Shroud Page 22

  I have allowed I hope a decent interval for the laughter, the jeers and the catcalls to subside. Now I must qualify this startling declaration. It was a great surprise to me, a great shock, at this late, last stage of my life, to find myself host to such a sudden and unfamiliar, if not forgotten, emotion. Inside every old man, or inside this one, anyway, there lives on an unageing youth who never had enough of love, of the Keats and moonlight variety, and who at the least encouragement and in the most unsuitable circumstances will leap out, posy in paw and glans athrob, ready to scale the ivy to the rose-hung balcony and his beloved's bedchamber. He is of a serious, a solemn, bent, this flushed and swooning Romeo; he is after more than mere gratification of the flesh. Despite the pococurantish pose to which in the matter of love I am given like all my kind – men, I mean, old or young – I approach the female body on the knees of my soul. Never, since that April evening in my earliest springtime when bad little Lili Erstenheim lifted her skirts for me in the shadows under the staircase of our apartment building and laughing seized my rigid virginity and slipped it effortlessly, like a lollipop, into the hot hollow between her skinny thighs, never, I say, have I been able to breach that holy of holies, wherever I have encountered it, without a numinous shiver. To thrust a limb of one's living flesh into the living flesh of another, how can that be other than a sacred or a sacrilegious act?

  I do not say that this heightened state of reverence survives intact into the afterwards of sweat and tangled sheets and that peculiarly melancholy smell of sea-wrack and ammonia that lingers when the tide of love has ebbed. After the first time, the first two times, in the hotel room, when, half-drunk and obscurely terrified, I had thrown myself upon Cass Cleave in her bed, my mind naturally turned at once to the question of how to get rid of her. Bitter experience in my early academic life had taught me a simple but peremptory lesson, namely, that one might take a student to bed once and get away with it, but to repeat the performance is as good as giving a pledge of life-long passionate devotion, involving marriage and children, a nice big house, and dinner parties, foreign travel, a place in the country, companionship throughout a long and vigorous retirement, then tears at the graveside and a comfortable inheritance to follow. As I lay there through that long afternoon I considered carefully my little predicament. True, Cass Cleave was not the vengeful rival bent on destroying me and my reputation that I had expected; she was, I estimated, just a bright though unstable young woman who had stumbled on a great man's youthful follies, and was eager to see what profit might be made of her discovery. Perhaps merely these hours of passion in the peccant professor's arms would be enough to buy her silence? After all, I told myself, that rascal Schaudeine might not have revealed to her the real secret, that is, the secret of my, or, should I say, Axel Vander's, true identity. Yes, a kiss, a rough cuddle, a few well-fashioned endearments – never before, my darling child, never have I known such, such…! – and then I could get up from this bed and put on my hat and be gone. But I could not do it. At first, it was easy to find excuses not to have done with her just yet. I must have time, must I not, in which to worm out of her the full extent of what she knew about me? And she was disturbed in her head, remember: if I let her go now, who could say what things she might not invent to incriminate me? Even if she were only to bruit it abroad that I had taken her to bed I would be a laughingstock – is there anything more horribly funny than a lustful and infatuate old man? – and besides, I would not have been surprised if under some antique but still flourishing law of this paternalist and fervidly Catholic country the monstrous disparity in age between us were to make me guilty, in a technical sense, of rape. No, no, I must keep her le strategy to adopt.

