Today there was a letter waiting for me on my desk, a letter in a long, cream-coloured envelope embossed with the blazon of the University of Arcady. That rang a cracked bell. Of course—Axel Vander’s safe haven off there on the sunny side of America, where Marcy Meriwether hails from. I love expensive stationery, the rich crackle of it, the shiny roughness of its surface, the gluey aroma that is for me the very smell of money. I am invited to attend a seminar the sobering title of which is Anarch: Autarch—Disorder and Control in the Writings of Axel Vander. Yes, I too was compelled to consult the dictionary; the result was not enlightening. All expenses paid, though, first-class flights, and a fee, or honorarium, as the letter’s signatory, one H. Cyrus Blank, delicately has it. This Blank is the Paul de Man—him again!—Professor of Applied Deconstruction in the English Department at Arcady. He seems a friendly type, from his tone. Yet he is vague, and does not say in what capacity I am being invited to join in these arcadian revels. I might be required to come as the old fraud himself, with limp and ebony walking stick, eye-patch and all—I would not put it past them, Professor Blank and his fellow deconstructionists, to have thought of hiring me as an impersonator, a sort of moving wax-work representation of their hero. Shall I go? JB is also invited. It might be a pleasant jaunt—think of all those oranges fresh off the trees—but I am wary. People, real people, expect actors to be the characters they play. I am not Axel Vander, nor anything like him. Am I?
Blank. I have come across that name in JB’s life of Vander, I am sure I have. Was there not a Blank involved somehow when Vander’s wife died, in suspicious circumstances, as they say? I must look up the index. Could my Professor Blank be this other Blank’s father, or his son? These spidery strands of connection, stretching across the world, their clinging touch gives me the shivers. Blank.
I think it is time Dawn Devonport was returned to the world. I am not sure how to put this to her. Lydia will help, I know. They spend a great deal of time together down in the kitchen, smoking and drinking tea and talking. Lydia has become an inveterate tea drinker, like my mother. I approach the kitchen door but when I hear their voices from the other side, an undulant blended buzz, I stop, and turn, and tiptoe away. I cannot think what things they talk about. Voices behind a door always seem to me to be coming from another world, where other laws obtain.
Yes, I shall ask Lydia to aid me in persuading our auroral guest, our star of the morning, to reassume her role, to step back into her part, to be in the world again. The world? As if it were the world.
I met JB for a drink, not sure why, and now wish I had not. We went at the cocktail hour to a place of his choosing, a sort of gentlemen’s club up a side street, a curious establishment, unremarkable on the outside but gloomily palatial within, pillared and porticoed and sunk in a somnolent hush. The pillars were white, the walls Athenian blue, and there were many oil portraits of indistinct staring figures with high collars and mutton-chop whiskers. We sat on either side of a vast fireplace, in buttoned leather armchairs that squeaked and groaned in weary protest under us. The fireplace was deep, and disturbingly black in its depths, with an ornate brass fender and a brass coal scuttle and gleaming firedogs, but no fire. An ancient attendant in bow-tie and tails brought us our brandies on a silver tray and set them down wheezingly on a low table between us and went away without a word. I thought we were the only ones in the place until I heard someone unseen in the far depths of the room clearing his throat with a long, hawking rasp.
JB is distinctly odd, and grows odder each time I encounter him. He maintains a furtive, anxious air, and gives the impression always of being in the process of edging nervously away, even when he is sitting still, as now, in his high, winged armchair with his legs crossed and a brandy glass in his hand. Toby Taggart tells me it was JB who recommended me for the part of Vander. It seems he was there in the audience that disastrous night years ago when I dried on stage, a tongue-tied, goggling Amphitryon, and was impressed. I wonder what impressed him. What would he not be prepared to do for me had I dragged my way through to the final curtain? Now he sat there, at once glazed and alert, watching my lips intently as I spoke, as if he thought to read from them a different and darkly revealing version of the altogether too innocent-sounding matters that my words were meant to convey. No, he said hastily, interrupting me, no, he was sure there had been no one with Axel Vander in Liguria. This gave me pause. If I wished he would look up his notes, he went on, with a vehement gesture of the hand that was not holding the brandy snifter, but he believed he could say with certainty that Vander had been alone in Portovenere, quite alone. Then he looked away, frowning, and making a faint distressed humming noise at the back of his throat. There was a pause. So Vander, then, I said, had been in Portovenere, in fact. I felt like one who has been discharged from hospital with a clean bill of health but who arrives home only to find the ambulance waiting outside the house, its back doors wide open and two bored attendants standing in the street holding ready the stretcher, with its blood-red blanket. At my question JB turned back, I could almost hear the cogs in his neck grinding, and stared at me pop-eyed, opening and closing his mouth as if to test the mechanism before trusting himself to speak. He did recall, he said, the Nebraskan savant Fargo DeWinter, when he spoke to him in Antwerp all those years ago, mentioning something about an assistant who had worked with him on the Vander papers. I waited. JB blinked, gazing at me now in what seemed a fixed, faint torment. He had the impression, he said, with the wincing look of one trying in desperation to hold on to some fragile thing he knows he is about to let drop, and it was only an impression, mind, the merest hint of a suspicion, that it was this assistant and not DeWinter himself who had unearthed the goods, the real, that is the bad, goods on Vander and his questionable, to say the least, past. I waited again. JB went on staring and twitching. It was I now who felt I was about to let fall that breakable thing. When Cass was a little girl she used to say that as soon as she was grown-up she would marry me and we would have a child just like her so that if she died I would not miss her and be lonely. Ten years; she has been dead ten years. Must I set off in search of her again, in sorrow and in pain? She will come no more to my world, but I go towards hers.