Shroud (4 page)

Here is the airport, in the morning's splintered glare, the flustered travellers lugging their bags, the taxi cabs like milling hounds nosing at each other's rear parts, the black man in the peaked cap grinning and saying,
"Good
morning, sir!" with enormous, false, emphatic cheerfulness. I paid the Russian his fare – the brute smiled! – and took my suitcase and turned on the swivel of my stick and went forward with my boatman's gait to meet a shadowy otherself in the smoked-glass doors of the departure hall that at the last moment, just as it seemed I and my reflection must meet in mutual annihilation, suddenly bethought themselves and opened before me with a hot gasp.

Fly! Fly!

She placed the two frail scraps of newspaper on the little lamp-lit table by the bed and sat back on her heels and studied them for a long moment, her hands laid flat on the table edge and her chin resting on her hands, now the news report of his long-ago death, now the side-by-side photographs of him and of the other one, all faded by time. Each breath she breathed clouded briefly the glass top of the table and stirred the fragments of sepia-coloured paper. They were brittle and light as a butterfly's wings. She felt a thrill of guilt; she had clipped them out with a nail scissors, hunched over the newspaper file, expecting the librarian to see what she was doing and come and upbraid her in guttural outrage and in a language not one word of which she would understand. She wondered again at the misprint in the caption to the photograph –
Axel Vanden
– the inexplicable appropriateness of it. How young he looked, hardly more than a boy, very good-looking, but with such an alarmed expression; it was probably just that the camera flash had startled him, though she could not help seeing fright and foreboding in those eyes. The other one, beside him, wore a grin, insolent and yet self-mocking. She picked up delicately in her fingertips the two rectangles of rice paper, which she had trimmed to an exact fit, and laid one each over the two cuttings, first the report of his death, then the photographs. The fountain pen she had bought was of an old-fashioned design, plump in the middle and tapered at the end; it had cost an alarming amount of money. Inside, there had been not the rubber bulb she had expected – the fake-antique effect was confined to the exterior – only a rigid plastic ink cartridge. It was better this way: a bulb she would have had to remove, for fear of it leaking, or bursting, but she could leave the cartridge in, it would be safe, and small enough to give ample space for her purpose inside the hollow of the barrel. This way too the pen would work, and that was good; verisimilitude is in the details, that was a lesson she had learned at the knee of a master. Now she moved the two pieces of newsprint to the front edge of the table and carefully, not daring to breathe, rolled them tightly on to the spindle of the ink cartridge, first one, then the other, face down with the protective sheets of rice paper between them, and secured them with a loop of fine thread she had teased from the hem of her blouse. Tying the knot was difficult, for the leaves of newsprint and the rice paper all kept trying to uncurl, and she had to make three attempts before she succeeded. She was careful too in screwing back the barrel of the pen; at one of the turns it snagged somehow on its threads and made a cracking noise, and she had the sensation of something soft and warm flipping over in the pit of her stomach. But then it was done. Resting fatly in her fingers the pen felt as full as a loaded pistol. To test it she wrote her name with a flourish on the pad beside the bed; the nib was too fine for her liking. She screwed on the cap again and clipped the pen into the pocket of her blouse and went and stood before the wardrobe mirror and looked at herself for a long time. Her own reflection always fascinated her, and frightened her, too, this inescapable person standing there, so known, so knowing, and so strange.

Tonight the voices in her head were silent.

