trees. Mrs Gray liked to wade in the water, the depths of which were the same glossy shade of brown as her eyes. Venturing out gingerly from the bank, watching for sharp stones on the bottom, with that self-forgetting smile and her skirts lifted to her hips, she was Rembrandt’s Saskia, sunk to the shins in her own world of umber and gold. One day it was so hot that she took her dress off altogether, pulled it over her head and threw it back for me to catch. She had been wearing nothing underneath, and advanced now naked out into the middle of the stream and stood there, up to her waist, her arms outstretched on either side, happily patting the surface of the water with her palms and humming—did I mention that she was an inveterate hummer, even though she had not a note of music in her head? The sun through the alder leaves scattered her about with flickering gold coins—my Danaë!—and the hollows of her shoulders and the undersides of her breasts glimmered with reflected, swaying lights. Impelled by the madness of the moment—what if some rambler from the town had chanced upon the scene?—I waded in after her, in my khaki shorts and shirt. She watched me coming towards her, my elbows sawing and neck thrust out, and gave me that look from under her eyelashes that I liked to imagine she reserved for me alone, her chin tucked in and her lips compressed in a thin upturned impish arc, and I dived, down into the brown water, my shorts suddenly a sodden weight and my shirt clutching with breathtaking coldness at my chest, and managed to flip over on to my back—at that age, my God, I was as agile as one of those speckled trout!—and reached my hands around her bottom and pulled her to me and got my face between her thighs that at first resisted and then went shudderingly slack, and pressed my fish-mouth to her nether lips that were chill and oysterish on the outside and hot within, and a cold shock of water went up my nose and gave me an instant ache between my eyes, and I had to let go of her and flounder to the surface, flailing and gasping, but triumphant, too—oh, yes, every advantage I got of her represented a nasty, miniature victory for my self-esteem and sense of lordship over her. Once out of the water we scampered back to Cotter’s place, I with her dress in my arms and she naked still, a birch-pale dryad flickering ahead of me through the sunlight and shadows of the wood. I can still feel, as I felt when presently we threw ourselves panting on to our makeshift bed, the rough texture of her goosefleshed arms, and can smell, too, the excitingly stale tang of river-water on her skin, and taste the lingering, brackish chill between her thighs.
Ah, days of play, days of—dare I say it?—days of innocence.
‘Did she tell you why she did it?’ Billie asked.
She was perched before me on a high wooden stool with her tubular thighs in those tight jeans splayed and her glass held in both hands between her knees. I was confused for a moment, my mind having been off doing bold things with Mrs Gray, and thought she was referring to Cass. No, I said, no, of course not, I had no inkling why she did it, how could I? She gave me one of her balefully deprecating looks—she has a way of making her eyes seem to bulge that is distinctly unnerving—and I realised it was Dawn Devonport she meant. To cover up for my mistake I looked away, frowning, and fiddled with my glass of port. I said, sounding rather prim to my own ears, that I was sure it had been a mistake and that Dawn Devonport had not meant to do it. Billie, seeming to lose interest, only gave a grunt and glanced idly about the bar. I studied her puffy profile, and as I did so I had briefly a vertiginous sensation, as if I had been brought up short at the very lip of a high sheer cliff. It is a feeling I have sometimes when I look, I mean really look, at other people, which I do not often do, which no one does, often, I expect. It is linked in a mysterious way with the feeling that used to come over me occasionally on stage, the feeling of falling somehow into the character I was playing, literally falling, as one might trip and pitch forwards on one’s face, and losing all sense of my other, unacting, self.
The statisticians tell us there is no such thing as coincidence, and I must accept they know what they are talking about. If I were to believe that a certain confluence of events was a special and unique phenomenon outside the ordinary flow of happenstance I would have to accept, as I do not, that there is a transcendent process at work above, or behind, or within, commonplace reality. And yet I ask myself, why not? Why should I not allow of a secret and sly arranger of seemingly chance events? Axel Vander was in Portovenere when my daughter died. This fact, and I take it as a fact, stands before me huge and immovable, like a tree, with all its roots hidden deep in darkness. Why was she there, and why was he?
Svidrigailov.
I intended to go, I said now, to Portovenere, and that although I intended taking Dawn Devonport with me, she did not know it yet. I think that was the first time ever I heard Billie Stryker laugh out loud.
In former times the only access to those little towns was from the sea, for the hinterland along that coast is formed largely of a chain of mountains the flanks of which plunge at a sharp angle into the bay. Now there is a narrow railway track cut through the rock that runs under many tunnels and affords abrupt, dizzying vistas of steep landscapes and inlets where the sea gleams dully like stippled steel. In winter the light has a bruised quality, and there is salt in the air and the smell of sea-wrack and of diesel fumes from the fishing boats that crowd the tiny harbours. The car that I had hired turned out to be a surly and recalcitrant beast and gave me much trouble and more than one fright on the road as we travelled eastwards from Genoa. Or perhaps the fault was mine, for I was in a state of some agitation—I am not a good traveller, being nervous of foreign parts and a poor linguist besides. As we drove I thought of Mrs Gray and how she would have envied us, down here on this blue coast. At Chiavari we abandoned the car and took the train. I had difficulty with the bags. The train was smelly and the seats were hard. As we chugged along eastwards a rain storm swept down from the mountains and lashed at the carriage windows. Dawn Devonport watched the downpour and spoke out of the depths of the upturned big collar of her coat. ‘So much,’ she said, ‘for the sunny south.’
From the moment when we stepped on to foreign soil she had been recognised everywhere, despite the headscarf and the enormous sunglasses that she wore; or perhaps it was because of them, they being the unmistakable disguise of a troubled star on the run. This prominence was something I had not anticipated, and although I was a largely disregarded presence at her side or, more often, in her wake, I still felt unnervingly exposed, a chameleon that has lost its adaptive powers. We were due that day at Lerici, where I had booked hotel rooms for us, but she had insisted on seeing the Cinque Terre first, and so here we were, uncertainly astray on this cheerless winter afternoon.
Dawn Devonport was not as she had been. She was prone to flashes of irritation, and fussed constantly with things, her handbag, her sunglasses, the buttons of her coat, and I had a vivid and unsettling glimpse of what she would be when she was old. She was smoking heavily, too. And she had a new smell, faint yet definite behind the masking smells of perfume and face powder, a flat dry odour as of something that had first gone rank and then become parched and shrivelled. Physically she had taken on a new and starker aspect, which she wore with an air of dull forbearance, like a patient who has been suffering for so long that being in pain has become another mode of living. She had grown thinner, which would have seemed hardly possible, and her arms and her exquisite ankles looked frail and alarmingly breakable.
I had expected her to resist coming away with me, but in the end, to my surprise and, I confess, faint unease, she needed no persuading. I simply presented her with an itinerary, which she listened to, frowning a little, turning her head to one side as if she had become hard of hearing. She was sitting up in her hospital bed, in her faded green gown. When I finished speaking she looked away, towards the blue mountains, and sighed, which, in the absence of any other, I decided to take as a sign of acquiescence. The resistance, need I say, came from Toby Taggart and Marcy Meriwether. Oh, the noise they made, Toby’s bass rumblings and Marcy shrieking like a parrot down the transatlantic line! All this I ignored, and next day we simply took to the air, Dawn Devonport and I, and flew away.
It was odd, being with her. It was like being with someone who was not entirely present, not entirely conscious. When I was a very little boy I had a doll, I do not know how I came by it; certainly my mother would not have given me a girl’s toy to play with. I kept it in the attic, hidden under old clothes at the back of a wooden chest. I called it Meg. The attic, where one day years later I was to glimpse the shade of my dead father loitering irresolutely, was easy of access by way of a narrow set of wooden stairs running up along the wall from the landing. My mother stored onions up there, spread out on the floor; I think it was onions, I seem to remember the smell, or maybe it was apples. The doll, that must once have had abundant hair, was bald now, except for a scant blonde fringe at the back of the skull stuck in a clot of glittery yellow gum. It was jointed at the shoulders and the hips but its elbows and knees were rigid, the limbs moulded in a bowed shape so that it seemed to be locked in a desperate embrace with something, its twin, perhaps, that was no longer there. When it was laid on its back it would close its eyes, the lids giving a faint sharp click. I doted on this doll, with a dark and troubling intensity. I spent many a torrid hour dressing it in scraps of rag and then lovingly undressing it again. I performed mock operations on it, too, pretending to remove its tonsils, or, more excitingly, its appendix. These procedures were hotly pleasurable, I did not know why. There was something about the doll’s lightness, its hollowness—it had a loose bit inside it that rattled around like a dried pea—that made me feel protective and at the same time appealed to a nascent streak of erotic cruelty in me. That was how it was with Dawn Devonport, now. She reminded me of Meg, she of the boneless, brittle limbs and clicking eyelids. Like her, Dawn Devonport too seemed hollow and to weigh practically nothing, and to be in my power while yet I was in hers, somehow, alarmingly.
We got down from the train at random at one of the five towns, I cannot remember which. She walked off rapidly along the platform with her head down and her handbag clutched to her side, like one of those thin intense young women of the nineteen-twenties, in her narrow coat with the big collar, in her seamed stockings, her slender shoes. Meanwhile I was left yet again to struggle behind her lugging our three suitcases, two large ones hers, one small one mine. The rain had stopped but the sky still sagged and was the colour of wetted jute. We ate a late lunch in a deserted restaurant on the harbour. It stood at the head of a slipway where dark waves jostled like so many big metal boxes being tossed about vigorously. Dawn Devonport sat crouched over an untouched plate of seafood with her shoulders hunched, working fretfully at a cigarette that might have been a slip of wood she was whittling with her teeth. I spoke to her, asking her random things—these silences of hers I found unnerving—but she rarely bothered to answer. Already this venture I had embarked on with her seemed more improbable even than the extravaganza of light and shadow that her suicide attempt and our subsequent flight had so severely disrupted and, for all I knew, might have brought to an unfinished, unfinishable and ignominious end. What an ill-assorted pair we must have looked, the obscurely afflicted, stark-faced girl with her scarf and dark glasses, and the grizzled, ageing man sunk in glum unease, sitting there silent in that ill-lit low place above a winter sea, our suitcases leaning against each other in the glass vestibule, waiting for us like a trio of large, obedient and patiently uncomprehending hounds.
When Lydia heard of my plan to go off with Dawn Devonport she had laughed and given me a disbelieving look, head back and one eyebrow arched, the selfsame look that Cass used to turn on me when I had said something she considered silly or mad. Was I serious, my wife asked. A girl, again, at my age? I replied stiffly that it was not like that, not like that at all, that the trip was intended to be purely therapeutic and was a charitable act on my part. Saying this, I sounded even to myself like one of Bernard Shaw’s more pompous and tendentious leading asses. Lydia sighed and shook her head. How could I, she asked quietly, as if there were someone who might overhear, how could I take anyone, least of all Dawn Devonport, to that place, of all places in the world? To this I had no reply. It was as if she were accusing me of besmirching Cass’s memory, and I was shocked, for this, you must believe me, was something I had not considered. I said she was welcome to come with us but that only seemed to make things worse, and there was a very long silence, the air vibrating between us, and slowly she lowered her head, her brow darkening ominously, and I felt like a very tiny toreador facing a frighteningly cold and calculating bull. Yet she packed my suitcase for me, just as she used to do in the days when I still went on tour. The task done, she headed off at a haughty slouch to the kitchen. At the door she stopped and turned to me. ‘You won’t bring her back, you know,’ she said, ‘not like this.’ I knew she was not speaking of Dawn Devonport. Her curtain line delivered—not for nothing has she lived all these years with an actor—she went into her lair and shut the door behind her with a thud. Yet I had the conviction, greatly to my consternation, that she found the whole thing more than anything else absurd.
I had not told Dawn Devonport about Cass—that is, I had not told her that Portovenere was where my daughter died. I had proposed Liguria to her as if I had hit on it by chance, a place in the south where it would be quiet, a place of recuperation, uncrowded and tranquil at this time of year. I suppose it did not matter much to Dawn Devonport where she went, where she was taken. She came away with me in a stupor, as if she were a sleepy child whom I was leading by the arm.
Abruptly now, there in the restaurant, she spoke, making me jump. ‘I wish you’d call me Stella,’ she said in an angry undertone, through gritted teeth. ‘It’s my name, you know. Stella Stebbings.’ Why was she so irritated all of a sudden? Had I been in a sunnier mood myself I might have taken it as a sign in her of a return to life and vigour. She ground out her cigarette in the plastic ashtray on the table. ‘You don’t know the first thing about me, do you?’ she said. I watched through the window the rollicking waves and, irritated, enquired in a tone of patient and faintly offended mildness what she considered the first thing about her to be. ‘My name,’ she snapped. ‘You could start by learning that. Stella Stebbings. Say it.’ I said it, turning my gaze from the sea and giving her a steady look. All this, the opening skirmishes of a quarrel with a woman, was lamentably familiar, like something known by heart that I had forgotten I knew and that now was coming balefully back, like a noisy play I had played in and that had flopped. She glared at me narrowly with what seemed a venomous contempt, then all at once leaned back in her chair and shrugged one shoulder, as indifferent now as a moment ago she had been furious. ‘You see?’ she said with weary disgust. ‘I don’t know why I bothered trying to do away with myself in the first place. I’m hardly here at all, not even a proper name.’
Our waiter, an absurdly handsome fellow with the usual aquiline profile and thick black hair slicked back from his forehead, was at the kitchen door at the rear, where the chef had put out his head—chefs in their smeared bibs always look to me like struck-off surgeons—and now they both came forwards, the chef shy and hesitant in the wake of his undauntably cocky colleague. I knew what they were about, having witnessed more or less the same ritual on countless occasions since we had stepped on to Italian soil. They arrived at our table—by now we were the only customers left in the place—and Mario the waiter with a flourish introduced Fabio the chef. Fabio was roly-poly and middle-aged, and had sandy hair, unusual in this land of swarth Lotharios. He was after an autograph, of course. I do not think I had ever before seen an Italian blushing. I waited with interest for Dawn Devonport’s response—not a minute ago she had seemed ready to hit me with her handbag—but of course she is a professional to the tip of her little silver pen, which she produced now and scribbled on the menu that red-faced Fabio had proffered, and handed it back to him with that slow-motion smile she reserves for close-up encounters with her fans. I managed to glimpse the signature, with its two big, looped, opulent Ds like recumbent eyelids. She saw me seeing, and granted me a wry small smile in acknowledgement. Stella Stebbings, indeed. The chef rolled away happily, the precious menu pressed to his soiled front, while smirking Mario struck an attitude and enquired of the diva if she would care perhaps for caffè, while pointedly ignoring me. I suppose they all think I am her manager, or her agent; I doubt they take me for anything more.
Since it seems that nothing in creation is ever destroyed, only disassembled and dispersed, might not the same be true of individual consciousness? Where when we die does it go to, all that we have been? When I think of those whom I have loved and lost I am as one wandering among eyeless statues in a garden at nightfall. The air about me is murmurous with absences. I am thinking of Mrs Gray’s moist brown eyes flecked with tiny splinters of gold. When we made love they would turn from amber through umber to a turbid shade of bronze. ‘If we had music,’ she used to say at Cotter’s place, ‘if we had music we could dance.’ She sang, herself, all the time, all out of tune, ‘The Merry Widow Waltz’, ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’, ‘Roses Are Blooming in Picardy’, and something about a skylark, skylark, that she did not know the words of and could only hum, tunelessly off-key. These things that were between us, these and a myriad others, a myriad myriad, these remain of her, but what will become of them when I am gone, I who am their repository and sole preserver?
‘I saw something, when I was dead,’ Dawn Devonport said. She had her elbows on the table and was leaning forwards again at a crouch, dabbling with a fingertip among the cold ashes in the ashtray. She was frowning, and did not look at me. Outside the window the afternoon had turned to the colour of ash. ‘I was technically dead for nearly a minute, so they told me—did you know that?’ she said. ‘And I saw something. I suppose I imagined it, though I don’t know how I could be dead and imagine something.’
Perhaps, I said, it was before she was dead, or afterwards, that she had undergone this experience.
She nodded, still frowning, not listening. ‘It wasn’t like a dream,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t like anything. Does that make sense, something that wasn’t like anything? But that was what it was—I saw something like nothing.’ She examined the ashy tip of her finger and then looked at me with curious dispassion. ‘I’m frightened,’ she said, quite calm and matter-of-fact. ‘I wasn’t before but now I am. That’s strange, isn’t it?’
As we made our exit the waiter and the chef were at the door, bowing and grinning. Fabio the chef winked at me with a cheery, almost a fraternal, disdain.
It was late when we arrived at Lerici, suffering still from the sour wine at lunch and then the bad air and the clamour of the train. It had begun to snow, and the sea beyond the low wall of the promenade was a darkling tumult. I tried to make out the lights of Portovenere across the bay but could not for those great flocks of whiteness hosting haphazard in the brumous air. The lamp-lit town straggled ahead of us up a hillside towards the brute bulk of the castello. In the snow-muffled silence the winding, narrow streets had a closed and sombre aspect. There was the sense of everything holding its breath in amazement before the spectacle of this relentless, ghostly falling. The Hotel le Logge was wedged between a little grocery shop and a squat, stuccoed church. The shop was still open, despite the lateness of the hour, a startling, brightly lit windowless box with crowded shelves stacked all the way to the ceiling and at the front a big slanted counter on which were displayed a profusion of damply glistening vegetables and polished fruits. There were crates of mushrooms, cream and tan, and shameless tomatoes, ranks of tufted leeks as thick as my wrist, zucchini the colour of burnished palm leaves, open burlap bags of apples, oranges, Amalfitan lemons. Stepping from the taxi we stopped and looked with incomprehension and a kind of dismay upon this crowding and unseasonal abundance.
The hotel was old and shabby and, inside, appeared to be of an all-over shade of brown—the carpet had the look of monkey-fur. Along with the usual whiff of drains—it came in wafts, at a fixed interval, as if rising out of ancient, rotting lungs—there was another smell, drily wistful, the smell, it might be, of last summer’s sunshine trapped in corners and in crevices and gone to must. As we entered there was much bowing and beaming before the brisk and imperious advance of Dawn Devonport—public attention always bucks her up, as which of us, in our business, does it not? The high fur collar of her coat made her already thinned face seem thinner and smaller still; the headscarf she had folded in and tucked close to her skull in the style of what’s-her-name in Sunset Boulevard. How she managed to make her way through the lobby’s crepuscular gloom with those sunglasses on I do not know—they are unsettlingly suggestive of an insect’s evilly gleaming, prismatic eyes—but she crossed to the desk ahead of me at a rapid, crisply clicking pace and plonked her handbag down beside the nippled brass bell and took up a sideways pose, presenting her magnificent profile to the already undone fellow behind the counter in his jacket of rusty jet and his frayed white shirt. I wonder if these seemingly effortless effects that she pulls off have to be calculated anew each time, or are they finished and perfected by now, a part of her repertoire, her armoury? You must understand, I felt permanently as abject before the spectacle of her splendour as did the poor chap behind the desk—this absurdity, O heart, O troubled heart.
Then the rattly lift, the vermiform corridors, the crunch of the key in the lock and a stale sigh of air released out of the shadowed room. The muttering porter with his stooped back went ahead and placed the bags just so at the foot of the big square bed that had a hollow in the middle of it and looked as if generations of porters, this one’s predecessors, had been born in it. How accusingly a suitcase once set down can seem to look at one. I could hear Dawn Devonport next door making many mysterious small noises, clinks and knocks and softly suggestive rustlings as she unpacked her bags. Then there came that moment of mild panic when the clothes had been hung, the shoes stowed, the shaving things set out on the bathroom’s marble shelf, where someone’s forgotten cigarette had left a burned stain, a black smear with amber edges. Down in the street a car swished past, and the flare of its head-lamps poked a pencil-ray of yellow light through a chink in the curtains that probed the room from one side to the other before being swiftly withdrawn. Upstairs a lavatory gulped and swallowed, and in response the drain in the bathroom here, getting into the spirit, made a deep-throated sound that might have been a gurgle of lewd laughter.
