Ghosts

1

HERE THEY ARE. There are seven of them. Or better say, half a dozen or so, that gives more leeway. They are struggling up the dunes, stumbling in the sand, squabbling, complaining, wanting sympathy, wanting to be elsewhere. That, most of all: to be elsewhere. There is no elsewhere, for them. Only here, in this little round.

‘List!’

‘Listing.’

‘Leaky as a —’

‘So I said, I said.’

‘Everything feels strange.’

‘That captain, so-called.’

‘I did, I said to him.’

‘Cythera, my foot.’

‘Some outing.’

‘Listen!’

Behind them the boat leans, stuck fast on a sandbank, canted drunkenly to starboard, fat-bellied, barnacled, betrayed by a freak wave or a trick of the tide and the miscalculations of a tipsy skipper. They have had to wade through the shallows to get to shore. Thus things begin. It is a morning late in May. The sun shines merrily. How the wind blows! A little world is coming into being.

Who speaks? I do. Little god.

Licht spied them from afar, with his keen sight. It was so long since he had seen their like that for a moment he hardly knew what they were. He flew to the turret room at the top of the house where the Professor increasingly spent his time, brooding by himself or idly scanning the horizon through the brass telescope mounted on his desk. Inside the door Licht stopped, irresolute suddenly. It is always thus with him, the headlong rush and then the halt. The Professor turned up his face slowly from the big book open in front of him and stared at Licht with such glassy remoteness that Licht grew frightened and almost forgot what he had come to say. Is this what death is like, he wondered, is this how people begin to die, swimming a little farther out each time until in the end the land is out of sight for good? At last the Professor returned to himself and blinked and frowned and pursed his lips, annoyed that Licht had found him there, lost like that. Licht stood panting, with that eager, hazy smile of his.

‘What?’ the Professor said sharply. ‘What? Who are they?’

‘I don’t know,’ Licht answered breathlessly. ‘But I think they’re coming here, whoever they are.’

Poor Licht. He is anything from twenty-five to fifty. His yellow-white curls and spindly little legs give him an antique look: he seems as if he should be got up in periwig and knee-breeches. His eyes are brown and his brow is broad, with two smooth dents at the temples, as if whoever moulded him had given his big head a last, loving squeeze there between finger and thumb. He is never still. Now his foot tap-tapped on the turret floor and the fist he had thrust into his trousers pocket flexed and flexed. He pointed to the spyglass.

‘Did you see them?’ he said. ‘Sheep, I thought they were. Vertical sheep!’

He laughed, three soft, quick little gasps. The Professor turned away from him and hunched a forbidding black shoulder, his sea-captain’s swivel chair groaning under him. Licht stepped to the window and looked down.

‘They’re coming here, all right,’ he said softly. ‘Oh, I’m sure they’re coming here.’

He shook his head and frowned, trying to seem alarmed at the prospect of invasion, but had to bite his lip to keep from grinning.

Meanwhile my foundered creatures have not got far. They have not lost their sea-legs yet and the sand is soft going. There is an old boy in a boater, a pretty young woman, called Flora, of course, and a blonde woman in a black skirt and a black leather jacket with a camera slung over her shoulder. Also an assortment of children: three, to be precise. And a thin, lithe, sallow man with bad teeth and hair dyed black and a darkly watchful eye. His name is Felix. He seems to find something funny in all of this, smiling fiercely to himself and sucking on a broken eye-tooth. He urges the others on when they falter, Flora especially, inserting two long, bony fingers under her elbow. She will not look at him. She has a strange feeling, she says, it is as if she has been here before. He wrinkles his high, smooth forehead, gravely bending the full weight of his attention to her words. Perhaps, he says after a moment, perhaps she is remembering childhood outings to the seaside: the salt breeze, the sound of the waves, the cat-smell of the sand, that sun-befuddled, sparkling light that makes everything seem to fold softly into something else.

‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘Might that be it?’

She shrugged, smiled, tossed her hair, making an end of it. She thought how quaint yet dangerous it sounded when a person spoke so carefully, with such odd emphasis.

Softly.

The boys — there are two of them — watched all this, nudging each other and fatly grinning.

‘So strange,’ Flora was saying. ‘Everything seems so …’

‘Yes?’ Felix prompted.

She was silent briefly and then shivered.

‘Just … strange,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’

He nodded, his dark gaze lowered.

Felix and Flora.

The dunes ended and they came to a flat place of dark-green sward where the sandy grass crackled under their tread, and there were tiny, pink-tipped daisies, and celandines that blossom when the swallows come, though I can see no swallows yet, and here and there a tender violet trembling in the breeze. They paused in vague amaze and looked about, expecting something. The ground was pitted with rabbit-burrows, each one had a little pile of diggings at the door, and rabbits that seemed to move by clockwork stood up and looked at them, hopped a little way, stopped, and looked again.

‘What is that?’ said the blonde woman, whose name is Sophie. ‘What is that noise?’

All listened, holding their breath, even the children, and each one heard it, a faint, deep, formless song that seemed to rise out of the earth itself.

‘Like music,’ said the man in the straw hat dreamily. ‘Like … singing.’

Felix frowned and slowly turned his head this way and that, peering hard, his sharp nose twitching at the tip, birdman, raptor, rapt.

‘There should be a house,’ he murmured. ‘A house on a hill, and a little bridge, and a road leading up.’

Sophie regarded him with scorn, smilingly.

‘You have been here before?’ she said, and then, sweetly: ‘Aeaea, is it?’

He glanced at her sideways and smiled his fierce, thin smile. They have hardly met and are old enemies already. He hummed, nodding to himself, and stepped away from her, like one stepping slowly in a dream, still peering, and picked up his black bag from the grass. ‘Yes,’ he said with steely gaiety, ‘yes, Aeaea: and you will feel at home, no doubt.’

She lifted her camera like a gun and shot him. I can see from the way she handles it that she is a professional. In fact, she is mildly famous, her name appears in expensive magazines and on the spines of sumptuous volumes of glossy silver and black prints. Light is her medium, she moves through it as through some fine, shining fluid, bearing aloft out of the world’s reach the precious phial of her self.

Still they lingered, looking about them, and all at once, unaccountably, the wind of something that was almost happiness wafted through them all, though in each one it took a different form, and all thought what they felt was singular and unique and so were unaware of this brief moment of concord. Then it was gone, the god of inspiration flew elsewhere, and everything was as it had been.

I must be in a mellow mood today.

The house. It is large and of another age. It stands on a green rise, built of wood and stone, tall, narrow, ungainly, each storey seeming to lean in a different direction. Long ago it was painted red but the years and the salt winds have turned it to a light shade of pink. The roof is steep with high chimneys and gay scalloping under the eaves. The delicate octagonal turret with the weathervane on top is a surprise, people see its slender panes flashing from afar and say, Ah! and smile. On the first floor there is a balcony that runs along all four sides, with french windows giving on to it, where no doubt before the day is done someone will stand, with her hand in her hair, gazing off in sunlight. Below the balcony the front porch is a deep, dim hollow, and the front door has two broad panels of ruby glass and a tarnished brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s paw. Details, details: pile them on. The windows are blank. Three steps lead from the porch to a patch of gravel and a green slope that runs abruptly down to a stony, meandering stream. Gorse grows along the bank, and hawthorn, all in blossom now, the pale-pink and the white, a great year for the may. Behind the house there is a high ridge with trees, old oaks, I think, above which seagulls plunge and sway. (Oaks and seagulls! Picture it! Such is our island.) This wooded height lowers over the scene, dark and forbidding sometimes, sometimes almost haughty, almost, indeed, heroic.

The house is a summer house; at other seasons, especially in autumn, it wheezes and groans, its joints creaking. But when the weather turns warm, as now, in May, and the fond air invades even the remotest rooms, something stirs in the heart of the house, like something stirring out of a long slumber, unfolding waxen wings, and then suddenly everything tends upwards and all is ceilings and wide-open windows and curtains billowing in sea-light. I live here, in this lambent, salt-washed world, in these faded rooms, amid this stillness. And it lives in me.

Sophie pointed her camera, deft and quick.

‘Looks like a hotel,’ she said.

‘Or a guesthouse, anyway,’ said Croke, doubtfully.

It is neither. It is the home of Professor Silas Kreutznaer and his faithful companion, Licht. Ha.

They had come to the little wooden bridge but there they hesitated, even Felix, unwilling to cross, they did not know why, and looked up uncertainly at the impassive house. Croke took off his boater, or do I mean panama, yes, Croke took off his panama and mopped his brow, saying something crossly under his breath. The hat, the striped blazer and cravat, the white duck trousers, all this had seemed fine at first, a brave flourish and just the thing for a day-trip, but now he felt ridiculous, ridiculous and old.

‘We can’t stand here all day,’ he said, and glared accusingly at Felix, as if somehow everything were all his fault. ‘Will I go and see?’

He looked about at the rest of them but all wanly avoided his eye, indifferent suddenly, unable to care.

‘I’m hungry,’ Hatch said. ‘I want my breakfast.’

Pound the bespectacled fat boy muttered in agreement and cast a dark look at the adults.

‘Where’s that picnic that was promised us?’ Croke said testily.

‘Fell in the water, didn’t it,’ Hatch said and snickered.

‘Pah! Some bloody outing this is.’

‘Listen to them,’ Felix said softly to Flora, assuming the soft mask of an indulgent smile. ‘Rhubarb rhubarb.’

His smile turned fawning and he inclined his head to one side as if imploring something of her, but she pretended to be distracted and frowned and looked away. She felt so strange.

Sophie turned with an impatient sigh and took Croke’s arm.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘We will ask.’

And they set off across the bridge, Sophie striding and the old boy going carefully on tottery legs, trying to keep up with her, the soaked and sand-caked cuffs of his trousers brushing the planks. The stream gurgled.

Licht in the turret window watched them, the little crowd hanging back — were they afraid? — and the old man and the woman advancing over the bridge. How small they seemed, how distant and small. The couple on the bridge carried themselves stiffly, at a stately pace, as if they suspected that someone, somewhere, was laughing at their expense. He was embarrassed for them. They were like actors being forced to improvise. (One of them is an actor, is improvising.) He pressed his forehead to the glass and felt his heart racing. Since he had first spotted them making their meandering way up the hillside he had warned himself repeatedly not to expect anything of them, but it was no use, he was agog. Somehow these people looked like him, like the image he had of himself: lost, eager, ill at ease, and foolish. The glass was cool against his forehead, where a little vein was beating. Silence, deep woods, a sudden wind. He blinked: had he dropped off for a second? Lately he had been sleeping badly. That morning he had been awake at three o’clock, wandering through the house, stepping through vague deeps of shadowed stillness on the stairs, hardly daring to breathe in the midst of a silence where others slept. When he looked out he had seen a crack of light on the leaden horizon. Was it the day still going down or the morning coming up? He smiled sadly. This was what his life was like now, this faint glimmer between a past grown hazy and an unimaginable future.

The woman on the bridge stumbled. One moment she was upright, the next she had crumpled sideways like a puppet, all arms and knees, her hair flying and her camera swinging on its strap. Licht experienced a little thrill of fright. She would have fallen had not the old boy with surprising speed and vigour caught her in the crook of an arm that seemed for a second to grow immensely long. His hat fell off. A blackbird flew up out of a bush, giving out a harsh repeated warning note. The woman, balancing on one leg, took off her sodden shoe and looked at it: the heel was broken. She kicked off the other shoe and was preparing to walk on barefoot when Felix, as if he had suddenly bethought himself and some notion of authority, put down his bag and fairly bounded forward, shot nimbly past her and set off up the slope, buttoning the jacket of his tight, brown suit.

‘Who is that,’ the Professor said sharply. ‘Mind, let me see.’

Licht turned, startled: he had forgotten he was not alone. The Professor had been struggling with the telescope, trying in vain to angle it so he could get a closer look at Felix coming up the path. Now he thrust the barrel of the instrument aside and lumbered to the window, humming unhappily under his breath. When Licht looked at him now, in the light of these advancing strangers, he noticed for the first time how slovenly he had become. His shapeless black jacket was rusty at the elbows and the pockets sagged, his bow-tie was clumsily knotted and had a greasy shine. He looked like a big old rain-stained statue of one of the Caesars, with that big balding head and broad pale face and filmy, pale, protruding eyes. Licht smiled to himself hopelessly: how could he leave, how could he ever leave?

Felix was mounting the slope swiftly, swinging out his legs in front of him and sawing the air with his arms.

‘Look at him,’ Croke said, chuckling. ‘Look at him go.’

From the bridge it seemed as if he were swarming along on all fours. The nearer he approached to the house the more it seemed to shrink away from him. Licht was craning his neck. The Professor turned aside, patting his pockets, still humming tensely to himself.

Below, the lion’s peremptory paw rapped once, twice, threefour times.

Here it is, here is the moment where worlds collide, and all I can detect is laughter, distant, soft, sceptical.

At that brisk and gaily syncopated knock the house seemed to go still and silent for a moment as if in alarmed anticipation of disturbances to come. Licht lingered dreamily at the turret window, watching the others down at the bridge. Then another knock sounded, louder than before, and he started and turned and pushed past the Professor and rattled down the stairs in a flurry of arms and knees. In the hall he paused, seeing Felix’s silhouette on the ruby glass of the door, an intent and eerily motionless, canted form. When the door was opened Felix at once produced a brilliant smile and stepped sideways deftly into the hall, speaking already, his thin hand outstretched.

‘… Shipwrecked!’ he said, laughing. ‘Yes, cast up on these shores. I can’t tell you!’ Licht in his agitation could hardly understand what he was saying. He fell back a pace, mouthing helplessly and nodding. Felix’s sharp glance flickered all around the hall. ‘What a charming place,’ he said softly, and threw back his head and smiled foxily, showing a broken eye-tooth. He had a disjointed, improvised air, as if he had been put together in haste from disparate bits and pieces of other people. He seemed full of suppressed laughter, nursing a secret joke. With that fixed grin and those glossy, avid eyes he makes me think of a ventriloquist’s dummy; in his case, though, it would be he who would do the talking, while his master’s mouth flapped open and shut like a broken trap. ‘Yes, charming, charming,’ he said. ‘Why, I feel almost at home already.’

Afterwards Licht was never absolutely sure all this had happened, or had happened in the way that he remembered it, at least. All he recalled for certain was the sense of being suddenly surrounded by something bright and overwhelming. It was not just Felix before whom he fell back, but the troupe of possibilities that seemed to come crowding in behind him, tumbling and leaping invisibly about the hall. He saw himself in a dazzle of light, heroic and absurd, and the hallway might have been the pass at Roncesvalles. I should not sneer: I too in secret have always fancied myself a hero, dying with my face to Spain, though I suspect no ministering angel or exaltation of saints will come to carry me off as I cough out my heart’s last drops of blood.

Felix was describing how the boat had run aground. Daintily with finger and thumb he hoisted skirt-like the legs of his trousers to show a pair of skinny, bare, blue-white ankles and his shoes dark with wet. Head on one side, and that comical, self-disparaging grin.

‘Professor Kreutznaer,’ Licht said in a sort of hapless desperation, ‘Professor Kreutznaer is … busy.’

Felix was regarding him keenly with an eyebrow lifted.

‘Busy, eh?’ he said softly. ‘Well then, we shall not disturb him, shall we.’

The others had shuffled across the bridge by now, dragged forward reluctantly in the wake of Felix’s rapid ascent to the house, as if they were attached to him at a distance somehow; they loitered, waiting for a sign. Sophie sat down on a rock and kneaded the foot she had twisted. Hatch was clutching his stomach and rolling his eyes in a dumbshow demonstration of hunger, while Pound snickered and Alice smiled doubtfully. Have we met Alice? She is eleven. She wears her hair in a shiny, fat, brown braid. She is not pretty. Sophie considered the elfin Hatch without enthusiasm, his narrow, white face and red slash of a mouth; there is one clown in every company.

‘After the war,’ she said to him, ‘when I was younger than you are now, we had no food. Every day for months, for months, I was hungry. My mother rubbed the top of the stove with candle grease —’ with one hand she smoothed large, slow circles on the air ‘— and fried potatoes in it, and when the potatoes were eaten she fried the peelings and we ate those, too.’

Hatch with a tragic look embraced himself and did a dying fall on to the grass and lay there twitching.

‘Oh, leave them alone, Countess,’ Croke said waggishly, wagging his head at her. ‘This is not old Vienna.’

She eyed him coolly. When he grinned he showed a large set of yellowed, horsey teeth, and the skin over his cheekbones tightened and the skull under the taut skin seemed to grin as well, but in a different way. Countess: he had started calling her that last night in the hotel bar when he was tipsy, winking at her and trying to get her drunk; she suspected gloomily it would stick.

‘So funny you are,’ she said. ‘All of you, so funny.’

The boys laughed — how quickly the grown-ups could irritate each other today! — but they were uneasy, too. Sophie already was an object of deep and secret speculation to them, this moody woman in black who was as old as a mother would be but unlike any mother they had ever known, the hungry way she smoked cigarettes, the way she sat with her knees apart, like a man, not caring (Hatch on the ground was trying to look up her skirt), the fascinating tang of sweat she left behind her on the air when she passed by.

Croke, still leering at her toothily, sang under his breath, in a quavery voice:

Wien, Wien, nur du allein!

When he laughed he coughed, a string of phlegm twanging in his throat, and Alice glared at him. She disapproved of Croke, because of his coarseness, and because he was old.

‘I am not even Viennese,’ Sophie said ruefully, frowning at her foot.

‘But you should be, Countess,’ Croke said, with what he thought was gallantry. ‘You should be.’

Flora had moved away carefully with her eyes lowered. Sophie watched her narrowly. Flora was wearing an affected, far-off look, as if she thought there might be unpleasantness that she would have to pretend not to notice. How beautiful she was, like one of Modigliani’s girls, with that heavy black hair, those tilted eyes, that hesitant, slightly awkward, pigeon-toed grace. Sophie suspected she had been with Felix last night. Sanctimonious little twat.

Vienna. God! She lit a cigarette. Her foot was callused and the nail on the little toe had almost disappeared into the flesh. She closed her eyes. She was sick of herself. Why had she said that nonsense about the potato peelings? For whom was she playing this part that she had to keep on making up as she went along? A comedy, of course, all a horrible comedy. Out there in the flocculent, moth-laden darkness an invisible audience was splitting its sides at her. She rose, suddenly angry, at herself and everything else, and, carrying her shoes and stepping warily, set off up the pathway to the house, where Felix had reappeared and was waiting for them on the porch with a proprietorial air, his hands like a brahmin’s joined before him, a man brimming with secrets, smiling.

He might have been master of the house so warmly did he welcome them, touching an elbow here, patting a shoulder-blade there, winking gaily at the boys, who had carried up his black bag between them. And to their surprise as he ushered them in they all, even Sophie, felt a rush of gratitude for his ministering presence; they remembered the awful, sickening lurch when the boat had keeled over, things falling and a big crate sliding off the deck into the water and the drunken skipper cursing, and it came to them that after all they were survivors, in a way, despite the festive look that everything insisted on wearing, and suddenly they were full of tenderness for themselves and pity for their plight. Licht hovered in the dimness of the doorway, smiling helplessly, nodding to them and mouthing wordless greetings as they entered.

‘Hello, Harpo,’ Hatch said brightly, and Pound behind him spluttered.

The hall was wide and paved unevenly with black and white tiles. There was a pockmarked mirror in a gilt frame and an umbrella stand with an assortment of walking canes and a broken shooting-stick. The walls up to the dado were clad with embossed wallpaper to which repeated layers of varnish had imparted a thick, clammy, toffee-coloured texture, while above the rail stretched shadowy grey expanses that had once, long ago, been white. There was a smell of apples just starting to rot. And an air now of polite shock, of a hand put to mouth in amazement at all this noise, this intrusion. Licht was beside himself.

They stood uneasily in a huddle and did not know what to do next.

And then something happened, I am not sure what it was. They were all crowded together there, uncertain whether to advance or wait, and this uncertainty produced a ripple among them, a restless stirring, as when the day darkens suddenly and a gust of wind from nowhere blows through the trees, shaking them. Nice touch of the Virgilian, that. Croke, squinting up at something on the ceiling, stepped backwards and trod on Sophie’s foot, the one that she had twisted. She shrieked, and her shriek brought an immediate and solemn silence and everyone went as still as a statue. I could leave them there, I could walk away now and leave them there forever. The silence lasted for the space of half a dozen heartbeats and then slowly, as if she were slowly falling, Alice began to cry.

‘Oh,’ Licht said in distress, ‘my poor … my dear …’

He touched a tremulous hand to her shoulder but she twisted away from him violently with a great slack sob. She did not know what was the matter with her. The boys stared at her with frank interest.

‘Christ,’ Pound said in happy disgust, ‘there she goes.’

Alice cries easily.

Licht led them into the kitchen, a big, high-ceilinged room with a scrubbed pine table and mismatched wooden chairs and a jumble of unwashed crockery in the sink. An enormous, gruel-coloured stove with a black chimney squatted in a blackened recess. The window looked out on sloped fields and the tree-clad rise, so that they had a curious sense of submersion, and felt as if they were looking up through the silvery water-light of a deep, still pool. Licht leaned down at the stove and opened the little door of the firebox and looked inside.

‘Out, of course,’ he said disgustedly and shouted: ‘Stove!’ but no one answered. He turned up to them an apologetic smile. ‘Are you wet?’

They were wet. They were tired. They said nothing. They had got on board a boat at first light to take a little pleasure trip and now here they were stranded in a strange house on this island in the middle of nowhere.

Licht was still leaning at the stove gazing up at them, the smile forgotten on his face. They might have walked straight out of his deepest longings. Days he had dreamed of an invasion just such as this, noise and unfamiliar voices in the hall and the kitchen full of strangers and he among them, grinning like a loon. He left the stove and busied himself with making them sit and taking their wet shoes and offering them tea, scurrying here and there, hot with happy fear that they might at any moment prove a figment after all and vanish. Sophie was asking him something about the ruins in the hills, but he could not concentrate, and kept saying yes, yes, and smiling his unfocused, flustered smile. When Flora at the table looked up at him weakly and handed him her wet, warm shoes he felt a sort of plunge inside him, as if something had dropped in the hollow of his heart and hung there bobbing lightly on its elastic. She felt strange, she told him, strange and sort of shivery. Her voice was soft. She looked at him from under her long lashes, helpless and at the same time calculating, he could see it, how she was measuring him; he did not care, except he wished that he were younger, taller, altogether different. He stood before her holding her shoes, one in each hand, and a swarm of impossible yearnings rose up in him drunkenly. He brought her upstairs to rest and lingered in the doorway of the bedroom, twisting and twisting the doorknob in his hand. She sat down slowly on the side of the bed and folded her arms tightly around herself and looked emptily at the floor.

‘Are you on a holiday?’ he said tentatively.

‘What?’ She continued to stare before her in dull bewilderment, frowning. She roused herself a little and shook her head. ‘No. I’m taking care of them.’ She gestured disdainfully in the direction of downstairs. ‘Supposed to be, anyway.’ She gave a soft snort.

‘Oh?’

She glanced up at him impatiently.

‘The children,’ she said. ‘It’s only a summer job, at the hotel.’ She bit her lip and looked sullen.

‘Ah,’ he said. Some sort of skivvy, then; he felt encouraged. He waited for more, but in vain. ‘Did that boat,’ he said after a moment, ‘did that boat really run aground?’

She did not seem to be listening. She was staring blankly at the floor again. Behind her an enormous, lead-blue cloud was edging its way stealthily into the window, humid and swollen, the very picture of his own muffled desires. She was so lovely it made him ache to look at her, with her slender, slightly turned-in feet and enormous eyes and faint hint of moustache. A memory stirred in his mind, the sense of something sleek and smooth and faintly, tenderly repulsive. Yes: the hare’s nest in the grass that he had found one day on the dunes when he was a child, the two baby hares in it lying folded around each other head to rump like an heraldic emblem. He had brought them home under his coat but his mother would not let him keep them. How tinily their hearts had ticked against his own suddenly heavy heart! That was him all over, always on the look-out for something to love that would love him in return and never finding it. Or hardly ever. Poor mama. When he went back to look for the nest he could not find it and had to leave the leverets under the shelter of a rock, with leaves to lie on and grass and dandelion stalks to eat. Next day they were gone. Not a trace. The stalks untouched. Gone. And yet how little he had cared, standing there in the grey of morning contemplating that absence, while the sea beyond the dunes muttered and the wind polished the dark grass around him. Now he sighed, baffled at himself, as always.

‘I think I want to lie down,’ Flora said.

‘Of course, of course.’

‘Just for a little while.’

‘Of course.’

He was torn between staying there, leaning sleepless on his shield, and rushing downstairs again to reassure himself that the others had not disappeared. Instead, when she had stretched herself out on the bed, yawning and sighing, and he had shut the door behind him lingeringly, he found himself wandering in a sort of aimless, apprehensive rapture about the upper storeys, stopping now and then to listen, he was not sure for what: for the crackle of wing-cases, perhaps, for the sounds of the new life breaking out of its cocoon. From the stairs he caught a glimpse through the half-closed lavatory door of Sophie sitting straight-backed on the stool with her skirt hiked up and her pants around her knees, gazing before her with a dreamy, stern stare as her water tinkled freely into the bowl beneath her. He hurried past with eyes averted, red-faced, smiling madly in embarrassment, muttering to himself.

Oh, agog, agog!

THE SEAGULLS wake me early. I hear them up on the chimney-pots beating their wings and uttering strange, deep-throated cries. They sound like human babies. Perhaps it is the young I am hearing, not yet flown from the nest and still demanding food. I never was much of a naturalist. How lovely the summer light is at this time of morning, a seamless, soft grey shot through with water-glints. I lie for a long time thinking of nothing. I can do that, I can make my mind go blank. It is a knack I acquired in the days when the thought of what was to be endured before darkness and oblivion came again was hardly to be borne. And so, quite empty, weightless as a paper skiff, I make my voyage out, far, far out, to the very brim, where a disc of water shimmers like molten coin against a coin-coloured sky, and everything lifts, and sky and waters merge invisibly. That is where I seem to be most at ease now, on the far, pale margin of things. If I can call it ease. If I can call it being.

An island, of course. The authorities when they were releasing me had asked in their suspicious way where I would go and I said at once, Oh, an island, where else? All I wanted, I assured them, was a place of seclusion and tranquillity where I could begin the long process of readjustment to the world and pursue my studies of a famous painter they had never heard of. It sounded surprisingly plausible to me. (Oh yes, guv, says the old lag, standing before the big desk in his arrowed suit and twisting his cap in his hands, this time I’m going straight, you can count on it, I won’t let you down!) There is something about islands that appeals to me, the sense of boundedness, I suppose, of being protected from the world — and of the world being protected from me, there is that, too. They approved, or seemed to, anyway; I have a notion they were relieved to get rid of me. They treated me so tenderly, were so considerate of my wishes, I was amazed. But that is how it had been all along, more or less. They had worse cases than me on their hands, fellows who in a less squeamish age would have been hanged, drawn and quartered for their deeds, yet they seemed to feel that I was special. Perhaps it was just that I had confessed so readily to my crime, made no excuses, even displayed a forensic interest in my motives, which were almost as mysterious to me as they were to them. For whatever reason, they behaved towards me as if I had done some great, grave thing, as if I were a messenger, say, come back from somewhere immensely difficult and far, bringing news so terrible it made them feel strong and noble merely to be the receivers of it. It may be, of course, that this solemn mien was only a way of hiding their hatred and disgust. I suspect they would have done violence to me but that they did not wish to soil their hands. Maybe they had been hoping my fellow inmates would mete out to me the punishments they were loth to administer themselves? If so, they were disappointed; I was a man of substance in there, ranging freely as I might among that hobbled multitude. And now I had done my time, and was out.

