Ancient Light Part 4

In the end I opted to risk the bed. I padded softly around the side of it, and out of habit took off my watch and set it down on the little gla.s.s-topped table there. The clink that it made, of metal on gla.s.s, brought suddenly back to me all those nighttime vigils spent beside Ca.s.s's sick-bed when she was little, the unquiet darkness and the staled air, and the child felled there and seeming not to sleep but to be away in some half-tormented trance. Slipping soundlessly out of my shoes, but still dressed, with even my jacket b.u.t.tons demurely done, and without drawing back the covers, I lay down, very cautiously-though even so a few springs deep in the mattress tw.a.n.ged, in jubilant derision, so it sounded-and stretched out on my back beside the sleeping woman and folded my hands on my breast. She stirred and snuffled a bit but did not wake. If she had woken, and turned to see me there, what a fright she would have got, thinking that surely a corpse all neatly parcelled in its funeral suit had been laid out beside her while she slept. She was resting on her side, facing away from me. Against the backdrop of the dimly illumined window the high curve of her hip might have been the outline of a graceful hill seen at a distance in the darkness against a sallowly lit sky; I have always admired this view of the female form, at once monumental and homely. Her snores made a delicate rattling in the pa.s.sages of her nostrils. Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead. I wondered what Dawn Devonport might be dreaming of, although I have the theory, based on no grounds whatever, that snoring precludes dreaming. For my part, I was in that state of late-night hallucinated wakefulness that makes the very notion of sleep seem preposterous, yet presently I felt myself to be suddenly stepping off a footpath and missing my step, and I came to with a jolt that made the bed recoil, and realised I had drifted into a sort of sleep, after all.

Dawn Devonport, too, had woken. She was as she had been before, lying on her side, and did not move, but she had stopped snoring and her stillness was that of one awake and intently attending. She was so still I thought she might be rigid with fear-it was entirely possible that she did not remember how she had come to be here, in someone else's bed, in the middle of the night, with that ghastly light in the window and the snow falling outside. Discreetly I cleared my throat. Should I slide from the bed and slip out of the room and take myself off downstairs again-Senor Sorran might still be in the bar, broaching another bottle of Argentinian red-so that she might think I had been only the figment of a dream and thus rea.s.sured drift back into sleep? I was juggling these alternatives, none of them persuasive, when I felt the bed begin to tremble, or quake, in a way I could not at first account for. Then I understood the cause. Dawn Devonport was weeping, m.u.f.fling violent sobs and making hardly a sound. I was shocked, and my hands on my breast clutched at each other in a spasm of fright. The sound of a woman sobbing to herself in the darkness is a terrible thing. What was I to do? How was I to console her-was I required to console her? Was anything at all to be asked of me? I was trying to recall the words of a silly little ditty that I used to sing with Ca.s.s when she was small, something about lying in bed on one's back and getting tears in one's ears-how Ca.s.s used to laugh-and in the extremity of the moment I think I, too, would have begun to weep had Dawn Devonport not reared up suddenly, giving the sheet and the blanket a mighty yank, and fairly flung herself from the bed with a wordless exclamation of what seemed anger and run from the room, leaving the door wide open behind her.

I switched on the lamp and sat up, blinking, and swung my legs over the side of the bed and set my stockinged feet on the floor. Weariness settled all at once on my bowed shoulders, like the weight of all that snow outside, or of the night itself, the great dome of darkness all above me. My feet were cold. I wriggled them into their shoes, and leaned forwards, but then just stayed leaning there, my arms hanging, incapable even of doing up the laces. There are moments, infrequent though marked, when it seems that by some tiny shift or lapse in time I have become misplaced, have outstripped or lagged behind myself. It is not that I think myself lost, or astray, or even that it is inappropriate to be where I am. It is just that somehow I am in a place, I mean a place in time-what an odd way language has of putting things-at which I have not arrived of my own volition. And for that moment I am helpless, so much so that I imagine I will not be able to move on to the next place, or go back to the place where I was before-that I will not be able to stir at all, but will have to remain there, sunk in perplexity, mured in this incomprehensible fermata. But always, of course, the moment pa.s.ses, as it pa.s.sed now, and I got myself to my feet and shuffled in my unlaced shoes to the door Dawn Devonport had left open, and shut it, and returned and switched off the lamp, and lay down again, still in my clothes, with my tie still knotted, and pa.s.sed at once into blessed oblivion, as if a panel had opened in the night's wall and I had been slid on a slab into the dark and shut away there.

We never did make the crossing to Portovenere, Dawn Devonport and I. Perhaps I had never intended that we should. We might have gone, there was nothing to stop us-unless it was everything, of course-for despite the winter storms the ferries were operating and the roads were open. She, it turned out, had known all along that it was in the little port across the bay that my daughter died-she had heard it from Billie Stryker, I imagine, or Toby Taggart, for it was no secret, after all. She did not ask why I had chosen not to tell her myself, why I had pretended to have picked our destination at random. I expect she thought I had a plan, a programme, a scheme of my own, one that she might as well go along with, for want of better. Perhaps she did not think anything at all, just let herself be taken away, as if she had no choice and were glad of it. "Keats died here," she said, "didn't he, drown or something?" We were walking on the front below the hotel in our overcoats and m.u.f.flers. No, I told her, that was Sh.e.l.ley. She paid no attention. "I'm like him, like Keats," she said, narrowing her eyes at the turbulent horizon. "I'm living a posthumous existence-isn't that what he said of himself somewhere?" She laughed briefly, seeming pleased with herself.

It was morning, and the disturbances and interrupted sleep of the night before had left me in a chafed and shaky state, and I felt as raw as a freshly peeled stick. Dawn Devonport on the other hand was preternaturally calm, not to say dazed. The hospital must have given her tranquillisers to take with her on the trip-her doctor, the nice Indian, had not wanted her to come at all-and she was remote and slightly bleared, and looked on everything around her with a sceptical expression, as if she were sure it had all been got up to deceive her. Every so often her attention would focus and she would peer at her watch, narrowing her eyes and frowning, as if something momentous that had been meant to happen were being inexplicably delayed. I told her of my encounter with Fedrigo Sorran, although I was not sure that in my tired and travel-fevered state I had not dreamed him, or invented him, and indeed I still have doubts. In the hotel that morning there had been no sign of him, and I was convinced he was no longer staying there, if he had been there at all, in the first place. Of her coming to my room, of our chaste conc.u.mbence, of her tears and her subsequent abrupt and violent exit, we did not speak. Today we were like a pair of strangers who had met in a dockside bar the night before and gone on board together in tipsy good-fellowship, and now the vessel had sailed, and we were hungover, and the voyage was still all grimly ahead of us.

