Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream (18 page)

That is what Sir Peter Wheeler had done, kept silent from the start, when I finally asked him and Mrs Berry, over Sunday lunch or, rather, afterwards, just before I got up from the table and left for the station to catch the train back to London, about the bloodstain at the top of his stairs.

'Before I forget,' I had said, taking advantage of a pause, the kind that heralds or brings about farewells, 'last night I cleaned up a bloodstain on the stairs, at the top of the first flight, when I went up to my room.' And I pointed backwards with my thumb at the first few stairs. In fact, it had happened when I was coming downstairs, carrying
From Russia with Love
as if it were a treasure, the copy dedicated to Wheeler by the former Commander Fleming of the Naval Intelligence Division (". . . who may know better.
Salud!"),
but that didn't matter and I didn't want Peter to take me for a tattletale, or a
chafardero,
as they say in the Castilian spoken in Catalonia. 'I don't know where it came from, but it wasn't a small drop. Do either of you have any idea?'
It was Mrs Berry who answered, the odder the question is,
the more immediately a reply is required, although this one consisted only in repeating a word:
'A bloodstain?' she said, and her eyebrows arched of their own accord and not apparently in response to any previous command. And then she added, slightly annoyed: 'How could I possibly not have seen it on my way up to my room, especially if it was a large stain,' and thus she appeared to deflect the matter and turn it into a possible act of negligence on her part. 'At the top of the stairs, you say, Jack? How odd.' And she eyed with disgust the lower steps I had pointed to, as if the thing I had told her about were still visible - although I had also told her that I had cleaned it up - and in such an unfortunate place too. 'I'm so sorry to have put you to all that trouble, Jack.'

I glanced at Wheeler, who had opened his eyes very wide and his mouth just a little, a look of sufficient surprise to warrant the expression 'left speechless'. Or was it merely a look of partial incomprehension, as if the occasional slowness of his years were processing my question or news with bewilderment and even difficulty; as if he were thinking: 'Did I hear correctly, did he say blood? Did he mispronounce it, or did he actually say bloodstain? He may be foreign, but his pronunciation rarely lets him down, except in the case of strange or unusual words that he has perhaps never heard and only seen written down, but then he is conscious of his own uncertainty, and he hesitates and asks before saying them. Or was it me, perhaps I wasn't concentrating and didn't understand.' Those, at least, seemed to be his thoughts, but they couldn't have been because Mrs Berry had immediately repeated 'A bloodstain?' and there could be no doubts about
her
pronunciation.

'Don't worry, Mrs Berry, it was no trouble at all, besides, I wasn't tired,' I replied. 'It's just that I can't understand where it could have come from. I thought it must have come from me, that I had inadvertently cut myself, but I felt myself all over and I hadn't. So you've no idea either?' I insisted somewhat hesitantly.

Mrs Berry looked at Wheeler in perplexity, as if asking him a question with her eyes, or, it occurred to me, that glance might merely have been one of consultation or even of concern for me, because there I was claiming to have cleaned up some peculiar and highly improbable stain in the middle of the night. Peter, however, remained silent, with his metallic or mineral eyes very wide (in the daylight, they were like chalcedony) and his lips still parted (but not so much as to merit the description 'open-mouthed').

'Not really,' she replied. 'Perhaps a guest cut himself when he went up to the bathroom on the first floor, I saw several people go up there during the evening . . . Where was it exactly?'
I stood up and so did she ('I'll show you'), I led her to the stairs, went up the first flight two steps at a time, and she followed more sedately behind.

