Athena (4 page)

By now I had begun seriously to regret having breached this house of shades, and would have been thankful if Mr Haddon or some other guardian of the place had come and stepped firmly in front of me and shut the door and ushered me down the stairs and out into the day, saying,
There there, it is all a mistake, you have come to the wrong place, and besides your aunt is dead
. I thought with panicky longing of the blue sea and the sky out there, those swaying, sentinel trees. That’s me all over, forever stepping unwillingly into one
place while wishing for another. I had the impression, and have it still despite the evidence of later experience, that the room was huge, a vast, white, faintly humming space at the centre of which Aunt Corky lay tinily trapped on the barge of a big high bed, adrift in her desuetude. She had been dozing and at my approach her eyes clicked open as if the lids were controlled by elastic. In my first glimpse of her she did that trick that people do when you have not seen them for a long time, thrusting aside a younger and now not very convincing double and slipping deftly into its place. She lay still and stared at me for a long moment, not knowing, I could see, who I was or whether I was real or a figment. In appearance she seemed remarkably little changed since the last time I had seen her, which must have been thirty years before. She was wrinkled and somewhat shrunken and had exchanged her dyed hair for an even more startlingly lutescent wig but otherwise she was unmistakably Aunt Corky. I don’t know why this should surprise me but it did, and even made me falter for a second. Without lifting her head she suddenly smiled and said, ‘Oh, I would not have recognised you!’ Did I ever describe to you Aunt Corky’s smile? She opened her eyes wide and peeled her lips back from a set of dentures that would have fitted a small horse, while her head very faintly trembled as if she were quaking from the strain of a great though joyous physical effort. A mottled hand scrabbled crabwise across the sheet and searched in space for mine; I grasped her hooked fingers and held her under the elbow – what a grip she had: it was like being seized on by a branch of a dead tree – and she hauled herself upright in the bed, grunting. I did the usual business with pillows and so on, then brought a chair and sat down awkwardly with my hands on my knees; is there any natural way to sit beside a sickbed? She was wearing a not very clean white smock with short sleeves, the kind that patients are made to don for the operating theatre; I noticed
bruises in the papery skin of the crook of her arm where blood must have been put in or taken out. She sat crookedly with her mouth open and gazed at me, panting a little, her unsteady smile making it seem as if she were shaking her head in wonderment. Two big tears brimmed up in her eyes and trembled on the lower lids. As ever in the presence of the distress of others I found myself holding my breath. I asked her how she was and without a trace of irony she answered, ‘Oh, but wonderful, wonderful – as you see!’

After that, conveniently enough, there are gaps in my memory, willed ones, no doubt. I suppose we must have talked about the past, the family, my so-called life – God knows, Aunt Corky was not one to leave any chink of silence unstopped – but what I best recall are things, not words: that white smock, for instance, bleached by repeated use (how many had died in it, I wondered), an overflowing tinfoil ashtray on the bedside table, the livid smear of lipstick she hastened to put on with an unsteady hand. She was a little dazed at first, but as the anaesthetic of sleep wore off she became increasingly animated. She was annoyed to be discovered in such a state of disarray, and kept making furtive adjustments – that lipstick, a dab of face powder, a rapid tongue-test of the state of her dentures – assembling herself in flustered stages, a prima donna preparing for the great role of being what she imagined herself to be. And as the physical she became firmly established so too the old manner strongly reasserted itself, as she sat there, fully upright now, smoking and complaining, at once haughty, coquettish and put-upon. Aunt Corky had an intimately dramatic relationship with the world at large; no phenomenon of history or happenstance was so momentous or so trivial that she would not see it as an effect directed solely at her. In her version of it the most recent world war had been an act of spite got up to destroy her life, while she would look out at a rainy day with a martyr’s sorrowing gaze and shake her head as if
to say,
Now look what they have sent to try me!
But a moment later she would shrug and gamely tip her chin (each whisker sprouting on it dusted with a grain or two of face powder) and flash that equine smile that never failed to make me think of the talking mule in those films from my childhood, and be her usual, chirpy self again. Always she bobbed up, pert and bright and full of jauntiness, a plucky swimmer dauntlessly breasting a sea of troubles.

But none of this was as I had expected it would be. After all, they had summoned me to what I had assumed would be a deathbed scene, with my aunt, a serene and quietly breathing pre-corpse, arranged neatly among the usual appurtenances (crisp linen, tweed-suited doctor, and in the background the wordless nurse with glinting kidney-dish), instead of which here she was, as talkative and fantastical as ever. She was frail, certainly, and looked hollow, as old people do, but far from being on her last legs she seemed to me to have taken on a redoubled energy and vigour. The Aunt Corky of my memories of her had by now dwindled so far into the past that I could hardly make her out any more, so vivid was this new, wizened yet still spry version before me. The room too seemed to diminish in size as she grew larger in it, and the glare of sea-light abated in the window, dimmed by the smoke of her cigarettes.

