Athena Read online

  ‘Where are they,’ I said, ‘the pictures? I mean the real ones.’

  Popeye stopped whistling and sat very still, looking at nothing. The Da gazed at me for a moment, considering, then laughed and shook his head and held up a commanding hand. ‘No: no shop,’ he said. ‘Respect for the dead. I’m in the export business now. Have another drink.’ He went on watching me with a mischievous smile, playfully. ‘Did Morden pay you for the work you did?’ he said. ‘Present him with a bill, that’s the thing. List it all out: to expert advice, such-and-such. You earned it.’ He paused, and leaned forward and set his face close to mine. ‘Or did you get what you wanted?’ he said. He watched me for a moment with a sort of stony smile. ‘She’s the genuine article, all right,’ he said. ‘A real beauty.’ And he took up his glass and drained it and gave me a last, lewd wink.

  The thinned-out sunlight seemed charged and sharpened as I ran through the streets to Rue Street: I have always lived in the midst of a pathetic fallacy. She was gone, of course. So were the pictures, my table, books, instruments, everything; the chaise-longue had been stripped, the sheets and pillows taken away. We might never have been there. I swarmed through the house, up and down the stairs like a maddened spider, muttering to myself. I must have been a comic sight. I had lost her, I knew, yet I would not stop searching, as if by these frantic spirallings through the empty house I might conjure some living vision of her out of the very air. In the end, exhausted, I went back to our now emptied room and sank down on the chaise-longue and sat for a long time, I think it was a long time, with shaking hands on shaking knees, staring at the roofs and the still sky beyond the window. I know the mind cannot go blank but there are times when a sort of merciful fog settles on it through which things blunder in helpless unrecognition. Far off on a rooftop a workman in a boiler suit had appeared and was clambering laboriously among the chimney-pots; he seemed impossibly huge, with bowed arms and a great blunt head and tubular legs. I watched him for a while; what was he doing out there? Idly and with a grim sense of exhilaration I considered what it would be to fling myself from a high place: the receiving air, the surprise of such speed, and everything whirling and swaying. Would I have time to hear the slap and smash before oblivion came? Presently I rose to go, and it was then that I found her note, scribbled in pencil on a piece of grey pasteboard torn from a matchbox and attached to the arm of the couch with a safety pin. It spoke in her voice. ‘Must go. Sorry. Write to me.’ There was no signature, and no address. I sat down again suddenly, winded, as if I had been punched very hard in the midriff. I have not got my breath back yet.

  If only I could end it here.

  I do not know for how long the noises had been going on before I noticed them. They were not noises, exactly, but rather modulations of the silence. I crept downstairs, pausing at every other step to listen. The basement was dark. I stopped in the doorway in the faint glow falling darkly from the high lunette at the far end of the corridor. Linseed oil, turpentine, old-fashioned wood glue. I remembered A. bringing me here that first day, my arm pressed in hers, a shimmer of excited laughter running through her. She had shown me what I could not see, what I would not understand.

  In the dark before me Francie laughed quietly and said, ‘You too, eh? Where Jesus left the Jews.’ His voice was blurred. I switched on the light and he put up a hand to shade his eyes from the weak glare of the bare bulb. He was lying on the floor beside the workbench on a makeshift pallet of rags and old coats. ‘You wouldn’t have a fag, I suppose?’ he said. In fact, I had: the packet I had bought in the café that breakfast time an aeon ago was still in my pocket, battered but intact; the coincidence, or whatever it was, struck me as comical. He sat up and fished about in his pockets for a match. Had it not been for the ginger suit (lining lolling like a tongue from a torn lapel) and wispy red hair I might not have recognised him. His face was bruised and swollen, a meat-coloured puffball with rubber lips and purple and honeysuckle-yellow eye-sockets. One of his front teeth was gone, and each time before he spoke he had to organise his tongue to the new arrangement of his mouth. He held the cigarette in a shaking hand, the swollen index finger of which stuck out stiffly at an oblique angle. I sat down on the floor beside him with my arms around my knees. He smelled warmly of blood and pounded flesh. He squinted at me, and chuckled, and coughed. I asked him what had happened to him and he shrugged. ‘Your friend Hackett,’ he said. ‘Brought me in for a chat. What could I tell him? Morden forgot to leave a forwarding address.’

  I saw a long straight road with poplars and an ochre- and olive-green mountain in the distance. Paysage. My demoiselle.

