Shroud Page 20

  It was spring again when the two toughs waylaid me in the park. They were big bruisers, not as big as I am, but big enough. There are professionals in all walks of life, and after some initial fumbling they did a thorough job. It all happened wordlessly. I wonder that I did not cry out for help – there were always bobbies on the beat in those days. Curiously, I recall the incident from outside, as if I had not been part of it, but a witness, rather, a bad Samaritan hanging back in the bushes. I see myself there, walking purposefully along a path with high laurel hedges on either side. It is coming on for twilight, very nice and calm, the air smelling of grass after its first cutting of the season. I am wearing a grey, double-breasted pin-striped suit, brown brogues, a grey fedora with a black satin band, every inch the gent. I am feeling full of vigour and purpose; I had been working steadily in secret – the secrecy necessitated by the tacit rule laid down by Lady Laura that as her paid paramour I was to appear an amiable but unlettered dolt – and had finished and sent off to a pinkish New York magazine what I consider my first major piece of work, that essay, "Shelley Defaced," which you so much admired. However, here comes a harder reality in the shape of one of my two assailants, in cap and tight, shiny suit, enquiring for a match for his cigarette. I should have known. While I was fishing in my pockets, the other one came up behind me and struck me with a cosh. Yes, a cosh, the real thing. I must have sensed him coming, however, and started to turn, for the blow fell a fraction wide and struck me on, rather than behind, the ear, the spot for which I am told an experienced footpad would have been aiming. Temporarily stunned, I half fell into the arms of the fellow in front of me. There followed a brief interval of strenuous pushing and pulling as he tried to free himself and I held on, while the wielder of the cosh danced heavy-footed around us looking for the chance to hit me again. The one I was clinging on to smelled of soot, a fact, a clue, that afterwards I thought the police would be extremely interested in, but they were not; perhaps violent ambushing is, or was, a common sideline for chimney sweeps – there were so many aspects of English customs and manners of which I remained in ignorance. He breathed effortfully, and seemed more man anything else impatient with me. My ear was humming angrily where the cosh had caught me, and in a moment of suspended stillness, the three of us locked together in straining equilibrium, I saw one of my teeth falling to the ground at the end of a quivering, thin string of bloodied spittle. At length they managed to haul me off the pathway into the laurels, and knocked me down, and went to work in earnest. It is not commonly known that the eyeball is one of me toughest, most resilient muscles in the human body. You could hit it a hammer blow without bursting it, although of course it would be unlikely to function afterwards, as an eye. It was a boot-heel that did for my left orb that evening. Such a blaze of colour I saw for a second, fireworks reds and greens and celestial gold, and then a deep, soft, satin blackness settled in, that I knew would never lift. Possibly it was the same heel, with its razor-sharp metal cleat, that tore open my left inner thigh through my trousers and severed a whole ganglion of nerves.

  I was found, with what I think of now as cruel but faulty aptness, by a pair of lovers, boy and girl. I recall a policeman kneeling on one knee and bending over me, his helmet cradled in the crook of his arm, enquiring politely if I could see him. This struck me as comical. The wet on my face was blood, not rain, as at first I had thought, although plainly it was not raining. The young chap who had found me stepped forward politely and asked the policeman if he and his girl might be on their way, as the girl thought she was going to be sick. My gashed leg was entirely numb, it might have been severed altogemer at the hip for all I could feel of it. Presently an ambulance arrived and I was loaded in and taken away and deposited into a cavernous hospital ward in which all the other beds, twenty or thirty of them, were empty, and sinisterly waiting, their sheets turned down and blankets tucked, their pillows smooth as marble. A harassed little bulldog of a doctor came and examined me, sighing irritably the while. He bandaged my eye, and ordered me to be taken to the operating theatre, where I was inexpertly and partially anaesthetised while he sewed up my leg, and then I was trundled back to the still empty ward and left alone. In the small hours my eye became intolerably painful, but when I shouted for relief no one came. In the morning I was transferred to a private room – Laura had been on the telephone – and at the end of a week I was pronounced strong enough to be driven by ambulance into the country, to a ludicrously picturesque cottage hospital, with rose beds and a weather-vane and ivy around the windows, and white-clad nuns whose elaborate wimples looked to my drugged and pain-racked fancy like the ghosts of giant butterflies. It was here that Laura paid me her first visit.

