Shroud (24 page)

After a search, I found Laura upstairs, locked in a little bathroom attached to what turned out to have been the nursery. She would not open the door at first, and I had to wait, looking somewhat desperately out of a circular window at a far field with grazing cows. At last I heard the lock turning. She had a gin bottle, half empty, the neck of which she had somehow managed to break off, cutting her hand quite badly. She sat on the wooden lid of the lavatory and I knelt before her and tore my handkerchief into strips and bound the wound while she mewled and wept. The fittings in the room, the lavatory, the rust-stained bath, the handbasin, the towel rail, were all made in miniature, to a child's scale, and I had a distracting sense of grotesque disproportion; we were back in a fairy tale again, I the worried giant now, and she the tiny, hysterical princess. She was already drunk, thoroughly, comprehensively, in a way I had not seen nor drunk before. She kept alternating between clawing apologies and accusatory, hair-shaking rages, big, iridescent bubbles of saliva forming and bursting between her slack, gin-raw lips. She said it was all my fault, she should never have brought me here, what had she been thinking of, it was mad, mad, she should have known, oh, how could I ever forgive her, she was sorry, so sorry, so very sorry… I took her in my arms, still kneeling before her, and she twined her legs around my waist and pressed her hot temple so hard against my cheek I thought a molar might crack. She wailed in my ear and dribbled on my shoulder. If I ever loved her, it was in that moment.

She slept until evening, there in the nursery, crouched in the narrow little bed with a cushion clutched to her stomach. The Dowager, in her gumboots again, and a suit of tweed that looked as heavy as chain-mail, glanced in nonchalantly and said she must be off to attend to some pressing agricultural matter; it was apparent she had long ago become inured to her daughter's distresses. She gave me an ironical little half grin and was gone. I sat by the bed, feeling strangely at peace. The April afternoon outside was quick with running shadows and sudden sun. I listened to the life of the house going on around me, the clocks chiming the hours, one of the maids singing down in the kitchens, a delivery boy whistling, and seemed to see it all from far above, all clear and detailed, like one of those impossible distances glimpsed through an arched window in a van Eyck setpiece, the house and fields, the village, and roads winding away, and little figures standing at gaze, and then here, in the foreground, this room, the bed, the sleeping child-woman, and I, the wakeful watcher, keeping vigil. Tell me this world is not the strangest place, stranger even than what the gods would have invented, did they exist. She woke eventually and smiled at me, and sat up, plucking away a strand of hair that had caught at the corner of her mouth. She said nothing, only put out her arms, like a child asking wordlessly to be lifted from the cradle. The little bed would not accommodate us both so we lay on the floor on an old worn rug. I had never known her so mild, so attentive, so undefended. She gave off a strong sweet smell of gin. Halfway through our slow-motion love-making she squirmed out from under me and made me turn on my back, and flipped herself upside down and lay with her belly on my chest and took me into her mouth and would not let me go until I had spent myself against the burning bud of her epiglottis. Then she swivelled right way up again – such an agile girl! – and balanced the length of herself along me, a sprat riding on a shark, and for a second I saw Josette, with her bobbed hair and upturned small breasts, smiling at me in the fish-scale light of Hendaye, and something went through me, needle-sharp, that was surprisingly like pain. Laura rested her swollen face in the hollow of my shoulder. A last, thin shaft of sunlight from the window fell across her thigh, sickle-shaped. "I am all mouth, aren't I," she said with a sigh. "You, the bottle, fags, food. Weaned too early, I imagine."

I have one last memory of that weekend to record. The next day, Sunday, in the morning, when Laura and her mother were off performing some bucolic ritual – distributing bibles to the cottagers, perhaps, or administering gruel to their children – in the performance of which, it was firmly made clear, my company was not required, I took the opportunity to explore the Dowager's domain. On a short flight of uncarpeted, well-worn wooden stairs down at the back of the house, near what I supposed were the servants' quarters, I encountered a maid, whose name was Daisy, or Dottie, a fine, strong, big-boned girl with the arms of a ploughman and a charming overlap in her front incisors, who smelled of loaves and soap, and who cheerfully allowed me to kiss her, and put my hand on her warm bodice. There had been a shower but it was stopped now, and the light was like watered silk, and the wind was blowing, and big shivery raindrops clung to the many panes of a tall window above us. I think of her often, even yet, dear Dot or Daise. I was not then the brute that I have since become. I hope that she has had a good life, and that she is living still, tended by the third or even the fourth generation. I hope too, with small confidence, that she has not altogether forgotten me. When she had freed herself from my embrace and turned aside, laughing, and tripped away up the steps, plucking up her long skirts between two fingers and two thumbs as daintily as any fine lady, I took out of my pocket a netsuke of clouded green-white jade that I had pinched from the drawing room, and, surprised at myself, went back and replaced it on the mantelpiece among its fellows.

