Quilt

Part Three

It is scarcely seven weeks, still less than two months, since the funeral. A week, a month, whizzing in an hour. Every noun is another ephemeroid. Time pop. No more thought bubbles, never again. I miss him and worry more than I can say. He speaks sometimes with his usual lucidity but at other times he sounds somehow off, difficult to follow, obscure. And too often I can’t reach him at all. Where have you been? I thought you said you’d be around today? Don’t you remember I said I’d call at this time?

I tell him he has to see a doctor.

— About the episode?

He calls it the one-off episode, like it was a special edition of a TV show. He assures me he will go. And then for three days I hear nothing. Three oceans. He doesn’t answer the phone, he doesn’t respond to emails. I send half a dozen text messages imploring him to let me know he is OK. On the fourth day he picks up the phone and sounds normal. He asks how I am, apologises for not being in touch earlier, he’s been out a lot, tootling about in the motor, he says, picking up supplies for the rays.

— I’m onto a new project, he says.

— What about the doctor?

Silence. Then in a dipped voice:

— You’ll be just like the rest of them. You’ll think it absurd. I have a new theory of ghosts. It’s been staring me in the face.

His voice sounds strained. I try to reassure him:

— Of course not. I’m listening, my love.

Then he pitches off again:

— I was down at the Tea Party… Oh!

— Whatever’s the matter?

— Oh, my god! It’s happening again!

— What are you saying?

— It’s the rays. I noticed it last time we talked and now it’s happening again. I was just feeding them some bits and pieces of left-over salad from the fridge. They were tranquilly engaged with that, chomping away, then when the phone rang…

— Yes, when the phone rang?

— It’s as if your voice, that pristine chapel, held in place, hello?

Another silence.

— Are you there?

— It’s like a choreography written in water. When you speak they raise themselves up, as if braced by something deep inside your voice. They were busy at the lettuce but the moment I say ‘Tea Party’ they all break off, and when you go ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ perk up their noses and pulse upwardly through the silvery light of the pool, in a shimmy of adoration. They miss you.

I laugh, a bit apprehensive, unsure how much of this is his English sense of humour.

— I miss them. You were at the Tea Party…

— …having a coffee and veering about on the net, I came across all these images of rays, you have to see them. They’re stunning. But then there’s something that’s terrible. It sickens me. It’s from somewhere, some hunting grounds I want to say, off the coast of your country. I don’t want you to see this. It’s like the forbidden photograph in Barthes, the most important one, he doesn’t reproduce. It’s almost a hundred years ago and there’s this moustache-twirly sea captain standing in front of a dead ray that’s been yanked up on a crane, perhaps an old fire-engine winch. It’s a manta. A ‘giant devil fish’, as the silly caption exclaims. It measures seven metres across and weighs eight tons. For me, it’s a photograph of photography. It’s a puncturation of the punctum. It’s a riddle, a true riddling: a punctum everywhere you look. It’s the astonishing, majestic corpse of a manta, bigger than any living creature. It fills the frame and it’s full of bullets: it seems the creature caught its hunters rather than vice versa. It comes with strings attached.

— Strings attached?

— Strings, lines, ropes, yes: it got caught up in fishing lines and the noble captain and his trigger-merry men had to shoot it twenty or thirty times to be confident it was dead, but it’s a picture that shows you the ropes, the way everything is rigged. The colossal creature is strung up: the iconography of a lynching is unmistakable. And the captain is standing proprietorially alongside, pointing with his right forefinger, in case you might otherwise not notice the — I was going to say, elephant in the room. Like a tenting to the quick, now dead, his digit is itself a wound. Ecce Manta birostris. Another wound, but not the last. And can you guess what he’s holding in his other hand?

— His gun? A cigar?

— At first glance it looks like a paper plane. But it’s a baby manta, rigid, barely ten inches across, stillborn, proudly extracted from the mother at the creation of the massacre. And then the eye…

— I, ego?