I was not at all the same person that I had been a decade before (is the oldster in his dotage the same that he was when he was an infant swaddled in his truckle bed?). A slow sea-change had taken place. I believe that over those ten years of incarceration — life, that is, minus time off for good, for exemplary, behaviour — I had evolved into an infinitely more complex organism. This is not to say that I felt myself to be better than I had been — the doctrine of penal rehabilitation broke against the rock of my inexpungible guilt — nor did it mean I was any worse, either: just different. Everything had become more intricate, more dense and pensive. My crime had ramified; it sat inside me now like a second, parasitic self, its tentacles coiled around my cells. I had grown fat on my sin; I seemed to myself to wallow along, bloated and empurpled, like a mutated species of jellyfish stuffed full with poison. Soft, that is, formless, malignant still, yet not so fierce as once I had been, not so careless, or so cold. Puzzled, too, of course, still unable to believe that I had done what I did do. I make no pleas; it is the only thing I can boast of, that I never sought to excuse myself for my enormities. And so I had come to this penitential isle (there are beehive huts in the hills), seeking not redemption, for that would have been too much to ask, but an accommodation with myself, maybe, and with my poor, swollen conscience.

They tell me I am too hard on myself; as if such a thing were possible.

I was brought, or perhaps transported is a better word: yes, I was transported here by boat. It was charming. I had expected to find myself standing outside the gates some desolate grey morning with a brown-paper parcel under my arm, whey-faced and baffled before a prospect of enormous streets, yet here I was, skimming gaily over the little waves with the breeze in my face and the tarry smell of the sea in my nostrils. The morning was sunny and bright, the light like glass. Shadows of clouds raced towards us across the water, darkened the air around us for a second, and swept on. When we got into the lee of the island the breeze dropped and the skipper cut the engine and we glided smoothly forward into a vast, flat silence. The water with the sun on it was wonderfully clear, I could see right down to the bottom, where there were green rocks and opulent, coffee-coloured weeds, and shoals of darting fish, mud-grey, with now and then a flash of platinum-white. The little jetty was deserted, the strand, too, and the green hill behind. On the quayside there was a jumble of tumbledown stone houses with holes in the roofs; at the sight of them, I do not know why, I experienced one of my moments of black fright. I have almost got used to these attacks, these little tremors. They last only an instant. There are times, especially at night, when I mistake them for stabs of physical pain, and wonder if something inside me is diseased, not a major organ, not heart or liver, but the spleen, perhaps, or the gall-bladder, something like that, some bruised little purple plum or orchidaceous fold of malignant tissue that might one day be the thing that would do me in to the accompaniment of exquisite torments.

I heard then for the first time that strange, soft, bellowing sound the island makes, it came to me clearly across the water, a siren voice.

‘Like music,’ I said. ‘Like … singing.’

When I asked the skipper what it was he shrugged.

‘Ah, don’t mind that,’ he said. ‘There must be an old blowhole somewhere that the tide pushes out the air through. Don’t mind that, at all.’

Then that teetering moment of slide and sway and the soft bump of the boat against the dock: landfall.

I liked the island straight away, finding its bleakness congenial. It suits me well. It is ten miles long and five miles wide (or is it five miles long and ten miles wide? — this matter of length and breadth has always puzzled me), with cliffs on one side and a rocky foreshore on the other. The seas round about are treacherous, running with hidden currents and rip-tides, so that yachts and pleasure boats for the most part steer clear of us, with the happy result that we are not troubled by day-trippers, or hearty people in caps and rugged jumpers tramping about the harbour demanding grog and talking incomprehensibly about jibs and mizzens and all the rest of it. The place overall is gratifyingly lacking in the picturesque. It is true, there are whitewashed cottages and dry-stone walls, and sheep, and even here and there a tweed-clad shepherd. We have the bigger stuff as well, the rolling hills and ocean views and shimmering, lavender distances, and at night there is the light-thronged firmament. What is missing is that look of stony fortitude — storms withstood, privations endured — which a real island turns upon the outside world and which fills the casual visitor with an equal mixture of awe and irritation. The fact is, the place is not like an island at all, more like a bit of the mainland that has recently come adrift. There are patches of waste ground, and mysterious, padlocked sheds smelling of diesel oil, and tarred roads that set off determinedly into the hills as if great highways awaited them out there like destiny. The village, though it lies no more than a mile inland from the harbour, hidden in the fold of a hill, has the forlorn look of a place lost in the midst of the plains. It seems to be inhabited entirely by idiots. (I should move there, I could be the village savant; imagine a mournful chuckle.) There is a shop, a post office, and a pub the door of which I do not darken. It is mostly the old who live here now, the young having fled to what I suppose they imagined would be the easier life of the mainland. I had thought, when I first arrived, of opening a little school, like poor Ludwig on the Snow Mountain, to teach the few children that remain, but nothing came of it, as was the case with so many of my projects. I, a schoolteacher! What an idea. Still, the thought was benevolent, I do not have many such. The island services in general are meagre. The nearest doctor is a slow and sometimes erratic boat-journey away on the mainland. So when I arrived I felt at once as if somehow I had come home. Will that seem strange, to say I felt at home in such seemingly uncongenial surroundings? But the poverty, you see, the dullness and lack of emphasis, these might have been a form of subtlety, after all. Drama was the last thing I wanted, unless it be seagulls wheeling above oaks, or a boat stuck on a sandbank, or a woebegone band of strangers struggling up the dunes one day and spying an old house standing on the side of a hill.

From my copious reading — what else had I to do, in those first days of so-called freedom, except to read and dream? — I gleaned the following: I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that lam leading a posthumous existence. I had burned my boats, the years were strewn like ashes on the water. I was at rest here, in the calm under the great wave of the world. Yes, I felt at home — I, who thought never again to feel at home anywhere. This does not mean I did not at the same time feel myself to be an outsider. The place tolerated me, that’s all. I had the impression of a certain disdain, of everything leaning carefully away from me with averted gaze. The house especially had a frowning, tight-lipped aspect. Or perhaps I am wrong, perhaps what I detected was not contempt, or even disapproval, but something quite other: tactfulness, for instance — inanimate objects seem ever anxious not to intrude — or just a general wish to preserve the forms. Yet wherever I went, even when I walked into an empty room, I had an uncanny sense of things having fallen silent at my approach. I know, of course, that this was all foolishness, that the place did not care a damn about me, really, that I could have vanished into the air with a ping! and everything would have gone on in its own sweet way as if nothing had happened. Yet I could not rid myself of the conviction that somehow I was — how shall I put it? — required.

And I was alone, despite the presence of the others. How to be alone even in the midst of the elbowing crowd, that is another of those knacks that the years in captivity had taught me. It is a matter of inward stillness, of hiding inside oneself, like an animal in cover, while the hounds go pounding past. Oh, I know only too well how this will seem: that I had retreated into solitude, that I was living in a fantasy world, a world of pictures and painted figures and all the rest of it. But that is not it, no, that is not it at all. It is only that I was trying to get as far away as possible from everything. I had tried to get away from myself, too, but in vain. The Chinese, or perhaps it was the Florentines of Dante’s day — anyway, some such fierce and unforgiving people — would bind a murderer head and toe to the corpse of his victim and sling this terrible parcel into a dungeon and throw away the key. I knew something of that, here in my oubliette, lashed to my ineluctable self, not to mention … well, not to mention. What I was striving to do was to simplify, to refine. I had shed everything I could save existence itself. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps it is a mistake: perhaps I should be shouldering the emcumbrances of life instead of throwing them off? But no, I wanted not to live — I would have others to do that for me — but only to endure. True, there is no getting away from the passionate attachment to self, that I-beam set down in the dead centre of the world and holding the whole rickety edifice in place. All the same, I was determined at least to try to make myself into a — what do you call it? — a monomorph: a monad. And then to start again, empty. That way, I felt, I might come to understand things, in however rudimentary a fashion. Small things, of course. Simple things.

But then, there are no simple things. I have said this before, I shall say it again. The object splits, flips, doubles back, becomes something else. Under the slightest pressure the seeming unit falls into a million pieces and every piece into a million more. I was myself no unitary thing. I was like nothing so much as a pack of cards, shuffling into other and yet other versions of myself: here was the king, here the knave, and here the ace of spades. Nor did it seem possible to speak simply. I would open my mouth and a babble would come pouring out, a hopeless glossolalia. The most elementary bit of speech was a cacophony. To choose one word was to exclude countless others, they thronged out there in the darkness, heaving and humming. When I tried to mean one thing the buzz of a myriad other possible meanings mocked my efforts. Everything I said was out of context, necessarily, and every plunge I made into speech inevitably ended in a bellyflop. I wanted to be simple, candid, natural — I wanted to be, yes, I shall risk it: I wanted to be honest — but all my striving provoked only general hoots of merriment and rich scorn.

My case, in short, was what it always had been, namely, that I did one thing while thinking another and in this welter of difference I did not know what I was. How then was I to be expected to know what others are, to imagine them so vividly as to make them quicken into a sort of life?

Others? Other: they are all one. The only one.

Not to mention.

And yet it all went on, went on without stop, and every moment of it had to be lived, used up, somehow; not a lapse, not the tiniest falter in the flow; a life sentence. Even sleep was no escape. In the mornings I would get up exhausted, as if part of me had been out all night roving in the dark like a dog in rut. Such dreams I had, immense elaborations, they wore me out. What were they for, I wondered? They were like alibis, fiendishly intricate versions of an event the true circumstances of which I dared not admit, even to myself, that I remembered. To whom was I offering these implausible farragos, before what judge was I arraigned? Not that I imagined I was innocent, only I would have liked to see the face of my oneiric accusers. I remember the first dream I had, the very first night I slept here. I have no idea what it signified, if it signified anything. I was somewhere in the Levant, at the gates of a vast, grey, crumbling city, at evening, with my mother. She was nothing at all like her real self as I recalled it, but very brisk, very much the intrepid traveller, rigged out in tweeds and a broad-brimmed hat and wielding a stout stick. She kept stopping and hectoring me, the laggard son stumbling at her heels in his city shoes and sag-arsed trousers, overweight and sweating and risibly middle-aged. When we entered the city we found ourselves at once in a high, narrow alleyway lined with stalls. There were many people and a great hubbub of voices and eastern music and the mellifluous shrillings of merchants crying their wares. This is the gold market, my mother said to me, speaking very loudly close to my ear. There was a sumptuous shine in the air, as if the light were coming not from the sky but rising spontaneously from the countless precious things laid out around us, the ornaments and piled plates and great beaten bowls. We pressed on through the winding streets, into the heart of the town. There were mosques and minarets and arched gateways and houses with latticed windows giving on to courtyards where lemon trees grew in enormous stone pots. Everything was made of the same grey stone, a sort of pumice only darker, which was wrong, it should have been something hard and smooth and almost precious, like marble, or porphyry, whatever that is. Evening was coming on, and now there was no one to be seen, and our footsteps echoed along the little streets. It is Ramadan, my mother said softly. At that moment suddenly under a dim archway before us two boys appeared, slender, barefoot, honey-skinned, wearing faded robes that swirled about them loosely as they moved. They crossed the archway at a dancing run from left to right, lithe and swift as monkeys, bearing above their heads a gleaming shell of beaten gold the size and shape of an inverted coracle but so delicate and light it seemed to float on the tips of their fingers. They laughed, making soft, trilling noises deep in their throats. Were they playing a game, or was it some marvellous, ritual task they were performing? I saw them only for a second and then they were gone, and my mother too was gone from my side, and it was all so real, so fraught with mysterious significance, that I began to cry in my sleep, and woke up sobbing my heart out, like a child.

There are the nightmares too, of course, the recurring ones, lit with a garish, unearthly glow, in which the dead speak to me: flesh, burst bone, the slow, secret, blue-black ooze. I shall not try to recount them, these bloodstained pageants. They are no use to me. They are only a kind of lurid tinkering that my fancy indulges in, the crackles and jagged sparks thrown off by the spinning dynamo of my overburdened conscience. It is not the dead that interest me now, no matter how piteously they may howl in the chambers of the night. Who, then? The living? No, no, something in between; some third thing.

Dreams, then waking. At times it was hard to tell the difference; I would drift out of riotous slumber and get up and walk around in a hazy, shallow state that seemed only a calmer, less tormented form of sleep than that which had gone before. I tramped the roads in the chill of dawn while a white sun came up tremblingly out of the sea. Everything is strange at that hour, stranger than usual, I mean: the world looks as I imagine it will look after I am dead, wide and empty and streaked with long shadows, shocked somehow and not quite solid, all odd-angled light and shifting facades. These open vistas — so much sky! — alarmed me. I was permanently dizzy, clinging for dear life to our flying island, and there was constantly a sort of distant ringing in my ears. It felt like early morning all day long, there was that fizzing in the blood, that taste of metal in the mouth. The days hung heavy, falling towards night. We watched in silence the unremitting, slow advance of time. Here on Devil’s Island we are not allowed the illusion of highs and troughs, of sudden speedings up, of halts and starts. There is only the steady, glacial creep that carries all along with it. Sometimes I fancied I could feel the planet itself hurtling ponderously through space in its bubble of bright air. I had my moments of rebellion, of course, when I would scramble up from the slimed flagstones and rattle my shackles in rage, shouting for the non-existent jailer. Mostly, though, I was content, or calm, at least, with the febrile calm of the chronic invalid. That’s it, that’s what this place is most like, not a prison or a pilgrimage isle, but one of those Sanatoriums that were so numerous when I was a child and half the world had rotting lungs. Yes, I see myself up here in those first weeks and months immured behind a wall of glass, peering out in a feverish daze over serried blue pines while a huge sun declined above a distant river valley. Heights, I have always sought the heights, physical if not moral. It is not grandeur I crave, not the mossy crag or soaring peak, but the long perspective, the distance, the diminution of things. I had hardly arrived here before I found myself tramping up the fields behind the house to the oak ridge. Wonderful prospect from this lofty crest, the near green and the far blue and that strip of ash-white beach holding up an enormity of sea and sky, the whole scene clear and delicate, like something by Vaublin himself, a background to one of his celebrated pèlerinages or a delicate fête galante. From this vantage I could make out in the fields around me a curious, ribbed pattern in the turf. I wondered if vines perhaps had grown here once (vines, in these latitudes! — what an ignoramus I am), but the spinster who runs the post office in the village put me right. ‘Potato drills,’ she told me, shouting because for some reason she took me for a foreigner (which, when I think of it, I suppose I am). ‘From before the famine times, that was.’ A thousand souls lived here then. I picture them, in their cawbeens and their shawls, straggling down the path to the beach and the waiting black ship, the men fixed on something distant and the women looking back out of huge, stricken eyes. Cythera, my foot. Such suffering, such grief: unimaginable. No, that’s not right. I can imagine it. I can imagine anything.

I bring the household rubbish up here on to the ridge to burn it. I like burning things, paper especially. I think fire must be my element; I relish the sudden flare and crackle, the anger of it, the menace. I stand leaning on my pitchfork (a wonderful implement, this, the wood of the shaft silky from use and the tines tempered by flame to a lovely, dark, oily opalescence), in my boots and my old hat, chewing the soft inside of my cheek and thinking of nothing, and am excited and at the same time strangely at peace. At times I become convinced I am being watched, and turn quickly to see if I can catch a glimpse of a foxy face and glittering, mephitic eye among the leaves; I tell myself I am imagining it, that there is no one, but I am not persuaded; I suppose I want him to be here still, someone worse than me, feral, remorseless, laughing at everything. The heat shakes the air above the fire and makes the trees on the far side of the clearing seem to wobble. Between the trunks I can see the sea, deep-blue, unmoving, flecked with white. The stones banked around the fire hum and creak, big russet shards with threads of yellow glitter running through them. I recall as a child melting lumps of lead in a tin can, the way the lead trembled inside itself and abruptly the little secret shining worm ran out. I used to try to melt stones, too, imagining the seams of ore in them were gold. And when they would not break nor the gold melt I could not understand it, and would fly into a rage and want to set fire to everything, burn everything down. Timid little boy though I was, I harboured dreams of irresistible destruction. I imagined it, the undulating sheets of flame, the red wind rushing upwards, the rip and roar. Fire: yes, yes.

I have other chores. I draw wood, of course, and tend the stove, and check that the water pump is running freely and that the septic tank is functioning. These used to be Licht’s jobs; he took a great satisfaction in handing them over to me as soon as I arrived. I had not the heart to let him see how I enjoyed the work that he thought would be a burden. I could rhapsodise about this kind of thing — I mean the simple goodness of the commonplace. Jail had taught me the quiet delights of drudgery. Manual work dulls the sharp edges of things and sometimes can deflect even the arrows of remorse. Not that convicts are required any more to do what you would call hard labour. I have a theory, mock me if you will, that modern penal practice aims not to punish the miscreant, or even to instil in him a moral sense, but rather seeks to emasculate him by a process of enervation. I know I had ridiculously old-fashioned notions of what to expect from prison, picked up no doubt from the black-and-white movies of my childhood: the shaved blue heads, the manacled, ragged figures trudging in a circle in the exercise-yard, the fingernails destroyed, like poor Oscar’s, from picking oakum — why, even leg-irons and bread and water would not have surprised me — instead of which, what we had was Ping-Pong and television and the ever-springing tea-urn. I tell you, it would soften the most hardened recidivist. (Perhaps when I am finished with Vaublin I shall produce a monograph on prison reform: here as elsewhere, though it may be slower, the spread of liberal values goes unchecked and cannot but do harm to the moral fibre of the race, which needs its criminals, just as it needs its sportsmen and its butchers, for that vital admixture of strength, cunning and freedom from squeamishness.) Of course, in prison there were deprivations, and they were hard to bear, I will not deny it. I had thought it would be women I would want when I got out, women and silk suits and crowded city streets, all that rich world from which I had been isolated for so long, but here I was, pottering about in this rackety house on a crop of rock in the midst of a waste of waters. I had my books, my papers, my studies, playing the part of Professor Kreutznaer’s amanuensis, supposedly aiding him in the completion of his great work on the life and art of Jean Vaublin for which the world, or that part of it that cares about such things, has grown weary of waiting. The fiction that I was no more than his assistant was one that, for reasons not wholly clear to me, it suited us both to maintain; the truth is, before I knew it he had handed over the task entirely to me. I was flattered, of course, but I did not deceive myself as to his opinion of my abilities; it is true, I have a capacity to take pains, learned in a hard school, but I am no scholar. It was not regard for me but a growing indifference to the fate of his life’s work that led the Professor to abdicate in my favour. No, that’s not right. Rather it was, I think, an act of expiation on his part. He like me had sins to atone for, and this sacrifice was one of the ways he chose. Or was it, on the contrary, as the weasel of doubt sometimes suggests to me, was it his idea of a joke? Anyway, no matter, no matter. My name will not appear on the title page; I would not want that. A brief acknowledgment will do; I look forward to penning it myself, savouring in advance the reflexive thrill of writing down my own name and being, even if only for a moment, someone wholly other. If, that is, it is ever to be finished. I am happy at my labours, happier than I expected or indeed deserve to be; I feel I have achieved my apotheosis. My time is wonderfully balanced between the day’s rough chores and those scrupulosities and fine discriminations that art history demands, this saurian stillness before the shining objects it is my task to interrogate. In these soft, pale nights, while a grey-blue effulgence lingers in the window, I work at the kitchen table at the centre of a vast and somehow attentive silence, doing my impression of a scholar, sorting through sources, reading over the Professor’s material, in Licht’s exuberant typewriting, and writing up my own notes; collating, imbricating, advancing by a little and a little. It is a splendid part, the best it has ever been my privilege to play, and I have played many. I am in no hurry; the lamplight falls upon me steadily, my bent head and half a face, my hand inching its way down the pages. Now and then I pause and sit motionless for a moment, a watchman testing the night. I have a gratifying sense of myself as a sentinel, a guardian, a protector against that prowler, my dark other, whom I imagine stalking back and forth out there in the dark. Where can he be hiding, if he is still here? Could he have got back into the house, could he be skulking somewhere, in the attic, or in some unused room, nibbling scraps purloined from the kitchen and watching the day gradually decline towards darkness, biding his time? Is he in the woodpile, perhaps? If he is here it is the girl he is after. He shall not have her, I will see to that.

So anyhow: I came here, and I settled down, if that is the way to put it. I was content. This was a place to be. I did not travel to the mainland. No one had said I might not do so, but I seemed to feel an unspoken interdiction. If there was such a rule it must have been of my own making, for I confess I had no desire to realight from Laputa into the land of giants and horses. Yes, I was happy to bide here, with my catalogues and my detailed reproductions, polishing my galant style in preparation for the great work that lay before me impatient for my attentions. Ah, the little figures, I told myself, how convincingly, how gaily they shall strut!

Did I pin too many of my hopes on this work, I wonder? Could I really expect to redeem something of my fouled soul by poring over the paintings — over the reproductions of the paintings — of a long-dead and not quite first-rate master? We know so little of him. Even his name is uncertain: Faubelin, Vanhoblin, Van Hobellijn? Take your pick. He changed his name, his nationality, everything, covering his tracks. I have the impression of a man on the run. There is no early work, no juvenilia, no remnants of his apprenticeship. Suddenly one day he starts to paint. Yes, a manufactured man. Is that what attracts me? Something in these dreamy scenes of courtly love and melancholy pantomime appeals to me deeply, some quality of quietude and remoteness, that sense of anguish they convey, of damage, of impending loss. The painter is always outside his subjects, these pallid ladies in their gorgeous gowns — how he loved the nacreous sheen and shimmer of those heavy silks! — attended by their foppish and always slightly tipsy-looking gallants with their mandolins and masks; he holds himself remote from these figures, unable to do anything for them except bear witness to their plight, for even at their gayest they are beyond help, dancing the dainty measures of their dance out at the very end of a world, while the shadows thicken in the trees and night begins its stealthy approach. His pictures hardly need to be glazed, their brilliant surfaces are themselves like a sheet of glass, smooth, chill and impenetrable. He is the master of darkness, as others are of light; even his brightest sunlight seems shadowed, tinged with umber from these thick trees, this ochred ground, these unfathomable spaces leading into night. There is a mystery here, not only in Le monde d’or, that last and most enigmatic of his masterpieces, but throughout his work; something is missing, something is deliberately not being said. Yet I think it is this very reticence that lends his pictures their peculiar power. He is the painter of absences, of endings. His scenes all seem to hover on the point of vanishing. How clear and yet far-off and evanescent everything is, as if seen by someone on his deathbed who has lifted himself up to the window at twilight to look out a last time on a world that he is losing.

Twice a week I report to Sergeant Toner, the island’s only civic guard, a taciturn and stately figure. His dayroom in the barracks reminds me strangely of the schoolrooms of my childhood: the dusty floorboards, the inky smell, the wood-framed clock up on the wall ticking away the slow, sunstruck afternoons. Sergeant Toner moves with vast deliberation, rising from his desk in a rolling motion, as if he were shouldering great soft weights, nodding to me in sober salutation. A kind of monumental decorum marks these occasions. We speak, when we speak, mainly of the weather, its treacheries and unexpected beneficences. The Sergeant leans at his counter, his meaty shoulders hunched and his pink scalp gleaming through the stubble of his close-cropped, sandy hair, and writes my name into the daybook with the stub of a plain, sweat-polished pencil tethered to the counter on a piece of string; that pencil must have been here since the days when he was still a recruit. He breathes heavily, so heavily that once in a while, seemingly without his noticing it, a slurred word will surface, a fragment of his inner musings which he involuntarily extrudes in a sort of rasping sigh. Ah, dear Christ, he will murmur, or Wednesday, or, on one memorable occasion, Puddings … He honours the niceties of our predicament, maintaining a careful distance between us. In the beginning I had worried that he would be impressed with me, in a professional way, that he might look on me as a sort of celebrity to be watched over and shown off — after all, it is not every day a man of my notoriety swims into his ken — but the very first time when, nervous as a schoolboy, I came to report to him, he repeated my name to himself thoughtfully a couple of times and then — though he had been expecting me, of course, and knew all about me, having been thoroughly briefed, as they say, by the authorities — he asked gently, with that fastidiousness and sense of tact which I have come so much to admire in him, if I would please spell it for him. When I had done so, and he had carefully written it into his book, we observed a brief silence, with eyes downcast, in acknowledgment I suppose of the solemnity of the occasion. ‘Ah yes,’ he said then with a sigh, ‘yes: life means life, right enough.’ This is something that has been dinned into me over the years, yet coming from him, and the way that he put it, it had a certain weight, a certain grandeur, even, and for a moment I saw myself as a person of consequence; a serious person, deeply flawed and irremediably damaged, it is true, but someone, all the same: definitely someone.

I need these people, the Sergeant, and Mr Tighe the shopman in the village, even Miss Broaders, she of the pink twinsets and tight mouth, who presides over the post office. I needed them especially in the early days. They had substance, which was precisely what I seemed to lack. I held on to them as if they were a handle by which I might hold on to things, to solid, simple (yes, simple!) things, and to myself among them. For I felt like something suspended in empty air, weightless, transparent, turning this way or that in every buffet of wind that blew. At least when I was locked away I had felt I was definitively there, but now that I was free (or at large, at any rate) I seemed hardly to be here at all. This is how I imagine ghosts existing, poor, pale wraiths pegged out to shiver in the wind of the world like so much insubstantial laundry, yearning towards us, the heedless ones, as we walk blithely through them.

Time. Time on my hands. That is a strange phrase. From those first weeks on the island I recall especially the afternoons, slow, silent, oddly mysterious stretches of something that seemed more than clock time, a thicker-textured stuff, a sort of sea-drift, tidal, surreptitious, deeper than the world. Look at this box-kite of sunlight sailing imperceptibly across the floor, listen to the scrape of the curtain as it stirs in the breeze, see that dazed green view framed in the white window, the far, narrow line of the beach and beyond that the azure sea, unreal, vivid as memory. This is a different way of being alive. I thought sometimes at moments such as this that I might simply drift away and become a part of all that out there, drift and dissolve, be a shimmer of light slowly fading into nothing. It was coming into the season of white nights, I found it hard to sleep. Extraordinary the look of things at dusk then, it might have been another planet, with that pale vault of sky, those crouched and hesitant, dreamy distances. I wandered about the house, going softly through the stillness and shadows, and sometimes I would lose myself, I mean I would flow out of myself somehow and be as a phantom, a patch of moving dark against the lighter darkness all around me. The night seemed something on the point of being spoken. This sense of immanence, of things biding their time, waiting to occur, was it all just imagination and wishful thinking? Night-time always seems peopled to me; they throng about me, the dead ones, yearning to speak.

