Athena (14 page)

As always, you had left your mark on the house, it resonated with your absence like a piano slammed shut. I climbed to the room, which already I thought of as
our
room, and sat on the chaise-longue in my wet mac with my knees apart and hands drooping between my thighs and gazed through the window for a long time at the rain spattering raggedly across the rooftops. Have I described the view from our eyrie? Spires and curlicues and beautiful rusted fire-escapes, and a big green copper dome that always reminded me of a cabbage; directly below, on the other side of the road, behind a hoarding and hidden from the street, was a vacant site with flourishing greenery where sometimes, at twilight, a fox appeared, stepping delicately over the rubble with brush down and snout up; beyond that there was a large, stately building, a church or meeting-house or something, foursquare and imposing, that I never could manage to locate when I was at street level. I was cold. Draggingly I turned myself about, a stone statue turning on its plinth, and walked with granite tread to where the pictures were stacked. Of course I had recognised them. I could close my eyes and
see the walls of Whitewater House where they had hung, interestingly gapped now in my mind’s eye, like a jigsaw puzzle with half a dozen pieces missing. I had recognised them and at the same time I had not. Extraordinary, this knack the mind has of holding things, however intimately connected, on entirely separate levels, like so many layers of molten silt. I turned and went to the couch and got between the sheets, wet coat and shoes and all, and lay on my side curled up with a hand under my cheek and felt my eyelids fall as if ghostly fingertips had closed them. Gradually the cold seeped out of my bones and I lay swaddled in my own fug, breathing my own smell, a mixture of wet wool, flesh, sweat and damp shoe-leather.

And here memory, that ingenious stage director, performs one of its impossible, magical scene-changes, splicing two different occasions with bland disregard for setting, props or costumes. It is still Saturday afternoon, it is still raining, there is still that rent in the clouds bright as a magnesium flare, and I am still lying between the smooth new crackly sheets on the chaise-longue, but now I have been divested of my clothes, and A. is in my arms, naked also, or nude, I should say, for she was never merely naked, my pearly, damp darling. That was the first time, as they say; very chaste it was, I can think of no better word, and almost absent-minded, as if we were outside ourselves, half looking away from this strange, laborious act in which our bodies were conjoined; looking away and listening in a kind of subdued astonishment to the far, small noises of a no longer quite recognisable world. The first time, yes, and in a way the last: never again that luxurious, doomed sense of something final, complete, done.

What do I remember? Tears at the outer corners of her eyes, her sticky lashes; the little hollow at the base of her spine, with its dusting of burnished, fair hairs; the hollow of her throat, too, a tiny cup full of her that I drank to the dregs; the sudden flash of her thigh, fish-belly white, with
its thick, lapis-blue artery through which her very life was pulsing. She muttered things under her breath, words I could not catch, and I had the eerie sensation of there being a third with us for whose benefit she was keeping up a breathless running commentary. And once she said No, very loud, not to me but to herself, and went rigid, with her eyes screwed shut and teeth bared, and I waited in alarm, holding myself poised above her on arms quivering like bent bows, and slowly whatever it was went out of her and she gave a hoarse, falling sigh and clung to me, grinding her moist brow against mine. Then she fell asleep.

Once more I am lying on my side, facing as before towards the window and the dwindling rain, cradling her in my arm now as she snuffles and twitches, and my arm has gone numb but I will not shift it for fear of disturbing her, and besides, I feel heroic here, young Tristan watching sleepless over his
Irisch Kind
; heroic and foolish, unreal, anxious, exultant. And slowly there unfolded in me a memory from the far past, when as a child one summer afternoon on a holiday at the seaside I stepped out of a tin-roofed cinema expecting rain, fog, boiling clouds, and found myself instead standing in the midst of rinsed and glistening sunlight with a swollen cobalt sea before me upon which a boat with a red sail leaned, making for the hazed horizon, and I felt for once, for one, rare, mutely ecstatic moment, at home in this so tender, impassive and always preoccupied world.

The rain stopped altogether and the rent in the clouds turned into a broad sash of marian-blue sky and A. woke with a start and frowned as if she did not know who I was. ‘Look,’ I said to her softly, ‘look what we have done to the weather!’ She peered at me closely to see if I was joking and, deciding I was not, laughed.