— No, this isn’t about the ego. The eye of the photograph. It’s a way aloft, unnoticed at first amid the ropes and crane, against the tall deadwall blankness of brickwork that forms the backdrop to the whole picture. Only one is visible, but it’s the mother’s eye, and it’s looking at you, just as though it were alive.

— Sounds terrible. It reminds me of something I was reading recently about hypnosis. Just as you can never be sure someone under hypnosis isn’t merely pretending to be, so a dead eye in a photo might be a trompe l’œil too. I’m sorry. But I was asking you about the doctor…

— No, my dearest, I’m telling you about the new project.

— But I’m asking you about the doctor…

— You wouldn’t believe what I’ve managed to do here. I’ve been working at it day and night. It’s a new pool.

— What do you mean, a new pool?

— Well, not ‘pool’ exactly. More like ‘donut’. Ah! They’re doing it again! Incredible! When you said you were asking me about the doctor, when you put the stress on ‘you’, they started choreographing you again. Hilary gave this sort of twitch of grace and went sliding, jetting up the side of the glass, coming to rest virtually on my face here, while Taylor took to shuffling in the substrate. They’re directly responding to you. If you were here you’d understand. When are you going to be here?

— You know this, I told you: I can’t get across for another month. Donut?

— Remember last summer? The marvellous donut-shaped rays’ enclosure at the aquarium in Barcelona? And then when we got to the place in Boulogne — what’s its name?

— Nausicaa.

— The very same. You remember the eagle rays at Nausicaa?

— Don’t tell me. You’re building a donut-shaped pool for eagle rays in the drawing room.

— How did you guess?

— Could it be because last time you deigned to talk to me you were telling me all about how you had got the estate agent in and how you’re putting the house on the market and now you’ve come to the realisation that the property will be much more attractive, especially to families, if most of the ground-floor accommodation is taken up with touchpools for rays?

‘Touchpools’ is a mistake. Creepy, it’s as if I’m losing touch with him.

— Touchpools?

Exasperated and uneasy, I am starting to apologise, but he cuts me off:

— I changed my mind. I realised it couldn’t be done. I’m keeping the house.

I’m inclined to query this (how can he afford it? what about his job?), but he’s irrepressible now:

— You want to know about the doctor? Exactly. Everything’s fine. My brain’s entirely normal: that was their actual phrase. I signed up in town as a temporary resident and saw the doctor and he set up a hospital appointment for me the very next day. It was like being in a very slow washing-machine. And then the letter came through from the consultant just yesterday. I’m all clear. I’m entirely normal! But here’s the thing. And it has to do with the photograph I was telling you about. It’s about ghosts and nakedness and superimposition. When I signed on at the local surgery I’d expected to see the GP who saw my father, but actually it was the old one, the other one, the doctor who used to be our family doctor, twenty years ago. Dr Scrivens is his name. He’s always given me the creeps. My mother couldn’t tolerate the thought of him and when she began to decline, through the disintegration of days and years following the point at which as she told me she was losing her marbles, she connected keeping her health with not seeing this doctor, and then the question came up of her seeing him. It would have been a sort of declaration that she was certifiably off her rocker. The whole prospect terrorised her. It delayed for weeks the very idea of getting her seen by anyone at all. In the end my father managed to get her transferred to another doctor. But then on some later occasion, to do with a graze on her leg that would not heal, my father took her along, sitting with her in the waiting room before guiding her through the door when called, virtually into the arms of Scrivens. Floating face-up in Alzheimer soup was she by then merely oblivious? Or did seeing this object of terror somehow return her to life, in the way that sometimes a tiny incident or chance encounter can trigger a massive recuperation, if only for a moment? All of this only comes back to me now when I find myself in the same trap. I am at the surgery and before I realise what’s happening there I am, just six feet away from him, and of course he has been expecting me, he’s had time to prepare, but our encounter is the strangest phantasmagory, his eyes shifting eerily into focus like binoculars on a death-camp. Naturally he smiles, and I too. It is Scrivens, unmistakably, twenty years later yet miraculously aged, as if from a fairytale. And perhaps he, almost completely gray-haired, fainter-eyed, experiences from head to toe the passage of a similarly wayward vibration: I will look twenty years older to him too. And any second, I know, because now it comes back to me, he’ll do that thing with his eyes, that ocular passover, coming out with the standard portrait, the medical gaze that all doctors are trained to impose. But for that crystalline split-second slice of replay, in which we set eyes upon the other, I’m seeing Scrivens in my mind’s eye seeing me, double strangers both, outstaring ghosts. That’s when I have this eureka thing, and I realise my theory.

