Ghosts Read online

  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 st
raw 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.