The house has a nautical feel to it. Sea breezes make the timbers shift and groan, and the blue, salt-laden light in the windows is positively oceanic. The air reeks of brine and the floors when the sun comes in give off a tang of pitch. Then there is that faint smell of rancid apples everywhere: I might be Jim Hawkins, off on a grand venture. When I came down at last on that morning of their arrival the kitchen was like a ship’s cabin. I felt at first a certain sullen indignation, tinged with fear: this was my place and they were invading it. And yet, although I had only been here a few weeks, like Licht I too was eager already for change, for disorder, for the mess and confusion that people make of things. It was simple, you see, no matter how much of a mystery I may make the whole thing seem. Company, that was what we wanted, the brute warmth of the presence of others to tell us we were alive after all, despite appearances. They were crowded at the long pine table nursing mugs of the tea that Licht had made for them and looking distinctly queasy. Their shoes were lined up on top of the stove to dry. It was still early, and outside a flinty sun was shining and piled-up vastnesses of luminous silver and white clouds were sailing over the oak ridge. When I came in from the hall the back door flew open in the wind and everything flapped and rattled and something white flew off the table, and poor Licht waded forward at an angle with one arm outstretched and his coattails flying and slammed the door, and all immediately subsided, and our galleon ploughed serenely on again.

‘This milk is sour,’ said Pound.

I forget: is he the comedian or the fat one with the specs? I can see I shall have trouble with these two.

You would think I would have asked myself questions, as characters such as I are expected to do: for instance, Who can they be? or, What are they doing here? or, What will this mean to me? But no, not a bit of it. And yet I must have been waiting all along for them, or something like them, without knowing it, perhaps. Biding my time, that is the phrase. It has always been thus with me, not knowing myself or my velleities, drifting in ignorance. Now as I stood there gazing at them in dull wonderment, with that eerie sense of recognition that only comes in dreams, a memory floated up — though memory is too strong a word, and at the same time not strong enough — of a room in the house where I was born. It is a recurring image, one of a handful of emblematic fragments from the deep past that seem mysteriously to constitute something of the very stuff of which I am made. It is a summer afternoon, but the room is dim, except where a quartered crate of sunlight, seething with dustmotes, falls at a tilt from the window. All is coolness and silence, or what passes for silence in summer. Outside the window the garden stands aghast in a tangle of trumpeting convolvulus. Nothing happens, nothing will happen, yet everything is poised, waiting, a chair in the corner crouching with its arms braced, the coiled fronds of a fern, that copper pot with the streaming sunspot on its rim. This is what holds it all together and yet apart, this sense of expectancy, like a spring tensed in mid-air and sustained by its own force, exerting an equal pressure everywhere. And I, I am there and not there: I am the pretext of things, though I sport no thick gold wing or pale halo. Without me there would be no moment, no separable event, only the brute, blind drift of things. That seems true; important, too. (Yes, it would appear that after all I am indeed required.) And yet, though I am one of them, I am only a half figure, a figure half-seen, standing in the doorway, or sitting at a corner of the scrubbed pine table with a cracked mug at my elbow, and if they try to see me straight, or turn their heads too quickly, I am gone.

‘That skipper,’ Felix was saying. ‘What a fellow! Listing? I said to him, listing? More like we are in danger of turning tortoise, I believe!’ And he laughed his laugh.

I was thinking how strangely matters arrange themselves at times, as if after all there were someone, another still, whose task it is to set them out just so.

Licht from across the room gave me one of his mournfully accusing glares.

‘It’s all right,’ he called out loudly, ‘it’s all right, don’t trouble yourself, I’ll light the stove.’

PROFESSOR KREUTZNAER in his eyrie sat for a long time without stirring, hearing only the slow beat of his own blood and the spring wind gusting outside and now and then the hoarse baby-cry of a gull, startlingly close. Strain as he might he could hear nothing from downstairs. What were they doing? They had not left, he would have seen them go. He pictured them standing about the dim hallway, magicked into immobility, glazed and mute, one with a hand raised, another bending to set down a bag, and Licht before them, stalled at the foot of the stairs, nodding and twitching like a marionette, as usual.

He fiddled with the telescope and sighed. Surely he had been mistaken, surely it was not who he thought it was?

He went to the door. It had a way of sticking and was hard to open quietly. Sure enough it gave its little eek! and shuddered briefly on its hinges. A flare of irritation made his heart thud hotly. He stood a moment on the landing with an ear cocked. Not a sound. Out here, though, he could feel them, the density of their presence, the unaccustomed fullness in the air of the house. His heart quietened, settling down grumpily in his breast like a fractious babe. The stairs at this level were narrow and uncarpeted. On the return a little circular window, greyed with dust and cobwebs, looked out blearily on treetops and a bit of brilliant blue, it might be sea or sky, he could never decide which. Again he found himself listening to his own heartbeat, with that occasional delicate tripping measure at the systole that made him think of rippling silk. If he were to pitch headlong down these stairs now would he feel it, his face crumpling, knees breaking, his breastbone bumping from step to step, or would he be gone already, a bit of ectoplasm floating up into the dimness under the ceiling, looking back with detached interest at this sloughed slack bag of flesh slithering in a comic rush on to the landing? When he was young he had thought that growing old would be a process of increasing refinement by which the things that mattered would fall away like little lights falling dark one by one, until at last the last light winked out. And it was true, things that had once seemed important had faded, but then others had taken their place. He had never paid much attention to his body but now it weighed on him constantly. He felt invaded by his own flesh, squatted upon by this ailing ape with its pains and hungers and its traitorous heart. And he was baffled all the time, baffled and numb.

He began cautiously to descend the stairs, wincing on each step as the boards squeaked. If it was Felix, how had he found his way here? Chance? He smiled to himself bitterly. Oh, of course — pure chance. He could feel the past welling up around him, a smoking, sulphurous stuff.

At the window on the first-floor landing he paused again and looked out at the distant sea. How clear it was today: he could see the burnished tufts of grass on the slopes of the dunes tossing in the wind. He liked mornings, the cold air and immensities of light, the raw, defenceless feel of things. This was the time to work, when the brain was still tender from the swoons and mad alarms of sleep and the demon flesh had not yet reasserted its foul hegemony. Work. But he no longer worked. He could feel the wind pummelling the house, pounding softly on the window-panes. On the sill a fly was buzzing itself to death, fallen on its back and spinning madly in tiny, spiralling circles. He leaned against the window-frame and at once the old questions rose again, gnawing at him. How can these disparate things — that wind, this fly, himself brooding there — how can they be together, continuous with each other, in the same reality? Incongruity: disorder and incongruity, the grotesqueries of the always-slipping mask, these were the only constants he had ever been able to discern. He closed his eyes for a moment, taking a tiny sip of darkness. Stay here, never stir again, gradually go dry and hollow, turn into a brittle husk a breath of wind would blow away. He imagined it, everything quiet and the light slowly changing and evening coming on, then the long dark, then rain at dawn and the gull’s wing, then shine again, another bright day declining towards dusk, then another night, endlessly.

Suddenly there was a muffled cataclysm and the door behind him opened and Flora came out. At first he saw her only as a silhouette against a haze of white light in the lavatory window at her back. She shimmered in the doorway as if enveloped in some dark, flowing stuff, an angled shape flexing behind her shoulder like a wing being folded.

‘Oh,’ she said, and, so it seemed to him, laughed.

She closed the door behind her with one hand while with the other she held up her long hair in a bundle at the nape of her neck. He touched a hand to his crooked bow-tie. A hairpin fell to the floor and she crouched quickly to retrieve it. He looked down at her knees pressed tightly together, pale as candle-wax, and saw the outlines of the frail bones packed under the skin and caught for a second her warm, dark, faintly urinous smell. She was barefoot. As she was rising she swayed a little and he put out a hand to steady her, but she pretended not to notice and turned from him with a blurred, stiff smile, murmuring something, and went away quickly down the stairs, still holding up the flowing bundle of her hair. When she was gone the only trace of her was the borborygmic grumbling of the cistern refilling, and for a moment he wondered if he might have dreamed her. Suddenly the image of his mother rose before him. He saw her as she had been when he was a child, turning from shadow into light, a slight, small-boned woman in a black dress with a bodice, her heavy dark hair, which gave her so much trouble and of which she was so vain, done up in two braided shells over her ears and parted down the middle with such severity he used to think it must hurt her, the white weal scored from brow to nape like a bloodless wound. Das Mädel, his father used to call her, with a bitter, mocking smile, das kleine Mädel. Father in his white suit standing under the arbour of roses, idly drawing figures on the pathway with the tip of his cane, gay and disappointed and dreamily sinister, like a character out of Chekhov. Where was that? Up on the Baltic, the summer house. In the days when they had a summer house. The past, the past. He faltered, as if he had been struck a soundless blow, and closed his eyes briefly and pressed his fingertips to the window-sill for support, and a sort of hollow opened up inside him and he could not breathe.

Licht came up the stairs. ‘What’s wrong?’ he said, sounding annoyed. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

The Professor blinked. ‘What?’

‘She said you were …’

They looked at each other. Licht was the first to turn away his eyes.

‘Who is that,’ the Professor said after a pause.

‘Who?’

‘That girl.’

Licht shrugged and hummed a tune under his breath, tapping one foot. The Professor lifted his weary eyes to the window and the shining day outside. The wind was still blowing, the fly still buzzed. He turned to Licht again.

‘What did you say to them?’ he said. ‘Have they asked to stay?’

Licht frowned blandly and went on humming as if he had not heard, picking with a fingernail at a patch of flaking paint on the wall in front of him. The Professor descended a step towards him menacingly and paused. He could feel it suddenly, no mistaking it, the tiny but calamitous adjustment that had been made in their midst.

Felix, then: it must be Felix.

Licht spoke a word under his breath.

‘What?’ the Professor said.

‘Flora,’ Licht answered and looked up at him defiantly. ‘That’s her name. Flora.’ Then he turned and skipped off swiftly down the stairs.

The room that Flora found herself in was small and had a low ceiling; everything in it seemed made on a miniature scale, so that she felt huge, with impossible hands and feet. Also the floor sloped; when she got up from the bed and walked to the window it was as if she were toppling backwards in slow motion. One of the panes in the little window was broken and a piece of cardboard was wedged in its place. Down in the sunlit yard a few scrawny chickens were picking halfheartedly in the dust and a fat old dog was asleep under a wheelbarrow. When she leaned down she could see fields and, beyond them, that sort of long ridge with trees on it. There was a fire going up there, weak flitters of white smoke were whipping in the wind above the treetops. She waded back to the narrow bed and sat down carefully with her arms pressed to her sides and her hands gripping the edge of the mattress. She could still feel the sway of the sea, a flaccid, teetering sensation, as if her limbs were brim-full of some heavy, sluggish liquid. She was not well, she did not want to be in this house, on this island. When Licht had brought her up here the bed had still been warm from someone sleeping in it. She had lain on top of the covers — a fawn blanket with a suspicious-looking stain in the middle of it and a sheet made, she was convinced, from old flour sacks — not daring to pull them back. The mattress sagged in the middle as if a heavy corpse had been left lying on it for a long time. On the little pine dressing-table there was a hairbrush with a few thin strands of reddish hair tangled in the bristles. A speckled mirror leaned from the wall at a watchful angle, reflecting a mysterious shimmer of grey and blue. She thought of searching the chest of drawers — she liked to poke about in other people’s stuff — but she had not the energy. A coloured reproduction of a painting torn from a book was tacked to the wall beside the mirror. She looked at it dully. Strange scene; what was going on? There was a sort of clown dressed in white standing up with his arms hanging, and people behind him walking off down a hill to where a ship was waiting, and at the left a smirking man astride a donkey.

Felix opened the door stealthily and put in his narrow head and smiled, showing a glint of jagged tooth.

‘Are you decent?’

She did not answer. She felt detached from things. Everything around her was sparklingly clear — the tilted mirror, the window with its sunny view, that little brass globe on the bedpost — but it was all somehow small and far away. She might have been standing at the back of a deep, narrow tunnel, looking out. Felix closed the door behind him and moved in that sinuous way of his to the window, seeming not to touch the floor but rather to clamber smoothly along the wall. He did not look at her but kept smiling to himself with a show of ease. Why had she let him into her room last night? She knew nothing about him, nothing; he had just turned up, suddenly there, like someone she had known once and forgotten who now had come back. That was the strange thing, that there had seemed nothing strange about it when he smiled at her in the hotel corridor and put a hand on the door to stop her shutting it and glanced all around quickly and stepped into the room sideways with a finger to his lips. He could have been anyone: anything could have happened. He was horrible with his clothes off, all skin and bone and sort of stretched, like a greyhound standing up on its hind legs. How white he had looked in the dark, coming towards her, glimmering, with that huge thing sticking up sideways like something that had burst out of him, blunt head bobbling and one slit eye looking everywhere for a way in again. He had squirmed and groaned on top of her, jabbing at her as if it were a big blunt knife he was sticking into her. When she moaned and rolled up her eyes she had felt him stop for a second and look down at her and give a sort of snicker and she knew he knew she was pretending. His hair down there was copper-coloured and crackly, like little tight coils of copper wire.

‘Nice view,’ he said now and for some reason laughed. ‘Lovely prospect. Those trees.’

He came towards her, and his reflection, curved and narrow and tinily exact, slid abruptly over the rim of the polished brass ball on the bedpost beside her. She sat without moving and looked at him and a pleasurable surge of fear made her throat thicken; it was like the panicky excitement she would feel as a little girl when in a game of hide-and-seek some surly, bull-faced boy was about to stumble on her in her hiding-place. She saw that Felix was going to try to kiss her and she stood up quickly, lithe as a fish suddenly, and twisted past him.

‘It’s hot,’ she said loudly. ‘Isn’t it hot?’

Her voice had a quaver in it. He would think she was frightened of him. A voice said mockingly in her head, You are, you are. She leaned down and tried to open the little window. He came up behind her and tapped the frame with his knuckles.

‘Painted shut,’ he said. ‘See?’ She could feel him thinly smiling and could smell his grey breath. He reached up and deftly plucked out a hairpin and her hair fell down; he took a thick handful of it and tugged it playfully and put his mouth to her ear. ‘Poor Rapunzel,’ he whispered. ‘Poor damsel.’

She closed her eyes and shivered.

‘Are you frightened?’ he whispered. ‘You must not be frightened. There is no danger. Everything is safe and sound. We have fallen flat on our feet here.’

In the yard the chickens scratched among the cobbles, stopped, stepped, scratched again. The dog was gone from under the wheelbarrow. Felix breathed hotly on her neck. Everything felt so strange. Her skin was burning.

‘Hmm?’

‘So strange,’ she said. ‘As if I …’

He let fall her hair and, suddenly full of tense energy, turned away from her and paced the little room, head down, his hands clasped behind his back.

‘Yes yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘Everyone feels they have been here before.’

She heard the dog somewhere nearby barking half-heartedly.

‘That man,’ she said. ‘I thought he was going to …’

‘Who?’

‘That old man.’

He laughed silkily.

‘Ah, you have met the Professor, have you?’ he said. ‘The great man?’

‘He was standing on the stairs. He —’

‘Do you know who he is?’ He smiled; he seemed angry; she was frightened of him.

‘No,’ she said faintly. ‘Who?’

‘Ah, you would like to know, now, wouldn’t you.’ He glanced at her slyly. ‘He is famous.’

‘Is he?’

‘Or was, at least,’ he said and laughed. ‘I could tell you a secret about him, but I do not choose to.’

She pressed her back against the window-frame and folded her arms, cradling herself, and watched him where he paced. Yes, he would do anything, be capable of anything. She wanted him to hit her, to beat her to the floor and fall on her and feed his fill on her bleeding mouth. She pictured herself dressed in white sitting at a little seafront café somewhere in Italy or the south of France, where he had brought her, the hot wind blowing and the palms clattering and the sea a vivid blue like in those pictures, and she so cool and pale, and people glancing at her, wondering who she was as she sat there demurely in her light, expensive frock, squirming a little in tender pain, basking in secret in the slow heat of her hidden bruises, waiting for him to come sauntering along the front with his hands in his pockets, whistling.

Then somehow she was sitting on the bed again looking at her bare feet on the blue and grey rug on the floor and Felix was sitting beside her stroking her hand.

‘I can give you so much,’ he was saying fervently, in a voice thick with thrilling insincerity. ‘You understand that, don’t you?’

She sighed. She had not been listening.

‘What?’ she said. ‘Yes.’ And then, more distantly: ‘Yes.’

What was he talking about? Love, she supposed; they were always talking about love. He smiled, searching her eyes, scanning her face all over. Behind his shoulder, like another version of him in miniature in a far-off mirror, the man on the donkey in the picture grinned at her gloatingly.

‘Will you be my slave, then, and do my bidding?’ he said with soft playfulness. He lifted a hand and gently cupped her breast, hefting its soft weight. ‘Will you, Flora?’ His dark eyes held her, lit with merriment and malice. It was as if he were looking down at her from a little spyhole, looking down at her and laughing. He had not said her name before. She nodded in silence, with parted lips. ‘Good, good,’ he murmured. He touched his mouth to hers. She caught again his used-up, musty smell. Then, as if he had tested something and was satisfied, he released her hand and stood up briskly and moved to the door. There he paused. ‘Of course,’ he said gaily, ‘where there is giving there is also taking, yes?’

He winked and was gone.

She looked at her hand where he had left it lying on the blanket. Her breast still felt the ghost of his touch. She shivered, as if a cold breeze had blown across her back, her shoulder-blades flinching like folded wings. The day around her felt like night. Yes, that was it: a kind of luminous night. And I am dreaming. She smiled to herself, a thin smile like his, and pulled back the covers and laid herself down gently in the bed and closed her eyes.

When Professor Kreutznaer came down to the kitchen at last the stove was going and Licht was frying sausages on a blackened pan. The Professor stopped in the doorway. The blonde woman sat with her black jacket thrown over her shoulders and an elbow on the table and her head on her hand, regarding him absently, her camera on the table before her. A cloud of fat-smoke tumbled slowly in mid-air. The smaller of the boys was gnawing a crust of bread, the little girl sat red-eyed with her hands in her lap. And that ancient character in the candy-striped coat, what was he? What were they all? A travelling circus? Felix had outdone himself this time. Licht was saying something to him but he took no notice and advanced into the room and sat down frowningly at a corner of the table. The one in the striped blazer cleared his throat and half rose from his chair.

‘Croke’s the name,’ he said heartily, then faltered. ‘We …’ He looked at Sophie for support. ‘Damn boat ran aground,’ he said. ‘That captain, so-called.’

The Professor considered the raised whorls of grain in the table and nodded. The silence whirred.

‘We were in a boat,’ Sophie said loudly, as if she thought the Professor might be deaf. ‘It got stuck on something in the harbour and nearly capsized.’ She pointed to their shoes on the stove. ‘We had to walk through the water.’

The Professor nodded again without looking at her. He appeared to be thinking of something else.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The tides hereabouts are treacherous.’

‘Yes.’ She caught Croke’s eye and they looked away from each other quickly so as not to laugh.

Licht brought the pan from the stove and forked the charred sausages on to their plates, smiling nervously and nodding all around and making as much clatter as he could. He did not look at the Professor. There was a smell of boiled tea.

Felix came bustling in, rubbing his hands and smiling, and sat down beside Pound and picked up a sausage from the boy’s plate and bit a piece off it and put it back again.

‘Yum yum,’ he said, chewing. ‘Good.’

Something tilted wildly for a second. All waited, looking from Felix to the Professor and back again, feeling the air tighten between them across the table. The Professor, frowning, did not lift his eyes. Pound regarded his bitten sausage with sullen indignation.

‘Well,’ Sophie said to break the silence, ‘how is Beauty?’

Felix looked blank for a moment and then nodded seriously.

‘She is not well,’ he said. ‘She has an upset head. A certain dizziness, you know.’

Croke nudged Sophie under the table and whispered hoarsely into her ear:

‘Struck down by our friend Poison-Prick.’

Sophie let her lids droop briefly and she faintly smiled.

Suddenly, as if he had been rehearsing it in his head, Felix jumped up and leaned across the table and thrust out his hand to the Professor.

‘So good of you to take us in,’ he said with a breathy laugh, avoiding the Professor’s eye, ‘so good, yes, thank you.’ The old man looked without expression at the hand that was offered him and after a second Felix snapped it shut like a jack-knife and withdrew it. ‘May I introduce —? This is Mr Croke, and Sophie here, and little Alice, and Patch —’

‘Hatch,’ said Hatch.

‘Hatch I mean. Ha ha! And Pound — Pound? Yes.’ A mumbling, a shuffling of feet. He sat down. ‘Ouf! what a business,’ he said. ‘I believe that captain was drunk. I said to him, I did, I said to him, You will be responsible, remember! A tour of the islands, we were told; a pleasure cruise. What pleasure, I ask, what cruise? Look at us: we are like the Swiss family Robertson!’ He laughed excessively, his shoulders shaking, and paused for a moment, licking his lips with a glistening tongue-tip. ‘This house, sir,’ he said softly, in an almost confidential voice, ‘the garden, those trees up there,’ pointing, ‘I have to tell you, it is all very handsome, very handsome and agreeable. I hope we do not inconvenience you. We shall be here only for a very little time. A day. Less than a day. An afternoon. Perhaps an evening, no more. Dusk, I always think, is so lovely in these latitudes: that greying light, those trembling shadows. I am reminded of my favourite painter, do you know the one I mean?’ He mused a moment, smiling upwards, displaying his profile, then looked at the Professor again and smiled. ‘You will hardly know we are here at all, I think. Our wings —’ he made an undulant movement with his hands ‘— our wings will scarcely stir the air.’

Another silence settled and all sat very still again, waiting for the Professor to speak. But the Professor said nothing, and Felix shrugged and winked at Sophie and made a face of comic helplessness. Licht turned to the stove with a wincing look, his shoulders hunched, as if something had fallen and he were waiting for the crash. A little leftover breathy sob took Alice by surprise and she gulped, and glanced at Hatch quickly and blushed. Felix drummed his fingertips on the table and softly sang:

Din din!

Don don!

The sun shone in the window, the wind rattled the back door on its latch.

‘This milk is sour,’ Pound said. ‘Jesus!’

The lounge, as it is called, is a long, narrow, low-ceilinged, cluttered room with windows looking out to sea. It smells like the railway carriages of my youth. Here, in the unmoving, brownish air, big, indistinct lumps of furniture live their secret lives, sprawled armchairs and an enormous, lumpy couch, a high, square table with knobbled legs, a roll-top desk sprouting dog-eared papers so that it looks as if it is sticking out a score of tongues. Everything is stalled, as though one day long ago something had happened and the people living here had all at once dropped what they were doing and rushed outside, never to return. Still the room waits, poised to start up again, like a stopped clock. I have my place to sit by the window while I drink my morning tea, wedged in comfortably between a high bookcase and a little table bearing a desiccated fern in a brass pot; behind me, above my head, on a bureau under a glass dome, a stuffed owl is perched, holding negligently in one mildewed claw a curiously unconcerned, moth-eaten mouse. From where I sit I can see a bit of crooked lawn and a rose bush already in bloom and an old rain barrel at the corner of the house.

I think to myself, My life is a ruin, an abandoned house, a derelict place. The same thought, in one form or another, has come to me at least once a day, every day, for years; why then am I surprised anew by it each time?

I have my good days and my bad. Guess which this one is.

Tea. Talk about tea. For me, the taking of tea is a ceremonial and solitary pleasure. I prefer a superior Darjeeling; there was a firm of merchants in Paris, I remember — what were they called? — who did a superb blend, an ounce or two of which they would part with in exchange for a lakh of rupees. Otherwise a really fine Keemun is acceptable, at a pinch. Then there is the matter of the cup: even the worst of Licht’s stewed sludge will taste like something halfway decent if it is served in, say, an antique fluted gold-rimmed piece of bird’s-egg-blue Royal Doulton. I love bone china, the very idea of it, I want to take the whole thing, cup and saucer and all, into my mouth and crack it lingeringly between my teeth, like meringue. Tea tastes of other lives. I close my eyes and see the pickers bending on the green hillsides, their saffron robes and slender, leaf-brown hands; I see the teeming docks where half-starved fellows with legs like knobkerries sticking out of ragged shorts heave stencilled wooden chests and call to each other in parrot shrieks; I even see the pottery works where this cup was spun out of cloud-white clay one late-nineteenth-century summer afternoon by an indentured apprentice with a harelip and a blind sister waiting for him in their hovel up a pestilential back lane. Lives, other lives! a myriad of them, distilled into this thimbleful of perfumed pleasure –

Oh, stop.

The philosopher asks: Can the style of an evil man have any unity?

The lounge.

The day outside was darkening. A bundled, lead-coloured cloud burning like magnesium all along its edge had reared up in the window. A crepitant stillness gathered, presaging rain. I wonder what causes it, this expectant hush? I suppose the air pressure alters, or the approaching rain damps down the wind somehow. I should have studied meteorology, learned how it all works, the chaotic flood and flow of things, air currents, wind, clouds, these vast nothingnesses tossing to and fro over the earth.

Flora is dreaming of the golden world.

Worlds within worlds. They bleed into each other. I am at once here and there, then and now, as if by magic. I think of the stillness that lives in the depths of mirrors. It is not our world that is reflected there. It is another place entirely, another universe, cunningly made to mimic ours. Anything is possible there; even the dead may come back to life. Flaws develop in the glass, patches of silvering fall away and reveal the inhabitants of that parallel, inverted world going about their lives all unawares. And sometimes the glass turns to air and they step through it without a sound and walk into my world. Here comes Sophie now, barefoot, still with her leather jacket over her shoulders, and time shimmers in its frame.

She stopped inside the door and looked about her at the big dark pieces of furniture huddled in the brownish gloom, and immediately there started up in her head the rattly music of a barrel organ and she saw a little girl standing at a window above a wide avenue, with grey light like this lingering and dead leaves in the wind stealthily scurrying here and there over the pavement. Assailed, she sank down into a corner of the sagging couch, drawing up her legs and folding them under her and gingerly massaging her bruised instep. There were so many things she was tired of remembering, the happy as well as the bad. The apartment on Kirchenallee, the upright piano by the window where she practised scales through the endless winter afternoons, her fingers stiff from the cold and her kneecaps numb. Smell of almonds and ersatz coffee, of the dust in the curtains where she leaned her head, looking down on the people passing by on the broad, bare pavements of the ruined city, hunched and hurrying, carrying bags or clutching parcels under their arms, like people in a newsreel. Her mother in the kitchen selling silk stockings and American cigarettes from a suitcase open on the table, talking and talking in that high, fast voice that sounded always as if at any moment it might break and fly off in pieces like a shattering lightbulb. The customers were furtive, timid, resentful, Frau Müller who limped, the sweaty, grey-faced man in the tight suit, that skinny girl from the café across the street. They glanced at her guiltily with weak, somehow beseeching smiles as they crossed the living room, hiding their purchases; how quietly, how carefully they would shut the door behind them, as if they were afraid of breaking something. She had thought she had managed to forget all that, she had thought she had banished it all, and now here it was again. The past mocked her with its simplicities, its completedness.