  Try as I might, though, I could not hide from myself the fact, intolerably shamibeside me, under surveillance, that was the only safe and sensibng to me now, that I was as gone on her as any gonadolescent on his girl. She was, I suppose, the last fire in the winter of my life. This is the part I wish I could skip. How I squirm, thinking of it. I wanted to please her. I wanted her to admire me. I wanted her to deliquesce in my arms, helpless with astonished desire and adoration. I did all the foolish things an old man does when he falls in love with a girl. I tried to seem young, naturally. I made light of my physical afflictions. Why, I even bought a bright new neck-tie. I used to entertain the happy daydream – I am blushing, blushing – of taking her to some exclusive and fabulously expensive clinic where she would be cured of her malady, where together we would banish the interloper Mr. Mandelbaum and mend her mind. In my reveries I conjured the place, a sparkling white complex cunningly designed to look like a ski lodge, clinging to an Alpine crag, with hushed corridors and an ever-smiling staff, and an open verandah where my love in her spotless smock would lie drowsing in the crystalline, pine-scented air, I on one side of her, holding her hand in mine as gently as if it were a sleeping bird, and on the other the good Herr Doktor Jungfreud, with beard and specs and tobacco pipe, smiling down upon us both benignly, working the cure already just by the kindliness of his eye. Then we would set out gloriously on our travels together. We would go everywhere, to Paris, to New York, to Zacatecoluca, to Hy Brasail the Isle of the Blest! And I would teach her things, I would teach her everything that I had learned in a long life. For I knew, of course, that the way to her heart was through my mind. I would write at last the masterpiece that all these years, I would tell her, had been locked inside me, waiting for her to come with the key. She would be my Beatrice, my Laura, my Trilby. What times we should have – what time: for her, I would live forever. It was a splendid fantasy. However, had I harboured any real, honest, human feelings for her I would have protected her and not let her drop from my safe-keeping like a drunk man dropping a brimming glass. Even that is not quite right, I did not even have drunkenness to blame for my lack of care. It was plain inattention. The object of my true regard was not her, the so-called loved one, but myself, the one who loved, so-called. Is it not always thus? Is not love the mirror of burnished gold in which we contemplate our shining selves? Ah, see how I seek to wriggle out of my culpability: since all lovers really love themselves, I am only one among the multitude. It will not do; no, it will not do.

  I am, as is surely apparent by now, a thing made up wholly of poses. In this I may not be unique, it may be thus for everyone, more or less, I do not know, nor care. What I do know is that having lived my life in the awareness, or even if only in the illusion, of being constantly watched, constantly under scrutiny, I am all frontage; stroll around to the back and all you will find is some sawdust and a few shaky struts and a mess of wiring. There is not a sincere bone in the entire body of my text. I have manufactured a voice, as once I manufactured a reputation, from material filched from others. The accent you hear is not mine, for I have no accent. I cannot believe a word out of my own mouth. I used Cass Cleave as a test of my authentic being. No, no, more than that: I seized on her to be my authenticity itself. That was what I was rooting in her for, not pleasure or youth or the last few crumbs of life's grand feast, nothing so frivolous; she was my last chance to be me.

  Incidentally, I find it curious that I failed to note how much my present love-struck state resembled that phantasmagoric parody of amorousness into which poor Magda blundered at the end. She seemed to have reverted in her mind to our earliest days together. She would sit down beside me and stroke my hand, or the side of my neck, murmuring endearments. Her smile, coy yet eager, was the smile of a girl surprised by passion for the first time. Her broad forehead lost its lines, her eyes grew clear. She would follow me about the house, heaving lovelorn sighs or, worse, softly, lewdly laughing. I did not know how to deal with these grotesque displays of ardour. And anyway, in her ruined understanding she was surely embroidering the past, for certainly I had no recollection of ever having engaged with her in this kind of erotic playfulness. Perhaps she was mistaking me for someone else, my predecessor the Pole, for instance. But would that muscle-bound little tyke have submitted himself any
more willingly than I would to such shows of needful and suggestive affection? Maybe it was another kind of love she was acting out. Maybe she took me for the child she had never been able to have – an early, botched abortion had left her barren – and thought I was her huge, ancient, peg-legged, Cyclopian son. Yet it was alarming how affected I could be by her when she was in this state. Once, when we were seated side by side on the couch in the lounge, where I was trying to read, and with a little moan of tenderness she laid her heavy head on my shoulder – it was noon and I had already begun the day's drinking – I suddenly burst into tears. Magda lifted her head and looked at me with what seemed pleased surprise. She put her hand up to my face and caught a single tear on her fingertip before it fell and examined it wonderingly, the plump clear bead shining there, magnifying the whorls of her skin and bearing on its brim a tiny, curved reflection of the window in front of which we were seated.

