Swish, and the curtain goes up on the last act. Place: the same. Time: some weeks later. I am at my table, as before. But no, nothing is as before. The geraniums are finished, save for a few drooping sprays. The angle of the sun on the garden has shifted, it does not shine in at my window any more. The air has a new chill to it, there are gales, and the skies all day are a deeper blue and piled high with clouds, dense, billowing ranges of copper and chrome. I avoid all that outside stuff, though, when I can. It is too much for me. The world has become a wound I cannot bear to look at. I take everything very slowly, with great care and caution, avoiding all sudden movements, afraid that something inside me might be stirred, or shattered, even, that sealed flask in which the demon lurks, raging to get at me. Throughout the house deep silence reigns, a silence as of the sickroom. I shall not stay long.
The tragedians are wrong, grief has no grandeur. Grief is grey, it has a grey smell and a grey taste and a grey ashy feel on the fingers. Lydia’s instinct was to struggle against it, vainly ducking and clawing, as though grappling with an attacker, or trying to fend off a pestilence out of the air. Of the two of us, I was the luckier; I had been in practice, so to speak, and had come to quietude, a kind of quietude. When at last I left the safety of my little room that evening, the evening after the circus, the scene that met me was strikingly reminiscent of the one the day before, when Lydia had arrived and I had found her in the hall and she had shouted at me for not coming sooner to greet her. There she was now, again, in her leggings and smock, and there too was Lily, barefoot, just as they had been yesterday—I think I was even holding my fountain pen. Lydia still wore her charlady’s headscarf, and her smock today was white, not red. Her expression… no, I shall not attempt to describe her expression. When I saw her, what came into my head immediately was a recollection of something that happened once when I was with Cass, when she was a child. It was summer, and she was wearing a white dress made of layer upon layer of some very fine, translucent, gauzy stuff. We had just stepped out of the house, we were going somewhere together, I cannot remember where, it was some outing we were on. The day was sunny, with thrilling gusts of wind, I remember it, the gulls crying and the mast-ropes of the boats in the harbour tinkling like Javanese bells. A group of half-drunk loud young men was in the street, all vests and belt buckles and menacing haircuts. As they went reeling past us, one of them, a blue-eyed brute clutching himself by the wrist, turned about suddenly and with a flick of his hand, the palm of which bore a broad gash from knife or broken bottle, threw a long splash of blood diagonally across Cass’s dress. He laughed, a high, crazed whinny, and the others laughed too, and they went on, down the road, staggering, and shouldering each other, like a skulk of Jacobean villains. Cass said nothing, only stood a moment with her arms lifted away from her sides, looking down at the crimson sash of blood athwart her white bodice. At once, without a word, we turned back to the house, and she went off quickly upstairs and changed her dress, and we set out again, to wherever it was we had been going, as if nothing had happened. I do not know what she did with the white dress. It disappeared. When her mother questioned her about it she refused to answer. I said nothing, either. I think now that what had happened had happened out of time, I mean had happened somehow not as a real event at all, with causes and consequences, but in some special way, in some special dimension of dream or memory, solely, and precisely, that it might come to me there, as I stood in the hall, in my mother’s house, on an evening in summer, the last evening of what I used to think of as my life.
With three quick, stiff steps Lydia was on me, pounding her fists on my chest, pressing her face close up to mine. “You knew!” she cried. “Blubbering in picture-houses, and coming back to this place, and seeing ghosts—you knew!” She was trying to get at me with her nails now. I held her by the wrists, smelling her tears and her snot, feeling against my face the awful furnace heat of her sorrow. I was aware of a low animal wailing somewhere, and looked past Lydia’s shoulder and saw that it was Lily, up at the front door, who was keening in this unhuman way—it must have been she, not Lydia, her child’s stricken cries, that I had heard from my room. She stood at a crouch, with her fists braced on her knees and her face a crumpled mask, trying not to look at us as we grappled there. I found myself wondering in mild annoyance what it could be that so ailed her, when it was we, Lydia and I, who should have been crying out in anguish and in pain; had Lydia frightened her, or hurt her in some way, by slapping her, perhaps? The door behind her was open a disturbing foot or so. The evening sun shone through the transom window, an ancient light, golden, dense, dust-laden. Now Quirke appeared in the kitchen doorway, carrying a tall glass of water, holding it on the palm of one hand and balancing it with the fingers of the other. Without surprise, almost wearily, he looked at Lydia and me, still locked in struggle. At sight of him Lily abruptly left off her wailing, and something of Lydia’s fierceness abated too. I let go of her wrists, and Quirke he came forward with a priestlike mien and did not so much hand her the glass as entrust it to her, as if it were a chalice. The ecclesiastical tenor of the moment was heightened by the paper coaster he had placed under the glass, white and brittle as a Host. All these things I noted with avid attention, as if a record of them must be kept, for evidence, and the task of preserving them had fallen to me. Holding the coaster in place during the handing over of the glass, which both of them seemed to feel was essential, required a complicated pas de deux of swivelling thumbs, and fingertips held delicately en pointe. Lydia took a long deep draught of the water, leaning her head far back, her throat, the new and slightly goitrous pale fatness of which I had not noticed until now, working with a pumping motion, as if there were a fist inside it, going up and down. Having done, she handed back the glass to Quirke, both of them repeating the business with the coaster. Lily at the door had begun to snivel, with every sign of being about to start wailing again, but Quirke made a sharp noise of command in her direction, such as shepherds make at their dogs, and she clapped a hand over her mouth, which made her eyes seem all the more abulge and terrified. Lydia, the fight all gone out of her, had pulled off her headscarf and stood before me dispiritedly now with her head bowed, her splayed fingers pressed to her forehead at the hairline, in the attitude of one who has escaped a catastrophe, instead of being caught in the middle of it. The front door standing open like that was still troubling me, there was something horribly insinuating about it, as if there were someone or something out there waiting for just the right moment to slip inside, unnoticed.