He had been on his way back from Leghorn, I told her, when his boat sank in a storm. She looked at me. "Sh.e.l.ley," I said. His friend Edward Williams was with him, and a boy whose name I could not recall. Their boat was named the Ariel. Some say the poet scuttled it himself. He was writing The Triumph of Life. She was no longer looking at me and I was not sure that she was listening. We stopped and stood and gazed across the bay. Portovenere was over there. We might indeed have been on the stern of a ship, steaming steadily away from what was meant to have been our destination. The sea was high and vehemently blue, and I could just make out a bustle of white water at the foot of that distant promontory.

"What was she doing there, your daughter?" Dawn Devonport asked. "Why there?"

Why indeed?

We walked on. Amazingly, impossibly, last night's snowfall was entirely gone, as if the stage designer had decided it had been ill-advised and had ordered it to be swept away and replaced with a few minimalist puddles of muddy slush. The sky was hard and pale as gla.s.s, and in the limpid sunlight the little town above us was sharply etched against the hillside, a confused arrangement of angled planes in shades of yellow ochre, gesso white, parched pink. Dawn Devonport, her hands plunged in the pockets of her calf-length, fur-trimmed coat, paced beside me over the flagstones with her head down. She was in full disguise, with those enormous sungla.s.ses and a big fur hat. "I thought," she said, "when I did it, or tried to-when I took the pills, I mean-I thought I was going to a place I would know, a place where I'd be welcomed." She had some difficulty with the words, as if her tongue were thick and hard to manage. "I thought I was going home."

Yes, I said, or to America, like Svidrigailov, before he put the pistol to his head and pulled the trigger.

She said she was cold. We went to a cafe on the harbour front and she drank hot chocolate, crouched at the little round table and clutching the cup in both of those big hands of hers. An odd thing about those little cafes in the south is that they seem, to me, anyway, to have been something else originally, apothecary shops, or small offices, or even domestic living rooms, that had been gradually and as if unintentionally adapted to this new use. There is something about the counters, so high and narrow, and the way the tiny tables and the chairs are crammed in, that lends the place a makeshift, improvised look. The staff, too, bored and laconic, have a transitory air, as though they had been drafted in temporarily to fill a shortage and are irritably eager to get away and take up again whatever far more interesting pursuit it was they had been engaged in previously. And see all those flyers and playbills around the cash register, the postcards and signed photographs and sc.r.a.ps of messages stuck in the frame of the mirror behind the bar, that make the fat proprietor there-bald head with greasy grey strands draped over it, a scrunched-up moustache, a big gold ring on his fat little finger-look like a booking agent of some variety ensconced at his desk among the sc.r.a.ps and memorabilia of his trade.

You won't bring her back, you know, Lydia said, not like this. And of course she was right. Not like this, nor any other way.

Who, Dawn Devonport wanted to know, frowning and concentrating, who was Svidrigailov? That was, I told her again, patiently, the name my daughter gave to the person she had come here with, whose child she was carrying. Through the gla.s.s door of the cafe I could see, far out on the bay, a sleek white craft, low in the stern and high in the prow, shouldering its way over the purple swell and seeming as if it would take to the sky at any moment, a magic ship, breasting the air. Dawn Devonport was lighting a cigarette with a hand that trembled. I told her what Billie Stryker had told me, that Axel Vander had been here or hereabouts at the same time as my daughter. She only nodded; perhaps she knew it already, perhaps Billie Stryker had told her that, too. She took off her sungla.s.ses and folded them and put them on the table beside her cup. "And now we're here, you and I," she said, "where the poet drowned himself."

We left the cafe and walked up through the narrow streets of the town. In the hotel the lounge was deserted and we went in there. It was a cramped room with a high ceiling, very like the parlour in my mother's lodging-house, with its shadows and its silence and its vague but indispersible air of ill-content. I sat on a sort of sofa with a low back and a high-sprung seat; the upholstery smelt strongly of immemorial cigarette smoke. A grandfather clock, its toiling innards on show through an oval gla.s.s panel in its front, stood in a corner sentry-straight and ticked and tocked with ponderous deliberation, seeming to hesitate an instant before each tock and tick. The centre of the room was occupied by a high and somehow overbearing dining-table made of black wood, with stout carven legs, on which was spread a cloth of heavy brocade that hung low over the sides and was edged with ta.s.sels. On it the busy set designer had placed, of all things, and as if all so artlessly, an antique volume of the poems of Leopardi, with marbled edges and a tooled leather spine, in which I tried to read- Dove vai? chi ti chiama Lunge dai cari tuoi, Belissima donzella?

Sola, peregrinando, il patrio tetto S per tempo abbandoni?...

-but the poetry's gorgeous sonorities and sobbing cadences soon defeated me, and I put the book back where I had taken it from and returned to my seat creakingly, like a chided schoolboy. Dawn Devonport sat in a narrow armchair in a corner opposite the grandfather clock, leaning forwards tensely with her legs crossed, flipping rapidly and, as it seemed, contemptuously through the pages of a glossy magazine in her lap. She was smoking a cigarette, and after each puff, without turning her head, she would twist up her mouth as if to whistle and shoot out a thin jet of smoke sideways. I studied her. Often it seems to me the closer I come to a person the farther off I am. How is that? I wonder. I used to watch Mrs. Gray like that when we were in bed together, and would feel her grow distant even as she lay beside me, just as sometimes, disconcertingly, a word will detach itself from its object and float away, weightless and iridescent as a soap bubble.

Abruptly Dawn Devonport tossed the magazine on to the table-how flabbily the heavy pages flopped-and rose and said she would go to her room and lie down. She lingered a moment and looked at me strangely, with what seemed a strange surmise. "I suppose you think he was Svidrigailov," she said, "Axel Vander-you think he was him." She made herself shiver, wincing as if she had tasted something sour, and went out.

I sat on there alone for a long time. I was remembering-or I am remembering now, it does not matter which-Mrs. Gray talking to me one day about dying. Where were we? In Cotter's place? No, somewhere else. But where else was there that we could have been? Bizarrely, my memory places us in that upstairs living room where Billy and I used to drink his father's whiskey. Surely it is not possible, yet that is where I see us. But how would she have managed to smuggle me into the house, under what pretext, and for what purpose?-certainly not the accustomed one, given that we were in the living room, with our clothes on, and not down in the laundry room. I have a picture in my mind of the two of us sitting very properly in two armchairs set close to each other at an angle opposite the rectangular window with the metal frames. It was a Sunday morning, I believe, a late-summer Sunday morning, and I was wearing a tweed suit in which I was hot and itchy, and in which I felt ridiculous, more nearly naked than clothed, as I always did when I was made to put on my Sunday best. Where were the others, Billy and his sister and Mr. Gray? What can have been going on? I must have been there for a reason; Billy and I must have been going somewhere, on a school outing, maybe, and he was late as always and I was waiting for him. But would I have called for him, given that now I was devoting so much energy and ingenuity to avoiding him? Anyway, I was there, that is all there is to say. The sun was shining full upon the square outside and everything out there seemed made of vari-coloured gla.s.s, and a playful breeze was filling the lace curtain at the open window and making it billow inwards and upwards in ever-swelling languor. I always had a strong sense of estrangement on those Sunday mornings when I was young-the noose-like feel of my shirt collar, the birds at their excited business, those far church-bells-and there was always an air that seemed to waft from the south, yes, the south, with its lion-coloured dust and lemon glare. No doubt it was the future I was antic.i.p.ating, the shimmering promise of it, for the future for me always had a southern aspect, which is strange to think of now, now that the future is arrived, up here in Ultima Thule, arrived and steadily pouring through the pinhole of the present, into the past.

