Storm Glass (3 page)

All the way back across the city he murmured, “Where have you been, where have you been, where did you go?”

Robert Browning lay dying in his sons Venetian palazzo. Half of his face was shaded by a large velvet curtain which was gathered by his shoulder, the other half lay exposed to the weak winter light. His sister, son, and daughter-in-law stood at the foot of the bed nervously awaiting words or signs from the old man. They spoke to each other silently by means of glances or gestures, hoping they would not miss any kind of signal from his body, mountain-like under the white bedclothes. But for hours now nothing had happened. Browning’s large chest moved up and down in a slow and rhythmic fashion, not unlike an artificially manipulated bellows. He appeared to be unconscious.

But Browning was not unconscious. Rather, he had used the last remnants of his free will to make a final decision. There were to be no last words. How inadequate his words seemed now compared to Shelley’s experience, how silly this monotonous bedridden death. He did not intend to further add to the absurdity by pontificating. He now knew that he had said too much. At this very moment, in London, a volume of superfluous words was coming off the press. All this chatter filling up the space of Shelley’s more important silence. He now knew that when Shelley had spoken it was by choice and not by habit, that the young man’s words had been a response and not a fabrication.

He opened his eyes a crack and found himself staring at the ceiling. The fresco there moved and changed and finally evolved into Shelley’s iconography—an eagle struggling with a serpent.
Suntreader
. The clouds, the white foam of the clouds, like water, the feathers of the great wings becoming lost in this.
Half angel, half bird
. And the blue of the sky, opening now, erasing the ceiling, limitless so that the bird’s wing seemed to vaporize.
A moulted feather, an eagle feather
. Such untravelled distance in which light arrived and disappeared leaving behind something that was not darkness.
His radiant form becoming less radiant
. Leaving its own natural absence with the strength and the suck of a vacuum. No alternate atmosphere to fill the place abandoned.
Suntreader
.

And now Browning understood. It was Shelley’s absence he had carried with him all these years until it had passed beyond his understanding.
Soft star
. Shelley’s emotions so absent from the old poet’s life, his work, leaving him unanswered, speaking through the mouths of others, until he had to turn away from Shelley altogether in anger and disgust. The drowned spirit had outdistanced him wherever he sought it.
Lone and sunny idleness of heaven
. The anger, the disgust, the evaporation.
Suntreader, soft star
. The formless form he never possessed and was never possessed by.

Too weak for anger now, Robert Browning closed his eyes and relaxed his fists, allowing Shelley’s corpse to enter the place in his imagination where once there had been only absence. It floated through the sea of Browning’s mind, its muscles soft under the constant pressure of the ocean. Limp and drifting, the drowned man looked as supple as a mermaid, arms swaying in the current, hair and clothing tossed as if in a slow, slow wind.
His body was losing colour, turning from pastel to opaque, the open eyes staring, pale, as if frozen by an image of the moon. Joints unlocked by moisture, limbs swung easy on their threads of tendon, the spine undulating and relaxed. The absolute grace of this death, that life caught there moving in the arms of the sea. Responding, always responding to the elements.

Now the drowned poet began to move into a kind of Atlantis consisting of Browning’s dream architecture; the unobtainable and the unconstructed. In complete silence the young man swam through the rooms of the Palazzo Manzoni, slipping up and down the staircase, gliding down halls, in and out of fireplaces. He appeared briefly in mirrors. He drifted past balconies to the tower Browning had thought of building at Asolo. He wavered for a few minutes near its crenellated peak before moving in a slow spiral down along its edges to its base.

Browning had just enough time to wish for the drama and the luxury of a death by water. Then his fading attention was caught by the rhythmic bump of a moored gondola against the terrace below. The boat was waiting, he knew, to take his body to the cemetery at San Michele when the afternoon had passed. Shelley had said somewhere that a gondola was a butterfly of which the coffin was a chrysalis.