“The tea is on,” Quirke said in a sombre, curiously flat voice, like that of the villain in a pantomime.
I could not understand him at all; it was as if the words were all out of order, and I thought he must be drunk, or attempting some sort of hideous joke. Struggling to comprehend, I had that panicky sensation one has sometimes abroad, when a request to a chambermaid or shop assistant spoken three times over in three different languages elicits only the same dull shrug and downcast glance. Then I noticed the sounds that were coming from the kitchen, the homely sounds of crockery being laid out and chairs set in place at table, and when I looked into the room a woman was there whom I did not remember ever having seen before, though yet she seemed familiar. She was elderly, with iron-grey hair, and pink-framed spectacles that were slightly askew. She was wearing my mother’s apron, the same one that Lydia had been wearing earlier. The woman looked to be perfectly at ease out there and familiar with everything, and I wondered for a moment if she might be yet another secret tenant of the house whose presence I had not detected. Seeing me looking in, she gave me a warmly encouraging smile, nodding, and wiping her hands on her—I mean my mother’s—apron. I turned to Quirke, who only raised his eyes and inclined his head a little to one side. “The tea,” he said again, with a heavier emphasis, as if the word should explain everything. “You’ll be hungry, though you won’t know it.” I found his flat complacent tone suddenly, deeply, irritating.
It was Quirke who had brought the news. It always falls to a Quirke, to bring news like that. Someone had phoned him at the office, he told me, and looked abashed at the grandly proprietorial sound of that at the office. He did not know who the caller was, he said, and had forgotten to ask, and now was very apologetic, as if it really were something that mattered. It had been a woman, he thought, though he was not sure even of that much. Foreign accent, and the line was bad. I never did find out her, or his, identity. Tragedy always has its anonymous messengers, in sandals and robe they run in fleet-footed from the wings and fall to one knee before the throne, heads bowed, leaning on the caduceus. Or do I mean caducous? Words, words. No matter, I have not the energy to look up the dictionary, and anyway, when I think of it, both words apply, in this case.
I am running dry.
The strange woman came forward, still smiling, still nodding encouragement, like the kindly old lady in the gingerbread house in the forest where the babes are lost. I shall call her, let me see, I shall call her—oh, what does it matter, call her Miss Kettle, that will do. She was a Miss, I believe, for I feel, on no evidence, that she was a spinster. I noticed the reason that her specs were askew: the earpiece on one side was missing. She took my hand; hers was warm, and dry, and not at all work-worn, a soft warm pad of flesh, the most real thing I had touched since hearing Lily’s cries and coming out of my room. “I’m sorry for your trouble,” she said, and I heard myself, out of unthinking politeness, answer her almost airily, “Oh, it’s no trouble.”
She had prepared one of those quintessential, archaic meals of childhood. There was a lettuce salad with tomatoes and scallions and cut-up hard-boiled eggs, and plates of soda bread, brown and white, and two big pots of tea, each with its pig’s-tail of steam curling from the spout, and square slices of that processed ham I did not think they still produced, pallid, marbled, evilly aglisten. For a moment we all stood around the table eyeing the food, awkward as a party of incongruously varied dinner guests—Whatever will that actress find to talk to the Bishop about?—then Quirke with a courtly gesture pulled back a chair for Lydia, and she sat, and so did we, clearing our throats and scraping our heels on the floor, and Miss Kettle poured the tea.