Mrs. Gray was dressed in a rather severe blue suit-a costume, she would have called it-and wore black shoes with high heels, seamed stockings, a pearl necklace. Her hair was done differently from usual, swept back in some way that even managed to subdue for the moment that wayward curl at her ear, and she smelt as my mother did, as I suppose everyone's mother did, on Sunday mornings in summer, of scent and cold cream and face powder, of sweat, a little, of flesh-warm nylon and faintly mothbally wool, and of something vaguely ashen, too, that I was never able to identify. The jacket of her suit was fashionably high at the shoulders and tightly nipped at the waist-she must have been wearing a corset-and the calf-length skirt was narrow, with a slit at the back. I had not seen her dressed so formally before, so rigidly, all interestingly pinned and pent, and I sat surveying her with an impudent and, it might almost be, an uxorial sense of possession. It is a scene from one of those women's pictures of the day, of course, the kind that Mrs. Gray did not like, for I see it in black-and-white, or charcoal-and-silver, rather, she in the Older Woman role while I am played by, oh, some boy wonder with a cheeky grin and a quiff, as pert as you please in my neat tweed suit and starched white shirt and striped, clip-on tie.

At first I did not absorb what it was she was talking about, distracted as I was in studying the complicated system of seams-darts, I believe they are called-in the wonderfully full bosom of her dress, the brittle blue material of which had an excitingly metallic burnish, and made tiny crackling sounds with each breath she took. She had turned her head away and was looking pensively towards the window and the sunlit square, and was saying, with a finger to her cheek, how she wondered sometimes what it would be like not to be here-would it be like being under an anaesthetic, maybe, with no sense of anything, not even of time pa.s.sing?-and how hard it was to imagine being somewhere else, and how harder still it was to think of not being anywhere at all. Slowly her words filtered their way into the inilluminable dimness of my self-regarding consciousness, until, with a sort of click, I understood, or thought I understood, exactly what she was saying, and suddenly I was all ears. Not to be here? To be somewhere else? What was all this, surely, but a roundabout way of letting me know that she was preparing to have done with me? Now, at other times, should the barest suspicion have entered my head that she was hinting at any such thing, I would straight away have set to whining and howling and drumming my fists, for I was a child still, remember, with all a child's conviction of the imperative need for an instant, tearful and clamorous response to even the mildest threat to my well-being. That day, however, and for whatever reason, I bided, warily, watchfully, and let her talk on until, perhaps sensing the vigilant quality of my attentiveness, she paused, and turned, and focused in that way she did, seeming to swivel and train on me an invisible telescope. "Do you ever think of it," she asked, "dying?" Before I could answer she laughed self-disparagingly and shook her head. "But of course you don't," she said. "Why would you?"

Now my interest switched on to another track. If she was really talking about death as death and not as a hint that she was leaving me, then she must be talking about Mr. Gray. The possibility that her husband was mortally ill had been taking an ever-strengthening hold on my imagination, with a consequent bolstering of my hopes of securing Mrs. Gray for myself on a long-term basis. If the old boy were to croak, there at last and gloriously would be my chance. I must not make a move precipitately, of course. We would have to wait, the two of us, until I was of age, and even then there would be obstacles, Kitty and my mother not the least of them, while Billy would hardly warm to the grotesque prospect of having for his stepfather a boy of his own age, and a sometime best friend, at that. In the interval, however, while we were antic.i.p.ating my majority, what opportunities would offer themselves for me to fulfil my childhood dream of having not a bald and inarticulated doll to cuddle and care for and operate on, but a full-sized, warm-blooded, safely widowed woman all of my own, accessible to me all day and every day, and, more momentously, every night, too, a prized possession that I might show off boldly to the world, whenever and wherever I pleased. So now I sharpened my ears and listened keenly to whatever else she might have to add on the subject of her husband's prospective demise. Alas, she would say nothing more, and seemed abashed, indeed, by what she had already said, and short of asking straight out how long the doctors had given the purblind optician I could get nothing further out of her.

But what was I doing there, in her living room, in my scratchy suit, on a Sunday, in the dying days of that summer-what? So often the past seems a puzzle from which the most vital pieces are missing.

Although I grew up in that world of transience and hidden presences, and married a woman who grew up there, too, I still find hotels uncanny, not only in the stillness of the night but in the daytime, too. At mid-morning, especially, something sinister always seems to be afoot under cover of that fake, hothouse calm. The receptionist behind the desk is one I have not seen before, and gives me a blank look as I drift past and does not smile or offer a word of greeting. In the deserted dining room all the tables are set, the gleaming cutlery and the sparkling napery laid out just so, like an operating theatre where multiple surgical procedures will presently be carried out. Upstairs, the corridor buzzes with a breathless, tight-lipped intent. I pa.s.s along it soundlessly, a disembodied eye, a moving lens. The doors, all identical, a receding double procession of them, have the look of having been slammed smartly shut one after another a second before I stepped out of the lift. What can be going on behind them? The sounds that filter out, a querulous word, a cough, a s.n.a.t.c.h of low laughter, seem each the beginning of a plea or a tirade that is cut short at once by an unheard slap, or a hand clapped over a mouth. There is a smell of last night's cigarettes, of cold breakfast coffee, of faeces and shower soap and shaving balm. And that big trolley thing abandoned there, stacked with folded sheets and pillow-cases and with a bucket and a mop hooked on at the back, where is the chambermaid who should be in charge of it, what has become of her?

