Athena (2 page)

On the top floor we stopped under a peeling plaster dome. I could feel Francie eyeing me still with that expression of subdued mirth. I squared my shoulders and pretended interest in the architecture. There was a circular, railed balcony with white doors giving off it, all shut. I felt like the last Mrs Bluebeard. Francie walked ahead of me. That walk: a kind of slack-heeled, undulating lope, as if he belonged to a species that had only lately begun to go about upright. The limp seemed not to trouble him, seemed, in fact, to confer agility, less a limp than a spring in his step. He opened one of the white doors and again stood aside and waved me forward. ‘Here we are, friend,’ he said jauntily, and made an insolent, clicking noise out of the side of his mouth.
Now listen here, my man
, I said … No, of course I didn’t. I stepped past him. I could sense the dog at my heels and hear its rapid breathing, like the sound of a soft engine hard at work. I do not like dogs.

There are certain moments in life when—

But no, no. We shall dispense with the disquisition on fate and the forked paths that destiny sets us upon and all such claptrap. There are no moments, only the seamless drift; how many times do I have to tell myself this simple truth? That day I could no more have prevented myself from stepping through that doorway than I could have made my heart stop beating or the lymph halt in its courses through my glands. I do not mean to imply there was coercion involved, that, fixed in Francie’s amused, measuring gaze, I had been robbed of all volition; if it were so, how much easier everything would seem. No, what I mean simply is that I did not stop, did not turn aside, but went on, and so closed off all other possibilities. Things happen, therefore they have happened. If there are other worlds in which the alternatives to our actions are played out we may know nothing of them.
Even if I had felt a spider’s web of foreboding brush against my face I would have been drawn irresistibly through it by the force of that linked series of tiny events that began the instant I was born, if not before, and that would bundle me however unceremoniously through today’s confrontation, just as it will propel me on to others more or less fateful than that one until at last I arrive at the last of all and disappear forever into the suddenly shattered mirror of my self. It is what I call my life. It is what I imagine I lead, when all the time it is leading me, like an ox to the shambles.

The corridor in which I found myself was low and broad and cluttered with stuff. White walls again, the peculiar, tired, parched yellowish-white that was the overall no-colour of the interior of the house. Of the same shade and texture, at least in my first vague awareness of them, were the nameless things piled everywhere, the litter of decades – of centuries – resembling, to my eyes, big bundles of slightly soiled clouds or enormous, dried-up blobs of papier mâché. As I picked my way through them I had the impression that they were more than merely rubbish that had been dumped and left here over the years, that they were, rather, a kind of detritus extruded by the place itself, a solidified spume that the walls by some process of slow internal decomposition had spontaneously precipitated. And even later on, when I came to rummage through these recrements, they retained for me something of this desiccated, friable texture, and there were times when I fancied that I too from prolonged contact with them was beginning to moulder and would steadily crumble away until nothing remained of me but a shapeless heap of unidentifiable odds and ends. Behind me Francie swore lightheartedly and kicked a cardboard box out of his way. ‘Heavenly Christ,’ he said with a sigh, ‘this place, this place.’

The corridor before me curved a little – the house was all bends and droops and sudden inclines, the result of subsidence,
according to Morden, who managed to give the word an infernal resonance – and suddenly I came up against another door, this one open an inch or two. Doors standing ajar like that have always filled me with unease; they seem so knowing and somehow suggestive, like an eye about to wink or a mouth opening to laugh. A strange, intense white light was coming from behind it, spilling through the crack as if a great flare of magnesium were burning in the room beyond. It was only daylight, however, falling from two tall and, so it seemed to me at first, slightly canted, overhanging windows. The room, very high and airy, had the look of an atelier. A thing made of poles and pulleys, like a rack for drying washing, was suspended by ropes from the ceiling, and a large, dirty white sheet that seemed as if it had been stretched right across the room and had fallen down at one side was draped in a diagonal sweep from the corner of a window-frame to the floor, making a dramatic effect that was oddly and unaccountably familiar; the whole thing – the high room, the massed, white light, that cascading sash – might have been a background to one of Jacques Louis David’s revolutionary group portraits. Morden followed my glance and said, ‘The Tennis Court Oath eh?,’ and threw me a sharp, ironical look, his great head thrown back. Thus at the very outset we had a demonstration of his divinatory powers. I took a step backwards, shocked, as if one of the floorboards had sprung up under my foot and smacked me bang on the nose. I could see he was pleased with himself. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the place is that old, to the very year; amazing, isn’t it?’

