I had arranged to meet Billie Stryker by the canal. How I love the archaic sunlight of these late-autumn afternoons. Low on the horizon there were scrapings of cloud like bits of crinkled gold leaf and the sky higher up was a layering of bands of clay-white, peach, pale green, all this reflected as a vaguely mottled mauve wash on the motionless and brimming surface of the canal. I still had that agitated sensation, that electrical seething in the blood, that had started up in me at Dawn Devonport’s bedside. I had not felt like this for a very long time. It was the kind of feeling I remembered from when I was young and everything was new and the future limitless, a state of fearful and exalted waiting like that into which, all those years ago, Mrs Gray had stepped, crooning distractedly under her breath and twisting that recalcitrant curl behind her ear. What was it today that had tapped me on the shoulder with its tuning fork? Was it the past, again, or the future?
Billie Stryker was in her accustomed rig-out of jeans and worn running shoes, the lace of one undone and straggling, and a short, shiny black leather jacket over a too-small white vest that was moulded like a second skin around her bosom and over the two puffy pillows of flesh into which her stomach above her belt was bisected by a deep, median wrinkle. Her hair, since I had seen her a couple of days before, had been dyed orange and violently cropped, by her own hand, I judged, and bristled in stubby clumps as if her skull were studded all over with tufted darts. She seems to derive a vengeful satisfaction from cultivating her unloveliness, pampering and primping it as another would her beauty. It is sad how she mistreats herself; I should have thought her horrible husband could be depended on to do that for her effectively enough. Over these past weeks of plodding and repetitious make-believe I have come to appreciate her for her stolid practicality, her doggedness and disenchanted resolve.
That husband. I find him a peculiarly unappetising specimen. He is tall and thin, with many concavities, as if slices had been taken off him at flanks, stomach, chest; he has a pin-head and a mouthful of rotting teeth; his grin is more like a snarl. When he looks about him the things his eye falls on seem to quail under his tainting glance. Early on he took to hanging about the set, so that Toby Taggart, soft-hearted as ever, felt compelled to find odd jobs for him. I would have had him seen off the premises, with threats, if necessary. I do not know what he does for a living otherwise—Billie is evasive on this as on so much else—but he gives an impression of constant busyness, of significant doings about to begin, of grand projects that at a word from him will get under way. I am sceptical. I think he lives on his wits, or on Billie’s, which are bound to be sharper. He gets himself up like a workman, in bleached-out dungarees and collarless shirts and boots with rubber soles an inch thick; also he keeps himself very dusty, even his hair, and when he sits down he does so at a weary sprawl, an ankle crossed on a narrow knee and an arm hooked over the back of his chair, as if he had finished a punishingly long stint of work and had stopped now briefly for a well-earned break. I confess I am a little afraid of him. He surely hit poor Billie and I can easily see him swinging a fist at me. Why does she stay with him? Futile question. Why does anyone do anything.
I said to Billie now that I wanted her to track down Mrs Gray for me. I said I did not doubt she would succeed. Nor do I. A pair of swans approached upon the water, a pen and her mate, surely, for are they not a monogamous species? We stopped to watch them as they came. Swans in their outlandish and grubby gorgeousness always seem to me to be keeping up a nonchalant front behind which really they are cowering in a torment of self-consciousness and doubt. These two were skilled dissemblers, and gave us a speculative stare, saw our hands were empty of crusts, and sailed onwards with a show of cool disdain.
Billie, tactful as ever, did not enquire as to why I should be suddenly so eager to trace this woman from my past. It is hard to guess what Billie’s opinion is on any matter. To talk to her is like dropping stones into a deep well; the response that comes back is long-delayed and muted. She has the wariness of a person much put-upon and menaced—that husband again—and before speaking seems to turn over every word carefully and examine it from all sides, testing its potential to displease and provoke. But she must have wondered. I told her Mrs Gray would be old by now or possibly no longer living. I said only that she had been my best friend’s mother and that I had not seen her or heard anything of her for nigh-on half a century. What I did not say, what I emphatically did not say, was why I wished to find her again. And why did I?—why do I? Nostalgia? Whim? Because I am getting old and the past has begun to seem more vivid than the present? No, something more urgent is driving me, though I do not know what it is. I imagine Billie told herself that my age allowed of quixotic self-indulgence, and that if I was prepared to pay her good money to trace some old biddy from my young days she would be a fool herself to question my foolishness. Did she guess my doings with Mrs Gray involved what I had heard her at other times refer to scornfully as hanky-panky? Perhaps she did, and was embarrassed for me, fond old codger that I must appear in her eyes, and that I appear, indeed, in my own. What would she have thought if she knew what thoughts I was thinking about that stricken girl lying in her hospital bed as we spoke? Hanky-panky, indeed.
We walked on. Moorhens now, a hissing stand of reeds, and still those little gold clouds.
Our daughter’s death was made so much the worse for her mother and me by being, to us, a mystery, complete and sealed; to us, though not, I hope, to her. I do not say we were surprised. How could we have been surprised, given the chaotic state of Cass’s inner life? In the months before she died, when she was abroad, an image of her had been appearing to me, a sort of ghost-in-waiting, in daytime dreams that were not dreams. You knew what she was going to do! Lydia had cried at me when Cass was dead. You knew and never said! Did I know, and should I have been able to foresee what she intended, haunted by her living presence as I was? Was it that, in those ghostly visitations, she was sending me somehow a warning signal from the future? Was Lydia right, could I have done something to save her? These questions prey upon me, yet I fear not as heavily as surely they should; ten years of unrelenting interrogation would wear down even the stubbornest devotee of an absconded spirit. And I am tired, so tired.
What was I saying?
Cass’s presence in Liguria
Cass’s presence in Liguria was the first link in the mysterious chain that dragged her to her death on those bleak rocks at Portovenere. What or who was in Liguria for her? In search of an answer, a clue to an answer, I used to pore for hours over her papers, creased and blotted wads of foolscap sheets scratched all over in her minuscule hand—I have them somewhere still—that she left behind her in the room in that foul little hotel in Portovenere that I shall never forget, at the top of the cobbled street from where we could see the ugly tower of the church of San Pietro, the very height she had flung herself from. I wanted to believe that what looked like the frantic scribblings of a mind at its last extremity were really an elaborately encoded message meant for me, and for me alone. And there were places indeed where she seemed to be addressing me directly. In the end, however, wish as I might, I had to accept that it was not me she was speaking to but someone other, my surrogate, perhaps, shadowy and elusive. For there was another presence detectable in those pages, or better say a palpable absence, the shade of a shade, whom she addressed only and always under the name of Svidrigailov.