What convinces me that he is having a breakdown? It is not when he goes on to outline the beautiful bareness, as he calls it, of his theory. Nor, perhaps more surprisingly, is it a few minutes later, when he drifts off into what, to anyone else, might seem demented singsong.

It is a question of veils, capes, sheets, shrouds, cloaks, blankets, quilts, mantles.

It’s too crazy for a cult. He realises that. And it might indeed remain for centuries illegible, incomprehensible or even imperceptible to the general public.

But a ray doesn’t constitute an analogy or ‘lively metaphor’ for a ghost. Rather, it is the other way round: it is necessary to think spectrality starting from the ray. There is no ghost without a trace of the ray. Everything that might be identifiable with the singularity of a living cape or gliding sheet comes back to this. Put crassly, the pallid underside of a ray is not like the bed-sheet whiteness of a spectre. The ray is at the origin. It’s the originary spook. Plato was already onto that, in the ray haunting Socrates and Meno. What people call the Gothic is a kind of anamorphic manifestation of the effects of the ray. The whole sprawling industry of ghosts and vampires is, in truth, largely a ray-phenomenon. Any moderately reflective reader might notice the importance of cloaks, mantles, shrouds, shawls and so on in the Gothic novel. It is necessary, however, to realise how integrally, how inextricably, this motif is folded into the figure or property of the ray, the living blanket or quilt. The bat is a red herring, in fishy phrase, dried and smoked, tried and tested, a making small and manageable of what is neither. What haunts is of greater scope, more minatory and dangerous, all-enfolding, from another element.

Broadly speaking, the manta and the vampire (or ‘vampyre’, in its earliest orthography) emerge at the same period, in the first half of the eighteenth century. That the latter (a fantasy) seems to owe something to the former (the real) might veritably be classed a no-brainer. We don’t know when exactly the word ‘manta’ (meaning ‘blanket’ or ‘cloak’) was first used to designate the rays now linked with that name, but it appears to have been originally used interchangeably with ‘quilt’. In Socratic spirit it is tempting to construe ‘quilt’ here in its other sense, namely as a reference to that point in the throat at which swallowing becomes involuntary, but Antonio de Ulloa in his Voyage to South America (1758) writes of the ways in which the negro slaves off the coast of Panama are fastened with ropes and forced to fish for pearls, ‘and the mantas, or quilts, either press them to death by wrapping their fins about them, or crush them against the rocks by their prodigious weight’. This is as shocking an evocation of the reality of slavery as it is a fictitious and absurd description of mantas. Despite their often great size, manta rays are of course completely harmless. De Ulloa goes on: ‘The name manta has not been improperly given to this fish, either with regard to its figure or property; for being broad and long like a quilt, it wraps its fins round a man or any other animal that happens to come within its reach, and immediately squeezes it to death. This fish resembles a thornback in shape, but is prodigiously larger.’ It seems unlikely that, for all his luminous childlike gifts as an actuary of the imaginary, Lewis Carroll had the ray in mind when he frabjously unveiled his portmanteau but, once the double meaning of ‘manta’ is registered, it seems equally difficult not to envisage such a creature in the bag, so to speak, or lurking at any rate under his cloak. It is a question of a new imaginary, not a regression into the vagary of animistic belief, a restituted primitivism, but a thinking of the ray as a force, a trace, whether buried or dancing, in a quite different understanding of the spectre and the wake. Like a dream of excarnation without any possible fossilisation, dream as impossible fossil, there is a naked cape and it is alive. Rays to the ground: starting off in the substrate. It is a matter of a new teratology, an enantiodromic animism that is radically non-theological, nanothinking through the ray.