The year and I are both declining; there is a chill in the air. Yesterday I looked up and saw that overnight the tips of the corona of mountains that rings the city were fringed with snow. The little shops along the Via dei Mercanti light their lamps early. The housewives have seized the opportunity to bring out their mink coats, of which they are touchingly proud; wearing these rich furs, or being worn by them, as it often seems, they look more than ever like large, exotic, pampered pets. I am not the only one who studies the dubious charms of these matrons. There is another old codger who paces the streets of our quarter, whose eye, black and bright as a raptor's, I sometimes catch, and who will flash at me the edge of a malicious-seeming grin before turning aside to feign deep interest in a bunch of asparagus on a vegetable stall. Like me he carries a stick, but his is an elegant malacca cane with a silver handle in the shape of an animal's head, a wolf, I think; I would not be surprised if the thing conceals a sword blade. He is shorter than I am, but then practically everyone is, and has dainty, liver-spotted hands and very small feet shod in patent leather. He dresses richly in camel hair and English tweed; his shirts, from what I can see of them beneath his cashmere muffler, are custom made, of the finest cotton and silk; they were measured for a sturdier version of him, though, and his tortoise neck waggles distressingly in the rigid, upright shackle of their loose-fitting collars. His head is narrow and almost entirely fleshless, with only the thinnest integument of tobacco-coloured skin stretched tightly over the bones of the face. A slick of oiled black hair, dyed assuredly, is smeared across his pate. He is old – that is, he is about my age. He seems never to be without a cigarette perched at a graceful angle in his tapered, bony fingers. I do not know why I notice him especially, there are many of his stamp in this ambiguous city. I fear we shall become acquainted, he and I, it is surely inevitable. I can see us in the Caffè Torino or the Caval 'd Brons, stooped forehead to forehead over a pocket chess set, with our cigarettes and our thimblefuls of oily grappa, as night falls, and the snow comes down, muffling the sounds of the city.

Kristina Kovacs, poor Kristina, will be dead before the springtime.

I am not the first to have exclaimed upon the pleasures of life in wartime London. I do not mean the great, new, warm sense of communality everyone is supposed to have felt, the keeping up of peckers and of home-fires burning and all the rest of that twaddle; no, what I am thinking of is the licence, voluptuous and languid, with just a whiff of brimstone to it, that was granted to us by the permanent likelihood of imminent, indiscriminate and violent death. Living there with Lady Laura and her money was like being on an ocean liner gone out of control and helplessly adrift yet on board which all the indulgent decorums of a luxury cruise are punctiliously observed. What did it matter that up on the bridge the captain was drunk and down in the bilges the crew was frantically pumping? Despite the bombs and rumours of bombs, despite the austerities and the tiresome restrictions on everyday living, we flitted, my little lover and I, from bar to bar, from club to club, from party to party, heedless, and as happy as probably either of us was capable of being. The city was all plangent airs and melancholy graces. I am thinking of the rich, deep sheen on the casings of wooden wirelesses; of asthmatic taxis, black and square as hearses, with crosses of black tape on their headlamps; of a certain dish of quails' eggs, washed down with mugs of woody-tasting tea, eaten late at night in a strange bed in someone's flat somewhere; of loud singing in low places; of Laura's hand on my wrist as she turned laughing at some joke and caught my eye and let the laugh turn into a look of love and longing that was no less affecting for being almost entirely fake. But of all the remembered sensations of that time that I can summon up, the most immediate is that of the smell that was everywhere in the bombed-out streets when I first arrived, a glum but to me deeply stimulating mixture of cordite and old mortar and fractured sewerage pipes. The bombers were tilling London, turning over its topsoil. And I was a sort of fifth column all of my own. The authorities took a sporadic interest in me. There was an unnerving interview with some kind of policeman in plain clothes, and for a worrying couple of weeks it seemed I might be interned on some ghastly, windswept offshore island, until Laura spoke to someone she knew in military intelligence and the threat was silently dropped; I suspect a bit of discreet blackmail was involved. There were those among her more immediate circle, too, who had their suspicions of me. There was that plummy peer, Lord Somebody, large and smooth and fabulously wealthy, a picture collector, amateur jazz pianist, and one of
my people,
who would point his big pale proboscis at me like an anteater searching out its prey and venture slyly that surely there was more to me than met the eye… Laura said everyone thought I was a spy; she was delighted.