  She put her head around the door, and crept in, wincing and smiling. She was wearing, I noticed, the clinging blue-grey silk costume she had worn the day we met, or one exactly like it; she did have an instinct for the symbolic. She had brought a picnic hamper and a bottle of champagne and a pile of books for me. She looked at the books and at my bandaged eye and pulled a face. "Not very tactful," she said. "I am sorry." She touched a fingertip to the bandage; I could see her struggling to contain her curiosity. "Is it very painful, darling?" She sat on the bed, avoiding the mound of my trussed-up leg under the covers, and set the hamper between us. I opened the champagne. "My big strong man," she said. When I started to fill a glass for her she gave a little squeal and made a show of staying my hand, saying she had been for a week to a frightfully expensive place where they had thoroughly dried her out. She looked at me from under her lashes and grinned, biting her lip. "Oh, all right, then," she said, "but just the one glass, mind." She asked if they were treating me well here, and sighed crossly and said so they should be, considering the money they were charging her. I said I had expected her to come to see me before now. "He speaks!" she cried, clapping her hands together. Then she looked serious, pouting, and began picking at the coverlet. "I would have come, of course," she said, "only you know how squeamish I am." She told me her mother had sent her love, and could not keep from smirking. I smiled too. She took my hand and squeezed it. "You are not so unhappy, then, darling, are you?" she said. "And you have forgiven me? They were not supposed to hurt you, you know, only give you a fright." I asked her who had hired them for her. She shrugged. She had knocked back three glasses of the champagne and her eyes had a faintly frantic light. We were silent for a while. She went back to teasing a thread out of the coverlet, frowning. "You took my money," she said softly, not looking at me. "You sold my things. That was very naughty." A gust of wind smacked its palm against the window, and a cherry tree outside shook its head, shedding a flurry of pink blossoms. She was still holding my hand, and now she lifted it to her lips and kissed it. "Poor love," she said, smiling sadly.

  She paid all my hospital bills. I wrote to her mother, mentioning some of Laura's more bizarre bedroom predilections, and how embarrassing it would be if word of them was to find its way into the gossip columns, and a week later I received a generous cheque in the post from Berkshire, accompanied by a remarkably dignified letter of reproach from the Dowager. I redeemed one of Laura's rings from the pawnbroker's and sent it back to her. She acknowledged it with a note, saying I was very sweet, and that she was missing me already. A month later I was on the Atlantic, sailing westwards, in a convoy of ten ships, three of which were torpedoed and sunk off the islands of the Azores. On board I met a man, a Swedish functionary of the Red Cross, who promised to enquire into the whereabouts of my family. A month after my arrival in New York he sent me the news that my father had died of malnutrition in a labour camp in southern Poland, where shortly afterwards my mother, no longer capable of productive work, had been shot. Of my siblings, unfortunately, so said the Swede, no information was available.

  So you see, my dear.

  THREE

  Those were, Cass Cleave considered, the best days of all the days, not many, not very many, that they were to spend together. She had a task, which was to take care o
f him. Never had she felt so free of herself. All of her energy and attention was directed toward him. She thought at first he would die, he was so listless and turned inward. She could scarcely tell the difference between his good eye and his bad, for they both seemed equally blank, although he was constantly watching her, she could sense it. If he were to die he would die; it would have been ordained. That was the word that came to her: ordained. She had an almost sanctified sense of purpose. She tended him with that equal mixture of solicitude and harshness that she remembered from the nuns who ran the hospitals where she had spent so much of her childhood. She saw herself, like them, in white, moving silently, on silent feet, carrying something. At other times she was a Christian thrown to the lions before whom the lions had knelt down in meekness; she heard the savage clamour all around her of the crowd crying out for her blood, saw the circle of blue sky above, felt the hot dust under her bare feet. And indeed, he was like some big, ailing beast, lying in his lair, panting softly in the heat, the eyelids slowly closing and slowly opening again, the yellowed gaze directed always a little to the side of her but seeing her all the same. He seldom spoke; entire days went past when she did not hear a word from him. It was May. In. iie mornings, %tv^ Nvould go down, to kve ofcfc›^ ATd ^«?i\. YffiSil wo one was looking and gather up the newspapers that were set out on a big table there for the guests to read, armfuls of them, and bring them back to the room and sit on a chair at the bedside reading aloud to him, choosing items at random. Occasionally he would chuckle at a report of some absurdity, some calamity. When he was tired of listening to her he would turn his face aside and lift a hand and bat the air jadedly, waving her away. He developed a grimace, he would screw up his eyes and smack his lips disgustedly, as if he had a foul taste in his moudi. He smelled, too, no matter how thoroughly she washed him. It was a smell she recognised from long ago but could not think from where, sweetish and soft, not entirely unpleasant, a smell as of something that had died under a bush. She learned to stay out of the lavatory for a good quarter of an hour after he had used it. He said his liver must be rotting. None of this she minded.

