Athena (18 page)

By now I was sunk utterly in despondency and so weary I seemed to be melting into the ground, like a snowman. I turned on the gas fire (it uttered a resentful
Huh!
) and sat Aunt Corky by it swaddled in her furs and went into the bedroom and changed the linen on my bed; the starched sheets when I shook them rattled like distant thunder. When I was done I leaned by the window to rest my fevered brain for a moment. In the wintry twilight the garden stood gaunt and greyly adroop. I did not know myself (do I ever know myself?). That is what home is for, to still the selfs unanswerable questionings; now I had been invaded and the outer doubts were seeping in like fog through every fissure.

Aunt Corky settled in straight away, calling up old skills, I imagined, from her refugee days. She made a nest for herself in the corner where her bed was, draping her things over the back of a chair and on a towel rack that she had fished out of some cupboard or other. I kept my eyes averted as best I could from this display of geriatric rags, for I have always been squeamish in the underwear department. She, of course, was undaunted by our enforced intimacy. There was the matter of the lavatory, for instance. On that first evening I had to joggle her back down the stairs on my arm, a step at a time, and stand outside the bathroom door humming so as not to hear the sounds of her relieving herself. When she came out and looked up at the climb awaiting her she shook her head and made that soft, clicking noise with her lips that I took for one of the signs of her foreignness, and I thought with foreboding of chamber pots, and worse. Next day, without consulting me, she commandeered
from the kitchen a handleless saucepan which she kept under her bed and first thing each morning emptied through the window into the yard three storeys below. I waited in fear for the tenants on the ground floor to complain, but they never did; what did they think was the explanation for it, this tawny matutinal deluge landing with a splat outside their kitchen window? She managed in other ways, too. She liked to cook for herself, having a particular relish for scrambled eggs. She even did some of her laundry at the kitchen sink; I would come home of an evening and find pairs of satin bloomers with elasticated legs – heirlooms, surely – and soggy and lugubriously attenuated stockings hanging above the gas stove on a clothes-horse I had not noticed was there, and all four burners of the stove going full blast. (Her way with gas was something I could not let myself begin to worry about; ditto her habit of smoking in bed.) As for her illness, whatever it was, she showed scant sign of it. She coughed a lot – I pictured her lungs hanging in rubbery tatters, like burst football bladders – and behind the fogbank of her perfume there was detectable an acrid smell, like the smell of tooth decay, only worse, that seemed to me the very stink of mortality. She had a look that lately I catch sometimes myself in my mirror of a morning: the pinched, moist gaze, the slackness, the surprise and sad alarm at time’s slow damage. She seemed hardly to sleep at all. At night, lying on my makeshift bed on the sofa in the front room with my head skewed at one end and my toes braced against the moulded armrest at the other, I would hear her in the bedroom, her mousy scrapings and fumblings, as she moved about in there for hours, waiting for the dawn, I suppose, for those first pallid, hopeful fingerings along the edges of the curtains. She never complained of feeling bad, though there were days when she did not get up at all but lay in the jumbled bed with her face turned to the wall, her hands clenched on the turned-down blanket as if it were the
lid of something closing on her that required all her strength to hold ajar. On those bad days I would come sometimes in the afternoons, still quivering from you, with your smell all over me, and sit with her for a while. Although she did not acknowledge me I knew that she knew I was there. It was like being in the presence of a creature of another species, whose silent suffering was happening in a different sphere from the one I inhabited. I held her hand, or should I say she held mine. They were unexpectedly peaceful, these occasions, for me. The light in the room, the colour of tarnished tin, was the light of childhood. I would see again afternoons like this in the far past and myself as a child at a window watching the day fail and the rooks settling in the high, bare trees and the rain like time itself drifting down. That rain: when it grew heavy the drops danced on the shining tar of the road and looked to me like so many momentarily pirouetting little ballerinas; that must have been the very first simile I formulated.

Father Fanning came to visit, in his green suit and sandals, with his startled crest of young man’s white hair standing up like a question mark (Tintin! – of course, that’s who he reminded me of). Aunt Corky was not pleased to see him; her enthusiasm for God and godly things had not lasted long. She listened in silence, impatiently, blowing streamers of smoke past his head, as he spoke in his earnest and friendly way of the weather and the Lord’s goodness; he might have been a tiresome stranger she had met on holiday and been polite to and who now had tastelessly turned up expecting to renew a seaside intimacy. After a little while he became discouraged and departed sadly. At the front door he tried to tell me again how good I was and in the guise of giving him a friendly pat on the shoulder I propelled him firmly into the street and shut the door on him.