  I need hardly say I shed no tears in Cass Cleave's presence. As fond an old satyr I may have been as ever stumbled in the wake of fair-limbed nymph, but I had not forfeited all my instinct for cunning and concealment. I was careful to seem to be holding her at emotional arm's length. I laughed at her, and grasped her wrist and squeezed it in my iron claw until she turned pale with pain. Yet for all the swagger and strutting before her, there must at times have been in me a faltering, a flinching, an abject, beseeching light in glance or gaze, that even she, the self-obsessed, could not but recognise and know what was betokened.

  I tried, I tried to know her. I tried to see her plain and clear. I tried to put myself into her inner world, but even at those moments, all too rare, when I managed to hack my way through the thickets of fantasy and illusion inside which she was trapped I – came only to an immemorial, childhood place, a region of accent-less and unemphatic prose, exclusive haunt of the third person. She would not be known; there was not a unified, singular presence there to know. She was one of those creatures – Magda was another such – who exist on a median plane between the inanimate and the super-animate, between clay and angels. Despite any claims to the contrary I may seem to make, I am an ordinary soul. My hungers are human, my aspirations mundane. On the lip of the grave I was happy and grateful to get my hands on a girl – should I deny it? And she, what did she want, of me? At the time I thought, because it was convenient to think so, that profit was what she was after, self-advancement, a little fame, or, if fame was not for the having, notoriety at least. How I misjudged her.

  When did it happen, this famous falling in love, when did I drown in that Rubicon? Impossible to say, exactly, yet I fix on a certain remembered moment which when I call it to mind produces what seems the most telling, most piercing, pang of all the pangs of pain to which I am subject now. It was at the end of that term of imposed para-hospitalization in the hotel room, during which she would not let me out of her sight for more than minutes at a time. My liver had at last made a recovery of sorts from the alcoholic insults I had been piling on it for decades, and with a particular vengeance since coming to the city. Not since youth had I been entirely sober for a full day at a stretch, and now, after a fortnight without a drink, I was so clear-headed that I almost felt dizzy. I registered hardly a tremor anywhere, I, who had not known a completely steady hand since early manhood. I had that heightened sense of self-awareness, that scarcely bearable feeling of being open to the world like a wound, that was last experienced in childhood, when illness seemed a chrysalis out of which one would struggle into a new and quivering, still sticky, not quite opaque version of a former, less developed, self. Everything around me was intensely sharp and clarified and almost painful to the touch, and even to the sight. That day, the day which I am remembering, it was coming on for twilight, the wind had died, the air was hot and still, and I was standing by the open window of the hotel room, re-learning how to knot my tie – extraordinary how illness can deprive one of the simplest skills – and there was traffic below in the street, and there were the sounds of people, and birds of some variety were circling slowly at an immense height, if I leaned forward and craned my neck I could glimpse them up there in the powdery, purple, late sky. I had my back turned to Cass Cleave, but her three-quarters reflection was to be seen beside me in the mirror of the wardrobe door. Something in her attitude made me pause. She was sitting on the side of the unmade bed, motionless, barefoot, her shoulders slumped, holding her shoes one in each hand and gazing before her with a look of helpless desolation that seemed to me echoed somehow, and somehow made all the more awful, by the heartless, glaring whiteness of the bed sheet where she sat and the malignant glint of the mahogany headboard beside her. I had seen this look before, it came over her always when the intolerable difficulty of being uniquely and inescapably herself brought her like this to a baffled halt in the midst of some perfectly ordinary and trivial bit of life's necessary business. For her, a pair of shoes, left and right, could be as insoluble as any conundrum with which the world might confront her. I noted with a kind of horrified tenderness the translucent white skin at her temples where her pinned-up hair was drawn back, and the shape of her knees under the light material of her frock, and the twin faint gleams of reflected window light along her shin-bones. For a moment I was dazzled by the otherness of her. Who was she, what was she, this unknowable creature, sitting there so plausibly in that deep box of mirrored space? Yet it was that very she, in all the impenetrable mysteriousness of her being entirely other, that I suddenly desired, with an intensity that made my heart constrict. I am not speaking of the flesh, I do not mean that kind of desire. What I lusted after and longed to bury myself in up to the hilt was the fact of her being her own being, of her being, for me, unreachably beyond. Do you see? Deep down it is all I have ever wanted, really, to step out of myself and clamber bodily into someone else. Everything had gone still. I dared not move; I thought that if I tried to turn I would not be able to, as if the air had turned into a solid medium in which I was stuck fast. I fancied I could hear the faint calling of those far birds. Then she bent forward with a sigh and set her shoes on the floor, one beside the other, and the movement disturbed the air and made the mirror tremble, and a watery shiver ran across the glass, and the cries of the birds became the traffic noises in the street, and she stood up, and began to say something, and then I did turn to her, the real not the mirrored she, and at my look – in that moment I must have seemed the madder of the two of us – her eyes widened, and she wavered, seeming to shrink back and at the same time to lean irresistibly into me, and I put my ape arms around her and held her with such force in my decrepit, foul embrace that she gasped, and I felt the flutter of her expelled breath against my neck, and if I had been able to speak, I do not know what I would have said.