You see how for them too the mirror turns transparent and that silver world advances and folds them in its chill embrace?

She longed to be in her darkroom, in that dense, red, aortic light, watching the underwater figures darken and take shape, swimming up to meet her. Things for her were not real any longer until they had been filtered through a lens. How clear and small and perfectly detailed everything looked inside that little black box of light!

Humbly the first drops of rain tapped on the window.

All out there, oh, all out there.

What if, I ask myself, what if one day I were to wake up so disgusted with my physical self that my flesh should seem no longer habitable? Such torment that would be: a slug thrashing in salt.

Sophie.

Sophie sighed and

Sophie looked at her hands and sighed and closed her eyes for a second. She felt dizzy. There was a sort of whirring in her head. It was as if she had been spinning in a circle and had suddenly stopped. When she was a little girl her father would take her hands and whirl her round and round in the air until her feet seemed to fill with lead and her wrists creaked. It was like flying in a dream. Afterwards, when he let go of her and she stood swaying and hiccuping, everything would keep on lurching past her like a vast, ramshackle merry-go-round. And sometimes she grew frightened, thinking it was the movement of the earth she was seeing, the planet itself, spinning in space. She had never really lost it, that fear of falling into the sky. There were still moments when she would halt suddenly, like an actor stranded in the middle of the stage, lines forgotten, staring goggle-eyed and making fish-mouths. She took a cigarette from the packet in the pocket of her leather jacket and struck a match. She paused, watching the small flame creep along the wood, seeing the tiny tremor in her hand. Corpsing: that was the word. She imagined being in bed here, in an anonymous little room up at the very top of the house, just lying at peace with her hands resting on the cool, turned-down sheet, looking at the sea-light in the salt-rimed windows and the gulls wheeling and crying. To be there, to be inconsequential; to forget herself, even for a little while; to stop, to be still; to be at peace.

She entertained the notion that her father was alive somewhere, a fugitive in the tropic south, on some jungly islet, perhaps; she pictured him, immensely old by now, shrivelled and wickedly merry, sitting at his ease in the shade outside an adobe shack, tended hand and foot by a flat-nosed Indian woman while naked children brown and smooth as mud gambolled at his feet, with the broad, cocoa-coloured river at his back, and beyond that the enormous forest wall, screeching, green-black, impenetrable. She wanted him to have been important, terrible, a hunted man; it was her secret fantasy. They had waited for him day after day in the icy apartment (strange how heavy the cold felt, a sort of invisible, stony substance standing motionless in the air), then week after week, then the weeks became months, the months years, and he did not come. She thought of him as she had seen him for the last time, going down the stairs with a kit-bag on his shoulder. She could not remember his face now, but she recalled how lightly he had skipped down the steps, whistling, his head with its oiled hair and neat white parting sinking from sight. The pain, the outrageous pain of being abandoned had surprised her, the way all pain always surprised her in those days, like news from another world, the big, the real one, where she did not want to go but to which each day brought her a little closer. She was six years old when he left. Her mother lay in bed at night and cried; night after night, Sophie could hear her from across the hall, moaning and gulping, stuffing the pillow into her mouth, trying to stop herself, trying not to be heard, as if it were something shameful she was doing, some shameful act.

There was a scrabbling at the door and Croke came in cautiously, first a big, liver-spotted paw, then bigger head, then knees, then last of all the bowed back. He glanced about the room and did not see her curled up in the shadowed corner of the sofa. He advanced to the window, stepping over the carpet with a camel’s ponderous slouch, seeming to lag half a pace behind his legs, his long head swaying on its drooped stalk. The rain was coming down heavily now, like a fall of dirty light. He stood with his hands behind his back and stared out bleakly, his loose lips pursed as if he were trying to remember how to whistle.

‘The golden world!’ he muttered, in a tone of deep disgust.

He farted, closing one eye and scrunching up his face at the side. At Sophie’s soft laugh he started in fright and peered wildly at her over his shoulder.

‘Jesus!’ he cried. ‘Do you want to kill me?’ He waggled his fingers at her as if he were sprinkling water. ‘Sitting there like a ghost!’

She laughed again. He was a game old brute: when she had stumbled on the bridge and he caught her his big hands had been all over her. She shivered, remembering the feel of his old man’s arm, the slippery, fishy flesh inside the sleeve and beneath it the bone hard and sharp as an ancient weapon. Now he paced agitatedly in a little circle, mumbling to himself and shaking his head. He halted, looking down at his feet.

‘My shoes are wringing still,’ he said and did his phlegmy laugh. ‘Leaky as an unstanched wench. Ha!’ He peered at her but she said nothing and he resumed his pacing. He stopped at the window and looked out again balefully at the rain. The world out there had turned to an undulant grey blur.

Silence. Picture them there, two figures in rainlight. Something, something out of childhood.

‘I was trying to think,’ Croke said, ‘of the name of that thing they keep the host in to show it at Benediction. What do they call that? The thing shaped like the sun that the priest holds up. Did you ever see it? What is it, now. I’ve been trying to remember all morning.’ He sighed. ‘And I was an altar boy, you know.’ He turned to her stoutly, expecting her to laugh. ‘I was.’

But she was not listening. She sat and rocked herself in her arms, her eyes fixed on the floor. Croke shrugged and turned away and fiddled with the knobs of a huge, old-fashioned radio standing on a low table beside the window. The green tuning light came on, a pulsing eye, and as the valves warmed up a distant crackling swelled, as if it were the noise of the past itself that was trapped in there among the coils and the glowing filaments. He spun the dial, and out of the crackling a faint voice emerged, speaking incomprehensible words, distantly. Croke listened slack-eyed for a moment and then switched it off.

Felix came in. When he saw Sophie he hesitated and let his gaze go blank and wander about the room. Croke he ignored.

‘What a place!’ he said. ‘You know there is no telephone?’

She watched him, her eyes narrowed against the smoke of her cigarette. She had heard him creeping about in the hotel corridor last night, until that little bitch had let him in, she was sure of it. She had been using her cupped hand as an ashtray and now she held the swiftly smoking stub of her cigarette aloft and looked about her with a frown. Felix stepped smartly to the mantelpiece and found a saucer there and brought it to her. He watched with what seemed almost fondness as she leaned forward and crushed out the butt. The last, acrid waft of smoke was like something swift and bitter being said. She raised her eyes briefly and then looked away.

‘You know who he is,’ he said, ‘the Professor? You recognised him?’ She shrugged, and he shook his head at her reprovingly. ‘O Fama …!’ He heaved a histrionic sigh.

‘Tell me, then,’ she said, stung. ‘Tell me who he is.’

‘Someone famous. A famous man.’

She looked sceptical.

‘Oh yes?’

He nodded with mock solemnity and laid a finger to the side of his nose. She felt herself flush. She said brusquely:

‘Should you not go and see if the Princess is sleeping soundly?’

Still he leaned above her in his buttoned brown suit and stringy tie, a pent-up, parcelled man, his smile twitching and one eyebrow arched, studying her. She drew the collar of her jacket tight about her throat.

‘Am I,’ he said, ‘the charming Prince, I wonder, or the Beast?’ She did not answer and he advanced his smiling face close to hers and softly asked: ‘Are you jealous?’

She laughed out loud.

‘What, of her?’

He shook his head once.

‘I meant of me,’ he said.

She opened wide her eyes and looked at him steadily with a formless smile and said nothing. Croke stood motionless with his head lifted as if he were listening to something in the distance, an echo of that voice out of the ether. (That gold thing, like a sort of sunburst, with the big gold knobs on the handle and the big square base, and the price tag still on the instep of the priest’s shoe when he genuflected; smell of incense and of candle-grease, the fleshy stink of lilies — what was it called?) There was a gust of wind, and the rain whispered softly like blown sand against the glass. Felix turned from Sophie with a flourish and strolled up the room and down again at an equine prance, seeming pleased with himself, humming lightly under his breath and smirking. He stopped to examine the stuffed owl, his narrow head lifted at an angle and his lips pursed. A spot of silver light gleamed in the hollow of his temple. He took a dented, flat gold case from his breast pocket and extracted from it a black cheroot and lit it carefully, holding it clipped between the second and third fingers of his left hand.

‘I see you kept your baccy dry, anyhow,’ Croke at the window said, and still was ignored.

‘We have not had a real talk, you and I,’ Felix said to Sophie over his shoulder, making a frowning face at the owl. A ribbon of harsh smoke trickled out at the corners of his mouth. The bird stared back at him with apoplectic fixity. ‘We should, I think, don’t you?’

Abruptly the rain stopped and the sun came out shakily and everything outside shimmered and dripped.

‘Talk?’ Sophie said. ‘Talk about what?’

‘Oh, anything. Everything. I am trying to be friendly, you see.’

Sophie considered his narrow back for a moment thoughtfully.

‘Who is he?’ she said. ‘That old man.’

‘What? I told you: a famous person. From the past. A professor of fine arts.’ He seemed to find that very funny. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, laughing without sound, one bony shoulder shaking, ‘a great appreciator of the fine arts!’

She studied him with her head held on one side.

‘Is that why you came here,’ she said, ‘because of him?’

He laughed almost shyly this time and touched a hand to his dyed hair.

‘No, no,’ he murmured happily. ‘Chance — pure chance!’

She nodded, not believing him.

‘He does not seem to have heard of you,’ she said.

‘He has — oh, he has. But perhaps he prefers to forget.’ He cast a smiling glance at her. ‘Maybe you will make him famous again?’ He took the cheroot from his lips and lifted an invisible camera to his eye. ‘Snap-snap, yes? The great man at his desk.’ He was mimicking her accent.

She rose from the couch, smoothing the lap of her dress, and crossed the room and stood with one hand on the doorknob and the other still holding her jacket closed at her throat.

‘What a fraud you are,’ she said.

‘A fake, yes,’ he answered swiftly, pouncing, with his fierce, tight-lipped smile, ‘but not a fraud. Ask the Professor: he knows about such things.’ He advanced a step towards her eagerly and stopped and stood with his hands in the pockets of his jacket and his head thrown back, looking at her along his nose and smiling genially, the cheroot held in his teeth and his curved mouth oozing smoke. ‘What do you say,’ he said, ‘shall we fight?’

She hesitated, her eyes lowered, looking at the spot where he was standing. She pictured herself striding forward without a word and beating him to his knees, could almost see the blood-dark shadow in her head and feel the irresistible exultation shake her heart; she would cross the space between them at a run, one arm drawn back like a bow, fleet-footed, winged, taking a little skipping step halfway, the floor like firm air under her tread, and then feel the crack of fist on flesh and hear his laughter and his cries as he fell in a clatter with limbs askew, like a wooden doll. She trembled, and turned abruptly and went out, letting the door shut behind her with a ragged click.

Felix turned to Croke with eyebrows raised and empty palms helplessly upturned and lifted his shoulders and sighed.

‘Listen,’ Croke said, ‘you look like a man that would know: that thing at Benediction that the priest holds up, what is that called?’

He demonstrated, lifting clasped hands aloft. Felix studied him carefully and then slowly smiled and wagged a finger in his face.

‘Aha,’ he said, with a reproving laugh, ‘trying to pull the wool from under my feet, eh?’

Flora’s dream has darkened. She wanders now in a wooded place at evening. The trees encircle her, stirring their branches and murmuring among themselves like masked attendants at a ceremony. Above her the sky is bright, lit with the smoke-blue, tender glow of springtime, but all is dimness and false shadow where she walks, circling the circle of trees, searching in vain for a way out. People are indistinctly present, posed like statues, Sophie and the children, old Croke in his straw hat, and someone else whose face she cannot see, who stands in the centre of the clearing, motionless and hanging somehow, as if suspended from invisible strings, a glimmering figure clad in white, grief-stricken and in pain, who does not stir or speak. Felix approaches her astride a pantomime donkey, stumping along on his own legs with the stuffed animal clamped between his knees. He puts his face close to hers and laughs and crosses his eyes and flaps his pink, pointed tongue suggestively. She notices that the donkey, though it is made of some sort of thick, furred stuff, is alive; it looks up at her pleadingly and she recognises Licht, sewn up tight inside the heavy fur. She flees, but there is no way out, and she hears Felix at her heels, his laughter and the jingling of buckles and poor Licht’s harsh gasps of complaint. At last she runs behind the motionless, whiteclad figure and finds that it has turned into a hollow tube of heavy cloth, and there is a little ladder inside it that she climbs, pulling the heavy, stiff tunic shut behind her. There is a musty smell that reminds her of childhood. In the dark she climbs the little steps and reaches the hollow mask that is the figure’s face and fits her own face to it and looks out through the eyeholes into the broad, calm distances of the waning day and understands that she is safe at last.

I walked up the fields to the oak ridge. I noticed that my hands were shaking; nothing like a visitation to set the adrenalin coursing through the blood. The rain had stopped but the grass was thick with wet. Another dark cloud stood hugely above the trees like an ogre with arms outstretched. The little wood was green as green, and there were bluebells and wild garlic and even a nosegay of primroses here and there, nodding on a mossy bank or lurking coyly in the rotted bole of a storm-felled oak. The trees were lacily in leaf, at just that stage when Corot loved to capture them. All very pretty, and plausible too, yet I could not help thinking how all of it seemed laid on for someone else, someone milder than I, less tainted, without that whiff of brimstone that I suspect precedes me wherever I go. In the clearing my fire of yesterday was smouldering still; I soon got it back to life. Presently the rain started up again, tentatively at first, pattering on the dead leaves above me and then coming down in whitish swathes, billowing brightly through the trees and hissing in the fire. I stood with my head bowed and my arms hanging at my sides and the rain ran over my scalp and into my eyebrows and trickled down my face like tears and fell in heavy drops from my chin. Sometimes I like to abandon myself to the elements like this. I have never been one to worship nature, yet I recognise a certain therapeutic value in the contemplation of natural phenomena; I believe it has to do with the world’s indifference, I mean the way the world does not care about us, about our happiness, or how we suffer, the way it just bides there with uplifted glance, murmuring to itself in a language we shall never understand. Even such a one as I might learn humility from that unfailing example of endurance and small expectations. Nothing surprises nature; terrible deeds, the most appalling crimes, leave the world unmoved, as I can attest. Some find this uncanny, I know, and lash out all round them, raging for a response, though nothing avails, not even the torch. I, on the other hand, take comfort from this universal dispassion –

But stop, stop; I have begun to generalise again. That is what the philosophic mode will do to you. Nature did not exist until we invented it one eighteenth-century morning radiant with Alpine light.

Anyway, I am standing in the rain with my head bowed, in my penitential pose. All at once, though I had noticed no flash, a terrible crack of thunder sounded directly above my head, making the trees rattle. It gave me a dreadful fright. What a thing that would be, to be struck down by a bolt out of the blue, or the grey, at least. So much for the world’s indifference then; that would be what you might call a pathetic fallacy, all right. Or perhaps lightning would galvanise me into life, poor inert monster that I am? Then, by God, the world would want to watch out, oh yes.

The rain crashed down and almost at once began to ease. A storm in May; how well that sounds, to say it. I thought how my life is like a little boat and I must hold the tiller steady against the buffeting of wind and waves, and how sometimes, such as this morning, I lose my hold somehow and the sail luffs helplessly and the little vessel wallows, turning this way and that in the swell. Such formulations please me, as if to picture the world in this way were somehow to subdue it. (Subdue? Did I say subdue? Perhaps I am not so insouciant in the face of nature’s heedlessness after all.) Yes, a little skiff, and I in it, out over depthless waters.

When the shower had passed and the sun came out again I took off my shirt and strung it between two sticks by the fire to dry. The breeze fingered my bared back, giving me gooseflesh. I looked at myself; I noticed that I was beginning to develop breasts; I laughed, and hunkered down by the fire for warmth. The flames faltered among the wet wood and the smoke stung my eyes. When Hatch and Pound came upon me even Hatch hung back at first, uncertain of this big, half-naked, red-eyed, dripping creature, the wildman of the woods, squatting with his arms wrapped round his knees and watching them from under half-closed lids. Circumspectly then they advanced and stood beside me and we stared all three into the fire. Around us the wind swept wetly through the trees and the leaves dripped and the damp sunlight flickered. Each fresh gust brought with it faintly the sound of the sea: the far, faint thud of waves and the hiss of water running on the shingle. I closed my eyes and the past was like a melody I had lost that was starting to come back, I could hear it in my mind, a tiny, thin, heartbreaking music.

‘What’s this place called?’ Hatch asked.

‘The Land of Nod,’ I said, and they laughed without conviction and then lapsed again into silence.

I studied them with covert attention. Hatch was sly and unhappy and Pound was sharper than he looked. Pound’s mother was supposed to have accompanied them on the boat trip but something had come up. He frowned into the fire, gnawing his lip. I wondered what his mammy would say if she knew her plump little boy was consorting unchaperoned with the ogre himself in the wild wood now. Sometimes I wonder if it was wise of the authorities to free me like this. But perhaps they knew me better than I know myself? I am harmless, I’m sure. Fairly harmless. No longer dangerous, anyway. Or not very.

Hatch said nothing; Hatch had no mother.

A strong gust shook the trees and the wet leaves clattered.

‘This is worse than at home,’ Pound said with sudden vehemence and kicked the embers at the fire’s margin. ‘Nothing to bloody do.’

I remembered suddenly how when I was young like them I sat in a hazel wood one winter Sunday by a damply smoking fire like this one as night came on and a boy whose name I cannot recall (Reck, I think it was, or Rice) arrived and told us a woman had been beaten to death in her sweetshop down a lane. I pictured the scene, distorted, wavering, the colours seeping into each other, as if I were looking at it all through bottle-glass, and felt fearful and inexplicably guilty. I have never forgotten that moment, that sudden, blood-boltered vision, intense as if I had been there myself. First such stain on my life.

The boys watched me uncertainly, waiting for me to speak. I said nothing. They must have thought I was cracked. I am, a little. I must be, surely. It would be a comfort to think so.

A squashy, wet, warm smell rose from the greenery around us as the sun dried out the rain, and suddenly summer stood up out of the undergrowth like a gold man, dripping and ashine. Between the trees the lapis glint of sea. The air was gaudy with birdsong.

I left them and made my way down the hillside, carrying a stick; my shirt, still damp, clung to my back. The wind had grown gay and the sun was hot. The house stood below me, closed on itself. I sat down on a rock under a flowering thorn bush. There are times when my mind goes dead, as if something had switched itself off in my head. Some mornings when I wake I do not remember who I am or what it is I have done. I will lie there for a minute or more, unwilling to stir, basking in the anaesthetic of forgetfulness. It is like being new-born. At such moments I glimpse a different self, as yet unblackened, ripe with potential, a sort of radiant big infant swaddled in shining light. Then it all comes seeping back, spreading like a slow, thick liquid through my mind. Yet sometimes even when I am fully awake, in the middle of the day, I will imagine for a second, as if I were walking in a dark place and suddenly stepped through a patch of sunlight, that none of it had happened, that I am what I might have been, an innocent man, though I know well I have never been innocent, nor, for that matter, have I ever been what could properly be called a man. Still the dream persists, suppressed but always there, that somehow by some miraculous effort of the heart what was done could be undone. What form would such atonement take that would turn back time and bring the dead to life? None. None possible, not in the real world. And yet in my imaginings I can clearly see this cleansed new creature streaming up out of myself like a proselyte rising drenched from the baptismal river amid glad cries.

While I sat there on my hard rock under the may-tree the house below me as I watched over it began to come alive. Licht appeared in the yard with slops for the chickens, and above him, on the first floor, the french windows opened with theatrical suddenness and Sophie stepped out into the sunlight on the balcony with her camera. Dimly at a high-up window I could see Felix loitering, his long swarth face and glittering eye. Alice was climbing the stairs, I saw her on successive landings, a small, solemn figure resolutely ascending, first to the right, then to the left, and then the frosted glass of the lavatory window whitened briefly as she entered there and shut the door behind her. The Professor was pacing the turret room, a moving darkness against the light of the windows all around him, and now, as he turned, the weathervane on the roof turned with him in the breeze, and I smiled at this small coincidence that only I had seen.

It was Flora I was vainly watching for, of course, the rest of them might have been so many maggots in a cheese for all I cared. Oh yes, I had spotted her straight away, with my gimlet eye, the moment I had walked into the kitchen and seen them sitting there barefoot with their mugs of tea. She sprang out from their midst like the Virgin in a busy Annunciation, calm as Mary and nimbed with that unmistakable aura of the chosen. What did I hope for, what did I expect? Not what you think. I have never had much interest in the flesh. I used to be as red-blooded, or red-eyed, at least, as the next man, but for me that side of things was always secondary to something else for which I cannot find an exact name. Curiosity? No, that is too weak. A sort of lust for knowledge, the passionate desire to delve my way into womanhood and taste the very temper of its being. Dangerous talk, I know. Well, go ahead, misunderstand me, I don’t care. Perhaps I have always wanted to be a woman, perhaps that’s it. If so, I have reached the halfway stage, unsexed poor androgyne that I am become by now. But the girl had nothing to do with any of this. (By the way, why so coy about using her name? Want to rob her of her individuality, eh? — want to turn her into das Ewig-Weibliche that will lead you on to salvation, is that it, you sly old Faustus? … What have I said?) Sophie would have been more my vintage, with her camera and her fags and her tragic memories, but it was the girl I singled out. It was innocence I was after, I suppose, the innocent, pure clay awaiting a grizzled Pygmalion to inspire it with life. It is as simple as that. Not love or passion, not even the notion of the radiant self rising up like flame in the mirror of the other, but the hunger only to have her live and to live in her, to conjugate in her the verb of being.

Leave me there on my rock, leaning on my staff under may blossom in the rinsed air of May, a figure out of Arcady. Give me this moment.

The Professor paced the narrow round of his glass tower and considered the ruins of his life. When he sat down in his seacaptain’s chair the things on the desk before him would not be still, pencils, papers, a teacup in its saucer, all trembled faintly; it puzzled him, until he realised that it was he, his tremulous presence, that was making everything quake like this. He was breathless and a little dazed, as if at the start of a large and perilous exploit. He felt excited, foolish, aghast at himself, as always, at the preposterousness of all that he was and did. Felix. It was Felix, bringing it all back. He seemed to hear the squeal of pipes and the rattle of timbrels, a raucous clamour rising through the bright air; was it the god departing, or returning a last time, to deliver him a last blow to the heart?

‘Am I disturbing you?’

Sophie made a show of hesitating on the threshold, leaning against the door-frame, regarding him with a small, false, enquiring smile. He said nothing, merely looked at her, and she advanced, still smiling. She smelled of smoke and perfume and something sweetly dirty. The expanse of skin above her collarbone was mottled and there were hairline cracks in the make-up around her eyes. Stop at the window, consider the view. The sun shines on a glitter of green and summer strides up the hillside. He watched her where she stood with her back to him and her arms folded, as if she were holding another, slighter self clasped tightly to her. He noticed her poor bare feet with their stringy tendons and the scribble of purplish veins at the backs of her ankles. Once the world had seemed to him a rich, a coloured place, now all he saw was the poverty of things.

‘Felix says you are famous,’ she said without turning.

‘What?’

He was not sure if he had spoken or only imagined that he had. He had got out of the habit of speech.

‘He seems to know you,’ she said.

He nodded absently, frowning, glancing here and there about the desk as if he were trying to calculate its dimensions.

‘That girl,’ he said, ‘what is her name —?’

‘Flora.’

‘Yes. She reminds me of someone.’

‘Oh,’ she said blankly. ‘Who?’

‘From long ago.’

A ravelled silence.

‘I know what you mean,’ she said.

He lifted his head, frowning. ‘What?’

‘Faces,’ she said. ‘There are not many; five or six, I think, no more than that.’

He nodded; he had not been listening.

‘Dead,’ he said. He cleared his throat and gave himself a sort of heave as if he were shifting a weight from one shoulder to the other. Dead, yes; her cold hand in his, like a little bundle of brittle twigs wrapped in tissue paper; how much smaller than herself she had seemed, like a carved figurine, a memento of herself she had left behind. ‘My mother,’ he said. Sophie turned her face to the view again and stood still. ‘A long time ago.’ He nodded slowly, thinking. ‘Remarkable, that girl …’

Another silence, longer this time. With the covert flourish of a conjuror she produced her camera from somewhere under her arm. He fidgeted, and she laughed.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I have not come to photograph people, only ruins.’ She focused on his desk, the back of his chair, the window-sills. He listened with faint pleasure to the repeated grainy slither of the shutter working. ‘I am making a book,’ she said. ‘Tableaux morts: that is the title. What do you think?’

He had stopped listening again.

‘Have you known him for a long time?’ he said.

She glanced at him, then shook her head.

‘He was at the hotel last night,’ she said, ‘and afterwards on the boat. Why?’

He shrugged.

‘I thought you knew him,’ he said. ‘I thought …’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I do not know him.’

Thus they converse, haltingly, between long pauses. Behind the language that they speak other languages speak in silence, ones that they know and yet avoid, the languages of childhood and of loss. This reticence seems imperative. Both are thinking how strange it is to be here and at the same time to be conscious of it, seeing themselves somehow reflected in each other. That must be how it is with humans, apart and yet together, in their world, their human world.

Far thunder at dead of night, I wake to it, a low rumble along the horizon, the air crumpling. I imagine what it must be like out there, out beyond the land, where the humped sea hugely heaves, black as oilskin, under a bulging, clay-dark sky; I imagine it, and I am there. In these waters there are dolphins, I have seen them; uncanny creatures, with their rubbery grins and little mewling cries. It is said they save men from drowning. Would they save me, I wonder, if I came plummeting down and disappeared under the waves with a hiss? I live among ghosts and absences. A nightbird flies past, I hear the rapid whirr of wings, and down in the direction of the stream suddenly something gallops away. A horse? There are no horses here. A donkey, perhaps. I hear it, clear as anything, the unmistakable sound of hoofbeats. Who is the horseman?

Life, life: being outside.

Night and silence and

Oh life!

And I in flames.