'Here,' I said, and pointed to the approximate place. I couldn't be more exact because spatial memory is imprecise unless there is some established, unchanging reference point, and not a trace was left, you couldn't even see where I had rubbed, everything was smooth and immaculate, I had done a good, thorough job, I would have made an excellent servant in another life, or a conscientious, although probably not very illustrious, cleaner. 'It was more or less here,' I added, 'about an inch and a half in diameter, perhaps two. And what's so odd is that there was no trail, just that one drop. Like a single footstep.' Mrs Berry bent over to study the floor more closely. I had crouched down and was tapping on the wooden boards with my five fingers, my hand in the shape of a claw, as if trying to summon up something from the wood, only there was nothing to invoke and nothing that could burst forth from it. 'I knew it,' I thought fleetingly, 'I should have left a bit of the rim, there was a reason why it resisted being erased.' Peter had also got up from the table now, rather more calmly, and had followed us to the foot of the stairs, but he did not come up. He stood there with his hands resting on his walking stick as if it were a sword stuck in the earth in a moment of temporary rest, looking up, looking at us with that gaze one often sees in the old even when they are in company and talking animatedly, the eyes become dull, the iris dilated, staring far, far off back into the past, as if their owners really could physically see with them, could see their memories I mean, sometimes even the old and blind have this gaze, like the poet Milton in his dream, and it is not an absent look, but a very focused one, focused on something a very long way off. And Wheeler was still saying nothing.

'That big? But there's nothing here,' said Mrs Berry. The wood was, indeed, polished, shining, waxed, as if it had never been touched. 'What did you use to clean up the stain?'
'I got some cotton wool and surgical spirit from the bathroom downstairs. I did it very slowly and carefully. I didn't want to dirty one of your cloths or leave a mark.'

'Well, you certainly succeeded, Jack,' said Mrs Berry approvingly, still staring hard at the blank floor, but I thought I noticed just a hint of irony in her words. She was possibly beginning not to believe me. 'Are you sure it was blood, Jack? It couldn't have been a drop of liqueur or wine that someone spilled? Or some juice from the roast beef, from a slice that slipped off someone's plate? I'm afraid Lord Rymer wasn't the only one who was a bit unsteady on his feet last night. And the meat was
tres saignante,
and some people had gravy with it. Could you have mistaken the juice or the gravy for blood? That would explain why there was no trail, a piece of meat falls from a plate and leaves just one mark. It doesn't drip.' I thought: 'She thinks I was drunk and that I imagined it all; true enough, a rare steak would just fall onto the floor, plop, but they weren't steaks, they were slices of beef And then I remembered that I couldn't even retrieve the bloodstained cotton-wool balls to show her, I had put them down the toilet, not in the waste bin, and, naturally enough, had pulled the chain; besides, it would have looked very odd if I had gone and rummaged around in the waste bin, it was fortunate I couldn't really, she would have taken me for a fool, a maniac.

'I didn't taste it, if that's what you mean, Mrs Berry,' I said and there must have been a touch of disappointment in my voice, or hurt pride. 'But I know blood when I see it, believe me. I can tell the difference.'

'Well, then, that's very odd indeed.' That is what Mrs Berry said, as if bringing the inspection and the whole matter to a close; it was as if she had said: 'Don't go on, Jack, what more do you expect of us? I don't know anything about it and I didn't see it, neither did Peter. And it's not like me to miss a stain like that, certainly not on the way up to my room. Don't you see how difficult it is?'
I removed my fingers from the floorboards, I got up, I turned more towards Wheeler, I regarded him from above. He had not said a thing, but it seemed to me that this was not another oral blockage like the one that had afflicted him shortly before in the garden, after the episode with the low-flying helicopter, or the previous night, when we were alone and he could not get himself to come out with the ridiculous word 'cushion'. It did not seem to me that any kind of prescience was involved at all, his elderly gaze was no longer staring into a future that was as uncertain and, therefore, as blank and smooth as the floorboards, I was sure of that, rather, in his current state of amazement, it reached much further, to something beyond my head and Mrs Berry's head, at which his gaze was directed, although without actually focusing on that either or not entirely, and his wide eyes gave him a contradictory expression, almost like that of a child who discovers or sees something for the first time, something that does not frighten or repel or attract, but which produces a sense of shock, or else some flash of intuitive knowledge, or even a kind of enchantment. He was looking at something that was rough in texture, with a design or a figure on it, unlike the floor, but it wasn't clear to me at all whether its outline was firm and distinct or if it belonged to the past. It was as if he were gazing into limbo, that enviable place, the only one, on that final day, which, according to ancient speculations, would be free of judgements and calculations and to which the Judge would withdraw now and then for some peace and quiet and to take a breather from all the atrocities and
all the perfections, from the wild excuses and the overblown aspirations, perhaps to enjoy a small snack to restore strength and patience for the interminable sessions, and even to take a sip from the divine hip flask, a little trip to perk him up, before returning to the great ballroom where he would continue listening to those millions and millions of imbroglios and confused, pathetic, ridiculous stories.

