Did I appreciate these things then as I appreciate them now, or am I only luxuriating in them in retrospect? Could a boy of fifteen have been possessed of my old roué’s discriminating and hungry eye? Mrs Gray taught me many lessons, the first and most precious of which was to forgive another human being for being human. I was a boy and therefore had in my mind’s eye the platonically perfect girl, a creature bland as a manikin that did not sweat or go to the lavatory, that was docile, adoring and fabulously compliant. Mrs Gray was as unlike this fantasy as could be. She only had to do her laugh, a high whinny in the sinuses with a deep diaphragm note underneath, to send that lifeless dummy flying in tatters from my head. It was not a smooth substitution, the actual woman for the imagined ideal. In the early days I found Mrs Gray’s fleshliness itself disconcerting, at certain moments, in certain postures. Remember, up to then my knowledge of the female form had been confined to the Kayser Bondor lady’s legs and the bud-like breasts that Hettie Hickey had let me fondle in the Alhambra’s smoky darkness years before. Though Mrs Gray was not all that much more imposing in stature than Hettie, at times she seemed to me, in our early days, at least, a giantess looming over me, a figure of unassailable erotic power.
Yet she was thoroughly, inescapably, at times dismayingly, human, with all a human creature’s frailties and failings. One day we were tussling on the floor in Cotter’s place—she was dressed and had been attempting to leave but I had got hold of her and made her plump back down on the mattress with my hand under her behind—when she inadvertently released into my palm an abrupt soft fart. Its single note was followed by a terrible silence, such as there would be after a pistol shot or the first rumble of an earthquake. It was, of course, for me a great shock. I was still at an age when although I knew that in matters peristaltic the sexes are identical I could blithely deny to myself that it was so. A fart, however, was incontrovertible. In the aftermath of this one Mrs Gray drew away from me quickly with a heave of the shoulders. ‘Now look,’ she said angrily, ‘now look what you made me do, yanking at me like that as if I was a tinker’s trollop or something.’ The injustice of this left me speechless. When she turned back, though, and saw my look of outrage, she gave a spluttering laugh and pushed me hard in the chest and demanded to know, still laughing, if I was not thoroughly ashamed of myself. As so often, it was her laughter that saved the moment, and in time, far from being repelled by the thought of that fundamental report she had let go, I felt privileged, as though she had invited me to be with her in a place where no one before me had ever been permitted.
The fact is, she spoiled most other females for me. Girls like Hettie Hickey were nothing to me now, their meagre breasts and boyish hips, their knock-knees, their plaits and pony-tails—all this I discounted, I who had known the opulence of a grown-up woman, the feel of her full flesh straining inside the strictures of her clothing, the hot fatness of her lips when they went pulpy from passion, the cool moist touch of her slightly pitted cheek when she laid it against my belly. As well as fleshliness she possessed too a quality of lightness, of grace, that not the daintiest slip of a girl could match. Her colours, for me, were grey, naturally, but a particular lilac-grey, and umber, and rose, and another tint, hard to name—dark tea? bruised honeysuckle?—to be glimpsed in her most secret places, along the fringes of her nether lips and in the aureole of the pursed little star occluded within the crevice of her bum.
And she was, for me, unique. I did not know where in the human scale to place her. Not really a woman, like my mother, and certainly not like the girls of my acquaintance, she was, as I think I have already said, of a gender all to herself. At the same time, of course, she was womanhood in its essence, the very standard by which, consciously or otherwise, I measured all the women who came after her in my life; all, that is, save one. And what would Cass have made of her? How would it have been if Mrs Gray and not Lydia had been my daughter’s mother? The question fills me with alarm and consternation yet since it is posed I must entertain it. Remarkable how the idlest piece of speculation can seem to invert everything in and for an instant. It is as if the world had turned around somehow in a half-circle and shown itself to me from an unfamiliar angle, and I am plunged at once into what feels like happy grief. My two lost loves—is that why I—? Oh, Cass—
That was Billie Stryker just now calling on the telephone, telling me Dawn Devonport tried to kill herself. And failed, it seems.
Part II
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When my daughter was a little girl she suffered from insomnia, especially in the weeks around midsummer, and sometimes, in desperation, mine and hers, late in those white nights I would bundle her in a blanket into the car and take her for drives northwards along the back roads by the coast, for we were still living by the sea then. She enjoyed these jaunts; even if they did not make her sleep they induced in her a drowsy calm; she said it felt funny to be in the car in her pyjamas, as if she were asleep after all and travelling in a dream. Years later, when she was a young woman, she and I spent a Sunday afternoon retracing our old route up that coastline. We did not acknowledge to each other the sentimental implications of the journey, and I made no mention of the past—one had to be careful of what one said to Cass—but when we got out on that winding road I think she no less than I was remembering those nocturnal drives and the dreamlike sensation of gliding through the greyish darkness, with the dunes beside us and the sea beyond them a line of shining mercury under a horizon so high it seemed it must be a mirage.
There is a place, quite far north, I do not know what it is called, where the road narrows and runs for some way beside cliffs. They are not very high cliffs, but they are high enough and sheer enough to be dangerous, and there are yellow warning notices at intervals all the way along. That Sunday, Cass made me stop the car and get out and walk with her on the clifftop. I was unwilling, having always been afraid of heights, but it would not have done to refuse my daughter so simple a request. It was late spring, or early summer, and the day was brilliant under a scoured sky, with a warm blast of wind coming in off the sea and the sting of iodine in the salt-laden air. I took scant interest in the sparkling scene, however. The look of the swaying waters far below and of the waves gnashing at the rocks was making me nauseous, though I kept up as brave a front as I could manage. Sea birds at eye-level and no more than a few yards away from us hung almost motionless on the updraughts, their wings trembling, their screeches sounding like derisive taunts. After some way the narrow path grew narrower still and made an abrupt descent. Now there was a steep bank of clay and loose stones on one side and nothing on the other save sky and the growling sea. I felt giddier than ever, and went along in a dreadful funk, leaning in towards the bank on my left and away from the windy blue abyss to the right. We should have gone in file, the way was so narrow and the going so treacherous, but Cass insisted on walking beside me, on the very edge of the path, with her arm locked in mine. I marvelled at her lack of fear, and was even starting to feel resentful of her insouciance, for by now my own fright was such that I was sweating and I had begun to tremble. Gradually it became apparent, however, that Cass too was terrified, perhaps more terrified than I was, hearing the wooing wind crooning to her and feeling the emptiness plucking at her coat and the long fall that was only the tiniest sidestep away opening its arms to her so invitingly. She was a lifelong dabbler in death, was my Cass—no, she was more, she was a connoisseur. Striding along that cliff-edge was for her, I am sure, a sip of the deepest, most darksome, brew, the richest vintage. As she held on tight to my arm I could feel the fear thrumming in her, the thrill of terror twitching along her nerves, and I realised that, perhaps because of her fear, I was no longer afraid, and so we went on briskly, father and daughter, and which of the two of us was sustaining the other it was impossible to say.