I stood outside Dawn Devonport's door for fully a minute before knocking, and even then I barely brushed my knuckles against the wood. There was no response from within. Was she sleeping again? I tried the k.n.o.b. The door was not locked. I opened it an inch and waited again, listening, and then stepped into the room, or insinuated myself, rather, slipping in sideways without a sound, and closed the door carefully behind me, holding my breath as the catch caught. The curtains were not drawn, and although the air was chill, there was more brightness than I had expected, almost a summer radiance, with a broad beam of sunlight angling down from a corner of the window, like a spot, and the net curtain a blaze of gauzy whiteness. Everything was tidied and orderly-that missing maid had been in here, anyway-and the bed might not have been slept in. Dawn Devonport lay on top of the covers, on her side again, with a hand under her cheek and her knees drawn up. I noticed how shallow an indentation in the mattress her body made, so light is she and how little of her there is. She still had her coat on, the fur collar making an oval frame for her face. She was looking at me from where she lay, those grey eyes of hers turned up to me, larger and wider than ever. Was she frightened, had I alarmed her by sliding into the room in that sinuous and sinister way? Or was she just drugged? Without lifting her head she extended her free hand to me. I clambered on to the bed, shoes and all, and lay down, face to her face, our knees touching; her eyes seemed larger than ever. "Hold on to me," she murmured. "I feel as if I'm falling, all the time." She drew back the wing of her coat and I moved closer and put my arm over her, inside her coat. Her breath was cool on my face and her eyes were almost all I could see now. I felt her ribs under my wrist, and her heart beating. "Imagine I'm your daughter," she said. "Pretend I am."

So we remained for some time, there on the bed, in the cold, sunlit room. I felt as if I were gazing into a mirror. Her hand lay lightly, a bird's claw, on my arm. She talked about her father, how good he had been, how cheerful, and how he would sing to her when she was little. "Silly songs, he sang," she said, " 'Yes, We Have No Bananas,' 'Roll Out the Barrel,' that sort of thing." One year he had been elected Pearly King of the c.o.c.kneys. "Have you ever seen the Pearly King? He was so pleased with himself, in that ridiculous suit-he even had pearls on his cap-and I was so ashamed I hid in the cupboard under the stairs and wouldn't come out. And Mum was Pearly Queen." She cried a little, then wiped at the tears impatiently with the heel of a hand. "Stupid," she said, "stupid."

I withdrew my arm and we sat up. She swung her legs off the bed but remained sitting on the side of it, with her back turned to me, and lit a cigarette. I lay down again, propped on an elbow, and watched the lavender smoke curling and coiling upwards into the shaft of sunlight at the window. She was crouching forwards now, with her knees crossed and an elbow on her knee and her chin on her hand. I watched her, the slope of her back and the set of her shoulders and the outline of her shoulder-blades folded like wings and her hair wreathed in smoke. A drama coach I once took lessons from told me a good actor should be able to act with the back of his head. "Roll out the barrel," she sang softly, huskily, "we'll have a barrel of fun."

Had she really intended to kill herself, I asked. Had she wanted to die? She did not answer for a long time, then lifted her shoulders and let them fall again in a weary shrug. She did not turn when she spoke. "I don't know," she said. "Don't they say the ones who fail weren't serious in the first place? Maybe it was just, you know, what we do, you and I." Now she twisted her head and looked at me at a sharp angle over her shoulder. "Just acting."

I said we should go back, that we should go home. She was still regarding me from under her hair, her head on one side and her chin resting on her shoulder. "Home," she said. Yes, I said. Home.

SOMEHOW IT SEEMS to me it was the thunder-clap that did it, I mean I think it was by some dark magic our undoing. Certainly it presaged the end. The storm caught us at Cotter's place. There is something vindictive about that kind of rain, a sense of vengeance being wrought from above. How relentlessly it clattered through the trees that day, like artillery fire showering down on a defenceless and huddled village. We had not minded rain, before, but that was the gentler kind, mere grapeshot compared to this barrage. At Cotter's place it even used to give us a game to play, running here and there to set a pot or a jam-jar on the floor under each new leak in the ceiling as it sprang. How Mrs. Gray would squeal when a plummeting cold drop fell on the back of her neck and slithered down along her bare skin under her flowered dress. By happy chance the corner where we had set out our mattress was one of the few dry places in the house. We would sit there together contentedly side by side, listening to the susurrating rain among the leaves, she smoking one of her Sweet Aftons and I practising jackstones with the beads from a necklace of hers the string of which I had broken unintentionally one afternoon in the course of a particularly energetic bout of love-making. "Babes in the wood, that's us," Mrs. Gray would say, and grin at me, displaying those two endearingly overlapping front teeth.

It turned out she was terrified of thunder. At the first crash of it, directly overhead and at what seemed no higher than the level of the roof, she went ashen-faced on the instant and crossed herself rapidly. We had been just short of the house when the rain came on, sweeping down on us through the trees with a m.u.f.fled roar, and although we had sprinted the last few yards along the track we were thoroughly wet by the time we tumbled in at the front door. Mrs. Gray's hair was plastered to her skull, except for that irrepressible curl at her ear, and her dress was stuck to the front of her legs and moulded around the curves of her belly and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She stood flat-footed in the middle of the floor with her arms out at either side and flapped her hands, scattering drops from her fingertips. "What'll we do?" she wailed. "We'll catch our deaths!"

The summer had drawn to an end almost without our noticing-the storm was a brusque reminder-and I was back at school. I had not called for Billy on the first morning of the new term, and did not on any subsequent morning, either. It was harder than ever to look him in the eye now, not least because that eye was so like his mother's. What did he imagine had happened, that I should shun him like this? Maybe he thought of that day in Rossmore when I b.u.mped into him with his tennis friends and his two rackets in their fancy new presses. In the school yard we avoided each other, and walked home by separate ways.

I was in trouble elsewhere, too. I had done badly in my exams, which was a surprise to everyone, though not to me, whom love had kept busy throughout that previous spring when I should have been at my studies. I was a bright boy and much had been expected of me, and my mother was sorely disappointed in me. She reduced my pocket money by half, but only for a week or two-no moral tenacity, that woman-and, much more seriously, threatened to make me stay indoors and apply myself to my schoolwork from now on. Mrs. Gray, when I told her of these punitive measures, sided against me, to my astonishment, saying my mother was quite right, that I should be ashamed of myself for not working harder and for putting in such a poor academic performance. This led at once into the first real row we had, I mean the first that was caused by something other than my unresting jealousy and her amused disregard of it, and I went at her, bald-headed, as she would have said, which is to say, just like an adult-I was very much older now than I had been before this summer began. How darkly she glowered back at me, how defiantly, from under down-drawn brows, as I thrust my face close up to hers and snivelled and snarled. A fight like that is never forgotten, but goes on bleeding unseen, under its brittle cicatrice. But how tenderly we made up afterwards, how lovingly she rocked me in her embrace.