'And you have no idea what it could have been either, Peter.' I spoke directly to him now, it was more a statement than a question, but also, I realised, an attempt to elicit some verbal response from him about the blood or not blood that I had seen or not seen, something spoken in his own voice and not through the intermediary of Mrs Berry, who had commandeered the conjectures and responses. In a way, there was nothing strange about that, it was only logical, she was in charge of the upkeep of the house, of its spotlessness or cleanliness as well as of its imperfections and stains. She was what is known in English as the housekeeper, literally the person who tends or looks after the house.

'No.' Wheeler's negative was immediate, he wasn't miles away, he had, after all, been listening to what was being said. His gaze may have gone off travelling, but it had not got lost. 'That's very odd indeed,' he repeated, although he did not say this in the same categorical tone as his housekeeper. 'That's very odd indeed,' he said in English, as if it were just a conventional phrase, a more or less acceptable and inoffensive way of leaving the matter hanging in the air, or of packing it off to limbo, where everything is overruled and there is never any case to be answered, because no one cares what happens there. He picked up his sword, held it for a moment in both hands as if about to deal a two-handed blow, and then turned to go back to the table and finish dessert. For me this was a sign that I had better stop there, give up, resign myself. I came down the stairs, letting Mrs Berry go first, and as we followed him in, I made only one more comment on the subject:
'I had to use a lot of cotton wool to clean up the stain. There won't be much left, so you'd better buy some more. The same goes for the surgical spirit too.' That is what I said. I felt it was only fair to warn them, so that they would not go thinking that I had imagined or invented that too.

I thought of another possibility then, yes, another one occurred to me as I left the Ladies' toilet or, rather, afterwards, that same night, but some hours later, when I was trying in vain to get to sleep, managing at most a kind of meditative doze during which I was thinking how much had been revealed to me in the course of events and how much I had pushed to one side. Yes, it was probably afterwards, because when I left the toilet. I was in a hurry and my attention was focused on what was happening outside, although I must have had some inkling of it while I was in the Ladies, it was an idea that would never have crossed Wheeler's mind or Mrs Berry's for that matter, indeed, it didn't even cross mine until that moment, after I had seen the woman with the abundant thighs sitting on the toilet, no, abundant makes them sound fat, but they weren't, they were, how can I put it, magnificence, formidability, pure presence. A summons. 'A woman is wearing no knickers,' I thought, 'although she is wearing tights, possibly the sort you can get nowadays that come halfway up the thigh like stockings, but which are held up by elastic, a graceless substitute for old-fashioned garters, the kind worn by that imminent heiress-cum-spouse - the one who stayed the night and for breakfast as well and whose husband-to-be and cuckold-that-was appeared to be obsessed with her mobile phone or to consider it a military objective - at least she wore them on the one occasion when I saw her take them off or when I took them off for her, I can't really remember the incident in any detail.' I remembered and thought this while lying in bed, when I wasn't, in fact, particularly interested in
remembering, it was entirely involuntary. 'A woman decides not to wear knickers to Wheeler's cold buffet, some women take a pride in doing without this particular item of clothing in order to feel terribly avant-garde and radical, or they do so only occasionally and provocatively in order to risk being seen if they wear a short or very short skirt and there are going to be a lot of witnesses present (a meeting, a banquet, a premiere, a class if they're students and the male teacher always stands in front), or to annoy a husband whom they inform of this intimate detail on the way to the party and who is troubled by it, or to provoke an outbreak of fleeting and very basic desire where it did not exist or perhaps never would have existed — a glimpse, a glimmer - and which might then become persistent or prolonged - a condensation, an increase - quite a few women learned this from that famous film starring Sharon Stone and Kirk Douglas's witch-faced son.