Sphinx (29 page)

On the back of the photograph were inscribed the words:

The lines of poetry resonated. I glanced at the book in which the photograph had been hidden - was there any connection? I searched through it and found the three lines in Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’:

What had the group been excavating? I remembered Hermes telling me about Behbeit el-Hagar, an important site in relation to the last days of the Pharaohs. Was it linked to the astrarium in some way? And why had Hugh Wollington lied to me?

I touched the inscription on the inside cover, the slight indentation unfurling a whole scenario in my imagination. An affair, lovemaking, that lay embedded in my wife’s past, secret, unshared; the shadowy figure of a man she’d never told me about. Each new disclosure about Isabella’s past separated us further. How well had I really known her? Was the woman I’d loved an artifice? A composite of all that I’d wanted her to be rather than what she actually was? The idea was too distressing to dwell on. I needed to believe in us, in the authenticity of the marriage - there was little else left.

I glanced back at the name, racking my memory. Enrico Silvio. I’d never heard it before. I knew the Yeats poem was about the end of Christianity - my mother had made me memorise it as a child - but the imagery reverberated in different ways: the circling falcon that had lost its master, the sphinx galvanised into a slow awakening by the possibility of the end of the known world, the crowing of the desert birds flying wildly around the blinking eyes of the colossus; it was an allegory that felt uncomfortably relevant to my own disintegrating world.

I looked around the room, thinking. Isabella had a collection of old address books that she had never thrown away. They had to be somewhere. I searched the room several times. Eventually my gaze fell on a collection of old bags hanging from the back of the door. I went through each of them carefully. Finally I got lucky. It was the beaded shoulder bag I remembered her wearing when we were courting - I knew she’d had it since her student days. The inside smelled musty and the torn silk lining was stained with perfume, lipstick and crumbs of what I suspected might have been hashish. I turned the bag inside out. Slipped between the lining and the bag itself was an address book. I opened it; the handwriting - a simpler, more looped version of the script I’d known - made my heart lurch. I sat down and turned tentatively to the letter ‘S’. It was just a hunch, an instinct I wasn’t sure I wanted to play out. But there it was: ‘ES’ followed by an Oxford phone number.

I knew it was a long shot - the number must have been over five years old - but it was worth a gamble. I glanced at my watch - it was already nine in the morning and light now flooded the living room. I reached for the phone and dialled the number. It rang for ages. I was just about to give up when a woman answered: older, foreign. In a curt voice she told me that Enrico was currently in hospital but was due home later that day.

I gave her my name and number and asked her to tell him I was the widower of Isabella Brambilla. Widower. The word felt like a tragedy that had befallen someone else. The woman’s voice tightened at the mention of Isabella’s name, but perhaps I was imagining it.

I put down the receiver, wanting now to escape the history of my marriage, the claustrophobic flat, London itself and my growing sense of being watched.

Outside I heard the sudden noise of someone on the landing. I froze, ready for the pounding on my front door. I sat there calculating how long it would take for me to grab the astrarium and climb out onto the roof. A second later the steps continued down to the ground floor, followed by the slam of the front door - just my neighbour going to work. After my run-in with Hugh Wollington, I was finally completely convinced of the astrarium’s value and authenticity. And there was no doubt that Hugh Wollington had shown an unhealthy interest in it, that he had played an odd game by pretending it was a fake. There was a violence about the man that worried me. Who knew what he might do next? I had to get out of London, I needed to assess my position and work out my next move. But the question was whether I had inadvertently drawn Gareth into this dangerous and possibly fatal web.

The ringing of the phone startled me.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, Oliver. Gareth here . . . just checking in like I promised. ’

My brother sounded totally exhausted, but I was relieved to hear his voice.

‘How are you?’ I asked, trying not to sound anxious. ‘Have you been home yet?’

‘Well, I am now. Did you get back to West Hampstead okay?’

‘Kind of. Listen, Gareth, have you noticed anything strange - people following you, weird things like that?’ Again, I attempted to sound calm and rational, although I was starting to wonder whether I wasn’t just a touch paranoid.

‘Just the usual groupies. Why, are you paying someone to spy on me?’ he joked.

I didn’t laugh. ‘Just watch your back, okay?’

‘
Jawohl
, Herr Kommandant.’

‘And take care of yourself.’ He knew I was referring to the drug abuse.

‘Didn’t I say I would?’

His voice was sullen now, hostile; I had to win his trust back.

‘I’m going home later, to see Da. Any messages?’

‘Yeah, tell him I’m not dying. Then the old bastard might get off my back.’

There was a click, then the dial tone. Gareth had put the phone down but the genetic thread between us was still there, vibrating like a lightly plucked guitar string.

 

That morning I left via the lane behind the building and walked to the tube station. I had decided it would be easier to lose a tail by immersing myself in the anonymity of King’s Cross station and getting a train to go up north. After mingling in with the commuters, I caught a train to my father’s village, the astrarium carefully stowed in my rucksack.

The station was exactly as I’d remembered it - the painted sign hanging over the platform, the wooden tubs of roses at each end. A familiar sight that made me relax instantly. The only new additions were a Cadbury’s chocolate vending machine placed discreetly next to the ticket office and a brand-new telephone booth installed next to the toilets. Mr Wilcott, the stationmaster, whom I’d known all my life, stood at one end of the platform, a tall, hunched-over individual with a limp from a wound he’d received in the Second World War - a story he used to regale us schoolboys with. After whistling to signal the train’s departure, he limped down the platform towards me.