This was the first of several sombre repasts that Lydia and I were to be treated to over the following days. At times of bereavement, I have discovered, people revert to a primitive kindliness, which is manifest most obviously in the form of offerings of food. Plates of sandwiches were brought to us, and thermos flasks of chicken soup, and apple tarts, and big-bellied pots of stew, discreetly draped in tea towels that afterwards Lydia washed and ironed and returned to their owners, neatly folded inside the scrubbed pots that I had emptied, every one of them, into the dustbin. We felt like priest and priestess officiating at the place of veneration, receiving the sacrifices of the faithful, which were all handed over with the same sad nodding smile, the same patting of hand or grasping of arm, the same embarrassed, mumbled condolences. I did not weep at all, never once, in those first days—I had done my weeping already, in the luminously peopled darkness of those afternoon cinemas months before—but if I were to break down, it would have been at one of those moments when a plate of fairy cakes or a saucepan of soup was pressed tenderly into my hands. But it all came too late, the muttered invocations, the promised prayers, the funeral baked meats, for the maiden had already gone to the sacrifice.
Grief takes the taste out of things. I do not mean to say merely that it dulls the subtler savours, smoothing out the texture of a fine cut of beef or blunting the sharpness of a sauce, but that the very tastes themselves, of meat, vegetables, wine, ambrosia, whatever, are utterly killed, so that the stuff on the end of the fork might as well be cardboard, the strong drink in one’s glass dead water only. I sat and ate like a machine, slow and ruminant; the food went in, my jaws made their familiar figure-of-eight motion, the cud went down, and if it had come out immediately at the other end without pausing on the way I would not have been surprised, or perturbed, for that matter. Miss Kettle in her commonsensical way kept up a conversation, or monologue, really, that was not exactly cheerful but not lugubrious, either. She must have been a neighbour, or one of Quirke’s relations he had called on for support and succour in this hour of crisis, though she seemed to disapprove of him, for her lips went tight and deeply striated whenever her unwilling gaze encountered him. She was a descendant and refinement of those professional keeners who in the old days in this part of the world would have been hired in to set the process of mourning properly in motion with their screeches and wailings. In her talk she touched on the matter of death with a skill and delicacy worthy of a society undertaker. The only discordant note in her performance was those crooked spectacles, which gave her something of the look of a Dickensian eccentric. She mentioned repeatedly her sister who had died, though when or in what manner I was not attending closely enough to register; from the way that she spoke of her and her going, it almost seemed that I was expected to be already familiar with the details. These exchanges, if exchanges they could be called, would have had the potential for large confusions and embarrassments, in other circumstances; here, however, nothing seemed required of me in the way of manners or politeness; I felt like some harmless big beast who had been brought in wounded from the wild, to be cared for, and covertly studied. Lydia sat opposite me, like me mechanically eating, in silence, her gaze fixed steadily on her plate. Quirke was at the head of the table, looking quite the man of the house, mild and solicitous of expression, keeping an eye on everything. There are people who are good with death, they positively blossom in the icy breath of mortality, and to my surprise, and obscure displeasure, Quirke was turning out to be one of them. Each time I met his eye, which was as seldom as I could manage, he would give me a half-smile accompanied by a short, encouraging nod, a close relative to the smiling nods Miss Kettle had bestowed on me earlier, when we had first caught sight of each other, and it briefly crossed my addled mind that perhaps all this—the sympathy, the distracting talk, the meat tea—was indeed a professional service they were rendering, and that presently there would be an awkward moment of coughs and apologetic shrugs, and an invoice, and a fee to be paid. I pictured Quirke discreetly passing over the bill, the reverse of a magician palming a card—the envelope no doubt done up with a black silk ribbon—and his appreciative, silent mouthings as I disdainfully handed over a pouch of clinking guineas. Yes, there is definitely something Victorian about Quirke; he has the proprietorial, jauntily insolent air of a retainer who has been retained so long he believes he may count himself part of the family.
Lily was the one who puzzled me. After her earlier outburst in the hall, she was all surliness and feline shrinking now. She sat beside me slumped over her plate, her face hidden by hanging locks of hair. I know very well how death bores the young, like a glum intruder come to spoil finally an already dull party, but the silence that radiated off her like heat had a furious force to it that was, as I could see even in my distress of mind, directed entirely at me. But what injury had I done to her? As a rule I do not understand human beings, as I am sure I have remarked more than once, but the young I find especially baffling, and always have found them so. Later, in the hall, when Lydia and I were leaving, shuffling off in our sodden sorrow, the child appeared out of nowhere and fairly flung herself at me and clung to me for a second in a violent, awkward, damp embrace, before speeding off again, on those swift, bare, filthy feet of hers. Perhaps she really did want me for a Dad.