I HAD HARDLY been a week on the island before I found myself a widow-woman. At least, I am sure that is how they told it hereabouts, where it seems every other cottage harbours a canny bachelor on the look-out for a secondhand mate, one already well accustomed to the bit, as Mr Tighe the shopman put it to me wheezily the other day, leaning over his counter on one elbow and giving me a large, lewd wink. My widow even had a few acres of land. She lived above us here on the ridge, in a rain-coloured cottage backed up crookedly against the massy darknesses of the oak wood. She kept chickens, and a goat tethered to a post in the front yard. Odd objects lay here and there about the place, as if they had become bogged down on their way elsewhere. There was a bright-red plastic baby-bath, a car tyre, a rusty mangle, and something that looked like a primitive version of a washing machine. The first time I went up there it was a brumous evening, more like November than May, with a solid blare of wind out of the west and the sea lying flat in the distance like a sheet of rippled steel. The front door stood open but there was no one to be seen. I approached cautiously, unnerved by the look of that dark doorway; I am always wary of strange houses. The goat, chewing on something with a rapid, sideways motion, eyed me with what seemed a sardonic smirk, while the chickens gave their goitrous croaks of complaint. I knocked and waited, and had to knock again, and at last there was a scuffling sound and she appeared, rising up suddenly in the dim doorway with her medusa-head of tangled hair and her unnerving, bleached-blue eyes. She said nothing, but stood with her hand on the latch and looked at me with a sceptical air, as if she did not really believe I could be real. She was a tall, spare figure with arthritic hands and a fine, long, ravaged face, handsome and yet curiously indistinct: when I think of her I always see her in profile, upright, archaic, noble, as if on the side of a worn silver coin. Everything about her was faded, her skin, her old skirt, her bird’s nest of ash-coloured hair, and I had the notion that if I reached out to touch her my hand would encounter only shadowed air. For a moment I could think of nothing to say, then asked lamely if she would let me have a few eggs, since that was mainly what we were living on here at Château d’If and the hens that week had taken it into their heads to stop laying. She waited a moment, pondering, and then turned without a word and went away to the back of the house. I peered greedily through the open doorway: that’s me always, hungering after other worlds, the drabber and more desolate the better, God knows why: so that I can fill them up, I suppose, with my imaginings. There was a table with a plain cloth, a rocking chair, a black stove; the walls and the concrete floor were bare. At the back dimly I could see a lean- to kitchen, with a roof of transparent corrugated plastic from which there sifted down an incongruously lovely, peach-coloured light such as might bathe a domestic interior by one of the North Italian masters. When she returned with the eggs in a paper bag I offered to pay for them but she shrugged and said she had more of them than she could use. Her voice was so distant and light I could hardly hear it, a sort of dry, papery rustling. I was halfway down the hill again before her accent registered.

She was not a native of these parts. Her name was Mrs Vanden. The islanders called her the Dutchwoman, but she might have been South African; I never did find out what her true nationality was. She had lived in many places abroad — her husband had been a colonial official of some sort. She rarely talked about the past, and when she did her voice took on a weary and faintly irritated edge, as if she were a historian describing an important but not very interesting period of antiquity. The late Mr Vanden hardly figured in this all-but-vanished age, and perhaps it was because I know so little about him that he has assumed in my imagination the outlines of a legendary figure, a Stanley or a Mungo Park, with pith helmet and swagger stick and enormous moustaches. How his widow ended up here I do not know. When I ventured to ask her, she said she had come to the island to get away from the noise; I presume she meant noise in general, the hubbub of the world. She was a great one for silence; it seemed a form of sustenance for her, she fed on it, like a patient on a drip. Sometimes when I visited her, as I did with increasing and, it strikes me now, surprising frequency over the weeks that I knew her, she hardly spoke a word. Perhaps Mr Vanden had been a talker? They did not seem rude, these silences. Rather, I took them as a mark of, not friendliness, perhaps — I would not describe our relations as friendly, no matter how close they might have been — but of toleration. She suffered me as she did those things in the yard, the odds and ends that just happened to have come to rest there. I suspect she never did manage to believe that I was entirely real. At times, if I were to say something after a long pause, or otherwise make my presence unexpectedly felt, a look of startlement tinged with dismay would cross her face, as if some comfortably inanimate presence had suddenly sprung to troublesome life before her eyes.

I met her a second time one evening in the oak wood. I had the fire going there; in fact, it was her fire I had taken over, as she had taken it over from some previous tender of the flame; I see a line of us, with our flints and pitchforks, stretching back to the time of the druids. She came wandering through the trees with her head down, in that distracted way she had, weaving a little, as if she were searching for something on the ground. I confess I was not greatly pleased to see her; a good bonfire, like so many things for me in those days, from sex to tea, was best enjoyed in solitude. She did not look at me, and even when she had drifted to a stop by the fire I was not sure if she was fully aware of me. She wore Wellingtons and a crooked skirt and a battered hat that surely had seen duty on the veldt. The evening was grey and greyly warm. We stood gazing into the flames. Then she cast a thoughtful, sideways glance at my feet and invited me to come to her house and take tea. I was too surprised to refuse.

Her kitchen smelled of cooking fat and bottled gas and old water. I sat warily at the bare deal table and watched her. She reminded me of a piece of polished bone, or a stick of driftwood, thinned and hardened by the action of the years. I looked for her marks on the room, the impress of her solitary life here, but could find none. Plain chairs, plain pots, plain delft on the dresser. On a nail above my head hung one of Mr Tighe’s advertising calendars with a photo on it of an outmoded bathing beauty. My attention was caught briefly by an electric Sacred Heart lamp on a wooden socket fixed to the wall, pink as an iced lolly and tremulously aglow, but when she saw me looking at it she smiled drily and shook her head: it had been here, she said, when she came to the house, and she had not known how to disconnect it.

We ate in ruminant silence. The slow day died and the sun went down in the kitchen window in a gradual catastrophe of reds and golds. As the dusk advanced we talked desultorily of this and that. It was not exactly a conversation, more a sort of laborious, intermittent batting; we were like a pair of decrepit tennis players having a game at close of day, lobbing slow balls high up to and fro through the darkening air. The name Dickie kept coming up, and Mrs Vanden grew almost animated: Dickie was this, and Dickie had done that, and oh, Dickie did have such a fine seat on a horse. I took it she was speaking of her late husband, but when my mistake became apparent an awkward silence fell and she looked at me directly, for the first time, it seemed, with those blank, impenetrable eyes, and it was as if I had come to a stumbling stop on the very lip of a precipice with nothing before me but the vast and depthless sky. No, she said, Dickie was her daughter, her only child, dead this twenty years. I was flustered, and could think of nothing to say, and looked down in confusion at my plate. I ask myself now, did I miss a real opportunity on that occasion? For what? Well, I might for instance have found out all sorts of things about her and her travels with the intrepid Mr Vanden. Perhaps I might even have let my own dead walk abroad for a bit, they who are as palpably present to me as Dickie the phantom horsewoman was to her. But the moment passed and already it was night, and I stood up fumblingly from the table and thanked her and hurried off down the hill through the immense, soft darkness.

How courtly we were, how correctly we conducted ourselves. I think that even if she had been fifty years younger there would have been no more between us than there was. And yet I believe that what there was was much. Does that make sense? There are certain people who seem to know me better than I know myself. To some, I realise, this would be an uncomfortable intrusion on their privacy and their sense of themselves, and it is true, there were occasions when in her presence I was acutely conscious of the pressure upon me of the sagging and unmanageable weight of all she must have known about me and did not say; mostly, though, I felt, well, lightened, somehow, as if I had been given permission to set down for a moment my burden — the burden of my self, that is — and stand breathing, unrequired briefly, in some calm, wide place. There was nothing filial in all of this, and certainly, I am sure of it, nothing maternal — no mother of mine was ever remotely like Mrs Vanden, apart from the Dutch blood — yet there was in it something that must have been very like that tentative, unspoken complicity, that feeling of basking in the knowledge of a secret agreement, that I am told exists between sons and mothers. This is perilous territory, I know; any minute now Bigfoot will come clumping on to the scene, with his sockets streaming. But I don’t care, you can do all the cheap psychologising you want, I will still say that I felt when I was with her that I was protected, shielded somehow from at least some of the things that the world had it in mind to do to me; the smaller things, the quotidian inflictions. It is what I had always wanted, someone strong and mute and unknowable behind whose skirts I could hide. Wait, that’s a surprise; do I mean that? Sometimes my pen just goes prattling along all by itself and the strangest things come out, things I did not know I was aware of, or of which I would prefer not to be made aware, or not to hear expressed, anyway. Mute, now, unknowable: is that what I really want, a sort of statue, one of those big Mooreish pieces, all scooped-out hollows and cuppable curves, faceless and tightly swathed, like a bronze mummy (oops! — what a treacherously ambiguous medium our language is)? I was content, at any rate, to be adrift in Mrs Vanden’s company, if that is what it can be called, incurious as to the nature of her inner life, her thoughts, her opinions, if she had any. I should berate myself for my selfishness, I suppose, my incurable solipsism, yet I cannot do it, with any conviction. I have the notion — I hesitate to speak of it, really, knowing how it will sound — that what we achieved, that what we began to achieve, Mrs V. and I, was a new or at least rare form of relation, one that, I realise, I had been aiming for for longer than I can remember. I do not know what to call it, how to describe it; words such as reticent, respectful, calm, these do not begin to suffice. There are men, I know, who prowl the world in search of an ideal woman, one who will indulge their darkest desires and slake for them the hot, half-formed urgings of the blood; I am like that, except that what I lust after is not some sly-eyed wanton but a being made up of stillnesses; not inert, not lifeless, only quiet, like me — yes, quiet, I am quiet, in spite of all this gabble — a pale pool in a shaded glade in which I might bathe my poor throbbing brow and cool its shamefaced fires (I know, I know: the pool, and the lover leaning over it, I too caught that echo). Forgiveness, I suppose; it all seems to come down to that, in the end, though I hate these big words. Forgiveness not for the things I have done, but for the thing that I am. That is the toughest one to absolve: what they used to call, if I remember rightly, a reserved sin.

Anyway, one day a couple of weeks after our first meeting I went up to the cottage and she did not answer my knock, though the door stood open as always, and when, with my heart in my mouth, I had climbed the stairs to what I knew was her bedroom, I found her lying neatly on her back in the narrow bed with the blanket pulled to her chin and her eyes open and all filmed over and a cocky fly strolling across her cold forehead. At first, in my surprise and numbed dismay, I had the crazy thought that it was not she at all, but an effigy of herself she had left behind her to fool me while she made good her escape. (I was not too far off the mark, I suppose.) The fly on her forehead stopped and wrung its hands as if in energetic dismay and then flew off in a bored sort of way, and I leaned over her and closed her eyes — now there is a creepy sensation — and quietly withdrew. I discovered that I was holding my breath. At the front door I debated with myself whether or not to shut it, but decided in the end to leave it open, since that was her way; besides, it is the practice in these parts, when someone dies, for the house to be left open to all-comers. Do I imagine it, or did the goat give me a soulful, commiserating look as I walked off down the path?

What I felt most strongly was resentment. It was as if she had played a tasteless practical joke on me, had tricked me, first luring me on and then abruptly vanishing. I had needed her, and she had let me down. But what had I needed her for? I brooded on the question without really wanting to find the answer, touching it gingerly, with the barest tips of thought, as if it were one of those lethal lumps the precise depth and dimensions of which I would not care to discover. Forgiveness, as I’ve said, absolution, I was aware of all that; but that was what I had wanted, not what I had wanted her to represent, as a being separate from me. (Oh God, this is all so murky and confused!) Look, here, let me come clean: I could not rid myself of the belief that she had seemed some sort of hope, not just for me, but for — well, I don’t know. Hope. I am well aware how foolhardy it is to say such things, but there you are: it’s true, it’s what I felt. The trouble with death, I realised, is that it is really not an ending at all; it leaves so much unfinished, and so much unassuaged. You keep thinking that the one who died has just gone away, has walked off in the middle of things and will come back presently and take up where you both left off. I cursed myself for not having searched her house that last day, when I had the opportunity; no one would have known, I could have delved into every corner, investigated every last cranny in the place. However, I know in my heart that I would have found nothing, no cache of family papers, no eyebrow-raising diaries, no bundle of dusty letters done up in a blue ribbon. She had jettisoned everything but the barest essentials. Compared to hers my life was still awash with the flotsam of former, sunken lives. I entertained the hope that someone would turn up and surprise us at the funeral, a leathery old colonial, say, who would talk about kaffirs and gin slings and that time that new chap went mad and shot himself on the steps of the club, but in vain; Sergeant Toner and I were the only mourners. As the priest droned the prayers and shook holy water on her coffin I realised with a start that I had not even known her Christian name.

Another dead one; dear Jesus, I do keep on adding to them, don’t I? Well, that’s life, I suppose. I think of them like the figures in one of Vaublin’s twilit landscapes, placed here and there in isolation about the scene, each figure somehow the source of its own illumination, aglow in the midst of shadows, still and speechless, not dead and yet not alive either, waiting perhaps to be brought to some kind of life. That’s it, let us have a disquisition, to pass the time and keep ourselves from brooding. Think of a topic. Ghosts, now, why not. I have never been able to understand why ghosts should be considered something to be afraid of; they might be troublesome, a burden to us, perhaps, pawing at us as we try to get on with our poor lives, but not frightening, surely. Yet, though the fresh-made widow weeps and tears her breast, if she were to come home from the cemetery in her weeds and veil and find her husband’s spirit sitting large as life in his favourite armchair by the fire she would run into the street gibbering in terror. It makes no sense. I can think of times and circumstances when even the ghosts of complete strangers, no matter how horrid, would be welcomed. The prisoner held in solitary confinement, for instance, would be grateful surely to wake up some fevered night and find a troupe of his predecessors come walking through the wall in their rags and beards and clanking their chains, while Saint Teresa would have been tickled, I suspect, to receive a visit to her interior castle from some long-dead hidalgo of Old Castile. And what of our friend Crusoe in his hut, would he not have been happy to be haunted by the spirits of his drowned shipmates? The ship’s doctor could have advised him on his ague, the carpenter on his fencing, while the cabin boy, no matter how fey, surely would have afforded a welcome change of fare from Friday’s dusky charms.

There are ghosts and ghosts, of course. Banquo was a dampener on the king’s carousings, and Hamlet’s father made what I cannot but think were excessive calls on filial piety. Yet, for myself, I know I would be grateful for any intercourse with the dead, no matter how baleful their stares or unavoidable their pale, pointing fingers. I feel I might be able, not to exonerate, but to explain myself, perhaps, to account for my neglectfulness, my failures, the things left unsaid, all those sins against the dead, both of omission and commission, of which I had been guilty while they were still in the land of the living. But more than that, more important than the desire for self-justification, is the conviction that I have, however preposterous it may sound, that there is an onus on us, the living, to conjure up our particular dead. I am certain there is no other form of afterlife for them than this, that they should live in us, and through us. It is our duty. (I like the high moral tone. How dare I, really!)

Let us take the hypothetical case of a man surprised by love, not for a living woman — he has never been able to care much for the living — but for the figure of a woman in, oh, a painting, let’s say. That is, he is swept off his feet one day by a work of art. It happens; not very often, I grant you, but it does happen. The fact that the subject is a female perhaps is not of such significance, although it should be perfectly possible to ‘fall in love’, as they like to put it, with a painted image; after all, what is it lovers ever love but the images they have of each other? Freud himself remarked that in the passionate encounter of every couple there are four people involved. Or should it be six? — the two so-called real lovers, plus the images they have of themselves, plus the images that they have of each other. What a tangled web Eros weaves! Anyhow. This man, this hypothetical man, finds himself one day in the house of a rich acquaintance, where he is confronted by a portrait of a woman and knows straight away that at once and by whatever means he must possess it. That is what they mean by love, surely? It is not, mark you, that the woman is beautiful; in fact, the model was evidently a plain, pinched person with fishy eyes and a big nose and too much flesh about the lips. But ah, in her portrait she has presence, she is unignorably there, more real than the majority of her sisters out here in what we call real life. And our Monsieur Hypothesis is not used to seeing people whole, the rest of humanity being for him for the most part a kind of annoying fog obscuring his view of the darkened shop-window of the world and of himself reflected in it. He tells himself he will steal the picture and hold it for ransom, but really that is just for the purposes of the plot. His true and secret desire — secret even from himself, perhaps — is to have this marvellous object, to have and to hold it, to bathe in the brightness of its perfected, still and immutable presence. He is, or at least has been, let us say, a man of some learning, trained to reason and compute, who in the face of a manifestly chaotic world has lost his faith in the possibility of order. He drifts. He has no moral base. Then suddenly one midsummer day he comes upon this painting and is smitten. Some other object might have done as well, a statue, for example (I feel we shall have something to say on the subject of statues before long; yes, definitely I feel that topic coming on), or a beautiful proposition in mathematics, or even, who knows, a real, walking-and-talking, peeing-and-pouting, big live pink mama-doll. Obviously the need was there all along, awaiting its fulfilment in whatever form chance might provide. It is being that he has encountered here, the thing itself, the pure, unmediated essence, in which, he thinks, he will at last find himself and his true home, his place in the world. Impossible, impossible dreams, but for a moment he allows himself to believe in them. He takes the painting.

Here the plot does not so much thicken as coagulate.

He is an inept thief, our lovelorn hypothetical hero. He comes along bold as brass in broad daylight and lifts the lady off the wall, then turns and is confronted at once by a living, flesh-and-blood person (oh yes, lots of flesh, lots of blood), a maidservant, perhaps (pretend this is olden times, when domestics were readily available, not to say expendable), who by bad luck happens at that moment to walk into the room. Well, to shorten a long and grisly tale, without ado he bashes in the maid’s head, not because she is a threat to him, really, but because, well, because she is there, or because she is there and he does not see her properly, or — or whatever, what does it matter, for Christ’s sake! He kills her, isn’t that enough? And he makes his get-away. Such things were commonplace in olden times. Suddenly, however, to his intense surprise and deep chagrin, he discovers that the picture has lost its charm for him. Ashes. Daubs. Mere paint on a piece of rag. He tosses it aside as if it were a page of yesterday’s newspaper. What interests him now, of course, is the living woman that he so carelessly did away with. He recalls with fascination and a kind of swooning wonderment the moments before he struck the first blow, when he looked into his victim’s eyes and knew that he had never known another creature — not mother, wife, child, not anyone — so intimately, so invasively, to such indecent depths, as he did just then this woman whom he was about to bludgeon to death. Well, he was shocked. Guilt, remorse, fear of capture and disgrace, he had expected these things, welcomed them, indeed, as a token that he had not entirely relinquished his claim to be considered human, but this, this sudden access to another’s being, this astonished and appalled him. How, with such knowledge, could he have gone ahead and killed? How, having seen straight down through those sky-blue, transparent eyes into the depths of what for want of a better word I shall call her soul, how could he destroy her?

And how, having done away with her, was he to bring her back? For that, he understood, was his task now. Prison, punishment, paying his debt to society, all that was nothing, was merely how he would pass the time while he got on with the real business of atonement, which was nothing less than the restitution of a life. Restitution, that was the word, he remembered it from when he was a child at school and they told him what the thief must do, which is to make proper restitution.

Of course, he did not know how to do it, where to begin. He stood aghast before the prospect, baffled and helpless. That moment of ineffable knowing when he had turned on her with the weapon raised was no help to him here, that was a different order of knowledge, the stuff of life, so to speak, while what he needed now was the art of necromancy. The question was how to put into place another’s life, but how could he answer, he who hardly knew how to live his own? A life! with all its ragged complexities, its false starts and sudden closures, the summer solitudes and winter woes, the inexplicable exaltations in April weather, the meals to be eaten, the sleeps to be slept, the blood in its courses, the coat that will go one more season, the new shoes, the old shoes, the afternoons, the nights, the bird-thronged dawns, the old dying and the new ones being born, the prime and then in a twinkling the autumnal shadows, then age, and then the proper death. That was what he had taken from her, and now must restore. He would need help. Oh, he would need help. And so he waits for the rustle in the air, for the moment of sudden cold, for the soundless falling into step beside him that will announce the presence of the ghost that somehow he must conjure.

As I say, merely a hypothesis.

Last night I had a dream about my father. This is an unusual occurrence. I rarely think of him, never mind entertain him in my dreams. My mother was a dreadful old brute but we were fond of each other, I believe, in our violent, unforgiving way. For my father, however, I seem never to have felt anything stronger than distaste. I mean, I probably loved him, as sons do love fathers, biologically, as it were, but I had as little to do with him as I could. He was a fearsome little fellow, a constant complainer and prone to sudden, ungovernable rages. I always think of him, God forgive me, as Mr Hyde, in his too-big tweeds, stumping along and snorting and stabbing at things with his stick. He died badly, rotting away before our eyes, shrinking to nothing as if he were consuming himself in his own anger. In my dream we were walking together through a huge and echoing administrative building, a place out of my childhood, a town hall or public library or something, I don’t know. Anyway, the light in the dream was the light of childhood, steady and clear and dense with its own insubstantial vastness. Though I could see no one, I could hear distinctly the sounds of the place: the brittle clacking of a typewriter, the laughter of a fellow and a girl larking somewhere, and someone with squeaky shoes walking away very businesslike down a long corridor. Father and I were climbing an interminable, shallow staircase with many turns: I could feel the clammy sheen of the banister rail under my hand and sense the high, domed ceiling far above me. The old man was stamping along at a great rate, a pace in front of me, as usual, head down and elbows going like pistons. Suddenly he faltered, and I, not noticing, came up behind him and collided with him, or perhaps it was that he fell against me, I do not know which it was. Anyway, for an amazing moment I thought he was assaulting me. What I noticed most strongly was his smell, of hair oil and serge and cigarette smoke, and something else, something intimate and sour and wholly, shockingly other. He clung to me for a second to steady himself, fixing iron fingers on my wrist in a grip at once infirm and fierce, and I seemed to feel a sort of oscillation start up suddenly, as if some enormous, general and hitherto unnoticed equilibrium had collapsed. A clerk put his sleek head out of an office doorway below us and quickly withdrew it again. My father thrust me aside with what seemed revulsion. I tripped! he snarled, as if expecting to be contradicted, and glared at the banister, white with fury. He searched his pockets and produced a handkerchief and wiped his hands. We stood panting, as if we had indeed been engaged in a scuffle. A telephone rang nearby, a raucous jangling, like metallic laughter, and someone picked it up and began to speak at once in a low voice, urgently, as if trying to placate the machine itself. And I realised that what we had come there for was my father’s death certificate; this seemed perfectly natural, of course, as such things do in dreams. We went on up the long stairs, and he was very brisk now, cheery, almost, in a pitiful sort of way, trying to pretend nothing of any note was happening, and I was embarrassed for him because I understood that he had already started to die and that death was something that would be shameful for him as a man, like being cuckolded, or going bankrupt. I was hoping that no one would see us there together, for if we got away without being seen we could pretend I did not know that he was doomed and that way he would save face. Then came a confused and hectic digression which I shall not bother with: how strange, the people that pop up in dreams, like the figures that loom at the shrieking travellers in a ghost train, springing out of the surrounding murk for a gesticulating, mad moment before being jerked away again on their strings. Anyway, after that wild interval my father and I found ourselves presently in an enormous room full of people rushing about in all directions, shouting, waving bits of paper at each other, demanding, beseeching, cursing. Father plunged at once, terrier-like, into the thick of this mêlée, shoving and shouting with the best of them, with me after him, desperately trying to keep up. He was outraged that the officials among the throng were not marked off somehow from the rest, and he kept stopping random passers-by, grasping them by the upper arms and rising on tiptoe and roaring in their faces. You don’t understand, he would yell at them, I’m here for my chit, dammit, I’m here for my chit! But no one listened, or even looked at him, so busy were they craning to look past him, trying to glimpse whatever it was they were searching for with such fierce determination. Somehow I lost him, and now I in my turn found myself running here and there in desperation, shouting out his name and plucking at people and demanding if they had seen him. And then all at once, like smoke clearing, the crowd dispersed and I was left alone in the enormous room. After a long, panicky search I found a little door built flush to the wall and so well camouflaged that it could hardly be distinguished from the panelling, though by some means I knew it had been there for me to find. When I went through I was in another, much smaller room, with a barred window looking out on a sunlit, classical landscape of meadows and hills and bosky glades, dotted about with statuary and marble follies and dainty, sparkling waterfalls. My father was sitting crookedly on a chair in the middle of the bare floor with an air of bewilderment, stooped and crumpled, peering up fearfully as if expecting a blow; it was obvious that he had been thrust hurriedly on to the chair as I was about to enter. Behind him a group of silent men in starched high collars and black morning-coats and striped trousers stood about in attitudes of stern pensiveness, frowning at their fingernails, or gazing fixedly out of the window. Father had been weeping, his face was blotched and his nose was runny. All his fierceness was gone. It’s you, he said to me, in a mixture of accusation and pleading, you have to serve your term before they’ll do anything! At that the group of gentlemen behind him sprang at once into action and came forward hurriedly and picked him up, still seated, and bustled him chair and all out of the room, negotiating the narrow door with difficulty, muttering directions to each other and tuttutting irritably. When I opened my eyes and sat up in the dawn light I was lost for a moment in that half-world between sleep and waking, and was convinced I had not been dreaming at all, but remembering; all day there has lingered the uneasy sense of an opportunity missed, of some large significance left unacknowledged. Certain dreams do that, they seem to darken the very air, crowding it with the shadows of another world.

Dreams bring remembrance, too; perhaps that is what they are for, to force us to dredge up those dirty little deeds and dodges we thought we had succeeded in forgetting. These half-involuntary memories are a terrible thing. There are days like this when they course through me from morning until night like pure pain. They leave me gasping, even the seemingly happy ones, as if they were the living record of heinous yet immensely subtle sins I had thought were covered up forever. And always, of course, there is the unexpected: although last night’s dream was about my father, all day today I have been thinking mainly of my mother. After father died I was surprised by the depth of her grief. It made of her something ancient and elemental, a tribal figure, sitting dry-eyed draped in black, bereft, unmoving, monumentally silent, like a pelt-clad figure in a forest clearing watching over the smouldering ashes of a funeral pyre. Had I misjudged her, thinking she was made of sterner stuff? I believe that was for me the beginning of maturity, if that is the word, the moment when I realised it was too late to readjust my notions of her; too late for atonement, too (there is that word again). I tiptoed around her, not knowing what to say, fearful of intruding on this primitive rite. The house wore the startled, doggy air of having been undeservedly rebuked. I knew the feeling.

INHABITANTS OF THIS PLACE. What a peculiar collection we must seem, the Professor and Licht, the girl and I, disparates that we are, thrown together here on this rocky isle. The girl has complicated everything, of course. Before her coming things had settled down nicely; even Licht, who at first had been so resentful of me, had reconciled himself to my presence. Yes, without her we might have pottered along indefinitely, I at my art history and Licht at his schemes — he is a great one for schemes — and the Professor doing whatever it is the Professor does. Now we have grown restless, and chafe under the imposed languor of these summer days; time, that before seemed such a calm medium, has grown choppy as a storm-threatened sea. If the others had remained, I mean Sophie and Croke and the children, if they too had stayed behind they might have become a little community, might have formed a little fold, and I could have been the shepherd, guarding them against the prowling wolf. Idle fancies; forgive me, I get carried away sometimes.

Inevitably of course there has grown up a half-acknowledged divide, with the Professor and Licht on one side, the girl and I on the other, and behind that again there is yet another grouping in which the girl stands between Licht and me, a pair of ragged old rats scrabbling in the dirt and showing each other our sharpest teeth. Licht thinks he is in love with her, of course, and resents what he considers the excessive attentions I pay to her. Her silences torment him and strike him mute in his turn; he creeps up and stands behind her tongue-tied and quivering, or sits and stares at her across the dinner table, rabbit-eyed, his pink-rimmed nostrils flared and his hands trembling. He devises sly, round-about ways of talking about her, deprecating as Mr Guppy, introducing her name with elaborate casualness into the most unlikely topics and employing laboriously cunning circumlocutions. He is heartsick, mooning about the house with the agonised look of a man nursing an unassuageable toothache. At least it has made him smarten himself up a bit. He runs a comb now and then through that fright-wig of hair, and bathes more frequently than he used to, if my nose is any judge. I suppose she has become associated in his mind with the dream he has of leaving here and finding some more fulfilling life elsewhere; I see them, as in one of those old silent films, in a bare room with a square table, he sitting head in hands and she smiling her Lulu smile at the moustachioed and leering landlord who beckons to her suggestively from the doorway.

