Napoleon's Roads (13 page)

THE PANTHER

I came across the panther in the National Gallery, in a painting entitled
Bestiary
by a little-known French artist of the late eighteenth century, Auguste Lorrain. I remember thinking how ordinary the painting was and wondering why anyone would have wanted to enshrine it at all, until I saw it there, the panther, in the shadows at the back, seeming to stare – no, I will say
staring
– directly at me, its eyes so piercing they seemed to be tracking my thought itself. I mumbled something and my companion, leaning towards me, asked what I had said. ‘Nothing,' I replied, ‘nothing,' and then, in afterthought, ‘Why do you think it is, whenever artists are doing compositions of this kind – you know, all these Temptations of Saint Anthony and the like – that they have to put in there, a
panther
?' My friend looked at me, then at the painting, quite closely, and then at me again, and at last, a quizzical look on his face, shrugged. Only later did it occur to me that he had probably not seen the panther at all.

We went out for a drink afterwards, and talked about other things. After two glasses of wine and a long discussion about the coming election I suggested we go off to dinner somewhere, but he, a married man, was due home and so we parted on the pavement outside and I walked back towards my own small, book-crowded house through the old quarter, pausing over the curiosities in the boutique windows, and out, down Republic Avenue, along the edge of the National Gardens.

It was only then, away from the lights of the restaurants and cafés and the congenial congestion of the narrow streets, that I began to get the feeling that, although I could see no other pedestrian within fifty metres before or behind me, I was not alone. I stopped and peered into the shadows of the Gardens, listening intently, but could see or hear nothing. Twenty metres further on, the feeling continuing, I stopped, repeated my survey, and decided to cross to the other side of the avenue where the lighting was better and there were more people about. I do not carry much money but the little I do is hard-earned and I don't much fancy being mugged for it. Five minutes later, at my door, I paused and looked back before entering. It was a warm night. Bats were already darting about the streetlights. Apart from an elderly man putting out garbage on the other side of the road, there seemed to be nobody around.

Inside, I poured myself another glass of wine and began to think about food. There was little in the pantry – I should have been shopping rather than at the gallery – but within a few minutes I had the makings of a pasta with onions, garlic, olives, crushed dried pepper and some of the fine, rich oil I bring with me from my sister's neighbour in the country. I then set to opening my mail and had just shuffled through the half-dozen envelopes – bank statements, bills, charities asking for money, a letter from my publisher doubtless telling me how poorly my books were selling – when I heard a muted thud in my courtyard. A burglar, I thought immediately, and my heart raced as I stepped back into a small alcove by the telephone, from which I could watch the French doors – thankfully locked – without being observed.

A shadow moved there, black against the night's blackness, too low to be human, unless this burglar had injured himself in his drop from the wall, or was accustomed to approaching on all fours. A cat, I thought, but this was far too big. A large dog? But dogs do not leap walls. And what could it want? And then I saw the eyes. Exactly as they had been in the gallery. Absurd. Impossible. Electrifying. My first inclination was to think, in some embarrassment, that I was losing my mind. I looked away, a reflex action, and then back again, to find them thankfully vanished – the eyes and the shadow both.

Not
wanting
to see them, I suppose, I turned and got on with my dinner, reflecting upon the matter as I ate. If I had been dreaming then the dream had a remarkable realism and intensity. And as to my mind, well, it had not as yet shown any other signs of deterioration. But perhaps one could not oneself be always the best judge. Clearly it would be better to investigate than to ignore the issue. My meal over, I took my plate into the kitchen, came back and bent down, looked more closely through the door-glass into the darkness. Nothing. At first. Nothing. But then I looked up. The tree. There is a large tree on the other side of the courtyard, an old plane tree, with strong lower branches, upon one of which a panther was stretched out, staring into me. As if it had been waiting for a signal it now rose, leapt down – that quiet thud again – and ambled across the flagstones.

