Athena Read online

  The springs in the seat twanged under me and I sank so low my knees were almost at the level of my shoulders. There was a strong smell of mothballs, from the greatcoat, I presumed. The sun in the windows was all spikes and sheer edges. Young Popeye slipped behind the wheel and started up the engine but we did not move; I was childishly disappointed; I would have liked a spin in this big crazy car. Popeye turned a knob and a fan came on and blew a blast of hot, metallic air in our faces. ‘I suffer terrible from the cold,’ the Da said. ‘I have to have the heat and then I get the chilblains. It’s fucking awful.’

  So our conversation began. We discussed the climate and ways of coping with its vagaries, the provenance of his motor car, the incidence of spontaneous combustion among elderly ladies in the city in recent years, Morden’s character (‘Is he dependable, would you say?’), the stupidity of policemen (despite the fact that he was a notorious criminal, as he admitted with quiet pride, they had not managed to get him into jail since he had been a teenager, and then only for six months for shoplifting), the pastimes that make prison life bearable, the state of the picture market, the nature of art. I found all this perfectly agreeable and interesting. He was originally, he told me, a butcher by trade, although he had not practised for a long time, being in a different line of work nowadays. I nodded, saying of course, of course, one serious man of the world to another. I’m sure he explained many more things to me but if so I forgot them instantly. The hot breeze from the heater and the glitter of sunlight in the windscreen gave a sense of headlong movement, as if we were swishing smoothly down the boulevards of some great humming metropolis. After a time the Da ventured to unbutton his greatcoat and I noticed that he was dressed as a priest, with a full soutane and an authentically grubby collar.

  He wanted me to tell him about art. He said he had just gone into the art business – Popeye in the front seat snickered at that – and he needed the advice of an expert.

  ‘That one, now,’ he said, ‘that Birth of what-do-you-call-her, why would that be so special?’

  I did not hesitate. ‘Scarcity,’ I told him, in a strong voice firm with conviction. My face, however, had a rubbery feel to it and I had some trouble getting my arms to fold.

  ‘Scarcity, eh?’ he said, and repeated the word a number of times, turning it this way and that, nodding to himself with his fat lower lip stuck out. ‘So it’s like everything else, then,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered stoutly, ‘just like everything else, a matter of supply and demand, what the market will bear, horses for courses, and so on. There are not,’ I said, ‘very many Vaublins in existence.’

  ‘Is that so?’ the Da said.

  ‘Yes, indeed. Scarcely more than twenty in the world, and few of them of such quality as the Birth of What’s-her-name.’

  In my mind I saw Morden’s big surly face and through the murk suddenly I had a glimpse of the far-off state of sobriety and a shimmer of unease passed over me like a gust of wind passing over the surface of a still pool; dark, fishy forms were down there, nosing about. The Da pondered in silence for a while, his chin sunk on his breast and his hands playing together like piglets in his lap. Then he roused himself and put an arm around my shoulder and gave me a quick squeeze. ‘Good man,’ he said, as if I had done him some large service, ‘good man.’ He pushed me firmly but not ungently out of the door. When I was on the pavement he leaned sideways and with two fingers gaily blessed me with the sign of the cross and produced a cracked cackle of laughter. ‘God go with you, my son,’ he said.

  I stood listing slightly and watched as the big pink car slewed into Ormond Street and roared off with a great fart of exhaust smoke. I think I may even have waved, though feebly.

  I decided at once that what I needed was more drink, and set off for The Boatman. I found it eventually, after straying down a number of false trails. The pub was very dark and broody after the brightness of the afternoon streets. What month is it? October still? The barman was leaning on his elbows on the bar reading a newspaper and picking his teeth with a matchstick. I considered what would sit best with the remains of Gall’s firewater and decided on vodka, a drink I do not like. I threw back three or four measures in quick succession and left.

