Shroud (17 page)

A clatter and crash woke them both at once. It was broad day. For the space of a held breath they lay staring at each other from pillow to pillow in baffled alarm. The crash came again. Cass Cleave rose and drew back the heavy inner curtains and opened wide the two tall panels of the window. A shutter outside had corne loose from its catch and was swinging against the wall. There were white horse-tails high in the scoured sky and over the whole city an oceanic wind was pouring in luminous billows. She leaned out and hooked the shutter fast. Vander sat up, bleary and blinking, smacking gummed lips, long strands of white hair floating and flickering about his head like charged electric filaments. "You," he said, glaring at her. "Still here." She did not answer, but came and started to rearrange the bedclothes around him. He made no move to help her, would not even shift his haunches to let her pull the sheet straight. "I am sick," he said. "Was I asleep?" Still she did not answer him. With a groan he got himself out of bed and shuffled past her into the bathroom and slammed the door. The bedclothes when she pulled them back released a stronger waft of his ashy, waxen odour. From the bathroom came the sounds of retching followed by a loud moan of fury and disgust. She went to the window again. In the building opposite a man was leaning out of his window, smoking a cigarette. She could see an office behind him, with a desk and papers and office machines, all stark and shadowless under the unreal, icy glare of strip-lights in the ceiling. They regarded each other for a moment in faint, humorous desperation, like two castaways trapped on their separate islands, the deep, unfordable channel of the street running between them. She could feel the wind buffeting the building.

She was hungry, and went to the telephone to order breakfast. The voice that answered her was shrill and tinny, seeming to come up to her from a series of deeper and still deeper, echoing cisterns. She could not think what to ask for. She thought she could hear the wind rustling in the receiver. The voice from the kitchen, losing patience, said something she could not understand and the line went dead. Vander came out of the bathroom, naked and white-faced and shivering. "I'm sick," he said again, not looking at her, and made for the bed, his shoulders hunched, rubbing his palms together with squeamish vigour, like a trepidant swimmer approaching the dreaded water's edge. There were chocolate-brown moles on his back, and long grey hairs sprouting on his shoulder blades, and the loose flesh of his lop-sided rump wobbled when he walked. She had never seen anyone so huge, so naked and so defenceless. She pondered in mild amazement the mystery of time and time's damagings. Soon, in a very few years, a decade at most, surely, he would be gone, and all that he had been and was now would be no more.

He had got into bed and pulled the covers to his chin. She could see the bristles on his sunken jaw glittering like spilt grains of sand. When the knock came she turned quickly with a wild look as if whoever it was outside might be about to hurl a shoulder against the door and break it down. For a moment she thought in terror that it might be the doctor come back to make sure that she had done all he had told her to do, that Vander was resting, that he had stopped drinking, that the graze on her arm had healed, that everything was as it should be and nothing amiss. It was not the doctor, however, but a waiter, bringing the breakfast she had not ordered. It was all set out on a sort of trolley that he could wheel into the room, leaning forward over it like a billiard player and casting his hooded gaze circumspectly to right and left as he advanced. He was an elderly, bald fellow; she recognised him, she could not for the moment think from where. He glanced from her to Vander behind her in the bed and frowned: there was breakfast only for one. It was all right, she said hurriedly, lifting her hands, it would be enough, it would do. She was afraid she would scream if he said a word, a single word. She contemplated the food with something like despair, helplessly. There were eggs, and cold meats, and slices of pale, glistening cheese, and bread rolls and rusks, and miniature pots of honey and jam, and jugs of milk and hot water with tea bags and sachets of instant coffee, and a big wine glass of impossibly orange orange juice under a frilled paper lid. The waiter wheeled the table to the window and turned it about, setting it just so, aligning it to invisible markers on the floor, and looked at her, and lifted the paper crown from the orange juice glass with a strange, grave movement of his hand, like a priest lifting the white cloth from the chalice, and she recognised him. He was the night porter, the one who had fetched her the glass of water and the napkin – how was it she had not known him straight away, how could she have forgotten? Vander's trunkless head said something to him in Italian that he seemed not to hear, or chose to ignore, and he continued gazing at Cass Cleave out of his dark and melancholy eyes that were just like the doctor's eyes. She scooped a jumble of coins from her purse and gave them to him, and he made a little bow with his head, bobbing it sideways and down with a little grimace denoting gratitude, and pocketed the coins and stepped past her nimbly and went to the door and turned and bowed again and silently, silently, withdrew.