It had not occurred to us, in the golden glare of that long-lasted summer, that sooner or later we would have to look for somewhere more resistant to the elements than the old house in the woods. Already there was an autumnal crispness in the air, especially in the late afternoons when the sun had declined sharply from the zenith, and now with the rains it was chillier still-"We'll soon be doing it in our overcoats," Mrs. Gray said gloomily-and the floorboards and the walls were giving off a dispiriting odour of damp and rot. Then came the thunder-clap. "Well, that," Mrs. Gray declared, her voice shaking and the raindrops dripping from her fingertips, "that puts the tin hat on it." But where else were we to find shelter? Desperate speculation. I even toyed with the thought of requisitioning one of the disused rooms under the attic in my mother's house; we could come through the back garden, I said eagerly, seeing us there already, and in by the back door and up the back stairs from the scullery and no one would be the wiser. Mrs. Gray only looked at me. All right then, I said sulkily, did she have a better suggestion?

As it turned out, we need not have worried. I mean, we should have worried, but not about finding a new place for ourselves. That day, even before the last grumbles of thunder had settled and ceased, Mrs. Gray in her fright was off, scampering in the rain along the track through the streaming wood, with her shoes in her hand and her cardigan pulled over her head for an ineffective hood, and was in the station wagon and had the engine started and was moving off before I caught up and scrambled in beside her. By now we were both thoroughly soaked. And where were we going? The rain was battering on the metal roof and dishfuls of it were sloshing back and forth across the windscreen before the valiantly labouring wipers. Mrs. Gray, her hands white-knuckled on the wheel, drove with her face thrust forwards, the whites of her eyes glinting starkly and her nostrils flared in fright. "We'll go home," she said, thinking aloud, "there's no one there, we'll be all right." The window beside me was awash, and quavering trees, gla.s.sy-green in that electric light, loomed in it an instant and were gone, as if felled by our pa.s.sing. The sun, improbably, was managing to shine somewhere, and the washes of rain on the windscreen now were all fire and liquid sparks. "Yes," Mrs. Gray said again, nodding rapidly to herself, "yes, we'll go home."

And home we went-to her home, that is. As we were drawing into the square there was an almost audible swish and the rain stopped on the instant, as if a silver bead curtain had been drawn peremptorily aside, and the drenched sunlight crept forwards, to re-stake its shaky claim on the cherry trees and the sparkling gravel under them and the pavements that had already started to steam. The air in the house felt damp and had a wan, greyish odour, and the light in the rooms seemed uncertain, and there was an uncertain hush, as if the furniture had been up to something, some dance or romp that had stopped on the instant when we entered. Mrs. Gray left me in the kitchen and went off and came back a minute later having changed into a woollen dressing-gown that was too big for her-was it Mr. Gray's?-and under which, it was plainly apparent, to my avid eye, at least, that she was naked. "You smell like a sheep," she said cheerfully, and led me down-yes!-led me down to the laundry room.

I have a suspicion she did not remember our previous encounter there. That is to say I do not think it occurred to her to remember it, on this occasion. Is it possible? For me this narrow room with the oddly lofty ceiling and the single window set high up in the wall was a holy site, a sort of sacristy where a hallowed memory was stored, whereas for her I suppose it had reverted to being just the place where she did the family's washing. The low bed, or mattress, I noticed at once, was no longer there, under the window. Who had removed it, and why? But then, who had put it there in the first place?

Mrs. Gray, humming, took a towel to my wet hair. She said she did not know what to do about my clothes. Would I wear one of Billy's shirts? Or no, she said, frowning, perhaps that would not be a good idea. But what would my mother say, she wondered, if I came home soaked to the skin? She did not seem to have noticed that, under cover of the towel she was so vigorously applying to my head-how many times in her life had she dried a child's hair?-I had been edging ever closer to her, and now I reached out blindly and seized her by the hips. She laughed, and took a step backwards. I followed, and this time got my hands inside the dressing-gown. Her skin was still slightly damp, and slightly chilled, too, which somehow made her seem all the more thoroughly, thrillingly naked. "Stop that!" she said, laughing again, and again stepped back. I was out from under the towel, and she made a wad of it and pushed it at my chest in a half-hearted attempt to fend me off. She could go back no farther now for her shoulder-blades were against the wall. The belted gown was agape at the top where I had been fumbling at it, and the skirts of it, too, were parted, baring her bare legs to their tops, so that for a moment she was the Kayser Bondor lady to the life, as provocatively dishevelled as the original was composed. I put my hands on her shoulders. The broad groove between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s had a silvery sheen. She began to say something, and stopped, and then-it was the strangest thing-then I saw us there, actually saw us, as if I were standing in the doorway looking into the room, saw me hunched against her, canted a little to the left with my right shoulder lifted, saw the shirt wet between my shoulder-blades and the seat of my wet trousers sagging, saw my hands on her, and one of her glossy knees flexed, and her face paling above my left shoulder and her eyes staring.

She pushed me aside. Of all the things that were about to start happening, I think that push, the shock of it, although it was not violent or even ungentle, is the thing I have remembered of that day with the keenest clarity, the acutest anguish. Thus must the puppet feel when the puppeteer lets the strings fall from his fingers and ducks out of the booth, whistling. It was as if in that instant she had sloughed a self, the self I knew, and stepped past me as a stranger.

Who was it that was standing in the doorway? Yes, yes, I need not tell you, you know already who it was. The lank plaits, the thick specs, the knock-knees. She was wearing one of those dresses that little girls wore then, vaguely Alpine, dotted all over with tiny flowers, pleated, and with a crimpled, elasticated front to the bodice. In her hand she was holding something, I do not remember what-a fiery sword, perhaps. Marge was there, too, her fat friend from the birthday party, the one who took a shine to me, but I paid her scant heed. They just stood, the two of them, looking at us, with curiosity, it seemed, more than anything else, then turned aside, not hurriedly, but in that dull blank way that spectators turn aside from the scene of an accident when the ambulance has driven off. I heard their clumsy school shoes clattering on the wooden steps up to the kitchen. Did I hear Kitty snicker? Mrs. Gray went to the doorway and put her head into the corridor, but did not call out to her daughter, did not say anything, and after a moment came back again, into the room, to me. She was frowning, and nibbling at her lower lip. She looked as if she had misplaced something and were trying hard to think where she might have left it. What did I do? Did I speak? I remember her looking at me for a second as if puzzled, then smiling, distractedly, and putting a hand to my cheek. "I think," she said, "you should go home now." It was so strange, the simple, utter, incontestable finality of it. It was like the end of an orchestral performance. All that had held us suspended and rapt for so long, all that violent energy, that tension and concentration, all that glorious clamour, suddenly in that moment stopped, leaving nothing but a fading gleam of sound upon the air. I did not think to protest, to plead or weep or shout, but did as she bade me and stepped past her meekly without a word, and went home.

