Athena (5 page)

It was a surprise, when I stepped out into the world again, how bright and gay everything seemed, the sun, the gleaming grass, those Van Gogh trees, and the big, light sky with its fringe of coppery clouds; I felt as if I had been away on a long journey and now all at once had arrived back home again. I legged it down the drive as fast as I could go, but when the gate had shut itself behind me I paused and pressed the bell again and the hidden speaker squawked at me as before. But I don’t know what it was I had thought I would say, and after some moments of impatient, metallic breathing the voice-box clicked off, and in the sudden silence I felt foolish and exposed again and turned and skulked away down the hill road.

As I went along under the beneficence of the September afternoon’s blue and deepening gold my heart grew calm and I felt another pang like the one that had pierced me when I smelled the eucalyptus at the gate. What paradisal longings are these that assail me at unconsidered moments when my mind is looking elsewhere? They are not, I think, involuntary memories such as those the celebrated madeleine is supposed to have invoked, for no specific events attach to them, no childhood landscapes, no beloved figures in rustling gowns or top-hats; rather they seem absences, suddenly stumbled upon, redolent of a content that never was but was only longed for, achingly. This mood of vague, sad rapture persisted even when I got back to the city and my steps took me unresisting and only half aware along the river and down Black Street in the direction of Morden’s house. Some part of me must have been brooding on him and his secret trove of pictures stacked in that sealed room. The street was quiet, one side filled with the calm sunlight of late afternoon and the other masked in shadow drawn down sharply like a deep awning. The Boatman’s double doors stood open wide and from the cavernous gloom of the interior a beery waft came rolling. A three-legged dog passed by and bared its side-teeth silently at me in a perfunctory way. Someone in an upstairs room nearby was listlessly practising scales on an out-of-tune piano. Thus does fate, feigning unconcern, arrange its paltry props, squinting at the sky and nonchalantly whistling. I stood on the corner and looked up along Rue Street at the house with its blank windows and broad black door. I was not thinking of anything in particular, just loitering. Or maybe in that impenetrable maze I call my mind I was turning over Morden’s proposition, maybe
that
was the moment when I decided, in the dreamy, drifting way that in me passes for volition, to take on the task of evaluating and cataloguing his cache of peculiar pictures. (There it is again, that notion of volition, intention, decisiveness;
am I weakening in my lack of conviction?) Suddenly the door opened and a young woman dressed in black stepped out and paused a moment on the pavement, checking in her purse – money? a key? – then turned and set off briskly in the direction of Ormond Street. I know you always insisted you saw me there, skulking on the corner, but that’s how I remember it: the door, stop and peer into purse, then turn on heel without a glance and go, head down, and my heart quailing as if it knew already what was in store for it.

