Athena Read online

  Outside it was a silver day. My heart lifted, as it always did when I made good my escape from that place, but beneath that momentary exaltation I was still upset. There were things I did not want to think about. Aunt Corky’s story had stirred the murky waters of remembrance. That’s how it is, you tie a rock to things and sink them in the depths and then the first autumn storm breaks and they come bobbing up again with bloated limbs and filmed-over eyes that stare straight through you into eternity. But I did not blame her. Why should she not people her world with dramatic figments, if they brought her comfort, or amused her, or helped to pass the time? I am done with blaming people for their weaknesses. I am done with blaming anyone for anything. Except myself, that is. No, no end to that.

  Home, after that unsettling venture into the haunted landscapes of Aunt Corky’s past, was suddenly a tricky proposition, so when I got off the bus I found myself turning, inevitably, in the direction of Rue Street. A Saturday quiet reigned in the quarter. Outside the house, on the opposite pavement, a man was loitering. He had a large, smooth, globular head, and was dressed in a buttoned-up tweed jacket and too-tight trousers and very shiny black brogues; he reminded me of those glossy wooden peg-shaped toy soldiers I used to be given to play with as a child. As I approached he shot me a peculiar, underhand sort of smile, as if he knew me, and turned away. I had a key by now and could let myself into the house. I shut the front door behind me and stood for a moment in the lofty silence of the hall. Immediately, as if I had entered a decompression chamber of the heart, the thought of A. came bubbling along my veins and everything else fell away.

  But what does it mean, what does it signify, to say: the thought of A.? Was it her I was thinking of, or the idea of her? That is another of the questions that torment me now. For, even when she was still here, still with me, if I summoned her to mind it was not she who came but only the vague, soft sense of her, a sort of vaporous cloud through which her presence gleamed like the sun unseen gleaming through a mist at morning. Only once or twice, towards the end, when she was in my arms, did I seem to penetrate that cloud of unknowing and find what I told myself must surely be the real she. I know, I know the objections, I have read the treatises: there is no real she, only a set of signs, a series of appearances, a grid of relations between swarming particles; yet I insist on it: she was there at those times, it was she who clutched me to her and cried out, not a flickering simulacrum foisted on me by the stop-frame technique of a duplicitous reality. I had her. I don’t care about the deceit and the cruel tricks that were played on me, I don’t care about any of that. I had her, that is the thing. And already I am forgetting her. Oh yes, that is another torment. Every day she decays a little more in my memory as the ever-returning tides wash away steadily at her image. I cannot even remember exactly what colour her eyes were, are. This is part of the price I must pay: in order to have had her I must lose her. Something amiss with the tenses there, I think. What would I do to divert myself if I had not language to play with?

  I felt her presence in the house before I heard her. I climbed the stairs silently, rising in spirals like a suppliant soul making its slow ascent to Heaven. The secret door stood open and I could see her moving about in the room. I lingered in the corridor, watching her. It occurs to me that this moment of covert surveillance was the first, unacknowledged token of what was to come; do I imagine it or did I feel an anticipatory flick of pleasure’s flame, as I skulked there, bloodshot and breathless, wrapped in my dirty old mac? We were well matched, the watcher and the watched. Perhaps she in turn knew that I was there, perhaps that was what gave her the idea of the spyhole (which will open its amazed eye presently). She was busy at something, walking in and out of my field of vision, her high heels clicking. Quicksilver noon in the window behind her and the first murmurs of rain on the glass. What shall I dress my dolly in today? Black, as usual, a black silk blouse and those stretched trousers that I disliked – in my day they were called ski-pants – that hooked under her heels and made her legs look rubbery and kneeless, tapering sharply from hip to ankle. I shall have to look into this matter of clothes, learn the styles and so on, the names, remember not to call a skirt a dress, that sort of thing. (And what exactly, by the way, is a frock?) That will be another diversion, a harmless one. In a drapery store the other day I saw a quietly distraught, haggard young man at the knickers counter in earnest consultation with a surprisingly tolerant female shop assistant. Certainly times have changed – in the old days that chap would have got himself a cuff on the ear or even have been put into the hands of the police. A. was indulgent in this regard. Once when we were lying together and I got up the courage to ask her shamefacedly not to take off a last, flimsy covering, and mumbled an apology, she laughed her throatiest laugh and said she had always wanted to have a fetishist for a lover. Happy memories. Meanwhile I am loitering in the corridor as the soft rain of September comes on and A., bless her dear and on occasion shockingly practical heart, is making up a bed for me (for us, in the fullness of time) on the old, lumpy, uncomplaining and ever accommodating chaise-longue that thoughtful fate or the exigencies of art had placed at our disposal in that white room.