  One day the hotel manager stopped her by the fountain in the lobby and spoke to her, smiling broadly without warmth, holding his hands before his breast, the fingers splayed, like a singer in an opera. He asked her if Vander required the doctor to come again. She said no. He said the hotel was concerned. She noticed that, like the doctor's, his hair too was dyed; it looked as if it had been smeared all over with ink. At the lift she turned and he was still standing by the desk, watching her.

  She liked the evenings best of all, when the daylight began to go and she could draw the curtains. Then they might be alone together in the world, not another soul existing. She would order dinner to be brought up, always something simple, an omelette or soup for him, pasta for herself. He demanded wine, of course, but she pretended not to hear, and then he swore at her. The old waiter from the first night did not appear again. She wondered if she might have imagined him; she had imagined others, often, figures who stepped out of her dreams and walked up and down in the world, real as real people. When the food was finished and she had put the tray on the floor outside in the corridor she would run a bath and lie in it for a long time. She felt so weary. The tepid water soothed her. She looked along the pallid length of herself; her skin had the dullish gleam of tarnished silver, and when she stirred, quick flashes ran along her flanks, like phosphorescence. She always left the bathroom door ajar, worrying that he would creep out of bed and get dressed and make his escape. What would she do without him? He was her vocation now.

  She did not sleep. That is, she slept, but so lightly it hardly counted as sleep. She would lie beside him under the sheet, her eyes lightly closed, holding his hand if he would let her, and her mind would drift over all sorts of things, memories, imaginings, notions of the future, a possible future, with him. Sometimes she would dream, too, strange, delicate dreams such as she had never experienced before, if it could be said of dreams that they are experienced. At dawn she was always wide awake. Even though the light could not penetrate the heavy curtains she would know the sun had risen. Each night the wind died and in the morning started up again. It had a name, he told her, it was called the Fôhn, pronounced Fenn, blowing out of season. Everyone complained of it, the waiters, the chambermaid, throwing their eyes to heaven and making a clicking noise at the back of their throats. The chambermaid she had trouble with at first. She wanted to maintain the room herself, clean the bathroom and change the bed linen and even vacuum the floors, but the maid obviously thought this a scandalous idea, not to be countenanced, and there was a tussle between them every morning over the clean towels and the clean sheets. Then Vander said something to the maid in Italian, making a threat, or offering some inducement, and there were no more arguments after that. The woman was from the south. She was short and bandy and ageless, with skin so dark it had a greenish tinge. She smelled of dishwater. Now when Vander spoke to her, after the first time, she laughed at the things he said, and probably blushed, too, only her blushes could not be seen because she was so swarthy, and made little crowing sounds of delight, waggling her head, and sometimes even threw her hands in the air and ran out of the room, squealing. Then, when she had gone and they were left alone again, he would turn a spiteful look on her before lying down on his back like a corpse and closing his eyes and pulling the sheet to his chin.

  In time, out of boredom, she supposed, he began to talk to her again. It was not conversation, of course, he was not interested in anything she might say. He told her things, scraps of reminiscence, gossip about dead scholars, old jokes, fanciful tales, sitting up in bed in an old grey cardigan, red-eyed and unshaven. He spoke about his dead wife. "Magda," he said, " Magdalena," looking into the past and frowning as if in puzzlement, shaking his head. "She was a standing affront to all the things I held cheap." He chuckled, waggling his eyebrows at her, inviting her to admire his wit. He had her go out and buy packs of cards, and they played together for hours. He taught her intricate, arcane games she had never heard of. She told him she loved him and he laughed at her and said not to be a fool, but she noticed how he looked away from her quickly, showing, like a startled horse, the whites of his eyes, the yellows, rather. She said her heart was his. "Heart?" he said, throwing back his head and baring his teeth in that way that he did. "Heart? If it could think, the heart would stop beating. A great writer whom you have not read wrote that. Do not talk to me of heart." That was his way, to laugh, and pretend to be outraged, and cite quotations. Her names for him were Harlequin, and sometimes Svidrigailov. He called her Cassandra. She said if she was Cassandra then he was Agamemnon. Gagamemnon, more like, he said, and did not smile, but scowled. "Today," he told her, "todav you will learn how to play piquet."