By now it was almost night, yet it was hard to get away, hard to find a formulation that would bring the occasion to a close. Miss Kettle was smiling and nodding again, and Quirke stood by saying nothing, but looking serious and thoughtfully benign. We might have been children, Lydia and I, tired and sleepy after a day in the country visiting a kindly aunt and uncle. The evening had passed for me in a peculiar, crepuscular gloom, illumined fitfully as by wan and slowed-down flashes of a camera bulb. Certain snapshots remained: Quirke and Lydia away from the table, sitting opposite each other on straight-backed chairs, Lydia weeping without restraint, and Quirke, leaning forward earnestly with his knees open, holding her hands in his and gently flapping them up and down, as if he were out for a drive in a gig and they were the two ends of the reins he was wielding; Miss Kettle laughing at something, and then remembering, and snapping shut her mouth, and apologetically straightening her glasses, which at once went crooked again; Lily’s bare arm beside mine, each tiny strand of down on it agleam; the evening sunlight in the window, goldening the draining board and glinting on the rim of a tumbler; my plate, with one limp round of tomato, a bruised lettuce leaf, a smear of crumbled egg yolk. These are the things one remembers.
Our leaving, when we managed it at last, was the beginning of that grotesque parody of a family holiday that Lydia and I were condemned to play out over the coming days. We were all gathered at the front door, us with our bags, and Quirke and Miss Kettle, and even Lily, who had reappeared from wherever she had fled to, and hung back in the shadows of the hall, surly and accusing, like a spoiled young actress who has been upstaged, which I suppose she had been. The last light of evening from the west paled the glow of the street lamps behind us. The lenses of Miss Kettle’s spectacles caught a flash of something and for an instant seemed two blank-faced, shining coins laid on her eyes. Quirke in shirt-sleeves stood in the doorway in the pose of Vaublin’s Pierrot, trying to find something to do with his hanging hands.
“There was only the one?” he said to me.
“The one?”
“Daughter.”
In my mind I clearly saw Goodfellow, who smiled his thin-lipped smile, and winked at me, and faded.
“Only the one,” I said, “yes.”
There were bizarre gestures of aid and comfort. It will seem strange, perhaps, but these, the most bizarre of them, were the ones that touched me most sharply, striking through the otherwise impenetrable shrouds of grief like little shocks of static electricity. One of Lydia’s aunts, a moustached old brute with skin like elephant hide, who I thought had always despised me, clasped me in a mothball-smelling embrace and thrust a wad of banknotes into my hand, croaking hoarsely in my ear that there would be things that would be needed. The man who did Lydia’s garden—I think of the house by the sea and everything in it as hers, now—volunteered to do the flowers for the funeral. The local tradesmen rallied, too; Lydia had to spend days writing notes of thanks. Her chemist passed us under the counter an insomniac’s treasure trove of sleeping draughts that would normally have required a prescription signed by a whole board of doctors, so potent were they. The grocer sent round a box of assorted tinned goods. And there were the letters of condolence, they had to be answered too. Some of these were from people whose names we did not recognise, in places abroad that we had never heard of, academic institutions, research foundations, libraries. They made another version of our daughter, one I did not recognise: the international scholar; I should have paid more attention to what I always winced at when I heard her refer to it as her work. I could never believe it was anything more than an elaborate pastime, like thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles, or Chinese patience, something dull but demanding that would soothe her frantic mind. Late one night, when we had finally got to sleep, felled at last by Mr. Finn’s knock-out drops, someone telephoned, but he was drunk, and rapturously weeping, and I could make out nothing of what he was saying, except that it was something about Cass, and I was still trying to shake my brain awake when he hung up. I have begun to realise fully at last how little I know about my daughter—how little I had known; I must accustom myself now to the past tenses.
On the endless journey out—in real time it took only from early morning until the middle of an afternoon—woe sat like lumpy satchels on our backs, weighing us down. I thought of a pair of mendicant pilgrims out of a Bible scene, bent under our burdens, making our toilsome way along a hot and dusty road leading off into an infinite perspective. We were so weary; I have never known such weariness, it burned in us like the dregs of a long night’s drinking. I felt grimy and sweat-stained and used up. My skin was puffy and hot to the touch, as if it were not blood but acid that was boiling in my veins. I sat slumped in the narrow aeroplane seat, numb of mind and heart, stewing in my crumpled clothes, my bilious frog’s stare fixed on the stylised patchwork world slowly passing far below us. I could find no ease for my physical discomforts, and kept involuntarily heaving little fluttery, whimpering sighs. Beside me Lydia wept to herself quietly, almost reflectively, it seemed, and sighing too the while. Yet I wonder if, like me, she felt behind it all, behind the sorrow and the ceaseless tears, hardly palpable yet never fading, the background hum of relief. Yes, there was a kind of relief. For now that the worst had happened, I would no longer have to live in fear of it. Thus reason, stricken, formulates its wounded logic.
