We never did make the crossing to Portovenere, Dawn Devonport and I. Perhaps I had never intended that we should. We might have gone, there was nothing to stop us—unless it was everything, of course—for despite the winter storms the ferries were operating and the roads were open. She, it turned out, had known all along that it was in the little port across the bay that my daughter died—she had heard it from Billie Stryker, I imagine, or Toby Taggart, for it was no secret, after all. She did not ask why I had chosen not to tell her myself, why I had pretended to have picked our destination at random. I expect she thought I had a plan, a programme, a scheme of my own, one that she might as well go along with, for want of better. Perhaps she did not think anything at all, just let herself be taken away, as if she had no choice and were glad of it. ‘Keats died here,’ she said, ‘didn’t he, drown or something?’ We were walking on the front below the hotel in our overcoats and mufflers. No, I told her, that was Shelley. She paid no attention. ‘I’m like him, like Keats,’ she said, narrowing her eyes at the turbulent horizon. ‘I’m living a posthumous existence—isn’t that what he said of himself somewhere?’ She laughed briefly, seeming pleased with herself.
It was morning, and the disturbances and interrupted sleep of the night before had left me in a chafed and shaky state, and I felt as raw as a freshly peeled stick. Dawn Devonport on the other hand was preternaturally calm, not to say dazed. The hospital must have given her tranquillisers to take with her on the trip—her doctor, the nice Indian, had not wanted her to come at all—and she was remote and slightly bleared, and looked on everything around her with a sceptical expression, as if she were sure it had all been got up to deceive her. Every so often her attention would focus and she would peer at her watch, narrowing her eyes and frowning, as if something momentous that had been meant to happen were being inexplicably delayed. I told her of my encounter with Fedrigo Sorrán, although I was not sure that in my tired and travel-fevered state I had not dreamed him, or invented him, and indeed I still have doubts. In the hotel that morning there had been no sign of him, and I was convinced he was no longer staying there, if he had been there at all, in the first place. Of her coming to my room, of our chaste concumbence, of her tears and her subsequent abrupt and violent exit, we did not speak. Today we were like a pair of strangers who had met in a dockside bar the night before and gone on board together in tipsy good-fellowship, and now the vessel had sailed, and we were hungover, and the voyage was still all grimly ahead of us.
He had been on his way back from Leghorn, I told her, when his boat sank in a storm. She looked at me. ‘Shelley,’ I said. His friend Edward Williams was with him, and a boy whose name I could not recall. Their boat was named the Ariel. Some say the poet scuttled it himself. He was writing The Triumph of Life. She was no longer looking at me and I was not sure that she was listening. We stopped and stood and gazed across the bay. Portovenere was over there. We might indeed have been on the stern of a ship, steaming steadily away from what was meant to have been our destination. The sea was high and vehemently blue, and I could just make out a bustle of white water at the foot of that distant promontory.
‘What was she doing there, your daughter?’ Dawn Devonport asked. ‘Why there?’
Why indeed?
We walked on. Amazingly, impossibly, last night’s snowfall was entirely gone, as if the stage designer had decided it had been ill-advised and had ordered it to be swept away and replaced with a few minimalist puddles of muddy slush. The sky was hard and pale as glass, and in the limpid sunlight the little town above us was sharply etched against the hillside, a confused arrangement of angled planes in shades of yellow ochre, gesso white, parched pink. Dawn Devonport, her hands plunged in the pockets of her calf-length, fur-trimmed coat, paced beside me over the flagstones with her head down. She was in full disguise, with those enormous sunglasses and a big fur hat. ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘when I did it, or tried to—when I took the pills, I mean—I thought I was going to a place I would know, a place where I’d be welcomed.’ She had some difficulty with the words, as if her tongue were thick and hard to manage. ‘I thought I was going home.’
Yes, I said, or to America, like Svidrigailov, before he put the pistol to his head and pulled the trigger.
She said she was cold. We went to a café on the harbour front and she drank hot chocolate, crouched at the little round table and clutching the cup in both of those big hands of hers. An odd thing about those little cafés in the south is that they seem, to me, anyway, to have been something else originally, apothecary shops, or small offices, or even domestic living rooms, that had been gradually and as if unintentionally adapted to this new use. There is something about the counters, so high and narrow, and the way the tiny tables and the chairs are crammed in, that lends the place a makeshift, improvised look. The staff, too, bored and laconic, have a transitory air, as though they had been drafted in temporarily to fill a shortage and are irritably eager to get away and take up again whatever far more interesting pursuit it was they had been engaged in previously. And see all those flyers and playbills around the cash register, the postcards and signed photographs and scraps of messages stuck in the frame of the mirror behind the bar, that make the fat proprietor there—bald head with greasy grey strands draped over it, a scrunched-up moustache, a big gold ring on his fat little finger—look like a booking agent of some variety ensconced at his desk among the scraps and memorabilia of his trade.
You won’t bring her back, you know, Lydia said, not like this. And of course she was right. Not like this, nor any other way.
Who, Dawn Devonport wanted to know, frowning and concentrating, who was Svidrigailov? That was, I told her again, patiently, the name my daughter gave to the person she had come here with, whose child she was carrying. Through the glass door of the café I could see, far out on the bay, a sleek white craft, low in the stern and high in the prow, shouldering its way over the purple swell and seeming as if it would take to the sky at any moment, a magic ship, breasting the air. Dawn Devonport was lighting a cigarette with a hand that trembled. I told her what Billie Stryker had told me, that Axel Vander had been here or hereabouts at the same time as my daughter. She only nodded; perhaps she knew it already, perhaps Billie Stryker had told her that, too. She took off her sunglasses and folded them and put them on the table beside her cup. ‘And now we’re here, you and I,’ she said, ‘where the poet drowned himself.’
We left the café and walked up through the narrow streets of the town. In the hotel the lounge was deserted and we went in there. It was a cramped room with a high ceiling, very like the parlour in my mother’s lodging-house, with its shadows and its silence and its vague but indispersible air of ill-content. I sat on a sort of sofa with a low back and a high-sprung seat; the upholstery smelt strongly of immemorial cigarette smoke. A grandfather clock, its toiling innards on show through an oval glass panel in its front, stood in a corner sentry-straight and ticked and tocked with ponderous deliberation, seeming to hesitate an instant before each tock and tick. The centre of the room was occupied by a high and somehow overbearing dining-table made of black wood, with stout carven legs, on which was spread a cloth of heavy brocade that hung low over the sides and was edged with tassels. On it the busy set designer had placed, of all things, and as if all so artlessly, an antique volume of the poems of Leopardi, with marbled edges and a tooled leather spine, in which I tried to read—