Against the Day (158 page)

Cyprian and Theign had remained
poised at opposite ends of the Venice flat. “Suit yourself!” shrieked Theign at
last, off without further formalities for the train that would again take him
to Vienna, where lately, it was an open secret, he had been spending more and
more time. In ordinary circs this news alone might’ve been enough to draw
Cyprian’s soul, frail as a Fortuny gown, through a bright, smallradius ring of
panic. But as his own train headed across the Mestre bridge, bound for Trieste,
all he could consider with any clarity was Yashmeen, dreading what he was now
obliged to tell her, wondering what recourse there could still be left for the
likes of them against the storm gathering, so generally that this time not even
Theign might be able to escape.

“
Hardly the most
hopeful news I could bring you.”

She shrugged. In stays and a
darkplumed hat today, she seemed to stand a foot taller, and spoke in measured
cadences which ran counter to the accelerated coffeerhythms of Trieste. He
remembered how little she needed protecting. How far they were from Cloisters
Court, and the twilit chapel at King’s. “And how likely am I to run into this
Theign person?”

“I haven’t told him you’re here. That
doesn’t mean he hasn’t found out, of course.”

   
“Do
you think—”

She stopped herself, but he had heard
the silent part of the question. “Your trouble in Vienna? I wouldn’t put it
past him.”

She
was giving him a peculiar look. “You two were intimate once. But—”

“Is he the love of my life? Yashmeen
. . .
You
are
the love of my life.” What had he just said?

She appeared to ignore it. “Yes but
you continue to do whatever he tells you to. Now you’re going out there on his
orders.”

“ ‘
And England’s far,
’ ”
he quoted, not exactly in reply,
“ ‘
and honour a name.
’ ”

“And what does that mean?
his
game
isn’t cricket. You’re forever, all of you, banging on so about honour. Is it
from having a penis or something?”

“I shouldn’t wonder.” But he had
thrown her quickly a look she knew she must not respond to.

   
“And
if he’s sending you into a trap?”

   
“Too
elaborate for Theign. He’d simply use a hired stiletto.”

“What shall I do here in Trieste
then? In this Jewish city? While I wait for my man to return?”

Once he would have snarled back at
her, and the phrase “thankless task” would almost certainly have to be deployed
by one of them. But lately he was finding a perverse fascination in Patience,
not so much as a virtue but more as a hobby requiring discipline, like chess or
mountainclimbing. He smiled as blandly as he knew how. “What do they recommend
back at Chunxton Crescent?”

   
“They
have been curiously silent.”

For
a moment it was like watching each other from opposite sides of a deep opening
in the earth. He marveled at the ease with which she could let hope glide away.

“I’ll
put you in touch with Vlado Clissan. He should be able to keep away the usual
sorts of pest anyway.”

   
“When
will you be back from wherever it is?”

“It’s
all fairly straightforward, Yashmeen, just pop over the mountains and back,
shouldn’t be long
. . . .
What are you
doing for money?”

   
“I’m
an adventuress, money’s never a problem, even when I don’t have it. And what is
that look?
This
cannot be about ‘honour.
’ ”

They met at
the Caffè degli Specchi and she was
all, it seemed defiantly, in white, from kid boots he must make an effort to
keep from gazing at to her draped velvet hat and the white egret plume on it,
though the year was darkening and taking on a chill, and the modish ladies in
the Piazza Grande were giving her looks. “I won’t thank you for anything,” she
warned him.

   
“I
hope not.” He glanced about at the overcast day, the indifference of commerce
going on all around with or without them. Electric trams came racketing across
the Piazza, bound for the train station or one of the
Rive.
Delivery
cartmen rolled barrels of coffee down plank inclines and along the cobbles of
the streets. The city smelled overwhelmingly like coffee. Most of the
pedestrian traffic seemed kitted out for some formal, if not ceremonial,
purpose. Boat whistles sounded in the bay. Lateeners and steam vessels glided
in and out. Military personnel of all ranks rambled, ogled, preened, and
glared.

They
lit cigarettes and sat in front of small cups of coffee. “I’ve delivered you to
this,” gesturing at the scene with his head. “I deserve your curse, not your
thanks.”

“It’s
lovely. And where else should I be? If I turned back now, to England again,
what would await me there? At Chunxton Crescent I’m regarded as having, in some
way dark to me, failed. I shall never understand the motives of the T.W.I.T.,
their policies change day to day, they will help me, or not help, and may have
even chosen, as we speak, to work me some serious mischief.”

“But it’s Limbo here. Well, Limbus
actually,
in Limbo
being
the
ablative—”

She
pretended to run him through with her parasol. “If Limbo is a sort of suburbs
of Hell, then it is perhaps exactly the place for me. Between fire and outer
darkness, enjoying the equipoise. Until I receive another omen anyway.”

“That’s
what happened in Vienna? An omen?” He sat blinking. He had not cried since one
drunken evening in Vienna after discovering Derrick Theign in the embrace of a
miserable little fivekroner
Strichmädchen
that Theign had kept insisting
was one of his colleagues. He had resolved in fact to give up tears as an
unproductive indulgence. But now, faced with this attempt at sophisticated
cheer, he was in danger of reverting. He found and clapped on a pair of
bluelensed sport spectacles.

“I’ll
be all right,” she assured him. “You be as well, understand? or risk my
displeasure.”

A
sailor from the Lloyd Austriaco, and quite presentable, too, Cyprian had to admit,
now appeared, working his way round the caffès in the Piazza, holding a ship’s
bell and striking it with a small hammer and a not untheatrical flourish.
Passengers gathered their impedimenta and began making their way toward the
Molo San Carlo. There was this damnable stricture in Cyprian’s throat. “You
don’t have to see me over the horizon,” he croaked.