It seemed that there was little to do but open the door and allow the creature ingress. Strangely the prospect did not strike me with fear. Rather I had a feeling – an impression – of patience and calm expectation, on both sides. As if it already knew the place it walked in, without hurry or hesitation, looking about itself, taking the scent of things at leisure. Having visited the kitchen, the hall, my study, it came back to the living room and took possession of the sofa. Was this dream? Was this insanity? I simply did not know. I sat two hours watching it, and for the most part being watched in return. I had no idea what it was thinking. Eventually, bored or satisfied, it closed its eyes and to all appearances went to sleep. Having in my kitchen no milk or meat, for I do not consume such things, I got for it a large bowl of water, deferring until daylight the question of sustenance. Who knew? If this was all a dream the matter might never arise. Seeing no point in sitting down there again, and feeling too exhilarated for sleep, I went to my study and wrote my diary. A test. In the morning, with any luck, there would be no panther, no bowl of water, nothing written under this day's date.

And indeed in the morning the creature was gone, although only half of the water, and none of my curious entry concerning the events of the night before. How it contrived to open the door I do not know, but then I was never to know, in the year thereafter. It never left while I was there, did not often arrive while I was there. Simply it
was
, on the sofa, or on the arrangement of cushions and blankets that I set up for it in my study. Thankfully it showed – but I should not call it ‘it', since it was very definitely a ‘he' – no interest in following me up to my bed.

Nor was there any knowing when he would be there or not. Sometimes he was with me several evenings in a row; sometimes gone for a week. Where he went when he was not with me I cannot say. Perhaps out into the countryside. Perhaps to some other abode. Perhaps back to the gallery, up into the painting again. Once, in the early months, upon a whim, not having seen him for forty-eight hours or more, I went back there to see. His eyes were there, as on that first day, staring, with only the slightest hint of recognition – the trace of a trace – although I readily admit that even this may have been my imagination. On another occasion, when he'd been almost ten days away, he met me at the National Gardens as I was walking home after dinner with a friend, if a meeting it was to realise that he was accompanying me, in the first tier of shadows, scarcely more than a rustling amongst them, the glint of his eyes now there and now not as he passed beneath the branches. Indeed I put the beginning of our walks, our night perambulations, down to this night, for it can't have been long afterward that, tiring of my writing, I went out to walk at midnight, on a night when he was not with me, only to find him, now following and now keeping pace, padding from tree to tree through the suburb as if it was as familiar to him as to me.

I'd become complacent, by this. In the first month I'd done little else but interrogate the relationship almost obsessively in the attempt to determine what kind of being he was, even the extent to which he could be said to be being at all, but with our growing familiarity this had passed. On one such late-evening walk, however, we encountered an acquaintance, approaching so directly that there was no means of avoiding him. I was surprised that my panther did not recede into the shadows, melt strategically away. Instead, while I spoke with this gentleman, a librarian, the panther sat, half in shadow, I'll admit, but so close to heel that I could only presume that my acquaintance quite simply could not see him.

In time these night walks came to mean a lot to me. We would go into the vast Gardens – a place one is still well advised to stay away from after dark – and I became reacquainted with the peace and strangeness there, and the people and creatures who constitute its community of shadows. Drunks. Prostitutes going about their business. Night searchers. Nyctophiles. Once, uncannily, a deer grazing, for whom I immediately feared, only to find that it seemed to know and was not in any way alarmed by my companion. Once an old, great-bearded man who spoke in the strange phrases of a visionary. And, more than once, in the open space by the derelict rotunda, which seemed a kind of chapel to her, a bruised but beautiful young woman, in rags, who seemed to me to be somehow intellectually impaired, but who spoke each time with the panther dearly and softly, as if with an old friend, cradling his head in her hands, holding it to her breast, draping her long silver hair over him, with a tenderness I would suddenly long for.