He had the look himself of a somewhat later vintage, less David’s Robespierre than Rodin’s Balzac, standing in the middle of the empty floor wrapped in his long coat with his arms folded high up on his massive chest and looking askance at me down his boxer’s big, splayed nose. The eyes – ah, the eyes! That panther glance! I realised two things simultaneously,
that he was younger than me by a good ten years, and that I was afraid of him; I did not know which of these two facts I found the more disturbing. I heard Francie moving about softly behind me and for a mad moment I had the notion that he was positioning himself to tackle me, like a henchman in the movies who will suddenly yank the victim’s jacket back and pinion his arms so that the boss in his camel-hair coat and raked fedora may step forward smilingly at his leisure and deliver the hapless hero a haymaker into the breadbasket. After an interval of compressed silence Morden, still fixing me with that glossy black stare, seemed to come to a decision and nodded and muttered, ‘Yes indeed, yes indeed,’ and put on a look that was partly a grin and partly a scowl and turned and paced slowly to the window and stood in silence for a long moment contemplating the building opposite. That coat, though, he cannot have been wearing that greatcoat yet, the weather was still too warm; if I have got that detail wrong what else am I misremembering? Anyway, that is how I see him that day, posed there in the light under those beetling windows with his arms still folded and one leg thrust forward from the skirts of his coat, a big, deep-chested, brooding man with flattened features and a moneyed suntan and a lovingly barbered thick long mane of lustreless red-brown hair.

‘So: here you are,’ he said, as if to set aside what had gone before and start all over again. Already I felt out of breath, as if I were being forced to scramble after him back and forth across a steep incline. ‘Yes, here I am,’ I said, not knowing what else to say. Morden looked past me at Francie and raised his eyebrows and said, ‘Hark: he speaks!’ Then he fixed his level, measuring gaze on me once more. Behind me Francie laughed quietly. Another silence. Prince the dog sat in the doorway, tongue lolling, watching us attentively, its vulpine ears erect and faintly twitching.

I’m sure none of this is as it really happened.

‘I think that you can help me,’ Morden said briskly. ‘I hear you are a man a man might trust.’ He seemed to find that briefly amusing and turned aside a faint smirk. His voice was large, resonating in that big chest, and weighted with odd emphases, deliberately running on and falling over itself as if he wanted to make it known that he had not the time or patience to say all he had to say and therefore the words themselves must work overtime; a manufactured voice. He said he had lately acquired the house – I liked that word, acquired – and added, ‘For development,’ waving a beringed and strangely bloated, bloodless hand. ‘Development, preservation, the two in one; big plans, we have; yes, big plans.’ Now it was Francie’s turn to smirk. Oh, they were having a rollicking time, the two of them. Morden nodded in happy satisfaction, contemplating the future and breathing deep through those wide nostrils as if he were snuffing up the heady smells of fresh-cut timber, bricks and mortar. Then he roused himself and turned from the window, suddenly, energetically cheery. ‘And now, I think, a little toast,’ he said. ‘Francie?’

Francie hesitated and for a moment there was rebellion in the air. I turned and together Morden and I looked at him. In the end he shrugged and gave his side teeth a disdainful suck and slouched off with the dog following close behind him. Morden laughed. ‘He’s a bit of an artist himself, you know, is old Francie,’ he said confidingly.

I felt something relax in me with a sort of creak, as if the pawl and ratchet of a suspended, spring-loaded mechanism in my chest had been eased a notch. Morden went back to his silent contemplation at the window. It was very quiet; we might have been in a lift together, the two of us, soundlessly ascending towards I knew not what. I could hear my heart beating; the rate seemed remarkably slow. Strange, the moments like that when everything seems to break free and just drift and anything might happen; it is not like life at all,
then, but some other state, conscious and yet dreamy, in which the self hangs weightless in a sort of fevered stillness. Perhaps there is a kind of volition, after all (involuntary volition? – could there be such a thing?), and perhaps it is in intervals such as this one that, unknowingly, we make our judgments, arrive at decisions, commit ourselves. If so, everything I have ever believed in is wrong (belief in this sense is of course a negative quality). It is an intensely invigorating notion. I do not really credit it; I am just playing here, amusing myself in this brief intermission before everything starts up again.

