We docked. Everything went quiet suddenly. The skipper came out of the wheelhouse and spat over the side. The boy was already on the pier, winding a rope around a bollard. When I stepped up after him on to dry land the world went on moving under my feet. Hyperborean Apollo, I prayed, make haste to help me! Mr Tighe’s van came bumping along the pier and drew to a shuddering halt at the dockside where the boy was unloading the cargo from the deck. How vivid and gay everything seemed to my gin-tinted gaze, the acid-green hill and the opalescent water shimmering under a lemon light. I set off up the hill and presently Mr Tighe in his laden van drew level with me and offered me a lift which I declined, making large gestures of thanks. He nodded in friendly fashion and drove on, the van farting petrol-blue billows of exhaust smoke. Shall we describe him now? I think not. Mr Tighe, and that old dog that comes and goes, and the horse I am supposed to have heard but never saw: holes in the backdrop, through which the bare sky twinkles. When I looked back from the last bend of the road the boat was already under way again, veering out past the jetty like an offer of reprieve being unceremoniously withdrawn. What had I done, coming to this far-flung place? Yet how light I felt, how fleet, as if I were aloft on wings! I went on and soon spotted the house, perched in its solitude under the oak ridge. The hawthorn was in blossom. Here is the little bridge. Wind, shine, clouds, the unwarranted yet irrepressible expectancies of the heart. I am arrived.
I MUST HAVE LOOKED like something out of a Bible story, toiling up that stony track in my soiled suit with my cardboard suitcase in my hand and my collar turned up against the wind. I should have been on my knees, of course, or, better still, barefoot, with staff and falcon, like the penitent pilgrim I was pretending to be. I could still feel the sway of the sea, and of that other sea of gin sloshing around inside me, and the ground kept rearing up under my feet in the most alarming way, like a carpet with the wind under it; I stumbled more than once, making the stones fly and getting grit in my shoes. I could hear myself breathing. I always know I am drunk when I can hear myself breathing; it sounded as if I were carrying a large, fat, winded man on my back. At the gate I paused to gather my wits but that only made my head spin; I set off again sternly, marching up the path to the front door like a wooden man, snorting and muttering, with my head thrown back and swinging my free arm. I rapped the knocker smartly and turned and surveyed the scene before me, chest out and nostrils flared, snuffing up the air.
I had to knock a second and then a third time before Licht came at last. He opened the door a crack and stuck out his little face and peered crossly past my shoulder, the tip of his sharp little nose twitching. I told him my name and he pursed his lips and sniffed.
‘Oh, it’s you, is it,’ he said. I thought he might shut the door on me, but after a moment of sullen indecision he stood aside grudgingly and motioned me in. ‘I’m Licht. The Professor said you were coming.’
He sniffed again.
The hallway was high and hung with shadows. I experienced a mysterious shock of recognition: it was as if I had stepped inside myself, into the shadowed vault of my own skull.
‘He’s working,’ Licht said truculently. ‘There’s a room ready for you.’ That seemed to amuse him.
He shut the door, fussing with the lock. I stood breathing; I could feel a horrible, tipsy leer slipping and sliding uncontrollably about my face. I seemed to be floating in some heavy, sluggish substance, a Dead Sea of the mind. I had a sense of vague, violent hilarity, and there was an inner roll and lurch as if something inside me had come loose and was yawing wildly from side to side. Licht still would not look directly at me but eyed vexedly a patch of the floor between us with his mouth pursed and a hand twitching in his pocket and one leg jigging. Never still, never still. I did not know what to say to him. At bottom I am a shy soul — yes, yes, I am, really. My kind always are. When I hear on the wireless a report of some grimy little atrocity — the bloodstained body discovered in the wood, the pensioner beaten to death in his bed, the mother-in-law dismembered and packed in a trunk and sent off on the night mail to Dundee — I think at once not of the victim, as I know I should, but of the other one, the poor, shivering, dandruffy, whey-faced fellow in his sleeveless pullover and cheap shoes, with his shaking hands and haunted eyes, caught there, frozen in the spotlight, realising with a falling sensation in the pit of his stomach that he will never again have a moment’s privacy, never a second he can call his own, that they will poke at him and probe him and ask endless questions and then put him in the dock to be gawped at and then send him for life — life! — to that panopticon where he will not even be able to void his bowels without an audience looking on. This is how you lose yourself, this is how they wrench you out of what you thought you were and hang you up by the hair and invite the world to gather round and point and laugh and take a shy at you for free. And all the time of course you know you deserve it, deserve it all, and more.
‘You look awful,’ Licht said with satisfaction and grinned uncontrollably and bit his lip. ‘Were you seasick?’
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Just a little, just a little … tired.’
I tramped behind him up the stairs. The upper flights grew progressively narrower and our footsteps thudded ringingly on the uncarpeted boards. My room was cramped and low, with peeling wallpaper and a tilted floor. I could see why Licht had been amused. There was a rush-bottomed chair — a relic of St Vincent — and a pine dressing-table and a coffin-sized wardrobe. On the floor beside the bed there was a worn, blue and grey rug. (How many more such cells must I invent?) One of the panes in the little window was broken and someone had mended it by wedging a bit of cardboard in the hole. Pigeons had got in, there were droppings on the sill and down the wall, hardened to a whitish stuff, like coral. The window framed a three-quarters view of indistinct greenery and the corner of a sloped field. I put my suitcase on the bed and looked about me. There was a steady, pulsing hum in my head as if a delicately balanced pinion spinning in there had developed a wobble.
Licht hovered on the threshold with a hand on the doorknob, frowning hard at the wardrobe.
‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re another expert, are you?’
‘An expert?’ I said blearily.
‘On art.’ His lip curled on the word.
‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘no, not at all.’
‘Good,’ he said. ‘One is enough.’
We stood a moment saying nothing, each thinking his own thoughts. I felt a weight in my jacket pocket and brought out the half-empty gin bottle. We both looked at it dully.
‘How is the Professor?’ I said.
He glanced at me sharply.
‘He’s all right,’ he said. ‘Why?’ I had no answer to that. He looked away from me again and nibbled the nail of his little finger. ‘So you were in jail,’ he said and tittered, and then quickly recomposed his sullen glare. ‘What was it like?’
‘Like hell,’ I said. ‘Very warm and crowded.’
He nodded, thinking, still chewing his fingernail. We might have been talking about the weather.
‘I wouldn’t like that,’ he said, ‘jail.’
‘No,’ I said.
He slid a rapid glance across the floor and let it settle somewhere near my feet.
‘Bad, was it, yes?’
I said nothing. Still he waited, eyes aglitter with eager malice, hoping for the worst, I suppose, for some tearful cry or terrible, blurted confession. The wind in the chimneys, the gulls, all that: the strangeness of things. The strangeness of being here — of being anywhere.