  At length my knees began to tremble from the strain of keeping still and I coughed with theatrical loudness and sidled into the room, trying to look abstracted, as if I had not noticed her. If she was surprised to see me she did not show it, just gave me a glance and put a pillow into my arms and said, ‘Hold that.’ She was being quite the little home-maker, all bustle and frown. She wanted to know if I thought the couch was all right where it was, opposite the window. ‘And I must get curtains,’ she said, measuring the casement with a slitted eye. Oh yes, curtains, by all means, and a rocking chair and a cat, and slippers and pipe for me, and presently a cradle in the corner, too, why not? I stood with the pillow clasped to my chest and a simpleton’s smile on my face, trying to decide which was more absurd, what she was doing, or me behaving as if it were the most natural thing in the world to come upon her in the empty house on a Saturday lunchtime turning this grim little room into a love-nest. That was the last moment when I might have come to my senses, the final, clear-eyed recognition that what was happening was ridiculous, impossible, fraught with unspeakable perils. I would only have to tell her who and what I really was, I thought, and she would back out the door shaking her head with eyes like saucers and her mouth working in silent horror and disbelief. But I said nothing, only stood smiling and nodding like a brand-new hubby drunk on love, and when she briskly plucked the pillow from my embrace and bore it like a plump white baby to the bed I let my hands fall helplessly to my sides and realised that I was lost. I remember wondering, with stupendous irrelevance, if she dyed her hair, it was so glossy and black against the white of her brow, her virginal neck. Have I mentioned her paleness? There was nothing enervated or sickly about it. She was luminous, she shone within the taut, transparent sheathing of her skin. At times, at the start, when I held her naked in my arms I fancied it was a false covering that I touched, a sort of marvellously fine and supple carapace within which another, unreachable she lay in hiding. Did I really, ever, manage to break through that gauzy membrane?— Oh for Christ’s sake, stop! It’s always the same question, I am sick of it! And anyway I know the answer, so why keep asking? The rain on the window whispered to itself, agog to know what we would do next. The smell of fresh linen made me think, incongruously, of childhood. A. held the pillow tucked under her temporarily doubled chin and was shrugging it into its case. I stepped towards her as if wading through oil, walking my fingers along the edge of the work-table like a squad of quaking soldiers. She threw the pillow on to the bed and turned her head sideways and watched me approach, with a faint, calculating smile, as if she were counting the paces diminishing between us, her eyes narrowed. For a moment I was afraid she was going to laugh. I seemed to have at least three arms, all of them superfluous. I began to say something but she put a finger quickly to my lips and shook her head once. I took he
r hand in both of mine and remembered a bird once that I had caught and held like this; it must have been sick; it must have been dying. ‘You are cold,’ I said to her. This is not the theatre, these are the banalities that spring to the most eloquent lover’s lips on such occasions. ‘Oh no,’ she answered, ‘oh no, I’m not.’

  Of all our sweet occasions of sin, I think this one, preliminary and practically blameless, is the one I recollect most vividly, with the sharpest and acutest pangs of pain. I remember that unwavering small smile with which she held me as slowly she undid the buttons of her blouse. She was sitting on the edge of the couch now, with me standing over her, still in my raincoat, mouth agape, I suppose, and breathing laboriously, like a staggered old bull. I remember the dips of shadow in the hollows of her shoulders, and her shoulders themselves, shapely and high, the right one stamped with a curved patch of eggshell sheen from the window, and her odd little knobbled breasts with their swollen, bruise-coloured aureoles, that always made her look, God forgive me, as if she were holding her upraised clenched fists pressed against her chest. The waistband of her ski-pants was hidden under a fold of pale flesh the line of which I wanted to trace with my tongue. She had kicked off her shoes and unhooked the heel-straps of her pants, and the elasticated material clung to her legs now like deflated balloon skins. Her miniature feet were of a reddish hue, and curiously splayed at the toes, betokening a barefoot childhood spent in some gaudy, aquatic region of mud and magnolia and bright, shrieking birds. Oh, my Manon, where are you? Where are you.