I am not naturally curious about people – too self-obsessed for that – but sometimes when my attention is caught I will go to extraordinary lengths to make the most banal discoveries about total strangers. It’s crazy, I know. I will get off a bus miles before my own stop so I can follow a secretary coming home from the office to see where she lives; I will traipse through shopping malls – ah, those happy hunting-grounds! – just to find out what kind of bread or cabbages or toilet rolls a burdened housewife with two snotty kids in tow will buy. And it is not just women, in case some bloodhound’s nostrils are starting to twitch: I follow men, too, children, anyone. No doubt a first-year psychiatry student could put a name to this mild malady. It’s harmless, like picking my nose or biting my nails, and affords me a certain wan pleasure. I am saying all this in my defence (though who my accusers might be I do not know): when I set off that day in surreptitious pursuit of that young woman, a perfect (oh, perfect!) stranger, I had no object in mind other than to know where she was going. I am aware how strident and implausible these protestations of blamelessness sound. Certainly someone observing us making our way along that street, she in sun and I slinking after her on the other, shadowed side, might well have pondered the advisability of alerting a policeman. She was dressed in a short-sleeved black dress and impossible high heels, on which she teetered along at a remarkably swift pace, her
purse clasped to her breast and her slender neck thrust forward and her head bent, so that as she clicked along she seemed to be all the while peering over the edge of a precipice that was steadily receding before her. Very pale, with black hair cut short in page-boy style (my Lulu!) and high, narrow shoulders and very thin legs; even at this distance I could see her little white hands with their pink knuckles and ill-painted nails bitten to the quick. On this calm, bright day she looked odd in her black dress and those black silk seamed stockings and gleaming black stilettos; a new-made widow, I thought, off to hear the reading of the will. When she came to the corner of Ormond Street she paused again, daunted, it seemed, by the crowd and the noise and the stalled herds of rush-hour traffic throbbing in the sun. She glanced over her shoulder (
that
was when you saw me) and I turned away quickly and peered into a shop window, my throat thick with fright and gleeful panic, for this is how I get, all hot and fluttery, when I am in full pursuit and my quarry hesitates as if sensing a waft of my hot breath on her neck. After a moment I noticed that the shop I had stopped in front of was derelict and that the cobwebbed window in which I was feigning such interest was empty. When I turned to look for her again she was gone. I hurried to the corner but there was no sign of her. As always when the object of my morbid interest eludes me like this I felt a flattish sensation, a mixture of disappointment and not quite comprehensible relief. With a lighter step I turned to go back the way I had come – and there she was right in front of me, so close that I almost collided with her, standing motionless in a plum-coloured pool of shadow with her purse still primly clutched to her breast. She was older than I had at first supposed (her age, I have just counted it on the calendar, was twenty-seven years, four months, eleven days and five hours, approximately). The glossy crown of her head came up to the level of my adam’s apple. Hair really very black, blue-black, like
a crow’s wing, and a violet shading in the hollows of her eyes. Identifying marks. Dear God. Absurdly, I see a little black pillbox hat and a black three-quarters veil – a joke, surely, these outlandish accessories, on the part of playful memory? Yet she did reach up to adjust something, a strand of hair or a stray eyelash, I don’t know what, and I noticed the tremor in her hand and the nicotine stains on her fingers. With her small, pale, heart-shaped face averted she was frowning into the middle distance, and when she spoke I was not sure that it was me she was addressing.

2.
The Rape of Proserpine
1655
L. van Hobelijn (1608-1674)

Oil on canvas, 15 × 21½ in. (38.1 × 53.3 cm.)

Although the grandeur of its conception is disproportionate to its modest dimensions, this is van Hobelijn’s technically most successful and perhaps his finest work. The artist has set himself the task of depicting as many as possible of the elements of the myth of the abduction of Demeter’s daughter by the god of the underworld, and the result is a crowded, not to say cluttered, canvas which with its flattened surface textures and uncannily foreshortened perspectives gives more the impression of a still life than the scene of passionate activity it is intended to be. The progression of the seasons, the phenomenon which lies at the heart of this myth, is represented with much subtlety and inventiveness. The year begins at the left of the picture in the vernal meadow by lake Pergus – note the opalescent sheen of water glimpsed through the encircling, dark-hued trees – where Prosperpine’s companions, as yet all unaware of what has befallen her, wander without care amidst the strewn violets and lilies that were let drop from the loosened folds of the girl’s gown when the god seized her. In the foreground the great seated form of Demeter presides over the fertile summer fields, her teeth like barley pearls (or pomegranate seeds?) and with
cornstalks wreathed in her hair: a grotesque, Arcimboldoesque figure, ancient yet commanding, the veritable mother of the mysteries. To her left, at the right of the picture, the trees that fringe the headlands above the narrow inlet of the sea have already turned and there is an autumnal smokiness in the air. Sunk here to her waist in the little waves the nymph Cyane, cursed by the god of death, is dissolving in her own bitter tears, while at her back the waters gape where Pluto has hurled his sceptre into the depths. On the surface of the water something floats which when we take a glass to it reveals itself to be a dark-blue sash: it is Proserpine’s girdle, the clue that will lead her grief-demented mother to the underworld in pursuit of her lost daughter. The placing of the girdle in the sea is one of van Hobelijn’s temporal jests, for when we examine the figure of Proserpine suspended above the waves we note that the girdle in fact has not yet fallen from her waist: in this painted world all time is eternally present, and redeemable. With what consummate draughtsmanship has the painter positioned in the pale, marine air the flying chariot with its god and girl. The arrangement of vehicle, horses and passengers measures no more than five centimetres from the flared nostrils of the leading steed to the tips of Proserpine’s wind-rippled hair, yet we feel with overwhelming immediacy the full weight of this hurtling mass of iron and wood and flesh that is about to plunge into the gaping sea. With its sense of suspended yet irresistible violence the moment is an apt prefigurement of the rape shortly to take place in Tartarus. The god’s swarth features are set in a grimace of mingled lust and self-loathing and his upraised arm wielding the great black whip forms a gesture that is at once brutal and heavy with weariness. Proserpine, a frail yet striking figure, intensely realised, seems strangely unconcerned by what is occurring and gazes back over her shoulder, out of the frame, with an air of languid melancholy, caught here as she is between the bright
world of the living and the land of the dead, in neither of which will she ever again be wholly at home. Beyond her, in the background at the top of the picture, Mount Etna is spewing fire and ash over a wintry landscape laid waste already by the wrath of grief-stricken Demeter. We see the broken ploughshare and the starving oxen and the farmer lamenting for his fields made barren by the goddess in her rage at an ungrateful earth that will not give up to her the secret of her daughter’s fate. And so the round of the seasons is completed. We think of other paintings with a seasonal theme, the
Primavera
, for example, but van Hobelijn is not that ‘Botticelli of the North’ some critics claim him to be, and his poor canvas with its jumbled perspectives and heavy-handed symbolism is utterly lacking in the poise, the celestial repose, the sense of unheard music sounding through its pellucid airs, that make of the Italian painter’s work a timeless and inexhaustible masterpiece. However,
The Rape of Proserpine
wields its own eerie yet not inconsiderable power, fraught as it is with presentiments of loss and disaster, and acknowledging as it does love’s destructiveness, the frailty of human wishes and the tyrannical and irresistible force of destiny.