She is a singular creature, or seems so to me, at any rate. She claims to be twenty-one but I think she is no more than eighteen or nineteen. She will not tell me about her life, or at least does not: I mean maybe if I knew how to ask, if I knew the codes that everyone else has been privy to since the cradle, she would prattle away non-stop about her mammy and her daddy and schooldays and the job she did at the hotel and all the rest of it. As it is she wears the dulled, frowning air of an amnesiac. There are times when I catch her studying me with that remote stare that she has as if I were something that had suddenly appeared in her path, like a rock, or a fallen branch, or an unfordable blank span of water. Probably she finds me as baffling a phenomenon as I find her, my songless Mélisande. She trails about the house in an old raincoat of Licht’s that she uses for a dressing-gown, with her lank hair and wan cheeks. I am startled anew each time I encounter her. I am like an anthropologist studying the last surviving specimen of some delicate, elusive species long thought extinct. I am assembling her gradually, with great care, starting at the extremities; I ogle her bare feet — the little toe is curled under its neighbour like a baby’s thumb — her hard little hands, the vulnerable, veined, milk-blue backs of her knees. Sometimes at night she comes and sits in the kitchen while I work. I do not know if she is lonely, or afraid, or if the kitchen is just one of a series of stopping-places in her fitful wanderings; she has a way of touching things as she passes them by, tapping them lightly with her fingertips, like a child touching the markers of a secret game. She is tense, restless, preoccupied, always poised somehow, as if at any moment she might unfurl a set of hidden wings and take flight out of the window into the darkness and be gone. It will happen; some morning I will wake and know at once that she has flown, will feel her absence like a jagged hole in the air through which the wind pours without a sound. What shall I do then, when my term is ended?

Felix she does not mention.

I tell her about the painter Vaublin, what little is known of him. She listens, large-eyed, nodding faintly now and then, taking it all in or thinking of something else, I do not know which. Perhaps I am talking to myself, telling myself the same story all over again. Listen –

Who does not know, if only from postcards or the lids of superior chocolates boxes, these scenes suffused with tenderness and melancholy that yet have something harsh in them, something almost inhuman? Le monde d’or is one of those handful of timeless images that seem to have been hanging forever in the gallery of the mind. There is something mysterious here beyond the inherent mysteriousness of art itself. I look at this picture, I cannot help it, in a spirit of shamefaced interrogation, asking, What does it mean, what are they doing, these engimatic figures frozen forever on the point of departure, what is this atmosphere of portentousness without apparent portent? There is no meaning, of course, only a profound and inexplicable significance; why is that not enough for me? Art imitates nature not by mimesis but by achieving for itself a natural objectivity, I of all people should know that. Yet in this picture there seems to be a kind of valour in operation, a kind of tight-lipped, admirable fortitude, as if the painter knows something that he will not divulge, whether to deprive us or to spare us is uncertain. Such stillness; though the scene moves there is no movement; in this twilit glade the helpless tumbling of things through time has come to a halt: what other painter before or after has managed to illustrate this fundamental paradox of art with such profound yet playful artistry? These creatures will not die, even if they have never lived. They are wonderfully detailed figurines, animate yet frozen in immobility: I think of the little manikins on a music-box, or in one of those old town-hall clocks, poised, waiting for the miniature music that will never start up, for the bronze bell that will not peal. It is the very stillness of their world that permits them to endure; if they stir they will die, will crumble into dust and leave nothing behind save a few scraps of brittle lace, a satin bow, a shoe buckle, a broken mandolin.

I admire the faint but ever-present air of concupiscence that pervades all of this artist’s work. Viewed from a certain angle these polite arcadian scenes can seem a riotous bacchanal. How lewdly his ladies look out at us, their ardent eyes shiny as marbles, their cheeks pinkly aglow as if from a gentle smacking. Even the props have something tumescent about them, these smooth pillars and thick, tall trees, these pendulous and smoothly rounded clouds, these mossy arbours from within which there seem to issue the sighs and soft laughter of breathless lovers. Even in Le monde d’or, apparently so chaste, so ethereal, a certain hectic air of expectancy bespeaks excesses remembered or to come. The figure of Pierrot is suggestively androgynous, the blonde woman walking away on the arm of the old man — who himself has a touch of the roué — wears a wearily knowing air, while the two boys, those pallid, slightly ravaged putti, seem to have seen more things than they should. Even the little girl with the braided hair who leads the lady by the hand has the aura of a fledgling Justine or Juliette, a potential victim in whom old men might repose dark dreams of tender abuse. And then there is that smirking Harlequin astride his anthropomorphic donkey: what sights he seems to have seen, what things he knows!

I pause to record an infestation of flies, minute, glittering black creatures with disproportionately large yet impossibly delicate wings shaped like sycamore seeds. I think they must be newly hatched. What is a blow-fly? That is what I thought when I saw them: blow-flies. Is there something dead around here that has not yet begun to stink? I cannot discover where they are coming from; they just appear in the light of the lamp, attracted by the warmth, I suppose, and fly up against the bulb and then drop stunned on the table and flop about groggily until I sweep them away with my sleeve. They have got into my papers, too, I lift a page and find them squashed flat there, tiny black and crimson bursts of blossom stuck with wing-petals. It is eerie, even a bit alarming, yet I am almost charmed. It is like something out of the Bible. What does it portend? I have become superstitious, the result no doubt of living for so long with ghosts. Down here in the underworld things give the uncanny impression of being other things, all these Pierrots and Colombines in their black masks, and even flies, looked at in a certain light, can seem celestial messengers. When they first began to appear I did not feel repugnance, only a sort of pleased surprise. I sat for a long time watching them, head on hand, lost to myself and inanely smiling, like one of those bewhiskered dreamers fluttered about by fairies in a Victorian engraving. I know that the reality they inhabit is different from mine, that for them this world they have blundered into is all struggle and pain and sudden, inexplicable fire — they are only flies after all, and I am only I — yet as they rise and fall, fluttering in the light, they might be a host of shining seraphim come to comfort me.

Today in my reading I chanced upon another jewel: Hard beside the woe of the world, and often upon its volcanic soil, man has laid out his little garden of happiness. Yes, you have guessed it, I have taken up gardening, even in the shadow of my ruins. It is a relaxation from the rigours of scholarship. (Scholarship!) But no, no, it is more than that. Out here among these greens, in this clement weather, I have the irresistible sensation of being in touch with something, some authentic, fundamental thing, to which a part of me I had thought atrophied responds as if to a healing and invigorating balm. So many things I have missed in my life; there are moments, rare and brief, when I think it might not be too late after all to experience at least some of them. My needs are modest; a spell of husbandry will do, for now. (Later will there come the tree of knowledge, Eve, the fatal apple, and all the rest of it, Cain included?) Perhaps I shall make a little statue of myself and grind it up and mix it with the clay, as the philosopher so charmingly recommends, and that way come to live again through these growing things.

I found down at the side of the house the remains of what must once have been a kitchen garden. Everything was choked with weeds and scutch grass, but the outlines of bed and drill were still there. I cleared the ground and found good black soil and put in vegetables — runner beans, mainly, I’m afraid, for I love their scarlet flowers. Already the first fruits have appeared (shall I hear the voice of the turtle, too?). I cannot express the excitement I felt when these tender seedlings began to come up. They were so fragile and yet so tenacious, so — so valiant. I have a great fondness for the stunted things, the runts, the ones that fail to flower and yet refuse to die, or are beaten down by the wind and still put out blossoms on the fallen stems. I have the notion, foolish, I know, that it is because of me that they cling on, that my ministrations, no, simply my presence gives them heart somehow, and makes them live. Who or what would there be to notice their struggles if I did not come out and walk among them every day? It must mean something, being here. I am the agent of individuation: in me they find their singularity. I planted them in neat rows, just so, and gave each one its space; without me only the madness of mere growth. Not a sparrow shall fall but I … how does it go? I have forgotten the quotation, the misquotation. Just as well, I am getting carried away; next thing I shall be hearing voices. It is just that there are days when, like Rameau’s nephew, I have to reflect: it is an affliction that must run its course.

Where was I? My garden, yes. I entertain high hopes of a bumper crop. What shall I do with such abundance, though? Perhaps Mr Tighe will take some of it to sell in his shop? If not, what matter. Let it all go to waste. Life, growth, this tender green fighting its way up through the dirt, that’s all that interests me. Obvious, of course, but what do I care about that? The obvious is fine, for me. Sometimes, anyway.

And then there are the weeds; I know that if I were a real gardener I would do merciless and unrelenting battle against weeds, but the fact is I cherish them. They seem to me even more fiercely alive than the planted things they flourish among. Cut them down today and tomorrow they will be back; tear them out of their holes and leave the merest thread of root behind and they will come shouldering their way up again, stronger than ever. Compared to these ruffians even my hardiest cabbages are namby-pambies. How cunning they are, too, how cleverly they choose their spot, growing up slyly beside those cultivated plants they most resemble. Against whom are they adopting this camouflage? Pests do not seem to eat them, having my more tender produce to gorge upon, and birds leave them alone. Is it me they fear? Do they see me coming, with my boots and blade? I wonder if they feel pain, experience terror, if they weep and bleed, in their damp, vermiculate world, just as we do, up here in the light? I look at the little sprigs of chickweed trembling among the bean shoots and I am strangely moved. Such steadfastness, such yearning! They want to live too. That is all they ask: to have their little moment in the world.

A robin comes to forage where I dig, a tough-looking type. It watches me with a glint and darts under my feet after its prey. Seagulls swoop and blackbirds fly up at a low angle, fluting shrilly. This morning when I was hoeing between the potato beds a rat appeared, nosing along under the whitewashed wall that separates my garden from the yard. It must have been sick: when it saw me it did not run away, only sat up on its hunkers and looked at me in weary surprise. (Where is that dog?) I thought of Alba Longa, of course, of Carthage in flames, all that. What a mind I have, stuffed with lofty trivia! After a moment or two the thing turned and made off, going at a sort of sideways wallow and dragging its fat pink tail over the clay. Trust me: the quick all around and I find myself face to face with a rat dying of decrepitude. I suppose I should have killed it. I am not so good at killing things, any more. Will it come back? In dreams, perhaps.

All this, the garden and so on, why does it remind me so strongly of boyhood days? God knows, I was never a tow-haired child of nature, ensnared with flowers and romping on the grass. Cigarettes and dirty girls were my strongest interests. Yet when I trail out here with my hoe I feel the chime of an immemorial happiness. Is it that the past has become pastoral, as much a fancy as in my mind this garden is, perpetually vernal, aglow with a stylised, prelapsarian sunlight such as that which shines with melancholy radiance over Vaublin’s pleasure parks? That is what I am digging for, I suppose, that is what I am trying to uncover: the forfeited, impossible, never to be found again state of simple innocence.

So picture me there in this still-springlike early summer weather, in my peasant’s blouse and cracked brogues, delving among the burdocks, an unlikely Silvius, striving by harmless industry to do a repair job on what remains of my rotten soul. The early rain has ceased and the quicksilver air is full of flash and chill fire; a surprise, really, this drenched brilliance. There is a sort of ringing everywhere and everything is damp and silky under a pale, nude sky. We had a wet winter, summer has made a late start, and the clay is sodden still, a rich, dark stuff that heaves and slurps when I plunge my blade into it. All moves slowly, calmly, at a mysteriously ordained, uniform pace; I have the sense of a vast clock marking off the slow strokes, one by one by one. I pause and lean on the handle of the hoe with my face lifted to the light, ankles crossed and feet in the clay (which is their true medium, after all) and think of nothing. There is a tree at the corner of the garden, I am not sure what it is, a beech, I believe, I shall call it a beech — who is to know the difference? — a wonderful thing, like a great delicate patient animal. It seems to look away, upwards, carefully, at something only it can see. It makes a restless, sibilant sound, and the sunlight trapped like bright water among its branches shivers and sways. I am convinced it is aware of me; more foolishness, I know. Yet I have a sense, however illusory, of living among lives: a sense, that is, of the significance, the ravelled complexity of things. They speak to me, these lives, these things, of matters I do not fully understand. They speak of the past and, more compellingly, of the future. They are urgent at times, at times so weary and faded I can scarcely hear them.

I have discovered the source of those flies: a bunch of flowers that lovelorn Licht left standing for too long on the window-sill above the sink. Another attempt to brighten the place; that is his great theme these days, the need to ‘brighten up the place’. Chrysanthemums, they were, blossoms of the golden world. Among the petals there must have been eggs that hatched in the sun. The water they were standing in has left behind a sort of greeny, fleshy smell. But imagine that: flies from flowers! Ah Charles, Charles — wait, let me strike an attitude: there — Ah, Charles, mon frère mélancholique! You held that genius consists in the ability to summon up childhood at will, or something like that, I can’t remember exactly. I have lost mine, lost it completely. Childhood, I mean. Versions of it are all I can manage. Well, what did I expect? Something had to be forfeited, for the sake of the future; that is where I am pinning my hopes now. The future! Ah.

Flora is sleeping on her side with one glossy knee exposed and an arm thrown out awkwardly, her hand dangling over the side of the bed. See the parted lips and delicately shadowed eyelids, that strand of damp hair stuck to her forehead. A zed-shaped line of sunlight is working its imperceptible way towards her over the crumpled sheet. She murmurs something and frowns.

‘Are you all right?’ Alice says softly and touches her lolling arm.

‘What?’ Flora sits up straight and stares about her blankly with wide eyes. ‘What?’

‘Are you all right?’ People waking up frighten Alice, they look so wild and strange. ‘They sent me up to see if you were better.’

Flora closed her eyes and plunged her hands into her hair. She was hot and damp and her hair was hot and damp and heavy. She took a deep breath and held it for a moment and then sighed.

‘I’m not better,’ she said. ‘I feel shivery still. I must have got a chill. Will you bring me a drink of water?’

She flopped back on the bed and stared vexedly at the ceiling, her dark hair strewn on the pillow and her arms flung up at either side of her face. The undersides of her wrists are bluish white.

‘It was raining but it’s lovely now,’ Alice said.

‘Is it?’ Flora answered from the depths. She was trying to remember her dream. Something about that picture: she was in that picture. ‘Yes,’ she said, staring at the print pinned on the wall beside her, that strange-looking clown with his arms hanging and the one at the left who looked like Felix, grinning at her.

Alice had the feeling she often had, that she was made of glass, and that anyone who looked at her would see straight through and not notice her at all. She is in love with Flora; in her presence she has a sense of something vague and large and bright, a sort of painful rapture that is all the time about to blossom yet never does. She wished now she could think of something to say to her, something that would make her start up in excitement and dismay. She could hear the wind thrumming in the chimneys and the gulls crying like babies. She thought of her mother. A cloud switched off the sunlight. In the sudden gloom she began to fidget.

‘That man made sausages for us,’ she said.

A faint smell of frying lingered.

‘Who?’ Flora said. Not that she cared. She lifted her knees under the blanket and hugged them; she reclined there, coiled around the purring little engine of herself, with the restless and faintly aggrieved self-absorption of a cat. Suddenly she sat up and laughed. ‘What?’ she said. ‘Did he cook — Felix?’

Alice put her hands behind her back and swivelled slowly on one heel.

‘No,’ she said witheringly. ‘The one that lives here. That little man.’

The sunlight came on again and everywhere there was a sense of running, silent and fleet. Flora pulled the coarse sheet over her breast and snuggled down in the furry hollow of the mattress, inhaling her own warm, chocolatey smells. She no longer cared whose bed it was, what big body had slept here before her. Blood beat along her veins sluggishly like oil.

‘Tell them I’m all right,’ she said. ‘Tell them I’m asleep.’ The soft light in the window and the textured whiteness of the pillow calmed her heart. She was sick and yet wonderfully at ease. She closed her eyes and listened to the sounds of the day around her, birdsong and far calls and the wind’s unceasing vain attempt to speak. She was a child again, adrift in summer. She saw the sun on the convent wall and the idiot boy on the hill road making faces at her, and below her the roofs shimmering, the harbour beyond, and then the sea, and then piled clouds like coils of dirty silver lying low on the hot horizon. ‘Tell them I … ’

*

Outside the door Alice paused. Through the little window above the landing she could see the shadows of clouds skimming over the distant sea and the whitecaps that from here looked as if they were not moving at all. Outside the window on the next landing there was a big tree that shed a greenish light on the stairs. She glanced down through the shifting leaves and thought she saw someone in the garden looking up at her and she turned hot with fright. Hatch had said this place was surely haunted. She hurried on.

The kitchen had the puzzled, lost look of a place lately abandoned. Only Licht was there, sitting at the strewn table with his head lifted, dreaming up into the wide light from the window. At first when he saw her he did not stir, then blinked and shook himself and sat upright.

‘She said to say that she’s asleep,’ she said. He nodded pleasantly and smiled, quite baffled. ‘Flora,’ she said with firmness.

‘Ah. Flora.’ Nodding. ‘Yes.’ His gaze shied uncertainly. He was thinking there was something he should think. The noise of the wind had made him feel dizzy, as if a crowd had been shouting in his ear for hours, and he could not clear that awful buzzing sensation in his head. For an instant he saw himself clearly, sitting here in the broad, headachey light of morning, an indistinct, frail figure. Over the oak wood a double rainbow stood shimmering, one strong band and, lower down, its fainter echo. ‘Flora,’ he said again. Dimly in the dark of his mind the lost thought swirled.

Alice imagined taking him by the shoulders and shaking him; she wondered if his head would rattle.

‘She said to say she’s still not well,’ she said.

‘Oh?’ Childe Someone to the dark tower came. ‘I hope she …’

The unwashed crockery was still in the sink, the breakfast things were on the table.

‘Will we wash up?’ Alice said.

Licht shook his head.

‘No,’ he said, ‘leave that, that’s someone else’s job.’ He looked at her sidelong with a crafty smile. ‘We had a maid one time who had a dog called Water, and when my mother complained that the plates were dirty, Mary always said, Well, ma’am, they’re as clean as Water can make them.’ He laughed, a sudden, high whoop, and slapped the table with the flat of his hand and then grew solemn. ‘Poor mama,’ he murmured. He stood up. Hop, little man, hop. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you something.’

The rainbows were fading already in the window.

The house was quiet as they climbed up through it and she imagined figures lurking unseen all around her with their hands pressed to their mouths and their eyes slitted, trying not to let her hear them laughing. She walked ahead of Licht and had a funny sensation in the small of her back, as if she had grown a little tail there. She could hear him humming busily to himself. The thought of her mother was like a bubble inside her ready to burst. Everything was so awful. On the boat that morning Pound had come into the lavatory when she was there and offered her sweets to pull down her pants and let him look at her. She was a little afraid of him, but she felt sorry for him, too, the way he bared his front teeth when he frowned and had to keep pushing his glasses up on his sweaty nose. His breath smelled of cheese.

On the first landing Licht stopped and cocked his head and listened, his smile fixed on nothing. Who did he look like, in that long sort of frock-coat thing and those tight trousers? ‘All clear!’ he whispered, and winked and shooed her on. The White Rabbit? Or was it the March Hare. For she was Alice, after all.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘was the boat trip nice?’

She was not sure what she should answer. She thought he might be making fun of her. He was walking beside her now, leaning around so that he could look into her face. There were little webs of wrinkles at the corners of his mouth and eyes, very fine, like cracks in china.

‘It was all right,’ she said carefully. ‘Then it ran on to that sandbank thing and we all fell down. I think —’

‘Ssh!’

They crept past the room where Flora was asleep. He wondered if she had taken off her clothes. A slow, dull ache of longing kindled itself anew in his breast.

Again he stopped and listened.

All clear.

They gained the topmost storey.

In the turret room Alice stood with her hands clasped before her and her lips pressed shut. Everything tended upwards here. The windows around her had more of sky in them than earth and huge clouds white as ice were floating sedately past. Something wobbled. She had a sense of airy suspension, as if she were hovering a foot above the floor. She imagined that as well as a tail she had sprouted little wings now, she could almost feel them, at ankle and wrist, little feathery swift wings beating invisibly and bearing her aloft in the glassy air. She could see all around, way off to the sea in front and behind her up to the oak wood. It seemed to her she was holding something in her hands, a sort of bowl or something, that she had been given to mind.

‘This is Professor Kreutznaer’s room,’ Licht said, with a hand on his heart, panting a little after the climb. ‘This is his desk, see — and his stuff, his books and stuff.’

She advanced a step and bent her eyes dutifully to the muddle of yellowed papers with their scribbled hieroglyphs and the big books lying open with pictures of actors and musicians and ladies in gold gowns. It all seemed set out, arranged like this, for someone to see. There was dust on everything.

‘Does he look at the stars?’ she said.

‘What?’ He had turned his head and was gazing out of the windows into the depths of the sky.

‘The stars,’ she said, louder. ‘At night.’

Reluctantly he came back from afar. Alice pointed to the telescope.

‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘And the sea.’ He gestured vaguely. ‘The clouds.’

She stood before him, blank and attentive, waiting. He touched a fingertip to the back of the swivel chair and it flinched.

‘He used to only look at pictures,’ he said, frowning. ‘He was an expert on provenance.’

She nodded.

‘Providence,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

‘No no: provenance. Where a painting comes from, who owned it, and so on. You have to know that sort of thing to prove it’s not a fake. The painting, I mean.’

‘Oh.’

A helpless silence fell. Faintly from the garden below came the sound of voices; in a rush both stepped at once to the window and peered down, their foreheads almost touching. The boys were down there, wrestling half-heartedly on the grass.

‘Look at them,’ said Alice softly, with soft contempt.

Licht from the corner of his eye studied her in sudden wonderment. He had not been able to look at her this closely before now. She might have been a new species of something that had alighted at his side. He could hear her breathing. Each time that she blinked, her eyelashes rested for an instant on the soft rise of her cheek. She had a smell like the mingled smell of milk and pencil shavings. Distinctly they heard Hatch say, Oh, fuck! Silence, dark woods, that wind again, like a river running through the glimmering leaves. He closed his eyes. A nerve was twitching in his jaw.

‘Do you ever think,’ he said softly, ‘that you are not here. Sometimes I have the feeling that I have floated out of myself, and that what’s here, standing, talking, is not me at all.’ He turned his troubled eyes away from her and bit his lip. Alice gazed intently down through the glass, hardly breathing. Something swayed between them and then gently settled. He sighed. Of late he had been experiencing the strangest things, all sorts of strange noises and reverberations in his head, pops and groans and sudden, sharp cracks, as if the world were surreptitiously disintegrating around him. One night when he was on the very brink of sleep something had gone off with a bang and a flash of white light, like a pistol being fired inside his skull, and he had started awake in terror but there was nothing, not the faintest sound or echo of a sound. ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘I wonder is there something the matter with my brain.’ He saw himself elsewhere, running down a street, or crouched at a school desk in dusty sunlight under a ponderously ticking clock. ‘Do you think we just die, Alice?’ he murmured. ‘That everything just … ends?’

The shadow of a bird, stiff-winged and plunging, skimmed slantwise across the window.

‘I think that captain really was drunk,’ she said suddenly, still looking down through the glass.

‘What?’

‘The captain of the boat. He had a bottle under a shelf. First he cursed and then laughed and told that Felix fellow to go to hell.’

She sighed.

‘Is that right?’ he said. He watched her as she stood on tiptoe peering down through the window, the shell-pink rim of one ear showing through her hair and a tongue-tip touching her upper lip.

‘I’m staying in a hotel, you know,’ she said. She gestured in the direction where she thought the mainland lay. ‘My mammy …’

A tremulous frown passed over her face and he was afraid she was going to cry again.

‘Come on,’ he said.

Outside the turret room three deep steps led up to a door so low that even Alice had to stoop going through it. Here is the attic, a long, broad, tent-shaped, shadowed place with a dazzling pillar of sunlight suspended at an angle from a grimy mansard window in the roof. Smell of dust and apples and the sweetish stink of decaying timbers. It is hot up here under the roof and the air is thick. There were things piled everywhere, bits of furniture, old bottles, croquet mallets, an antique black bicycle, all standing like their own ghosts under a soft, furry outline of dust. ‘The Emperor Rudolf,’ Licht was saying, ‘the Emperor Rudolf …’ but the odd acoustics of the place took the rest of his words and made of them an unintelligible booming. They stood a moment, struck, listening to the echoes ricochet and fall like needles. A draught came in from the stairs and a door somewhere cried tinily on its hinges. The heat pressed on their eardrums. Unseen pigeons murmured lasciviously in the eaves and a mouse under the floorboards softly scurried. I have been here before.

‘A great collector,’ Licht said softly, as if someone else might be listening. ‘Did you ever hear of him?’

Alice glanced sideways worriedly at his knees. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said slowly.

‘He had such things! — a magic statue, for instance, that sang a kind of song when the sun shone on it.’ He looked uncertain for a moment. ‘At least, that’s what I read in a book somewhere.’

She turned and took a step away from him carefully, teetering. The thing she seemed to be holding in her hands now felt as if it were brimming over with some precious, volatile stuff. Suddenly he laughed behind her and the echoes flew up.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘listen,’ and came forward with a finger lifted. ‘What shape is a dead parrot?’ She made a pretence of thinking hard. He watched her gloatingly, nodding, his eyebrows rising higher and higher. ‘Give up?’ She got ready to laugh. ‘A polygon!’ He quivered with glee, teeheeing soundlessly. She smiled as hard as she could, nodding. She had heard it before.

In a corner the floor was strewn with shrivelled apples. When his eye fell on them Licht grew morose.

‘My pippins,’ he said. ‘I forgot about them.’ He picked one up and sniffed it wistfully. ‘Gone.’ He gave her a mournful smile. ‘Like poor Polly.’

He knelt before a brassbound chest. There were costumes in it, he told her, fancy-dress things from long ago, ballgowns and helmets and an officer’s uniform with a cocked hat. He tugged at the catches but could not get them undone. After a brief effort he gave up; leave them, leave them there, the gaudy centuries. He sat down on the lid of the chest and rocked himself back and forth, hugging one knee, while Alice stood, swaying a little, looking away. Another cloud swept over and the sunlight in the window above their heads died abruptly with a sort of click.

‘He was famous, you know,’ Licht said. ‘Oh yes. He was in books, and people came from all over the world to get his opinion on pictures.’ His face darkened and he looked like a vexed child. ‘Then they said that he —’ He paused and lifted a warning finger, listening.

Eek.

The sunlight returned. Distantly they heard again from the garden the raucous voices of the boys.

‘Where was he emperor of?’ Alice said.

Licht looked at her and blinked. ‘Eh? No, no, not him — I mean Professor Kreutznaer.’

‘Oh.’

He looked more vexed than ever. He stood up from the chest and paced the floor moodily with his hands at his back and the corners of his mouth pulled down. Alice felt the invisible bowl tilting in her hands.

‘I was his assistant, you know,’ he said airily, pointing to the papers on the desk. ‘I used to type up what he wrote.’ He waggled his fingers, tapping invisible keys. ‘I was the only one who could read his handwriting.’

