‘A very great collection,’ he said.
‘Yes, wonderful, wonderful,’ I said, with what I suppose must have seemed a horribly suggestive, pushy coyness. ‘There is that Vaublin, for instance.’
He shot me a rapid, sideways glance and cleared his throat. What had I said? His chair gave a stifled cry of protest under him as he rose. He walked heavily to the window and stood looking out, hunched and motionless, his fat, bloodless little hands clasped tight behind his back, the two stubby thumbs busily circling each other. Whenever I think of him this is how I see him, in the act of turning away from me like this, in the furtive way that he has, with one fat shoulder lifted and that great, round head bowed, like a man anticipating a hail of brickbats. Outside, rain fell glittering through sunlight.
‘Miss Behrens speaks highly of you,’ he said, and directed at me over his shoulder a sort of fishy rictus.
‘She’s very kind,’ I said. ‘We have known each other a long time.’
‘Ah.’ He sniffed.
‘I would like to have seen Le monde d’or,’ I said. ‘It is the centrepiece of the collection, as you know.’ A definite plumminess was creeping into my tone; I was beginning to sound like the suave cat-burglar in the old movies — where was my silver cigarette case, my patent-leather pumps, my cummerbund? The Professor sniffed again, louder than before. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘I would not go to Whitewater now. It would hardly be …’ I could not think of the word; the language is not commodious enough to encompass the notion of a return by me to — well, yes, to the scene of the crime. ‘I can’t go home either,’ I said and essayed a light, melancholy laugh. ‘I have burnt my boats, I’m afraid.’
He did not seem to be listening, standing motionless at the window with his back firmly set against me. At length he turned, frowning abstractedly at the floor between us.
‘There is a lot to be done,’ he said. ‘Papers, notes …’ He waved a hand over the disorder on his desk. ‘Secretarial work, really. Licht does what he can, but of course …’ He shrugged.
‘Then I can stay?’ I said.
It came out like a whoop. He flinched, as if he had been pounced upon by something large and heavy.
‘Yes,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders again, trying to extricate himself from the woolly embrace of my enthusiasm, ‘yes, I suppose you … I suppose …’
I thanked him. There was a catch in my voice, thick as it was with the pent of unshed tears; had I let them flow they would have come out forty per cent proof. Feeling the unabating waft of my gratitude he blinked and gave me one of his consternated, slow stares and turned away from me again uneasily. You must understand, this was a fraught moment for me, the commencement of my return from the wilderness into the place of humankind. I had come prepared to throw myself at his feet and here I was, still standing. Conceive of my joy, spiced though it was, I confess, with the actor’s secret triumph at having moved the house to tears (I have said it before, I shall say it again, the stage has lost a star in me). I went down the stairs and locked myself in the lavatory on the landing and sat on the bowl and gazed at the space between my knees, swaying a little and humming to myself, lost in a euphoric, unfocused introspection. I brought out my broad-shouldered comforter and took another good stiff nip of gin. My nose was running. Here I was, hardly a day out of prison and already a hand had come down from the clouds to haul me up to celestial heights. Why then, behind the euphoria, did I have the impression that something was being palmed off on me? Was there, I asked myself, a trace of dirt under the fingernails of that helping hand? Oh, not the greasy black stuff flecked with blood and hair that is lodged immovably under my splintered nails, but just the ordinary grime, the stuff that humans naturally accumulate as they claw their way through this filthy world. Would the Professor draw me up out of myself, or was I to help him to descend?
*
Thus I had alighted at last in what I suppose I may as well call my destination. I had a feeling of weightlessness, a floating sensation, which I recognised; I always feel like this when I first come to a new place, as if something of me were lagging behind the physical arrival, some part of myself hanging back, out on the ocean, or in the air, dazed by speed and change. Thus the angel when he came to Mary must have felt, trembling on one knee with his wings still spread in this other, denser azure, stammering out his amazing message. But what annunciation did I bring, what grotesque incarnation did I herald? What word? What flesh?
We ate our tea in the kitchen, the Professor frowning at his plate and Licht eyeing me narrowly and saying things under his breath. I felt like the interloper that I was. Interloper: what an apt word: as if I had run up quietly and pressed myself between them. I had an awkward sense of myself caught up in a sort of antique dance, smiling and wincing and mouthing excuse-me’s as together they trod out the measures of their ancient minuet, their eyes fixed on something elsewhere and their feet dragging leadenly.
Licht could not contain himself.
‘Why don’t we open a hostel?’ he said at last, loudly, his voice shaking.
The room cringed. The Professor put on a bland expression and did not lift his eyes, and Licht, white-faced and furious, glared across the table at his inclined, broad bald pate. ‘Why not turn the place into a doss-house?’ he cried. ‘We could take in every tinker and drunkard that happens to be passing by.’
A long and weighty silence followed. Licht sat and stared before him with livid fixity, his knife and fork clutched in his fists and his knuckles white and one leg going like a sewing-machine under the table, making the cruets rattle.
‘How was the crossing?’ the Professor enquired of me at last, in a resonantly courteous tone.
The effects of the gin were wearing off and the faint buzzing of a hangover had started up. My eyes felt as if they had been toasted and my breath came out in furnace blasts.
‘There’s the extra work,’ Licht shouted. ‘There’s the cooking, for instance. Am I expected to do all that? — because I won’t.’ He beat a fist softly on the table; there were tears in his eyes, big, shining drops brimming on the lids. ‘You never tell me anything!’ he cried. ‘You never consult me!’
Professor Kreutznaer fixed his eye on a patch of the tablecloth beside his plate and sighed.
I fell to quiet contemplation, as is my wont at times of social awkwardness such as this. How shyly chance portions of the world dispose themselves — a bit of yard spied through a doorway at evening, clouds crowding in the corner of a window — as if to say, Look at us! we mean something!
The dog came waddling in from the yard (yes, yes! — Mr Tighe will make a full appearance yet, arm in arm with Miss Broaders the postmistress, and a winged horse will put its head over the half-door, and there will be no mysteries left). Licht took our plates and set them on the floor for the beast to finish off the scraps. Its name was Patch; all dogs are Patch, to me. It had a bad case of pink-eye. As it gulped and gasped Licht talked to it loudly in angry good humour that was meant to sound a general rebuke, tousling its rank fur and slapping it on the rump, raising a cloud of brownish dust.
Another prison, I was thinking, its walls made of air, and the old self inside me still in its white cell snarling for release.
‘Good dog,’ Licht said heartily. ‘Good old dog!’
That’s me.
*