Downstairs, a humming quiet reigned. I paced on soundless feet over the carpet’s coarse pelt. The restaurant was closed; dimly through the glass I saw the many chairs standing on their tables, as if they had leaped up there in fright of something on the floor. The fellow at the desk mentioned the possibility of room service, though sounding doubtful. Fosco, he was called, so I was told by a tag on his lapel, Ercole Fosco. This name seemed a portent, though I could not say of what. Ercole Fosco. He was the night manager. I liked the look of him. Middle-aged, greying at the temples, heavy-jowled and somewhat sallow in complexion—Albert Einstein in his pre-iconic middle years. His soft brown eyes reminded me a little of Mrs Gray’s. His manner was touched with melancholy, though it was reassuring, too; he reminded me of one of those unmarried uncles who used to appear with gifts at Christmas time when I was a child. I dawdled at the desk, trying to find something to talk to him about, but could think of nothing. He smiled apologetically and made a little fist—what small hands he had—and put it to his mouth and coughed into it, those soft eyes sagging at the outer corners. I could see I was making him nervous, and wondered why. I thought him perhaps not a native of these parts, for he had a northern look—Turin, perhaps, capital of magic, or Milan, or Bergamo, or even somewhere farther off, beyond the Alps. He asked, on a weary note, mechanically, if my room was to my satisfaction. I told him it was. ‘And the signora, she is satisfied?’ I said yes, yes, the signora also was satisfied. We were both very satisfied, very happy. He made a little bow of acknowledgement, bobbing to one side so that it seemed he was not so much bowing as shrugging. I wondered idly if my manner and movements seemed as foreign to him as his seemed to me.
I went and stood inside the front door and looked out through the glass. It was deeply dark out there, in the gap between two street-lights, and the snow appeared almost black, falling rapidly straight down in big wet flakes, in a softly murmurous silence. Perhaps the ferries to Portovenere would not be plying at this time of year, in this weather—that was a subject I could have talked about to Ercole the night manager—perhaps I would have to go by road, back through La Spezia and out by the coast. It was a long way, and on the road there were many twists and bends above ragged cliffs. What a thing it would be for Lydia to hear of, her husband dashed to pieces against rocks on the way to where her daughter had died in similar fashion, in other circumstances.
When I moved, somehow my reflection in the glass did not move with me. Then my eyes adjusted and I saw that it was not my reflection I was seeing, but that there was someone out there, facing me. Where had he appeared from, how had he come to be there? It was as if he had materialised on the instant. He was not wearing an overcoat, and had no hat, or umbrella. I could not quite make out his features. I stood back and pulled the door open for him, it made a sucking sound, and the night bounded in like an animal, agile and eager, with cold air trapped in its fur. The man entered. There was snow on his shoulders, and he stamped his feet on the carpet, first one, then the other, three times each. He gave me a keen, a measuring, look. He was a young man, with a high, domed forehead. Or perhaps, I thought on second glance, perhaps he was not young, for his neatly trimmed beard was grizzled and there were fine wrinkles at the outer corners of his eyes. He wore spectacles with thin frames and oval-shaped lenses, which lent him a vaguely scholarly appearance. We stood there for a moment, facing each other—confronting each other, I was going to say—just as we had a moment ago but with no glass between us now. His expression was one of scepticism tempered with humour. ‘Cold,’ he said, fitting his lips around the word in a wine-taster’s pout. He spoke as if there were some small hindrance in his mouth, a seed or stone, that he must keep manoeuvring his tongue around. Had I already seen him somewhere? I seemed to know him, but how could I?
In the days when I was still working, in the theatre, I mean, for the duration of a run I did not dream. That is, I must have, since we are told the mind cannot be idle, even in sleep, but if I did dream I forgot what I dreamed about. Strutting and prating on stage five nights a week and twice on Saturdays must have fulfilled whatever the function is that dreaming otherwise performs for us. When I retired, though, my nights turned to riot, and more often than not I would wake of a morning in a sweaty tangle, panting and exhausted, having endured long and torturous passages through a chamber of horrors, or a tunnel of love, or sometimes both combined, tumbling helplessly headlong through all manner of grotesque calamities, and with no trousers on, as often as not, my shirttails flapping and my backside on show. Nowadays, ironically, one of my most frequent nightmares—those ungovernable steeds—carries me irresistibly back on stage and dumps me again at the footlights. I am playing in some grand drama or impossibly intricate comedy, and I dry in the middle of a lengthy speech. This did happen to me, famously, in real life, I mean waking life—I was playing Kleist’s Amphitryon—and it brought my theatrical career to an abrupt and inglorious end. It was odd, that lapse, for I had a remarkable memory, in my prime, it may even have been what is called a photographic memory. My method of learning off lines was to fix the text itself, I mean the very pages, as a series of images in my head, to be read and recited from. The terror of this particular dream, though, is that on the pages I have memorised, the text, so black and sharp one moment, the next begins to decay and crumble before my mind’s, my sleeping mind’s, desperately squinting eye. At first I am not greatly worried, convinced that I will be able to recall sufficient portions of the speech to bluff my way through it, or that if worse comes to worst I can improvise the entire thing. However, the audience soon realises that something is going badly awry, while the rest of the actors on stage with me—there is a milling crowd of them—suddenly finding a corpse in their midst, begin to fidget and to throw big-eyed looks at each other. What is to be done? I try to get round the audience, to win it over, by adopting a cravenly ingratiating manner, smiling and lisping, shrugging my shoulders and mopping my brow, frowning at my feet, peering up into the flies, all the while inching sideways towards the blessed shelter of the wings. A horrible comedy attaches to all this, a comedy that is all the more distressing in that it has nothing to do with stage business. Indeed, this is the very essence of the nightmare, that all theatrical pretence has been stripped away, and with it all protection. The scraps of costume that cling to me have become transparent, or as good as, and I am there, bare and exposed, in front of me a packed and increasingly restive house and at my back a cast that would happily kill me if it could and make of me a real corpse. The first catcalls are rising as I start awake, and find myself huddled around myself piteously in the middle of a disordered, hot and sweat-soaked bed.
There was someone at the door. There was someone pounding at the door. I did not know where I was, and lay palpitant and motionless like a hunted criminal cowering in a ditch. I was on my side, one arm in a cramp under me and the other thrown up as if to shield myself from assault. At the window the gauze curtains were yellowly aglow, and behind them there was a rapid and general downward undulation, which I could not understand or identify, until I remembered the snow. Whoever was at the door had stopped hammering, and instead seemed to be pressed against it, making a low keening sound that buzzed against the wood. I got up from the bed. The room was cold and yet I was sweating, and had to step through a miasma of my own fetor. At the door I hesitated, a hand on the knob. I had not switched on a lamp and the only illumination in the room was provided by the sulphurous glow of the street-light through the curtains behind me. I opened the door. At first I thought that someone in the hall had hurled an item of flimsy clothing at me, for the impression I had was the chill, shivery slither of something silken, with no one, it seemed, inside it. Then Dawn Devonport’s fingers were scrabbling at my wrist, and all at once she materialised within her nightdress, trembling and panting and redolent of night and terror.
She could not say what was the matter. Indeed, she could hardly speak. Was it a dream, I asked, an actor’s nightmare, perhaps, like the one her pounding at the door had woken me from? No—she had not been asleep. She had felt some vast thing in the room with her, a knowing, malignant and invisible presence. I led her to the bed and switched on the lamp on the table beside it. She sat with her head bowed and her hair hanging down and her hands resting lax on her thighs with the palms turned up. Her nightdress was made of pearl-grey satin, so fine and thin that I could have counted the links of her spine. I took off my jacket and draped it over her shoulders, and it was only then I noticed that I was still fully dressed—I must have come in and crawled on to the bed and fallen asleep straight off. What was I to do, now, with this shivering creature, who in her night attire seemed more naked than she would have been without it, so that I hardly dared to lay a hand on her? She said I did not have to do anything, only let her stay for a minute, until whatever it was had passed. She did not look up when she spoke, but sat as before, abject and trembling, with her head hanging and her hands turned helplessly up and the exposed pale back of her neck gleaming in the light of the bedside lamp.
How strange a thing it is, the immediate and intimate proximity of another. Or is it only I who think it strange? Perhaps for others others are not other at all, or at any rate not as they are for me. For me, there are two modes of otherness only, that of the loved one or of the stranger, and the former is hardly other, but more an extension of myself. For this state of affairs I believe I have Mrs Gray to thank, or blame. She took me into her arms so early on that there was not time for me to learn the laws of proper perspective. She being so close, the rest inevitably were pushed disproportionately farther off. Here I pause a moment to consider. Is this really the case, or am I indulging in that sophistry which from earliest days has bedevilled me? But how can I know if I am? I feel it to be so, that Mrs Gray was the original and, to an extent, abiding arbiter in my relations with other people, and no effort of thought, however extended or intense, will convince me otherwise. Even if I were to coerce myself into a contrary opinion by the force of thinking, feeling would still feel itself in the right, and be an ever-present, disgruntled rump, ready to assert its claim at every smallest opportunity. Such are the speculations a man will indulge in when in the snowy small hours of the morning many miles from hearth and home he finds himself unexpectedly entertaining in his hotel room a famous and notoriously beautiful film star wearing nothing but her nightie.
I got her to lie down on my unfragrantly sweaty bed—she was so limp I had to put a hand behind her ankles and help her to lift her chilly feet from the floor—and spread the blanket over her. She still had my jacket around her shoulders. It was apparent that she was even yet not entirely awake, and I was reminded of Lydia when she goes flying through the house on her frantic nocturnal quests for our lost daughter; is this the only role there is to be for me now, a comforter of driven and afflicted women? I drew a rush-bottomed chair to the bed and sat down to consider my position, here with this young woman whom I hardly knew, sleepless and harried, on this wintry shore. Yet there was something starting up too at the base of my spine, a hot trickle of secret excitement. When I was a boy, after Meg the doll but long before the advent of Mrs Gray, I used to entertain a recurring fantasy in which I was required to attend to certain cosmetic requirements of a grown-up woman. The woman was never specific but generic, woman in the abstract, I suppose, the celebrated Ewig-Weibliche. It was all very innocent, in action, at least, for I was not called upon to do more than administer to this imaginary idol a thorough hair-wash, say, or buff her fingernails, or, in exceptional circumstances, apply her lipstick—this last no easy feat, by the way, as I was to find out later on when I got Mrs Gray to let me have a go at her gorgeously pulpy, unfixable mouth with one of those sticks of crimson wax that always look to me like a brass cartridge case in which is embedded a surreally soft and glistening scarlet bullet. What I felt now, here in this dingy hotel room, was something of the same mildly tumescent pleasure that I used to enjoy all those years ago when I imagined assisting my phantom lady at her toilet.
‘Tell me,’ my unlooked-for visitor asked now, in an urgent whisper, breathlessly, opening wide those slightly hazed grey eyes of hers, ‘tell me what happened to your daughter.’
She was lying on her back with her hands folded on her breast and her head turned sideways towards me and her cheek crushing the lapel of my jacket underneath her. She has a way, I have come to know it by now, of speaking out suddenly like this, suddenly and softly, when least expected, and it is the suddenness that confers on what she says an oracular quality, so that her words, no matter how mundane or inconsequential they might be, generate an archaic throb. I presume this is a trick she has learned from her years before the camera. A film set does have, it is true, something of the airless intensity of the shrine of a sibyl. There, in that cave of hot light, with the mike at the end of its boom dangling over our heads and the crew fixed on us from the shadows like a circle of hushed suppliants, we might be forgiven for imagining that the lines we recite are the utterances, transmitted through us, of the riddling god himself.
I told her that I did not know what had happened to my daughter, except that she had died. I told her how Cass used to hear voices, and said perhaps they had driven her to it, the voices, as often is the case, so I understand, with those whose minds are damaged and who are led to damage themselves. I was remarkably calm, I might even say detached, as if the circumstances—the anonymous hotel room, the lateness of the hour, this young woman’s unwavering, grave regard—had at a stroke, and so simply, released or at any rate paroled me from the toils of the ten-year-long pact of restraint and reticence that I had made with Cass’s spirit. Anything might be spoken here, it seemed, any thought might be summoned up and freely expressed. Dawn Devonport waited, her great eyes fixed on me unblinking. There had been, I told her, someone with my daughter. ‘And so,’ she said, ‘you have come back here, to find out who it was.’
I frowned at that, and looked away from her. How yellow was the lamplight, how thickly beyond it the shadows thronged. In the window behind the web of curtain the heavy wet flakes fell down, fell down.
Her name for him, I said measuredly, whoever he was, was Svidrigailov. She reached a hand from under the blanket and laid it lightly, briefly, on one of mine, more in restraint, it seemed, than encouragement. Her touch was cool and curiously impersonal; she might have been a nurse testing my temperature, taking my pulse. ‘She was pregnant, you see,’ I said.
Had I told her that already? I could not recall.
That was, to my faint surprise, the end of our exchange, for like a child satisfied with only the opening of a goodnight story Dawn Devonport sighed and turned her face away and slept, or pretended to. I waited, not moving for fear of making the chair creak and causing her to have to wake up again. In the quiet I fancied I could hear the snow falling outside, a faint susurrus that yet bespoke unstinting labour and muffled suffering steadfastly endured. How the world works on, uncomplaining, no matter what, doing what it has to do. I was, I realised, at peace. My mind seemed bathed in a pool of limpid darkness that acted on me like a balm. Not since the far-off days of Father Priest and the confessional had I felt so lightened and—what?—shorn? I looked at the phone on the bedside table and it occurred to me to call Lydia, but it was too late at night, and anyway I did not know what it might be that I would say to her.
I stood up cautiously and eased my jacket from under the sleeping young woman and put the chair away and took up my key and left the room. As I was closing the door I glanced back at the bed under its low canopy of lamplight, but there was no movement to be seen, and no sound save that of Dawn Devonport steadily breathing. Was she, too, at peace for the moment, for a moment?
The corridor had its hush. I shied from the lift—its narrow double doors of dented stainless steel gave off a sinister shine—and took the stairs instead. They delivered me to an area of the lobby that I did not know, with a lavish palm in a pot and a cigarette-dispensing machine, as big as an upright sarcophagus, with a darkly opalescent shimmer down its side, and for a moment I lost my bearings entirely and experienced a flicker of panic. I turned this way and that, swivelling on a heel, and at last located the reception desk, off beyond that dusty splurge of palm fronds. Ercole the night manager was there, or at least his head was, in profile, for that was all of him I could see, resting so it seemed on the counter, behind a plate of boiled sweets. I thought of Salome’s grisly prize on a platter. Those sweets, by the way, are a convention left over from the days of the old currency, when they were offered in place of pocketfuls of negligible change. The things I retain, memory’s worthless coin.
I approached the desk. It was high, and Ercole was seated sideways behind it on a low stool, reading one of those old-style comic-books with curiously washed-out photographs instead of drawings. He glanced up at me with a mixture of deference and faint irritation, his droopy eyes looking more disconsolate than ever. I asked if it would be possible for me to have a drink, and he sighed and said of course, of course, if I would please to go to the bar he would come immediately. However, as I was walking away he spoke my name and I stopped and turned. He had put away his comic and risen from the stool, and was leaning forwards slightly, in a confidential attitude, supporting himself on fists set down before him on the desk, one to each side. I went back slowly and—devoutly, I was about to say. Signora Devonport, he asked, was everything all right with her? He spoke softly, with a breathy catch, as if in the aftermath of some ritual of sorrow and lamentation. Those melting eyes seemed to feel my face all over, like the fingertips of a blind seer. I said, yes, that everything was well. He smiled, gently disbelieving, as I saw. I did not know what he meant by this question, I did not know what he intended by it. Was it a caution? Had Dawn Devonport been heard banging on my door, had she been spied entering my room in distress? I am always uncertain about hotel rules. In the old days, if a lady were to come at night clandestinely to a gentleman’s room the house detective would have been up like a shot and collared them both, or the lady at least, whom he would have assumed was no lady at all, and driven her out into the snow. After a searching pause Ercole nodded, regretfully, I thought, as if I had disappointed him in some way. So many lies and petty evasions he must deal with, night after night. I tried to think of something to add in mitigation of whatever wrong I was guilty of in his sad brown eyes, but in vain, and instead I turned away. For all that, however, I felt I had been delivered, I do not know how, a benediction of some kind, my forehead crossed with chrism and my spirit salved.
The bar when I found it was unexpectedly new and sleek, with dark mirrors and black marble tables and low lamps that seemed to shed not light but a sort of radiant shadow, and gave the place a deceptive cast. I picked my way through this dim, glassy maze and settled myself on a tall stool at the bar. Behind the bar was another mirror, with shelves of bottles in front of it that were lit from below in an eerie fashion. I could barely see myself, reflected in fragments behind the bottles, where I seemed to be ducking and hiding even from myself. I waited for Ercole to come, and drummed my fingers. It was late, after a long day, yet I felt not at all tired or in need of sleep—on the contrary, I was almost painfully alert, the very follicles of my hair simmering. What could be the cause of this state of strange elation, strange expectation? Behind me someone coughed softly and, as it seemed, interrogatively. I turned quickly on the stool and peered into the gloom. A person was seated before a small table close by, calmly regarding me. Why had I not noticed him when I came in? I must have walked straight past that very table. He was leaning back in a low black leather armchair with his legs extended before him and crossed at the ankles and his fingers steepled in front of his chin. At first I did not know him. Then a chance dart of light from the illuminated shelves behind me slid across the lenses of his spectacles and I recognised the man I had met earlier at the front door of the hotel, the man with the snow on his shoulders. ‘Buenas noches,’ he said, and made a tiny bow, inclining his head an inch. There was a bottle on the table before him, and a glass—no, two glasses. Had he been expecting someone? Me, apparently, for now he gestured towards the bottle with his steepled fingers and asked if I would care to join him. Well, why not, in this endless night of strange encounters, fateful crossings?
He indicated the armchair opposite him, and I sat down. He was definitely younger than I, as I saw now, yes, a lot younger. I also noticed that the bottle was still full—had he indeed been waiting for me? How had he known I would come? He leaned forwards and, unhurriedly, with deliberation, filled our two glasses almost to the brims. He handed me mine. The heavy red wine looked black on the surface, with purple bubbles jostling around the edge. ‘It is an Argentinian vintage, I am afraid,’ he said. He smiled. ‘Like me.’
We raised our glasses in a wordless toast and drank. Wormwood, bitter gall, the taste of ink and luscious rot. We both leaned back, he opening his arms in a curious, flowing, arching movement and shooting his cuffs, and I thought of a priest in the days of the old dispensation turning from the faithful and setting down the chalice and lifting his shoulders and his arms in just that way, under the chasuble’s heavy yoke. He introduced himself. His name was Fedrigo Sorrán. He wrote it down for me, in a page of a little black notebook. I thought of far plains, the roaming herds, a hidalgo on a horse.
Ercole came and looked at us, and nodded, and smiled, as if all this had been arranged, and went away again, padding softly on flat feet.
What did we talk about at first, the man from the south and I? He told me he liked the night, preferring it to daytime. ‘So quiet,’ he said, smoothing the air before him with a flattened palm. Sho gwyett. He said he thought he recognised my name—could that be? I told him I used to be an actor, but that I doubted he would ever have heard of me. ‘Ah, then, you are perhaps a friend of’—he prodded a finger towards the ceiling and arched his eyebrows and rounded his eyes—‘the divine Señorita Devonport.’
We drank some more of the bitter wine. And what, I asked, did he do? He considered my question for a moment, smiling faintly, and joined his fingers together again and touched the tips of them lightly to his lips. ‘I am, let us say,’ he said, ‘in mining.’ This formulation seemed to amuse him. He directed towards the floor a mock-significant glance. ‘Underground,’ he whispered.