He stood and frowned, scratching his head with one finger.

‘Did they write about you in the books, too?’ she asked.

He glanced at her sharply. ‘Of course not!’ he snapped, and she felt the ghost of a quicksilver splash fall at her feet. He broke off and lifted a hand again, frowning, his rabbity nostrils flared. A stair creaked; then silence. (The Professor is out there, poised like a voyeur, listening.) I watch them, outlined in dusty sunlight against the soft dark, an emblem of something, and my heart contracts.

‘What is it?’ Alice whispered.

‘What? Oh, I thought I heard — ssh!’

They listened. No sound. Licht shrugged and started to speak, but suddenly Alice turned to him and said:

‘I’m afraid!’

And as soon as it was said it ceased to be true. Licht stepped back, staring, cradling in his startled palms the invisible vessel she had handed him.

When Alice had run off down the stairs and Licht came stooping through the little doorway Professor Kreutznaer was there at the landing window with his fists sunk in the sagging pockets of his old black jacket. Licht flushed angrily.

‘What are you doing?’ the Professor said.

‘Nothing!’ Licht cried. It came out as a squeak. He cleared his throat and tried again. ‘Nothing. What do you mean? Are you spying on me?’

From below came the abrupt thud of the front door slamming; the house quivered and after a second a ghostly draught came wafting up the stairs.

‘I told you you shouldn’t let them stay,’ the Professor said. ‘Why did you let them in?’

Licht strode past him to the window and stood looking out. Tears of anger and resentment welled up in his eyes.

‘Why do you blame me?’ he cried. ‘You blame me for everything, and spy on me, creeping around and listening at doors. It’s you they’re after, it’s you that fellow came to find!’ How gay and carefree everything outside seemed, the sun on the dunes and the grass waving and the unreal blue of the sea in the distance. At moments such as this he felt the world was rocking with laughter, jeering at him. He beat his fists softly on the window-sill and wept, his shoulders shaking. ‘I have to get away from here,’ he said as if to himself and heaved a juicy sob, shaking his head slowly from side to side, and a big bubble of spit formed on his blubby lips and burst with a tiny plop. ‘I have to get away!’

The Professor regarded him in silence, frowning. Licht, pawing at his eyes and muttering something, pushed past him and blundered away down the stairs.

The front door banged again and the Professor felt the tiny tremor under his feet. He waited and presently he heard another sound, closer at hand, and when he looked over the banisters he saw Felix on the landing below, leaning at the door of the bedroom there with one hand in the pocket of his jacket and his head inclined, smiling to himself, listening for a sound from within. The Professor drew back quickly, his heart joggling, but too late. For a moment there was silence and then from below he heard Felix laugh softly and softly sing up the stairwell:

‘Helloo-oo!’ Pause. ‘Professor?’ Pause; again a laugh. ‘Are you there, Truepenny?’

The Professor closed his eyes briefly and sighed. There were things he did not wish to recall. Black nights by the river, the lamps on the quayside shivering in the wind and the gulls wheeling in the darkness overhead like big, blown sheets of paper, and the boys standing in the shadows, all silk and sheathed steel, shuffling their feet in the cold, the tips of their cigarettes flaring and their soft cat-voices calling to him as he walked past them on the pavement for the third or fourth time, trying to appear distracted, trying to look like what at other times he thought himself to be. How are you, hard? Are you looking for it, are you? They all had the same, quick eyes, like the eyes of half-tamed animals. He was frightened of them. And yet behind all the toughness and the insolent talk how tentative they were; alone with him at last in a dark doorway or down a back lane they laughed self-consciously and ducked their heads, avoiding his furtive, beseeching eyes, pretending not to be there, just like him. It was that mixture of menace and vulnerability he found irresistible. And then stumbling away through the rain-slimed streets, light-headed, shaking with a sort of sated glee. Never again! he would cry out in his heart, never, I swear it! addressing a phantom version of himself that stood over him with arms folded and lips shut tight in terrible accusal. And Felix there always, lord of the streets, popping up out of nowhere, horribly knowing, making little jokes and smiling his malign, insinuating smile. They all knew Felix, with his cartons of contraband cigarettes off the boats and his little packets of precious powder. The Pied Piper, Professor, that’s me. And that laugh.

‘Coo-ee!’ he called now, in soft singsong. He was leaning out over the bannisters, his face upturned, with a wide, lipless grin. ‘There you are. Don’t be shy, Professor, it’s only me.’

Professor Kreutznaer slowly descended the stairs; Felix, still grinning, stood and watched him approach, beating out a little rhythm on the banister rail with his fingertips. How silent the house seemed suddenly.

‘What —’ the Professor said, and had to clear his throat and start again. ‘What are you doing here?’

Felix expelled a gasp of laughter and pressed spread fingers to his breast and assumed an expression of startled innocence.

‘You mean here?’ he said, pointing to the floor under his feet. ‘Why, nothing. Loitering without intent.’

‘I mean on the island,’ the Professor said.

Felix merely smiled at that and moved to the window and leaned there looking out brightly at the sunlit scene: the sloped lawn and the bridge over the stream and the grassed-over dunes in the distance and the far strip of sea. He sighed. ‘What a pleasant place you have here,’ he said. ‘So peaceful.’ He glanced over his shoulder and winked. ‘Not like the old days, eh? Although I suppose there is the odd fisher-lad to bring you up your kippers.’ He took out his dented gold case and lit a cheroot and placed the spent match carefully on the window-sill. He nodded thoughtfully, smoking. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a spot like this would do me very nicely, I must say.’

The Professor stood and listened to the unsteady beating of his heart, thinking how fear always holds at its throbbing centre that little, thin, unquenchable flame of pleasure.

‘Why have you come here,’ he said.

Felix blew a big stream of smoke and shook his head in rueful amusement.

‘I told you,’ he said. ‘The captain was drunk, our boat ran aground. We are castaways!’ And lightly laughed. ‘It’s true, really. A happy chance. Are you not pleased to see me?’

The Professor continued to fix him with a dull glare.

‘How did you know where to find me?’ he said.

Felix clicked his tongue in mock annoyance.

‘Really,’ he said, ‘I don’t know why you won’t believe me!’ He chuckled. ‘Have I ever lied to you?’

At that the Professor produced a brief bark of what in him passed for laughter. They eyed each other through a swirl of lead-blue smoke. The Professor raised his eyes and Felix touched a hand shyly to his dyed hair.

‘I thought you’d never notice,’ he said and put on a coy look and batted his eyelashes. ‘You know me, Professor, mutability is my middle name.’

‘What do you want from me?’ the Professor said.

‘Want? Why, nothing. What did I ever want? Amusement. Diversion. The company of a great man.’

Felix turned away smilingly and put his face close against the window and peered down at the garden. The wind swooped outside, the sunlight flickered.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how is the art market behaving these days? Volatile, is it?’

There was the sense of something beating in the air, as if after the tolling of a bell.

‘I think I’m dying,’ the Professor said.

He heard himself say it and took a step backwards in surprise and a sort of gulped dismay, as if from the windy edge of a high place. Felix at the window glanced at him absently over his shoulder.

‘What?’ he said. ‘Dying? Yes, well.’ He turned to the window again and smoked in silence for a long moment. ‘This truly is a grand spot,’ he said. ‘I really do like it. In fact, I like it so much I think I’ll stay for a while.’

Again that bell-tone beating in the air.

‘No,’ the Professor said.

Felix was peering hard out at the hillside where a bedraggled figure was sitting under a tree in blossom. ‘Montgomery!’ Felix cried out softly, ‘why has your man got pointed ears?’ He turned to the Professor smartly, with a bright smile. ‘No, did you say?’ he said. ‘My my, that’s not very hospitable. I only mean to stay for a little while. Until I find my feet again — I’ve had a few reverses lately. Nothing serious, you understand; nothing on the scale of some I could mention.’

They stood and contemplated each other, Felix with his meaning smile and the Professor grimly staring.

‘You can’t stay here,’ the Professor said.

‘Oh, come,’ Felix cried, ‘we shall fleet the time carelessly as we did in the golden world — oops!’ He clapped a hand to his mouth and raised his eyebrows high in mock dismay. ‘What have I said? — dear me, Professor, you’ve grown quite pale.’ He put his head on one side and contemplated with pursed amusement the old man standing hunched and scowling before him. ‘By the way, I went down to Whitewater the other day,’ Felix said pleasantly. ‘The daughter is in charge there now — quite the chatelaine. You pay a pound and they let you wander around at will. Very trusting, I must say — but then, they always were, weren’t they. I wanted to see if the gilt was still on the Golden World. What an amazing work it is — never ceases to surprise me. It’s so —’ his voice sank softly ‘— so convincing, I always think.’ His cheroot had died; he placed the butt beside the spent match on the window-sill. ‘I spoke to the lady of the house. She was most kind, most helpful.’

The Professor nodded grimly.

‘She told you where I was,’ he said. Felix only smirked. The Professor heard himself breathing and felt that silken ripple in his breast. ‘You can’t harm me,’ he said.

Felix reared back with an astonished smile.

‘Harm you?’ he cried. ‘Why would I want to harm you? No: you are going to be my golden goose, after all.’

He winked then and turned briskly and set off down the stairs, skipping swiftly; halfway down the flight he paused and turned back. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I hope you appreciate how discreetly I’ve behaved here, though you wouldn’t even condescend to shake my hand.’ He wagged his head reprovingly and chuckled and went on down the stairs.

When he was gone, the Professor stood motionless, suspended for a moment, as so often these days, waiting for something that did not come. Idly he tried the bedroom door. It was locked.

CROKE, NOW, try Croke, he is the real thing, the homo verus of myth and legend. He stepped out on the sunlit porch and stopped with a sour look and sniffed the day. Sea stink and the thick pungency of drenched grass and a sort of buttery smell that he supposed must be the smell of gorse. He did not much care for the countryside, trees and weather and suchlike. He was a city man, born and bred. A walk by the canal of an October morning, swans gliding on their own reflections and the sun on the gasworks and the air delicately blued with petrol fumes, that was enough of outdoors for him. He descended the porch steps and turned right along the flagged path past the rose bush and the rain barrel and the bluebottle-coloured mound where the coal-ash from the kitchen stove is dumped. Stunted apple trees grow here, standing in lush grass, and there are fruit bushes and a thick clump of nettles jostling greenly to attention, their webbed ears pricked up. Smell of roses, then of lilac, then of something sweetly dead. A cloud abruptly palmed the sun. Water was dripping nearby, or was it a bird, making that plip, plip noise? He arrived at the iron gate that led from the corner of the lawn into the yard behind the house. The cobbles were still wet in patches. He watched his hand grasp the bar of the gate and for a moment he was held, staring at that withered claw h. could hardly believe was his. Nowadays he avoided looking at himself too closely, not caring to see the dewlapped neck and grizzled chest, the sagging tits, the quaking, varicosed legs. The years had worn his skin to a thin, translucent stuff, clammy and smooth, like waxed paper, a loose hide within which his big old carcass slipped and slid. He would not need a shroud, they could just truss him up in himself like a turkey and fold over the flaps and tie a final knot. He smiled grimly and the gate opened before him with a clang. A wash of sunlight swept the yard and as he stepped forward falteringly into this sudden weak blaze the god unseen anointed him and he felt for a moment an extraordinary happiness.

A hen was picking over bits of straw, sharp eye agleam, looking for something among the slimed cobbles. It paused thoughtfully and dropped behind it a little twirled mound of shit, chalk-white and olive-green. Croke stared in mild disgust: what in the name of God is it they eat? The dog emerged from its bed under the wheelbarrow and advanced lopsidedly a pace or two and halted, gasping. ‘Here, old fellow,’ Croke said and was startled at the loudness of his voice, how hollow it sounded, how unconvincing. He saw himself there, a comic turn, in his candy-stripes and sopping shoes and ridiculous straw hat. ‘Here, boy,’ he said gruffly. ‘Here, old chap.’

The dog, a black and white spaniel with something awful coming out of its eyes, turned disdainfully and waddled back to its lair.

Croke walked on and came to another, wider iron gate. Beyond it were the fields sloping up to the oak ridge. He took off his hat and looked at it, feeling the air suddenly cool on his forehead.

What is it called, that thing, that gold thing?

Under the gate there was a patch of churned-up mud (are there cows?) with little puddles of sky-reflecting water in it like shards of glass. He stepped across the mud-patch shakily but the ground beyond too was boggy and the wet grass clutched at his feet alarmingly. He kept going, though, clambering up the uneven slope and treading on his own squat shadow lurching along in front of him.

Unless to see my shadow in the sun,

And something on mine own deformity.

Not that he was ever let play the king. All he ever got to do was stand around in sackcloth trews and a tunic that smelled of someone else’s sweat, trying not to yawn while a fat queer in a paper crown strode up and down, ranting. Pah. In his heart he despised the whole business, dressing up and pretending to be someone else. It was a pity no one did revues any more. He used to like revues, the old-fashioned kind, before everything got smart and smutty. He had been a great straight-man, because of his size, probably: a big, slow, shiny-faced gom with slicked-back hair standing up there in suit and tie with his brow furrowed while the little fellow ran rings around him, what could be funnier? Strange, he had never minded looking foolish like that. The funny men thought they were the ones in control; wrong, of course; that was the secret. Nasty little tykes, the lot of them, jealous, tightfisted, throbbing with grievances — and chasers too, God, yes, anything in a skirt.

He found himself thinking of Felix. He did not trust that joker, with his dyed hair and his dirty smile. Very sallow, too: was he a jewboy? Got his hands on the girl straight away, of course. They always do. That girl, now –

Oh!

He reared back in fright as a bird of some sort flew up suddenly out of the grass with burbled whistlings and shot into the sky. A lark, was it? He stood with his head thrown back, leering from the effort, and watched the tiny creature where it hung above him, pouring out its thick-throated song. After a minute it got tired, or perhaps the song was finished, and it sank to earth in stages, dropping from one steep step of air to another, and disappeared into the grass again. Croke walked on. Long ago, when he was a child, someone had kept a canary; he remembered it, perched in its cage in a sunny window. Who was that, who would have kept a singing-bird? He could see it all clearly, the cage there, and the net curtain pulled back, and the window with the little panes and the yellow light streaming in. He sighed. Melancholy, thick and sweet as treacle, welled up in his heart.

He went on, up the slope. This last part was steep and there was mud and dead leaves to make the going treacherous. He smelled wet smoke. Above him the trees were making a troubled, rushing sound. He paused to rest for a moment, leaning forward with his hands on his knees and breathing with his mouth open. His lungs pained him. What was he doing, climbing up here, what craziness had got hold of him? He could die like this, keel over like a tree and die, be here for days and no one would find him. He turned his darkening gaze to the fields falling away behind him, to the house down there, to the beach and the distant sea. White clouds sailed above his head. He seemed for a moment to be airborne, and he felt light-headed. Behind him someone started to sing.

Oh

He came off twice

In a bowl of rice

And called it tapioca

It was one of the boys. He was squatting in the middle of a clearing beside the remains of a fire, poking at the smouldering embers with a stick. He looked up at Croke without surprise. His no-colour hair was wet and plastered to his skull. His eyes were an eerie, washed-out shade of blue.

‘Which one are you?’ Croke said, still wheezing from the climb. ‘Are you Hatch?’ It occurred to him he should carry a cane, it would lend him authority, pointing with it and so on. Hatch went on looking at him with detachment; he might have been looking in through the bars of a cage. Croke, disconcerted by the child’s unwavering regard, tried another tack and pointed to the fire. ‘Go out on you?’ he said.

Hatch shrugged. ‘Pound pissed on it.’

‘I did not,’ Pound said, stepping out of the trees. Pound was the fat one: glasses, cowlick, shoes like boats. ‘He pissed on it himself.’

Unnerved, Croke grinned weakly. He opened his mouth but could think of nothing to say, and stood irresolute, feeling exposed and somehow mocked. He was secretly a little afraid of these two. Hatch in particular alarmed him, with his pixie’s face and violet eyes and pale little clawlike hands.

Pound came and stood by the fire and kicked at the ashes with the toe of his shoe. He cast a sidelong glance in Croke’s direction. ‘He must be gone,’ he said to Hatch. ‘I can’t see him.’

‘Gone to ground,’ Hatch said and laughed.

A gust of wind blew across the clearing, lifting dry husks and the lacy skeletons of last year’s leaves. In the silence Croke had a dreamy sense of slow, weightless toppling.

‘Someone up here, was there?’ he said.

Hatch stuck his stick into the ashes.

‘That fellow,’ he said.

‘Which fellow?’

‘Tarzan the apeman.’

This time Pound laughed, a fat bark. Croke looked from one of them to the other, the fey one squatting on the ground and fatty with his swollen cheeks and infant’s pasty brow. He tried again to think of something to say that would confound them, something harsh and funny, but in vain, and turned instead with an angry gesture and walked away, willing himself to saunter, the back of his neck on fire. Children and animals, children and animals: he should have known better.

He came to the edge of the trees and had to scramble down the first few yards of the slope at a crouch. He felt odd: wall-falling, his father used to say: I’m wall-falling. The ground seemed more uneven than it had when he was coming up, and the grass hid holes in which he was afraid he would twist an ankle (there must be cows, then — or horses, perhaps there are horses, after all). The house was clear to see below him but somehow he kept listing away from it, as if there were a hidden tilt to things, and when he got down to level ground the roof and even the little turret sank from view off to the left behind a steep, grassy bank riddled with rabbit burrows and he found himself toiling along a broad, sandy path with high dunes on either side.

The sea was before him, he could hear it, the hiss and rush of it and the gritty crash of the waves collapsing on the shingle. The sun shone upon him thickly. He stopped and stood there dully in the sun, his head bowed. What had happened to him? He could not understand it. A minute ago he had been up there on the ridge and now he was down here, sunk in this hot hollow. He looked about. The boys were behind him, standing on a dune, watching him. He could not see them very well; were they laughing? He felt dizzy again and something was buzzing in his head.

He went on. Sweat dimmed his sight. The band of his hat was greasy and hot and there was sand in his waterlogged shoes, hard ridges of it under his arches and wedged against his toes, making his corns pain him. The way grew steeper, the smooth slope rising before him like a wall; up there on the crest of the rise the wind was lifting fine swirls of sand and the sky beyond was a surprised, dense blue. A thick stench assailed him. A dead sheep lay crumpled in the sand, the head twisted sideways and the dainty black hoofs splayed. It must have lost its footing and tumbled down the dunes and broken its neck. Something had eaten out the hindquarters; the empty fleece, still intact, flapped in the wind, so that the dead thing seemed to be shuddering in pain and struggling to yank itself to its feet. He passed it by, trying not to breathe the smell, and caught the shine of a glazed muzzle and the black hole of an eye-socket. He coughed, spat, groaned. He hardly knew where he was any more, there was only this slope and the dazzling glitter of sunlight and the burning sand squirming under his feet. He wanted to get to the sea; he would be all right if only he could get to the sea. He heard the music the island makes, the deep song rising out of the earth, and thought he must be imagining it. He stumbled on, his heart wobbling in its cage and the salt air rasping in his lungs. After a dozen paces he halted again and turned. The boys were still behind him, keeping their distance. They stopped when he stopped and stood impassive, watching him. He shouted and shook his fist at them. Why would they not help him? Surely they could see he was in need of help. He was frightened. He thought he was going to cry. There was sand in his mouth now. What is that word? Anabasis. No. Descant. No, no, that thing, that gold thing, what is it! As if in a dream he watched his leaden feet slog through the sand, one sinking as the other rose, then that one sinking in its turn. How had he come to this, what had gone wrong, and so quickly? He saw the canary again, the light in the window of the cramped front room and the old man in the big high bed. Yes, yes, that was it, she had bought the bird for him at the end, to keep him company — To pipe me out! the old man would shout, laughing and coughing, amused and furious. He heard again the harsh laugh and the voice weary with contempt: My son, the comedian. Down the narrow stairs, the years falling away and suddenly he was a child again, the hall with the lino gleaming and that worn quarter-circle inside the door where the flap dragged, and out into the square, hand in her hand, the drinking trough and the cherry trees in blossom in their wire cages, and then the big, wide, echoing corridor ablaze with grainy light and the tall nun’s rapid step on the bumpy tiles — never see their feet — and her thin, high voice saying something about prayers and being good.

Mother! Hold me!

He gained the crest of the slope and stood for a moment swaying, looking out in slack-jawed amazement over the beach and the blue-green vasts of water, smelling the stink of sand and wrack. The wind blew his hat off and bowled it down the slope behind him. He set off across the beach at a stumbling run, yearning towards the ocean, his long arms swinging and his knees going out sideways. At the margin of the waves he halted. Above him the sun was a wafer of white gold shaking and slipping at the centre of the huge blue. He stretched out his arms. He was laughing or crying, he did not know which.

That gold

That thing that gold

He shut his eyes and it was as if a door had slammed shut inside his head.

The boys appeared over the brow of the dunes in time to see him rise up slowly on one leg, like a big old dying bird, his arms clutching helplessly at hoops of air. He wavered a moment, then slowly toppled over and collapsed full-length upon the sand.

*

I dreamed last night that — No, no, I can’t. Some dreams are too terrible to be told.

Pain in my breast suddenly. Ah! it pains. Perhaps I am the one who is dying of his heart. That would be a laugh, for me to die and leave them there, trapped, the tide halted, the boat stuck fast forever. End it all, space and time, one huge flash and then darkness and a blessed silence as the babble stops. Serve them right. Serve us all right. We are the dangerous ones, no other species like us, all of creation cowering before us, the death-dealers. I see a forked beast squatting on the midden of the world, red-eyed, regardant, gnawing on a shinbone: poor, dumb destroyer. Better without us, better the nothing than this, this shambles we have raised. Yes, have done with it all: one universal neck and I the hangman. In the end. Not yet. In the end.

Vaublin’s double. Curious episode. (See how quicky I recover my poise?) All the experts, Professor Kreutznaer included, agree that it was all a delusion, a phantasm spawned by fever and exhaustion in that last, desperate summer of the painter’s brief life. I am not so sure. The deeper I look into the matter the stranger it becomes. He was living on the Île de la Cité, last resting place in his fitful wanderings at the end, in big rooms high above the Seine. He was thirty-seven; his lungs were ruined. The paintings from that period, hurried dream-scapes bathed in an eerie, lunar radiance, have a shocked look to them, the motionless, inscrutable figures scattered about the canvas like the survivors of a vast calamity of air and light. What he is seeking here is something intangible, some pure, distilled essence that perhaps is not human at all. He speaks in one of his last letters of coming to the realisation that the centre of a painting, that packed point of equilibrium out of which every element of the composition flows and where at the same time everything is ingathered, is never where it seems it should be, is never central, or obviously significant, but could be a patch of sky, the fold of a gown, a dog scratching its ear, anything. The trick is to locate that essential point and work outwards from it. By now he had given himself up entirely to theatricality. The actors from the Comédie-Française sat for him in costume, all the leading figures, Paul Poisson, La Thorillière, the tragedienne Charlotte Desmares, Biancolelli whose Pierrot was the talk of the season. They were perfect for his purposes, all pose and surface brilliance. They would strike an attitude and hold it for an hour without stirring, in a trance of self-regard. He was drawing too on his memories of the fêtes and staged spectacles years before in the great gardens of the city. Those green and umber twilights of which he was so fond are surely recollections of the Duchesse de Maine’s grands nuits at Sceaux, the soft shadows among the trees, the music on the water, the masked figures strolling down the long lawns as the last light of evening turned to blackening dusk and the little bats came out and flittered in the darkening air. The melancholy that was always his mark is mingled in these final scenes with a kind of shocked hilarity. The luminance in which they are bathed seems always on the point of being extinguished, as if it had its source in the little palpitant flame of the painter’s own enfeebled, failing life.

When the notion came to him of a shadowy counterpart stalking him about the city he thought the thing must be a joke, an elaborate hoax got up perhaps by someone with a grudge against him — he had always been of a suspicious nature. In the street an acquaintance would stop and stare in surprise, saying he had seen him not five minutes ago walking in the opposite direction and wearing a black cloak. He was not amused. Then he began to notice the pictures. There were fêtes galantes and amusements champêtres, and even theatre scenes, his speciality, the figures in which seemed to look at him with suppressed merriment, knowingly. They were executed in a style uncannily like his own, but in haste, with technical lapses and scant regard for quality of surface. This slapdash manner seemed a gibe aimed directly at him and his pretensions, mocking his lapses in concentration, the shortcuts and the technical flaws that he had thought no one would notice. When he tried to get a close look at this or that piece somehow he was always foiled. He would glimpse a Récréation galante being carried between two aproned porters out of a dealer’s shop, or a gold and green Île enchantée, which for a dizzy second seemed surely his own work, hanging over the fireplace of a fashionable salon just as he was being ushered from the room. Who was this prankster who could dash off imitation Vaublins with such assurance, who knew his secret flaws, who could imitate not only his strengths but his weaknesses too, his evasions, his failures of taste and technique? He tells in a letter to his friend and obituarist, the collector Antoine de La Roque, of having a feeling constantly of being hindered; some days, he says, he has almost to fight his way to the easel, as if indeed there were an invisible double there before him, crowding him aside, and when he steps to the canvas another, heavier arm seems to lift alongside his. I seem to hear mocking laughter, he wrote, and someone is always standing in the corner behind me, yet when I turn there is no one there.

He had begun work on Le monde d’or, hastening while his strength lasted. The summer was hot. I see him aloft in his attic rooms, all doors and windows open to the air and the noises of the city, the breezes and sudden smells and shimmering water-lights. His hands shake, everything shakes, flapping and straining as if the house were a great, lumbering barquentine in full sail. He tells La Roque, I have embarked for the golden world. He wants to confess to something but cannot, something about a crime committed long ago; something about a woman.

STEALTHILY THE DAY BURGEONS, climbing towards noon. The wind has died. On the ridge the oaks are motionless, dark with heat, and the air above the fields undulates like a blown banner. The hens have departed from the yard, fleeing the sun, the old dog is asleep again under the wheelbarrow. The beech tree at the corner of the garden stands unmoving in the purple puddle of its own shadow. Something squeaks and then is still. Hushed, secret world! The back door is open, an up-ended box of soft black darkness; glide through here, light as a breeze, touch this and that, these dim things, with a blind man’s feathery touch. The narrow passageway beside the stairs smells of lime, the hall is loud with light. Voices. Upstairs a door opens and rapid footsteps sound. Listen! they are living their little lives.

In the kitchen Sophie stood with one haunch perched on the edge of the table taking photographs of Alice, who sat before her on a chair with her little wan face meekly lifted up to the lens, intent and motionless, like a flower holding itself up to the light. Felix came in from the hall, with Licht, rabbit-eyed and shaky, trotting worriedly at his heels. Sophie held up a hand to them and they stopped in the doorway, watching.

‘Don’t move,’ she said to Alice softly and with soft intentness turned the camera this way and that, softly crushing the shutter-button.

Felix came up behind her and she lowered the camera but did not turn to him. Alice smiled up at her anxiously.

‘I thought you only take pictures of things that are dead,’ Felix murmured.