‘Of course, these are forbidden,’ she said, tapping the barrel of her fag with a scarlet fingernail, and added darkly, ‘They are telling me all the time to stop, but I say, what concern is it of theirs?’

The bed, the chair, the little table, the lino on the floor, how sad it all seemed suddenly, I don’t know why, I mean why at just that moment. I rose and walked to the window and looked down over the tilted lawn to the sea far below. A freshening wind was smacking the smoke-blue water, leaving great slow-moving prints, like the whorls of a burnisher’s rag on metal. Behind me Aunt Corky was talking
of the summer coming on and how much she was looking forward to getting out and about. I had not the heart to remind her that it was September.

‘They are all so kind here,’ she said, ‘so good. And Mr Haddon – you have met him, I hope? – he is a saint, yes, a saint! Of course, he is trained for it, you know, he has diplomas. I knew the moment I saw him that he was an educated man. I said to him, I said,
I recognise a person of culture when I meet him
. And do you know what he did? He bowed, and kissed my hand – yes, kissed my hand!
And I
, he said, in that very quiet voice he has,
I, dear madam, I too recognise breeding when I see it
. I only smiled and closed the conversation; it does not do to be too much familiar. He sees to everything himself, everything. Do you know—’ she twisted about to peer at me wide-eyed where I stood by the window ‘—do you know, he even makes out the menus? This is true. I complimented him one day on a particularly good ragout – I think it was a ragout – and he became so embarrassed! Of course, he reddens easily, with that fair colouring.
Ah, Miss Corky
, he says – that is what he calls me –
ah, I can have no secrets from you!
’ She paused for a moment thoughtfully, working at her cigarette with one eye shut and her mouth pursed and swivelled to one side. ‘I hope I do not go too far,’ she murmured. ‘Sometimes these people … But—’ with an airy toss of the head that made the gilded curls of her wig bounce ‘—what can I do? After all, since I am here I must—’

The door opened with a bang and Sharon the child-nurse stuck in her carroty head and said, ‘Do you want the pot?’ Aunt Corky was scrabbling to stub out her cigarette. She shook her head furiously with lips shut tight. ‘Right-o,’ Sharon said and withdrew, then popped back again and nodded at the bristling ashtray and said cheerfully, ‘I’m telling you, them things will be the death of you.’

When she had gone I returned to the chair beside the bed
and sat down. Aunt Corky, mortified, avoided my eye, breathing heavily through flared nostrils and casting about her indignantly with birdlike movements of her head. In the embarrassment of the moment I was holding my breath again; I felt like the volunteer in a levitation act, suspended horizontally on empty air and not daring to move a muscle. Aunt Corky with quivering hands lit another cigarette and blew a defiant trumpet of smoke at the ceiling. ‘Of course,’ she said bitterly,
‘she
is nothing like
him
. She has I think no training, and certainly no feeling for things, no –
no finesse
. Where he got her no one can say.’ I said vaguely, ‘Well, she’s young, after all …’ Aunt Corky stared at me. ‘Young?’ she cried, a high, soft shriek, ‘young – that one?’ and began to cough. ‘No, no,’ she said impatiently, waving a hand and weaving a figure eight of smoke, ‘not the nurse, I mean
her –
the wife.’ A poisonous grimace. ‘Mrs Haddon.’ Whom, if I have the energy for the task, we shall be meeting presently. Aunt Corky got out her cartridge of lipstick again and with broad strokes moodily retouched the stylised pair of lips smeared over the ruined hollow where her mouth used to be, sighing and frowning; with the lipstick revivified she looked as if a tropical insect had settled on her face.