A charming spot it was Cass chose to die in, we saw it first from a turn of the coast road, an untidy amphitheatre of white and ochre and terracotta little houses on a stepped hill at the end of a promontory thrusting out into a white-capped sea of a deep, malignant blueness. It was like something in a travel brochure, only a little more wild of aspect. Byron supposedly did one of his marathon swims from here, thrashing away, club foot and all, to another headland a good five miles off across the strait. There were real fishermen on the harbour mending real nets, and real bars with bead curtains and men in white shirts playing clackety board games, and real ragazzi kicking a soccer ball under the dusty lime trees in the Piazza Cavour. Lydia parked our hired car outside the police station—at the airport I had realised that I had lost the ability to drive, simply could not work the pedals, change the gears—and we sat for a moment motionless side by side gazing blankly through the windscreen at a torn advertising poster from which an unreally perfect young woman poutingly proffered her half-naked breasts. “I can’t,” Lydia said, without emphasis. I laid a hand on her wrist but she shrugged it off, jadedly. We got out of the car, unfolding ourselves from our seats with the caution and infirm laboriousness of the sole survivors of a fatal accident. The square was strikingly familiar—that tree, that stark white wall—and I felt all this had happened before. There was the usual smell of fish and oil and dust and bad drains. A neat little man in a neat, expensive suit came out on the steps of the police station to meet us. Everything about him was made in miniature. He had a small moustache, and wonderfully small feet shod in spotless patent-leather pumps, and very black hair oiled and combed smooth and severely parted at the side. He shook hands gravely with both of us, his mouth pursed in a sympathetic moue, and ushered us inside the station. The building was incongruously grand, an echoing high square temple with pillars of pitted stone and a chequered black-and-white marble floor. Heads were briefly lifted from desks, dark eyes looked on us with remote inquisitiveness. The little man was skipping ahead, urging us on with soft clickings of tongue and lips, as if we were a pair of prize horses. I was never to make out exactly who or what he was; he may have been the chief of police, or the coroner, or Death himself, even. He could not be still, even when we had come to the mortuary and were standing helpless by the bier, but kept bowing from the shoulders, and reaching out but not quite touching Lydia’s hand, or my elbow, and stepping back quickly and delicately clearing his throat behind the raised first knuckle of a tiny brown fist. It was he who took me aside, out of Lydia’s hearing, and told me in a hurried whisper, husky with embarrassment, that my daughter had been pregnant when she died. Three months gone, as they say. He clapped a hand histrionically to his breast. “Ah, signore, mi displace…”
The sheet was drawn back. Stella maris. Her face was not there, the rocks and the sea had taken it. We identified her by a ring, and a little scar on her left ankle that Lydia remembered. But I would have known her, my Marina, even if all that was left of her was the bare, wave-washed bones.
What was she doing in this place, what had brought her here? As if the mystery of her life were not enough, now I must deal with the mystery of her death. We climbed the narrow streets to the little hotel where she had stayed. It was the siesta hour, and all was eerily still in the flat, airless heat, and as we laboured up those cobbled steeps we gaped about in a blear of disbelief, unable to credit the cruelty of the picturesqueness all around us. There were sleepy cats in doorways, and geraniums on window sills, and a yellow canary was singing in its cage, and we could hear the voices of children at play somewhere, in some sequestered courtyard, and our daughter was dead.
The hotel proprietor was a swarthy, big-chested old fellow with greased grey hair and a manicured moustache, a dead ringer for the film star Vittorio De Sica, if anyone now remembers him. He greeted us circumspectly, staying resolutely behind the protective barrier of the reception desk, looking at everything except us and humming to himself. He kept on nodding at everything we asked him, but the nods seemed more like shrugs, and he would tell us nothing. His fat wife, round and thick as a totem pole, had planted herself behind him with her hands implacably folded on her stomach, her Mussolini scowl fixed on the back of his head, willing him to caution. He was sorry, he could tell us nothing, he said, nothing. Cass had arrived two days ago, he said, and paid in advance. They had hardly seen her since she came, she had spent her days in the hills above the town, or walking on the beach. As he spoke he was fiddling with things on the desk, pens, cards, a sheaf of folded maps. I asked if anyone had been with her, and he shook his head—too quickly, I thought. I noticed his shoes—tassels, little gold buckles, Quirke would have been envious—and the fine silk of his too-white shirt. Quite the dandy. He led us up the narrow stairs, past a set of mildly indecent eighteenth-century prints in plastic frames, and applied a large, mock-antique key to the door of Cass’s room and opened it for us. We hung back, Lydia and I, looking incompetently in. Big bed, washstand and pitcher, straight chair with a straw seat, a narrow window squinting down on the sunstruck harbour. There was, incongruously, a smell of suntan lotion. Cass’s suitcase was open on the floor, still half unpacked. A dress, a pair of shorts, her remembered shoes, mute things clamouring to speak. “I can’t,” Lydia said, as listlessly as before, and turned aside. I looked at De Sica and he looked at his nails. His lumpy wife was still there at his shoulder. She would once have been as young as Cass, and as lissom too, most likely. I gazed full into her face, beseeching her silently to tell us what had happened here to our poor damaged daughter, our eclipsed light, that had driven her to death, but she just stood and stared back at me stonily and offered not a word.