And so Aunt Corky became another strand in the thick, polished, frightening rope into which my life was being
woven. In the mornings I would wake with a knot of anxiety behind my breastbone, and for a minute or two I would lie stiff and staring as my mind strove laboriously to unpick this ganglion of hard-laid hemp. My days were a kind of breathless straining on tiptoe as I swung at the end of my fear between, on one side, Inspector Hackett and all he represented, and, on the other, Morden and the Da. Fear, yes, and something more than fear, a sense of there being another interpretation altogether of the things I thought I knew, of there being another world entirely, coterminous with this one, where another, wiser I grappled undaunted with terrible facts that this I could only guess at. And always there was the suspicion that for certain others I was a figure of fun, the one in the blindfold turning helplessly with outstretched arms in the midst of the capering crowd. Morden was at once evasive and scandalously blunt. ‘I hear the cops are on to us,’ he said to me one day with a shark’s downturned grin. I stared at him, making a different kind of fishmouth. I had met him on Ormond Street sauntering through the morning crowds with the wings of his coat billowing and his crimson silk tie blowing back over his shoulder. I would often encounter him like this, going nowhere, relaxed and bored and faintly dangerous-looking, with a dead expression in his eyes. On such occasions he would drift to a stop and squint upwards at a corner of the roof of some distant building and begin to speak in a vague, distracted tone, as if we were already in the middle of a not very interesting conversation.

‘Cops?’ I said; it came out as a sort of frightened quack.

We walked down Rue Street. It was a blustery, brown day.

‘Yes,’ Morden said easily, ‘Francie tells me you were accosted by a detective.’ He glanced at me sideways with a bland expression. ‘Fond of the boys in blue, are you?’

We came to the house and he looked on as I got out the
key and opened the door. I had a sense of silent derision. Dealing with Morden was like trying to get a grip on a big, soft, greased, unmanageable weight that had been dropped unceremoniously into my arms. He stood with his head cocked to one side and waited, considering me. The door stood open, the hall held its breath. He grinned.

‘I hear you met the Da, too,’ he said. He grasped me by the arm and gave it an eager shake. ‘Tell us,’ he said, ‘what was he dressed as?’

I told him glumly and he laughed, a brief, loud shout.

‘A priest?’ he cried. Behind him an eddy of wind lifted dust and bits of paper on the pavement and swirled them in a spiral. ‘What a character!’ he said, shaking his head. ‘He skinned a man alive one time, you know, and tanned the skin and sent it to the fellow’s wife. In a parcel, through the post. True as God, he did.’ He stepped past me and crossed the hall and started up the stairs. He halted with a hand on the banister rail and turned to me again. ‘Don’t mind the Da,’ he said good-humouredly. ‘Don’t mind him at all.’ He went on up, humming, then stopped a second time and leaned over the rail and grinned down at me. ‘Cops and robbers,’ he said, ‘that’s all it is, the whole thing.’ He liked that. He laughed again and trudged on and laughing disappeared around a bend of the stairs.
‘Cops and robbers, I’m telling you!’

So you see how it was. Oh yes, as I have said, I was afraid, of course, but my fear was of that hot, fluttery variety that half the time feels like nothing more than a keen sense of anticipation. Something in me, a snickering goblin crouched and expectant, always wants the worst to happen. I remember once seeing in a newsreel report of some catastrophic flood somewhere an emaciated chap clad in turban and loincloth bobbing along on the torrent in a tin bathtub with his arms folded and grinning serenely at the camera. That’s me, with my knees in my chest, helplessly being
borne downstream in a trance of happy terror as the shattered tree-trunks and bloated bodies go swirling past. If the paintings were genuine they were stolen and I could go to jail for dealing with them. Simple as that. It was not prison, though, that I feared most, but the thought of losing you. (No, that’s not true, why do I say such things – the prospect of prison filled me with boiling panic, at the very notion of it I had to sit down with a hand to my heart until I got my breath back.)

I have never been good at games, I mean the serious ones. I believe you really wanted to teach me how to play, I believe you did. There were times when I would catch you looking at me in a certain stilled, speculative way, with a smile that was hardly a smile, your head tilted and one eyebrow flexed, and I think now they were the moments when you might have taken pity on me and led me to the couch and sat me down and said,
All right now, listen, this is what is really going on
 … But no, that is not how you would have done it. You would have blurted it out and laughed, wide-eyed, with a hand over your mouth, and only later, if at all, would I have realised the full significance of what it was you had told me. I never understood you. I walked around you, stroking my chin and frowning, as if you were a problem in perspective, a puzzle-picture such as the Dutch miniaturists used to do, which would only yield up its secret when viewed from a particular, unique angle. Was I very ridiculous? I say again, I don’t care about any of the rest of it, having been cheated and made a fool of and put in danger of going back to jail; all that matters is what you thought of me, think of me. (Think of me!)