Was it on that visit or later, I wonder, that I told her about Morden and his pictures? Had I even gone to see him at that stage? See how you have loosened my grasp on chronology. I get as mixed up as a dotard. Things from long ago seem as if they had happened yesterday while yesterday itself grows ancient before today has waned. Once I used to date events from before and after the moment when you first confronted me on the corner of Ormond Street; then the day of your going became the pivot on which the eras turned; now all is flux. I feel as the disciples must have felt in the days of desolation between Calvary and the rolling aside of the sepulchre stone. (Dear God, where did that come from? Am I getting religion? Next thing I’ll be seeing visions.) Anyway,
anyway, whatever day it was, that first or another, when I told her about my new venture, Aunt Corky went into raptures. ‘Art!’ she breathed, clapping a hand to her breastbone and putting on a Rouault face. ‘Art is prayer!’ At once I was sorry I had mentioned the subject at all and sat and looked gloomily at my hands while she launched into one of her rhapsodies, at the end of which she reached out a shaky claw again and grasped my wrist and said in a fervent whisper, ‘What a chance for you, to make of yourself something new!’ I sat back and stared at her but she continued to gaze at me undaunted, still holding on to my wrist and nodding her head slowly, solemnly. ‘Because, you know,’ she said, with a sort of reproachful twinkle, ‘you have been very naughty; yes, yes, very naughty.’ I would not have been surprised if she had reached up and tweaked my ear; I may even have blushed. Somehow I had imagined she would know no more of my doings in the years since I had seen her than I knew of hers. Infamy, however, is a thing that gets about. Aunt Corky let go of my wrist and patted me on the hand and lit yet another cigarette. ‘Death is nothing,’ she said with vague inconsequence, and frowned; ‘nothing at all.’ She gave a fluttery sigh and sat for a moment looking about her blankly and then slowly subsided against the dented pillows at her back and closed her eyes. I stood up quickly and leaned over her in consternation, but it was all right, she was still breathing. I prised the cigarette cautiously from her fingers and crushed it in the ashtray. Her hand fell away limply and settled palm upward on the sheet. She began to say something but instead her mouth went slack and she suddenly emitted a loud, honking snore and her legs twitched under the bedclothes.

I am never at ease in the presence of sleeping people – that is, I am even less at ease with them than I am when they are awake. When I was married, I mean when I still had a wife and all that, I would have preferred to spend my nights
alone, though of course I had not the nerve to say so. It is not so much the uncanny element of sleep that disturbs me, though that is disturbing enough, but the particular kind of solitude to which the sleeper at my side abandons me. It is so strange, this way of being alone: I think of Transylvania, voodoo, that sort of thing. There I sit, or, worse, lie, in the dark, in the presence of the undead, who seem to have attained a state of apotheosis, who seem so
achieved
, resting in this deeply breathing calm on a darkened plain between two worlds, here and at the same time infinitely far removed from me. It is at such moments that I am most acutely aware of my conscious self, and feel the electric throb and tingle, the flimsiness and awful weight, of being a living, thinking thing. The whole business then seems a scandal, or a dreadful joke devised by someone who has long since gone away, the point of which has been lost and at which no one is laughing. My wife, now, was a prompt if restless sleeper. Her head would hit the pillow and swish! with a few preparatory shudders she was gone. I wonder if it was her way of escaping from me. But there I go, falling into solipsism again, my besetting sin. God knows what it was she was escaping. Just everything, I suppose. If escape it was. Probably she was in the same fix as me, wanting a lair herself to lie down in and not daring to say so. To be alone. To be at one. Is that the same? I don’t think so. To be at one: what a curious phrase, I’ve never understood exactly what it means. And I, what must I be like when I sleep, as I occasionally do? Something crouched, I imagine, crouched doggo and ready to spring out of the dark, fangs flashing and eyes greenly afire. No, no, that is altogether too fine, too sleek: more like a big, beached, blubbery thing, cast up out of the deeps, agape and gasping.

What was I …? Aunt Corky. Her room. Afternoon sunlight. I am there. The cigarette I had crushed in the ashtray was still determinedly streaming a thin, fast, acrid
waver of blue smoke. I waited for a while, watching her sleep, my mind empty, and then with leaden limbs and pressing my hands hard against my knees I rose and lumbered quakingly from the room and closed the door without a sound behind me. By now the patch of parti-coloured light from the big window on the landing had moved a surprising distance and was inching its way up the wall. It is odd how the exact look of that afternoon glares in my memory, suffused with a harsh, Hellenic radiance that is sharper and more brilliant, surely, than a September day in these latitudes could be expected to furnish. Probably I am not remembering at all, but imagining, which is why it seems so real. Haddon was waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, stooped and unctuous and at the same time sharply watchful. ‘She is a handful, yes,’ he said as we walked to the door. ‘We were forced to confiscate her things, I’m afraid.’ ‘Things,’ I said, ‘what things?’ He smiled, a quick little sideways twitch. ‘Her clothes,’ he said; ‘even her nightdress. She had us demented, walking out of the place at all hours of the day and night.’ I smiled what must have been a sickly smile and nodded sympathetically, craven as I am, and thought with a shiver,
Imagine, just imagine being him
.