  There follows a period of confusion and distant tumult. I stumped along as if both my legs were made of wood from the thighs down, and there was a fizzing in my veins and my sight kept twitching distractingly with a regular, slow pulse. I remember stopping on a corner to speak to someone, a man in a cap – God knows who he was – but I could get no good of him and lurched on, muttering crossly. A patch of sky, delicate, deep and ardent, fixed like a great sheet of limpid blue glass between the tops of two high, narrow buildings, seemed to signify some profound thing. I saw again from childhood a path through winter woods and was preparing to weep but got distracted. I bought an ice cream cone and when I had greedily sucked up the ice cream I lobbed the soggy cone into a litter bin five yards away from me with such accuracy and aplomb that I expected the street to stop and break into applause. I met Francie and Gall shuffling along like dotards with Prince stalking carefully at their heels. The dog’s fur seemed to crackle with a sort of electric radiance. Francie pawed my lapels and kept repeating something incomprehensible, his jaw making spastic movements as if his mouth were filled with stones. I do not know what I said to him but it must have been affecting, for he began to blubber and pawed at me with renewed fervour, until Gall gave a high whoop and clapped him on the back, which sent him into a fit of horrible, stringy coughing. They passed on. Prince lingered a moment, looking at me speculatively as if it thought I might somehow be the explanation for all this amazing behaviour, then padded off after its master. That dog is going to bite someone, I’m convinced of it.

  When I got home (shortly I shall say a word about home) the telephone in the hall was ringing. It had a tone of vehemence that seemed to suggest it had been ringing for a long time. I held it gingerly to my ear. There is something avid and faintly hysterical about the telephone that makes me always wary of it. The voice on the line was already in mid-flow. I thought it was Mrs Haddon. I leaned against the wall and laid my throbbing brow against its clammy coolness. This place. Trying to murder me. I have to. You must, you must. Not Mrs Haddon. Someone else. With a sudden surge of alarm I recognised Aunt Corky. Her voice boomed and rattled as if she were speaking from the bottom of an enormous metal tank. I bade her calm down but that only made her worse.

  I managed somehow to find a taxi, a large, ancient, wallowing machine that seemed to progress in a series of sliding loops, as if it were spinning with locked wheels along the surface of a frozen river. I sat in the middle of the back seat with my arms outstretched and my hands braced on the plastic seat-cover. Buildings rose and toppled in the windows on either side and strange, staring people reared up and then dropped away behind us like ragdolls. The driver was a squat man with a flattened hat set squarely on a large, loaf-shaped head; he bore a remarkable resemblance to a stand-up comedian of my youth whose name I could not remember. He crouched over the steering wheel with his nose almost touching the windscreen. He seemed to be very cross and I wondered uneasily if when I had first got in I had said something to offend him that I had since forgotten. We slalomed on to the coast road. The sun was muffled in strands of insubstantial cloud and there was an unearthly, creamy luminance on the sea. The effects of the alcohol were fading and the acid of dread began to eat into my befuddled understanding. Hesitantly my mind reached out a feeler and touched this and that fizzing contact point – the pictures, Inspector Hackett, the Da and the Da’s musclebound minder – and at each place I experienced a sharp little shock of fright.

  We laboured up the hill road, gears groaning, and came to a slipping stop outside The Cypresses. I got out and spoke into the microphone and heard the lock disengage. How high up here we seemed, almost airborne. A seagull hanging overhead made a raucous, cackling noise disturbingly reminiscent of the Da’s cracked laugh. When we arrived
at the house the driver objected when I asked him to wait, but in the end he capitulated and sat hunched over the wheel in a sulk and peered after me suspiciously as I went into the porch and knocked at the glass door. My eyeballs burned in their sockets like cinders and there was a taste of hot rust in my mouth. The Haddons were waiting for me, standing side by side in the hall, him stooped and watchfully diffident and she staring off rabbit-eyed and grimly chafing her wrist. I could not help admiring again those nice legs of hers. ‘Mr Morrow,’ she said. There are times when I regret having chosen that name.