  The ceaseless beating of the wind outside excited her. She felt suspended, weightless, airborne, almost. It was like being in a plane in those moments after the initial scramble into the sky when the machine is suddenly freed not only of the earth but of its own desperate effort of flight and for a minute or two pours in a sort of thrumming silence upwards smoothly through the air as if it were flying not of its own accord but had been thrown somehow. Once on a flight going somewhere she had sat beside a man, an engineer, who knew about these things, and when she said she could never understand how the engines stayed on the plane he said what was more remarkable was that the plane could hold on to the engines. She saw straight away what he meant. That was how it was with her, she was the plane and her mind was the jet engines trying to speed away from it. She was barely held together. The slightest jolt might make her fly apart into a million pieces. Everything was like that, the particles all fused together and trying to pull asunder. One instant of imbalance, one dip in the equilibrium, and it would all explode. Yes yes, the voices said eagerly, explode, all explode…

  He did not die. At the end of a fortnight he was strong enough to get up and sit by the open window in the sun. Now
he was ignoring her again. He grew restless, and paced the floor, his dead leg dragging. One day when she was out of the room for only a minute he managed to bribe the chambermaid to bring him a bottle of whisky. When she tried to take it from him he swung a fist at her, his soiled eyes glaring. But he did not drink the whisky, and he did not die.

  As he got better she got worse. All the voices came back, joining all together, jostling to get at her. They said he was wicked, that he would harm her, kill her, even. At night now she fell into a kind of coma in which she could not move her limbs although her mind kept on, tumbling over and over like an electric motor gone out of control. The chambermaid told her that the Holy Shroud was to be put on public display, people from all over the world had come to the city for this rare and momentous occasion. By now Vander was well enough to go out, and she asked him if he would take her to see it. She told him how the Shroud was kept in a silver casket within an iron box inside a marble case in a black marble chapel. It had been taken to France by St. Veronica herself, who had fled the Holy Land after the Crucifixion along with Mary the Mother of God and sailed in a ship along the Mediterranean first to Cyprus and then to the coast of France and settled at last in the Languedoc. Cathars. The Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Freemasons. The Duc d'Orléans, heir in waiting to the French throne. She had studied it all, she had made discoveries, she knew secrets. He mocked her, and said the Shroud was a fake; he said he knew about fakes. Did she really think it was the image of the crucified Christ? But he got up and got dressed. He said he felt dizzy. He said that he would probably fall over in the street, and she would have to drag him by the heels back to the hotel. He described her going along with her head down, clutching his legs like the shafts of a cart, and him behind her on the ground, his arms thrown back in the shape of aV and his jacket and his shirt pulled up and his head bumping on the pavement. He laughed, and lit a cigarette, and coughed. When they came outside, that hot wind was blowing again, making their lips dry and coating their eyelids with a fine film of grit. The city looked unreal, sprawled in the turbulent heat under acid sunlight. They walked in a murk of underwater shadow along the polished marble pavements of the Via Roma, under the tall arcades. She linked her arm tightly in his and wondered if he could feel her trembling. Crowds of people were milling in the dusty piazzas, criss-crossing back and forth about them, blank of expression or frowning vaguely, as if in the aftermath of some tremendous but impalpable event. At first they all seemed to be wandering aimlessly, but then it came to her that there must be a pattern to so much movement, and she saw it as if from above, far above, the myriad lines of people merging and melting and forming again, the design at every point shifting and yet always remaining the same, the immense complex of individuals flowing into and through itself under the guidance of secret, immutable laws, and she at the centre of it all, its unwilling, moving focus. When they entered the Duomo, Vander sat down on a bench to rest, and his stick fell to the floor with an exaggerated clatter. A blue-jawed priest was hearing confessions, sitting in full view in his open box in an attitude of angry dejection, his head inclined to catch the urgent murmurings of an old woman kneeling at his right knee. The Chapel of the Holy Shroud was shut. Why was it shut? She could not understand it. Had the maid lied to her? She hurried agitatedly here and there, asking tourists with their cameras if they knew why the chapel was shut. She could feel Vander watching her, his grin. The tourists stared at her and moved on, uneasily ignoring her pleading questions. She confronted the confessor in his box. He frowned, and spoke a sentence brusquely in a hoarse, angry whisper. She went and crouched beside Vander and squeezed his hand in hers. "It is being shown somewhere else," she said, and gnawed on a thumbnail, looking up at him.