Suntreader
. Still beyond his grasp. The eagle on the ceiling lost in unfocused fog.
A moulted feather, an eagle feather, well I forget the rest
. The drowned man’s body separated into parts and moved slowly out of Browning’s mind. The old poet contented himself with the thought of one last journey by water. The coffin boat, the chrysalis. Across the Laguna Morta to San Michele. All that cool white marble in exchange for the shifting sands of Lerici.

S
ometimes what you are running away from and what you find when you stop running and arrive somewhere else are almost the same thing—variations on a ghostly theme. Then, a subsequent experience can become a positive print of a shadowy negative in the mind. Understand. There were originally two Johns; a dark silhouette followed by an idea. The latter added detail, colour to the outline of the former. And then there was only one.

In the not too distant past each time I thought of the first John the flat human shape of Peter Pan’s shadow leapt over the window sill of my imagination. Something about the way that shadow was folded up and placed inside a square object that may very well have been a drawer or toy box but that sticks in my mind as a suitcase. Folded up and placed inside some kind of luggage. You see, John’s shadow was always in my luggage, and no matter how far I ran or where I ended up, that shadow ended up there too. Even if I was certain that I had left it at home.

Home. That place where John’s shadow sometimes rang the phone but more often did not—the real John being busy in some office somewhere in another city. One stupid wire connecting our breathing, our tense silences; our bodies occupying rooms that were foreign to the other. Let me put it this way. I knew every detail of the rooms I lived in; the cracked paint around the windows, the stains on the carpets, that bit in the corner where the wallpaper was beginning to peel. I assume that John knew the peculiarities of his rooms as well. But neither of us knew anything about the other’s house—about the place where the other really lived. That was the nature of our relationship.

I always liked the idea that Peter Pan slid across the window ledge and took over the air of Wendy’s room. I liked his curiosity; the way he examined object after object so that, by the time he reached the very surprised Wendy, who was sitting bolt upright in her bed, he really knew her quite well; all about her window sashes and bedside tables, all about her music box and stuffed toys and sleeping brothers. He knew her well enough to demand that she sew his shadow back on immediately. Which she did, making everything more or less as it should be. John knew nothing of the interior of my rooms and didn’t care to know as far as I could tell. So, as a result, I gained full possession of his shadow. He just never knew me well enough to ask for it back. Perhaps he wasn’t even aware that I had it.

Once the shadow was back in place, back where it should be, Wendy and Peter began to have adventures. John and I shared no adventures. We met in neutral rooms in the neutral suburbs of what could have been any city in the world. It was all poured concrete and mirrors and plate-glass windows that
looked out on more poured concrete. You couldn’t take much home with you from spaces such as these. It would be unlikely that you would even remember the pattern on the spread or the pictures on the walls. Nobody stayed for long in these rooms and we knew it. They passed right through them on their way back to the unique furniture of their real lives. This was just the way John wanted it. The memory of me or anything to do with me was something he could do without. Because I was in love with him this angered and hurt me even though I knew that things could be no other way. Perhaps it was this hurt, this anger that made me unconsciously steal his shadow.

I was always running away from John one way or another: planes to here, planes to there, trains to places where there were no phones. Phones that ring, phones that remain silent, phones that are full of awkward sentences and tense silences. I was always running away to anonymous addresses in foreign countries. Sometimes I was annoyed to find John’s shadow in my suitcase when I arrived; sometimes, however, I was relieved. A bit of familiarity in a strange place. And without the possibility of having to deal with the neutrality of the real John this could be comforting. The shadow, I felt, had the ability to care.

And it was portable—unlike John who stayed, stayed, stayed where he was. Stayed with his wife, stayed with his kids, stayed in the city. He wouldn’t have followed me anywhere, not that John, not that real John. He made me come to him in those grey neutral rooms he rented. He locked me into them and pushed me out of them. He covered himself with me and then he showered me off. But I had his shadow with me later for some company.

More than anything, though, I missed knowing some other kinds of rooms; rooms where something, anything, belonged to him, belonged to me, belonged to us.