She it was who devised the games, she was mistress of the revels. I followed after her in my lumbering, anxious way, trailing my stick and pig’s bladder, desperate to keep up. She was the initiator. She it was, for instance, who bought the fitting for the spyhole. It was the day that the
third body was found, strung up by the heels on the park railings with throat cut so deeply the head was almost severed (the papers by now had found a name for the killer: the Vampire). When she came into the room, shaking rain-pearls from the hem of her black coat, I could feel her excitement – when she was like that the air around her seemed to crepitate as if an electric current were passing through it. She dropped her coat and handbag on the floor and plumped down on the couch and held out her upturned fist, smiling with her lips pressed shut, brimming and gleeful. My heart. ‘Look,’ she said, and slowly uncurled her fingers. I took the little brass barrel from her and peered at it in happy bafflement. ‘Look through it,’ she said impatiently, ‘it’s like a fish’s eye.’ I laughed. ‘How will we fit it?’ I said. She snatched the gadget from me and scanned the room through it, one eye screwed shut and a sharp little canine bared. ‘With a drill,’ she said. ‘How do you think?’

I am not much of a handyman. She sat at my table smoking and watched me at work, offering facetious suggestions and snickering. After a long and bad-tempered search in the basement I had found a twist drill, an antique, spindly affair suggestive of the primitive days of surgery, and with this implement I bored a hole in the false wall, at knee level, as she directed. I asked no question; that was the first rule in all our games. When I had screwed the brass lens into place she went outside and knelt to test it. (By the way, what of that gap in the plaster through which I am supposed to have had my first glimpse of her? Must have been fixed.) She came back scowling. ‘You’ve put it in the wrong way round,’ she said. ‘It’s for looking in, not out!’ She sighed. ‘You’re useless,’ she said. ‘Listen.’

She had it all worked out. This is how went. If we had an arrangement to meet at twelve o’clock, say, I was to come at eleven thirty and, without making a sound, kneel down at the spyhole and watch her for half an hour; then,
at noon, I was to creep back out to the stairs and come tramping down the corridor as if I had just arrived. Sometimes, however, I was not to come early, and not to use the spyhole; nor was I to tell her which were the times I had been there unseen by her and which when I had not. In this way she would never know for certain if she was being spied on during the half hour before my arrival or if she was playing out her little charades for no one’s benefit. I did as I was bidden, of course. What strange, shameful excitement there was in tiptoeing along the corridor – sometimes I went the entire distance on hands and knees – and putting my eye to that thrillingly cool glass stud and seeing the room beyond, radiant with silky light, resolve itself into a cup of swooping curves at the centre of which A. sat, a bulbous idol with pin-head and tiny feet and enormous hands folded in her swollen lap. This is how I always found her, sitting motionless and agaze, like tiny Alice waiting for the magic potion to take effect. Then slowly she would begin to stir, with odd, spasmic jerks and twitches. She would take a deep breath, drawing back her shoulders and lifting her head, carefully keeping her glance from straying in the direction of the spyhole; her movements were at once stiff and graceful, and touched with a strange, unhuman pathos, like those of a skilfully manipulated marionette. She would rise and take a step toward the window, extending one hand in a sweeping gesture, as if she were welcoming a grand guest; she would smile and nod, or hold her head to one side in an attitude of deep attention, and sometimes she would even move her lips in soundless speech, with exaggerated effect, like the heroine in a silent film. Then she would resume her seat on the couch with her invisible guest beside her and go through the motions of serving tea, handing him (there was no doubt as to this phantom’s gender) his cup with a lingering smile and then demurely dropping her gaze and taking her lower lip delicately between her teeth and biting it until it
turned white. Always the tableau began with these elaborate politenesses; gradually, however, as I shifted heavily from one knee to the other and blinked my watering eye, an atmosphere of menace would develop; she would frown, and shrink back and shake her head, pressing splayed fingers to her throat and lifting one knee. In the end, overwhelmed, her clothes undone, she would fall back slack-mouthed with breasts exposed and one arm outflung and a leg bared along its glimmering length to the vague dark hollow of her lap, and I would suddenly hear myself breathing. She would rest for a moment then, displayed there, her fingers idly playing with a strand of hair at the nape of her neck, and as the cathedral bell began to toll the noonday angelus I would get up stiffly and steal out to the landing and, composing myself as best I could (how the heart can hammer!), walk down the corridor again coughing and humming and breezily enter the room, by which time she would be sitting primly with knees pressed tightly together and her hands folded, looking up at me with a faint, shy, lascivious smile.