Now and again, too, other of these night people would speak to us, or so it seemed, or shout, in their dark-shrouded anger or drunkenness. Once a bottle was thrown, he did not flinch; and once a couple were fucking in a broad space of moonlight and he padded over to them, investigated them intimately – surely they felt his hot breath! – then lay only a pace away, staring as if awaiting the moment to devour. And as we left the Gardens, as often as not, there would be an encounter with the amputee who kept vigil from a bench by the entrance, either welcoming or abusing us, depending upon the state of his inebriation, at one time, to my alarm, roaring that the panther had taken his leg, though this proved to be a joke, for there was laughter as we walked away.

On one of the earliest of these night walks, on the far side of the Gardens, my companion disappeared down a lane. The question of food had preoccupied me for a time, until I realised that it seemed no part of what he expected of me. I assumed that he looked after this himself – that someone else was feeding him, perhaps – and that a belly recently filled was one of the reasons he would go to sleep so quickly after reclaiming his couch. Or perhaps, so strange a being as this being was, he had no need of food at all. But now, as if to tell me something – but what was it? – he reappeared with a parcel in his mouth and laid it carefully at my feet. Of meat, packaged for a supermarket and thrown away, having been tainted somehow, or passed its expiry date. It seemed he was asking me to unwrap it, which I did, with little pleasure, the first time I had touched meat in years.

The speed with which he then consumed the contents was disconcerting and the sight most unpleasant, of and in itself but also because he seemed to hate what he was doing; but I must admit that it gave me an idea, and on several occasions thereafter, recollecting, I investigated late at night a butcher's or a supermarket bin and brought home things I found there. The idea of eating the flesh of a living creature is abhorrent to me, but so too is the thought that, once its life has been taken so hideously, any portion of its sacred body should suffer the further indignity of being discarded – a logic, I'll admit, so fraught with its own inconsistencies that I'm glad only the panther has ever had to keep my secret.

Towards the end of the summer I went, as always, to visit my sister in the village. Normally I would go for a few days every month or two – she is a painter, and we enjoy each other's company – but for several months I'd not done so, reluctant to abandon my visitor, and despite the protests of my sister, to whom I could offer no satisfactory explanation. I could not avoid my annual sojourn, however, and so it was that I locked up my narrow city house and departed, apprehensive as I was that it might spell an end to this strange relationship.

I need not have worried. It was less than a week before he found me. I was sitting out with my sister one evening, drinking a last glass of wine with her in her large garden, when I became conscious of his eyes, staring from under the oleander, out of my sister's line of sight. It was possible that she might be one of those who would not see him, but she and I are so intimate, in so many ways, that I had little confidence of this. In the city I live reclusively, within the confines of my house, largely unobserved, but that was not the case here. Even if she could not see the panther – but he seemed to
choose
who would see him – it would be hard for me to behave as if he were not there.

‘You know,' I said, slowly, after a break in our conversation, the panther's eyes appearing to urge me to continue, ‘that I have been absorbed, lately – preoccupied – in town …'

‘Yes,' she said, leaning in a little, encouraging. She wanted me to have a partner, a lover, and I imagined she thought I was about to tell her of one. But as I went on, explaining everything, expecting, even from her, nothing but alarm and incredulity, I found only wide-eyed intrigue.

‘But I know!' she said at last, ‘I have seen him! The day after you came. In the orchard, near the barn. I am so glad! I thought I was losing my mind!' And then, after a pause, as if sensing, suddenly, its presence, ‘But why do you bring this up now?' And I told her, instructed her, to look around calmly, with no sudden movement, into the shadow beneath the dark bushes with their moon-pale flowers.

In retrospect I see it as a turning-point, that moment in the garden. We managed the next two weeks quite well. The panther was an almost constant presence, and now that he had made my sister's acquaintance – clearly the thing he had been seeking that evening – a presence much closer to the house, although, oddly, he never sought to enter. And, when I returned to the city, within hours he was there.

It was some time in the third week of September that I heard from my sister, a phone call in which, for several minutes, she seemed uncharacteristically to avoid coming to her point. Eventually, however, she asked about ‘my' panther, and I described how swiftly he had made his way back, and how easily we'd resumed our urban routine, our midnight walks, our forays into the National Gardens.