What happened after that happened with bewildering swiftness and dispatch. By evening Mrs. Gray had fled. I heard-from whom?-that she had gone back to the town where she and Mr. Gray had come from, to the grand boulevards and the worldly sophisticates about which and whom she had so liked to tease me. It must have been where she was born, for she was staying there in the care of her mother, it was said. The news that Mrs. Gray had a mother was so amazing as to divert me for a moment from my anguish. She had never mentioned a mother to me, unless she did and I was not listening; it is possible, but I do not think even I would have been that inattentive. I tried to picture this fabulous personage and saw an immensely aged version of Mrs. Gray herself, wrinkled, stooped and for some reason blind, leaning at a wicket fence in a sunlit cottage garden profuse with summer flora, smiling in sad forgiveness and holding out her hands in that vaguely beseeching way that blind people do, welcoming home her disgraced and penitent daughter. So strange, so strange even now to think of a previous Mrs. Gray-no, she would have been a Mrs. someone else. That is another thing I never knew, my maiden's maiden name.

The next day, auctioneer's signs sprouted on the front of the house in the square, and in the window of the shop in the Haymarket, too, and Miss Flushing's nostrils and the rims of her eyes were redder than ever. Do I recall the station wagon pulling out of the square packed with household things, and Mr. Gray and Billy and Billy's sister crowded together in the front seat, that seat on which Mrs. Gray and I had so often bounced together as on an enchanted trampoline, Mr. Gray looking pained but with his jaw juttingly set, like Gary Fonda in The Grapes of Noon? Surely I am inventing again, as so often.

Yet come to think of it their going cannot have been that precipitate, for days were to pa.s.s, a week, even, or more than a week, before I had my final encounter with Billy Gray. In my memory the seasons have shifted yet again, for although it was still September I see our confrontation acted out in raw winter weather. The place was called the Forge, near the square where the Grays lived; a blacksmith must have worked there, long ago. The surroundings were appropriate, for the Forge was always a.s.sociated for me, and still is, with a nameless disquiet. Yet it was an unremarkable enough place, where a hill road leading up to the square broadened and turned in an odd, lopsided way, and another, narrower road, little used, led off at a sharp angle into the countryside. Where this road started there was an overhang of heavy dark trees, underneath which was a well, or not a well, but a broad-mouthed metal pipe protruding from the wall, through which poured a constant flow of water, smooth and shiny as moulded zinc and thick as a man's upper arm, that plunged into a mossed-over concrete trough that was always full yet never overflowed. I used to wonder where so much water could be coming from, for it did not slacken off even in the driest months of summer, and was, I thought, uncanny in its unrelenting dedication to its one, monotonous task. And where did it go to, the water? Must have run off underground into the Sow River-can that really have been its name?-a meagre dirty stream that ran along a culvert at the foot of the hill. What do they matter, these details? Who cares where the water came from or went to, or what the season was or how the sky looked or whether the wind was blowing-who cares? Yet someone must-someone has to. Me, I suppose.

Billy was walking up the hill and I was walking down. I cannot say why I was there or where I was coming from. I must have been in the square, even though I distinctly recall making every effort to avoid the sight of that cardboard For Sale sign displayed outside Mrs. Gray's bedroom window like a flag on a plague ship. I might have crossed to the other side of the road, or Billy might have, but neither of us did. My memory, with its lamentable fondness for the pathetic fallacy, sets a raw wind skirmishing about us, and there are dead leaves, of course, sc.r.a.ping along the pavements, and those dark trees shake and sway. Details again, you see, always details, exact and impossible. Yet I have not remembered what Billy said to me, except that he called me a dirty f.u.c.king b.a.s.t.a.r.d and suchlike, but I do see his tears, and hear his sobs of rage and shame and bitter sorrow. He tried to hit me, too, wildly swinging those sheaf-gatherer's arms of his, while I retreated in little skips and hops, bent halfway over backwards like a contortionist. And I, what did I say? Did I attempt to apologise, did I try to explain myself and my base betrayal of our friendship? What explanation could I have offered? I felt peculiarly detached from the moment. It was as if what was happening were something that was being shown to me, a particularly violent sequence from a morality play, ill.u.s.trating the inevitable consequence of Unchast.i.ty, l.u.s.t and Lewdness. Yet at the same time, and I know it will provoke jeers of contempt and disbelief when I say it, at the same time I had never felt such care, such compa.s.sion, such tenderness-such, yes, such love for Billy as I felt there on that hill road, with him flailing and sobbing and me bobbing backwards, ducking and weaving, and the cold wind blowing and the dead leaves scrabbling and that thick skein of water crashing and crashing into its depthless trough. If I had thought he would allow it, I believe I would have embraced him. What was enacted there, in cries of pain and wildly aimed blows, was, I suppose, some version, for me, of the parting scene that had not played itself out between me and Mrs. Gray, so that I welcomed even this poor simulacrum of what had been withheld and what I so piercingly missed.

In the days immediately following Mrs. Gray's flight I think what I felt most strongly was fear. I found myself abandoned and astray in a place that was alien to me, a place I had not known existed, and in which I suspected I had not the experience or the fort.i.tude necessary to survive without suffering grave damage. This was grown-up territory, where I should not have to be. Who would rescue me, who would follow and find me and lead me back to be again among the scenes and the safety I had known before that bewitched summer? I clung to my mother as I had not done since I was an infant. I should say that although I thought it impossible for her not to have heard the scandalous news of Mrs. Gray and me-it might have been put about by a town crier, such was the instantaneity and volume of the gossip as it flew from street corner to church gate to kitchen nook and back again-she uttered not a single word about it, to me, and surely not to anyone else. Perhaps she also was afraid, perhaps for her also it was a strange and terrifying territory my salacious doings had landed her in.

Oh, but what a good son I was now, attentive, grave, studious, dutiful far beyond the call of duty. How prompt I was to run a household errand for my mother, with what patience and sympathy did I listen to her complaints, her grievances, her denunciations of our lodgers' laziness, venality and neglect of personal hygiene. It was all a sham, of course. If Mrs. Gray had bethought herself and come back as suddenly as she had gone, a thing that seemed to me not at all impossible, I would have flung myself upon her with all the old ardour, the old recklessness. For it was not discovery and disgrace, not the town's gossips or my mother's unspoken accusations, that made me tremble with fear. What I was afraid of was my own grief, the weight of it, the ineluctable corrosive force of it; that, and the stark awareness I had of being, for the first time in my life, entirely alone, a Crusoe shipwrecked and stranded in the limitless wastes of a boundless and indifferent ocean. Or rather say a Theseus, abandoned on Naxos while Ariadne hastened off about her uncaring business.