My mind must have wandered then, sent astray by the wine and the lack of sleep, or perhaps in fact I did sleep, a little, in some way. He had begun by speaking of mines and metals, of gold and diamonds and all precious elements buried deep in the earth, but now, without my knowing how, he had ranged out into the depths of space, and was telling me of quasars and pulsars, of red giants and brown dwarfs and black holes, of heat death and the Hubble constant, of quarks and quirks and multiple infinities. And of dark matter. The universe, according to him, contains a missing mass we cannot see or feel or measure. There is much, much more of it than there is of anything else, and the visible universe, the one that we know, is sparse and puny in comparison. I thought of it, this vast invisible sea of weightless and transparent stuff, present everywhere, undetected, through which we move, unsuspecting swimmers, and which moves through us, a silent, secret essence.
Now he was speaking of the ancient light of galaxies that travels for a million—a billion—a trillion!—miles to reach us. ‘Even here,’ he said, ‘at this table, the light that is the image of my eyes takes time, a tiny time, infinitesimal, yet time, to reach your eyes, and so it is that everywhere we look, everywhere, we are looking into the past.’
We had finished the bottle, he was pouring out the dregs. He tipped the rim of his glass against mine and made a ringing note. ‘You must take care of your star, in this place,’ he said in the softest of whispers, smiling, and leaning so far forwards in the chair that I could see myself reflected, doubly reflected, in the lenses of his spectacles. ‘The gods watch over us, and are jealous.’
It was a hot summer, that summer of Mrs Gray. Records were broken, new ones were set. There was a drought that lasted for months, water was rationed and stand-pipes were set up at street corners where vexatious mothers had to queue with buckets and saucepans, complaining, their sleeves pugnaciously rolled. Cattle died in the fields, or went mad. Gorse fires burst out spontaneously; entire hillsides were left blackened and smouldering and for hours afterwards the air in the town was acrid with smoke that made a scratch in the throat and gave everyone a headache. Tar in the roadways and in the cracks between paving stones melted and stuck to the soles of our sandals, and the tyres of our bicycles sank into it, and one boy fell off his bike that way and broke his neck. Farmers warned plaintively of a disastrous harvest, and in the churches special prayers for rain were offered.
For my part I recall those months as no more than bright and soft. I have an image, as in one of those sedulously crafted landscape paintings that were so popular in these parts in those days, of a big sky adrift with cotton clouds, and far gold fields with pudding-shaped haystacks, and a single distant spire, thin as a tack, and at the horizon the merest brushstroke of cobalt blue to suggest a glimpse of sea. Impossibly, I even remember rain—Mrs Gray and I loved to lie quiet in each other’s arms on the floor in Cotter’s place and listen to it sizzling through the leaves, while an impassioned blackbird somewhere close by whistled its heart out. How safe we felt then, how far removed from everything that would threaten us. The parched world around us might shrivel up and turn to tinder, we would be slaked by love.
I thought our idyll would never end. Or, rather, I would not entertain the thought of an end to it. Being young, I was sceptical of the future, and saw it as a matter of potential only, a state of things that might or might not arise and probably never would. Of course, there were markers to be observed, of an immediate kind. For instance, the summer certainly would come to a close, the holidays would be over, and I would be expected to start calling for Billy again in the mornings on the way to school—how would I carry that off? Would I be able to maintain the insouciant front that I did before the summer, when Mrs Gray and I were still merely strolling hand in hand up the lower slopes of what was soon to become Mount Hymettus itself, complete with golden honey-combs and cliffs of lovely blue-grey marble and naked nymphs in dells? The truth is, despite all youth’s daring and defiance, there hovered directly above my head a little cloud of foreboding. It was no more than a cloud, weightless, indefinite in shape, yet dark, outside its malignantly radiant silver lining. For the most part I managed to ignore it or pretend it was not there. What was a cloud, in comparison with love’s blazing sun?
It baffled me that people around us did not guess our secret; almost, at times, I found myself growing indignant at their lack of insight, their lack of imagination—in a word, at their underestimation of us. My mother, Billy, Mr Gray, these were not formidable enough figures to inspire much fear—though Kitty’s face I often seemed to glimpse in that menacing cloud over my head, grinning out at me gloatingly like the Cheshire Cat—but what about the town’s busybodies, the moral guardians, the powder-blue Legionnaires of Mary? Why were they so slack in their bounden duty to nose out Mrs Gray and me as we indulged ourselves shamelessly in endlessly inventive acts of concupiscence and lust? Heaven knows we took risks, at which Heaven itself must have been aghast. In this regard, of the two of us Mrs Gray was by far the more reckless, as I must already have said. It was a thing I could not account for, could not understand. I was about to say she had no fear, but it was not the case, for I had seen her on more than one occasion trembling in terror, I assumed at the prospect of being caught with me; at other times, though, she acted as if she had never known a moment of misgiving, parading with me brazenly that day on the boardworks, for example, or running naked in broad daylight through the wood, where the very trees seemed to throw up their arms and draw back, shocked and scandalised at the sight of her. Inexperienced in these matters though I was, I felt I could say with confidence that such behaviour was not commonplace among the matrons of our town.
I ask myself, again, if she were deliberately daring the world to find us out. One day she summoned me to meet her after she had been to an appointment with the doctor—‘women’s trouble,’ she would say brusquely, and make a face—and when she arrived in the station wagon at our meeting place on the road above the hazel wood she insisted I make love to her there and then, on the spot. ‘Come on,’ she said, almost angrily, her rump waggling at me as she clambered into the back seat of the station wagon, ‘do it to me, come on.’ I have to admit I was shocked by her shamelessness, and for once I was even a little unwilling—the spectacle of such raw desire threatened to have a deflating effect on me—but she put an arm that seemed as hard as a man’s around my neck and drew me fiercely down to her, and I could feel her heart already hammering and her belly shaking, and of course I did to her what she demanded. It was over in a minute and then she was all dismissive briskness, pushing me away and pulling at her clothes and using her pants to wipe herself. We had left a glistening smear on the leather seat between us. She had parked hardly ten yards off the road, and although there was little traffic in those days, any motorist who happened to slow down going past could have seen us, her upraised nyloned legs and my bare white backside plunging and rearing between them. Now we climbed back into the front seat, exclaiming at the hotness of the leather where the sun had been shining on it, and she lit a cigarette and sat half turned away from me with her elbow out of the open window and a fist under her chin, saying nothing. I waited meekly for her mood to pass, frowning at my hands.
What had happened, I wondered, that she was so wrought? Had I done something to anger her? For most of the time I was unshakeably confident of her love, with all of youth’s callous assurance, yet it would have taken no more than a harsh word or a disparaging glance from her to convince me on the spot that all was as good as over. It was peculiarly exciting, to be certain of her affections and yet always in fear of forfeiting them; to be in some sort of control of this passionate woman and yet also at her mercy. Such lessons she was teaching me about the human heart. That day, though, as always, it was not long before the gloom lifted. She stirred herself and flicked the unsmoked half of her cigarette out of the window—she might have been the cause of burning down the hazel wood and our love nest along with it—and then leaned forwards and drew her skirt back and peered into her lap. She saw my startled and disbelieving look—could she be ready to start up again, already?—and gave a throaty chuckle. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’m only searching for the button that you tore off my suspender.’ The button was not to be found, however, and in the end she had to borrow a threepenny piece from me to use in its place. It was an expedient I was familiar with, for I had seen my mother more than once do the same thing. My mother used Pond’s Cold Cream, too, as Mrs Gray did now. She took a little fat pot of the stuff from her handbag and unscrewed the cap with a quick turn of the wrist, as if deftly wringing the neck of some small creature, and, holding the pot and the cap both in a slack left hand, shimmied forwards on the seat, straining upwards to see herself in the driving mirror, and with a fingertip applied the ice-white salve to her forehead and cheeks and chin. I do not know if there is such a thing as wholly disinterested love, but if there is I came closest to it at moments such as this, when she was engaged in some ritual she had performed so often she was no longer really conscious of it, and her eyes struggled to focus and her features relaxed into a look of lovely vacancy except in the space between her eyebrows where the skin drew itself tight in a tiny frown of concentration.
I think that must have been the day she told me she would be going away—the family was to take its annual holiday at the seaside. At first I found it hard to grasp what she was saying. This is something I recall with fascination now, the way in which my mind, before the batterings of experience had sufficiently softened it up and made it porous, would refuse to accommodate the things it found unpalatable. In those days there was nothing I could not believe or disbelieve, accept or reject, if it suited me and fitted with my view of how matters must be. She could not go away; it was simply not possible for us to be parted, not possible at all. It could not be the case that I would be left alone while she went off for two weeks—two weeks!—to disport herself half naked on a beach, and play games of tennis and clock golf, and enjoy candlelit dinners with her dopey husband before waddling upstairs tipsily and falling on her back laughing on to a hotel bed—no no no! Contemplating this appalling, this not-to-be-entertained prospect, I had the sense of horror-struck incredulity that comes in the instant after the knife-blade has sliced into the ball of the thumb or the acid has splashed into the eye, when everything is suspended while pain the playful demon takes a deep and determined breath preparatory to getting down to the serious work at hand. What would I do without her all that time—what would I do? She was gazing at me in amused dismay, shocked at my shock. She pointed out that she was not going far, that Rossmore was only ten miles away by train—she would be practically down the road, she said, hardly away at all. I shook my head. I may even have clasped my hands before her in supplication. A sob of anguish was forming inside me like a big soft warm unlayable egg. She did not seem capable of grasping the essential fact that I could not think of being separated from her, that I could not imagine her being in a place where I was not. Something would happen to me, I declared, I would fall ill, I might even die. At this she laughed but quickly checked herself. I was not to be silly, she said in her married-woman’s voice, I would not get sick, I would not die. Then I would run away from home, I said, narrowing my eyes at her, I would pack my things in my schoolbag and come to Rossmore and live on the beach for the two weeks while she was there, and every time she and the other Grays stepped out of doors there I would be, dragging myself and my sorrow about the hotel grounds, and the tennis courts, and the golf range, her hollow-eyed, heartsick boy.
‘Now listen to me,’ she said, turning sideways and draping an arm on the steering wheel and lowering her head to glare at me sternly, ‘I have to go on this holiday—do you understand? I have to.’
I shook my head again, shook it and shook it until my cheeks rattled. She was becoming alarmed by my vehemence, I saw with satisfaction, and in her alarm I saw, too, a tiny sharp gleam of hope. I must press on—I must press harder. The sun was beating through the windscreen, greying the glass, and the leather upholstery was giving off a strong animal odour to which no doubt Mrs Gray and I were adding a post-coital tang. I had a shaky sensation, as if everything inside me had turned to crystal and was vibrating at a very fast and uniform pitch. I think if I had heard a car coming I would have leaped out and stood in the middle of the road with my hand up and made it stop, so that I might denounce Mrs Gray to the driver—Look, sir, upon this heartless jade!—for in my distress I was working up a steaming head of fury, and I would have welcomed a witness to the sore injustice I was being made to suffer. Who can do outrage and injury better than a boy in love? I said I would not let her go to Rossmore, and that was final. I said I would tell Billy what his mother and I had been up to, and he would tell his father, and Mr Gray would throw her out on the street, and then she would have no choice but to run away with me to England. I could see from the way her lips were twitching that she was finding it hard not to smile, and this drove me to a new extreme of fury. If she went away she would be sorry, I said narrowly. When she came back I would not be here, she would never see me again, and then how would she feel?—yes, I would go, I would leave this place altogether, I told her, and then she would know what it felt like to be abandoned and alone.
At last, after all these efforts, I ran out of energy, and turned away from her and folded my arms and glowered into the ragged hedgerow beside which we were parked. Silence erected itself between us like a barrier of glass. Then Mrs Gray stirred, and sighed, and said she would have to go home, that everyone would be wondering where she was, why she was so late. Oh, everyone would, would they? I said, with what was intended to be biting sarcasm. She laid a hand lightly on my arm. I would not unbend. ‘Poor Alex,’ she said cajolingly, and it struck me how seldom she spoke my name, which served to bring on yet a further access of anger and bitter resentment.
She started up the engine, mashing the gears as always, and reversed the station wagon and turned it in a storm of dust and flying gravel. Only then did we notice the three small boys standing with their bikes on the opposite side of the road, watching us. Mrs Gray spoke a word under her breath, and took her foot off the clutch too quickly and the engine gave a grunt and a heave and died. The dust continued to swirl lazily around us. The boys were homunculoid, grimy-faced, and had scabby knees and hacked-at hair—tinker children, probably, from the camp over by the town dump. They went on looking at us without expression, and there we sat, helplessly absorbing their blank stares, until presently they turned away in what seemed bland disdain and mounted up and rode off down the road at a leisurely glide. Mrs Gray laughed unsteadily. ‘Well, you needn’t worry, so,’ she said, ‘for if those fellows tell on us I won’t be going anywhere, and nor will you, my bucko, unless it’s to the reformatory.’
But she did go. Until the very last I did not believe she would have the resolve to part from me and leave me to suffer, yet the moment of her going came, and she went. Is it possible for a boy of fifteen to know love’s torments, I mean really to know them? Surely one would have to be fully and bleakly aware of the inevitability of death to experience the true anguish of loss, and to me as I was then the notion that I would one day die was preposterous, hardly to be entertained at all, the stuff of a bad and barely remembered dream. But if it was not actual pain I was experiencing then what was it? In form it was, or felt most like, a sort of pained, general dithering, so that I seemed to have grown old suddenly, old and fussed and infirm. In the week and more that I had to endure before her departure there continued and intensified in me the sense of agitation, of inner vibrating, that had started that day at the side of the road in the station wagon when she first made her announcement of the holiday. It might have been a form of ague, an interior St Vitus’s Dance. Outwardly I must have been much as usual, for no one, not even my mother, appeared to notice anything amiss with me. Inside, however, all was fever and confusion. I felt as one must feel who has been sentenced to death, torn between disbelief and stark dread. Had it never occurred to me that I would have to suffer some kind of separation from her sooner or later, even if only a temporary one? No, it had not. For me, lolling complacently in the lap of Mrs Gray’s opulent, all-embracing love, there was only the present, with no future in view, certainly not a future in which she did not figure. Now the sentence had been passed, the last meal had been eaten, and I was in the tumbril, I could hear its wheels harshing on the cobbles and could see clear the scaffold erected in the dead centre of the square, with its attendant hangwoman awaiting me, in her black hood.
It was a Saturday morning when they went. Imagine if you will a small-town summer day: flawless blue sky, birds in the branches of the cherry trees, a not unpleasant, sweetish reek of slurry from the pig farms out in the purlieus, the knock and clatter and cry of children at play. And now see me, skulking hunched and harrowed through the innocent, sunlit streets, on the way to meet in all its pitiless magnitude the first great sorrow of my young life. I will say this for suffering, that it lends a solemn weight to things and casts them in a starker, more revealing, light than any they have known hitherto. It expands the spirit, flays off a protective integument and leaves the inner self rawly exposed to the elements, the nerves all bared and singing like harp-strings in the wind. Approaching across the little square I kept my eyes averted from the house until the last minute, not wanting to see the dark-blue sun-blinds drawn in the windows, the note for the milkman screwed into the neck of an empty milk bottle, the front door locked impassively against me. Instead, I pictured in my mind, concentrating fiercely, as though by force of imagination I might make it be so, the battered station wagon, my accommodating, faithful old friend, standing at the kerb as always, and the front door of the house ajar and every window open, and in one of them a penitent Mrs Gray leaning far out and smiling radiantly down at me with welcoming arms flung wide. But then I was there, and had to look, and no station wagon was to be seen, and the house was shut, and my love had gone away and left me standing here in a puddle of grief.
How did I get through the rest of that day? I drifted, outwardly listless yet all aquiver within. My world yesterday with Mrs Gray in it had the lightness and glossy tension of a freshly inflated party balloon; now, today, with her gone, everything was suddenly slack, and tacky to the touch. Anguish, this constant, unremitting anguish, made me tired, terribly tired, yet I did not know how I might rest. I felt dry all over, dry and hot, as if I had been scorched, and my eyes ached and even my fingernails pained me. I was like one of those big sycamore leaves, resembling parched claws, that scuttled and scratched their way along the pavements, driven by the autumn gusts. What am I saying? It was not autumn, it was summer, there were no dead leaves on the ground. Yet that is what I see, the caducous leaves, and dust-eddies in the gutters, and my suffering self facing into a bitter wind portending the onset of winter.
Late in the afternoon, however, came the great revelation, followed by the greater resolution. In my wanderings I found myself outside Mr Gray’s glasses shop. I do not think I went there intentionally, although throughout the day I had lingered deliberately in this or that place with which for me my departed darling was associated, such as the tennis courts where I had once seen her play, and the boardworks where we had so fearlessly paraded ourselves and our love. The shop, like its proprietor, was unremarkable. There was a room at the front with a counter and a chair that customers could sit in to admire their new eyewear in a magnifying mirror in a circular silver frame set at a convenient angle on the counter. At the back was a consulting room, I knew, where the walls were fitted with stacks of shallow wooden drawers containing spectacle frames, and there was a machine with two big, round, startled-looking lenses, like the eyes of a robot, that Mr Gray tested his patients’ vision with. To supplement the optical business—remember how few people wore glasses in those days?—Mr Gray sold pricey trinkets and items of cosmetics, and even retorts and test tubes, in various sizes, if I am not mistaken. Looking at these things displayed in the window, I was not in such an extreme of agony that I did not recall Kitty’s birthday present that I still coveted and the thought of which now only added to my suffering and my sense of injury.
Business must have been slow that afternoon, for Miss Flushing, Mr Gray’s assistant, was standing in the shop doorway with the door open, enjoying the sunlight that had already begun to decline at a sharp angle over the rooftops but that was still strong and dense with heat. Was Miss Flushing smoking a cigarette? No, in those days women did not smoke in public, though bold Mrs Gray sometimes did, sometimes even in the street. Miss Flushing was big-boned and blonde, high at bosom and waist, with prominent and very white teeth that were impressive though somewhat alarming to look at. She gave a sense of all-over fairness and pinkness, and there was always a faint, delicate shine, like that on the inner whorl of a seashell, along the edges of her nostrils and the rims of her slightly starting eyes. She favoured angora cardigans that she must have knitted herself, unless she had a mother who knitted them for her; she kept them tightly buttoned so that they emphasised the impossibly sharp points of her perfectly conical breasts. She was extremely short-sighted, and wore spectacles with lenses as thick as the bottoms of bottles. Is it not remarkable that Mr Gray, myopic himself, should have hired an assistant whose vision was even worse than his own? Unless she was meant to be a sort of advertisement, an awful warning against the neglect of defective eyesight. She was a kindly if somewhat scattered person, although with slow or indecisive patients she could on occasion be distinctly short. My mother, a mistress of indecision, disliked and disapproved of her, and when once a year she took ten shillings from the petty cash and went to have her eyesight tested she would insist on being received and treated exclusively by Mr Gray, who was, as she often said, smiling wistfully, a lovely man. The notion of my mother submitting herself to the professional attentions of Mr Gray caused in me an unpleasant, even a queasy, sensation. Did they speak of Mrs Gray? Did my mother enquire after her well-being? I imagined the subject coming up, being briefly, tentatively contemplated, then put away carefully like a pair of glasses into their silk-lined case, after which there would be a silence into which my mother would let drop a soft, faint cough.
I was not acquainted with Miss Flushing, except insofar as everyone in our hardly populous little town could be said to be acquainted, more or less, with everyone else. When I arrived in the street that evening and, seeing her in the doorway, lifted up my chin and knotted my brow into a frown and made to walk past as if I were hurrying on a vital errand elsewhere—it was imperative she should not imagine I was there for any reason to do with the Grays, particularly Mrs Gray—she suddenly spoke to me, to my surprise and even some fright, addressing me by name, which I did not know she knew. I confess that, in my boy’s beady fashion and out of nothing other than a desire for a model against which to compare Mrs Gray’s full-fleshed charms, I had more than once in recent times speculated on how Miss Flushing would look if, somewhere like Cotter’s place some lazy afternoon, she were to be persuaded to take off that fluffy cardigan and the pointy paraphernalia of lace and whalebone underneath it, and I suspect that now when she spoke my name I must have blushed—not, I suppose, that she would have noticed.