I know now I should have told her who I was, should have admitted I had been to the house already, had met Morden and seen the pictures. In other words, I should have come clean, but I did not, and so the whole thing started off in a fog of ambiguity and dissimulation. On the other hand, you, I mean she (I must try to stick to the third person, which is after all what you turned out to be), she too it seems was less than candid, for although she treated me that day as if I were no more than an amiable stranger whose burden of solitude she was prepared to lighten for an hour, she insisted later that she had known very well who I was, or that at least – her version of the matter varied – she had known that I was someone who was involved with Morden and the house. Why else would she have accosted me on the street like that, she demanded, in the chalk-on-blackboard shriek by which now and then she betrayed herself; did I think she was in the habit of picking up strange men? I did not answer that but instead diffidently made mention of Cupid and his arrow, which caused her to snort. Anyway, if I had owned up that first day it would have destroyed the clandestine intensity of the occasion. I believe the tone of all that was
to happen between us was set in that first encounter with its sustained, hot hum of mendacity and secret knowing.

It was odd to be shown the house for a second time in the same week. Everything was different, of course. This time the emphases fell on the off-beats. I followed her up the stairs through the cool stillness of afternoon and tried to keep my eyes off her narrow little rump joggling in front of me in its tight sheath of black silk; for reasons that were and continue to be obscure I felt it was incumbent on me not to acknowledge the possibilities of the situation. I think that despite everything I must be at heart a gentleman of the old school. I take this opportunity, before I have put both feet on the slippery slope and can still articulate a balanced sentence (there will be a lot of heavy breathing later on), to state that when it comes to what is called love and all that the word entails I am a dolt. Always was, always will be. I do not understand women, I mean I understand them even less than the rest of my sex seems to do. There are times when I think this failure of comprehension is the prime underlying fact of my life, a blank region of unknowing which in others is a lighted, well-signposted place. Here, in me, in this Bermuda Triangle of the soul, the fine discriminations that are a prerequisite for moral health disappear into empty air and silence and are never heard of again. I could blame the women I have consorted with – my mother, for instance – and of course my sometime wife, could accuse them of not having educated me properly, of not inducting me into at least the minor mysteries of their sorority, but to what avail? None. The lack was in me from the start. Maybe a chromosome went missing in the small bang out of which I was formed. Perhaps that’s it, perhaps that’s what I am, a spoilt woman, in the way that there used to be spoilt priests. That would explain a lot. But no, that is too easy; even if it should be the case, there is too much the possibility of exoneration in it. No, it is not the anima lost in me that I
am after, but the ineffable mystery of the Other (I can hear your ribald snigger); that is what all my life long I have plunged into again and again as into a choked Sargasso Sea wherein I can never find my depth. In you I thought my feet at last would reach the sandy floor where I could wade weightlessly with bubbles kissing my shins and small things skittering under my slow-motion tread. Now it seems I was wrong, wrong again.