But next thing he is framing snatches of Clarence, speaking of ten thousand men that fishes gnawed upon, wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl, his internal marination, lengthening after life, in search of the empty, vast, and wand’ring air.

Gently I ask him what he’s talking about, but he’s hopped into blurred song, and I am inclined to think this is his way of acting off the slightly ‘possessed’ sense that he claims his theory has given him:

It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring, I see the doctor, I see the doctor and couldn’t get up in the morning, it’s roaring, marauding, we went to bed and deformed the head, of hearing and hoarding, who’s moaning, who’s speaking, it’s raining, it’s pouring, it’s howling, it’s calling, the moon rings, the moon sings, it’s paining, it’s spawning, wedged your head and went to bed, it’s feigning, it’s shoring, you hear the words are calling, cawing, they’re gnawing, and can’t get up in the can’t get up in the staining, it’s boring, she’s reigning, he’s fawning, I hear your voice, I know you’re dead, and can’t get up in the morning the morning the morning.

Such is the range of his more lyrical and impassioned traits. There’s nothing out of the ordinary here, I think. No, the horrifying conviction comes when he tells me about some writing project he’s begun elaborating and proceeds to read it aloud to me over the phone. It is a work of lexicography devoted to the buried life of anagrams and homophones, each word with its own idiosyncratic definition, a dictionaray, yes, as he is pleased to declare: the world’s first English dictionaray. It would be a verbal laboratory, a dictionary testamentary to the way the ray leaves its mark in everyday language, a vocabulary that might constitute a new species of bestiary, and generate an altogether other estuary English. He remarks that it is practically impossible to complete, particularly on account of the peculiarity of the adverb form in English, interminably stirring up as it does new terrain. And then he begins. With each new letter of the alphabet he pauses momentarily, then proceeds to the next series of words, giving each entry equal measure, enunciating throughout with customary care and scrupulosity (no doubt, it occurs to me, also his father’s). He reads it, in short, precisely in the manner of a poem. It takes me a while to get a grasp of what is going on:

A

Airy

Awry

Anniversary

Anteriority

Arraign

Arrange

Actuary

Afraid

Allegory

Amatory

Arty

Abrasion

Aurally

Absurdity

Already

Astronomy

Astrophysics

Arbitrary

Acrylic

Antiquary

Archetype

Archetypal

Apparatus

Alteration

Alterity

Abruptly

Army

Attractively

Admirably

Articulately

Apparently

Angry

Aleatory

Archaeology

Archery

Astray

Adversary

Ashtray

Aviary

Adoration

Anticipatory

Apothecary

Approvingly

Alary

Adultery

Adulterate

Asseveration

Accordingly

Accurately

Accelerate

Anywhere

B

Brae

Beray

Brain

Bleary

Binary

Betray

Berate

Brassy

Brazen

Braised

Barbarity

Break

Breakdown

Brake

Boundary

Braid

Bray

Brave

Balustrade

Battery

Brutality

Barely

Brace

Barley

Broadly

Beret

Bibliography

Biography

Bastardy

Brandy

Barmy

Bakery

Braille

Bestiary

Bizarrely

Brainy

Birthday

Bystander

C

Crafty

Centenary

Charade

Crystal

Chrysalis

Coronary

Carry

Combinatory

Category

Circularity

Culinary

Chivalry

Courageous

Concentration

Craven

Crayon

Cranny

Crazy

Contrary

Carvery

Centrality

Crane

Cranky

Crape

Crate

Crater

Consecrate

Creatively

Celebrate

Corroborate

Collaborate

Courtyard

Cradle

Crassly

Customary

Carpentry

Cartography

Carefully

Contradictory

Churchyard

Chrysanthemum

Commentary

Cinematography

Crayfish

Chlamydospore

Canary

Charmingly

Comfortably

Creamy

Cannery

Calibrate

Clairvoyant

Clearly

Carbohydrate

Cartilaginously

Certifiably

Constrain

Constraint

Certainty

Conspiracy

D

Derange

Diary

Dairy

Dictionary

Deprave

Dreary

Draughty

Deliberate

Deliberation

Drained

Disgraceful

Driveway

Desecrate

Dray

Drape

Derail

Disparity

Democracy

Dreamy

Dromedary

Debauchery

Dilatory

Decorate

Defloration

Dearly

Disarray

Dysphoria

E

Enrage

Exploration

Exploratory

Exhortatory

Extraordinary

Essayer

Earnestly

Entreaty

Errancy

Extravagancy

Erratically

Exaggerate

Eternally

Embrace

Experimentally

Estrange

Estuary

Early

Erase

Eraser

Entrails

Electrically

Entrain

Elementary

Exasperate

Extraneous

Eccentrically

Everyday

F

Frail

Frailty

Fragrant

Fragrancy

Freight

Fraternity

Freaky

Feathery

Fakery

Foray

Frugally

Fairytale

Fray

Frenetically

Faraway

Fainter-eyed

Fearsomely

Friday

Forsythia

Figuration

Foolhardy

Factory

Ferryboat

Frabjously

Frame

Framework

Filtration

G

Granary

Grange

Gyrate

Generate

Generically

Gray

Gravy

Grassy

Great

Grate

Granny

Grail

Grave

Graveyard

Graveside

Grain

Grammatology

Grammatically

Gravity

Gutturality

Grade

Grace

H

Hairy

Hoary

Hydra

Hydrate

Hilarity

Hysteria

Hysterical

Husbandry

Hairspray

Hearsay

Hardy

Holy-water

Hardly

Hierarchy

Hearty

Harmony

Heraldry

Hydrocephalic

I

Infirmary

Innovatory

Iconography

Irate

Irritably

Irascibly

Iracundity

Idiosyncratic

Infiltrate

Incorporate

Interchangeably

Irenically

Irrecoverably

Irreconcilably

Irreproachably

Ironically

Irradiate

Imagery

Incommensurably

Improbably

Irreciprocally

Irrecognisably

Irrealisably

Irrefutably

Irremediably

Irreparably

Invariably

Irrevocably

Irrecoverably

Irresolvably

Irrationally

Intolerably

Insuperably

Inextricably

Integrally

Involuntary

Illustrate

Inspirationally

Imaginary

J

Jay-walker

Jaybird

Jubilatory

Judiciary

Juratory

Jeopardy

Jellygraph

Jar-fly

Jaspery

Janglery

Jaculatory

Jaw-breaker

K

Kleptocracy

Klydonograph

Karmadharaya

Kirn-baby

Kirkyard

Knavery

Karstology

Kir royale

Kindheartedly

Knick-knackery

Kraken

L

Lairy

Lexicography

Laboratory

Law-breaker

Lavatory

Laundry

Layer

Lay-priest

Lawyer

Larynx

Lycra

Leathery

Largely

Lapidary

Literary

Library

Labyrinth

M

Marry

Metaphoricity

Maternity

Moderately

Meanderingly

Military

Maturity

Mortuary

Mortality

Morality

Migraine

Miraculously

Minatory

Momentary