  There is an interval, I have discovered, a little period of grace the heart affords itself, between the acknowledgment of loss and the onset of mourning. It is effected by a simple, or impossibly complicated, piece of legerdemain by which a blocking something is inserted between the door-frame and the suddenly slamming door, so that a chink of light remains, however briefly. In my case curiosity was the wedge. Suddenly I was agog to know how they had done it, and why, to be told of the forger’s art, the tricks of the trade, to be admitted to the grand arcanum. Not that I was interested, really. What I wanted, squatting with Francie there in the gloom of that Piranesian vault, was to have it all turned into a tale, made fabulous, unreal, harmless.

  ‘Gall and Plunkett painted them,’ Francie said with a shrug, ‘and I did the framing.’ He waved a hand, and winced. ‘Down here. Day and night for a week. And what did I get for my trouble?’ He contemplated his torn coat, his broken finger. ‘We dried them under the lamps,’ he said, ‘they were still sticky when he showed them to you and you never noticed.’

  Tarraa!

  ‘What were they for?’ I said.

  He fixed me with a bloodied eye and seemed to grin.

  ‘You’d like to know, now, wouldn’t you,’ he said.

  Then he leaned his head back against the leg of the bench and smoked for a while in silence.

  There really was a man called Marbot, by the way. Yes, he was real, even if everything else was fake. Amazing.

  Francie sighed. ‘And Hackett had poor Prince destroyed,’ he said.

  The world when I stepped back into it was immense, and hollowed out somehow. I saw myself for the rest of my days rattling about helplessly like a shrivelled pea in this vast shell. I walked homeward slowly, taking cautious little steps, as if I were carrying myself carefully in my own arms. The day was overcast, with a greasy drizzle billowing sideways into the streets like a crooked curtain. Things around me shimmered and shook, edged with a garish flaring like a migraine aura. In the flat I spent what seemed hours wandering abstractedly from room to room or sitting by the window watching the winter evening glimmer briefly and then slowly fade. I dragged Aunt Corky’s bag from under the bed and went through her things. It was something to do. Lugubrious rain-light slithered down the window. I unrolled her yellowed papers; they crackled eagerly in my hands, like papyrus, they couldn’t wait to betray her. She had been no more Dutch than I am. Before the war she had been married briefly to an engineer who had come from Holland to build a bridge and who abandoned her as soon as the last span was in place (the bridge later fell down, as I recall, with considerable loss of life). I sat on the floor and would have laughed if I could. What an actress! Such dedication! All those years keeping that fiction going, with foreign cigarettes and that hint of an accent. I wish I could have shed a tear for you, Auntie dear. Or perhaps I have?

  In the days that followed I could not be still. I walked the streets of the quarter, peering into remembered corners. Everything was the same and yet changed. It was as if I had died and come back. This is how I imagine the dead, wandering lost in a state of vast, objectless bewilderment. I lurked in Rue Street watching the house. No one; there was no one.

  When the story at last came out in the papers I was filled with indignation and proprietorial resentment; it was as if some painful episode of my private life had been dug up by these pig-faced
delvers (our reporter writes …) and spread across eight columns for the diversion of a sniggering public. I did not care that my name appeared; it was my old name, and the mention was purely historical (Previous Theft at Whitewater Recalled), and I was grateful to Hackett for keeping me out of it; no, what galled me, I think, was the way the whole thing, that intricate dance of desire and deceit at the centre of which A. and I had whirled and twined, was turned into a clumping caper, bizarre, farcical almost, all leering snouts and horny hands and bare bums, like something by Bruegel. How could they have reduced such complexity to a few headlines? Daring Robbery – Priceless Cache – Mystery of Pictures’ Whereabouts – Security Man Dies. It was all so impersonal, so … denatured. Morden was not named, though you could almost see our reporter squirming from buttock to buttock, like a boy in class with the right answer, dying to blurt it out. He was a leading businessman with underworld connections; far too dashing a description, I thought, for the distinctly loutish conman I had known. He and A. became the mystery couple. The Da was a notorious criminal figure. A Detective Inspector Hickett was quoted as saying that the police were following a definite line of inquiry. The butcher and the knave and the butcher’s daughter linked hands and stumbled in a ring …

  I saw A. everywhere, of course, just as I had done in the first days, after that first kiss. The streets were thronged with the ghost of her. The world of women had dwindled to a single image. There were certain places where I felt her presence so strongly I was convinced that if I stood for long enough, shivering in anguish, she would surely appear, conjured by the force of my longing. In Swan Alley there was a narrow archway beside a chip shop, it must at one time have been the entrance to something but was bricked off now, where buddleia grew and feral cats congregated, and where one dreamy November twilight we had made awkward, desperate, breath-taking love, standing in our coats and holding on to each other like climbers roped together falling through endless air locked in a last embrace. There I would loiter now, obscurely glad of the squalor, trying to make her appear; and one evening, huddled in the shadows under the archway, racked by sobs, I opened my coat and masturbated into the chip shop’s grease-caked dustbin, gagging on her name.

