The Cat’s Table (19 page)

That day, on the
Oronsay
, why did I invite you to my cabin along with your young cousin? During the journey I had watched you, and I feared that perhaps you too were being caught in a situation. I recognised the ease of it, and where you were going. But I was not sure. Instead I warned your cousin about the Baron. What I did not fully perceive, or know, that afternoon, was that the truly endangered one was
you
. I had chosen to protect the wrong child. Why did I not see it?

I see my time in Florence through flawed glass, which confuses the pleasure of those days with irony. I would after making love with him in his various ways watch him. The oblong of sunlight coming down the east wall onto his body, all that hair I had not seen on a man, satyr-like, it felt I had co-habited with another species, forest-raised. The green scarf around my English shoulders, as I strolled alongside the smell of the paints and the chestnut smell of our love-making. I thought I was being loved because I was being altered.

Now and then he’d bring out some painting, something Japanese, or a master sketch that he had bought for a fortune. He would take the index finger of my hand, that had loved him intimately a half-hour earlier, and guide it over the outline of a bowl or a bridge or a cat’s back – I still remember quite specifically a drawing of a woman’s lap, with hands holding on to a struggling cat. Using my finger he traced the lines as if he were creating them, his attempted brush against immortality.

He asked what I did when I was not at work, and made me describe my small room that he would not visit. He was curious about where else I had been, and what else excited me. There was a tentative courtship when I was at school … but really I was now running out of things to tell him. Then one afternoon I remembered the tender incident with Clive and the tapestry. I told him of the moment I’d descended the circular staircase in the Grand Rotunda and seen him gently brushing the coat of a dog that was standing in the foliage.

Horace was only half listening to me. And must have thought at first that I was describing a reality, and then he froze and said, ‘What dog?’

The rule between us, his rule, had been that there were to be no recognitions and repercussions outside the studio, beyond our hours there. If there were thrown pebbles, they needed to fall through water silently, and without a single enlarging circle. In fact when I was at work I rarely saw him. I shared my teatime with other members of the staff, and took my lunch out onto the second terrace of the garden, so I would have that angry statue of the Colossus brooding over me. I liked to be undisturbed, and if possible read during my spare hour. It was while I was relaxing there one Thursday that I began to hear a frantic breathing, someone nearby attempting to weep or even howl, though all that was able to be expressed was this disturbed repetitive breath. I got to my feet, followed the sound, and found the boy. His father must have punished him. When he saw me, blood rushed into his face and he ran from me as if I had done whatever it was to him. And of course I had. It was my little pre-coital anecdote about him and the dog.

The next afternoon I argued with Horace about his betrayal, howled in the way his son had been unable to. I wasn’t breathless. I had prepared my anger and I had come to wound him in any way I could for what he had done to the child. I saw him for what he was, a bully who hid in his courteous power and authority. And I knew he would slip that way through people all his life, learning nothing. When I saw my words would not hurt him, I swept my arm back, then towards him, and he enclosed my fist and swerved it back on to me. The scissors I held pierced the side of my belly with all the force and hate I had flung towards him. He would no doubt claim he had simply diverted the act of anger, craziness. I was bent in two, my head, my hair, almost down to my heels, the scissors still in me. I was silent. I was not moving and most of all refusing to cry. I was just like the boy. Horace tried to pull me up and I clutched my legs. I needed to remain folded, to be a smaller target against him. I suspected there was even a thrill in him for what had happened, and given a different response from me that involved helpless weeping and clinging to him, we would have attempted to make love again, perhaps, for a last time, as if solidifying our completion with the past. He would have known then that it was effectively over. For he would never have allowed himself to be in a position where he had to rely on someone like me again, someone with this clear opinion of him.

‘Let me dress it.’

And I imagined him opening up my blouse to look for the blood in its thin pulsing gush on my white belly. I rose slowly and walked out of his studio. I stood in the half-lit hallway. I was sweating. I looked down and pulled the thing out, and as I did the automatically timed light went out around me, and I was even more alone in the darkness. I stood there for an extra minute, expecting something. But he never came out.

For some weeks there had been preparations at the Villa Ortensia for a solstice celebration. Guests from neighbouring cities were expected, as well as artists, critics, family members, the burghers of Florence and all of us who worked in the archives or in the gardens. It was the annual gesture towards the community by him and his wife. It marked the end of the season. During the hot summer months that followed the event, the family would return to America or go travelling again, foraging its way through Russian duchies. Summer heat was not a comfort, even in the high stone rooms of this villa, even in its shadowed gardens.

The event would take place in two days, and I was lying on my bed wondering whether I would turn up or not. Would I hurt him or myself more by going or not going? I had ‘dressed’ my wound – such a genteel term – over a small cold-water sink. It was neither a competent nor a wise act and the scar would stay with me for ever. Lovers who knew me afterwards would pause at it and pretend it was either beautiful or not important. And then they would show me theirs – none of them as dramatic as mine.

I walked away, out of that dark hallway of his, onto the via Panicale, and went in search of a chemist. I remember finding one and describing the wound as ‘a deep cut’.

‘How serious?’ he asked.