This time when I arrived at the airport in northern England I was full of John, full of him. On the plane I had read books that I knew he liked, expressed to the stranger beside me opinions that I knew were his. I was even wearing a pair of jeans that were similar to his. Oh, I was full of him all right, more than I usually was when I was running away, and why? Because he had utterly rejected me before I had left. It was always like that: the greater the hurt, the more the compulsion to run away, the more he pumped through my blood stream and nervous system like some kind of bad drug leaving me weak with longing and self-loathing. His indifference was a stimulus to my obsession, it was as simple as that. And so, by the time I stepped off the plane in northern England I was so stunned, so absorbed that I wasn’t sure that his shadow wasn’t my own, that I hadn’t sewn it onto the toes of the wrong body by mistake.

John in my bloodstream, John in my nervous system and John’s shadow attached to every other part of my body as I walked up the flagstone path towards the stone cottage I had rented. Beside me, oblivious to all but my material luggage, my new landlady, Mrs. Southam, who was discussing, at some length, the hardships of the present winter, hardships which had continued well into this month of March. Snow was still present on the tops of the distant hills and the windows of the house were fogged in a way that suggested to me that, although it might be warmer
in than out, one would still be able to see one’s breath in the parlour. (John’s breath or mine?)

“You’ll be wanting,” she was saying, “coal, … maybe smokeless like we’re supposed to burn. But it’s very dear and we burn the old stuff and never get caught. Stanley will make delivery down chute,” she added, thoughtfully.

“Stanley …?”

“Me husband.”

Shades of John’s wife slid into my imagination. I had never met her and had no idea what she was like. But I had invented her, over and over. A practical, attractive woman of the skirt and sweater variety—one who cooked wholesome meals or, if I was feeling tired, a snivelling neurotic with perpetual psychosomatic pains and the ability to manipulate through guilt.

When John travelled to other places, which wasn’t very often, it was she who accompanied him and so, later, when he spoke about those rare times it would be she who shared his memories.

He shared nothing but poured concrete with me. Nothing but walls and windows with curtains obscuring views and doors which either locked you in or out.

The cottage was cold and bright and clean and sharp; the way certain landscapes look in the sun after a sudden, fierce shower. Dustless, smokeless. Even the fire, when I lit it, had a polished look, not at all what you associate with flame, and appeared slightly ridiculous quivering away in the sunlight. But then, I came from a country where central heating abounds and where fires are lit for decorative purposes at night. I remembered that
things always looked different to me in a warm room and I felt that this fire might change shape and colour as it began to throw out heat.

Then John’s shadow nudged my elbow and suggested that I might want to write John a letter in which I could describe my new surroundings. But I knew that a letter from me was the last thing that John wanted to see slipping through the letter slot into the entrance hall of his real life, lying there on the welcome mat demanding an explanation for its presence. So I contented myself, instead, with taking the shadow on a tour of the place we were to inhabit for the next few months.

As it had been, in the beginning, a hand-loom weaver’s cottage, a row of three light-giving windows dominated the single room on the first and second floors, providing all that sunlight that competed with the fire. Upstairs these windows reproduced themselves in sun squares on the lavender-coloured bedspread where I now flung my suitcase. As I unpacked I looked outside to the swells of the hills; moorgrass and then higher snow, and higher still, the uninterrupted blue of the sky. Suddenly, I remembered that there had been sky in some of the rooms I had entered with John, that occasionally, when the room had been on the tenth or eleventh floor he had felt safe enough to leave the curtains open and there had been all that blue behind gigantic sheets of plate glass. And once a bird of some sort had swung down from above and had hit the invisible barrier of the window with a thud that resembled the sound of a snowball hitting a car window. John had been very disturbed by that and had pulled the curtains so that no more birds would be fooled and harmed. So that they would know that the barrier existed and would always exist and would never change or go
away. Because it made it different from all the other times, the sound of that bird breaking itself against our solid transparent window was the only real memory that John and I shared though neither one nor the other of us ever mentioned it. And sometimes I actually believed I could hear an echo of that noise when we were making love; as if it were love itself trying to get into the room, stunning itself on the invisible barrier and then falling ten stories to its death.