4
I CONFESS I had avoided them all day. Oh, I know I pretended that I recognised in them what I had been waiting for since I first came here, the motley troupe who would take me into their midst and make a man of me, but the truth is I was afraid of them. I am not tough, not worldly-wise at all. It takes courage to expose yourself to the possibilities of the world and I am not a courageous man. I want only comfort, what little of it can be squeezed out of this life on a planet to which I have always felt ill-adapted. Their coming was a threat to the delicate equilibrium I had painstakingly established for myself. I was like a hungry old spider suddenly beset by a terrifying swarm of giant flying things. The web shook and I scuttled off into the foliage for shelter, legs flailing and eyes out on stalks. I saw old Croke walk up the hill and saw him too when he returned, staggering, from the beach where he had fallen, with the boy at his heels. I watched from hiding as Sophie set off into the hills to find the ruins she had come to photograph. I witnessed Felix pacing the lawn in the sun with a hand in his side pocket, smoking a cheroot. Oh yes, I skulked. And when late in the afternoon I screwed up my nerve and ventured back into the house it was I who seemed the intruder.
The kitchen was deserted. The debris of their lunch was still on the table, looking disturbingly like the remains of a debauch. I poured out the tepid dregs of Licht’s chicken soup and ate it standing at the stove. I wanted one of them to come in and find me there. I would nod in friendly fashion and perhaps say something about the weather, claiming by this show of ease that I was the true inhabitant of the house while they were merely transients. No one came, however, and anyway, if someone had, probably I would have dropped my soup bowl and taken to my heels in a blue funk. I have always suffered from a tendency to generate panic out of my own fears and imaginings; I think it is a common weakness of the self-obsessed. There are moments of quiet and isolation when I can feel within me clearly the tiny, ceaseless tremor of impending hysteria that someday may break out and overwhelm me entirely. What is its source? It is the old emptiness, I suppose, the black vacuum the self keeps rushing into yet can never fill. I’m sure there is a formula for it, some elegant and simple equation balancing the void on one side and the endless inward spin of essence on the other. It is how I think of myself, eating myself alive, consuming myself always and yet never consumed.
Some incarnation this is, I have achieved nothing, nothing. I am what I always was, alone as always, locked in the same old glass prison of myself.
Why is it, I wonder, that silent, sunlit afternoons always remind me of childhood? Was there some marvellous moment of happiness that I have forgotten, some interval of stillness and radiance in which the enchanted child lingered on the forest path while his other self stepped out of him and blundered on oblivious into the dark entanglements of the future? I stood in the ancient light of the hallway for a long time, gazing up into the shadows thronging on the stairs, listening for them, for the sounds of their voices, for life going on. I do not know what I expected: cries, perhaps, arguments, sobs, wild laughter. I had got out of the way of ordinary things, you see; life, being what others did, must be all alarms and confrontations and matters coming to a head. I could hear nothing, or not nothing, exactly, only that faint, pervasive pressure in the air, that soundless hum that betrays the presence of humankind. How thoroughly the house had absorbed them, as if they really were the ones who belonged here; as if they had come home.
Flora was waiting on the landing, hanging back in the shadowed corner between the window and the bedroom door. She had thrown a blanket over her shoulders, she clutched it about her like a shroud. The dark mass of her hair was tangled and damp and her eyes were swollen. Through the window beside her I could see far off in the fields a toy dog chivvying a toy flock of sheep. She had to clear her throat to speak.
‘I thought you were Felix,’ she said.
And almost smiled.
Licht had put her in my room; his idea of a joke, I suppose. Startling what a transformation her presence had wrought already; nothing was changed yet I would hardly have recognised the place as mine. The air was warm and thick with her smell, the musky smell of her hair and her hot skin. I shut the door behind me. She walked to the window and stood looking out at the dwindling afternoon, thick with slanted sunlight. Although she was on the far side of the room from me I had an extraordinarily vivid sense of her as she stood there with her arms folded around herself and her shoulder-blades unfurled, barefoot, in all her wan, popliteal frailty. I tend not to take much notice of other people — I have mentioned this before, it is one of my more serious failings — and on the rare occasions when I do put my head outside the shell and take a good gander at someone what strikes me as astonishing is not how different they are from me, but how similar, despite everything. I go along imagining myself to be unique, a sport of nature, a sort of tumour growing on the world, and suddenly I am brought up short: there it is, not I but another and yet made of skin, hair, clothed bone, just like me. This is a great mystery. Sex is supposed to solve it, but it doesn’t, not in my experience, anyway (not that nowadays I have anything more than the haziest recollection of that universal palliative). Perhaps that is all I ever wanted to do, to break open the shell of the other and climb inside and slam it shut on myself, terrible spikes and all. What a way that would be to end it all.
‘Have you lived here long?’ Flora said.
I felt nauseous suddenly. My palms were clammy and my innards did a slow heave, as if there were something alive in there. I had a teetering sensation, as if I had grown immensely tall, looming over the room, a great, fat, wallowing thing, a moving puffball stuffed with spores. I was frightened of myself. Not many people know the things they are capable of; I do. I wanted now to take this girl in my arms, to lift her up and hold her hotly to my heart, to feel the frail bones of her ankles and her wrists, to cup the delicate egg of her skull in my palm, to smell her blood and taste the silvery ichor of her sweat. How brittle she seemed, how easily breakable. This is what the poor giant in the old tales never gets to tell, that what is most precious to him in his victims is their fragility, the way they crack so tenderly between his teeth, giving up their little cries like lovers in the extremity of passion. He will never know what he yearns to know, how it feels to be little like them, gay and gaily vicious and full of fears and impossible plans. The human world is what he eats. It does not nourish him.
What she wanted, she was saying, was to stay here, on the island, just for a little while. She was sick, she was sure she was getting the flu. She stood for a moment frowning and biting her lip. The thing was, she said, she had made a mistake and now Felix had the wrong idea and she was afraid of him.
‘He said he’s going to stay on here,’ she said. ‘In this house. He knows something about that old man. He told me.’
Although her face was turned towards the window she was watching me. I still had that sensation of nausea. I felt shaky and almost tearful in what I imagined must be a womanly sort of way.
‘Would he let me stay, do you think?’ she said.
She meant the Professor.