Now there was nothing more to do; she had made all possible preparations. Axel Vander would have had her letter by this time, over there on the far side of the world, they had assured her of that at the post office. She had asked for the swiftest possible delivery; it had taken another dismayingly large handful of her dwindling store of bank notes. She went and leaned by the window and looked out into the night. In the square there were rain puddles, shiny and black as oil, and a line of trees, plane trees, she supposed, throwing ragged, oblong shadows across the pavement. She could hear a barrel organ playing somewhere, with mechanical and sinister cheeriness – a barrel organ, at this time of night? – and there was a faint, sickly aroma of what it took her a moment to identify as vanilla. She liked being here, in the unfamiliar city, the isolation of it. She was sure he would come. Perhaps as soon as tomorrow. He might even have set out already. She pictured him, tried to picture him, hurrying through the airport, flustered and petulant, banging his fist on the ticket counter and shouting out his name, demanding attention, insisting he must have a seat on the very next flight; he was famous for the violence of his temper. A tremor of excitement ran through her and she shivered. The only face she could put on him was the one from the newspaper cutting, with its youthful grin. He would be angry, and frightened, too, perhaps; he might offer her money; he might even threaten her. But she was not afraid. The prospect of his rage, his threats, did not alarm her; on the contrary, it made her feel calm, as if she were flying, somehow, suspended on firm air, unreachable, beyond all peril. What did she want from him? She did not know. There was something to be desired, certainly, she felt it inside her, like a vague and not unpleasurable distress; it was the feeling she imagined of being newly pregnant. She held his fate in her hands, his future; she had found him out. Yes, he would come, she was sure of it.

It was after midnight when I got into the city at last. There had been flight delays and missed connections, and the limousine that had been supposed to meet me at the airport was not there, the driver having tired of waiting and gone away. Then they told me my suitcase had not arrived, that it must have been sent on to somewhere else. At the lost luggage desk a swarthy clerk with his cap pushed to the back of his head and an unlit cigarette tucked behind his ear pretended not to understand my Italian – which, I might have told him, I learned from Dante – then shrugged and said the bag could be anywhere, and gave me a sheaf of incomprehensible forms to fill in. I threw the papers back in his face and for a horribly thrilling moment it seemed, from the truculent way he lowered his already low brow and scowled, that he might turn violent, and I took a step backwards and hefted my stick defensively. He only shrugged, however, and jabbered into a telephone, and told me someone would come, and turned contemptuously away. There was another wait then. Fuming, I sculled myself up and down the arrivals area, cutting a swathe through the press of tourists and noisy families and self-important businessmen with their slim briefcases and too-shiny, tasselled shoes. Presently a uniformed young woman from the airline arrived and informed me with a musical little laugh mat yes, the
Professore's
luggage had indeed gone to another destination, but that it would shortly be brought back and sent directly to my hotel. She had a large bust and a faint moustache and unpleasantly protrusive eyes, and reminded me of a celebrated operatic diva of the immediate postwar years whose name I cannot for the moment recall. I swore at her, and she blinked rapidly and ventured a glassy smile, not trusting that she had heard me correctly. She went off and found a taxi for me, and I was driven at astonishing speed – one always forgets how they drive here – through the humid night, into the city, where the last of the Saturday evening crowds were still promenading under the stone arcades.

Then at the hotel I found that my room had been given away. They pretended to have no record of my reservation, but from the evasively vacant look of the bald old body at the reception desk I knew it was a lie. I raised my voice, and made threats, and stabbed at the floor of the lobby with my stick. The manager was summoned, a preposterously handsome, heavy-set, ageing dandy, mahogany-coloured and shiny-haired, with the puffed-up chest of a heroic tenor – this entire business was turning into
opera bujfa
– and advanced on me, unctuously smiling, with hands outspread, and assured me that everything would be arranged, everything would be fixed, in just a little while, if I would be patient. So I went and sat on a squeaky leather chair in the deserted bar, under the resentful eye of a tired barman, and drank too much red wine, and when at length I was led up to my room, on the fifth floor, a partitioned-off brown cell with a naked lavatory bowl standing in a corner, I was too tipsy and tired to complain any more. Despite exhaustion and the lateness of the hour, however, I decided I must speak at once, immediately,
now,
to the letter-writer, my mysterious nemesis, and even called the switchboard and asked to be put through to Antwerp, but then I paused and thought better of it – I would have started straight away to shriek at her – and threw down the receiver and crawled into bed, bleared and unbathed, still wearing the underwear I had not changed since setting out half a world ago.

I passed a restless night; the bed, as so often with hotel beds, was far too small to accommodate me and my stiff leg, and I was woken repeatedly by noises from outside, car horns and revving motorcycles and young men shouting to each other from street to street. Toward dawn the clamour abated and I fell into a doze, beset by violent dreams. I woke early, sweating alcohol, my brain beating, and rose and stumbled to the window and opened wide the curtains and squinted up between the beetling buildings at the dense cerulean sky of Europe.

