Athena (25 page)

Since I am no longer speaking to anyone except myself (and maybe some dazed survivor of Armageddon, in foot-rags and squashed top-hat, idly turning over these scorched pages in his bomb-shelter of a night), I do not know why I should go on fussing over niceties of narrative structure, but
I do. It troubles me, for instance, that at about this point I have a problem with time. After that Day of Revelation there is a hiatus. A day and night at least must have passed before Aunt Corky’s interment but I have no recollection of that interval. Surely I would have tried to see you; surely, knowing all that I now knew, and with so much more still to know, my first thought would have been to confront you? But I stayed clear of Rue Street, where the gin-trap and the men with the guns were, and instead laid low in my hole, licking my wounds.

The sun shone for Aunt Corky’s funeral, weak but steady, though the day was cold. The Da turned up. God knows how he knew the time and place. I was surprised at how glad I was of his presence. Aunt Corky too would have been pleased, I’m sure. The big mauve car came swarming up the cemetery drive, incongruously gay amid the sombre yews and gesticulating marble angels, and drew to an abrupt stop, its front parts nodding. Popeye in his outsized suit shot out from behind the wheel in his whirling way and snatched open the rear door, and with a heave and a shove the Da emerged and stood and looked about him with an air of satisfaction. Today he was wearing a plain dark suit and dark overcoat; the absence of a costume I took for a mark of respect for the deceased, unless this sober outfit were another, subtler form of disguise. Spotting me he advanced in stately fashion, breasting the air like an ocean liner through the waves, chest stuck out and the wings of his coat billowing, and gravely shook my hand. ‘She was a grand woman,’ he said, pursing his lips and nodding, ‘grand.’ Then he stood aside and gave slow-witted Popeye a glare and the young man awkwardly stepped forward and offered me a surprisingly delicate, fine-boned, fat-fingered little hand (where …? whose …?) and looked at my knees and muttered something that I did not catch. The three of us walked together to the graveside over the still-lush grass
in a not uncomfortable silence; nothing like a funeral for promoting a sense of fellowship among the quick. The sky was very high and still and blue. The priest and the undertaker were there, and also, to my surprise, with his hands clasped before his flies and his head bowed, dark-suited Mr Haddon; in the open air his round, smooth face had a pinkish tinge and his fair hair seemed transparent. He gave me a studiedly mournful glance and lowered his gaze again. The ceremony was brief. The priest stumbled over Aunt Corky’s consonantal surname. As soon as the prayers were done a canary-yellow mechanical digger trundled forward and set to work with strangely anthropomorphic, jerky movements, like an idiot child eating fistfuls of clay. I turned and made off at once, fearing to be spoken to by Haddon. The Da stuck with me, however.

We went to a pub close by the cemetery for what he called a funeral jar. I like pubs in the morningtime, with that stale, jaded, faintly shamefaced air they have, as if a night-long debauch has just stumbled exhaustedly to an end. This was one of those brand-new antique places with fake wood and polished brass and a great many very clean and curiously blind-looking mirrors. The sun coming in at the tops of the windows suggested strong spotlights banked up outside on the pavement. We sat in a pool of shadowed quiet at a table in the corner and Popeye was sent to order our drinks. The Da watched him with a gloomy eye and sighed. ‘Have you any children yourself?’ he said to me. ‘I thought I heard you too had a son …’

Popeye returned, hunched in popeyed concentration with three glasses perilously clasped between his small hands, and the light caught his face and something leaped out at me for a second, something that was him and not him, and that I seemed to know from somewhere else (this is all with the benefit of shameless hindsight, of course). He set the drinks on the table. The Da lifted his glass in silent tribute to the
dead. He drank deep of his pint and set it down and licked a moustache of froth from his upper lip. Then he leaned back at ease with his arms folded and began to tell me of the techniques he had developed for dealing with police interrogations, to which he had been subjected frequently over the years. ‘The thing is not to say a word no matter what,’ he said. ‘Drives them mad. Do you know what the best trick is? Tell him, Cyril.’ Popeye rolled an eye and chuckled and began to jerk a hand up and down in his lap with fingers and thumb joined in a ring. The Da nodded at me. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Just take out the lad and sit there in front of them waggling away. Puts them off their bacon and cabbage, I can tell you.’ He cackled. ‘I’ll try it on Hackett,’ he said, ‘when he has me in to help him with his enquiries.’ He laughed again and slapped his knee, and then, bethinking himself and the occasion, he turned solemn again, and coughed and buried his nose in his pint glass. A restive silence settled on the table and Popeye began to fidget, looking about the bar in a bored fashion and whistling faintly through his teeth. The Da sat back and eyed me with an amused and speculative light.

‘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 …