We lodged there at the hotel that night, it seemed the simplest thing to do. Our room was eerily similar to the one Cass had been in, with the same washstand and chair, and the same window framing what seemed an identical view of the harbour. We ate dinner in the silent dining room, and then went down to the harbour and walked up and down the quayside for what seemed hours. It was quiet, there at the season’s end. We held hands, for the first time since the days of the Hotel Halcyon. A gold and smoke-grey sunset sank out at sea like a slow catastrophe, and the warm night came on, and the lamps on the harbour glowed, and the bristling masts tilted, and a bat swooped and swerved soundlessly about us. In the room we lay sleepless side by side on the big high bed, like a pair of long-term hospital patients, listening to the faint far whisperings of the sea. Softly I sang the little song I used to sing for Cass, to make her laugh:
“What did that man say to you?” Lydia asked out of the darkness. “The one at the police station.” She rose up on an elbow, making the mattress wobble, and peered at me. In the faint glow from the window the whites of her eyes glittered. “What was it, that he didn’t want me to hear?”
“He told me her surprise,” I said, “the one she told you not to tell me. You were right: I am amazed.” She said nothing to that, only gave what might have been an angry sigh, and laid her head down again. “I suppose,” I said, “we don’t know who the father is?” I could see him, a lost one like herself, most probably, some pimply young savant haggard with ambition and the weight of useless knowledge agonisingly acquired; I wonder if he knew how close he had come to replicating himself. “Not that it matters, now.”
In the morning there was no sea, just a pale gold glare stretching off to the non-horizon. Lydia stayed in bed, with her face turned away from me, saying nothing, although I knew she was not asleep; I crept down the stairs, feeling, I am not sure why, like a murderer leaving the scene of the crime. Perfect day, sun, sea-smell, all that. As I walked through the morning quiet I felt that I was walking in her footsteps; before, she had inhabited me, now I was inhabiting her. I went up to the old church standing on its crag at the far end of the harbour, tottering over the stones shined by the feet of generations of the devout, as if I were climbing to Golgotha. The church was built by the Templars on the site of a Roman shrine dedicated to Venus—yes, I had bought a guidebook. Here Cass performed her last act. In the porch, drifts of confetti were lodged in crevices between the flagstones. The interior was sparsely adorned. There was a Madonna, attributed to Gentileschi—the father, that is, not the notorious daughter—stuck away in a side chapel, a dark piece, badly lit and in need of cleaning, but displaying the master’s luminous touch, all the same.
Candles burned on a black iron stand with a tin box for offerings slung beneath it, and a big pot of sickly smelling flowers stood on the flags before the bare altar. A priest appeared, and knew at once who I was. He was squat and brown and bald. He had not a word of English, and I not many of Italian, but he babbled away happily, making elaborate gestures with his hands and head. He steered me out through an arched doorway by the side of the altar, to a little stone bower that hung a hundred feet above rocks and foaming sea, where by tradition, so my tasty guidebook tells me, newly-weds come directly after the marriage ceremony, so that the bride may fling her bouquet as a sacrifice to the seething waters far below. A breeze was blowing upward along the rocks; I held my face out into its strong, iodine-smelling draught and shut my eyes. The Lord temper the wind to the shorn lamp, says the Psalmist, but I am here to tell you that the Psalmist is wrong. The priest was showing me the place where Cass must have scrambled up on to the stone parapet and launched herself out upon the salt-bruised air, he even demonstrated how she would have done it, miming her actions for me, nimble as a goat and smiling all the while and nodding, as if it were some bold foolhardy prank he was describing, the initiatory swallow dive performed by George Gordon himself, perhaps. I picked up a jagged piece of stone newly dislodged from the parapet, and feeling its sharp weight in my hand, I wept at last, plunging headlong helplessly into the suddenly hollow depths of myself, while the old priest stood by, patting me on the shoulder and murmuring what seemed a series of soft, mild reproaches.
So I began that day the painstaking trek back over our lives, I mean our lives when Cass was there, the years she was with us. I was searching for the pattern, the one I am searching for still, the set of clues laid out like the dots she used to join up with her crayon to make a picture of the beautiful fairy with wand and wings. Was Lydia right when she accused me of somehow knowing what was to happen? I do not want to think so. For if I knew, if the ghosts were a premonition that this was what was to come, why did I not act? But then, I have always had the greatest difficulty distinguishing between action and acting. Besides, I was looking the wrong way, I was looking into the past, and that was not where those phantoms were from, at all. I used to daydream, in those first weeks I spent alone in the house, that Cass would come to live with me, that we would set up together some new version of the old life I had misled here, that we would somehow redeem the lost years. Was it out of these fantasies I conjured her? And did my conjurations weaken her hold on the real life she might have had, the life that now she will never live? The lives.