I cannot say when it was exactly that I became Axel Vander, I mean when I began to think of myself as him and no longer as myself. Not when I gave his name as mine to Max Schaudeine that day when we stood together in the snow-blue light of my parents' emptied bedroom; I had no thought, then, of taking on Axel's identity, the assumption of his name alone being enough excitement for one day. Was it in Liège that freezing November twilight when the old forger with the diffident shrug of the true artist produced my – my! – passport, ready-worn, with a crease along the cover, and Axel's name under my picture? Was it when I was with Lady Laura in bed the first time and in a rush of post-coital candour was about to tell her the truth of who I really was and then smoothly, without so much as a missed breath, changed my mind? Perhaps it is not possible to identify one certain moment of decision. Do we not on countless occasions every day step effortlessly into other selves without even noticing it? The man who rises from his lover's bed is not the same man who half an hour later meets his mortal enemy. Anyway, what interests me more than when is the question why. How I worked at it, this senseless deception. I became a virtuoso of the lie, making my instrument sing so sweetly that none could doubt the veracity of its song. Such grace-notes I achieved, such cadenzas! I lied about everything, even when there was no need, even when the plain truth would have been more effective in maintaining the pretence. I made up details of my made-up life with obsessive scruple and inventiveness, building an impregnable alibi for a case that no court was ever likely to be called upon to try. Yet I am fascinated by the paradox that even as I laboured to maintain the façade, at the same time it would not have mattered to me in the slightest if someone had suddenly stepped forward with irrefutable proof of my imposture. I would have laughed in his face and owned up with a shrug. Or her face, as the case might be. I ask what I have asked already: what did it benefit me to take on his identity? It must be, simply, that it was not so much that I wanted to be him – although I did, I did want to be him – but that I wanted so much more not to be me. That is to say, I desired to escape my own individuality, the hereness of my self, not the thereness of my world, the world of my lost, poor people. This seems to matter much. Yet I have lived as him for so long I can scarcely remember what it was like to be the one that I once was… I pause in uncertainty, losing my way in this welter of personal, impersonal, impersonating, pronouns. Do not imagine I meant to perpetuate his memory, or to live the life for him of which he had been deprived; no, nothing like that, I would not be so loyal, so large-hearted. I would have defended him, yes, I would have tried to protect his name, but had I been exposed I would have slithered out of him with the ease of a secret agent discarding his cover and stepping into another.

So many questions, so many quiddities, yet I am no further along. The mystery remains, as always: why? If, as I believe, as I insist, there is no essential, singular self, what is it exactly I am supposed to have escaped by pretending to be Axel Vander? Mere being, that insupportable medley of affects, desires, fears, tics, twitches? To be someone else is to be one thing, and one thing only. I think of an actor in the ancient world. He is a veteran of the Attic drama, a spear-carrier, an old trouper. The crowd knows him but cannot remember his name. He is never Oedipus, but once he has played Creon. He has his mask, he has had it for years; it is his talisman. The white clay from which it was fashioned has turned to the shade and texture of bone. The rough felt lining has been softened by years of sweat and friction so that it fits smoothly upon the contours of his face. Increasingly, indeed, he thinks the mask is more like his face than his face is. At the end of a performance when he takes it off he wonders if the other actors can see him at all, or if he is just a head with a blank front, like the old statue of Silenus in the marketplace the features of which the weather has entirely worn away. He takes to wearing the mask at home, when no one is there. It is a comfort, it sustains him; he finds it wonderfully restful, it is like being asleep and yet conscious. Then one day he comes to the table wearing it. His wife makes no remark, his children stare for a moment, then shrug and go back to their accustomed bickering. He has achieved his apotheosis. Man and mask are one.