Membrane

Mammary

Materiality

Myriad

Monarchy

Metaphorically

Marshy

Marvellously

Matrimony

Matronym

Matriarchy

Masturbatory

Moustache-twirly

Migrate

Mastery

Martyr

Martyrdom

N

Narrate

Narrator

Nearly

Narcolepsy

Nocturnally

Nocturnality

Narrowly

Naturally

Nary

Narky

Normality

Necessary

No-brainer

Nearby

O

Obituary

Osprey

Outrageous

Orally

Olfactory

Observatory

Ossuary

Orthography

Ordinary

Ordinarily

Oligarchy

Oragious

Oration

Originary

Originally

Overarchingly

Obliterate

P

Penetrate

Probability

Pray

Praise

Prate

Portray

Portrait

Probably

Purgatory

Psaltery

Phrase

Palaeography

Paternity

Parry

Prostrate

Prey

Pastry

Pregnancy

Preparation

Parade

Perpetually

Particularly

Proprietorially

Presumably

Parley

Patronym

Perpetrate

Photography

Parody

Parity

Pornography

Puncturation

Paralyse

Paralysis

Pterodactyl

Privacy

Pearly

Pleasantry

Primary

Pyramid

Phantasmagory

Pignorate

Prodromally

Paratactically

Perseveration

Q

Quarry

Quandary

R

Ranarian

Rabies

Restrain

Race

Racy

Rabbity

Radiate

Radiator

Radiant

Raise

Raven

Rayon

Radically

Ratio

Rationally

Rationality

Relay

Replay

Rarity

Rarely

Rain

Rainy

Raincoat

Raspy

Raspberry

Refrain

Reign

Res

Raid

Raider

Ratty

Royal

Rake

Rape

Raze

Rave

Raving

Rally

Ready

Respiration

Range

Rate

Rail

Railing

Ravenously

Rabidly

Rage

Really

Retrait

Remonstration

Registration

Reify

Radar

Raisin

Rapier

Raison d’être

Rein

Refractively

Relatively

Rivalry

Revealingly

Regrettably

Randy

Raunchy

Rascally

Realty

Rotary

Reliquary

Regenerate

Refrigerator

Rampantly

Ramifying

Rainbow

Rhapsody

Reality

S

Secretary

Strange

Stranger

Strangeways

Sharky

Starry

Stray

Spray

Soothsayer

Synastry

Starkly

Strawberry

Spectrality

Straight

Separate

Separately

Spectacularly

Spirogyra

Scrape

Sunray

Saturday

Scarcity

Singularly

Singularity

Strategy

Strategically

Saturate

Serrate

Scary

Swarthy

Syrah

Stationary

Stationery

Staggeringly

Swaggeringly

Scarry

Scarificatory

Similarly

Satisfactory

Sharply

Sedentary

Substrate

Scrawny

Savagery

Stratify

Sanctuary

Skyward

T

Terrain

Trace

Temporary

Tardy

Tarry

Tertiary

Testamentary

Testificatory

Terrestrially

Temporality

Tolerate

Transparency

Trait

Traitor

Train

Training

Trainers

Tirade

Teary

Trade

Tawdry

Tranquillity

Tranquilly

Thermostatically

Taciturnity

Tray

Trail

Tragically

Trimethylamine

Thursday

Tyranny

Tyrant

Translatably

Tyrannosaurus

Timeframe

Topography

Typography

Treaty

Traipse

Teratology

U

Unitary

Upbraid

Unpleasurably

Uranus

Unforeseeably

Unphotographably

Untranslatably

Urbanity

V

Vary

Venerate

Voluntary

Verticality

Variety

Veterinary

Vampyre

Vagary

Veracious

Vestiary

Veracity

Vibration

W

Weary

Wary

Watery

Wayward

Wraith

X

X-ray

Y

Yesterday

Yarn

Yard

Yare

Year

Yearn

Z

Zoography

I listened without the slightest expostulation or intervention. What struck me most of all was the tempo and tone in which he read. It remained so steady throughout. And the rendition of each and every one of these words was faultless. It was as if he had been rehearsing it for a very long time. I kept expecting him to change tone, to make a joke, to pause to comment on a particular word, to stumble, to laugh, to groan, to give up. But he carried on in this deadpan manner, as if each word were a world of its own, with its own raison d’être. The cumulative effect was like a tide coming in too quickly. He sounded, as he read the thing out, so ‘entirely normal’, to recall his phrase. Yet something irrevocably strange took place in his relaying of this lexicon, and I know my involuntary intake of breath, in the ensuing blankness, was audible enough for him to pick up:

— What’s the matter?