What was striking, too, was the silence that I felt around me. The town was humming with talk and I was the only one n.o.body spoke to. I welcomed Billy's onslaught that day in the Forge, for it made a noise, at least, and was aimed at me, uniquely. There will have been those in the town who were genuinely shocked and scandalised, but those, too, who will have secretly envied Mrs. Gray and me, the one lot not necessarily exclusive of the other. And everyone, to be sure, must have been vastly entertained, even those few who might have sympathised with us, disgraced, bereft and wounded as we were. I fully expected Father Priest to come calling again, this time to recommend that I be incarcerated among the Trappists on some sheep-flecked mountainside in remotest Alpland, but even he kept his distance, and his peace. Perhaps he was embarra.s.sed. Perhaps, I ask myself uneasily, they were all embarra.s.sed, even as they rubbed their hands in relish at the scandal? I would have preferred them to be outraged. It would have seemed more-what shall I say?-more respectful of the great thing Mrs. Gray and I had made between us and that was now no more.

I waited, confidently at first but then with deepening bitterness, for Mrs. Gray to send me something, a word, a valediction from afar, but nothing came. How would she have communicated with me? She could hardly have sent a letter through the post to me, to my mother's house. But wait-how did we communicate before, when our affair was still going on? There was a telephone in the overflowing cubby-hole beside the kitchen that my mother called her office, it was an antiquated model with a handle at the side that had to be cranked to get a connection to the operator, but I would never have called Mrs. Gray on it, and she would never have dreamed of calling me, for apart from anything else the operator always listened in, she could be heard on the line, making curious shiftings and excited, mousy scrabblings. We must have left notes for each other somewhere, at Cotter's place, maybe-but no, Mrs. Gray did not go there alone, she was afraid of the woods, and on those occasions when by chance she got there before me I would find her cowering anxiously in the doorway and on the point of flight. So how did we manage? I do not know. Another unsolved mystery, among the many mysteries. There was an occasion when through some mix-up she did not come when she was supposed to, and I waited for her through an agonised afternoon, increasingly convinced that she would appear no more, that she was lost to me for ever. That was the single occasion I can recall when the lines of communication between us broke down-but what lines were they, and where were they laid?

I did not dream about her, after she was gone, or if I did I forgot what I had dreamed. My sleeping mind was more merciful than the waking one, which never tired of tormenting me. Well, yes, it did tire of its sport, eventually. Nothing so intense could last for long. Or might it have, if I had truly loved her, with selfless pa.s.sion, as they say, as people are said to have loved in olden times? Such a love would have destroyed me, surely, as it used to destroy the heroes and the heroines in the old books. But what a pretty corpse I would have made, marbled on my bier, clutching in my fingers a marble lily for remembrance.

My my, talk about trouble. Marcy Meriwether says she is going to sue me. She telephones half a dozen times a day, demanding to know what I have done with Dawn Devonport, where I have hidden her, her furious voice on the line swooping from operatic trills and warbles to a gangster's guttural muttering. I imagine her, a disembodied Medusa-head suspended in the ether, threatening, bullying, cajoling. I insist repeatedly that I do not know the whereabouts of her star. At this she does her harsh and phlegmy laugh, followed by an interval of heavy wheezing as she lights up another cigarette. She knows I am lying. If filming is disrupted for one more day, one more day, she will terminate my contract and set her lawyers on me. This she has been saying every day for a week. I will not be paid another cent, she squawks at me, not another red cent, and furthermore she will move to seize back from me the pay I have received up to now. Behind all the blare and bl.u.s.ter I seem to detect a note of relish, for she enjoys a fight, that much is plain. When she slams down the phone, it leaves a whirring sensation for some seconds in my ear.

Toby Taggart invited me to lunch at Ostentation Towers the day after my return from Italy. I found him in the Corinthian Rooms, in a plush-lined booth, squirming and sighing and sitting on his hands to keep from biting his nails. What an aggrieved and wounded look he gave me. He was drinking a martini with an olive in it, he said it was his third; I have never seen him drink before, it is a mark of his distress. Look, Alex, he said, softly, patiently, this is serious, his s.h.a.ggy head lowered and his square hands joined before him over his martini as if to consecrate it-this could jeopardise the whole movie, do you understand that, Alex, do you? Toby reminds me of a boy I knew at school, a shambling fellow with an enormous head that was made more ma.s.sive still by a mop of glistening black hair coiled tight in wiry curls that tumbled over his forehead and his ears. Ambrose, he was called, Ambrose Abbott, nicknamed Bud, of course, or sometimes, ingeniously, Lou-yes, even in the matter of names he had no luck, no luck at all, poor chap. Ambrose could be heard coming from afar, for he was a keen collector of metal objects-blunt penknives, keys without locks, tarnished coins no longer in circulation, bottle-tops, even, in times of scarcity-so that as he walked he clinked and c.h.i.n.ked like a Bedouin's loaded pack-camel. Also he was asthmatic, and carried on constantly a medley of sighs and soft whoops and faint, rasping whistles. He was immensely brainy, though, and took first place in every school test and State examination. I think, looking back, he had a crush on me. I imagine he envied my pose of insolent bravado-I was already rehearsing for those future roles as dashing leading men-and my proclaimed disdain for study and hard work. Perhaps, too, he sensed the musky aura of Mrs. Gray about me, for it was in the time of Mrs. Gray that I came to know him well, or wellish. He was a tender soul. He used to press gifts on me, gems from his collection, which I accepted with ill grace and swapped for other things, or lost, or threw away. He was killed, later, knocked off his bike by a lorry on his way home from school. Sixteen, he was, when he died. Poor Ambrose. The dead are my dark matter, filling up impalpably the empty s.p.a.ces of the world.

We had a pleasant lunch, Toby and I, and spoke of many things, his family, his friends, his hopes and ambitions. I really do think him a fine fellow. When we had finished and I was leaving, I told him he should not worry, that I was sure Dawn Devonport had simply gone underground for a time and would soon return and be among us again. Toby is staying at the Towers, and insisted on seeing me out. The doorman tipped his top-hat to us and drew open the tall gla.s.s door-boing-g-g!-and we stepped out together into the late-December day. Remarkable weather we are having, clear and crisp and very still, with delicate j.a.panese skies and a sense in the air of a continuous far faint ringing, as if the rim of a gla.s.s were being rubbed and rubbed. The poet is right, midwinter spring is its own season. Toby, fuddled after those martinis and further gla.s.ses of wine, had begun again earnestly to entreat me in the matter of Dawn Devonport and the need for her to return to work. Yes, Toby, I said, patting him on the shoulder, yes, yes. And back inside he shambled, I hope to sleep off all that alcohol.