She said the Grays had gone away. I nodded, still frowning, still trying to pretend I was about important business from which she was keeping me. She was peering at me in her short-sighted way, which made her lift her full upper lip a little in the middle and wrinkle her nose. In those big lenses her pale, protuberant eyes were the size and shade of two shrunken gooseberries. ‘They’ve gone to Rossmore,’ she said, ‘for a fortnight. They went this morning.’ I seemed to catch in her tone a note of commiseration. Was she also in some way bereft? Was she too sorrowing, like me, and offering sympathy? The sun was striking down on some polished surface in the shop window and dazzling my already sorrow-dazed eyes. ‘Mr Gray is going to come up to town every day on the train,’ Miss Flushing was saying, smiling out of what I was sure now was a fixed, bright misery. ‘He’ll be working here and going down to them at night.’ Them. ‘It’s not far, on the train,’ she added, and a wobble came into her voice. ‘Not far at all.’
And then I saw it. Miss Flushing was commiserating not with me but with herself. The sorrow she could not keep from betraying was not on my part, it was on her own. Of course! For she was in love with Mr Gray, at that moment I was suddenly certain of it. And he?—was he in love with her? Were they as Mrs Gray and I were to each other? It would account for so many things—Mr Gray’s other kind of myopia, for instance, that prevented him from seeing what was going on under his nose between his wife and me, which perhaps was not myopia at all, I thought now, but the indifference of one whose affections had been transferred elsewhere. Yes, that was it, it had to be: he did not care if his wife spent her afternoons not shopping as she said she did or playing tennis with her housewife friends—what housewife friends did she have, anyway?—but tumbling top over tail with me at Cotter’s place, because meanwhile he was in the back room here with the shades pulled and the closed sign displayed, busy ridding flushed Miss Flushing of her ugly specs and clingy cardigan and underwired armour plating. Oh, indeed, I saw it all now, and was exultant, and the balloon of life’s possibilities was on the instant full to bursting again and tugging at its tether. And I knew what I would do. Come Monday morning, when Mr Gray was bound for town on the up line I would be on the down, speeding in a welter of steam and sparks towards my beloved, whose lovely limbs were sure to be by then already touched with a first alluring sunny flush. What of my mother, though, and what she would say? Well, what of her? It was the school holidays still, I would make some excuse to be gone for the day; she would not object, she credited my every lie and subterfuge, the poor, dim thing.
I pause. I am suddenly assailed by a memory of her, my mother, sitting on a beach on a windy bright day in the midst of the remains of a picnic, paper plates and crushed paper cups, bread crusts in a big tin biscuit-box, a banana skin rudely splayed, a bottle with the dregs of milky tea in it sunk at a drunken angle in the sand. She is sitting up straight with her bare mottled legs extended before her, and there is something on her head, a headscarf, or a shapeless cotton hat. Is she at her sewing?—for she wears that abstracted half-smile that she does when she is doing her embroidery. Where is my as yet undead father? I do not see him. He is down at the shallows, it must be, where he often was, paddling, his trousers rolled, his calves and his knobbed ankles on show, greyish-white, the colour of lard. And I, where am I, or what?—an eye suspended in mid-air, a hovering witness only, there and not there? Ah, Mother, how can the past be past and yet still be here, untarnished, gleaming, bright as that tin box? And did you never suspect what your son was up to, never once, throughout that broiling, tumid summer? Surely a mother would not be so blind to the passions of her only child. You said no word, dropped no hint, posed no pointed question. Yet what if you did suspect, what if you did know, and were too appalled, too terrified, to speak, to challenge, to forbid? This possibility troubles me, more, even, than the possibility that everyone knew, all along. So many people I have betrayed in my life, starting with her, the first casualty.
Would I really go to Rossmore? Countless times throughout that Saturday night and all of Sunday my resolution failed me, then rallied, only to falter and fail again. But go I did, surprising myself. The business of getting away turned out to be simplicity itself—I am sure there is a devil’s apprentice whose special task it is to smooth the way for clandestine lovers. I told my mother, at the demon’s dictation, that Billy Gray had invited me to come down and spend the day with him. Not only was she not suspicious, she was positively pleased, for the Grays were what she called a professional family and therefore a desirable connection for me to have and to cultivate. She gave me the train fare and something extra to buy an ice cream, made sandwiches for me to bring, ironed one of my two good shirts, and even insisted on whitening my plimsolls with pipe-clay. Her fussing infuriated me, of course, in my impatience to be away, but I kept my temper for fear of provoking capricious Fate, which so far had been smiling upon me with such unwonted tolerance.
Boarding the train, I had a twinge of misgiving that was something mysteriously to do with the smell of coal smoke and the bristly feel of the upholstery of the seats. Was I recalling then, too, my mother at Rossmore? Was I ashamed of having lied to her that morning with such oily ease? It is remarkable how few such pricks of conscience I was prey to in those days—I saved them all up for later, for now—yet in that moment, as the train wheezed and clanked its way out of the station, was it that I was afforded a glimpse of the fiery plain and the burning lake of sorrows, did I hear the cries of doomed lovers rising from the pit? This is a grave sin, my child, Father Priest had said, and surely it was. Well, let damnation come, I did not care. I got up from the seat, accompanied by little jets of ancient dust squirting out of the upholstery, and let the heavy wooden window down on its thick leather strap, and summer with all its promise leapt into my arms.
I have always liked trains. The old ones were best, of course, their soot-black engines venting bursts of steam and chuffing links of stylised white smoke, and the carriages rattling and yawing and the wheels violently clanging—so much might and effort, yet producing such a gay and toy-like effect. And then the way the landscape seemed to rotate like a vast, slow wheel, or to keep opening like a fan, and the telegraph wires dipped and slid, and birds flew past the window backwards, slowly, effortfully, like so many discarded bits of black rag.
How broad and flat the silence is that spreads along a station platform in summer when the train pulls out. I was the only one who had got off. The fat-necked station master in his peaked cap and navy-blue coat spat on the line and ambled off, that hoop thing he had got from the driver—was it? or from the guard in the guard’s van?—dangling on his shoulder. Parched grass on the far side of the track made ticking noises in the sun. A crow was perched on a post. I went through the little green gate up to the road. Dimly I saw, with a sort of inward undulation like that of a heavy black curtain stirring in a cold wind, how mad a thing it was to have come here like this; but still, no, I did not care, I would not care. I was too far gone to go back, and anyway there would not be an up train for hours. I took out of my pocket the packet of sandwiches my mother had made for me and hurled it across the track into the grass, as a pledge of my commitment, I suppose, of my determination not to be daunted. The crow on the post gave a put-upon squawk and unwrapped its wings of black crape and with a few lazy flaps flew down inexpectantly to investigate. All this had happened before somewhere.
The Beach Hotel, where the Grays were staying, a long, low, one-storeyed establishment with a glassed-in veranda, was a hotel in name only, being hardly more than a boarding-house, though a distinct cut above the shabby place my mother kept. I flitted past, not daring even to glance in the direction of those many sky-reflecting panes. What if Billy or, more calamitously, Kitty, were to come out and see me there? How would I account for myself? I did not have the necessary props to support an alibi, not even swimming trunks or a towel. I went on down the road, and presently came to a gap between a café and a shop that led on to the beach. The morning was hot, and I thought of buying the ice cream my mother had given me the money for, but decided to wait, since I did not know how long this day might last. I was already regretting the sandwiches I had so profligately thrown away.
I went and sat on the beach, and made a funnel of my fist and let sand pour through it while I gazed dolefully out to sea. The water with the sun on it was a broad sheet of rapidly bobbing sharp metallic flakes, old-gold, silver, chrome. People were out walking their dogs, and there were a few swimmers in the sea already, splashing and squealing. I was sure that all eyes were on me, that I was the centre of attention. What if that old boy with the bulldog, for instance, or that skinny woman with the sprig of lilac in the band of her straw hat, what if one of them were to become suspicious and challenge me—what defence of my idle presence would I be able to offer? And Mrs Gray, what would she say when she saw me, what would she do? There were times when she was for me only another adult, just as preoccupied and unpredictable and prone to outbursts of unreasoning anger; just as unlike me, that is, as all the rest of the grown-up world.
I stayed squatting there miserably in the sand for what seemed at least an hour but which when I checked by the clock on the bell-tower of the Protestant church behind the beach turned out to have been not a full ten minutes. I got up and brushed myself down and set off to walk through the village, to see what might be seen, which was only the usual: holiday-makers in wide shorts and silly hats, shops with clusters of beach balls in the doorways and ice-cream machines that whirred and thumped, golfers on the golf course in sleeveless yellow pullovers and big shoes with frilled wings. Sunlight glanced on passing windscreens and made sharp shadows in gateways. I stopped to watch a dog fight between three dogs but it was quickly over. As I was going by the galvanised-iron church I thought I spotted Kitty approaching on a bike and hid behind a hedge, my heart a hot lump struggling in my chest like a cat in a sack.
In those echoless caverns of empty time, being unobserved, unnoticed, I became increasingly detached from myself, increasingly disembodied. At moments I seemed to have become a phantom, and felt that I might walk up to people and pass straight through them and they would not even register a breath. At midday I bought a bun and a bar of chocolate and ate them sitting on a bench outside Myler’s grocery shop. Boredom and the beating sun were making me feel slightly sick. In desperation I began to devise stratagems so that I could call at the Beach Hotel and ask for Mrs Gray. I had got on the Rossmore train by mistake and was stranded here and needed to borrow the fare home; there had been an attempted break-in at their house on the square and I had rushed down to tell them of it; Mr Gray had thrown himself out of the carriage on the way up because Miss Flushing had threatened to jilt him, and they were still searching along the tracks for his mangled body—what did it matter? I was ready to say anything. But still I wandered, agitated and desolate, and the time went slower and slower.
I did encounter Billy. It was the most peculiar thing. I turned a corner and ran smack into him. He was coming from the public tennis courts, along with three or four other fellows, none of whom I knew. We faltered, Billy and I, then stopped, and stared. Stanley and Livingstone could not have been more startled. Billy was in tennis whites, a cream-coloured jumper with a blue band tied by the arms around his waist, and carried a racket—no, two rackets, I see them, both of them in shiny new wooden presses. He blushed, and I am sure I did, too, in the exquisite awkwardness of the moment. We both began to say something at the same time, and stopped. This was not supposed to have happened, we were not supposed to meet here like this—what did I mean by being here, anyway? And what was to be done? Billy was trying to hide those two rackets in their ostentatious presses, holding them down at his side with a show of negligence. The others had gone on a little way but now they paused, and looked back at us with not much curiosity. Mark, I was not thinking of Mrs Gray or my purpose in being there, that was not what was making for this discomfiting sensation, this hot mixture of embarrassment, dull dread and sharp annoyance. Then what was? Just the surprise, I suppose, the being caught off-guard. It was as if we had both become unfairly entangled in something shaming and could not think how to extricate ourselves; in a moment it seemed we would be snarling at each other, like two beasts halted snout to snout on a jungle path. Then everything suddenly relaxed, and Billy did his lopsided and faintly apologetic smile, ducking his head to one side—for a moment he was his mother—and with eyes downcast stepped past me, in a gingerly sinuous fashion, as if he were negotiating a barbed and bristling obstacle that had risen in his way. He spoke a word, too, that I did not catch, and went on to join his new seaside friends, who by now were grinning in ignorant enjoyment of what they had seen and had not understood. I could make out clearly the still reddened back of Billy’s neck. One of them clapped him on the shoulder, as if he had come valiant and safe through some tricky trial, and then they went on together, laughing, and a second one of them put an arm around Billy’s shoulders and glanced back at me with spiteful scorn. It all was done with so quickly that as I walked on it was as if it had not happened at all, and with a calm that surprised me I resumed my wanderings.
It was eerie how often that day I seemed to see—no, how often I saw Mrs Gray appear out of the throngs of summer people. She was everywhere, a tantalising brightness flitting among so many featureless shades. It was exhausting, coping with these surges of joyful recognition that no sooner rose up in me than they were dashed down again. It was like being teased by a mischievous and cruel-hearted sprite playing hide-and-seek with me among the drifting crowd. The more often I spied her and immediately lost her again the more maddened with longing for her I became, until I thought I should faint, or lose my reason, if the real she did not soon appear. Yet when she did, I had seen so many imaginary versions of her that I did not at first believe my eyes.
I had relinquished hope by then and was trudging up the road to the station on my way to take the last train home. So dispirited was I that I did not so much as cast a glance at the Beach Hotel as I passed by. She came towards me from the direction of the station with the sun at her back, a moving silhouette outlined in burning gold. She was wearing sandals, and her short-sleeved dress with the flower pattern—it was the dress I recognised first—and her hair was pinned back in a way that made her seem very young, a bare-legged girl slapping along in her sandals, swinging a shopping bag. At first she, too, I saw, could not believe the evidence of her eyes, and stopped on the path and stared in astonishment and dawning alarm. This was not at all the way I had imagined us meeting. What was I doing here, she demanded—was there something wrong? I did not know what to say. I had been right about the sunburn: there was a pink flush on her forehead and in the hollow of her throat, and a few freckles were sprinkled very fetchingly across the saddle of her nose.
She tilted her head and was regarding me with a sharp, sidewise stare, her eyes narrowed and her mouth set. The look of fright that had come into her face at the sight of me was turning now into a frown of suspicion and angry reproach. I could see her urgently calculating in her mind the dimensions of the problem that my sudden, shocking appearance here had presented her with. At any moment one of her children might walk out at the hotel gate not a hundred yards down the road and see the two of us there, and then what? In return I eyed her sulkily, kicking with my toe at a crack in the pavement. I was disappointed—more, I was disillusioned, bitterly so. Yes, I had given her a shock; yes, there was a danger we might be spotted and unable to account for ourselves; but what of her repeated affirmations of love for me, that love that was supposed to be careless of all convention? What of the heedless passion that had led her to lie down with me in her laundry room on an April afternoon, that had sent her prancing naked through the summer woods, and for the sake of which she was willing to park the station wagon at the side of a public road in broad daylight and scramble into the back seat and without preamble hike her skirt up to her waist and draw me peremptorily down upon her, her bucking boy? Her eyes now had taken on a harried look, and she kept glancing past me down the road towards the hotel and pressing the tip of her tongue back and forth along her lower lip. Something, I saw, would have to be done, and done quickly, to draw her attention away from herself and all she might lose and turn it back on me. I let my shoulders droop and lowered my gaze in chastened fashion—oh, yes, an actor in the making—and in a voice that had the merest hint of a sob in it I told her that I had come to Rossmore because I had not known what else to do, since I could not have borne to be away from her another day, another hour. She peered at me for a long moment, startled by the seeming intensity of my words, and then smiled, in that delighted, slow, blurry way of hers. ‘Aren’t you a terrible fellow?’ she murmured, her voice thickening, and she shook her head, and was mine again.
We went together back the way she had come, passing by the station, and having crossed the little humpbacked bridge we were at once in the countryside. Where had she been, I wanted to know, where had she come from? She laughed. She had been in town, all day. She showed me her bulging shopping bag. ‘They haven’t a thing in that place,’ she said, jerking her head disdainfully backwards in the direction of the Beach Hotel, ‘only sausages and spuds, spuds and sausages, every damned day.’ So she had gone up this morning, and come back, now, on the train? Yes, and she had been idling, like me, wandering about the town for hours, wondering where I might be, when all the time I was here! She laughed again, to see my chagrined scowl. We were walking along by the side of the road. The sun was in our eyes, and the evening light had turned to tarnished gold. Long grasses leaned out from the ditch and slapped at us lazily and left their dust on our legs. A wispy white mist was forming ankle-deep over the fields, and cattle stood on invisible hoofs and watched us as we went past, their lower jaws moving sideways and up in that mechanical, bored way. Summer, and the silence of evening, and my love by my side.
If she had come on the train, I said, what about Mr Gray—where was he? He was stuck in town, she said, and would catch the late mail train. Stuck in town. I thought of Miss Flushing’s blonde waves and high-set waist and those two big damply glistening front teeth of hers. Should I say something, should I let fall a hint of what I thought I knew of Mr Gray’s guilty secret? Not yet. And when I eventually did tell her, some time afterwards, how she laughed—‘Oh, God, I think I’ve wet myself!’—clapping her hands and shrieking. She knew her husband better than I did.
We stopped at a bend of the road, in the purple-brown shade of a stand of rustling trees, and I kissed her. Have I said she was taller than I was, by an inch or so? I was still a growing lad, after all; hard to think of that. Her sunburned skin was plushly hot against my lips, slightly swollen, delicately adhesive, more like a secret inner lining than an outer skin. Of all the kisses we exchanged, that is the one I recall most sharply, simply for the strangeness of it, I suppose, for it was strange to be standing up like that, under trees, at dusk on an otherwise unremarkable summer evening. Though we too were innocent, in our way, and that is strange, too. I see us as in one of those old rustic woodcuts, the youthful swain and his freckled Flora chastely embracing in a shady arbour under tangled honeysuckle and dew-sweet eglantine. All a fancy, you see, all a dream. When the kiss was done we each took a step back, cleared our throats, and turned together and walked on in decorous silence. We were holding hands, and I, the aspiring gallant, was carrying her shopping bag. What were we to do now? It was growing late, and I had missed the last train. What if someone who knew us were to come driving along and see us there, strolling hand in hand between those misty fields so late in the day, a beardless boy, a married woman, and yet a pair of lovers, plainly? I pictured it, the car swerving wildly and the driver’s disbelieving look over the wheel, his mouth opening to exclaim. Mrs Gray began to tell me how when she was small her father used to take her out on evenings such as this to gather mushrooms, but then broke off and became pensive. I tried to see her as a girl, picking her way barefoot through the mist-white meadows, with a basket on her arm, and the man, her father, going ahead of her, bespectacled, whiskered and waistcoated, like the fathers in fairy tales. For me she could have no past that was not a fable, for had I not invented her, conjured her out of nothing but the mad desires of my heart?
She said she would go back and fetch the station wagon and drive me home. But how would she manage it, I wanted to know, how would she get away?—for I had begun at last to weigh the perils of our predicament. Oh, she said, she would think of some story or other. Or had I, she enquired, a better plan to suggest? I did not like her sarcastic tone and did as I so often did and set to sulking. She laughed, and said I was a big baby, and drew me to her with both arms and gave me what was half a hug and half a shake. Then she pushed me away again, and brought out her lipstick and made herself a new mouth, pouting, and sucking in her lips until it looked as if she had no teeth and making faint smacking sounds. I was to wait by the railway bridge, she said, and she would come back and pick me up there. I should keep an eye out in case Mr Gray’s train arrived in the meantime. What, I asked, was I supposed to do if it did? ‘Hide behind the ditch,’ she said drily, ‘unless you want to explain to him how you happened to be hanging about here at this hour of the night.’
She took the shopping bag from me and went off. I watched her dimmening figure waver away through the twilight, over the bridge, and disappear, slipping like a shadow through a gap between two worlds, hers and mine. Why in so many of my memories of her is she walking away from me? I had not asked her what she had bought in town. I had not cared to know, but now I pictured her as in one of those brightly coloured cheery advertisements of the day, freckled and tanned in her summer frock, attended by Billy and Kitty, the two of them gazing up at her with rosy cheeks propped on their fists, grinning and eager, their eyes bright as buttons, as she produces from the cornucopia of her bag all manner of comestible delights—biscuits and bonbons, cobs of corn, sliced pans in wax-paper wrappers, oranges the size of bowling balls, a squamous pineapple with its gay topknot—while in the background Mr Gray, husband, father, only provider of all this abundance, looks up from his newspaper and smiles indulgently, modest, dependable, square-jawed Mr Gray. Their world, never to be mine. The summer was ending.