Sophie did not reply. She could feel the faint heat of his presence behind her; she put down the camera and rose abruptly and crossed to the window and stood with her hands braced on the cool, fat rim of the sink. She looked down at her face in the bit of broken mirror propped on the window-sill and hardly recognised her own reflection, all glimmering throat and hooded, unfamiliar eyes, like a burnished metal mask. When she turned back Felix was looking at her knowingly, with sly amusement, his head on one side and his lips pursed, and she felt herself flinch, as if she had brushed against some thrillingly loathsome, lewd and cloying thing.

A shadow fell in the doorway and Croke came in blunderingly, carrying his straw hat and laughing in distress.

‘Jesus!’ he said.

He stood swaying and looked about him in a kind of wonderment, smiling dazedly, his mouth open. The brim of his hat was crushed on one side and there were patches of wet sand on his blazer and his white trousers were stained and wet again at the cuffs. Hatch and Pound appeared behind him, one on either side, with the cerulean air of noon between them, bored and dully frowning. ‘What?’ Croke said sharply, as if someone had spoken. He shook his head and lumbered forward and sat down heavily at the table beside Alice. He seemed to have aged and yet at the same time looked impossibly young, with his face lifted listeningly and his hands hanging between his knees, a big, ancient, bewildered babe. His sunken jaw was stubbled and there were flecks of spit at the corners of his mouth; his hair stood up in a cowlick over one ear, when he tried to smooth it flat it sprang up again.

‘Fell down,’ he said, gesturing. ‘Like that: bang, down on my arse.’

He shook his head, bemused and laughing; he picked up a fork from the table and fiddled with it distractedly and put it down again. The boys sidled in and he heaved himself round on his chair and pointed a quivering finger at them accusingly. ‘And as for these two —!’ He laughed again and coughed and thumped himself in the chest with his fist, then turned back to the table and frowned, licking salt-cracked lips. The world was luminous around him. Everything shone out of itself, shaking in its own radiance. There was movement everywhere; even the most solid objects seemed to seethe, the table under his hands, the chair on which he sat, the very walls themselves. And he too trembled, as if his whole frame had been struck like a tuning fork against the hard, bright surface of things. The others looked at him, stilled for a moment, staring. He imagined himself as they would see him, a shining man, floating in the midst of light. He turned his head quickly and peered up, thinking he had heard a voice behind him call out his name. No one was there.

‘Jesus!’ he said again softly, with a soft, whistling sigh.

Licht went to the stove and pushed the pots and pans this way and that. A spill of sunlight from the window wavered in the murky recess above the stove, a roiling, goldened beam. He closed his eyes for a second and saw himself free, flying up without a sound into the blue, the boundless air. He crossed to the meat-safe on the wall and took out a white dish on which was draped a scrawny, plucked chicken with rubber-red wattles and scaly, yellow claws.

‘Look at that,’ he said in disgust. ‘Tighe didn’t clean it again.’

He put the bird on the table and took off his coat.

‘When my father died,’ Croke said to no one in particular, ‘he was younger than I am now.’

He looked about him with an empty smile, his clouded stare sliding loosely over everything. Alice stared with faint revulsion into the whorl of his huge, hairy ear. She thought of a picture she had seen when she was little of an old beggarman standing at a street corner and a tall angel with long golden hair and broad gold wings bending over him solicitously. She wondered idly if Croke was dying. She did not care. She picked up Sophie’s camera and was surprised by its weight. She liked the feel of it, its hard heaviness and leathery, stippled skin, the silky coolness of its steel wider-parts. She pictured the film rolled up tight inside, with her face printed on it over and over, dozens of miniature versions of her, with ash-white hair and black skin, strangely staring out of empty eye-sockets, and she shivered and felt something approach in the shadowed, purplish air and touch her.

‘So he breaks into the laundry,’ Hatch was saying furtively, ‘and fucks them all and then runs off, and the headline in the paper next day says: Nut Screws Washers and Bolts.’ He laughed wheezily, his colourless lips drawn back and his sharp little teeth on show. He cocked an eye at Licht and said: ‘’At’sa some joke, eh, boss?’

Licht pretended not to hear; Hatch turned to Alice.

‘I suppose you don’t get it,’ he said.

Pound, slumped at the table with his chin on his fat hands, snorted. Light flashed on his glasses and made it seem as if he had no eyes. Hatch kicked him casually under the table and said:

‘How’s your diet?’ He winked at Alice. ‘His ma has him on a diet, you know.’

‘Shut up,’ Pound said listlessly. ‘You eat your snot.’

Felix laughed and clipped the fat boy playfully on the ear and said:

‘Bunter, you are a beast.’

‘Ow!’

Hatch’s violet eyes glittered and he kicked Pound again on the shin, harder this time.

‘Damn you,’ Licht said to the chicken through clenched teeth and hacked off its head.

Felix went and stood beside Sophie at the sink and peered at her closely, putting on a look of grave concern.

‘You seem down in the doldrums, Contessa. What is it — crossed in love?’

And he chuckled.

She studied his long, laughing face and merrily malicious eye. When he laughed he slitted his eyes and the pointed, pink, wet tip of his tongue came flicking out.

‘Will the principessa be joining us?’ she asked.

He shrugged.

‘Quella povera ragazza!’ he said, and shook his head and heaved a heavy sigh. ‘She sleeps.’

‘Yes,’ Sophie said. ‘I know.’

It took him a moment. He laughed, and wagged a finger at her playfully.

‘Ah, erudèle!’ he trilled.

He went and stood in the back doorway and contemplated happily the sunlit yard, a hand inserted in the side pocket of his tight jacket and his narrow back twisted. A robin alighted at his feet.

‘Oh!’ Alice stood up quickly from the table. ‘I was supposed to bring her a drink of water.’

She went hurriedly to the sink and rinsed a smeared glass and filled it under the tap. Felix produced a key from the pocket of his jacket and held it negligently aloft.

‘You will need this,’ he said. Sophie stared in scorn and he shrugged. ‘A man must protect what is his,’ he said, smirking.

Alice took the key and put it in the pocket of her dress and went out, holding the glass carefully in both hands and watching the water sway under its shining, tin-bright, tense meniscus, her grave little face inclined.

Without warning Hatch and Pound leaped up from the table, like a pair of leaping fish, and Hatch in an amazing rage went at the fat boy with fists flailing. Pound stood suspended like a punchbag, with a mild expression, almost diffident, frowning in a kind of puzzlement as the punches sank in. Hatch leaned against him with his head down, hitting and hitting, as if he were trying to fight his way into Pound’s fat chest. The others looked on, mesmerised, until Croke struggled up and grasped Hatch by his skinny shoulders and lifted him into the air, where the boy, incoherently in tears, squirmed and swore, thrashing his arms and legs like a capsized beetle. Croke set him on his feet with a thump and the boy sat down and gathered himself into a huddle, biting his knuckles and furiously sobbing.

‘I only said,’ Pound said dully, ‘I only said …’

Alice came back and sat down and folded her hands in her lap. Felix lifted an eyebrow at her.

‘How is the patient?’ he asked.

Alice did not look at him.

‘She says she only wants to rest,’ she said and pursed her lips.

Felix came and stood above her, a hand outstretched.

‘The key?’

Alice looked sideways at his hand and considered.

‘She has it,’ she said and smiled a little smile of triumph and for a second she looked like a tiny wizened old woman.

Sophie laughed.

Felix hesitated, then shrugged and walked to the middle of the floor and stood with his feet together and his elbows pressed to his sides, smiling about him and bobbing gently on his toes, like a swimmer effortlessly treading water, borne up in his element. ‘Ah, Mélisande, Mélisande!’ he sang softly in thin falsetto, turning heavenwards his stricken eyes. Then he cut a sudden caper, tip and toe, rolling his eyes and waggling his hands limply from the wrists.

The latch of the back door rattled and knuckles tentatively rapped.

Felix, crooning wordlessly and holding himself at breast and back in a tango-dancer’s embrace, shimmied to the door and flung it wide. Light from the yard entered and along with it the smell of sun-warmed straw and hen droppings. Soft flurry of wings. A little breeze. The blue day shimmers.

A red-haired, buck-toothed boy in Wellingtons stood on the step.

‘Aha!’ cried Felix, ‘there you are! How fares le bateau ivre? Gone down, I trust, women and children in the boats, flag still flying and the captain saluting from the poop, all that?’

The boy squinted at him warily and said:

‘The skipper says to say the tide will be up before long and youse are to be ready.’

Felix turned back to the room and opened wide his arms.

‘Do you hear, gentles?’ he said. ‘The waters are rising.’

Sophie was winding the film in her camera.

‘Are you not coming with us?’ she asked.

But Felix only smiled.

Easing open the wooden gate Sergeant Toner paused a moment before tackling the steep path up to the house. He lifted his cap and scratched his head with middle and little finger and reset his cap at a sharper angle. The light had thickened to a hot haze over the fields. Housemartins skimmed here and there in the radiant air above him, shooting in swift loops in and out of their nests under the eaves. The Sergeant, large, freckled, mild man, moves in his policeman’s deliberate way, thoughtfully, with a sober and abstracted air. He climbed the steps to the porch and knocked loudly on the door and waited, and knocked again, but no one answered, and cupping his hands around his eyes he bent and peered through the ruby panels of the door but could see nothing except the claret-coloured shapes of hall table and umbrella stand and the tensed and somehow significantly unpeopled stairs. He descended the steps and stood with hands on hips and head thrown back and peered up frowningly at the upstairs windows. Behind sky-reflecting glass nothing moved. He turned and put his hands behind his back and with fist clasped in palm walked slowly around by the side of the house. In the yard a high-stepping hen stopped and looked at him sharply and the dog under the wheelbarrow growled but did not rise, thumping its tail half-heartedly in the dust. The back door was open; the kitchen was deserted. The Sergeant leaned in and rapped on the door with his knuckles and called out: ‘Shop!’ but no answer came except a tiny, ringing echo, like a stifled titter, of his own big voice. He stepped inside and stood a moment listening and then walked forward on creaking soles and pulled out a chair and sat down, removing his cap and setting it on the table beside his elbow, where the shiny dark-blue peak reflected in elongated form a squat milk-jug. He sighed. On the stove a big pot was making muffled eructations and there was the smell of chicken soup. A shimmering blade of sunlight stood broken on the rim of the sink.

Somewhere in the house someone loudly sneezed.

A very large bumble-bee flew in through the back door and did a staggering circle of the room and settled on the window-sill. Sergeant Toner studied it with interest as it throbbed there in its football jersey. He thought how it would feel to be a bee in summertime, drunk on the smell of clover and of gorse, and for a moment his mind reeled in contemplation of the prospect of other worlds.

Licht came hurrying in from the hall and skidded to a stop and stared at the Sergeant and sneezed.

‘God bless you!’ Sergeant Toner said largely, with broad good humour.

Blinking rapidly and gasping Licht fumbled in his trouser pocket and brought out a greyed handkerchief and stood with his mouth open weakly and his red-rimmed nose tilted back.

‘Ah … ah … ahh,’ he said expectantly on a rising scale, but this time nothing happened and amid a general sense of anti-climax he put away his handkerchief. ‘Getting a cold,’ he said thickly. He looked as if he had been weeping. He lifted the lid of the simmering pot on the stove and peered squintingly through the steam.

The bee with an angry buzzing rose up from the window-sill and flew straight out the door and was gone.

‘I was just passing by,’ the Sergeant said, quite at his ease.

‘Oh,’ Licht said flatly and nodded, avoiding the other’s eye. He sniffed. ‘Will you take something?’

The Sergeant considered.

‘Glass of water?’ he said, without conviction.

Licht centred the big black kettle on the hob; a thread of steam was already rising from the spout. Sergeant Toner watched him as he had watched the bumble-bee, with interest, calmly. Licht’s hands were unsteady. He let fall a spoon and tried to catch it and knocked over the tea caddy and spilled the tea. The spoon bounced ringingly on the tiles. The kettle came to the boil.

‘I think we’re in for a fine spell,’ the Sergeant said.

Licht nodded distractedly. He paused with the grumbling kettle in his hand and frowned at the wall in front of him.

‘I spend my life making tea,’ he said darkly to himself.

Sergeant Toner nodded seriously but made no comment. Licht picked up the spoon from the floor and wiped it on his trousers and spooned the tea into the pot and poured the seething water over the leaves and banged the lid back on the pot, then carried pot and a cracked white mug to the table and set them down unceremoniously beside the Sergeant’s hat. Milk, sugar, the same spoon. The Sergeant surveyed the table hopefully.

‘A heel of bread would be the thing,’ he said, ‘if you had it.’

Licht, unseen by the Sergeant, cast his eyes to the ceiling and went to the sideboard and came back with a biscuit tin and opened it and put it on the table with a tinny thump. The fawn smell of biscuit-dust rose up warmly on the air. Sergeant Toner smiled and nodded thanks. Judiciously he poured the tea, raising and lowering the pot with a practised hand, watching with satisfaction the rich, dark flow and enjoying the joggling sound the liquid made filling up the mug. Licht fetched cutlery from a drawer and began to set out places at the table while the Sergeant looked on with placid gaze.

‘Visitors?’ he said. Licht did not answer. From the dresser he brought soup bowls and dealt them out. The Sergeant idly counted the places, his lips silently moving. ‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘the time we had the devil-worshippers?’ He glanced up enquiringly. His white eyelashes were almost invisible. ‘Do you remember that?’

Licht looked at him blankly in bafflement.

‘What?’ he said. ‘No.’

‘Your mother, God rest her, was still with us then.’

The Sergeant lifted the brimming mug with care and extended puckered lips to the hot brim and took a cautious slurp. ‘Ah,’ he said appreciatively, and took another, deeper draught and then put down the mug and turned his attention to the biscuit tin, rising an inch off the chair and peering into the mouth of the tin with lifted brows. ‘A bad lot, they were,’ he said. ‘They used to cut up cats.’

Licht went to the sink, where the line of sunlight, thinned to a rapier now, smote him across the wrists. The sink was still piled with unwashed crockery; he stood and looked helplessly at the grease-caked plates and smeared cutlery.

‘Locals, were they?’ he said absently.

The Sergeant was biting gingerly on a ginger nut. ‘Hmm?’

Licht sighed. ‘Were they locals, these people?’

‘No, no,’ the Sergeant said. ‘They used to come over on the boat from the mainland when their feast days or whatever they were were coming up. The solstices, or whatever they’re called. They’d start off by making a big circle of stones down on the strand, that’s how I’d know they were here. Oh, a bad crowd.’

Licht plunged his hands into the greasy water.

‘Did you catch them?’ he asked.

Sergeant Toner smiled to himself, drinking his tea.

‘We did,’ he said. ‘We always get our man, out here.’

The Professor came in. Seeing the Sergeant he stopped and stood and all went silent. The Sergeant half rose from his chair in respectful greeting and subsided again.

‘I was just telling Mr Licht here about the devil-worshippers,’ he said equably.

The Professor stared.

‘Devil-worshippers,’ he said.

‘They killed cats,’ Licht said from the sink, and snickered.

‘Oh, more than cats,’ said the Sergeant, unruffled. ‘More than cats.’ He lifted the teapot invitingly. ‘Will you join me in a cup of this tea, Professor?’

Licht came forward bustlingly and put the lid back on the biscuit tin, ignoring the Sergeant’s frown of weak dismay.

‘We’re a bit busy,’ Licht said pointedly. ‘I’m making the lunch.’

Sergeant Toner nodded understandingly but made no move to rise.

‘For your visitors,’ he said. ‘That’s grand.’

For a moment all three were silent. Licht and the Professor looked off in opposite directions while the Sergeant thoughtfully sipped his tea.

‘I seen the ferry out on the Black Bank, all right,’ he said. ‘Ran aground, did it?’ He paused. ‘Is that the way they came?’ Then, softly: ‘Your visitors?’

Licht lifted a streaming plate from the sink and rubbed it vigorously with a dirty cloth.

‘The skipper was drunk, apparently,’ he said. ‘That ferry service is a joke. Someday somebody is going to be drowned.’ It sounded a curiously false note; too many words. He rubbed the plate more vigorously still.

The Sergeant nodded, pondering.

‘I was talking to him, to the skipper,’ he said. ‘The eyes were a bit bright, right enough.’ He nodded again and then sat still, thinking, the mug lifted halfway to his mouth. ‘And where would they be now, tell me,’ he said, ‘these castaways?’

Licht looked at the Professor and the Professor looked at the floor.

‘Oh,’ Licht said with a careless gesture, ‘they’re around the house, getting ready.’

The Sergeant frowned. ‘Ready?’

‘To leave,’ Licht said. ‘They’re waiting for the tide to come up.’

He could feel his voice getting thick and his eyes prickling. He wished now they had never come, disturbing everything. Blast them all. He thought of Flora.

‘Just over for the day, then, were they?’ the Sergeant said.

Licht turned away and muttered something under his breath.

‘Beg pardon?’ Sergeant Toner said pleasantly, cupping a finger behind his ear.

‘I said,’ Licht said, ‘maybe they came to say a black mass.’

A brief chill settled. Sergeant Toner was not a man to be mocked. Licht turned to the sink again, head down and shoulders hunched.

The Professor cleared his throat and frowned. The Sergeant with a musing air inspected a far corner of the ceiling.

‘Was there a chap with them,’ he said, ‘thin chap, reddish sort of hair, foreign, maybe?’

Licht turned from the sink.

‘Red hair?’ he said. ‘No, but —’

‘No,’ the Professor said heavily, and Licht glanced at him quickly, ‘there was no one like that.’

Sergeant Toner nodded, still eyeing the ceiling. From outside came the faint buzz of a tractor at work far off in the fields. Licht dried his hands, not looking at anyone now. The Sergeant made a tube of his fist and confided to it a soft, biscuity belch, then poured himself another cup of tea. The sun had left the window but the room was still drugged with its heat.

‘Grand day,’ the Sergeant said. ‘A real start to the summer.’

The Professor looked on as the Sergeant put two spoonfuls of sugar into his tea, hesitated, added a third, and picked up the mug in both large hands and leaned back comfortably on his quietly complaining chair. ‘Did you ever wonder, Professor,’ he said, ‘why people do the things they do?’ The Professor raised his eyebrows and said nothing. ‘I see a lot of it,’ the Sergeant went on, ‘in my line of work.’

The Professor regarded him with a level stare.

‘A lot of what?’ he said.

‘Hmm?’ The Sergeant looked up at him smilingly with his head at an enquiring tilt. ‘Oh, anything and everything.’ He drank the last draught of tea and set down the mug firmly on the table and looked at it, smiling to himself. ‘People think we’re out of touch out here,’ he said. ‘That we don’t know what’s going on in the big world. But I’ll tell you now, the fact is we’re no fools at all.’ He looked up laughing in silence. ‘Isn’t that so, Mr Licht?’

Licht, at the stove peering into the soup-pot, pretended not to hear.

The Professor turned aside slowly, like a stone statue turning slowly on a pivot. The Sergeant made a show of rousing himself. He slapped himself on the knees and took up his cap and stood up from the table.

‘I’ll be on my way now,’ he said, firmly, as if someone were seeking to detain him. He walked heavily to the back door and paused to set his cap carefully on his large head. Before him the afternoon stood trembling in the yard. ‘If you do see that chap,’ he said, ‘the one I mentioned, tell him I’m on the look-out for him.’ He glanced back over his shoulder. ‘You know the one I mean?’

The Professor was looking away at nothing. Licht turned from the stove and nodded and did not speak.

‘Well,’ the Sergeant said, hitching up his belt, ‘good day to you both.’

He tipped a finger to the peak of his cap and made his way almost daintily down the back step. They listened to the noise of his boots crossing the yard. The dog growled.

Licht halted on the landing and sneezed hugely, bending forward at the waist and spraying his shoes with spit. ‘Bugger!’ he cried, fumbling for his handkerchief. He waited, peering slackly before him, hankie at the ready, and then sneezed again and shuddered. Perhaps it was Flora’s cold he had caught. The thought brought him a crumb of melancholy comfort. Heavy footsteps sounded below him and presently the Professor appeared, rising up in the stairwell dark-browed and brooding, like an effigy, being borne aloft on unseen shoulders. When he saw Licht he stopped with his foot on the top step and they stood confronting each other with a sort of weary animosity. Suddenly Licht understood that something had happened, that something had shifted, that things would never be again as they had been before. He experienced a pang of regret. He had wanted change and escape but this felt more like an end than a beginning.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘what was all that about?’

He could even hear the new note in his voice, that touch of imperiousness and impatience. The Professor turned aside and looked hard out of the window at the dunes and the far sea.

‘I think I may have to leave,’ he said, in a distant voice, as if in his mind he were already on his way.

‘Yes?’ Licht said, surprised at himself, at how cold his own voice sounded. The Professor opened his mouth to speak, fumbling the words as if they were coin, but in the end said nothing and shrugged and moved past Licht and went on up the stairs. Licht looked after him as he ascended, like a bundled, flying figure on a painted ceiling, and watched until he was gone from sight, and then listened until his footsteps were no longer to be heard, and even then he lingered, gazing upwards almost wonderingly, imagining the old man rising steadily through higher and still higher reaches of luminous, washed-blue air, and dwindling to a point, and vanishing.

Listening at the door of what already he thought of as Flora’s room Licht could hear no sound. As the grave. The shadows on the landing seemed to gather about him like other, ghostlier listeners. He tried the doorknob; the tumblers played a sinister phrase on their tiny clavier: locked. He listened again and then tapped a knuckle gently on the wood. He wanted to say her name but did not dare. He knocked again and leaped in fright when at once a muffled voice spoke directly behind the door.

‘Who’s there?’

He looked about him wildly, thrilled with panic. It was as if he had put his hand into a trap and had been invisibly seized and held.

‘It’s me,’ he said squeakily. ‘Licht.’ She said nothing. He stood listening to his heart beating itself against the bars of its cage. He felt foolish and at a loss, and inexplicably expectant. ‘Are you all right?’

There came a sigh and then a faint, silky slithering; when she spoke, her voice was at the level of his knees; she must be sitting on the floor, or kneeling there, perhaps, with her forehead against the door.

‘What do you want?’ she said.

He squatted on his heels and lost his balance and had to steady himself. Clearly, yet with a curious, dreamy sense of inconsequence, and not for the first time, he saw his life for what it was. In the end nothing makes sense.

‘There was a guard here,’ he said.

Briefly he entertained an image of Sergeant Toner marching off down the hill, thumbs hitched in his belt and his big feet splayed, a wind-up, mechanical man with cheery painted cheeks and fixed grin and a huge key slowly rotating between his shoulder-blades.

‘A guard?’ Flora said dully through the door.

‘Yes. A policeman. He was looking for … he was looking for someone.’

She said nothing for a long time. He waited and presently she asked him what time it was. He heard her sigh and rise and walk away from the door, her bare feet making a fat, slow little slapping patter on the floorboards, and then the mattress-springs jangled and after that there was stillness again. Shakily he stood up, stiff-kneed and grimacing. He listened for another moment, then sighed and went on down the stairs.

*

Everywhere was silence. She lay still and listened but could hear nothing except the far soft gasping of the sea and the gulls crying and that strange booming in the distance. The day glared with a brassy radiance. She felt shaky; her mind was vague yet she had an impression of openness and clarity, as of light falling into a vast, empty room. She remembered Licht coming to the door; was there another after him or had she dreamed it, the timid little knock, the whisperings, the soft noise of breathing as whoever it was stood out there, listening? Alice, was it, or someone else again? Now there was only this silence and a sort of hollowness everywhere. She had made a journey through a dark place: water, seasurge and sway, a dull, repeated rhythm, then a reddening, and then the sudden astonishment of light. Sticky-eyed, with a coppery taste in her mouth and her skin smeared, she struggled from the bed and stood trembling, looking about her at nothing she could recognise, the hot key clutched in her damp hand. Something was starting up, she could sense it. Someone was waiting for her, content to wait, biding his time. She unlocked the door and stepped on to the landing, a blanket clutched about her, and paused a moment to listen again. She heard a step below her on the stairs and drew back, waiting, half in fear and half in fascinated, breathless expectation.

Nothing could have prepared me for it. After all these weeks, out of nowhere, as if, as if, I don’t know. This morning, not half an hour ago, I, that is Flora and I, that is Flora, when I … Easy. Go easy. What happened, after all, except that she began to talk? Yet it has changed everything, has transfigured everything, I don’t know how. Let me try to paint the scene, paint it as it was and not as it seemed, in washes of luminous grey on grey. The kitchen, midsummer morning, eight o’clock. Grey is not the word, but a densened whiteness, rather, the sky all over cloud and the light not falling but seeming to seep out of things and no shadows anywhere. Think of the particular thick dulled shine on the cheek of a tin teapot. Breakfast time. Frail smoke of morning in the air and a sort of muffled hum that is not sound but is not silence either. An ordinary day. My mind does not work very well at that early hour; that is to say, it works, all right, but on its own terms, as if it were independent of me, as if in the night it had broken free of its moorings and I had not yet hauled it back to shore. So I am sitting there at the old pine table, in that light, with the breakfast things set out and a mug of strong tea in one hand and a book in the other and my mind rummaging idly through its own thoughts. Licht and the Professor are still abed — they are late risers — and I am, I suppose, enjoying this hour of solitude, if enjoyment is the word for such a neutral state of simple drift. Enter Flora. She was barefoot, with her shoulders hunched as usual and her hands buried deep in the pockets of Licht’s old raincoat. She sat down at the table and in dumb show I offered her the teapot and she nodded and I poured her out a mug of tea. The usual. We often meet like this at breakfast time; we do not speak at all. How eloquent at these times the sounds that humble things make, the blocky slosh of tea being poured, the clack and dulled bang of crockery, the sudden silver note of a spoon striking the rim of a saucer. And then without warning she began to talk. Oh, I don’t know what about, I hardly listened to the sense of it; something about a dream, or a memory, of being a child and standing one summer afternoon on a hill road under a convent wall and looking across the roofs of the town to the distant sea while a boy who was soft in the head capered and pulled faces at her. The content was not important — to either of us, I think. What interested her was the same thing that interested me, namely … namely what? How the present feeds on the past, or versions of the past. How pieces of lost time surface suddenly in the murky sea of memory, bright and clear and fantastically detailed, complete little islands where it seems it might be possible to live, even if only for a moment. And as she talked I found myself looking at her and seeing her as if for the first time, not as a gathering of details, but all of a piece, solid and singular and amazing. No, not amazing. That is the point. She was simply there, an incarnation of herself, no longer a nexus of adjectives but pure and present noun. I noticed the little fine hairs on her legs, a scarp of dried skin along the edge of her foot, a speck of sleep in the canthus of her eye. No longer Our Lady of the Enigmas, but a girl, just a girl. And somehow by being suddenly herself like this she made the things around her be there too. In her, and in what she spoke, the world, the little world in which we sat, found its grounding and was realised. It was as if she had dropped a condensed drop of colour into the water of the world and the colour had spread and the outlines of things had sprung into bright relief. As I sat with my mouth open and listened to her I felt everyone and everything shiver and shift, falling into vividest forms, detaching themselves from me and my conception of them and changing themselves instead into what they were, no longer figment, no longer mystery, no longer a part of my imagining. And I, was I there among them, at last?