I have not begun to feel guilty, yet, not really; there will be ample time for that.
That night, after my visit to the church, I had a strange and strangely affecting dream, one that almost comforted me. I was in the circus tent. Goodfellow was there, and Lily, and Lydia, and I knew too that everyone in the audience, although I could not properly see it, out there in the gloom, was known to me, or was a relative of some kind. We were all gazing upward in rapt silence, watching Cass, who was suspended motionless in midair, without support, her arms outstretched, her calm face lit by a beam of strong white soft light. As I watched, she started her descent toward me, faster and faster, still impassive, still holding up her arms as if in a blessing, but the nearer she drew, instead of growing larger in my sight, she steadily shrank, so that when at the end I reached out to catch her she was hardly there at all, was hardly more than a speck of light, that in a moment was extinguished.
I woke, clear-headed, the weariness of the past days all gone, and rose and went and stood in the darkness by the window for a long time, looking down on the deserted harbour, and the sea, whose little, lapsing waves seemed something that was being sleepily spoken, over and over.
There was a storm on the day that we flew home. The plane unzipped the flooded runway and lifted with a howling whoosh. When we were over the mountains, Lydia, on her third gin, peered down at the flinty peaks and snow-streaked ravines and bleakly chuckled. “I wish we would crash,” she said. I thought of our defaced daughter in her casket down in the baggage bay under our feet. What Goodfellow got hold of her, what Billy in the Bowl sank his teeth into her throat and sucked her blood?
It was strange, to be home, what used to be home, the funeral done with and life, in its heartless way, insisting on being lived. I was out, as often as I could be. Our house by the sea was no longer my home. An odd constraint had grown up between Lydia and me, a shyness, an embarrassment, almost, as if we had committed some misdemeanour together and each was shamed by the other’s knowledge of what we had done. I spent long afternoons walking the streets of the city, favouring especially those neutral zones between the suburbs and the city proper, where the buddleia flourished, and abandoned cars sat rusting on their uppers in puddles of smashed glass, and the jagged windows of disused factories flashed with mysterious significance in the slanted autumn sunlight. Here gangs of urchins roamed freely, trotted after always by a grinning dog. Here the winos gathered, on patches of waste ground, to drink from their big brown bottles, and sing, and squabble, and cackle at me as I sidled past, sunk in my black coat. And here too I saw all manner of ghosts, people who could no longer be alive, people who were already old when I was young, figures from the past, from myth and legend. In those vacant streets I could not tell whether I was moving among the living or the dead. And I spoke to Cass, more freely, with more candour, than I ever could have when she was still here, though she never answered, never once, as she might have done. She might have told me why she chose to die on that sun-bleached coast. She might have told me who was the father of her child. She might have said if that was her suntan lotion I smelled that day in the hotel room. Would she have put on suntan lotion and then gone and jumped into the sea? These are the questions that occupy me. I go through her papers, the scores of foolscap sheets she left behind her at the hotel. She would be proud of me, my scholarly application; I am as intent as any sizar under his lamp. Handwritten, largely illegible, they seemed a chaos, at first, all out of sequence, with no rhyme or reason to them that I could discern. Then, gradually, a pattern began to emerge, no, not a pattern, nothing so definite as a pattern—an aura, rather, a faint, flickering glow of almost-meaning. They seem to be in part a diary, though the things she records, the events and encounters, are fantastical in tone, impossibly coloured. Is it perhaps a story she was inventing, to amuse herself, or ward off the accumulating horrors in her head? There are certain recurrences, a name, or merely an initial, a place revisited again and again, a word repeatedly underlined. There are accounts of expulsions, deaths, extinctions, lost identities. Everything spins and swirls in the maelstrom of her imaginings. And at the core of it all there is an absence, an empty space where once there was something, or someone, who has removed himself. Though the pages are unnumbered, of course, I am convinced that some are missing: discarded, destroyed—or purloined? I feel for the gaps, the empty places, moving my mind like a blind man’s fingers over the words, which still refuse to give up their secret. Am I going to have another ghost haunting me now, one I cannot even see, one impossible to recognise?
Then, at other times, I tell myself it is all in my fancy, that these are no more than the disjointed, desperate last vagaries of a dying mind. Yet I do not give up hope that one day these pages will speak to me, in that known voice, telling me all that I may or may not want to know.