If ever I get round to writing that work of philosophy which I am convinced I have in me, curled up in the amnion of my imagination with its thumb in its mouth, it will be
on the subject of happiness. Yes, happiness, believe it or not, that most mysterious because most evanescent of conditions. I know there are those – the mighty Prussians, for instance – who say it is not a condition at all, in any positive sense, holding it to be nothing more than the absence of pain. I do not fall in with this view. Don’t ask me to compare the state of mind of two animals one of which is engaged in eating the other; the happiness I speak of has nothing to do with nature’s fang and claw, but is exclusive to humankind, a by-product of evolution, a consolation prize for us poor winded runners in the human race. It is a force whose action is so delicate and so fleeting we hardly feel it operating in us before it has become a thing of the past. Yet a force it is. It burns in us, and we burn in it, unconsumed. I cannot be now as I was then – I may recall but not experience again the bliss of those days – yet I must not be led by embarrassment and sorrow and pain to deny what I felt then, no matter how shaming or deluded it may seem to me now. I held her to me, this suddenly familiar stranger, and felt her heart beating and listened to the rustle of her breathing and thought I had come at last to my true place, the place where, still and at the same time profoundly stirred, feverish yet preternaturally calm, I would at last be who I was.

Here she is, the moving mirror in which I surprised myself, poor goggle-eyed Actaeon, my traitorous hounds already sniffing suspiciously at my heels. Five foot two in her bare, her heartbreakingly bare, red little feet. Bust, thirty-four inches, waist … but no, no, this is no good. In the long-ago days when I took an interest in the physical sciences it was mensuration that gave me the most trouble – philosophically, that is – for how could anything in this fluctuant world be held still for long enough to have a measuring rod applied to it? (Have I said this before? I don’t care.) And even if it were possible to impose the necessary stillness, would the resulting measurements have any meaning
outside the laboratory, the dissecting room? Old What’s-his-name was right, all is flux and fire wherein we whirl. Even the dead move, as they crumble and drift, dreaming eternity. When I think of A. I see something like one of those dancing, multi-limbed figures from an oriental religion, all legs and slender, S-shaped arms, her face alone always turned towards me, even as she spins and shimmers. She is the goddess of movement and transformations. And I, I am bowed down before her, abject and entranced, my forehead pressed to the cold stone of the temple floor.

I have a handful of images of her, fixed in my memory like photographs. When I summon one of them up a spasm of mingled pain and pleasure goes off in me like a flashbulb. The tones range from platinum-white through glass-grey and nickel to silky blacks, with in places a pale sepia wash. Here, look at this one, look: I turn from the window and you are lying on your front amid the tangled sheets, wearing only a short, satin vest, facing away from me propped on your elbows and smoking a cigarette – ash everywhere, of course – your knees apart and feet in the air, and with stopped breath I stand and gaze at the russet and pink crushed orchid between your thighs and, above it, the tight-furled little bud with its puckered aureole the colour of pale tea. You feel my eyes on you and turn your head and squint at me over your shoulder and smile the smile of a debauched child, wriggling your toes in a derisively jaunty salute. Or here, look, here is another one, do you remember it? This time you are at the window. You are barefoot and your skirt I mean your dress is unbuttoned. You stand with eyes closed and head leaning back against the frame and one leg flexed with a heel hooked on the low sill, your arms folded tightly, crushing your breasts outwards like pale, offered fruit. I say your name but you do not hear me, or hear me and pay no heed, I don’t know which, and suddenly, as if summoned, a seagull, bigger than I would have thought possible, descends out of the sky on thrashing
wings and hangs suspended for a second just beyond the glass in the bronze light of the October afternoon and seems to peer in at us, first with one agate eye and then the other, and sensing its annunciatory presence you turn to the window quickly just as the bird, screeching, with beak agape, goes on its way, downward into the shadowed chasm of the street.

At first in the weeks after she had gone I used to torture myself with the thought that I had not observed her closely or carefully enough, that when I still had the opportunity I had not fixed her sufficiently firmly in the frame of memory, but now that I am calmer (am I calmer?) I cannot believe that anyone ever can have been subjected to such unwavering, demented attention as I devoted to you. Every day when you arrived in the room (I was always the first one there, always) I turned on you a gaze so awed, so wide with ever-renewed astonishment, beseeching in its intensity, that I thought you must take fright and flee from me, from such need, such fear, such anguished happiness. Not that you so much as flinched, of course; my poor haggard glare was never fierce enough to dazzle you. All the same I insist that I looked harder at you and deeper into your depths than anyone ever did before or will again. I saw you. That was the point of it all. I saw you. (Or I saw someone.)