Vander was watching her, turning his head on the pillow to follow her about the room with his eyes. He bade her eat. She brought a chair and sat down before the food. She was not hungry now. She was thinking. She was excited. Her gaze gleamed. She put a tea bag in the cup and poured hot water over it. She nibbled at one of the stale-tasting rusks. "You should not bite your nails," Vander said. "Look at them." They could hear the hot wind gusting outside, and in the room everything seemed taut and thrumming, and they might have been in the cabin of a ship under full-bellied sail. "I did see you come into that lecture room," he said, sullen and accusing, not looking at her now. "It must have been your ghost." She said nothing and took a sip of tepid tea. Thinking. "You came in," he said, "and sat down, and I was talking about the inexistence of the self." Suddenly he gave a loud laugh that ended in a cough, making the bed shake. He drew his hand from under the bedclothes and held it up for her to see. "With this I wrote those articles that you found," he said. "Not a single cell survives in it from that time. Then whose hand is it?" He, I, I saw again the empty bottle on its side, the mauve pills in my palm. I closed my eyes. I listened to the wind washing over the rooftops. The girl rose and came forward and knelt beside the bed and took my hand in both of hers and brought it to her lips and kissed it. I.

It was all so simple, so simple and so clear. She should have seen it from the start. The signs had been there all along, or rather, all along everything had been a sign, those high white peaks glistening in the moonlight that she had glimpsed from the train, the fat man who had almost fallen on her, the flock of pigeons at the station flying up out of shadows into the dawning sky, everything: the strange young woman at the Nietzsche house; the doctor taking her hand and making that sort of blessing over it; the child, singing. She had seen all this and yet not seen it. That was how it always was, with her, she would go along for a long time, just looking, noticing things, taking them in, but not connecting them, not recognising the connections; not understanding. It was only when the waiter had lifted the paper lid off the glass of orange juice, turning his wrist in that slow, solemn way, that at last it had come to her. It was as if a light had switched itself on in her head. Or no, no, it was as if she had been submerged in something dense and dark and suddenly had risen up and broken soundlessly through the surface into the light, the radiance. And it was all so clear, and so simple.

What was not clear was whether the signs were really signs, and meant especially for her, or if they were parts of the thing itself, the thing for which she had no name, yet; those parts, that is, that she was to be allowed to see, to notice, to register. The pattern she had suddenly discerned might be only a superficial aspect of a far deeper and infinitely more intricate order, to which she would never be allowed to penetrate. She would not mind if this were to be so. Indeed, she liked to think that there would be a level she could not reach, could never reach, a mosaic beneath the mosaic she had uncovered. A mosaic, yes, set in the floor of a temple, and she on her knees, the priestess bound to the shrine by immemorial, unbreakable vows. She even had her sacred sceptre, in the form of a fountain pen, with its profane relics wrapped safe inside it.

She did not expect to be able to understand the full meaning and significance of what had been… of what had been put in place. If she were to understand, that would mean there was no mystery, and the mystery was essential. No, she must simply perform the rites in the way that was required. She did not doubt that she would know the rites and the proper manner of their performance. She would be told. She would be shown. Or it might be that she was already doing what had to be done, that she had been doing it all along. It might be that what she did, every smallest action, was in fact precisely what was necessary, without her knowing it. Thinking this, she experienced a moment of such intense – she did not know what to call it – such intense something, that it made her blench. Everything had a meaning, a function, a place in the pattern, and nothing would be lost.

She was glad when Vander in the bed fell into a doze again, leaving her alone to think. It was to do with him, he was at the very centre of it, he was that centre itself. Was it that she was meant to save him? She sat looking down at his ravaged head resting in the deep pillows as if sunk in gleaming marble. His blue-veined eyelids were like two miniature globes of the world set into his skull, mapped all over with the figurations of tiny, blue rivers. She felt shivery, she was shaking, as if the searing wind blowing outside were blowing in her, too, sweeping through empty spaces inside her. She rose as quietly as she could and went out and went to her room and packed her bag and brought it back to Vander's room. She was hanging a dress in the wardrobe when she looked in the mirror in the wardrobe door and saw that he was awake again, and had turned his head on the pillow and was watching her. He asked her what she was doing. She said she was unpacking. "I am going to stay here with you, and take care of you." His gaze was listless and remote. "I dreamt of my wife," he said. "She was with me, here, in the room." He was tired, tired and ill. His brain felt molten, swollen in its bowl of bone. Perhaps he really had suffered a stroke in the street that first day with her, or at that restaurant, yesterday. What would a stroke feel like? He tried to flex his arms, to move his good leg. The covers seemed uncommonly heavy. "I think I am paralysed," he said mildly, and seemed to find the notion almost funny. "I cannot move." Cass Cleave, rearranging his pillows, paused, leaning over him, and looked into his eyes. Is that how it was to be, she asked herself, would that be all her task, simply to take care of him? She saw herself tending here, the bed a sarcophagus and his swaddled corpse topped with its living head; she saw the days rise from dawn to burning noon, then the long, slow fall to evening and the night. The head would speak, it would be the oracle, it would tell her things; she would understand; she would be given to understand; she would know. Suddenly, with an animal quickness, he reached from under the covers again and clamped his clawlike hand on her wrist. His fingers were dry and burning. She looked at the agate nails, striate, chipped. He let her go, his strength failing; his hand withdrawing under the sheet was like an animal slithering away. White weals on her wrist, and then the blood rushing back, under the slackening skin. She bent and put her mouth against his ear, saying something in a hot whisper, saying something I could not make out. Her burning breath. Saying something.

