Shroud (30 page)

Some things, real things, seem to happen not in the world itself but in die gap between actuality and the mind's apprehending; the eye registers the event but die understanding lags. For a moment all sat still, in startled silence. It was Montale who acted first. Without rising from his chair, and despite his bulk, he turned adroitly to the side and leaned forward, below die level of the table, humping his porpoise's big back, and we heard him saying something down there in a muffled tone to the stricken girl, something to which she did not reply. Kristina Kovacs was looking at me with a peculiar, still, and, I thought, sad expression the meaning of which eludes me even now. Franco Bartoli clamped his hands on the edge of the table and pressed down hard, as if he too had seen it turn into a tub of fouled and drowning waters that he thought might be in danger of capsizing. He said something, and then hopped up and hurried away to the kitchen, and reappeared a moment later bearing in his hand a glass of water. Behind him I glimpsed Maria the ancient cook hanging back in horror, clinging to the door jamb and peeping in on the disordered scene out of one unwilling eye. Signora Bartoli sat with her palms pressed to either side of her face, like that figure on the bridge in the Munch painting, producing not a scream, however, but a curious, distressed, chirping sound, like that which a hungry or a frightened fledgling might make. Now Montale, with much grunting, straightened up from under the table with Cass Cleave draped limply across his arms, her head turned a little toward his chest and her bare arms delicately drooping. Against the muted lamplight and the large, vague shadows of the room it was a pre-Raphaelite scene: the swooning girl in the embrace of the big, square, stern-faced man, and the rest of us arrayed in a semi-circle looking on, mute and grave, constrained, it seemed, in a sort of nerveless torpor. I made to rise, but Kristina Kovacs, still with that peculiar, sorrowing look, laid a hand on mine to stay me, and rose herself instead and followed after Montale, who in turn, with Cass Cleave in his arms, and walking with the delicate, slightly pigeon-toed step that is surprisingly common among large men, was following Franco Bartoli, still holding out before him in his hands the untouched and somehow sacral glass of water. And so they processed slowly from the room. As Montale leaned sideways to manoeuvre himself through the doorway he had to lift up Cass Cleave's legs and I was afforded a fleeting sight under her dress of the undersides of her long, glimmering thighs and at the top of them a taut triangle of white cotton, and the vile old beast in me stirred itself and lifted up its questing snout. Which is worse, I wonder, that I should be capable of arousal at such a moment, or that I should feel the necessity to record the fact here? Then they were gone through the door and I was left alone with the chirping woman and the old cook's single, disconcerting and, so it seemed, greedily ogling eye.

It was a long time, and very late, before they would allow me to see her. Why I should have accepted their authority over her I do not know. I kept to my place at the table for a while, moodily smoking and drinking the dregs of the wine bottles; I suppose I was not altogether sober. The cook silently withdrew into her lair, and with the others gone Signora Bartoli grew calm again, and sat sighing and murmuring to herself, trying to pick up invisible crumbs from the table with fumbling fingertips, in that way of the old, as I know, for lately I often catch myself doing the same thing. Presently, however, she began casting alarmed, sideways glances in my direction, in an increasingly agitated fashion, I suspect it was that as the minutes moved on she was progressively forgetting what had happened, and was wondering who this mistily familiar stranger might be, or how he had come to be here, alone with her, in her own dining room, from which, as the scattered place settings seemed to attest, another group of mysterious and unruly guests had lately and precipitately fled. Then Franco Bartoli came back, all pursed and accusingly silent – had Cass Cleave come round and spilled my secrets to him? – and sat down, keeping his eyes downcast and softly clearing his throat. The moments creaked past. He would not speak, and nor would I, so that a sort of wordless contest formed itself between us in which we were both determined to prevail. I watched him narrowly, and considered firing off a fresh salvo on the topic of the Eton Atheist and his poetical works, just for the hell of it; before I could touch taper to powder, however, Montale reappeared, in quietly masterful mode, although a little unsteady on his toes, for he too had been drinking unstintingly throughout the evening. He said that Cass Cleave was asleep and should not be disturbed – remarkable, how everyone becomes a physician on these occasions – and dealt me in his turn an accusing look. He stood for a moment in heavy silence, his hands braced on the back of a chair and his bullish shoulders bunched inside his straining jacket, glaring at a plate, as though he were struggling with the urge to come round to my side of the table and take me by the scruff and chuck me out into the night – he could probably have done it, too, for I admit I was not in full possession of my strength – but Bartoli spoke to him rapidly in Italian, saying something I did not catch, and after another moment of menacing hesitation he nodded grimly and let go his grip on the chair, and, with a bow to Bartoli's mother and a parting glare at me, turned and trundled off. The silence returned. Bartoli began clearing his throat again, annoyingly. Maria the cook came in and crept around the table, stealthily gathering the dishes, giving me a wide berth. I stood up, making as much commotion as possible, and stumped out of the room, going I knew not where.