  ‘Yes yes,’ I said majestically, holding up a hand to silence her, ‘I have come to take my aunt away.’

  This was as much of a surprise to me as it was to them, and the force of it stopped me in my tracks and I stood swaying. The Haddons looked at each other and Mrs Haddon gave her head a toss.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t think there’s any need to talk to us like that.’

  Like what? I must have been shouting. We all hesitated for a moment, seeming to turn this way and that uncertainly, then wheeled about, all three, and marched in the direction of Aunt Corky’s room. When we got to the foot of the stairs, however, Mr Haddon deftly sloped off. His wife did not register his going but marched on ahead of me, her sensible shoes pummelling the stair-carpet. Those legs.

  I discovered Aunt Corky in consultation with her priest. Father Fanning was a weary-eyed young man, tall and thin and somewhat stooped, with a plume of prematurely white hair that gave him the look of a startled, ungainly bird. He wore a clerical collar and a green suit and sandals with mustard-coloured socks. He bent on me a keen regard and shook my hand warmly. ‘Your aunt has been telling me about you,’ he said with a curious emphasis that smacked to me of effrontery. Aunt Corky clasped her hands. ‘Oh, he has been so good, Father,’ she cried. ‘So good!’ Father Fanning made a steeple of his hands under his chin and smiled and nodded and let fall his eyelids briefly, like a stage cleric. My aunt was wrapped in a tea-gown with elaborate flame-coloured designs leaping up at back and front. She sat on the edge of the bed with the priest standing beside her; they might have been mother and son. Her feet were bare; the sight of an old woman’s toenails is hardly to be borne. I found myself struggling with a rising tide of impatience, treading water and bobbing about annoyingly. I greeted my aunt in a level, accusing voice, and Mrs Haddon, as if she had been awaiting this cue, darted out from behind me and shouted at Aunt Corky, ‘Mr Morrow has come to take you away!’ There was an expectant silence as they waited on me. I understood, my mind grimly clicking its tongue at me, that there was no way out of what I had got myself into. A headache started up like a series of hammer-blows and made it seem as if I were being forced to bend towards the floor in definite but imperceptible stages. I asked Aunt Corky brusquely if she was ready. She glanced at me wildly and a shadow of panic, I thought, passed over her face. Mrs Haddon was suddenly brisk. ‘She’s all packed and ready,’ she said to me, and went to the wardrobe by the window and like a magician’s assistant threw it open with a flourish to reveal empty hangers and bare rails and a bulging carpetbag on the bottom shelf. ‘We have only to pop her into her dress and she’s all yours!’

  Sharon the nurse was summoned and Father Fanning and I were banished to the landing, where we loitered uneasily in an ecclesiastical fall of light from the coloured window there. I felt aggrieved and sorry for myself. I would have liked to hit someone very hard; Father Fanning must have mistaken for self-congratulation the speculative glint in the eye with which I was measuring him, for he nodded again with his eyelids gently closed and said, ‘Yes, you’re doing the right thing, the decent thing.’ I looked at my feet. The priest lowered his voice to a holy hush. ‘You are a good man,’ he said. Really, this was too much. I demurred, giving a sort of leonine snarl and baring my side teeth at him. With gentle firmness he grasped my arm and shook it a little. ‘Yes, it’s true,’ he said, smiling wisely; ‘a good man.’ He lifted a finger, with which I thought for a moment he was going to tap the side of his nose at me; instead he pointed aloft and his smile turned faintly maniacal. ‘The man above is the one who’ll judge,’ he said. ‘Oh yes?’ I said. ‘Then God help me.’ His brow buckled in puzzlement but he continued gamely smiling.