A tightlipped smile. “I have a light
schedule today.”

The military band did not make things
easier. Having detected a larger than usual turnout of British travelers, and
waiting with some infernal clair

voyance until Cyprian thought he had
a grip on himself, just as he turned to bid Yashmeen a breezy
arrivederci,
they
began to play an arrangement for brass of “Nimrod”—what else?—from
Elgar’s
Enigma Variations.
Teutonic bluntness notwithstanding, at the
first majorseventh chord, an uncertainty of pitch among the trumpets
contributing its touch of unsought innocence, Cyprian felt the tap opening
decisively. It was difficult to tell what Yashmeen was thinking as she offered
her lips. He was concentrating on not getting her vestee wet. The music took
them for an instant in its autumnal envelope, shutting out the tourist chatter,
the steam horns and quayside traffic, in as honest an expression of friendship
and farewell as the Victorian heart had ever managed to come up with, until
finally, the band moved mercifully on to “La Gazza Ladra.” It wasn’t till
Yashmeen nodded and released him that Cyprian realized they had been holding
each other. “Well, I never saw what the big mystery was,” she shrugged, “it’s
only ‘The Volga Boatmen,’ isn’t it.”

   
“No.
No, I always thought it was ‘Auld Lang Syne.
’
”

   
“Oh
but do let’s not quarrel Gonzalo.”

“But of course not, Millicent,” he
chirped back, flashed his teeth, and started up the brow.

   
“Drop
me a postal, now don’t forget!”

   
“As
soon as ever I can!” Adding, for some reason, under his breath, “My life.”

After he had
disappeared behind the breakwater,
Yashmeen strolled down the Riva Carciotti, found a spot, lit up a cigarette and
lounged awhile, beaming mindlessly upon the shifting scene. A cat followed her
back to her room and would not leave. She named her Cyprienne, and before long
they were close friends.

One day Yashmeen, out in the bora,
just for a stillbracing Δt, had a relapse into her old Zetamania. She
remembered that Littlewood, after struggling with a reluctant lemma one winter
at Davos, through weeks of föhn—the bora’s opposite, a wind so dry and
warm that in some parts of the Swiss Alps it is called a “scirocco”—had
reported that when that wind dropped for a day, the solution, as if by magic,
was there. And no doubt because the bora, known in these parts as the “wind of
the dead,” descending out of the Karst, blowing uninterrupted for long enough,
will also—with required changes of sign—have its effect upon the
mathematical mind, as the brain lobes for this sort of thing began to relax,
and strange and even counterintuitive thoughts to arrive from somewhere else
coconscious with the everyday, something similar happened now to Yashmeen. Just
for the instant, the matter was illuminated, unequivocally, something as
obvious as Ramanujan’s Formula—no,

something of which Ramanujan’s Formula
was a special case
—revealed
why Riemann should have hypothesized
onehalf
 
as
the real part of
every ζ(0), why he had needed to, at just that point in his thinking
. . .
she was released into her past,
haunting her old self, almost close enough to touch—and then of course it
was gone again and she was more immediately concerned with the loss of her hat,
flying away to join hundreds of others in migration to some more southerly
climate, some tropical resort of hats where they could find weeks of hat
dolce
far niente
to grow new feathers, allow their color to return or find new
shades, lie and dream about heads that Fate had meant them to adorn
. . . .
Not to mention the need to keep her
manteau from becoming a sort of
antiparachute
which sought to lift her
free of the pavement. She stood disbelieving, hair progressively loosening and
flaring into a wet dark aurora, a grin less puzzled than aggravated turned
against the incoming Adriatic norther, which for a moment, with that rogue
conjecture, had delivered her into shadowy abduction wherever it might have
led, and she could imagine, after all, visiting this coast for its wind, as a
different sort of tourist might a hydropathic, for some miraculous spring, some
return to youth.

And
of course it was just in that instant that she met up with Vlado Clissan, who
was staggering for shelter into the same doorway. The bora, as if
collaborating, lifted her skirts and underskirts without warning over her face,
as if a classical goddess were about to arrive in a cloud of crêpe lisse, and
in the moment one of his hands had seized her, down between her bared legs,
which opened further almost by reflex, one leg lifting, sliding up alongside
his hip to clasp him tightly while she tried in the infernal wind to stay
balanced on her other foot. Her hair, all undone now, lashed his face, his
penis was somehow out in the rain and uproar, this could not be happening, she
only had glimpses of his face, his smile fierce as the storm, he was tearing
the fine batiste of her drawers, she felt every divided second of his entry and
penetration, her clitoris was being addressed in an unfamiliar way, not rudely,
actually quite considerately, perhaps it was the angle
. . .
but how could she be thinking of geometry
. . .
but if she didn’t keep some
attachment to that, where
would
they be taken? Out to sea. Up above the
town and into the immemorial Karst. Up into the Karst, to a vineyard gate and
an
osmizza
just inside that served meals and wine, the lights of Trieste
far below, a wine ancient before Illyria, nameless, windfinished, ethereal in
its absence of color. And because here on this coast wine had never simply been
wine, any more than politics was simply politics—there lay
asyetundiscovered notes of redemption, timereversal, unexpected agency.

   
“I
was down there looking for you. Latewood gave me your address.”

   
“He
said you . . .” Her conversational resources faltered. Had she ever wanted so
much to keep looking into a man’s eyes? What was this? Vlado was not, she must
be clear with herself, in no way was he a substitute for Cyprian, some
desperate bounce she had taken because Cyprian had left, despite her best
efforts to persuade him to stay
. . . .