I went and sat on a stile. Below me the rail lines shone in the day’s last light, and in the station master’s office a wireless set inserted its needle of buzzing sound into the silence. Night came on, diffusing the purple-grey gloam that passes for darkness at that time of year. Now a light went on in the waiting-room window, and moths wove drunken, zigzag patterns under a buzzing lamp at the end of the platform. Behind me in the fields a corncrake began insistently to shake its wooden rattle. There were bats out, too, I could sense them flickering here and there above me in the indigo air, their wings making a tiny sound like that of tissue paper being surreptitiously folded. Presently a huge, fat-faced moon the colour of honey hoisted itself up out of somewhere and goggled down at me, mirthful and knowing. And shooting stars!—when is the last time you saw a shooting star? By now Mrs Gray had been gone a worryingly long time. Had something happened, had she been waylaid? Maybe she would not be able to come back for me at all. I was growing chilled, and hungry, too, and I thought mournfully of home, my mother in the kitchen, in her chair by the window, reading a detective story from the library, her glasses on the end of her nose, one ear-piece repaired with sticking-plaster, licking her thumb to turn the pages and blinking sleepily. But maybe she would not be reading, maybe she would be standing by the window, peering out worriedly into the dark, wondering why I was abroad so late, and where I could be, and what doing.
The arm of the railway signal below the bridge came down with a jerk and a clack, startling me, and the signal light had turned from red to green, and away off in the distance I could see the light of the approaching mail train. Mr Gray would shortly arrive, would step down to the platform, with his briefcase, and a rolled newspaper under his arm, and stand a moment, peering about and blinking, as if he were not sure he was in the right place. What should I do? Should I try to divert him? But as Mrs Gray had sensibly said, what excuse could I offer for being there, alone, so late at night, cold and shivering? Then the station wagon appeared over the crest of the hill. One of its headlamps was permanently askew, so that the lights had a comically wall-eyed, groping glare. It drew up and stopped by the stile. The window on the driver’s side was open and Mrs Gray was smoking a cigarette. She glanced past me at the light of the approaching train that was as big now and as yellow as the moon. ‘Jeepers,’ she said, ‘just in time, eh?’ I got in beside her. The leather seat felt cold and clammy. She reached out a hand and touched my cheek. ‘Poor you,’ she said, ‘your teeth are chattering.’ She gouged at the gears and in a burst of tyre-smoke we shot off into the night.
She said she was sorry she had been so long away. Kitty had not wanted to go to bed, and Billy had been out somewhere with his friends and she had felt she must wait for him to come back. His friends, I thought, oh, yes, his new friends that he had lost no time in making. She began to tell me about an old man staying at the hotel who haunted the beach all day spying on girls changing into their swimsuits. As she spoke she made large, hooping gestures with the cigarette, as if it were a stick of chalk and the air a blackboard, and laughed whinnyingly down her nose, seeming not to have a worry in the world, which annoyed me, of course. She still had her window open and as we sped through the moonlit landscape the night kept snapping up at her elbow, and her hair shivered in the wind and the stuff of her dress at her shoulder rippled and slapped. I told her how I had met Billy, and his friends. I had been saving up that piece of news. She was silent for a long time, thinking. Then she shrugged, and said he had been out all day, that she had hardly seen him since morning. I was not interested in any of this. I asked if we might stop somewhere, by the side of the road, or up a lane. She looked at me sidelong and shook her head, pretending to be shocked. ‘Do you ever,’ she asked, ‘think of anything else?’ But she did stop.
Later, when we got to town, she drew up at the far end of my street. The house, I saw, was dark. My mother must have gone to bed, after all—what should I think of that? Mrs Gray said I had better go in, yet I lingered. Beyond the windscreen the moonlight was carving the street into a jumble of sharp-edged cubes and cones, and everything seemed covered in a thin, smooth coating of silver-grey dust. Another shooting star, and then another. Mrs Gray was silent now. Was she thinking of her children? Was she wondering what she would say to her husband when she returned, what explanation she would offer for her absence? Would he be waiting up for her, sitting in the dark on the glassed-in veranda, drumming his fingers, his spectacle lenses shining accusingly? At length she sighed and drew herself up in the seat with a weary wriggle, and patted me on the knee and said again that it was very late and that I should go in. She did not kiss me goodnight. I said I would come down to Rossmore another day, but she made a line of her lips and gave her head a quick small shake, keeping her eyes on the windscreen. I had not meant it, anyway, I knew I would not go there again and spend another day like the one that had just passed. She waited until I was halfway along the street before driving off. I stopped and turned and watched the twin jewels of the station wagon’s rear lights dwindle and fade. I was recalling how she had looked when she saw me walking towards her up Station Road, how she had started in panic and dismay, and how after a second her eyes had taken on that narrow, calculating look. Was that how it would be again one day, one final day, her eyes cold and her face set against me, against all my begging and bawling, against my bitterest tears? Was that how it would be, in the end?
But what, you will be asking, what happened, what transpired, as Mrs Gray would have said, on that night in Lerici after my encounter in the snowbound hotel with the mysterious man from the pampas? For surely, you will say, surely something happened. After all, was it not the stuff of the sweaty fantasies of my boyhood to have all unbidden in my bed a creature such as Dawn Devonport, a star in need of succour, a goddess in want of tender tending? Was a time, after boyhood days were done, when in such circumstances I would have known exactly what to do and would not have hesitated for a second. Not that I was ever really a womaniser, even in the days of my hot youth and vigour, despite what certain people will say. An actress in distress, though, I could never resist. Tours especially saw brisk nocturnal activity, for the rooms were cold and the beds lonely in those cheerless digs and fleabag hotels where our little troupes used to put up, establishments that were dispiritingly familiar for me, son of the boarding-house that I was. In the febrile aftermath of the night’s show, often it would take no more than a wounding notice in an early edition to cause a girl still with dabs of greasepaint behind her earlobes to come tumbling in tears into my arms. I was known for my soft touch. Lydia was aware of these chance collisions, or at least she guessed at them, I know that. Did she stray, too, when I was off gallivanting? And if she did, what do I feel about it, now? I press upon the place that should smart and nothing returns. Yet I adored once, and was myself adored. Such a long time ago, all that, I might be speaking of a lost antiquity. Ah, Lydia.
Dawn Devonport, I have to tell you, is a snorer. I hope she will not mind my revealing this unflattering fact. It will not harm her, I am sure—we prefer our deities to display a human flaw or two. Anyway, I like to listen to a woman snore; I find it soothing. Lying there in the dark with that sonorous rhythm going on beside me I feel I am out on a calm sea at night, being borne along in a little skiff and gently rocked from side to side; a buried recollection of the amniotic voyage, perhaps. That night, when at last I slipped back into my room, the street-light outside was still shedding a soiled glow in the window and the snow was still steadily falling. Have you ever thought how odd a thing it is that all hotel rooms are bedrooms? Even in suites, even in the grandest of them, the other rooms are just anterooms to the inner sanctum where the bed stands in all its smug and canopied majesty, like nothing so much as a sacrificial altar. In mine, now, Dawn Devonport still lay sleeping. I contemplated my choices. What was it to be, a few uncomfortable hours—by now it was very late and first light could not be far off—huddled in my clothes on that rush-bottomed Van Gogh chair, or reclining with a crick in my neck on the equally uninviting sofa? I looked at the chair, I looked at the sofa. The former seemed to shrink under my gaze, while the latter was pressed against the wall opposite the bed with its back up and its padded arms braced to the floor, regarding me through the gloom with an air of smouldering suspicion. I note how more and more I feel my presence resented by supposedly inanimate objects. Perhaps it is the kindly world’s way, by making me increasingly unwelcome among its furniture, of easing me towards the final door, the one through which I shall presently be seen out for the last time.
In the end I opted to risk the bed. I padded softly around the side of it, and out of habit took off my watch and set it down on the little glass-topped table there. The clink that it made, of metal on glass, brought suddenly back to me all those nighttime vigils spent beside Cass’s sick-bed when she was little, the unquiet darkness and the staled air, and the child felled there and seeming not to sleep but to be away in some half-tormented trance. Slipping soundlessly out of my shoes, but still dressed, with even my jacket buttons demurely done, and without drawing back the covers, I lay down, very cautiously—though even so a few springs deep in the mattress twanged, in jubilant derision, so it sounded—and stretched out on my back beside the sleeping woman and folded my hands on my breast. She stirred and snuffled a bit but did not wake. If she had woken, and turned to see me there, what a fright she would have got, thinking that surely a corpse all neatly parcelled in its funeral suit had been laid out beside her while she slept. She was resting on her side, facing away from me. Against the backdrop of the dimly illumined window the high curve of her hip might have been the outline of a graceful hill seen at a distance in the darkness against a sallowly lit sky; I have always admired this view of the female form, at once monumental and homely. Her snores made a delicate rattling in the passages of her nostrils. Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead. I wondered what Dawn Devonport might be dreaming of, although I have the theory, based on no grounds whatever, that snoring precludes dreaming. For my part I was in that state of late-night hallucinated wakefulness that makes the very notion of sleep seem preposterous, yet presently I felt myself to be suddenly stepping off a footpath and missing my step, and I came to with a jolt that made the bed recoil, and realised I had drifted into a sort of sleep, after all.
Dawn Devonport too had woken. She was as she had been before, lying on her side, and did not move, but she had stopped snoring and her stillness was that of one awake and intently attending. She was so still I thought she might be rigid with fear—it was entirely possible that she did not remember how she had come to be here, in someone else’s bed, in the middle of the night, with that ghastly light in the window and the snow falling outside. Discreetly I cleared my throat. Should I slide from the bed and slip out of the room and take myself off downstairs again—Señor Sorrán might still be in the bar, broaching another bottle of Argentinian red—so that she might think I had been only the figment of a dream and thus reassured drift back into sleep? I was juggling these alternatives, none of them persuasive, when I felt the bed begin to tremble, or quake, in a way I could not at first account for. Then I understood the cause. Dawn Devonport was weeping, muffling violent sobs and making hardly a sound. I was shocked, and my hands on my breast clutched at each other in a spasm of fright. The sound of a woman sobbing to herself in the darkness is a terrible thing. What was I to do? How was I to console her—was I required to console her? Was anything at all to be asked of me? I was trying to recall the words of a silly little ditty that I used to sing with Cass when she was small, something about lying in bed on one’s back and getting tears in one’s ears—how Cass used to laugh—and in the extremity of the moment I think I too would have begun to weep had Dawn Devonport not reared up suddenly, giving the sheet and the blanket a mighty yank, and fairly flung herself from the bed with a wordless exclamation of what seemed anger and run from the room, leaving the door wide open behind her.
I switched on the lamp and sat up, blinking, and swung my legs over the side of the bed and set my stockinged feet on the floor. Weariness settled all at once on my bowed shoulders, like the weight of all that snow outside, or of the night itself, the great dome of darkness all above me. My feet were cold. I wriggled them into their shoes, and leaned forwards, but then just stayed leaning there, my arms hanging, incapable even of doing up the laces. There are moments, infrequent though marked, when it seems that by some tiny shift or lapse in time I have become misplaced, have outstripped or lagged behind myself. It is not that I think myself lost, or astray, or even that it is inappropriate to be where I am. It is just that somehow I am in a place, I mean a place in time—what an odd way language has of putting things—at which I have not arrived of my own volition. And for that moment I am helpless, so much so that I imagine I will not be able to move on to the next place, or go back to the place where I was before—that I will not be able to stir at all, but will have to remain there, sunk in perplexity, mured in this incomprehensible fermata. But always, of course, the moment passes, as it passed now, and I got myself to my feet and shuffled in my unlaced shoes to the door Dawn Devonport had left open, and shut it, and returned and switched off the lamp, and lay down again, still in my clothes, with my tie still knotted, and passed at once into blessed oblivion, as if a panel had opened in the night’s wall and I had been slid on a slab into the dark and shut away there.
We never did make the crossing to Portovenere, Dawn Devonport and I. Perhaps I had never intended that we should. We might have gone, there was nothing to stop us—unless it was everything, of course—for despite the winter storms the ferries were operating and the roads were open. She, it turned out, had known all along that it was in the little port across the bay that my daughter died—she had heard it from Billie Stryker, I imagine, or Toby Taggart, for it was no secret, after all. She did not ask why I had chosen not to tell her myself, why I had pretended to have picked our destination at random. I expect she thought I had a plan, a programme, a scheme of my own, one that she might as well go along with, for want of better. Perhaps she did not think anything at all, just let herself be taken away, as if she had no choice and were glad of it. ‘Keats died here,’ she said, ‘didn’t he, drown or something?’ We were walking on the front below the hotel in our overcoats and mufflers. No, I told her, that was Shelley. She paid no attention. ‘I’m like him, like Keats,’ she said, narrowing her eyes at the turbulent horizon. ‘I’m living a posthumous existence—isn’t that what he said of himself somewhere?’ She laughed briefly, seeming pleased with herself.
It was morning, and the disturbances and interrupted sleep of the night before had left me in a chafed and shaky state, and I felt as raw as a freshly peeled stick. Dawn Devonport on the other hand was preternaturally calm, not to say dazed. The hospital must have given her tranquillisers to take with her on the trip—her doctor, the nice Indian, had not wanted her to come at all—and she was remote and slightly bleared, and looked on everything around her with a sceptical expression, as if she were sure it had all been got up to deceive her. Every so often her attention would focus and she would peer at her watch, narrowing her eyes and frowning, as if something momentous that had been meant to happen were being inexplicably delayed. I told her of my encounter with Fedrigo Sorrán, although I was not sure that in my tired and travel-fevered state I had not dreamed him, or invented him, and indeed I still have doubts. In the hotel that morning there had been no sign of him, and I was convinced he was no longer staying there, if he had been there at all, in the first place. Of her coming to my room, of our chaste concumbence, of her tears and her subsequent abrupt and violent exit, we did not speak. Today we were like a pair of strangers who had met in a dockside bar the night before and gone on board together in tipsy good-fellowship, and now the vessel had sailed, and we were hungover, and the voyage was still all grimly ahead of us.
He had been on his way back from Leghorn, I told her, when his boat sank in a storm. She looked at me. ‘Shelley,’ I said. His friend Edward Williams was with him, and a boy whose name I could not recall. Their boat was named the Ariel. Some say the poet scuttled it himself. He was writing The Triumph of Life. She was no longer looking at me and I was not sure that she was listening. We stopped and stood and gazed across the bay. Portovenere was over there. We might indeed have been on the stern of a ship, steaming steadily away from what was meant to have been our destination. The sea was high and vehemently blue, and I could just make out a bustle of white water at the foot of that distant promontory.
‘What was she doing there, your daughter?’ Dawn Devonport asked. ‘Why there?’
Why indeed?
We walked on. Amazingly, impossibly, last night’s snowfall was entirely gone, as if the stage designer had decided it had been ill-advised and had ordered it to be swept away and replaced with a few minimalist puddles of muddy slush. The sky was hard and pale as glass, and in the limpid sunlight the little town above us was sharply etched against the hillside, a confused arrangement of angled planes in shades of yellow ochre, gesso white, parched pink. Dawn Devonport, her hands plunged in the pockets of her calf-length, fur-trimmed coat, paced beside me over the flagstones with her head down. She was in full disguise, with those enormous sunglasses and a big fur hat. ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘when I did it, or tried to—when I took the pills, I mean—I thought I was going to a place I would know, a place where I’d be welcomed.’ She had some difficulty with the words, as if her tongue were thick and hard to manage. ‘I thought I was going home.’
Yes, I said, or to America, like Svidrigailov, before he put the pistol to his head and pulled the trigger.
She said she was cold. We went to a café on the harbour front and she drank hot chocolate, crouched at the little round table and clutching the cup in both of those big hands of hers. An odd thing about those little cafés in the south is that they seem, to me, anyway, to have been something else originally, apothecary shops, or small offices, or even domestic living rooms, that had been gradually and as if unintentionally adapted to this new use. There is something about the counters, so high and narrow, and the way the tiny tables and the chairs are crammed in, that lends the place a makeshift, improvised look. The staff, too, bored and laconic, have a transitory air, as though they had been drafted in temporarily to fill a shortage and are irritably eager to get away and take up again whatever far more interesting pursuit it was they had been engaged in previously. And see all those flyers and playbills around the cash register, the postcards and signed photographs and scraps of messages stuck in the frame of the mirror behind the bar, that make the fat proprietor there—bald head with greasy grey strands draped over it, a scrunched-up moustache, a big gold ring on his fat little finger—look like a booking agent of some variety ensconced at his desk among the scraps and memorabilia of his trade.
You won’t bring her back, you know, Lydia said, not like this. And of course she was right. Not like this, nor any other way.
Who, Dawn Devonport wanted to know, frowning and concentrating, who was Svidrigailov? That was, I told her again, patiently, the name my daughter gave to the person she had come here with, whose child she was carrying. Through the glass door of the café I could see, far out on the bay, a sleek white craft, low in the stern and high in the prow, shouldering its way over the purple swell and seeming as if it would take to the sky at any moment, a magic ship, breasting the air. Dawn Devonport was lighting a cigarette with a hand that trembled. I told her what Billie Stryker had told me, that Axel Vander had been here or hereabouts at the same time as my daughter. She only nodded; perhaps she knew it already, perhaps Billie Stryker had told her that, too. She took off her sunglasses and folded them and put them on the table beside her cup. ‘And now we’re here, you and I,’ she said, ‘where the poet drowned himself.’
We left the café and walked up through the narrow streets of the town. In the hotel the lounge was deserted and we went in there. It was a cramped room with a high ceiling, very like the parlour in my mother’s lodging-house, with its shadows and its silence and its vague but indispersible air of ill-content. I sat on a sort of sofa with a low back and a high-sprung seat; the upholstery smelt strongly of immemorial cigarette smoke. A grandfather clock, its toiling innards on show through an oval glass panel in its front, stood in a corner sentry-straight and ticked and tocked with ponderous deliberation, seeming to hesitate an instant before each tock and tick. The centre of the room was occupied by a high and somehow overbearing dining-table made of black wood, with stout carven legs, on which was spread a cloth of heavy brocade that hung low over the sides and was edged with tassels. On it the busy set designer had placed, of all things, and as if all so artlessly, an antique volume of the poems of Leopardi, with marbled edges and a tooled leather spine, in which I tried to read—
Dove vai? chi ti chiama
Lunge dai cari tuoi,
Belissima donzella?
Sola, peregrinando, il patrio tetto
Sì per tempo abbandoni? …
—but the poetry’s gorgeous sonorities and sobbing cadences soon defeated me, and I put the book back where I had taken it from and returned to my seat creakingly, like a chided schoolboy. Dawn Devonport sat in a narrow armchair in a corner opposite the grandfather clock, leaning forwards tensely with her legs crossed, flipping rapidly and, as it seemed, contemptuously through the pages of a glossy magazine in her lap. She was smoking a cigarette, and after each puff, without turning her head, she would twist up her mouth as if to whistle and shoot out a thin jet of smoke sideways. I studied her. Often it seems to me the closer I come to a person the farther off I am. How is that, I wonder? I used to watch Mrs Gray like that when we were in bed together, and would feel her grow distant even as she lay beside me, just as sometimes, disconcertingly, a word will detach itself from its object and float away, weightless and iridescent as a soap bubble.
Abruptly Dawn Devonport tossed the magazine on to the table—how flabbily the heavy pages flopped—and rose and said she would go to her room and lie down. She lingered a moment and looked at me strangely, with what seemed a strange surmise. ‘I suppose you think he was Svidrigailov,’ she said, ‘Axel Vander—you think he was him.’ She made herself shiver, wincing as if she had tasted something sour, and went out.
I sat on there alone for a long time. I was remembering—or I am remembering now, it does not matter which—Mrs Gray talking to me one day about dying. Where were we? In Cotter’s place? No, somewhere else. But where else was there that we could have been? Bizarrely, my memory places us in that upstairs living room where Billy and I used to drink his father’s whiskey. Surely it is not possible, yet that is where I see us. But how would she have managed to smuggle me into the house, under what pretext, and for what purpose?—certainly not the accustomed one, given that we were in the living room, with our clothes on, and not down in the laundry room. I have a picture in my mind of the two of us sitting very properly in two armchairs set close to each other at an angle opposite the rectangular window with the metal frames. It was a Sunday morning, I believe, a late-summer Sunday morning, and I was wearing a tweed suit in which I was hot and itchy, and in which I felt ridiculous, more nearly naked than clothed, as I always did when I was made to put on my Sunday best. Where were the others, Billy and his sister and Mr Gray? What can have been going on? I must have been there for a reason; Billy and I must have been going somewhere, on a school outing, maybe, and he was late as always and I was waiting for him. But would I have called for him, given that now I was devoting so much energy and ingenuity to avoiding him? Anyway, I was there, that is all there is to say. The sun was shining full upon the square outside and everything out there seemed made of vari-coloured glass, and a playful breeze was filling the lace curtain at the open window and making it billow inwards and upwards in ever-swelling languor. I always had a strong sense of estrangement on those Sunday mornings when I was young—the noose-like feel of my shirt collar, the birds at their excited business, those far church-bells—and there was always an air that seemed to waft from the south, yes, the south, with its lion-coloured dust and lemon glare. No doubt it was the future I was anticipating, the shimmering promise of it, for the future for me always had a southern aspect, which is strange to think of now, now that the future is arrived, up here in Ultima Thule, arrived and steadily pouring through the pinhole of the present, into the past.