After breakfast, with renewed fuss and apologies, I was moved into a large suite on the more salubrious third floor. The rooms were spacious and cool, with floors of black marble, silken smooth. My returned suitcase stood at the foot of the bed, wearing a shame-faced look. I have a fondness for hotel rooms, the air they have of tight-lipped anonymity, the sense of being sealed off from the world, the almost audible echo of whisperings and indrawn breaths and women crying out in helpless rapture. Reclining in a mid-morning bath I concocted a picture of Miss Nemesis: a dried-up old virgin with blue-veined talons and spectacles on a string, and a mouth, with a fan of fine wrinkles etched into the whiskered upper lip, set in bitter dissatisfaction at the lost promise of her youth, when she had worn slacks and smoked cigarettes and written that thesis on Wordsworth's politics or Shelley's atheism that had so shocked and impressed her tutor at Girton or the bluestockings at Bryn Mawr. Surely she would be easy to deal with. First I would try charm, then threats; if all else failed I would take her to the top of the Antonelli Mole and push her off. Laughing, I began to cough, and felt my tobacco-beaten lungs wobbling in their cage like heavy, half-inflated, wet balloons, and the bath water around me swayed and almost slopped over. My cigarette case, another purloined trinket from the past, was beside me in the soap dish. I lit up, small flakes of hot ash hissing around me in the water. Nothing like a good deep chestful of cigarette smoke to quell a morning cough.

I hauled myself up in a cascade of suds and immediately jarred my elbow on the edge of a glass shelf. This new pain struck up an echo in the knee I had bruised yesterday in the taxi on the bridge. I stood a moment clutching my arm and swearing. I am a bad fit with the world, an awkward fit; I am too high, too wide, too heavy for the common scale of things. I am not being boastful, quite the contrary; I have always found my oversized self burdensome and embarrassing. Before me in the misted glass of the bathroom's floor-length mirror my reflection loomed, pallid and peering I went out to the bedroom and stood by the window looking down into the shaded defile of the street, still massaging my bruised elbow. A bus went past, cars, foreshortened people. At the corner, where an angled block of buttery sunlight leaned, a woman selling flowers looked up and seemed to see me – was it possible, at such a distance? What a sight I would have been, suspended up there behind glass, a grotesque seraph, vast, naked, ancient. I lifted a hand, the palm held flatly forward, in solemn greeting, but the flower seller made no response.

Almost before I knew what I was doing I had snatched up the telephone and asked for the Antwerp number. Waiting, I could hear myself breathing in the mouthpiece, as if I were standing behind my own shoulder. Wet still from the bath, I dripped on the marble floor, in the darkly gleaming surface of which I could see yet another, dim reflection of myself, in end-on perspective this time, like that bronzen portrait of the dead Christ by what's-his-name, first the feet and then the shins, the knees, and dangling genitals, and belly and big chest, and topping it all the aura of wild hair and the featureless face looking down.

She answered on the first ring. I hardly knew what to say; I had not thought I would reach her at once like this, I had expected delays, obstacles, evasions. Yes, she said, yes, this is she. I could not place her accent; she was not English, and yet an English-speaker. I knew from something in her voice that she had been doing nothing, nothing at all, only waiting for me to call. I pictured the scene, the meagre room in the cheap hotel, the light of a northern spring morning the colour of shined-on lead falling from a mansard window, and her, sitting on the side of the bed, head bowed and arthritic old hands folded in her lap, biding through the long hours, listening to the silence, willing it to be broken by the telephone's jangling summons. She spoke with judicious care, costively, rationing the words; was there someone with her, overhearing what she said? No, she would be alone, I was certain of that. I said that she must come to me, for I would not go to her, and there was a lengthy pause. Then she said it was a question of the fare; train travel was expensive, and it was a long way. Now it was I who allowed the silence to expand. Did she think I should pay for her to come and ruin me? Still I would not speak. Very well, she said at last, she would take the overnight express and be here in the morning, and without another word, yet not hurriedly, she hung up. I shivered; the bath water drying off had left my old skin stretched and chill. My hands were shaking too, a little, but not from the damp or the cold.