‘Deep,’ I said. ‘It was an accident.’

He gave me something in the sulphur family, as well as bandages and presses and a liquid antiseptic, something on a par with what had been used in the Crimean War, I suspect, not much better than that. I did not tell him it was for me, although I must have appeared pale, and was probably weaving. I felt uncertain of everything. All that I had was my competent Italian, so I focused on that. And he kept on talking, perhaps wanting to be certain I was all right. I looked down at one point and there was thick blood on my skirt.

I had a long walk home. I stayed in bed most of that evening and the night that followed. I had not applied any of the medicine. I just dropped the packages on the floor. I simply lay on the bed, wanting to think about everything in the dark. What I had just lived through. If there would be a future for me. He was not a part of the argument. This is when I became myself, I suppose.

I could barely move the next day. But I forced myself to get up and stand by the sink that had a long narrow mirror beside it. I pulled apart the blouse and skirt that had become attached to my body, until the wound was revealed. I coated on the unguent the chemist had given me, and then went back to bed, leaving my skin open to the air. I had many dreams. And there were loud discussions with myself. I got up and looked in the mirror in the afternoon light. The bleeding had stopped. I would be all right. I would not die self-condemned. And I would go to the solstice celebration that was a day away. I would not go. I would go.

I arrived late, missing the welcoming speeches intentionally. I was walking slowly, the pain tearing at my side with each step. Still I listened and followed the sound of the chamber music. They were on the petite stage of the Teatrino, the ‘little theatre’ beyond the second terrace. I had always loved this site, a place where audiences and performers met on an equal footing. A pianist and a cellist were just beyond the gathering, beneath the lit trees. And in the third movement, as it all melded and the music swept through the garden like an ordered wind and carried us within its arms, I was suddenly joyous. I felt contained, as if wearing a coat of music.

I glanced around – at the families, staff, celebrities, who were being given this gift – and then I saw Horace listening to the continuing music. It was as if he were peering at it. Everything else seemed to have disappeared for him. Then I realised he was focused on the cellist, a woman who was joined utterly to the technique and spirit of her art, and I saw there was nothing that could unlock his gaze. I assumed at first she was his sexual prey. But this was, I had to admit, more. Horace might just as easily have been infatuated with the pianist, whose adept fingers raced alongside the cello music and carried it without any gravity, in the act of an engineer as much as a hypnotist. Their art was this shared skill made up of small coils and screws and resin and chords and a learned pace. These rooted this nondescript cellist in black sensually to the earth. And it made me feel deeply content that she was in a realm Horace could never enter, with all his power and his wealth. He could seduce her and hire her and toast her with his wit. He could collect her and swan around her, but he could never reach the place she was in.

At the bottom of the last page she had written years earlier, Miss Lasqueti had added a note:

Where are you, dear Emily? Will you send me your address, or write to me? I wrote this to give to you during our time on the
Oronsay
. Because, as I said, I had become aware that like me in my youth, you were under someone’s spell. And I thought I could save you. I’d seen you with Sunil from the Jankla Troupe, and it seemed you were caught up in something dangerous.

But I never gave it to you. I feared … I don’t know. All these years I have wondered about you. If you got free. I know that I became for a while dark and bitter to myself, till I escaped that circular state. ‘Despair young and never look back,’ an Irishman said. And this is what I did.

Write to me

Perinetta

TWO YEARS AFTER I received that correspondence from Miss Lasqueti, I was in British Columbia for a few days, and a phone call came through to my hotel room. It was about one in the morning.

‘Michael? It’s Emily.’

There was a long pause until I asked her where she was. I was expecting some distant time zone, some European city where it was already morning. But she said she was only a few miles away, on one of the Gulf Islands. It was clearly one a.m. where she was as well. She had, she said, tried several hotels.

‘Can you get away? I saw that piece about you in the
Georgia Straight
. Can you come see me?’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow?’

I agreed, got the details, and after she hung up I lay there on the tenth floor of the Hotel Vancouver, unable to sleep. ‘Get the ferry from Horseshoe Bay to Bowen Island. The two-thirty ferry. I’ll meet you there.’

So I did as I was told. I had not seen her for fifteen years.

The Overheard

WE WERE STILL in the Mediterranean, days away from England. The Jankla Troupe was to give an afternoon performance, and during the encore they invited passengers onto their makeshift stage to perform alongside them. One of them was Emily. Soon she was being whirled until she was horizontal, as if about to fly out of the grip of Sunil.