Mrs Gray was dressed in a rather severe blue suit—a costume, she would have called it—and wore black shoes with high heels, seamed stockings, a pearl necklace. Her hair was done differently from usual, swept back in some way that even managed to subdue for the moment that wayward curl at her ear, and she smelt as my mother did, as I suppose everyone’s mother did, on Sunday mornings in summer, of scent and cold cream and face powder, of sweat, a little, of flesh-warm nylon and faintly mothbally wool, and of something vaguely ashen, too, that I was never able to identify. The jacket of her suit was fashionably high at the shoulders and tightly nipped at the waist—she must have been wearing a corset—and the calf-length skirt was narrow, with a slit at the back. I had not seen her dressed so formally before, so rigidly, all interestingly pinned and pent, and I sat surveying her with an impudent and, it might almost be, an uxorial sense of possession. It is a scene from one of those women’s pictures of the day, of course, the kind that Mrs Gray did not like, for I see it in black-and-white, or charcoal-and-silver, rather, she in the Older Woman role while I am played by, oh, some boy wonder with a cheeky grin and a quiff, as pert as you please in my neat tweed suit and starched white shirt and striped, clip-on tie.
At first I did not absorb what it was she was talking about, distracted as I was in studying the complicated system of seams—darts, I believe they are called—in the wonderfully full bosom of her dress, the brittle blue material of which had an excitingly metallic burnish, and made tiny crackling sounds with each breath she took. She had turned her head away and was looking pensively towards the window and the sunlit square, and was saying, with a finger to her cheek, how she wondered sometimes what it would be like not to be here—would it be like being under an anaesthetic, maybe, with no sense of anything, not even of time passing?—and how hard it was to imagine being somewhere else, and how harder still it was to think of not being anywhere at all. Slowly her words filtered their way into the inilluminable dimness of my self-regarding consciousness, until, with a sort of click, I understood, or thought I understood, exactly what she was saying, and suddenly I was all ears. Not to be here? To be somewhere else? What was all this, surely, but a roundabout way of letting me know that she was preparing to have done with me? Now, at other times, should the barest suspicion have entered my head that she was hinting at any such thing, I would straight away have set to whining and howling and drumming my fists, for I was a child still, remember, with all a child’s conviction of the imperative need for an instant, tearful and clamorous response to even the mildest threat to my well-being. That day, however, and for whatever reason, I bided, warily, watchfully, and let her talk on until, perhaps sensing the vigilant quality of my attentiveness, she paused, and turned, and focused in that way she did, seeming to swivel and train on me an invisible telescope. ‘Do you ever think of it,’ she asked, ‘dying?’ Before I could answer she laughed self-disparagingly and shook her head. ‘But of course you don’t,’ she said. ‘Why would you?’
Now my interest switched on to another track. If she was really talking about death as death and not as a hint that she was leaving me, then she must be talking about Mr Gray. The possibility that her husband was mortally ill had been taking an ever-strengthening hold on my imagination, with a consequent bolstering of my hopes of securing Mrs Gray for myself on a long-term basis. If the old boy were to croak, there at last and gloriously would be my chance. I must not make a move precipitately, of course. We would have to wait, the two of us, until I was of age, and even then there would be obstacles, Kitty and my mother not the least of them, while Billy would hardly warm to the grotesque prospect of having for his stepfather a boy of his own age, and a sometime best friend, at that. In the interval, however, while we were anticipating my majority, what opportunities would offer themselves for me to fulfil my childhood dream of having not a bald and inarticulated doll to cuddle and care for and operate on, but a full-sized, warm-blooded, safely widowed woman all of my own, accessible to me all day and every day, and, more momentously, every night, too, a prized possession that I might show off boldly to the world, whenever and wherever I pleased. So now I sharpened my ears and listened keenly to whatever else she might have to add on the subject of her husband’s prospective demise. Alas, she would say nothing more, and seemed abashed, indeed, by what she had already said, and short of asking straight out how long the doctors had given the purblind optician I could get nothing further out of her.
But what was I doing there, in her living room, in my scratchy suit, on a Sunday, in the dying days of that summer—what? So often the past seems a puzzle from which the most vital pieces are missing.
Although I grew up in that world of transience and hidden presences, and married a woman who grew up there too, I still find hotels uncanny, not only in the stillness of the night but in the daytime, too. At mid-morning, especially, something sinister always seems to be afoot under cover of that fake, hothouse calm. The receptionist behind the desk is one I have not seen before, and gives me a blank look as I drift past and does not smile or offer a word of greeting. In the deserted dining room all the tables are set, the gleaming cutlery and the sparkling napery laid out just so, like an operating theatre where multiple surgical procedures will presently be carried out. Upstairs, the corridor buzzes with a breathless, tight-lipped intent. I pass along it soundlessly, a disembodied eye, a moving lens. The doors, all identical, a receding double procession of them, have the look of having been slammed smartly shut one after another a second before I stepped out of the lift. What can be going on behind them? The sounds that filter out, a querulous word, a cough, a snatch of low laughter, seem each the beginning of a plea or a tirade that is cut short at once by an unheard slap, or a hand clapped over a mouth. There is a smell of last night’s cigarettes, of cold breakfast coffee, of faeces and shower soap and shaving balm. And that big trolley thing abandoned there, stacked with folded sheets and pillow-cases and with a bucket and a mop hooked on at the back, where is the chambermaid who should be in charge of it, what has become of her?
I stood outside Dawn Devonport’s door for fully a minute before knocking, and even then I barely brushed my knuckles against the wood. There was no response from within. Was she sleeping again? I tried the knob. The door was not locked. I opened it an inch and waited again, listening, and then stepped into the room, or insinuated myself, rather, slipping in sideways without a sound, and closed the door carefully behind me, holding my breath as the catch caught. The curtains were not drawn and although the air was chill there was more brightness than I had expected, almost a summer radiance, with a broad beam of sunlight angling down from a corner of the window, like a spot, and the net curtain a blaze of gauzy whiteness. Everything was tidied and orderly—that missing maid had been in here, anyway—and the bed might not have been slept in. Dawn Devonport lay on top of the covers, on her side again, with a hand under her cheek and her knees drawn up. I noticed how shallow an indentation in the mattress her body made, so light is she and how little of her there is. She still had her coat on, the fur collar making an oval frame for her face. She was looking at me from where she lay, those grey eyes of hers turned up to me, larger and wider than ever. Was she frightened, had I alarmed her by sliding into the room in that sinuous and sinister way? Or was she just drugged? Without lifting her head she extended her free hand to me. I clambered on to the bed, shoes and all, and lay down, face to her face, our knees touching; her eyes seemed larger than ever. ‘Hold on to me,’ she murmured. ‘I feel as if I’m falling, all the time.’ She drew back the wing of her coat and I moved closer and put my arm over her, inside her coat. Her breath was cool on my face and her eyes were almost all I could see now. I felt her ribs under my wrist, and her heart beating. ‘Imagine I’m your daughter,’ she said. ‘Pretend I am.’
So we remained for some time, there on the bed, in the cold, sunlit room. I felt as if I were gazing into a mirror. Her hand lay lightly, a bird’s claw, on my arm. She talked about her father, how good he had been, how cheerful, and how he would sing to her when she was little. ‘Silly songs, he sang,’ she said, ‘“Yes, We Have No Bananas”, “Roll Out the Barrel”, that sort of thing.’ One year he had been elected Pearly King of the Cockneys. ‘Have you ever seen the Pearly King? He was so pleased with himself, in that ridiculous suit—he even had pearls on his cap—and I was so ashamed I hid in the cupboard under the stairs and wouldn’t come out. And Mum was Pearly Queen.’ She cried a little, then wiped at the tears impatiently with the heel of a hand. ‘Stupid,’ she said, ‘stupid.’
I withdrew my arm and we sat up. She swung her legs off the bed but remained sitting on the side of it, with her back turned to me, and lit a cigarette. I lay down again, propped on an elbow, and watched the lavender smoke curling and coiling upwards into the shaft of sunlight at the window. She was crouching forwards now, with her knees crossed and an elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand. I watched her, the slope of her back and the set of her shoulders and the outline of her shoulder-blades folded like wings and her hair wreathed in smoke. A drama coach I once took lessons from told me a good actor should be able to act with the back of his head. ‘Roll out the barrel,’ she sang softly, huskily, ‘we’ll have a barrel of fun.’
Had she really intended to kill herself, I asked. Had she wanted to die? She did not answer for a long time, then lifted her shoulders and let them fall again in a weary shrug. She did not turn when she spoke. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Don’t they say the ones who fail weren’t serious in the first place? Maybe it was just, you know, what we do, you and I.’ Now she twisted her head and looked at me at a sharp angle over her shoulder. ‘Just acting.’
I said we should go back, that we should go home. She was still regarding me from under her hair, her head on one side and her chin resting on her shoulder. ‘Home,’ she said. Yes, I said. Home.
Somehow it seems to me it was the thunder-clap that did it, I mean I think it was by some dark magic our undoing. Certainly it presaged the end. The storm caught us at Cotter’s place. There is something vindictive about that kind of rain, a sense of vengeance being wrought from above. How relentlessly it clattered through the trees that day, like artillery fire showering down on a defenceless and huddled village. We had not minded rain, before, but that was the gentler kind, mere grapeshot compared to this barrage. At Cotter’s place it even used to give us a game to play, running here and there to set a pot or a jam-jar on the floor under each new leak in the ceiling as it sprang. How Mrs Gray would squeal when a plummeting cold drop fell on the back of her neck and slithered down along her bare skin under her flowered dress. By happy chance the corner where we had set out our mattress was one of the few dry places in the house. We would sit there together contentedly side by side, listening to the susurrating rain among the leaves, she smoking one of her Sweet Aftons and I practising jackstones with the beads from a necklace of hers the string of which I had broken unintentionally one afternoon in the course of a particularly energetic bout of love-making. ‘Babes in the wood, that’s us,’ Mrs Gray would say, and grin at me, displaying those two endearingly overlapping front teeth.
It turned out she was terrified of thunder. At the first crash of it, directly overhead and at what seemed no higher than the level of the roof, she went ashen-faced on the instant and crossed herself rapidly. We had been just short of the house when the rain came on, sweeping down on us through the trees with a muffled roar, and although we had sprinted the last few yards along the track we were thoroughly wet by the time we tumbled in at the front door. Mrs Gray’s hair was plastered to her skull, except for that irrepressible curl at her ear, and her dress was stuck to the front of her legs and moulded around the curves of her belly and her breasts. She stood flat-footed in the middle of the floor with her arms out at either side and flapped her hands, scattering drops from her fingertips. ‘What’ll we do?’ she wailed. ‘We’ll catch our deaths!’
The summer had drawn to an end almost without our noticing—the storm was a brusque reminder—and I was back at school. I had not called for Billy on the first morning of the new term, and did not on any subsequent morning, either. It was harder than ever to look him in the eye now, not least because that eye was so like his mother’s. What did he imagine had happened, that I should shun him like this? Maybe he thought of that day in Rossmore when I bumped into him with his tennis friends and his two rackets in their fancy new presses. In the school yard we avoided each other, and walked home by separate ways.
I was in trouble elsewhere, too. I had done badly in my exams, which was a surprise to everyone, though not to me, whom love had kept busy throughout that previous spring when I should have been at my studies. I was a bright boy and much had been expected of me, and my mother was sorely disappointed in me. She reduced my pocket money by half, but only for a week or two—no moral tenacity, that woman—and, much more seriously, threatened to make me stay indoors and apply myself to my schoolwork from now on. Mrs Gray, when I told her of these punitive measures, sided against me, to my astonishment, saying my mother was quite right, that I should be ashamed of myself for not working harder and for putting in such a poor academic performance. This led at once into the first real row we had, I mean the first that was caused by something other than my unresting jealousy and her amused disregard of it, and I went at her, bald-headed, as she would have said, which is to say, just like an adult—I was very much older now than I had been before this summer began. How darkly she glowered back at me, how defiantly, from under down-drawn brows, as I thrust my face close up to hers and snivelled and snarled. A fight like that is never forgotten, but goes on bleeding unseen, under its brittle cicatrice. But how tenderly we made up afterwards, how lovingly she rocked me in her embrace.
It had not occurred to us, in the golden glare of that long-lasted summer, that sooner or later we would have to look for somewhere more resistant to the elements than the old house in the woods. Already there was an autumnal crispness in the air, especially in the late afternoons when the sun had declined sharply from the zenith, and now with the rains it was chillier still—‘We’ll soon be doing it in our overcoats,’ Mrs Gray said gloomily—and the floorboards and the walls were giving off a dispiriting odour of damp and rot. Then came the thunder-clap. ‘Well, that,’ Mrs Gray declared, her voice shaking and the raindrops dripping from her fingertips, ‘that puts the tin hat on it.’ But where else were we to find shelter? Desperate speculation. I even toyed with the thought of requisitioning one of the disused rooms under the attic in my mother’s house; we could come through the back garden, I said eagerly, seeing us there already, and in by the back door and up the back stairs from the scullery and no one would be the wiser. Mrs Gray only looked at me. All right then, I said sulkily, did she have a better suggestion?
As it turned out, we need not have worried. I mean, we should have worried, but not about finding a new place for ourselves. That day, even before the last grumbles of thunder had settled and ceased, Mrs Gray in her fright was off, scampering in the rain along the track through the streaming wood, with her shoes in her hand and her cardigan pulled over her head for an ineffective hood, and was in the station wagon and had the engine started and was moving off before I caught up and scrambled in beside her. By now we were both thoroughly soaked. And where were we going? The rain was battering on the metal roof and dishfuls of it were sloshing back and forth across the windscreen before the valiantly labouring wipers. Mrs Gray, her hands white-knuckled on the wheel, drove with her face thrust forwards, the whites of her eyes glinting starkly and her nostrils flared in fright. ‘We’ll go home,’ she said, thinking aloud, ‘there’s no one there, we’ll be all right.’ The window beside me was awash, and quavering trees, glassy-green in that electric light, loomed in it an instant and were gone, as if felled by our passing. The sun, improbably, was managing to shine somewhere, and the washes of rain on the windscreen now were all fire and liquid sparks. ‘Yes,’ Mrs Gray said again, nodding rapidly to herself, ‘yes, we’ll go home.’
And home we went—to her home, that is. As we were drawing into the square there was an almost audible swish and the rain stopped on the instant, as if a silver bead curtain had been drawn peremptorily aside, and the drenched sunlight crept forwards, to re-stake its shaky claim on the cherry trees and the sparkling gravel under them and the pavements that had already started to steam. The air in the house felt damp and had a wan, greyish odour, and the light in the rooms seemed uncertain, and there was an uncertain hush, as if the furniture had been up to something, some dance or romp that had stopped on the instant when we entered. Mrs Gray left me in the kitchen and went off and came back a minute later having changed into a woollen dressing-gown that was too big for her—was it Mr Gray’s?—and under which, it was plainly apparent, to my avid eye, at least, that she was naked. ‘You smell like a sheep,’ she said cheerfully, and led me down—yes!—led me down to the laundry room.
I have a suspicion she did not remember our previous encounter there. That is to say I do not think it occurred to her to remember it, on this occasion. Is it possible? For me this narrow room with the oddly lofty ceiling and the single window set high up in the wall was a holy site, a sort of sacristy where a hallowed memory was stored, whereas for her I suppose it had reverted to being just the place where she did the family’s washing. The low bed, or mattress, I noticed at once, was no longer there, under the window. Who had removed it, and why? But then, who had put it there in the first place?
Mrs Gray, humming, took a towel to my wet hair. She said she did not know what to do about my clothes. Would I wear one of Billy’s shirts? Or no, she said, frowning, perhaps that would not be a good idea. But what would my mother say, she wondered, if I came home soaked to the skin? She did not seem to have noticed that, under cover of the towel she was so vigorously applying to my head—how many times in her life had she dried a child’s hair?—I had been edging ever closer to her, and now I reached out blindly and seized her by the hips. She laughed, and took a step backwards. I followed, and this time got my hands inside the dressing-gown. Her skin was still slightly damp, and slightly chilled, too, which somehow made her seem all the more thoroughly, thrillingly naked. ‘Stop that!’ she said, laughing again, and again stepped back. I was out from under the towel, and she made a wad of it and pushed it at my chest in a half-hearted attempt to fend me off. She could go back no farther now for her shoulder-blades were against the wall. The belted gown was agape at the top where I had been fumbling at it, and the skirts of it too were parted, baring her bare legs to their tops, so that for a moment she was the Kayser Bondor lady to the life, as provocatively dishevelled as the original was composed. I put my hands on her shoulders. The broad groove between her breasts had a silvery sheen. She began to say something, and stopped, and then—it was the strangest thing—then I saw us there, actually saw us, as if I were standing in the doorway looking into the room, saw me hunched against her, canted a little to the left with my right shoulder lifted, saw the shirt wet between my shoulder-blades and the seat of my wet trousers sagging, saw my hands on her, and one of her glossy knees flexed, and her face paling above my left shoulder and her eyes staring.
She pushed me aside. Of all the things that were about to start happening, I think that push, the shock of it, although it was not violent or even ungentle, is the thing I have remembered of that day with the keenest clarity, the acutest anguish. Thus must the puppet feel when the puppeteer lets the strings fall from his fingers and ducks out of the booth, whistling. It was as if in that instant she had sloughed a self, the self I knew, and stepped past me as a stranger.
Who was it that was standing in the doorway? Yes, yes, I need not tell you, you know already who it was. The lank plaits, the thick specs, the knock-knees. She was wearing one of those dresses that little girls wore then, vaguely Alpine, dotted all over with tiny flowers, pleated, and with a crimpled, elasticated front to the bodice. In her hand she was holding something, I do not remember what—a fiery sword, perhaps. Marge was there too, her fat friend from the birthday party, the one who took a shine to me, but I paid her scant heed. They just stood, the two of them, looking at us, with curiosity, it seemed, more than anything else, then turned aside, not hurriedly, but in that dull blank way that spectators turn aside from the scene of an accident when the ambulance has driven off. I heard their clumsy school shoes clattering on the wooden steps up to the kitchen. Did I hear Kitty snicker? Mrs Gray went to the doorway and put her head into the corridor, but did not call out to her daughter, did not say anything, and after a moment came back again, into the room, to me. She was frowning, and nibbling at her lower lip. She looked as if she had misplaced something and were trying hard to think where she might have left it. What did I do? Did I speak? I remember her looking at me for a second as if puzzled, then smiling, distractedly, and putting a hand to my cheek. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘you should go home now.’ It was so strange, the simple, utter, incontestable finality of it. It was like the end of an orchestral performance. All that had held us suspended and rapt for so long, all that violent energy, that tension and concentration, all that glorious clamour, suddenly in that moment stopped, leaving nothing but a fading gleam of sound upon the air. I did not think to protest, to plead or weep or shout, but did as she bade me and stepped past her meekly without a word, and went home.