When Kristina Kovacs came to look for me I was standing in the book-lined passageway through which earlier we had entered, leaning against the shelves holding a big book up to the light and pretending to read in it. She stood before me quietly for a moment, her head bowed and hands clasped. She had taken on the distinct air of a nun, in her black dress with its white lace collar, and for a giddy moment I thought she was trying to think how to frame the news that Cass Cleave was dead. In the sallow light of the narrow passageway her skin had a sickly, moist pallor and the rims of her eyelids were inflamed. With a jolt, I was struck by the amazing fact that this woman who was here now would in a little while be here no more, would be, indeed, nowhere, that her flesh that I had intimately known would soon be falling off the bones, and in time the bones themselves would fall to dust, and then the dust itself would disappear. Always a shock, when one comes smack up against death like that, as if for the first time. I mean, one can be aware that a person is dying and yet not have acknowledged it, not have absorbed it, fully. Mortal illness, after all, is only a matter of acceleration. Who knows, I might be gone before she goes. It is a rum business. I stand amazed before the ungainsayable certainty that in a hundred years' time every creature now alive on this earth, with the exception of a few giant turtles and the odd hardy herder of yaks in the Ladakhs, will be dead. I do not necessarily deplore this arrangement – think of the crowding if it were to be otherwise. And indeed, I often feel it is not so much the passing of the present lot that should appal me as the prospect of our replacement by a fresh cast of fools and knaves, with their needs, loves, terrors, their little tragedies. Yes, the poor old world would be better rid of us entirely; leave it to the ants, I say. Meanwhile, however, here is the dying though still living Kristina Kovacs demanding my attention. "Axel," she said, "you must do something about this girl." Why, I wonder, do people always think the employment of one's first name will add irresistible weight to their pronouncements? Calmly I closed the book I had been inspecting, keeping an index finger between the pages to mark my place – it was, not that it matters, the
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,
the London 1888 facsimile of the 1499 original, in mint condition, as the old book thief in me could not help noting with nostalgic interest – and assumed an expression of polite, perplexed enquiry. Kristina sighed. She indulges me, does Kristina, and never more than mildly chides me for my reprehensible ways. "What are you doing with her?" she said. "You can see she is sick." Sick, I expostulated, sick? "Yes," she said, "sick. And she has shown me the bruises." Bruises, bruises, what bruises? What had the child been saying about me? "Are you by any chance jealous, Kristina?" I said. The possibility had just occurred to me at that moment, I had spoken the thought before I was aware of having it. These little instances of unpremeditated insight convince me that the machines will never take over from us. Goodness, how discursive I am being today, with all this talk of insects, and machinery – whatever next? But Kristina, now, jealous… She gazed at me for a long moment, then turned aside with a weary, a despairing, shrug. "She wants to see you," she said. The bedroom where they had put Cass Cleave was large and square and high-ceilinged; stepping into it was like stepping straight into the past. Occupying the centre of the room was an enormous, high, iron bed in the chilly wastes of which my girl looked like a lost Arctic explorer fast-frozen in an ice floe. An electric lamp with a brown shade was burning weakly on a low table beside her, while all around on every available surface there was set out an unnerving array of devotional prints, all of Jesus, or the Virgin Mary, or the two of them together, mother and son vying with each other in expressions of sorrow, and seeping wounds, and ever bigger and bloodier bleeding hearts. I sat down gingerly on the side of the bed; it swayed, the springs wearily protesting. Cass Cleave's eyes were closed, and her face was drawn and without colour, not unlike the many doleful faces of the Virgin and her virginal Son ranged round about, and just as unreally, as ethereally, beautiful. Only her head and hands were visible, which increased the impression of her having succumbed in the effort of trying to free herself from the frozen medium of pillowcase and sheets. I was still lugging the
Hypnerotomachia;
I laid it down now on the bed beside her and she moved a hand sideways and touched the cover, still with her eyes closed, tracing the texture of the binding with her fingertips, as if she were blind. She smiled. "Well," I said, not harshly, "what happened to you?" For a while she said nothing. I could feel her thinking. There was not a sound around us anywhere. Idly I entertained the thought that we might both have died, without noticing, and that this dim-lit chamber crowded with hearts and thorns and plaster tears was all that there would be of the next world. "The different air," Cass Cleave said, very softly. "The different smells. If you got used to that, a foreign country would not be foreign any more." I said, yes, that was true, I supposed. I looked about, and even whistled a little, softly, to myself; one can be bored no matter what the circumstances. On the wall above the bed there was a large, framed, faded photograph of a young man with longish hair, dressed in the fashion of a previous century, dark coat and high stiff collar and stock, whose slightly crossed but burning eyes stared down upon me with an expression of deep animosity and challenge. Despite the antiquity of the picture, the fellow in it bore a marked resemblance to old Signora Bartoli, whose bedroom, I surmised, this must be. Cass Cleave moved her fingers from the cover of the book and touched my hand. She was looking at me now. "I want to go to America," she said. I nodded, indulging her. "Of course you do," I said. I could have lied, I could have said I would take her to Arcady with me, but I did not. It is no matter; it was not my America she meant.