  This is all confused, I know, unfocused and confused and other near-anagrams indicating distress. But that is how I want it to be, all smeary with tears and lymph and squirming spawn and glass-green mucus: my snail-trail.

  Barbarossa was still living in his box. I was surprised he had survived so far into the winter, huddled there in the cutler’s doorway. I suppose he was pickled by now, preserved, like a homunculus in its jar of alcohol. How even the frailest things could endure, as if to mock me! It was surprising too that the owner of the shop had not had him shifted; it could not have been good for business, to have a character like that living on your doorstep, even if he was careful to absent himself discreetly during business hours. But the derelicts in general, I noticed, seemed to be getting more impudent every day, encroaching more and more upon the city, moving out of the back alleyways into the squares and thoroughfares, bold as brass, colonising the place. At the cocktail hour they would gather with their bottles around an oily, dangerous-looking fire on that bit of waste ground by the bus depot and sing and fight and shout abuse at passers-by. Even when they approached me individually they could be surprisingly truculent. One of them accosted me in Fawn Street one evening, big strapping young fellow with a mouthful of crooked teeth, planted himself in my path with his hand stuck out and said nothing, just glared at me with one eye rolling like the eye of a maddened horse and would not let me pass. There was no one else about and for a minute I thought he might haul off and take a swing at me. Breath like a furnace blast and the skin of his face glazed and blackened as if a flaming torch had been thrust into it. Alarming, I can tell you. Why is it so hard to look a beggar in the eye? Afraid of seeing myself there? No; it’s more a sort of general embarrassment, not just for him but for all of us, if that does not sound too grand. I gave him a coin and made a feeble joke about not squandering it on food and heard myself laugh and hurried on discomfited and obscurely shamed. Instead of which, of course, I should have taken him tenderly in my arms and breathed deep his noxious stink and cried, ‘My friend, my fellow sufferer!’ as the misanthropic sage of Dresden recommends.

  Barbarossa had abandoned the tricolour cap A. had liked so much in favour of a much less picturesque, imitation-leather affair with ear-flaps. Also he sported now a rather natty pair of pinstriped trousers, the kind that hotel porters wear or ambassadors when they are presenting their credentials. I should very much like to know the history of that particular pair of bags. By the way, that beard of his: it did not seem to grow at all, I wonder why; or perhaps it did and I just did not notice it because I saw him every day? His girth was steadily increasing, I noticed that. On what was he growing so rotund? I never saw him eating anything, and the rotgut wine or sherry or whatever it was that he drank – always demurely jacketed in its brown-paper bag – surely could not be so nourishing that it would make him into this roly-poly, Falstaff figure? Perhaps, I thought, he was like those starving black babies one sees so many distressing pictures of these days, their little bellies swollen tight from hunger. He had a fixed course that he followed daily, squaring off the quarter in his burdened, back-tracking way: down Gabriel Street, across Swan Alley into Dog Lane, then along Fawn Street and under the archway there on to the quays, then into Black Street and Hope Alley and down the lane beside The Boatman and so back into Gabriel Street, as the day failed and the shops began to shut and lights came on in uncurtained upper windows, though never in ours, my love, never in ours.

  I have a confession to make. One night when I was passing Barbarossa’s doorway I stopped and gave him a terrible kick. I can’t think why I did it; it’s not as if he were doing me any harm. He was lying there, asleep, I suppose, if he did sleep, wrapped up in his rags, a big, awful bundle in the shadows, and I just drew back my foot and gave him one in the kidneys, or kidney, as hard as I dared. He had a dense, soggy feel to him; it was like kicking a sack of grain. He hardly stirred, did not even turn his head to see who it was that had thus senselessly assaulted him, and gave a short groan, more of gloomy annoyance, I thought, than pain or surprise, as if I had done no more than disturb him in the midst of a pleasant dream. I stood a moment irresolute and then walked on, not sure that the thing had happened at all or if I had imagined it. But it did happen, I did kick the poor brute, for no reason other than pure badness. So much violence in me still, unassuaged.

  What are those damn pipes for? I cannot say. Not everything means something, even in this world.

  One afternoon I witnessed a touching encounter. Iron-grey weather with wind and thin rain like umbrella-spokes. Barbarossa on his rounds turns a corner into Hope Alley and finds himself face to face with Quasimodo and rears back in obvious consternation and displeasure. They must know each other! I halt too, and skulk in a doorway, anxious not to miss a thing. The hunchback gives the burdened one an eager, sweet, complicitous smile, but Barbarossa, clutching to him his fistful of pipes, pushes past him with a scowl. Quasimodo, rebuked and near to tears, hurries on with his head down. Compagnon de misère!