— You were reading so strangely!

— I wasn’t reading.

— What do you mean?

— I don’t have anything written down yet: I was making it up as I went along.

Something in me gave way. Our separation was no longer to be tolerated. The strange framing of rationality, this new English dictionary on hysterical principles, this division of voices and hearts of hundreds of miles of cold deep sea made me realise that he couldn’t be left alone any longer. I told him I was coming, I’d take unpaid leave or something. I got the next flight I reasonably could, just two days later. I spoke to him only on one further occasion, when I called to let him know my arrival time at Heathrow, and he said he would meet me. It wasn’t the best line. I remember saying it’s not the best line and he thought I said best man. And at another moment he talked of a ‘real surprise’, so I thought, but actually it was, as he had to clarify, ‘getting ray supplies’. Then he said, if I heard correctly, that he was ‘after life’ or ‘after my life’ or ‘more life’: the reception was very poor. The line went dead, or possibly he hung up. I called back but got no answer.

Bizarrely, he wasn’t there. I spent two increasingly anxious hours at Heathrow waiting for his expectant face to show in that great mélange of human bodies crossing and crisscrossing the arrivals hall, calling him repeatedly on my phone, and even having his name paged over the PA system. I was sick with worry by this point. I took trains across country as far as I could. It was a beautiful early autumn day. At last I got out and dragged myself and suitcase up the main street to the Tea Party, having taken it into my head that he might just be there. I don’t know what I was thinking — that he was writing me? that he was hiding? I was shattered from the journey and felt an unwelcome but immense desire to lie down and sleep. I took a taxi up to the house. I knew where the spare key was, but didn’t need it. Still I rang the bell and stood there a while, as the cab reversed away back up the driveway. I walked inside to what seemed at first like complete normality and put down my luggage.

Charmingly lit and clear, as if waiting to be remembered in every finicky detail, was the great ray pool. I looked into the silvery water and soon enough made out Hilary, Taylor and Mallarmé. Melted clocks, but with a military air, they propelled to the surface, breaking it one two three in a splishing so suggestive of comic applause I couldn’t not smile. And Audrey? As if on cue, prodromally precise, a modest but giveaway ruffle in the substrate just nearby where I was crouched: pancaking in reverse, gliding, jetting up, she joined the others. I realised I was already seeing them as he had supposed, a truly radical gymnastics, the pyrotechnic forecasting, irrepressibly pulsing upwardly, from imperceptible in the substrate to shooting up, happy-slapping ghosts, dreamily clowning the surface, unclear who would have been watching who or when, questions ramifying only after the winging off and away, in conversational shadowings. Jetlag was getting the better of me. For a brief interval, which might have been ten seconds or ten minutes, I stared, eyes adrift in the immeasurably engaging turns, breaks and suspensions enacted by the rays as they nuzzled, untroubled in the substrate, plooping up an occasional pebble on a spout of water, then raised themselves up, thrusting, sweeping, surging in exhortatory mime, before surfacing so soft and inhuman, full of gratulatory curiosity.

I got to my feet feeling as if I’d been drugged. I called out his name, three or four times, but my voice seemed eerie and out of place. Although a part of me was worrying that he’d fitted again and fallen someplace in the house, and another part was fearing even worse, I also felt strangely sure that he wasn’t there. I was making my way towards the stairs when I noticed for the first time that there was light coming from the drawing room. Momentarily remembering, I opened the door onto that extraordinary affair to which he had (quite earnestly, it was now clear) made reference. The room had been transformed into the interior of a maelstrom, emptied and reorganised in such a way that you walked into a kind of calm, gigantic horse-shoe of water. I could see straight away that it was based on the donut from Barcelona, except that here in the centre was a circular couch, surrounded from floor to ceiling by water. On the couch lay a single sheet of paper. It was in his beautiful hand. Impersonally addressed, I could feel his eyes glittering with pleasure over it. Under the heading ‘Eagle rays (Rhinoptera bonasus)’, it simply offered a list of names together with a short description of their diet and where such foodstuffs could be obtained, along with brief guidelines on the upkeep of the tank. There were twelve names inscribed, as follows:

Larry

Gary

Harry

Andrea

Lorraine

Hardy

Cary

Marty

Barry

Bryan

Ryan

Raymond (N.B. not to be abbreviated)

I was leaning backwards on the couch and losing all sense of my elements, staring round me into the great glass space. I counted all twelve, bleached-bone-white, with their pug-nosed, almost sharky heads, long thin dark spines like antennae, and stretched-out disc fins closely resembling wings. Underwater birds in a phantom aviary. The huge tank was incessantly shifting, a world of braking and accelerating, altering shapes and directions, a busy submarine airport, uncontrollable traffic of miniature chubby Concordes. At one moment they looked like water-filled white paper bags, the next they were dreaming and slow-winged as flamingos, flapping up into the ether. Then each seemed a cloud-white cruise missile, a disembodied flamboyant cuff brandishing a rapier, an upside-down technician with an antenna that turns its body into a walkie-talkie, a trapeze artist gathered at the end of its own tightrope. They appeared to me then more spectral than the motoros, or anything I had ever seen. My eyes were filming over.

Everyone knows. This is no whodunit.

My love was written in the starry sky above our heads.

As intrepid as a somnambulist I made my way to the stairs and mounted them as if for the first time, holding onto the handrail fashioned from the trunk of a young pine. It was dark, for all the doors were shut. I looked into his father’s study and hardly recognised it: glowing polished wooden floorboards, a new sofa and armchair, family paintings on the walls, and a filing cabinet. By the window, looking out, I realised also how much had been done to the garden. At the other end of the corridor I pushed on the door: his own bedroom was vacant, not even the bed remained. Once more I called out his name, and heard nothing but the absurdity of my own voice.

As I walked back along the midday twilight of the corridor, I felt, tingling in my eyes, virtually breaking me down at every step, exactly what lay beyond. As I opened the door of his parents’ room the light seemed at once to stream in and hold. Tears were running down my face. It was a translucent cave. It was crazier than anything downstairs, perhaps in part because of its elevated location. It is part of the law of probability, Aristotle said, that many improbable things happen. What used to be the en-suite bathroom was now incorporated with the bedroom into a remarkable belvedere. The floor must have been reinforced, I told myself. And as I did so, I felt again an estranging taciturnity in the sound of my voice, even within the space of my own head. I gazed up into the depths. The sky had disappeared. It was a manta, the biggest ray, the strangest thing I had ever seen in a house. It seemed, indeed, bigger than the house, arching like a rainbow, majestically large, its great wings black and thin, conforming exactly with that cloak concealing nothing that its name implies. It was hanging, yes, in the watery light, but not motionless. The great pectorals like a double parabola, undulating, arching, in curvy pulsions, the sweeping down of a horseless highwayman, black as night, white as forest snow, it moved at once too easily, slowly and quickly to take in. It was in motion, but it barely moved. Hypnotic: yes, suspended. From the eversion of its underside it seemed to gambol like a lamb. And then it was a bizarre lover fetching invisible pastry straight from the bakery, wearing floppy black oven-gloves. Interminably in need, wherever was I to source the plankton and the nanoplankton? As if dissolving once again, gently shrugging off into a new form, chalk verticality, raft into the shadows of the underworld, veracity in black and white, it seemed momentarily to swing towards me with inhuman inquisitiveness, nudging against my vision, proffering its paddle-like cephalic lobes, head-wide mouth and staggering great white belly with five long slashes of gills. I looked around for some kind of note, a letter, the briefest message, but there was no sign of anything anywhere.