What happened after that happened with bewildering swiftness and dispatch. By evening Mrs Gray had fled. I heard—from whom?—that she had gone back to the town where she and Mr Gray had come from, to the grand boulevards and the worldly sophisticates about which and whom she had so liked to tease me. It must have been where she was born, for she was staying there in the care of her mother, it was said. The news that Mrs Gray had a mother was so amazing as to divert me for a moment from my anguish. She had never mentioned a mother to me, unless she did and I was not listening; it is possible, but I do not think even I would have been that inattentive. I tried to picture this fabulous personage and saw an immensely aged version of Mrs Gray herself, wrinkled, stooped and for some reason blind, leaning at a wicket fence in a sunlit cottage garden profuse with summer flora, smiling in sad forgiveness and holding out her hands in that vaguely beseeching way that blind people do, welcoming home her disgraced and penitent daughter. So strange, so strange even now to think of a previous Mrs Gray—no, she would have been a Mrs someone else. That is another thing I never knew, my maiden’s maiden name.
The next day, auctioneer’s signs sprouted on the front of the house in the square, and in the window of the shop in the Haymarket, too, and Miss Flushing’s nostrils and the rims of her eyes were redder than ever. Do I recall the station wagon pulling out of the square packed with household things, and Mr Gray and Billy and Billy’s sister crowded together in the front seat, that seat on which Mrs Gray and I had so often bounced together as on an enchanted trampoline, Mr Gray looking pained but with his jaw juttingly set, like Gary Fonda in The Grapes of Noon? Surely I am inventing again, as so often.
Yet come to think of it their going cannot have been that precipitate, for days were to pass, a week, even, or more than a week, before I had my final encounter with Billy Gray. In my memory the seasons have shifted yet again, for although it was still September I see our confrontation acted out in raw winter weather. The place was called the Forge, near the square where the Grays lived; a blacksmith must have worked there, long ago. The surroundings were appropriate, for the Forge was always associated for me, and still is, with a nameless disquiet. Yet it was an unremarkable enough place, where a hill road leading up to the square broadened and turned in an odd, lopsided way, and another, narrower road, little used, led off at a sharp angle into the countryside. Where this road started there was an overhang of heavy dark trees, underneath which was a well, or not a well, but a broad-mouthed metal pipe protruding from the wall, through which poured a constant flow of water, smooth and shiny as moulded zinc and thick as a man’s upper arm, that plunged into a mossed-over concrete trough that was always full yet never overflowed. I used to wonder where so much water could be coming from, for it did not slacken off even in the driest months of summer, and was, I thought, uncanny in its unrelenting dedication to its one, monotonous task. And where did it go to, the water? Must have run off underground into the Sow River—can that really have been its name?—a meagre dirty stream that ran along a culvert at the foot of the hill. What do they matter, these details? Who cares where the water came from or went to, or what the season was or how the sky looked or whether the wind was blowing—who cares? Yet someone must—someone has to. Me, I suppose.
Billy was walking up the hill and I was walking down. I cannot say why I was there or where I was coming from. I must have been in the square, even though I distinctly recall making every effort to avoid the sight of that cardboard For Sale sign displayed outside Mrs Gray’s bedroom window like a flag on a plague ship. I might have crossed to the other side of the road, or Billy might have, but neither of us did. My memory, with its lamentable fondness for the pathetic fallacy, sets a raw wind skirmishing about us, and there are dead leaves, of course, scraping along the pavements, and those dark trees shake and sway. Details again, you see, always details, exact and impossible. Yet I have not remembered what Billy said to me, except that he called me a dirty fucking bastard and suchlike, but I do see his tears, and hear his sobs of rage and shame and bitter sorrow. He tried to hit me, too, wildly swinging those sheaf-gatherer’s arms of his, while I retreated in little skips and hops, bent halfway over backwards like a contortionist. And I, what did I say? Did I attempt to apologise, did I try to explain myself and my base betrayal of our friendship? What explanation could I have offered? I felt peculiarly detached from the moment. It was as if what was happening were something that was being shown to me, a particularly violent sequence from a morality play, illustrating the inevitable consequence of Unchastity, Lust and Lewdness. Yet at the same time, and I know it will provoke jeers of contempt and disbelief when I say it, at the same time I had never felt such care, such compassion, such tenderness—such, yes, such love for Billy as I felt there on that hill road, with him flailing and sobbing and me bobbing backwards, ducking and weaving, and the cold wind blowing and the dead leaves scrabbling and that thick skein of water crashing and crashing into its depthless trough. If I had thought he would allow it, I believe I would have embraced him. What was enacted there, in cries of pain and wildly aimed blows, was, I suppose, some version, for me, of the parting scene that had not played itself out between me and Mrs Gray, so that I welcomed even this poor simulacrum of what had been withheld and what I so piercingly missed.
In the days immediately following Mrs Gray’s flight I think what I felt most strongly was fear. I found myself abandoned and astray in a place that was alien to me, a place I had not known existed, and in which I suspected I had not the experience or the fortitude necessary to survive without suffering grave damage. This was grown-up territory, where I should not have to be. Who would rescue me, who would follow and find me and lead me back to be again among the scenes and the safety I had known before that bewitched summer? I clung to my mother as I had not done since I was an infant. I should say that although I thought it impossible for her not to have heard the scandalous news of Mrs Gray and me—it might have been put about by a town crier, such was the instantaneity and volume of the gossip as it flew from street corner to church gate to kitchen nook and back again—she uttered not a single word about it, to me, and surely not to anyone else. Perhaps she also was afraid, perhaps for her also it was a strange and terrifying territory my salacious doings had landed her in.
Oh, but what a good son I was now, attentive, grave, studious, dutiful far beyond the call of duty. How prompt I was to run a household errand for my mother, with what patience and sympathy did I listen to her complaints, her grievances, her denunciations of our lodgers’ laziness, venality and neglect of personal hygiene. It was all a sham, of course. If Mrs Gray had bethought herself and come back as suddenly as she had gone, a thing that seemed to me not at all impossible, I would have flung myself upon her with all the old ardour, the old recklessness. For it was not discovery and disgrace, not the town’s gossips or my mother’s unspoken accusations, that made me tremble with fear. What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it; that, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean. Or rather say a Theseus, abandoned on Naxos while Ariadne hastened off about her uncaring business.
What was striking too was the silence that I felt around me. The town was humming with talk and I was the only one nobody spoke to. I welcomed Billy’s onslaught that day in the Forge, for it made a noise, at least, and was aimed at me, uniquely. There will have been those in the town who were genuinely shocked and scandalised, but those too who will have secretly envied Mrs Gray and me, the one lot not necessarily exclusive of the other. And everyone, to be sure, must have been vastly entertained, even those few who might have sympathised with us, disgraced, bereft and wounded as we were. I fully expected Father Priest to come calling again, this time to recommend that I be incarcerated among the Trappists on some sheep-flecked mountainside in remotest Alpland, but even he kept his distance, and his peace. Perhaps he was embarrassed. Perhaps, I ask myself uneasily, they were all embarrassed, even as they rubbed their hands in relish at the scandal? I would have preferred them to be outraged. It would have seemed more—what shall I say?—more respectful of the great thing Mrs Gray and I had made between us and that was now no more.
I waited, confidently at first but then with deepening bitterness, for Mrs Gray to send me something, a word, a valediction from afar, but nothing came. How would she have communicated with me? She could hardly have sent a letter through the post to me, to my mother’s house. But wait—how did we communicate before, when our affair was still going on? There was a telephone in the overflowing cubby-hole beside the kitchen that my mother called her office, it was an antiquated model with a handle at the side that had to be cranked to get a connection to the operator, but I would never have called Mrs Gray on it, and she would never have dreamed of calling me, for apart from anything else the operator always listened in, she could be heard on the line, making curious shiftings and excited, mousy scrabblings. We must have left notes for each other somewhere, at Cotter’s place, maybe—but no, Mrs Gray did not go there alone, she was afraid of the woods, and on those occasions when by chance she got there before me I would find her cowering anxiously in the doorway and on the point of flight. So how did we manage? I do not know. Another unsolved mystery, among the many mysteries. There was an occasion when through some mix-up she did not come when she was supposed to, and I waited for her through an agonised afternoon, increasingly convinced that she would appear no more, that she was lost to me for ever. That was the single occasion I can recall when the lines of communication between us broke down—but what lines were they, and where were they laid?
I did not dream about her, after she was gone, or if I did I forgot what I had dreamed. My sleeping mind was more merciful than the waking one, which never tired of tormenting me. Well, yes, it did tire of its sport, eventually. Nothing so intense could last for long. Or might it have, if I had truly loved her, with selfless passion, as they say, as people are said to have loved in olden times? Such a love would have destroyed me, surely, as it used to destroy the heroes and the heroines in the old books. But what a pretty corpse I would have made, marbled on my bier, clutching in my fingers a marble lily for remembrance.
My my, talk about trouble. Marcy Meriwether says she is going to sue me. She telephones half a dozen times a day, demanding to know what I have done with Dawn Devonport, where I have hidden her, her furious voice on the line swooping from operatic trills and warbles to a gangster’s guttural muttering. I imagine her, a disembodied Medusa-head suspended in the ether, threatening, bullying, cajoling. I insist repeatedly that I do not know the whereabouts of her star. At this she does her harsh and phlegmy laugh, followed by an interval of heavy wheezing as she lights up another cigarette. She knows I am lying. If filming is disrupted for one more day, one more day, she will terminate my contract and set her lawyers on me. This she has been saying every day for a week. I will not be paid another cent, she squawks at me, not another red cent, and furthermore she will move to seize back from me the pay I have received up to now. Behind all the blare and bluster I seem to detect a note of relish, for she enjoys a fight, that much is plain. When she slams down the phone it leaves a whirring sensation for some seconds in my ear.
Toby Taggart invited me to lunch at Ostentation Towers the day after my return from Italy. I found him in the Corinthian Rooms, in a plush-lined booth, squirming and sighing and sitting on his hands to keep from biting his nails. What an aggrieved and wounded look he gave me. He was drinking a martini with an olive in it, he said it was his third; I have never seen him drink before, it is a mark of his distress. Look, Alex, he said, softly, patiently, this is serious, his shaggy head lowered and his square hands joined before him over his martini as if to consecrate it—this could jeopardise the whole movie, do you understand that, Alex, do you? Toby reminds me of a boy I knew at school, a shambling fellow with an enormous head that was made more massive still by a mop of glistening black hair coiled tight in wiry curls that tumbled over his forehead and his ears. Ambrose, he was called, Ambrose Abbott, nicknamed Bud, of course, or sometimes, ingeniously, Lou—yes, even in the matter of names he had no luck, no luck at all, poor chap. Ambrose could be heard coming from afar, for he was a keen collector of metal objects—blunt penknives, keys without locks, tarnished coins no longer in circulation, bottle-tops, even, in times of scarcity—so that as he walked he clinked and chinked like a Bedouin’s loaded pack-camel. Also he was asthmatic, and carried on constantly a medley of sighs and soft whoops and faint, rasping whistles. He was immensely brainy, though, and took first place in every school test and State examination. I think, looking back, he had a crush on me. I imagine he envied my pose of insolent bravado—I was already rehearsing for those future roles as dashing leading men—and my proclaimed disdain for study and hard work. Perhaps too he sensed the musky aura of Mrs Gray about me, for it was in the time of Mrs Gray that I came to know him well, or wellish. He was a tender soul. He used to press gifts on me, gems from his collection, which I accepted with ill grace and swapped for other things, or lost, or threw away. He was killed, later, knocked off his bike by a lorry on his way home from school. Sixteen, he was, when he died. Poor Ambrose. The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty spaces of the world.
We had a pleasant lunch, Toby and I, and spoke of many things, his family, his friends, his hopes and ambitions. I really do think him a fine fellow. When we had finished and I was leaving I told him he should not worry, that I was sure Dawn Devonport had simply gone underground for a time and would soon return and be among us again. Toby is staying at the Towers, and insisted on seeing me out. The doorman tipped his top-hat to us and drew open the tall glass door—boing-g-g!—and we stepped out together into the late-December day. Remarkable weather we are having, clear and crisp and very still, with delicate Japanese skies and a sense in the air of a continuous far faint ringing, as if the rim of a glass were being rubbed and rubbed. The poet is right, midwinter spring is its own season. Toby, fuddled after those martinis and further glasses of wine, had begun again earnestly to entreat me in the matter of Dawn Devonport and the need for her to return to work. Yes, Toby, I said, patting him on the shoulder, yes, yes. And back inside he shambled, I hope to sleep off all that alcohol.
I walked across the park. There was ice on the duck pond and on the ice a crazed glare of reflected, warmthless sunlight. All at once, ahead of me, I spied a familiar figure, shuffling along the metalled pathway under the black and glistening trees. I had not had a sighting of him for some while, and had begun to worry; someday surely he will fall off the wagon finally and do for himself at last. I caught up with him and slowed my pace and walked along close behind him. I did not detect the usual fug that he trails in his wake, which was encouraging. In fact, as soon became clear, he has undergone one of his periodic metamorphoses—that girl of his must have taken him in hand again and given him a thorough going over. He does not seem as perky as in previous resurrections, it is true—his feet in particular, despite the plush boots, seem permanently beyond repair—and he has developed a distinct hump above his right shoulder-blade. All the same he is a new man, compared to what the recent old one was like. His pea-coat had been cleaned, his college scarf washed, his beard trimmed, while those desert-boots looked brand-new—I wonder if the daughter works in a shoe shop. By now I had drawn level with him, though I kept myself at a discreet remove on the far side of the path. He was fairly surging along, despite the infirmity of his feet. He had his hands up, as usual, half clenched into fists in their fingerless gloves; now, though, in his resuscitated state, he might have been some champ’s favoured sparring partner rather than the punch-drunk staggerer of previous times. I was trying to think of something I might do for him, or give him, or just say to him, to mark the little miracle of his return yet again from the lower depths. But what could I have done, what said? Had I tried to engage him in even the most bland exchange, about the weather, say, it would surely have resulted in embarrassment for us both, and who knows, he might even have taken a poke at me, sobered and jauntily pugnacious as he seemed. But it cheered me to see him in such fine fettle, and when a little farther on he veered off along the path around the pond I went on my own way with a measurably lightened step.
I must remember to tell Lydia I have seen him, in all his renewed, Lazarine vigour. She knows of him only by repute, through my reports, nevertheless she takes a lively interest in his successive declines and recoveries. She is that sort of soul, my Lydia, she worries about the lost ones of the world.
In the long and troubled years of Cass’s childhood there were certain moments, certain intermittences, when a calm descended, not solely on Cass but upon all our little household, though a doubtful calm it was, heartsick and anxious at the core. Late at night sometimes, when I was at her bedside and she had lapsed at last into a sort of sleep after hours of turmoil and mute, inner anguish, it would seem to me that the room, and not just the room but the house itself and all its surroundings, had somehow dipped imperceptibly beneath the common level of things into a place of silence and imposed tranquillity. It reminded me, this languorous and slightly claustral state, of how as a boy at the seaside on certain stilled afternoons, the sky overcast and the air heavy, I would stand up to my neck in the warmish, viscid water and slowly, slowly let myself sink until my mouth, my nose, my ears, until all of me was submerged. How strange a world it was just under the surface there, glaucous, turbid, sluggishly asway, and what a roaring it made in my ears and what a burning in my lungs. A kind of gleeful panic would take hold of me then, and a bubble of something, not just breath, but a kind of wild, panicky joyfulness, would swell and swell in my throat until at last I had to leap up, like a leaping salmon, twisting and gasping, into the veiled, exploded air. Whenever I come into the house in these recent days I stop in the hall and stand for a moment, listening, antennae twitching, and I might be back, at night, in Cass’s room—sickroom, I was about to write, since that was what it most often was—so poised and hushed is the air, so shaded and dimmed the light, somehow, even where it is brightest—Dawn Devonport by a negative magic has wrought permanent twilight in our home. I do not complain of this, for to tell the truth I am glad of the effect—I find it a calmative. I like to imagine, standing there excitedly on the mat just inside the front door, submerged and breathless, that if I concentrate hard enough I will be able to locate by mental exertion alone the exact whereabouts in the house of both my wife and Dawn Devonport. How I am supposed to have developed this divinatory power I cannot say. In these latter days they reign like twin deities, the two of them, over our domestic afterworld. To my surprise—though why surprise?—they have come to be fond of each other. Or so I believe. They do not discuss this with me, needless to say. Even Lydia, even in the sanctuary of the bedroom, where such matters are meant to be aired, says nothing of our guest, if that is what she is—is she our captive?—or nothing that would suggest what her feelings or opinions are in regard to her. I suppose it is none of my business. When Dawn Devonport and I returned from Italy Lydia took her in without a word, I mean without a word of protest, or complaint, as if the thing had been ordained. Is it that women naturally accommodate each other when trouble comes? Do they, any more than men accommodate men, or women accommodate men, or men accommodate women? I do not know. I never know about these things. Other people’s motives, their desiderata and anathemas, are a mystery to me. My own are, too. I seem to myself to move in bafflement, to move immobile, like the dim and hapless hero in a fairy tale, trammelled in thickets, balked in briar.
One of Dawn Devonport’s favourite roosting places about the house is the old green armchair in my attic eyrie. She passes hours there, hours, doing nothing, only watching light change on those ever-present hills far off at the edge of our world. She says she likes the feeling there is of sky and space up here. She has borrowed a jumper of mine that Lydia knitted for me long ago. Lydia, knitting, I cannot imagine it, now. The sleeves are too long and she uses them as an improvised muff. She is always cold, she tells me, even when the heating is set to its highest. I think of Mrs Gray: she too used to complain of the cold as our summer waned. Dawn Devonport sits in a huddle in the chair with her legs drawn up, hugging herself. She wears no makeup and binds her hair back with a bit of ribbon. She looks very young with her face bare like that, or no, not young, but unformed, unshaped, an earlier, more primitive version of herself—a prototype, is that the word I want? I treasure her presence, secretly. I sit at my desk in my swivel chair, with my back turned to her, and write in my book. She says it pleases her to hear the scratching of the nib. I recall how Cass as a little girl used to lie on her side on the floor while I paced, reading my lines aloud from a script held up before me, reading them over and over, getting them into my head. Dawn Devonport has never acted in the theatre—‘Straight to screen, that was me’—but she says the mountains look like stage flats. She intends to give up acting altogether, so she insists. She does not say what she will do when she stops. I tell her of Marcy Meriwether’s threats, of Toby Taggart’s heart-struck appeals. She looks out again at the hills, ash-blue in the afternoon’s unseasonal sunlight, and says nothing. I suspect it pleases her to think herself a fugitive, sought by all. We are in a conspiracy together; Lydia is in it too. I try to remember what loving Cass was like. Love, that word, I say it and it makes my poor old heart run fast, tickety-tock, its little flywheel fairly spinning. I see nothing, understand nothing, or little, anyway; little. It seems not to matter. Perhaps comprehension is not the task, any more. Just to be, that seems enough, for now, up here in this high room, with the girl in her chair at my back.
Today there was a letter waiting for me on my desk, a letter in a long, cream-coloured envelope embossed with the blazon of the University of Arcady. That rang a cracked bell. Of course—Axel Vander’s safe haven off there on the sunny side of America, where Marcy Meriwether hails from. I love expensive stationery, the rich crackle of it, the shiny roughness of its surface, the gluey aroma that is for me the very smell of money. I am invited to attend a seminar the sobering title of which is Anarch: Autarch—Disorder and Control in the Writings of Axel Vander. Yes, I too was compelled to consult the dictionary; the result was not enlightening. All expenses paid, though, first-class flights, and a fee, or honorarium, as the letter’s signatory, one H. Cyrus Blank, delicately has it. This Blank is the Paul de Man—him again!—Professor of Applied Deconstruction in the English Department at Arcady. He seems a friendly type, from his tone. Yet he is vague, and does not say in what capacity I am being invited to join in these arcadian revels. I might be required to come as the old fraud himself, with limp and ebony walking stick, eye-patch and all—I would not put it past them, Professor Blank and his fellow deconstructionists, to have thought of hiring me as an impersonator, a sort of moving wax-work representation of their hero. Shall I go? JB is also invited. It might be a pleasant jaunt—think of all those oranges fresh off the trees—but I am wary. People, real people, expect actors to be the characters they play. I am not Axel Vander, nor anything like him. Am I?