‘Oliver, is that you?’

‘The one and same, Mr Wilcott.’

‘I’m sorry about your wife, lad. I only met her the once but she were a lovely lass.’

The familiarity of his voice hauled me back into safer times, to the never-changing landscape of my childhood. As I listened to his thick northern accent and the small talk about nothing and everything, I suddenly realised how much I missed the unquestioning acceptance, the anchoring, of village life.

‘Did Da tell you?’ I asked.

‘Oh aye, he were very upset, you know. He’ll be glad to see you. With us long?’

‘Just the night, I’m afraid.’

‘Shame. Your da’s been ever so lonely since your mother passed. Stay longer - surely it’ll do you good to see a few old faces?’

‘I’d like to but I can’t afford the time.’

‘In that case, I’ll see you off tomorrow - the 10.45, is it?’

‘Aye.’

I walked down the stairs and onto the street, the rucksack hoisted over my shoulder. I’d planned to walk to my father’s house through the village - the same route I’d taken every day to and from school decades before. But now I didn’t feel like meeting anyone else; I decided to cut through the small field that led onto the row of terraced houses where my father lived and where I’d lived until leaving for university at eighteen. My mother had died five years before and I realised that the last time I’d visited had been for her funeral. It was still difficult for me not to expect her to be waiting with my father at the door of the small red-brick terrace house.

The meadow was filled with buttercups and daisies whose tiny stems bent with each gust of wind coming off the Fens. There was the faint smell of cow manure and the tang of wet peat. This had been one of the places where I’d done my dreaming as a child, staring up at the sky and imagining each cloud was a magic carpet on which I could escape - to exotic places, to new faces and landscapes. I stood, breathing in deeply, strongly tempted to lie down in the grass in the hope that time would reel back and I’d stand up as a ten-year-old. Cleanly. Innocently. Instead, I hoisted the astrarium back over my shoulder and kept walking.

 

My father stood waiting at the door of the small terrace house, his frame, once angular and impressive in its height, buckled with gravity, like an ancient tree. It was a shock seeing him so aged, and instinctively I found myself looking for the small frail figure of my mother.

The house was part of an estate built for miners in the 1920s - a harsh grid of narrow streets and small, terraced, architecturally monotonous red-brick dwellings. The railway line ran behind the terrace where my father lived, and alongside it stood a neat patchwork of allotment gardens. The one that belonged to my father was filled with marrows, tomatoes, strawberries and the occasional rose bush. This small oblong of territory was his pride and joy. It was where he’d disappear to for hours after church on Sundays. It was also a place that we, his sons, were excluded from. Even now it was impossible to look at the allotment without feeling resentful.

The house had two bedrooms upstairs, and downstairs there were a front room with a fireplace and a kitchen at the back. There was an outside toilet at the end of the concrete yard; no bathroom, no place to wash except for the kitchen sink. When I was a child we’d bathed in front of the fire in an old tin bath every Sunday night. Da first, then my mother, then myself, and finally Gareth. I would watch my father from the other side of the fireplace, his long skinny back mottled with the blue-black of coal dust, the mystery of his cock and balls a swinging shadow as he gingerly folded himself into the short tub. This rebirth of his, this transformation from black-faced Cyclops with the miner’s lamp on his forehead to mere mortal was my first memory. I must have been about one at the time, and it both fascinated and appalled me. I too wanted to go down into the earth, but I didn’t want it to poison me.

In the early 1960s, at the end of my first year as a successful consultant, I’d offered to pay for an extension to house a bathroom. My father had been furious. ‘I’ll not take charity from me own son,’ he’d told my mother. It had been a year until he’d agreed to talk to me again. But that was my father - as proud and truculent as the landscape he’d grown up in.

‘I thought you’d come in one of your fancy cars,’ he barked awkwardly from the door. I noticed he was clutching a walking stick, his huge bluish knuckles knotted over the wood. He was also wearing a woman’s cardigan, the top pearl button fastened tight, the pale pink wool stretched over his vest. I didn’t dare ask where it was from.

‘I took the train,’ I said. ‘The car’s still garaged - I haven’t had a chance to collect it since I got back.’

My father stared at me, his deep-set eyes searching my face. His skin was hollowed under the cheekbones, the wrinkles a topography of disappointment and anger. Today, though, the eyes were kind.

‘I’ve had tea on the table for over an hour,’ he said. ‘But I can put the kettle on again.’

‘That’ll be nice.’

Without shaking hands, we both entered the house.

Later that night, we sat in the tiny front room watching an episode of
The Benny Hill Show
- one of my father’s few indulgences - on the small black-and-white television I’d bought my parents five Christmases before, mainly to entertain my then-invalided mother. The silence between us was deafening. I’d often suspected this had been one of the many reasons I’d married Isabella - her voice had always run like a stream over my own impenetrable silences. In four hours my father still hadn’t mentioned her death. We’d talked about Gareth’s health, the weather, the latest disputes the miners’ union was having with management, Harold Wilson, Enoch Powell, the failing train services and the state of my father’s meticulously maintained allotment. We circled around the subject of my wife’s drowning like crows over a recently ploughed field.

The Benny Hill Show
finished with the rotund comedian chasing a buxom pigtailed blonde across the screen and my father, who still believed that using the television wore it out, got up to switch it off. On the way back to his armchair, he opened the sideboard drawer where he’d always kept a tin of sherbet lemons. Pulling it out with a rattle, he offered me one.