  In those terrible weeks I spent much of my time by the river, especially after nightfall. I liked to feel the heave and surge of water – for in the dark of course one senses rather than sees it – coiling past me like a vast, fat, undulant animal hurrying to somewhere, intent and silent, the slippery lights of the city rolling swiftly along its back. I’m sure I must have seemed a potential suicide, hunched there staring out haggard-eyed from the embankment wall with my misery wrapped around me like a cloak. I would not have been surprised if some night some busybody had grabbed me by the arm, convinced I was about to throw a leg over and go in. Do not do it, my friend, they would have cried, I beseech you, think of all that you will be losing! As if I had not lost all already.

  But I knew I must not give in to self-pity. I had nothin
g to pity myself for. She had been mine for a time, and now she was gone. Gone, but alive, in whatever form life might have taken for her, and from the start that was supposed to be my task: to give her life. Come live in me, I had said, and be my love. Intending, of course, whether I knew it or not, that I in turn would live in her. What I had not bargained for was that this life I was so eager she should embark on would require me in the end to relinquish her. No, that was the wrinkle I had not thought of. Now there I stood, in the midst of winter, a forlorn Baron Frankenstein, holding in my hands the cast-off bandages and the cold electrodes and wondering what Alpine fastnesses she was wandering in, what icy wastes she might be traversing.

  When I heard Aunt Corky had left me her money I bought champagne for the girls at No. 23 to celebrate my windfall. Yes, I had begun to go there again, but mostly for company, now. I saw myself as one of Lautrec’s old roués, debouching from a barouche and doffing my stovepipe to the pinched faces watching with feigned eagerness at the windows. I liked to sit in the parlour chatting in the early evening while business was still unbrisk. I think the girls looked on me as their mascot, their safe man. In their company I glimpsed a simpler, more natural life: does that seem perverse? And of course there were the memories of you there, flickering in the dimness of those mean rooms like shadows thrown by a wavering candle-flame. That day after the reading of the will, when I arrived with my clanking bag of bottles, the place did its best to stir itself out of its afternoon lethargy and we had a little party. I got skittishly drunk and thus fortified had the courage at last to approach Rosie again, our Rosie. She is, I realise, beautiful, in her ravaged way; she has wonderful legs, very long and muscular, with shapely knees, a rare feature, in my admittedly limited experience. Also her skin has that curiously soiled, muddy sheen to it that I find mysteriously exciting (perhaps it reminds me of the feel of you?); this skin tone is the effect of cigarettes, I suspect, for she is a great smoker, unlike you a real addict, going at the fags like billy-o, almost angrily, as if it were an irksome task that had been imposed on her along with the rest of her burdens. At first she was guarded; she remembered me, and asked after you; I lied. She was still wearing that safety pin in her ear; I wondered idly if she took it out at night. Presently the bubbly began to take effect and she told me her story, in that offhand, grimly scoffing way they adopt when speaking about themselves. It was the usual tale: child bride, a drunken husband who ran off, kids to rear, job at the factory that folded, then her friend suggested she give the game a try and here she was. She laughed phlegmily. We were in what Mrs Murphy calls the parlour. Rosie looked about her at the cretonne curtains and lumpy armchairs and the oilcloth-covered table and expelled contemptuous twin steams of smoke through flared nostrils. ‘Better here than on the streets at least,’ she said. I put my hand on her thigh. She was a raw, hard, worn working girl, your opposite in every way, and just what I thought I needed at that moment. But it was not a success. When we went upstairs and lay down on the meagre bed – how quickly these professionals can get out of their clothes! – she ground her hips against mine in a perfunctory simulacrum of passion and afterwards yawned mightily, showing me a mouthful of fillings and breathing a warm, sallow fug of stale tobacco-fumes in my face. She had been better as a witness than a participant. Yet in the melancholy afterglow as I lay on my stomach with chin on hands and the length of her cool, goosefleshed flank pressed against mine – I think she had dropped off for a moment – and looked out through the gap under the curtain at the shivery lights along Black Street I felt a pang of the old, fearful happiness and gave her a hug of gratitude and fond fellowship, to which she responded with a sleepy groan. (None of this is quite right, of course, or quite honest; in truth, I remain in awe of this tough young woman, cowering before her breathless with excitement and fright, trembling in the conviction of enormous, inabsolvable transgression; it might be my mother I am consorting with, as Rosie wields me, her big baby, with a distracted tenderness that carries me back irresistibly to the hot, huddled world of infanthood. Deep waters, these; murky and deep. She has a scar across her lower belly knobbled and hard like a length of knotted nylon string; caesarean section, I presume. What a lot of living she has done in her twenty years. I hope, by the way, I have made you jealous; I hope you are suffering.)