Our waiter, an absurdly handsome fellow with the usual aquiline profile and thick black hair slicked back from his forehead, was at the kitchen door at the rear, where the chef had put out his head—chefs in their smeared bibs always look to me like struck-off surgeons—and now they both came forwards, the chef shy and hesitant in the wake of his undauntably cocky colleague. I knew what they were about, having witnessed more or less the same ritual on countless occasions since we had stepped on to Italian soil. They arrived at our table—by now we were the only customers left in the place—and Mario the waiter with a flourish introduced Fabio the chef. Fabio was roly-poly and middle-aged, and had sandy hair, unusual in this land of swarth Lotharios. He was after an autograph, of course. I do not think I had ever before seen an Italian blushing. I waited with interest for Dawn Devonport’s response—not a minute ago she had seemed ready to hit me with her handbag—but of course she is a professional to the tip of her little silver pen, which she produced now and scribbled on the menu that red-faced Fabio had proffered, and handed it back to him with that slow-motion smile she reserves for close-up encounters with her fans. I managed to glimpse the signature, with its two big, looped, opulent Ds like recumbent eyelids. She saw me seeing, and granted me a wry small smile in acknowledgement. Stella Stebbings, indeed. The chef rolled away happily, the precious menu pressed to his soiled front, while smirking Mario struck an attitude and enquired of the diva if she would care perhaps for caffè, while pointedly ignoring me. I suppose they all think I am her manager, or her agent; I doubt they take me for anything more.
Since it seems that nothing in creation is ever destroyed, only disassembled and dispersed, might not the same be true of individual consciousness? Where when we die does it go to, all that we have been? When I think of those whom I have loved and lost I am as one wandering among eyeless statues in a garden at nightfall. The air about me is murmurous with absences. I am thinking of Mrs Gray’s moist brown eyes flecked with tiny splinters of gold. When we made love they would turn from amber through umber to a turbid shade of bronze. ‘If we had music,’ she used to say at Cotter’s place, ‘if we had music we could dance.’ She sang, herself, all the time, all out of tune, ‘The Merry Widow Waltz’, ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’, ‘Roses Are Blooming in Picardy’, and something about a skylark, skylark, that she did not know the words of and could only hum, tunelessly off-key. These things that were between us, these and a myriad others, a myriad myriad, these remain of her, but what will become of them when I am gone, I who am their repository and sole preserver?
‘I saw something, when I was dead,’ Dawn Devonport said. She had her elbows on the table and was leaning forwards again at a crouch, dabbling with a fingertip among the cold ashes in the ashtray. She was frowning, and did not look at me. Outside the window the afternoon had turned to the colour of ash. ‘I was technically dead for nearly a minute, so they told me—did you know that?’ she said. ‘And I saw something. I suppose I imagined it, though I don’t know how I could be dead and imagine something.’
Perhaps, I said, it was before she was dead, or afterwards, that she had undergone this experience.
She nodded, still frowning, not listening. ‘It wasn’t like a dream,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t like anything. Does that make sense, something that wasn’t like anything? But that was what it was—I saw something like nothing.’ She examined the ashy tip of her finger and then looked at me with curious dispassion. ‘I’m frightened,’ she said, quite calm and matter-of-fact. ‘I wasn’t before but now I am. That’s strange, isn’t it?’
As we made our exit the waiter and the chef were at the door, bowing and grinning. Fabio the chef winked at me with a cheery, almost a fraternal, disdain.
It was late when we arrived at Lerici, suffering still from the sour wine at lunch and then the bad air and the clamour of the train. It had begun to snow, and the sea beyond the low wall of the promenade was a darkling tumult. I tried to make out the lights of Portovenere across the bay but could not for those great flocks of whiteness hosting haphazard in the brumous air. The lamp-lit town straggled ahead of us up a hillside towards the brute bulk of the castello. In the snow-muffled silence the winding, narrow streets had a closed and sombre aspect. There was the sense of everything holding its breath in amazement before the spectacle of this relentless, ghostly falling. The Hotel le Logge was wedged between a little grocery shop and a squat, stuccoed church. The shop was still open, despite the lateness of the hour, a startling, brightly lit windowless box with crowded shelves stacked all the way to the ceiling and at the front a big slanted counter on which were displayed a profusion of damply glistening vegetables and polished fruits. There were crates of mushrooms, cream and tan, and shameless tomatoes, ranks of tufted leeks as thick as my wrist, zucchini the colour of burnished palm leaves, open burlap bags of apples, oranges, Amalfitan lemons. Stepping from the taxi we stopped and looked with incomprehension and a kind of dismay upon this crowding and unseasonal abundance.
The hotel was old and shabby and, inside, appeared to be of an all-over shade of brown—the carpet had the look of monkey-fur. Along with the usual whiff of drains—it came in wafts, at a fixed interval, as if rising out of ancient, rotting lungs—there was another smell, drily wistful, the smell, it might be, of last summer’s sunshine trapped in corners and in crevices and gone to must. As we entered there was much bowing and beaming before the brisk and imperious advance of Dawn Devonport—public attention always bucks her up, as which of us, in our business, does it not? The high fur collar of her coat made her already thinned face seem thinner and smaller still; the headscarf she had folded in and tucked close to her skull in the style of what’s-her-name in Sunset Boulevard. How she managed to make her way through the lobby’s crepuscular gloom with those sunglasses on I do not know—they are unsettlingly suggestive of an insect’s evilly gleaming, prismatic eyes—but she crossed to the desk ahead of me at a rapid, crisply clicking pace and plonked her handbag down beside the nippled brass bell and took up a sideways pose, presenting her magnificent profile to the already undone fellow behind the counter in his jacket of rusty jet and his frayed white shirt. I wonder if these seemingly effortless effects that she pulls off have to be calculated anew each time, or are they finished and perfected by now, a part of her repertoire, her armoury? You must understand, I felt permanently as abject before the spectacle of her splendour as did the poor chap behind the desk—this absurdity, O heart, O troubled heart.
Then the rattly lift, the vermiform corridors, the crunch of the key in the lock and a stale sigh of air released out of the shadowed room. The muttering porter with his stooped back went ahead and placed the bags just so at the foot of the big square bed that had a hollow in the middle of it and looked as if generations of porters, this one’s predecessors, had been born in it. How accusingly a suitcase once set down can seem to look at one. I could hear Dawn Devonport next door making many mysterious small noises, clinks and knocks and softly suggestive rustlings as she unpacked her bags. Then there came that moment of mild panic when the clothes had been hung, the shoes stowed, the shaving things set out on the bathroom’s marble shelf, where someone’s forgotten cigarette had left a burned stain, a black smear with amber edges. Down in the street a car swished past, and the flare of its head-lamps poked a pencil-ray of yellow light through a chink in the curtains that probed the room from one side to the other before being swiftly withdrawn. Upstairs a lavatory gulped and swallowed, and in response the drain in the bathroom here, getting into the spirit, made a deep-throated sound that might have been a gurgle of lewd laughter.