  The door opened and Aunt Corky issued forth at a shakily regal pace, tottering between the nurse and Mrs Haddon, who supported her on their arms. She wore a bulky fur coat with bald patches and a rakishly cocked hat with a veil of stiff black net (yes, a real veil, not one I have imagined for her). In that raggedy fur she bore a striking and obscurely distressing resemblance to an ill-used teddy bear I had been much attached to as a child. She looked at Father Fanning and me and her lip trembled, as if she feared that we might laugh. We descended the stairs with funereal slowness, the women going ahead and the priest and I behind them with our heads bowed and our hands clasped at our backs. A vague and restive band of old women waited in the hall to bid Aunt Corky farewell. I spotted the silked and sashed Miss Leitch among them but she showed no sign today of imagining that she knew me. They were murmurously excited, being unused, I suppose, to the sight of one of their company making an escape from that place not only in a conscious but also a vertical state. On the step of the porch Aunt Corky halted with a surprised and even distrustful air and looked about her at the lawn and the trees and the sea view as if she suspected the whole thing was a false front put up to deceive and lull her. The taxi driver was unexpectedly solicitous and even got out and helped me to lever the old woman into the passenger seat; perhaps she reminded him also of some worn-out, treasured thing from the past. She took off her hat and veil and eyed the no smoking sign pasted to the dashboard and sniffed. Mr Haddon appeared, lugging Aunt Corky’s bag, and the driver had to get out again and stow it in the boot. We started up with a cannonade of shudders and exhaust smoke, and Mr Haddon stepped away backwards from us slowly, like a batman pulling away the chocks. From the porch the gathering of ancient maenads waved wiltingly, while Mrs Haddon stood to one side looking angry and ill-used. Sharon the nurse ran forward and tapped on the window, saying something, but Aunt Corky could not get the window open and the driver did not see the girl, and we drove off and left her standing alone and uncertain, biting her lip and smiling, with the big, spindly, gruesomely festive house hanging over her. ‘Don’t look back!’ my aunt said angrily in a shaky voice, and pulled her neck down into her fur collar. Oh dear God, I was thinking, mentally wringing my hands, what have I done?

  How odd it is, the way the familiar can turn strange in a moment. Home, what I call home, took one look at Aunt Corky and went into a sulk from which it has not yet fully emerged. I felt like an errant husband coming back from a night on the tiles with a doxy hanging on his arm. My flat is on the third floor of a big old crumbling narrow house on a tree-lined, birded street with a church at one end and a cream-painted, uncannily silent convent at the other. I inherited the place from another, real aunt, who died here, sitting alone at the window in the quiet of a summer Sunday evening. You will want to know these details, I hope. I have two big, gaunt rooms, one giving on to the street and the other overlooking an untended, narrow and somehow malignant-looking back garden. There is a partitioned-off kitchen, and a bathroom one flight down on the return. I should have brought you here, I should have brought you here once at least, so you could have left your prints on the place. The other tenants … no, never mind the other tenants. Brown light stands motionless on the stairs and everywhere there is the treacly smell of over-used air. We are a quiet house. By day despite the traffic noises we can hear faintly the tiny, dry staccato of typewriters in the offices on either side of us, though lately these lovely machines, which always make me think of the spoked car-wheels and cinema organs of my childhood, are being replaced increasingly by computers, whose keyboards produce a loose clatter like the sound of false teeth rattling. I like, or liked (your going took the savour from things), the vast, useless sideboard, the blue-black circular table with it
s breathed-on, plumbeous bloom, the dining chairs standing poised and wary like forest animals, the startled mirrors, the carpets that still smell of my dead aunt’s dead cats. These rooms have a secret life of their own. There seems to be always something going on. When I walk into one or other of them unexpectedly – and who is there that would expect me? – I always have the impression of everything having halted in the midst of a stealthy and endless occupation that will quietly start up again as soon as I am out of earshot. It is like living in the innards of a vast, silent and slightly defective clock. Aunt Corky, when we had finally negotiated the three flights of stairs – it is evening by now – looked about her in the half-light with a last reserve of brightness and said, ‘Oh: Berlin!’ and like a surly child the place turned its back on her, and on me.