TWO

Come, my ghostly girl, plump up my pillows and sit by me here and I shall tell you a tale, a tale I had thought to think of no more until you brought it all back. It begins long, long ago, in the town of Antwerp, with a stroll along those little winding streets the name to which I gave, inevitably, was the Vander Way. The corner of the square with the plane trees was the crossing point from my world into his. When I think of that spot the weather in it is always grey, the luminous, quicksilver grey of an early northern spring, the colour for me of the past itself. On our side, the street leading up to the square was very narrow, and had to climb a slight incline, at a tilt, the left-hand pavement set higher than its counterpart on the right, giving me a giddy, toppling sensation as I walked up it, always, for some reason, on the lower level. Instead of a shifting church spire and the fragrance of hawthorn blossom I have as memory-points the three golden balls over Wassermann's pawnshop – how did they keep such a high shine, I always wondered, were they made of real gold? – and the warm, cloying aroma of vanilla from the pastry shop on the corner of the square. The big houses in the terrace on the far side, the Vander side, beyond the trees, were tall and brown and many-chimneyed; in the frost-smoke of winter mornings their upper reaches would crumble into dreamy insubstantiality, like the diaphanous edifices in the background to a Memling or a Tintoretto. They had shutters, and wrought-iron balconies, and here and there one of the tall windows would afford a glimpse of the opulent life within: a blazing chandelier, a bowl of roses on an antique table, a slender woman in silk standing with one arm folded and an elbow cupped in the palm of her hand, smoking a cigarette and looking down upon the world with an expression of lazy dissatisfaction. The Vander apartment itself was a numerous succession of high, cool rooms painted silvery white, or Greek blue, or deep, rich red. To my youthful, hungry eye the furnishings, all that brocade and ormolu and dark, gleaming wood, seemed the very epitome of taste and discreet luxury, although I suppose in reality it was just the usual high-bourgeois clutter. The Vanders did not seek to hide the fact of their wealth. Vander senior was a diamond merchant, an occupation that in a city other than ours would have seemed excitingly louche and exotic. He was very shrewd and careful behind a breezy manner. He travelled a great deal, to Amsterdam, Paris, London, and I suspect kept a mistress in more than one of those cities: he had a way of fingering his small moustache and smiling drowsily to himself that betokened a rich mental store of voluptuous images. His wife was a large, fretful woman, soft as a pigeon, big-bosomed and broad-beamed, with very round, starting eyes, of a washed-out blue that was almost colourless, and that gave her a permanent look of surprise and alarm. Everyone addressed her as Mama, even her husband. Axel treated his parents with indulgent disdain, affecting to be amused by their complacencies and pretensions. "Typical of their kind, of course," he would say, and heave a languid sigh. "I know I should hate them, but I can't." The apartment also housed a number of Vander relations, aunts and uncles, a brace of distant cousins, elderly, timid, curiously ill-defined persons, who kept out of sight as much as they could, as if fearing to risk expulsion by drawing attention to themselves. On Sunday evenings they would dispose themselves about the shadowy corners of the drawing room to listen with mournful earnestness as Mama Vander sang lieder to the piano accompaniment of her husband, or sometimes an unwilling Axel. She had a lachrymose mezzo voice that quavered perilously on the lower notes. She favoured the more saccharine songs of Schubert and Robert Schumann. These recitals would leave Axel shaking with mingled mirth and exasperation. He was a more than passable pianist. When we were at school together he had tried to teach me one or two easy pieces, without success. "Oh, you are hopeless,"he would say, and call me Hanswurst, and make a play of punching me in the chest. He was right. I could not keep the tunes in my head, and my outsized fingers – Hanswurst was right – wallowed over the keys like two huge handfuls of raw sausages.