Ancient Light Part 3

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 ca.n.a.l 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 gla.s.ses 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 gla.s.s 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 c.o.c.ktail 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 gla.s.s 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 s.h.i.+vered, 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 Ma.s.s 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 a.s.sociated in my mind with Ca.s.s'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 s.h.i.+ns 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 Danae!-and the hollows of her shoulders and the undersides of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 s.h.i.+rt. 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 s.h.i.+rt clutching with breathtaking coldness at my chest, and managed to flip over on to my back-at that age, my G.o.d, 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 lords.h.i.+p 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 makes.h.i.+ft 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 gla.s.s 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 Ca.s.s. 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 gla.s.s 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 sungla.s.ses 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 antic.i.p.ated, 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 p.r.o.ne to flashes of irritation, and fussed constantly with things, her handbag, her sungla.s.ses, the b.u.t.tons 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 ba.s.s 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 sc.r.a.ps 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-a.s.sorted pair we must have looked, the obscurely afflicted, stark-faced girl with her scarf and dark gla.s.ses, 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 gla.s.s 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 Ca.s.s 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 a.s.ses. 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 Ca.s.s'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 Ca.s.s-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 c.o.c.ky 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 blus.h.i.+ng. 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 rec.u.mbent 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 att.i.tude and enquired of the diva if she would care perhaps for caffe, 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 disa.s.sembled 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 dispa.s.sion. "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-m.u.f.fled 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 sungla.s.ses 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 bra.s.s 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 s.h.i.+rt. 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 c.h.i.n.k 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 coa.r.s.e pelt. The restaurant was closed; dimly through the gla.s.s 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 rea.s.suring, 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 gla.s.s. 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 fas.h.i.+on, in other circ.u.mstances.

When I moved, somehow my reflection in the gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 Sat.u.r.days 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 pa.s.sages 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 s.h.i.+rttails 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 s.h.i.+eld myself from a.s.sault. 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 k.n.o.b. 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, s.h.i.+very 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 s.h.i.+vering 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 pa.s.sed. 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 a.s.sert 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 bra.s.s 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 a.s.sisting 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 crus.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d himself.

I told her that I did not know what had happened to my daughter, except that she had died. I told her how Ca.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances-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 Ca.s.s'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 m.u.f.fled 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 s.h.i.+ed from the lift-its narrow double doors of dented stainless steel gave off a sinister s.h.i.+ne-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 s.h.i.+mmer 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 att.i.tude, 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 a.s.sumed 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, gla.s.sy 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 fas.h.i.+on. 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 gla.s.s-no, two gla.s.ses. 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 gla.s.ses 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 gla.s.ses 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 Sorran. 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 Senorita 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 ma.s.s 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 spa.r.s.e 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 gla.s.s 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 G.o.ds 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 impa.s.sioned 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 Ches.h.i.+re 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 l.u.s.t? 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 a.s.sumed 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, pus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.s, 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 a.s.surance, 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 ove