  By now I was sunk utterly in despondency and so weary I seemed to be melting into the ground, like a snowman. I turned on the gas fire (it uttered a resentful Huh!) and sat Aunt Corky by it swaddled in her furs and went into the bedroom and changed the linen on my bed; the starched sheets when I shook them rattled like distant thunder. When I was done I leaned by the window to rest my fevered brain for a moment. In the wintry twilight the garden stood gaunt and greyly adroop. I did not know myself (do I ever know myself?). That is what home is for, to still the selfs unanswerable questionings; now I had been invaded and the outer doubts were seeping in like fog through every fissure.

  Aunt Corky settled in straight away, calling up old skills, I imagined, from her refugee days. She made a nest for herself in the corner where her bed was, draping her things over the back of a chair and on a towel rack that she had fished out of some cupboard or other. I kept my eyes averted as best I could from this display of geriatric rags, for I have always been squeamish in the underwear department. She, of course, was undaunted by our enforced intimacy. There was the matter of the lavatory, for instance. On that first evening I had to joggle her back down the stairs on my arm, a step at a time, and stand outside the bathroom door humming so as not to hear the sounds of her relieving herself. When she came out and looked up at the climb awaiting her she shook her head and made that soft, clicking noise with her lips that I took for one of the signs of her foreignness, and I thought with foreboding of chamber pots, and worse. Next day, without consulting me, she commandeered from the kitchen a handleless saucepan which she kept under her bed and first thing each morning emptied through the window into the yard three storeys below. I waited in fear for the tenants on the ground floor to complain, but they never did; what did they think was the explanation for it, this tawny matutinal deluge landing with a splat outside their kitchen window? She managed in other ways, too. She liked to cook for herself, having a particular relish for scrambled eggs. She even did some of her laundry at the kitchen sink; I would come home of an evening and find pairs of satin bloomers with elasticated legs – heirlooms, surely – and soggy and lugubriously attenuated stockings hanging above the gas stove on a clothes-horse I had not noticed was there, and all four burners of the stove going full blast. (Her way with gas was something I could not let myself begin to worry about; ditto her habit of smoking in bed.) As for her illness, whatever it was, she showed scant sign of it. She coughed a lot – I pictured her lungs hanging in rubbery tatters, like burst football bladders – and behind the fogbank of her perfume there was detectable an acrid smell, like the smell of tooth decay, only worse, that seemed to me the very stink of mortality. She had a look that lately I catch sometimes myself in my mirror of a morning: the pinched, moist gaze, the slackness, the surprise and sad alarm at time’s slow damage. She seemed hardly to sleep at all. At night, lying on my makeshift bed on the sofa in the front room with my head skewed at one end and my toes braced against the moulded armrest at the other, I would hear her in the bedroom, her mousy scrapings and fumblings, as she moved about in there for hours, waiting for the dawn, I suppose, for those first pallid, hopeful fingerings along the edges of the curtains. She never complained of feeling bad, though there were days when she did not get up at all but lay in the jumbled bed with her face turned to the wall, her hands clenched on the turned-down blanket as if it were the lid of something closing on her that required all her strength to hold ajar. On those bad days I would come sometimes in the afternoons, still quivering from you, with your smell all over me, and sit with her for a while. Although she did not acknowledge me I knew that she knew I was there. It was like being in the presence of a creature of another species, whose silent suffering was happening in a different sphere from the one I inhabited. I held her hand, or should I say she held mine. They were unexpectedly peaceful, these occasions, for me. The light in the room, the colour of tarnished tin, was the light of childhood. I would see again afternoons like this in the far past and myself as a child at a window watching the day fail and the rooks settling in the high, bare trees and the rain like time itself drifting down. That rain: when it grew heavy the drops danced on the shining tar of the road and looked to me like so many momentarily pirouetting little ballerinas; that must have been the very first simile I formulated.