The other volunteers along with Emily were then persuaded to become the top layer of a human pyramid. And once they were up there, this pyramid began to move ponderously across the deck like a many-sleeved creature. As they reached the ship’s railing, the acrobats forming the lower part of the pyramid began swaying back and forth, terrifying the volunteers on the top, who began screaming either in fear or with some strange joy they had discovered in themselves. Then this edifice of humans, a few still crying out, turned in a slow wheel and walked back to us. Among the volunteers, only Emily was calm, only she appeared proud of her performance, and when they were let down, it was to Emily that a small award was given. There was much fanfare, and she was hoisted back up onto the shoulders of one of the men in the troupe. Those from the Cat’s Table who were there, including Mr Daniels and Mr Gunesekera and the three of us, applauded loudly. Sunil, standing almost casually on the shoulders of another man, approached her and closed a silver bracelet onto her wrist. She winced as the clasp cut into her skin, and there was an awkward moment when her knees almost buckled. I saw a slow line of blood on her arm. Sunil held her steady with one hand, and put the palm of his other hand against her forehead to calm her. They were lowered down and Sunil rubbed some unguent over the cut on her wrist, and Emily bravely held her arm up for us all to see the bracelet, or whatever it was, there on her forearm. This entertainment by the Jankla Troupe took place late in the afternoon, and when it was over, most of the passengers went back to their cabins to rest or prepare for dinner.

It was evening, some hours later. Cassius and I were in the same lifeboat we had been in two nights earlier, when we had learned that Emily was supposed to meet someone here. We sat there in the darkness and heard a hesitant conversation between Emily and a man who had joined her. Then at one point he said his name was Lucius Perera. The undercover Perera, the CID Perera, was talking to and revealing his identity for some reason to my cousin!

‘I did not think that you were
you
,’ Emily said.

I was running through all the voices I had listened to or overheard during the trip. I was certain I had not heard the man’s voice before. The talk sounded casual until Emily asked about the prisoner’s condition. Perera responded by impatiently mocking her concern. He kept on, asking if she even knew about the crimes the prisoner had committed.

And we heard Emily leave.

Mr Perera remained behind, right beneath us, pacing up and down. This was a senior officer in the Colombo police force, and we were practically on top of him, so near we could hear his match strike and flare up before it lit his cigarette.

Then Emily came back. ‘I am sorry,’ she said. Just that. And they started to talk again.

When I first heard Emily speak, she sounded tired, drowsy, in spite of her curiosity about Niemeyer’s situation. And when Perera had become impatient she walked away. She did not wish to continue the conversation. I often witnessed this in her – there was a definite barrier not to be crossed with Emily. She was adventurous, polite, but could also close down and turn away from you in an instant. Yet now for some reason she had come back to re-start her conversation with Perera. Was it out of courtesy? Her friendliness felt false to me. I remembered Sunil’s earlier remark about the man she was supposed to meet. ‘
He will be eager for you
.’ And then, as if Perera responded to my thoughts, he must have made some advance, or touched her, because she said, ‘No.
No
.’ She made a small cry.

‘This is the bracelet you won today, is it?’ he murmured. ‘Let me see your hand …’ His voice was stern, as if searching for information only he was aware of. ‘Give me your hand.’

It felt as if we were listening to a radio in the darkness. ‘This is …’ we heard him say. There was a scuffling. Something was happening. No one was saying anything now. I heard a gasp breathed into the wood of our lifeboat, and someone fell. A female voice was whispering.

Cassius and I did not move. I don’t know how long we were like that. It was a long time. Until the whispering stopped and it was quiet. We climbed out from the lifeboat. A body was lying there, I could see the man’s hands clutching his neck as if at a slash of blood. It must have been Mr Perera. We began walking towards him, but as we did the body shuddered. We froze, then ran into the darkness.

I got to my cabin and sat on the top bunk looking at the door, not knowing what to do. Cassius and I had not spoken, not said a word. We had just run. The only person I would normally have talked with was Emily, and I couldn’t talk to her. She must have had a knife, I thought. Perhaps she had left him to get a knife. All my thinking closed down and I kept looking at the door. It opened. And Hastie came in with Invernio and Tolroy and Babstock, and I lay back on the bed pretending to be asleep and listened to them talk quietly and then begin to bid against one another.

*

I SAT ON the floor of Ramadhin’s cabin with Cassius. It was early, and both of us knew we had to talk to Ramadhin about what we had seen, for he was always the calmest, the clearest about what to do. We told him what we had overheard, and about Emily’s leaving then coming back, and the scene with Mr Perera, and later seeing the body, hands clutching the cut neck. And our friend sat there, and said nothing, gave no advice. He too was overwhelmed. We sat in silence, as we had after the incident of the dog and Hector de Silva.

Then Ramadhin said, ‘Of course you have to talk to her.’

But I had already gone to see Emily. She could barely get to the door to let me in, and in a minute had sat down in a chair and fallen asleep again, her body loose-limbed in front of me. I leaned forward and shook her. She had been smothered all night, she said, by strange dreams; perhaps she had been poisoned by the food at dinner.

‘We all ate the same thing,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t poisoned.’

‘Can you give me something? Water …’

I brought her some, and she just held the glass on her lap.

‘You were by the lifeboats, remember?’

‘When? Let me sleep, Michael.’

I shook her again.

‘Do you remember, you were on the deck last night?’

‘I was here, wasn’t I?’

‘And meeting someone.’

She moved around in her chair.

‘I think you did something. Don’t you remember? Do you remember Mr Perera?’

She propped herself up with difficulty and looked at me.

‘Do we know who he is?’

* * *

Cassius and I walked to where we had last seen the body of Mr Perera. We knelt down and looked for any traces of blood, but the deck was spotless.