We had no night; it was always daylight when we met. Oh, the stillness of those pewter-coloured afternoons, with the muffled hum of the city below us and the sibilance of rain on the window and our breath white as thought in the motionless and somehow waiting air under that cranium-coloured ceiling. She did put up curtains, brown, hairy things that hung in lumpy folds like hides, but we never drew them. I wanted to look at her in the harshest light, to see the pores and blemishes and the little dark hairs that stood erect under my caresses; especially I treasured those times when, exhausted, or half asleep, she would lie sprawled across the couch, flaccid and agape, beached in forgetfulness
of herself and of me; then I would sit by her side with my legs drawn up and arms clasped about my knees and study her inch by inch, from her gnawed fingernails to her splayed, unsettlingly long toes, devouring her slowly, minutely, in an enraptured cannibalism of the senses. How palely delicate she was. She glimmered. Her skin had a grainy, thick texture that at times, when she was out of sorts, or menstrual, I found excitingly unpleasant to the touch. Yes, it was always there, behind all the transports and the adoration, that faint, acrid, atavistic hint of disgust, waiting, like pain allayed, waiting, and reminding. This I am convinced is what sex is, the anaesthetic that makes bearable the flesh of another. And we erect cathedrals upon it.

I believe that she did not much like the thing itself, the act, as it is interestingly called, or not as we performed it, anyway; no, I believe it was the accompanying ceremonial that interested her, the eager play, the games of consequences, the drugged post-coital exchanges. Perhaps it is only in the bitterness of hindsight that I look back now and see a certain briskness always at the end. She would push me aside and sit up and reach for her cigarettes, as though she were folding up some item of everyday use, a deckchair, say, or an ironing board, and putting it away so that the real business could start. I remember once after the final paroxysm when I lay on her breast gasping like a jellyfish she squirmed out nimbly from under me and picked up a half-eaten apple from where she had set it down on the floor beside the couch and set to work on it again as carelessly as an interrupted Eve. I would not have been greatly surprised, or greatly displeased, for that matter, if I had looked up one day from my endless, vain attempt to burrow myself bodily inside her (I think of an actor trying to struggle into a marvellously wrought but too-small costume) and found her idly smoking a cigarette, or flipping through one of those glossy magazines in the pages of which she lived yet another of her
flickering, phantom lives. I must not give the impression that she was indifferent or that she played her part with anything less than enthusiasm; it is just that she was, I believe, more interested in the stage directions than the text. But speeches, she was certainly interested in speeches. Talk was the thing; she loved to talk. Endless discussions. She would detach herself from my panting, pentapus embrace and sit up and wrap herself in the sheet, securing it under her curiously plump armpits with a deftness surely learned from the cinema, and demand that I tell her a story. ‘Tell me things,’ she would say, the tip of her sharp little nose turning pale with anticipation, ‘tell me about your life.’ I was evasive. It did not matter. She had enough fantasies for two.

She lied to me, of course, I know that, yet the things she told me (as distinct from the things that she did not) I think of not as lies but inventions, rather, improvisations, true fictions. The tales she spun had been breathed on and polished so often that the detailing had become blurred. There was the story of her family, and of her mother in particular. This mysterious woman – whom A. could not mention without narrowing her eyes and pursing up her lips as if to spit – though she was still malignly and, I suspected, exuberantly alive somewhere, was dead to her daughter. ‘I don’t want to talk about her!’ she would declare, turning aside her head and holding up a hand with its fuming cigarette canted at a trembling angle, and then proceed in a tight-throated drone to enumerate yet again the lengthy list of maternal enormities. The first time I heard of Mother she had been born in America, in Savannah, or Louisiana, or some other homonymous bayou of the Deep South, into a family of ancient lineage; in subsequent accounts, however, the birthplace shifted to Mississippi, then Missouri, and once even, if my ears did not deceive me, to Missoula, which, my atlas tells me, is a town in the Rocky Mountains in the northerly state of Montana, to where I, Melmoth the Bereft, shall journey
on that circumferential pilgrimage I intend one of these days to undertake in search of my lost love. But Missoula! – where on earth did she get that from? Her father, she said, was Swiss. He had been – I heard it coming before she said it – a diplomat in the foreign service, and she had been brought up all over the place; and indeed, in her sleep she often spoke in what seemed to me foreign languages. (By the way, why is it, I wonder, that I always take up with restless sleepers?) About Daddy ominous hints were dropped; I pictured a dark, sleek-haired
gentilhomme
, sinisterly handsome – see his skier’s tan, his chocolate-dark eyes, his multi-jewelled watch – idly fondling a pale little girl perched in his lap.