Blank. I have come across that name in JB’s life of Vander, I am sure I have. Was there not a Blank involved somehow when Vander’s wife died, in suspicious circumstances, as they say? I must look up the index. Could my Professor Blank be this other Blank’s father, or his son? These spidery strands of connection, stretching across the world, their clinging touch gives me the shivers. Blank.
I think it is time Dawn Devonport was returned to the world. I am not sure how to put this to her. Lydia will help, I know. They spend a great deal of time together down in the kitchen, smoking and drinking tea and talking. Lydia has become an inveterate tea drinker, like my mother. I approach the kitchen door but when I hear their voices from the other side, an undulant blended buzz, I stop, and turn, and tiptoe away. I cannot think what things they talk about. Voices behind a door always seem to me to be coming from another world, where other laws obtain.
Yes, I shall ask Lydia to aid me in persuading our auroral guest, our star of the morning, to reassume her role, to step back into her part, to be in the world again. The world? As if it were the world.
I met JB for a drink, not sure why, and now wish I had not. We went at the cocktail hour to a place of his choosing, a sort of gentlemen’s club up a side street, a curious establishment, unremarkable on the outside but gloomily palatial within, pillared and porticoed and sunk in a somnolent hush. The pillars were white, the walls Athenian blue, and there were many oil portraits of indistinct staring figures with high collars and mutton-chop whiskers. We sat on either side of a vast fireplace, in buttoned leather armchairs that squeaked and groaned in weary protest under us. The fireplace was deep, and disturbingly black in its depths, with an ornate brass fender and a brass coal scuttle and gleaming firedogs, but no fire. An ancient attendant in bow-tie and tails brought us our brandies on a silver tray and set them down wheezingly on a low table between us and went away without a word. I thought we were the only ones in the place until I heard someone unseen in the far depths of the room clearing his throat with a long, hawking rasp.
JB is distinctly odd, and grows odder each time I encounter him. He maintains a furtive, anxious air, and gives the impression always of being in the process of edging nervously away, even when he is sitting still, as now, in his high, winged armchair with his legs crossed and a brandy glass in his hand. Toby Taggart tells me it was JB who recommended me for the part of Vander. It seems he was there in the audience that disastrous night years ago when I dried on stage, a tongue-tied, goggling Amphitryon, and was impressed. I wonder what impressed him. What would he not be prepared to do for me had I dragged my way through to the final curtain? Now he sat there, at once glazed and alert, watching my lips intently as I spoke, as if he thought to read from them a different and darkly revealing version of the altogether too innocent-sounding matters that my words were meant to convey. No, he said hastily, interrupting me, no, he was sure there had been no one with Axel Vander in Liguria. This gave me pause. If I wished he would look up his notes, he went on, with a vehement gesture of the hand that was not holding the brandy snifter, but he believed he could say with certainty that Vander had been alone in Portovenere, quite alone. Then he looked away, frowning, and making a faint distressed humming noise at the back of his throat. There was a pause. So Vander, then, I said, had been in Portovenere, in fact. I felt like one who has been discharged from hospital with a clean bill of health but who arrives home only to find the ambulance waiting outside the house, its back doors wide open and two bored attendants standing in the street holding ready the stretcher, with its blood-red blanket. At my question JB turned back, I could almost hear the cogs in his neck grinding, and stared at me pop-eyed, opening and closing his mouth as if to test the mechanism before trusting himself to speak. He did recall, he said, the Nebraskan savant Fargo DeWinter, when he spoke to him in Antwerp all those years ago, mentioning something about an assistant who had worked with him on the Vander papers. I waited. JB blinked, gazing at me now in what seemed a fixed, faint torment. He had the impression, he said, with the wincing look of one trying in desperation to hold on to some fragile thing he knows he is about to let drop, and it was only an impression, mind, the merest hint of a suspicion, that it was this assistant and not DeWinter himself who had unearthed the goods, the real, that is the bad, goods on Vander and his questionable, to say the least, past. I waited again. JB went on staring and twitching. It was I now who felt I was about to let fall that breakable thing. When Cass was a little girl she used to say that as soon as she was grown-up she would marry me and we would have a child just like her so that if she died I would not miss her and be lonely. Ten years; she has been dead ten years. Must I set off in search of her again, in sorrow and in pain? She will come no more to my world, but I go towards hers.
Billie Stryker telephoned. I have come to fear these calls. She tells me there is someone I should speak to. I thought she said this person was a nun and I assumed I had misheard. I really must have my hearing seen to. My hearing, seen to—ha! There it is again, language playing with itself.
I have begun to look at Billie under a new light. Languishing for so long in the shadow of my inattention she seemed herself a shadow. But she too has her aura. She is, after all, the link between so many of the figures that most closely concern me—Mrs Gray, my daughter, even Axel Vander. I ask myself if she might be more than merely a link, if she is, rather, in some way a co-ordinator. Co-ordinator? Odd word. I do not know what I mean, but I seem to mean something. I used to think, long ago, that despite all the evidence I was the one in charge of my own life. To be, I told myself, is to act. I missed the vital pun, though. Now I realise that always I have been acted upon, by unacknowledged forces, hidden coercions. Billie is the latest in that line of dramaturgs who have guided from behind the scenes the poor production that I am, or am taken to be. Now what new twist of the plot has she uncovered?
The Convent of Our Sacred Mother stands on a bleak rise above a windy confluence where three ways meet. Here we are in the suburbs, yet I felt as though I had ventured on to a trackless wilderness. Do not mistake me—I am fond of spots like this, bleak and seemingly characterless, if that is the word, fond, I mean. Yes, give me an unconsidered corner any day over your verdant vales, your sparkling, majestic peaks. My scenic detours will lead you down littered streets where washing hangs from windows and slippered old parties with their dentures out stand in front doorways watching you. There will be slinking dogs going about their business, and children with dirt-smeared faces playing behind barbed wire on waste ground under a charred sky. Young men will put their heads far back and flare their nostrils and stare truculently, and girls in high heels and piled-up hairstyles will preen and flounce, pretending not to be aware of you, and screech at each other with the voices of parrots; it is always the girls who know there is an elsewhere, you can see them yearning for it. There are dustbin smells, and smells of mouldering plaster and rotting mattresses. You do not want to be here yet there is something here that speaks to you, something uneasily half remembered, half imagined; something that is you and not-you, a portent out of the past.
Why would the canny Sisters build their mother house—their mother house!—on such a spot? Maybe the building, painted mantle-blue and many-windowed, as commodious as one of Heaven’s promised mansions, was designed originally for some other purpose, was a barracks, maybe, or maybe a madhouse. The sky seemed impossibly low this day, the bellied clouds as if resting on the ranks of chimney pots and the rooks skimming down in deep, long arcs on to the wind-polished grass, seeming pressed upon by the weight of that sky and steering themselves by the ragged tips of their wings.
Sister Catherine was a brisk little body with a smoker’s cough. I would not have taken her for a nun at all. Her hair, grizzled like mine but cut shorter, was uncovered, and her habit, such as it was, square-cut from grey serge, looked to me like the kind of outfit that librarians and businessmen’s dowdy secretaries used to wear in my young days. When exactly was it that nuns stopped dressing the part? One must go far to the south, nowadays, to the Latin lands, to find the true original: the heavy black skirts to the ground, the hood and wimple, the big wooden rosary slung about the non-existent waist. This person’s legs were bare, her ankles thick. Strain though I might I could not see in her a likeness of her mother. She was home, she told me, on vacation, her word, from the mission fields abroad. At once I pictured a vast sandy tract under a white and pitiless sun, all scattered about with skulls and bleached bones and bits of glass and glittering metal lashed with thongs to painted sticks. She is a doctor as well as a nun—I remembered that coveted microscope. Her accent has a New World edge. She chain-smokes, Lucky Camels being her brand. She still wears those thick-lensed specs; they might have been from her father’s shop. I told her that Catherine was, had been, my daughter’s name. ‘Called Kitty, too, like me?’ she asked. No, I said: Cass.
There was an inner cloister where we walked, a stone-flagged, arcaded corridor around four sides of a gravelled courtyard with an open sky above. On the gravel there were palms growing in tall Ali Baba pots, and a trellis trailing some variety of winter-flowering climber with a pallid and despondent bloom. Despite my overcoat I was cold, but Sister Catherine, as I suppose I must go on calling her, in her thin grey cardigan, seemed not to notice the raw air and the wind’s insidious, icy fingers.
It seems I was mistaken about everything. Nobody knew about her mother and me. She had told no one what she had seen in the laundry room that day. She was lighting a cigarette, and had her hands cupped around a match, and now she looked up at me sideways with a glint of the Kitty of old, scornful and amused. Why, she asked, had I imagined that everyone knew? But I thought, I said in bewilderment, I thought the town was rife with talk of how her mother and I had carried on so disgracefully throughout that summer. She shook her head, detaching a flake of tobacco from her lip. But her father, I said, had she not told him? ‘What—Daddy?’ she said, spluttering on a mouthful of smoke. ‘He’d have been the last one I would tell. And even if I had told him he wouldn’t have believed me—in his eyes Mumser could do no wrong.’ Mumser? ‘That’s what we called her, Billy and I. Don’t you remember anything?’ Evidently not.
We walked on. The wind moaned among the stone arcades. I was suffering the same constraint that used to take hold of me in the old days in face of Kitty’s mockery and sly merriment. And how peculiar it felt, being here with her, after all these years, this tough little person giving off puffs of smoke like an old-fashioned steam train and shaking her head in happy wonderment at my ignorance, my deludedness. They used to say she was delicate; obviously they were wrong. Even if, she was saying, even if it had been proved to her father that for months his wife had been up to monkey business with a boy of—what age had I been then, anyway?—he would have done nothing about it, for he loved Mumser so desperately and held her in such helpless awe that he would have let her get away with anything. Saying these things, she displayed no rancour against me, the me of now or the me of then. She did not even seem to feel I had done wrong. I, on the other hand, was in a sweat of shame and embarrassment. Monkey business.
But Marge, I said, stopping short as I suddenly remembered, her friend Marge, what about her? Well, she said, stopping too, what about her? Surely, I said, she would have told what she had seen. She frowned, peering up at me as though I had lost my senses. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘Marge wasn’t there.’ This I could not take in at all. I had seen them in the doorway of the laundry room, I remembered it distinctly, the two of them standing there, Kitty in her pigtails and her round glasses and lardy Marge breathing through her mouth, both staring in that dull and slightly puzzled way, like a pair of putti who had lighted by mistake upon a crucifixion scene. But no, the nun said firmly, no, I was wrong, Marge was not there, it had been she alone at the open door.
We had come to a corner of the rectangular courtyard where there was an unglazed arched narrow window, an arrow-loop, or loop-hole, I think it is called, affording a view down the hillside to where those three roads converged. We could see cramped housing estates with serried roofs, and parked cars like so many coloured beetles, and gardens, and television masts, and mushrooming water-towers. The wind was streaming steadily through the stone slit, forceful and cold as a cascade of water, and we stopped and leaned into the deep embrasure to get the unexpectedly fresh feel of it on our faces. Sister Catherine—no, Kitty, I shall call her Kitty, it feels unnatural not to—Kitty was shielding her cigarette in her fist and still smiling to herself in bemusement at the enormity of my misconceptions, my misrememberings. Yes, she said again cheerily, I was wrong about everything, everything. The day that she happened upon us in the laundry room was not the day that Mrs Gray left to go back to her mother, that was a month later, more than a month, and Mr Gray had not shut the shop and put the house up for sale until long afterwards, at Christmas time. By then her mother, who had been ill throughout that summer, our summer, hers and mine, was failing fast; everyone had been surprised that she had held on for so long. ‘Because of you, probably,’ Kitty said, tapping a finger on the sleeve of my coat, ‘if that’s any comfort to you.’ I put my face close up to the narrow window and looked down into that populous vale. So many, so many of the living!
She had been mortally sick for a long time, my Mrs Gray, and I without an inkling. The child who had died had torn something in her insides when it was being born, and in that fissure the mad cells gathered and bided until their hour came. ‘Endometrial carcinoma,’ Kitty said. ‘Brr’—she gave herself a shake—‘to be a doctor is to know too much.’ Her mother died, she said, on the last day of that year. By then my heart had healed, and I had turned sixteen, and was about other business. ‘She was cold, all the time, that September,’ Kitty said, ‘though remember how hot it was? Every morning Pa would build a fire for her and she would sit in front of it all day wrapped in a blanket, looking into the flames.’ She gave a sort of soft little angry laugh through her nostrils and shook her head. ‘She was waiting for you, I think,’ she said, shooting me a glance. ‘But you never came.’
We turned and walked back across the courtyard. I told her how Billy had flung himself at me in the Forge that day, shouting and weeping and swinging his fists. Yes, Kitty said, she had told him, he was the only one she had told. She had felt she had owed it to him. I did not ask why. Now we were pacing again under the arcades, our footsteps sharp on the flagstones. ‘Will you look at those,’ she said, stopping, and pointing with her cigarette, ‘those palms. What sort of a thing are they, to have here?’ Billy died three years ago, of something in the brain, an aneurysm, she supposed. She had not seen him for a long time, had hardly known him any more. Her father outlived him by a year—‘Imagine that!’ Now they were all gone, and she was the last of the line, and the name would die with her. ‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘the world will hardly lack for Grays.’
I would have liked to ask her why she became a nun. Does she believe it all, I wonder, the crib and the cross, the miraculous birth, sacrifice, redemption and resurrection? If so, in her version of things, Cass is eternally alive, Cass, and Mrs Gray, and Mr Gray, and Billy, and my mother and my father, and everyone else’s father and mother, back through all the generations, even unto Eden. But that is not the only possible or highest heaven. Among the wonders that Fedrigo Sorrán told me of that snowy night in Lerici was the theory of the many worlds. Some savants hold that there is a multiplicity of universes, all present, all simultaneously going on, wherein everything that might happen does happen. Just as on Kitty’s thronging paradisal plain, so too somewhere in this infinitely layered, infinitely ramifying reality Cass did not die, her child was born, Svidrigailov did not go to America; somewhere too Mrs Gray survived, perhaps is surviving still, still young and still remembering me, as I remember her. Which eternal realm shall I believe in, which shall I choose? Neither, since all my dead are all alive to me, for whom the past is a luminous and everlasting present; alive to me yet lost, except in the frail afterworld of these words.
If I must choose one memory of Mrs Gray, my Celia, a last one, from my overflowing store, then here it is. We were in the wood, in Cotter’s place, sitting naked on the mattress, or she was sitting, rather, while I half lay in her lap with my arms loosely draped about her hips and my head on her breast. I was looking upwards, past her shoulder, to where I could see the sun shining through a rent in the roof. It must have been hardly more than a pinhole, for the beam of light coming through it was very fine, yet intense, too, radiating outwards in spokes in all directions, so that at every tiniest adjustment of the angle of my head it made a shivering, fiercely burning wheel that spun and stopped and spun again, like the gold wheel of an enormous watch. It struck me that I alone was witness to this phenomenon sparked at this one insignificant point by the conjunction of the great spheres of the world—more, that I was its maker, that it was in my eye it was being generated, that none but I would see or know it. Just then Mrs Gray shifted her shoulder, dousing the beam of sunlight, and the spoked wheel was no more. My dazzled eyes hastened to adjust to her shadowy form above me, and quickly the moment of eclipse passed and there she was, leaning down to me, holding up her left breast a little on three splayed fingers and offering it to my lips like a precious, polished gourd. What I saw, though, or what I see now, is her face, foreshortened in my view of it, broad and immobile, heavy-lidded, the mouth unsmiling, and the expression in it, pensive, melancholy and remote, as she contemplated not me but something beyond me, something far, far beyond.
Kitty let me out at a corner of the cloisters, through a postern gate, or sally-port—ah, yes, how I love the old words, how they comfort me. I was fiddling with my hat, my gloves, a fussed old party suddenly. I did not know what to say to her. We shook hands quickly and I turned and seemed to reel down that hillside, and was soon among those paltry, blemished streets again.
I am going to America. Shall I find Svidrigailov there? Perhaps I shall. JB and I are to travel together, an ill-assorted pair, I know. We have put our faith in the largesse of Professor Blank, our putative host at the Axelvanderfest in Arcady, where I am told there are no seasons. Our passage is booked, our bags are packed, we are eager to be off. All that remains is to shoot our final scene, the one in which Vander comes to bid farewell to Cora, his tragic girl who died of love for him. Yes, Dawn Devonport is back on set. In the end it was Lydia, of course, who persuaded her to return and be again among the living. I shall not ask what deal was done down in that kitchen lair, amid the libations of tea and the sacrificial fumes of cigarette smoke. Instead, I shall wait on the fringes of light as they lay out the star in her shroud and apply the last touches to her makeup, and I shall think, lingering there, before walking forwards to lean down and kiss her cold and painted brow, that a film set resembles nothing so much as a nativity scene, that little lighted space surrounded by its dim, attentive figures.
Billie Stryker too will shortly set out on a journey, to Antwerp, Turin, Portovenere. Yes, I have commissioned her to retrace whatever slime-trail Axel Vander may have left along that route ten years ago. More unfinished business. What things she will unearth I do not care to think but yet would know. I fear there is much that is buried. She is eager to be off, looking forward to getting away from that husband of hers, I do not doubt. I have signed over to her what I have been paid for playing Vander these past weeks. To what better use could I have put such a tainted bounty? Billie, my sleuth.
When I was a child I too, like Cass, suffered from insomnia. I think in my case it was that I deliberately kept myself awake, for I had bad dreams, and was prey to an abiding fear of sudden death—I would not lie on my left side, I remember, convinced that if my heart should fail while I was asleep I would wake up and feel it stopping and know I was about to die. I cannot say what age I was when I suffered this affliction; probably it was about the time of my father’s death. If so, I added to my bereaved mother’s torment by tormenting her with my wakefulness, night after night. I would beg her to leave her bedroom door open so that I could call out to her every few minutes to make sure she too was still awake. Eventually, exhausted no doubt by her own grief and my merciless importunings, she would fall asleep, and I would be left alone, wide-eyed and with scalding eyelids, crouched under the night’s stifling black blanket. I would stay there like that, in terror and anguish, for as long as I could bear it, which was not long, and then I would get up and go into my mother’s room. The convention was, and it never varied, that I had been asleep and had been wakened by one of my nightmares. Poor Ma. She would not allow me to get into bed with her, that was a rule she enforced, this least forceful of souls, but she would pass something to me, a blanket or an eiderdown, to put on the floor beside the bed to lie on. She would reach out a hand, too, from under the covers, and give me one of her fingers to hold. In time, when this ritual had become the norm, and I was spending a part of every night on the floor beside her bed, clutching her finger, I devised my own arrangement. I found a canvas sleeping bag in the attic—it must have been left behind by a lodger—and kept it in a cupboard, and would drag it with me into my mother’s room and wriggle into it and lie down in my place on the floor by her bed. This went on for months, until in the end I must have surmounted some barrier, crossed into a new and sturdier phase of growing up, and began to keep to my own room, and to sleep in my own bed. And then, years later, one night in the immediate, agonised aftermath of Mrs Gray’s departure, I found myself scrabbling in the cupboard for that old sleeping bag, and finding it I crept with stifled sobs into my mother’s room and spread it on the floor, as I used to. What did my mother think? I believed she was asleep, but presently—did she know I was weeping?—I heard a rustling sound and her hand came out from under the sheet and she touched me on the shoulder, offering me her finger to hold on to, as in the old days. I went rigid, of course, and shrank back from her touch, and presently she withdrew her hand and turned over with a heave and a sigh, and soon was snoring. I watched the window above me. The night was ending and the dawn was coming on, and light, uncertain as yet, a faint effulgence, was seeping in around the edges of the curtain. My eyes ached from weeping and my throat was swollen and raw. What I thought could not end had ended. Whom now would I love, and who would love me? I listened to my mother snoring. The air in the room was stale from her breath. One world was ending, without a sound. I looked to the window again. The light around the curtain was stronger now, a light that seemed somehow to shake within itself even as it strengthened, and it was as if some radiant being were advancing towards the house, over the grey grass, across the mossed yard, great trembling wings spread wide, and waiting for it, waiting, I slipped without noticing into sleep.