  From below came a knock at the front door. (Perhaps this is the theatre, after all.) What a change it brought. We stared at each other, two guilty children caught doing naughty things, and I noticed the gooseflesh on her arms and her puckered nipples and the mauve strap-marks scored into her shoulders. Came another knock, not loud, and oddly diffident, though all the more imperative for that. My heart joggled, rearing on its tethers. ‘Don’t answer it,’ A. whispered. She seemed more thoughtful than alarmed, frowning towards the window and gnawing on a thumbnail; this noise off had not been in the stage directions as she knew them. Absently she began to put her clothes back on. Despite my fright I admired with a sort of tumid wonderment the deft, clambering shrug with which she fitted her joggling breasts into their skimpy lace sling and then dived stiff-armed into her blouse, and as I turned and blundered from the room, rabbit-eyed and wiping the back of a hand across my dried-up mouth, I was in such a swollen state I thought I might have to negotiate the stairs on all fours. All fives.

  The front door as I approached it across the hall had a pent-up, gloating aspect, as if it were just dying to fly open and unleash on me a shouting throng of accusers. What prophetic intuition was it that provoked in me such dread? When I opened the door (how eagerly it swung on its snickering hinges!) my first reaction was an inward whinny of relief, though who or what it was I had expected I don’t know. On the step, tilted at an apologetic angle and with raindrops glistening on his already shiny brow, was the fellow with the big smooth head I had seen earlier loitering on the pavement opposite – remember him? His hand was lifted to knock a third time; hastily he let it fall and smiled beatifically and cleared his throat and said:

  ‘Ah, Mr M. – the very man.’

  4. Syrinx Delivered 1645

  Job van Hellin (1598-1647)

  Oil on canvas, 235⁄8 × 31½ in. (60 × 80 cm.)

  This painter, as is well known, served in the busy studio of Peter Paul Rubens for some ten years before the Flemish master’s death in 1640; indeed, it is possible that sections, some of them large-scale, in Rubens’s greatest paintings are in fact the work of van Hellin, who was one of the finest technicians in the Flanders of his day and seems to have enjoyed the complete trust of his teacher and mentor. In his letters van Hellin speaks of his deep respect for the older painter, and certainly in the pictures of his final years the influence of Rubens is clearly apparent, particularly in the vigorous brushwork and the painterly richness of their execution. However, as Syrinx Delivered attests, there is in van Hellin a coolness of approach – a coldness, some critics would say – which sets him apart from the majority of Rubens’s pupils and followers. Here, a remoteness and classical stillness are reminiscent more of Poussin or Claude Lorrain than of the fleshly immediacy characteristic of the school of the great Flemish master. The statuesque repose – so at variance with the violent subject – that is achieved in this picture, along with the pastoral simplicity of the landscape with its wandering flocks and feathery, evanescent distances, are the marks of a more temperate, less Italianate style than that of his teacher; van Hellin was a Catholic in Catholic Flanders, yet in his mature work we detect what, with licence, we may call a Protestant restraint that seems to indicate the painter’s consciousness of the political and religious tensions of the time. The landscape depicted here is not the Arcady of rock and olive tree and harsh, noonday light, but a peaceable northern plain untouched by the riotous passions of gods and heroes yet over which there hangs an atmosphere of indefinable unease. Mount Lycaeus shimmers in a blue miasmic mist, and the brown, somehow bulging surface of the river Ladon has a menacing sheen. Placed in the middle distance, the figures of god and nymph, caught in their little drama of desire and loss, seem almost incidental to the composition, which could easily stand without them as a self-contained landscape. The temple buildings on the right, tall and pale and set amongst dense greenery which in places is almost black, lend an air of solemn calm to the scene. They are the portals to that other world where the invisible Olympians sit in silent contemplation of the mortal sphere that fascinates and baffles them. Here, in this green and golden world, on this tawny afternoon, their black sheep Pan disports himself; with what skill the artist has depicted this figure, making it at once numinous, comic and terrifying. The god seems to run and dance at the same time, in mad pursuit of the nymph already lost to him amongst the leaning reeds. This Syrinx, who, with her white robe gathered above her knee, might be taken for Diana the huntress, is expressive both of great sorrow and a kind of languorous yearning for release from the human sphere that has become wearisome to her; she seems to long for that transfiguration into the world of nature that is imminent. The wind that blows against her, bending the reeds in the river’s shallows and drawing out her long yellow hair, is indeed the wind of change. (What a pity the painter has seen fit to set so delicate a figure amidst these swarming and frankly phallic bulrushes.) She is the pivot of the picture, the fulcrum between two states of being, the representation of life-in-death and death-in-life, of what changes and yet endures; the witness that she offers is the possibility of transcendence, both of the self and of the world, though world and self remain the same. She is the perfect illustration of Adorno’s dictum that ‘In their relation to empirical reality works of art recall the theologumenon that in a state of redemption everything will be just as it is and yet wholly different.’ I haven’t even a reed pipe to play on in commemoration of you.