That night, what was left of it, I slept alone for the first time in months. Or did not sleep, but lay in a sort of conscious daze, rather, attended by my familiar demons. I have always been prey to night terrors – hardly surprising, I suppose – but lately they are mainly of the waking kind. When I was young my dreams were all chaos, lust and violence, now in my old age sleep is a room of quiet marvels into which I am nightly ushered. It is the ante-room of death; in it, my fears are stilled. Tonight, however, that door was locked against me, and I lay on my back under a humid sheet with my hands folded on my chest like the dead Christ in his shroud and listened to the restless world's carousings. The city seemed to be celebrating one of this festive country's many feast days, for the streets outside were loud with revellers until the early hours. Or it may have been an hallucination: at one particularly clamorous stage of the celebrations I crept to the window and looked down and saw a sort of heraldic cavalcade passing along the street, young men in doublets and striped hose carrying banners and gowned girls with elaborate headdresses mounted on prancing steeds, followed by a band of motleyed minstrels. Toward dawn the crowds, phantom or real, at last dispersed, and then the all too real garbage trucks and delivery men took over. The curtain edges were lightening when I thought I saw Cass Cleave come into the room. She sat by me in the shadows and did not speak. I tried to touch her, to feel her warmth, but my winding-sheet held me fast and I could not move a limb. What was I thinking of, to leave her in the care of others, at such a time? But then, I was not aware that it was such a time. All the same, of the many derelictions of which I have been guilty in my life, this one seems to me now the most reproachable.

I do not know what passed between Kristina Kovacs and Cass Cleave that night, while I cowered in my forsaken bed, what confidences were offered, what pledges given. Kristina has not volunteered to tell me, and I have not had the heart to ask. I harbour no resentment against her. She acted for what she thought was the best, as unwitting mischief-makers usually do. If she does know my poor secrets she likely does not care, so engrossed is she in the hard business of dying. I sit with her for hours, in the evenings especially, and often late into the night. I think that for most of the time she forgets I am there. I can sense her labouring over her pain: it is as if she is trying to hew something out of tbe most unmalleable material, to fashion something that is beyond her powers and her failing strength. The doctors insisted that she undergo radium treatment, the only result of which I can see is that now she is entirely bald. She refuses to wear a wig. In this shorn state she has acquired an austere, elemental beauty; her pharaonic head, held frailly aloft and faintly trembling on the delicate, fleshless column of her neck, is stark and absolute, all line and plane and angled shadow. Sometimes when I am sitting with her I stroke her head; it seems to comfort her, and she nudges against my hand, with an almost forceful insistence, like a cat. Her scalp is warm and always a little moist, and there is a vein that beats beneath it, very fast. I accused her lightly that night at Franco Bar-toli's of being jealous, but I am the one who is jealous now. Whatever I may call what I felt for Cass Cleave – the word love, in my mouth, has acquired a blasphemous overtone – I know that Kristina in some way came to share it. They had only that one night together, and I am no more willing to speculate on how they spent it than I am to ask Kristina to tell me. I am prevented by a sort of prudishness, or do I mean pudency; the blaze that burns the jealous lover feels so like the heat of lust.