I walked across the park. There was ice on the duck pond and on the ice a crazed glare of reflected, warmthless sunlight. All at once, ahead of me, I spied a familiar figure, shuffling along the metalled pathway under the black and glistening trees. I had not had a sighting of him for some while, and had begun to worry; someday surely he will fall off the wagon finally and do for himself at last. I caught up with him and slowed my pace and walked along close behind him. I did not detect the usual fug that he trails in his wake, which was encouraging. In fact, as soon became clear, he has undergone one of his periodic metamorphoses-that girl of his must have taken him in hand again and given him a thorough going-over. He does not seem as perky as in previous resurrections, it is true-his feet in particular, despite the plush boots, seem permanently beyond repair-and he has developed a distinct hump above his right shoulder-blade. All the same he is a new man, compared to what the recent old one was like. His pea-coat had been cleaned, his college scarf washed, his beard trimmed, while those desert-boots looked brand-new-I wonder if the daughter works in a shoe shop. By now I had drawn level with him, though I kept myself at a discreet remove on the far side of the path. He was fairly surging along, despite the infirmity of his feet. He had his hands up, as usual, half clenched into fists in their fingerless gloves; now, though, in his resuscitated state, he might have been some champ's favoured sparring partner rather than the punch-drunk staggerer of previous times. I was trying to think of something I might do for him, or give him, or just say to him, to mark the little miracle of his return yet again from the lower depths. But what could I have done, what said? Had I tried to engage him in even the most bland exchange, about the weather, say, it would surely have resulted in embarra.s.sment for us both, and who knows, he might even have taken a poke at me, sobered and jauntily pugnacious as he seemed. But it cheered me to see him in such fine fettle, and when a little farther on he veered off along the path around the pond I went on my own way with a measurably lightened step.

I must remember to tell Lydia I have seen him, in all his renewed, Lazarine vigour. She knows of him only by repute, through my reports; nevertheless, she takes a lively interest in his successive declines and recoveries. She is that sort of soul, my Lydia, she worries about the lost ones of the world.

In the long and troubled years of Ca.s.s's childhood there were certain moments, certain intermittences, when a calm descended, not solely on Ca.s.s but upon all our little household, though a doubtful calm it was, heartsick and anxious at the core. Late at night sometimes, when I was at her bedside and she had lapsed at last into a sort of sleep after hours of turmoil and mute, inner anguish, it would seem to me that the room, and not just the room but the house itself and all its surroundings, had somehow dipped imperceptibly beneath the common level of things into a place of silence and imposed tranquillity. It reminded me, this languorous and slightly claustral state, of how as a boy at the seaside on certain stilled afternoons, the sky overcast and the air heavy, I would stand up to my neck in the warmish, viscid water and slowly, slowly let myself sink until my mouth, my nose, my ears, until all of me was submerged. How strange a world it was just under the surface there, glaucous, turbid, sluggishly asway, and what a roaring it made in my ears and what a burning in my lungs. A kind of gleeful panic would take hold of me then, and a bubble of something, not just breath, but a kind of wild, panicky joyfulness, would swell and swell in my throat until at last I had to leap up, like a leaping salmon, twisting and gasping, into the veiled, exploded air. Whenever I come into the house in these recent days I stop in the hall and stand for a moment, listening, antennae twitching, and I might be back, at night, in Ca.s.s's room-sickroom, I was about to write, since that was what it most often was-so poised and hushed is the air, so shaded and dimmed the light, somehow, even where it is brightest-Dawn Devonport by a negative magic has wrought permanent twilight in our home. I do not complain of this, for to tell the truth I am glad of the effect-I find it a calmative. I like to imagine, standing there excitedly on the mat just inside the front door, submerged and breathless, that if I concentrate hard enough I will be able to locate by mental exertion alone the exact whereabouts in the house of both my wife and Dawn Devonport. How I am supposed to have developed this divinatory power I cannot say. In these latter days they reign like twin deities, the two of them, over our domestic afterworld. To my surprise-though why surprise?-they have come to be fond of each other. Or so I believe. They do not discuss this with me, needless to say. Even Lydia, even in the sanctuary of the bedroom, where such matters are meant to be aired, says nothing of our guest, if that is what she is-is she our captive?-or nothing that would suggest what her feelings or opinions are in regard to her. I suppose it is none of my business. When Dawn Devonport and I returned from Italy, Lydia took her in without a word, I mean without a word of protest, or complaint, as if the thing had been ordained. Is it that women naturally accommodate each other when trouble comes? Do they, any more than men accommodate men, or women accommodate men, or men accommodate women? I do not know. I never know about these things. Other people's motives, their desiderata and anathemas, are a mystery to me. My own are, too. I seem to myself to move in bafflement, to move immobile, like the dim and hapless hero in a fairy tale, trammelled in thickets, balked in briar.

One of Dawn Devonport's favourite roosting places about the house is the old green armchair in my attic eyrie. She pa.s.ses hours there, hours, doing nothing, only watching light change on those ever-present hills far off at the edge of our world. She says she likes the feeling there is of sky and s.p.a.ce up here. She has borrowed a jumper of mine that Lydia knitted for me long ago. Lydia, knitting, I cannot imagine it, now. The sleeves are too long and she uses them as an improvised m.u.f.f. She is always cold, she tells me, even when the heating is set to its highest. I think of Mrs. Gray: she, too, used to complain of the cold as our summer waned. Dawn Devonport sits in a huddle in the chair with her legs drawn up, hugging herself. She wears no makeup and binds her hair back with a bit of ribbon. She looks very young with her face bare like that, or no, not young, but unformed, unshaped, an earlier, more primitive version of herself-a prototype, is that the word I want? I treasure her presence, secretly. I sit at my desk in my swivel chair, with my back turned to her, and write in my book. She says it pleases her to hear the scratching of the nib. I recall how Ca.s.s as a little girl used to lie on her side on the floor while I paced, reading my lines aloud from a script held up before me, reading them over and over, getting them into my head. Dawn Devonport has never acted in the theatre-"Straight to screen, that was me"-but she says the mountains look like stage flats. She intends to give up acting altogether, so she insists. She does not say what she will do when she stops. I tell her of Marcy Meriwether's threats, of Toby Taggart's heart-struck appeals. She looks out again at the hills, ash-blue in the afternoon's unseasonal sunlight, and says nothing. I suspect it pleases her to think herself a fugitive, sought by all. We are in a conspiracy together; Lydia is in it, too. I try to remember what loving Ca.s.s was like. Love, that word, I say it and it makes my poor old heart run fast, tickety-tock, its little flywheel fairly spinning. I see nothing, understand nothing, or little, anyway; little. It seems not to matter. Perhaps comprehension is not the task, any more. Just to be, that seems enough, for now, up here in this high room, with the girl in her chair at my back.

Today there was a letter waiting for me on my desk, a letter in a long, cream-coloured envelope embossed with the blazon of the University of Arcady. That rang a cracked bell. Of course-Axel Vander's safe haven off there on the sunny side of America, where Marcy Meriwether hails from. I love expensive stationery, the rich crackle of it, the shiny roughness of its surface, the