There was someone at the door. There was someone pounding at the door. I did not know where I was, and lay palpitant and motionless like a hunted criminal cowering in a ditch. I was on my side, one arm in a cramp under me and the other thrown up as if to shield myself from assault. At the window the gauze curtains were yellowly aglow, and behind them there was a rapid and general downward undulation, which I could not understand or identify, until I remembered the snow. Whoever was at the door had stopped hammering, and instead seemed to be pressed against it, making a low keening sound that buzzed against the wood. I got up from the bed. The room was cold and yet I was sweating, and had to step through a miasma of my own fetor. At the door I hesitated, a hand on the knob. I had not switched on a lamp and the only illumination in the room was provided by the sulphurous glow of the street-light through the curtains behind me. I opened the door. At first I thought that someone in the hall had hurled an item of flimsy clothing at me, for the impression I had was the chill, shivery slither of something silken, with no one, it seemed, inside it. Then Dawn Devonport’s fingers were scrabbling at my wrist, and all at once she materialised within her nightdress, trembling and panting and redolent of night and terror.
She could not say what was the matter. Indeed, she could hardly speak. Was it a dream, I asked, an actor’s nightmare, perhaps, like the one her pounding at the door had woken me from? No—she had not been asleep. She had felt some vast thing in the room with her, a knowing, malignant and invisible presence. I led her to the bed and switched on the lamp on the table beside it. She sat with her head bowed and her hair hanging down and her hands resting lax on her thighs with the palms turned up. Her nightdress was made of pearl-grey satin, so fine and thin that I could have counted the links of her spine. I took off my jacket and draped it over her shoulders, and it was only then I noticed that I was still fully dressed—I must have come in and crawled on to the bed and fallen asleep straight off. What was I to do, now, with this shivering creature, who in her night attire seemed more naked than she would have been without it, so that I hardly dared to lay a hand on her? She said I did not have to do anything, only let her stay for a minute, until whatever it was had passed. She did not look up when she spoke, but sat as before, abject and trembling, with her head hanging and her hands turned helplessly up and the exposed pale back of her neck gleaming in the light of the bedside lamp.
How strange a thing it is, the immediate and intimate proximity of another. Or is it only I who think it strange? Perhaps for others others are not other at all, or at any rate not as they are for me. For me, there are two modes of otherness only, that of the loved one or of the stranger, and the former is hardly other, but more an extension of myself. For this state of affairs I believe I have Mrs Gray to thank, or blame. She took me into her arms so early on that there was not time for me to learn the laws of proper perspective. She being so close, the rest inevitably were pushed disproportionately farther off. Here I pause a moment to consider. Is this really the case, or am I indulging in that sophistry which from earliest days has bedevilled me? But how can I know if I am? I feel it to be so, that Mrs Gray was the original and, to an extent, abiding arbiter in my relations with other people, and no effort of thought, however extended or intense, will convince me otherwise. Even if I were to coerce myself into a contrary opinion by the force of thinking, feeling would still feel itself in the right, and be an ever-present, disgruntled rump, ready to assert its claim at every smallest opportunity. Such are the speculations a man will indulge in when in the snowy small hours of the morning many miles from hearth and home he finds himself unexpectedly entertaining in his hotel room a famous and notoriously beautiful film star wearing nothing but her nightie.
I got her to lie down on my unfragrantly sweaty bed—she was so limp I had to put a hand behind her ankles and help her to lift her chilly feet from the floor—and spread the blanket over her. She still had my jacket around her shoulders. It was apparent that she was even yet not entirely awake, and I was reminded of Lydia when she goes flying through the house on her frantic nocturnal quests for our lost daughter; is this the only role there is to be for me now, a comforter of driven and afflicted women? I drew a rush-bottomed chair to the bed and sat down to consider my position, here with this young woman whom I hardly knew, sleepless and harried, on this wintry shore. Yet there was something starting up too at the base of my spine, a hot trickle of secret excitement. When I was a boy, after Meg the doll but long before the advent of Mrs Gray, I used to entertain a recurring fantasy in which I was required to attend to certain cosmetic requirements of a grown-up woman. The woman was never specific but generic, woman in the abstract, I suppose, the celebrated Ewig-Weibliche. It was all very innocent, in action, at least, for I was not called upon to do more than administer to this imaginary idol a thorough hair-wash, say, or buff her fingernails, or, in exceptional circumstances, apply her lipstick—this last no easy feat, by the way, as I was to find out later on when I got Mrs Gray to let me have a go at her gorgeously pulpy, unfixable mouth with one of those sticks of crimson wax that always look to me like a brass cartridge case in which is embedded a surreally soft and glistening scarlet bullet. What I felt now, here in this dingy hotel room, was something of the same mildly tumescent pleasure that I used to enjoy all those years ago when I imagined assisting my phantom lady at her toilet.
‘Tell me,’ my unlooked-for visitor asked now, in an urgent whisper, breathlessly, opening wide those slightly hazed grey eyes of hers, ‘tell me what happened to your daughter.’
She was lying on her back with her hands folded on her breast and her head turned sideways towards me and her cheek crushing the lapel of my jacket underneath her. She has a way, I have come to know it by now, of speaking out suddenly like this, suddenly and softly, when least expected, and it is the suddenness that confers on what she says an oracular quality, so that her words, no matter how mundane or inconsequential they might be, generate an archaic throb. I presume this is a trick she has learned from her years before the camera. A film set does have, it is true, something of the airless intensity of the shrine of a sibyl. There, in that cave of hot light, with the mike at the end of its boom dangling over our heads and the crew fixed on us from the shadows like a circle of hushed suppliants, we might be forgiven for imagining that the lines we recite are the utterances, transmitted through us, of the riddling god himself.
I told her that I did not know what had happened to my daughter, except that she had died. I told her how Cass used to hear voices, and said perhaps they had driven her to it, the voices, as often is the case, so I understand, with those whose minds are damaged and who are led to damage themselves. I was remarkably calm, I might even say detached, as if the circumstances—the anonymous hotel room, the lateness of the hour, this young woman’s unwavering, grave regard—had at a stroke, and so simply, released or at any rate paroled me from the toils of the ten-year-long pact of restraint and reticence that I had made with Cass’s spirit. Anything might be spoken here, it seemed, any thought might be summoned up and freely expressed. Dawn Devonport waited, her great eyes fixed on me unblinking. There had been, I told her, someone with my daughter. ‘And so,’ she said, ‘you have come back here, to find out who it was.’