  Always it comes back. I think of it as another story altogether but it is not. I delude myself that I have sloughed it all off and that I can walk on naked and unashamed into a new name, a new life, light and gladsome as a transmigrating soul, but no, it comes back dragging its boneless limbs through the muck and rears up at me grotesquely in the unlikeliest of shapes. Such as this fellow, for instance, with his extruded head balanced perilously on top of that cylindrical trunk – all three buttons of his tweed jacket were fastened – like a stone ball set on the pillar of a gate. I have never come across another such almost perfectly spherical head. The effect was emphasised by the oiled black hair parted just above his left ear and fanned out sideways across the dome of his bald skull like a tight-fitting, patent-leather cap. His eyes, also black, were very small and set very close together and slightly out of alignment, the left one higher than the right, which gave to his expression a quizzical cast I found both comic and disturbing. His smile, which he did with lips pressed shut and turned up at right ang
les at the corners, seemed less a mark of pleasure than discomfort, as if he were wincing at a twinge of indigestion or the pinching of a too-tight shoe. I had the impression of exceptional, fanatic cleanliness: he shone; he fairly glowed. I pictured him of a morning at a cracked sink in vest and drawers, vehemently ascrub, buffing himself to this high sheen. I knew straight away what, if not who, he was, and I felt a sort of soundless shock, and a shiver ran through me, as if I had been cloven clean in two from poll to fork by a blade of unimaginable fineness. Fright always has a flash of pleasure in it, for me.

  He told me his name was Hackett. ‘Do you not remember me?’ he said, seeming genuinely crestfallen.

  ‘Of course I do,’ I said, lying.

  Now, it is a curious thing, but really, I did not know him at all. My recollections of that time of crisis and disaster in my life – what is it, twelve, thirteen years ago? – have become blurred in certain aspects. No doubt memory, selective and indulgent record-keeper that it is, has seen fit to suppress this or that detail of my case, but I do not see how it could have erased entirely from the admittedly crowded picture of those fraught weeks a figure so memorable as Detective-Inspector Ambrose Hackett. Yet one of us was misremembering and it did not seem to be him. We stood in uncomfortable silence for a moment and he inserted a finger under his shirt-collar behind the fat knot of his tie and turned his head to the left with a quick little painful jerk, one of the many tics he had and which if I had already encountered them I would surely not have forgotten. Some more moments passed, marked by heartbeats. Among the few things I have learned over the years is that there is no occasion, no matter how weighty or terrible the circumstances, that is not susceptible to a merely social awkwardness. In my time I have known lawyers to go mute with embarrassment, judges to avoid my eye, jailers to blush. Surely it says something for our species, this sudden, helpless floundering when the universal code of manners fails us; surely the phenomenon bespeaks the soul’s essential authenticity? Here we were, the detective and myself, caught in an impossible situation, me proprietorial at the door of someone else’s uninhabited and unfurnished house, with a half-naked young woman upstairs eager for my imminent return, and him coatless on the step getting rained on and waiting with a wistful demeanour to be asked in.