  Despite such mysteriously intense passages, when I look back to then, which is still the recent past after all, it is strange how little I can see, how little remains that is not remote, diffuse, gone small and indistinct in time's misted-over window pane. Of the three-odd months – and the hyphen, by the way, is optional – that we were together, that she was with me, or I was widi her – I am not sure how to frame the thing – I retain only fragments, pitifully scarce. How did we pass the time, how fill the ordinary hours, the suspended mornings and torpid noons, the evenings that were all deserted corridors and air as dense as the shock-wave after an explosion? I see us sitting opposite each other at a table in the hotel's huge, muffled dining room, where the light falls down from the chandeliers like the light in a mortuary, and the waiters stand about in their cream jackets, fiddling with their bow ties and gloomily inspecting their fingernails. The only other regular is there, an elderly, silver-haired gentleman who lived permanently in a suite on the top floor, and had his own table in a corner by the mirrors, who makes subdued, knitting sounds with his knife and fork and at intervals will pause in eating to clear his throat delicately into a fine, white fist. These are the only sounds I hear, the clicking of the cutlery and the old man clearing his throat. We must have talk
ed, Cass Cleave and I, or she at least must have talked to me, since she was forever talking, at table and in bed, on the streets, in trams and taxis, telling me things, but all that persists, in my ears, is a sort of deep, hollow hum, the kind of hum that lingers for a time in an auditorium after the audience has left. We did things together, she and I, visited places, museums and the like, as diligent as any pair of tourists. We went to Milan, to the Brera, to look at Mantegna's dead Christ and Bellini's Greek Madonna. We made an excursion to Genoa, and spent a pleasant afternoon there strolling in the vast cemetery of Stagione, where the air smelled faintly, sweetly, of the decaying corpses that lay under the clay and in marble vaults everywhere about, and she was fascinated by the larger than life-sized stone scenes of the domestic doings of the dead that lined the long, arcaded walkways. But even in my memories of those more memorable days, what I see of her is not her, but something far less substantial, a wavering presence that seems hardly more than the idle dream of an old man's afternoon. Is it simply because I was so old and she so young that I have kept so little of her? How could I be expected to see her clearly, peering rheumily as I must across the chasm of the years that yawned between us?