I saw her, once more, a last time, I think it will be. I had gone down to the old house to collect my things. It was one of those smoked-glass autumn days, all sky and cloud and tawny distances. Quirke arrived while I was packing, and stood in the bedroom doorway in his blazer and his fish-grey slip-ons, leaning with one hand on the jamb, a thumb nervously working. After some huffing and throat-clearing he asked about Cass. “She got into difficulties,” I said, “she got into difficulties, and drowned.” He nodded, with a solemn frown. He seemed about to speak again, but changed his mind. I turned to him, expectantly, hopefully, even. Often with Quirke I had the feeling, and I had it again now, that he was about to impart some large and vital piece of information or instruction, some essential fact that is known to everyone, except me. He stands there, frowning, somewhat pop-eyed, amused a little despite himself, seeming to ponder the wisdom of disclosing to me at last the banal but all-important secret. Then the moment passes, and he gives himself a sort of mental shake, and is what he was before, just Quirke, and not the grave repository of momentous knowledge at all.
“When did your wife die? ” I said.
He blinked. “My missus?”
I was stacking books in a cardboard box.
“Yes. I used to see a ghost here, I thought at one time it might be her.”
He was shaking his head slowly, I fancied I could almost hear it turning on its cogs.
“My missus didn’t die,” he said, “who told you that? She ran off with a traveller.”
“A…?”
“Travelling salesman. Shoes.” He gave a mournful, angry laugh. “The bitch.”
He helped me to carry my bags and boxes of books downstairs. I told him I intended to give the house to the girl. “Not to you, mind,” I said. “To Lily.” He had stopped on the last step of the stair, and stood now, leaning forward with a heavy suitcase in each hand, his head on one side, looking at the floor. “There is only one condition,” I said, “that she doesn’t sell it. I want her to live here.” I could see him deciding, with a sort of click, to believe I was in earnest. Already the light of anticipation was dawning in his eye; I suspect he was as much looking forward to drawing up the papers as he was to getting his hands, even if at one remove, on my property. He put down the bags as if all his troubles were in them, and straightened, unable to keep himself from grinning.
Yes, I shall give her the house. I hope that she will live here. I hope she will let me visit her, la jeune châtelaine. I have all kinds of wild ideas, mad projects. We might fix up the place between us, she and I. What is it the estate agents say?—major refurbishments. Why, we might even take in lodgers again! I shall ask her if I may keep my little room. I might write something about the town, a history, a topography, learn the place names at last. Yes, yes, all kinds of plans, there is time enough, and my! how slowly it goes. When I have got back the knack of driving we shall go for a jaunt around the country in search of that circus, have Goodfellow do his dance for us again, and this time hypnotise me, perhaps, and lay all my ghosts. Or I could take her with me back to that village clinging to its rocky hillside on that cerulean sea, and climb those cobbled streets again and grab De Sica by the throat and say that I will throttle him unless he tells me all he knows. Vain thoughts, vain fancies.
I walked into the kitchen. When I looked through the window, Cass was outside. She was standing on the rise beyond what once had been the vegetable garden, by the half-grown birch tree there. She was wearing an unbelted green dress that left her arms and her long calves bare. I noticed the echo between her glimmering skin and the silver-white bark of the tree. She had the child with her, though when I say it was the child I mean it was as always only the notion of a child, hardly even an image, a wavering transparency. Seeming to see me at the window she turned and started toward the house. In her green tunic and thonged sandals she might have been striding out of Arcady to meet me. As she advanced along the overgrown garden path the air pressed the stuff of her smock-dress against her, and I thought, not for the first time, how like one of Botticelli’s girls she looked—even, like them, a little mannish. She came into the room and frowned and glanced about sharply, as if she had expected someone else to be here. One arm was lifted higher than her head, the hand open as if to catch some flung or flying thing out of the air. There was a brimming in her, an exaltation. Her eyes had a dazzlingly virescent shine. Her warm breath brushed my cheek, I swear it did. Remembered zephyr! How real she seemed, an incarnation sent ahead to greet me while the other she, the goddess of the birches, tarried outside, sheathing her arrows and unstringing her gilded bow. Cass! The glimmering brow, the aureole of russet hair, the fine-drawn nose with its saddle of apple-flecks, those grey-green eyes that are mine, the long pale pillar of neck. A pang went through me and I reached out a faltering hand to touch her, and I spoke her name, and she seemed to pause, and shiver, as if she had indeed heard me, and then at once she was gone, leaving only the glistening chord of her passing, that faded, and fell. Outside, in the garden, the bright day stood, a gold man, stilled in startlement. Die Sonne, sie scheinet all-gemein… I turned to the room again and there Lily was, leaning sideways on one leg and looking past me eagerly to the window, trying to see what I had seen, or perhaps not interested in me or my ghosts at all, perhaps just looking out into the world, the great world, waiting for her. Of Cass there was no sign, no sign at all. The living are too much for the dead. Lily was saying something. I could not hear her.
Blossom, speed thee well. The bud is in flower. Things can go wrong. My Marina, my Miranda, oh, my Perdita.