Presently Francie returned with a bottle of champagne and three wine glasses greyed with dust. Morden took the bottle and removed the foil and the wire cap and gave the cork a peremptory twist; I thought of a hunter putting some plump, sleek creature out of its misery. There was an unexpectedly feeble pop and a limp tongue of froth lolled from the neck. The wine was pink and tepid. Francie got none. Morden clinked his dusty glass against mine. ‘To art!’ he said. I drank but he did not, only raised the glass to his lips in dry dumbshow.

We tramped up and down the house, Morden ahead of me swinging the champagne bottle by the neck and his coat billowing and Francie in the rear going along softly at his syncopated slouch with the dog loping close behind him. This forced march had something violent and at the same time faintly preposterous about it. I had a sense of impending, laughable collapse, as in one of those burlesque dreams in which one finds oneself scampering trouserless through a convulsed crowd of hilariously pointing strangers. Solemnly we processed through high rooms with flaking plaster and torn-up floorboards and windows below which the sunlight’s geometry was laid out in complicated sections. Everywhere there was a sense of the place’s mute embarrassment at being seen like this, in such disarray.

‘… A person by the name of Marbot,’ Morden was saying, ‘Josiah Marbot, esquire, gent. of this ward. Great traveller, great builder, great collector, confidant to the King of Naples, guest of Marie Antoinette at the palace of Versailles (they say she had a clitoris as thick as your thumb, did you know that?). There are letters to him from Madame de Somebody, King Whatsit’s mistress. He made his fortune early, in the linen trade: flax from Flanders, hemp from Ghent, weavers from Bayeux. He paddled around the Low Countries picking up whatever he could find; oh yes, a fine eye for a bargain. He never married, and left his fortune to the Anti-Slavery Society or somesuch. Quaker he was, I believe. A real eighteenth-century type.’ He halted abruptly and I almost walked into him. He smelled of shaving balm and the beginnings of gum disease. He was still carrying his glass of champagne untouched. Mine he refilled. ‘At the end, of course, he went peculiar.’ He held the bottle tilted and fixed me with a beadily playful stare, his eyebrows twitching. ‘Shut himself away here in the house, only a manservant for company, years and years, then died. It’s all written up, I’ve read it. Amazing.’

While he spoke my attention was diverted to something behind him that he did not see. We had come to what seemed the dead-end of a corridor with a narrow, tall blank wall before us and no doors visible. The arrangement struck me as peculiar. The dead-end wall was a lath and plaster affair, and in one place, low down, the plaster had crumbled in a big, jigsaw-puzzle shape through which I could see to the other side: daylight and bare floorboards, and something black: black material, velvet, perhaps, which I took to be a curtain or a narrow screen of some sort until suddenly it moved and I glimpsed the flash of a stockinged leg and the spiked heel of a slender black shoe. The dog moaned softly. ‘Now watch this,’ Morden said, and turned to the blind wall, and, pressed his fingers to a hidden switch or something, and
with a click the narrow wall turned into a door and swung open on creaking hinges. What a childish thrill it was to see it, a wall opening! I felt like one of RLS’s plucky boy heroes. Beyond was a triangular room with a low, grimed window looking across the street to a brick parapet over the top of which I could see the city’s domed and spiked skyline dusted with September sunlight. The furnishings consisted of a single spindle-backed chair left there by someone and forgotten, and a broad, prolapsed chaise-longue that presented itself to our gaze with an air of elephantine suggestiveness. Stacked against the wall and draped with a mildewed dustsheet were what could only be framed pictures, half a dozen or so (eight, in fact; why this coyness?). I peered about: no one, and nothing, save a tang of perfume that was already so faint it might have been only in my imagination. Morden walked forward with an impresario’s swagger and whisked the dustsheet from the stacked pictures. Have a look, he said, gesturing at them with the champagne bottle, swinging it like an indian club. ‘Just have a look!’ While Francie leaned in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and winked at me, dropping with practised ease a lizard’s leathery eyelid.