‘Yes,’ I said, ‘if I ask him.’
I meant Licht.
‘If Felix was gone,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said, so stoutly I surprised myself, ‘yes, Felix will go.’
She nodded, still gnawing at her lip.
‘I don’t want to go back to that hotel,’ she said, narrowing her eyes. ‘They’re not nice to me there. They boss me around. The parents expect me to do everything and the manageress is a bitch.’
Stop! I wanted to say, stop! you’re ruining everything. I am told I should treasure life, but give me the realm of art anytime.
She went and sat down on the bed and hugged the blanket around her and stared at her bare feet. A girl, just a girl, greedy and dissatisfied, somewhat scheming, resentful of the world and all it would not give her. But that is not what I saw, that is not what I would let myself see.
Mélisande, Mélisande!
I still had, still have, much to learn. I am, I realise, only at the beginning of this birthing business.
I went downstairs, manoeuvring the way with difficulty in my newly swollen state, the gasping ogre, seeming to flop from step to step like an enormous bladder now, filled to the brim with slow, fat liquid. I was still queasy, still on the verge of tears, no, not tears, but a vast overflowing, an unstanchable flood of gall and gleet, my whole life oozing out of me in a final, foul regurgitation. I stopped at the window on the landing and rested a moment, leaning on the sill. How quickly the dusk was gathering, an oyster-grey stain spreading inland from the reaches of the sea, a darkness slowly, irresistibly descending.
Something had happened in that little room up there that before had been mine and now was hers, a solemn warrant had been issued on me, and I felt more than ever like the hero in a tale of chivalry commanded to perform a task of rescue and reconciliation. There they were, the old man in the tower with his books, the damsel under lock and key, and the dark one, my dark brother, waiting for me, the knight of the rosy cross, to throw down my challenge to him.
I laughed a soundless laugh and went on, down the stairs.
They were in the hall, ready to depart. They turned to look at me. What must I have seemed?
This toy dog, that toy flock.
We walked down the hill road in the blued evening under the vast, light dome of sky where Venus had risen. The fields were darkening on either side, the bay below us glistered. Everyone had acquired something. Croke his invisible companion that had risen with him from the sand at the sea’s edge and walked at his shoulder now step for step, Sophie her photographs that tomorrow would swim into her red room like water sprites, the boys that sly phantom that had run up swiftly and insinuated itself between them while they fought and would not go away, Alice her image of a girl reclining in a sunny bed.
A moth reeled out of the gloaming and there was a sense of something falling and failing and I seemed to feel the faint dust of wings sifting down. The god takes many forms.
We rounded a bend in the road where there was a little copse and a stream running by and found Felix sitting perched on a dry-stone wall in the dark with his arms around his knees and his face turned to the sky. The others walked on in calm procession, Sophie arm in arm with Croke and holding Alice by the hand and the boys trudging behind them, kicking stones. You see? They have their party favours and now they are going home, after the long day’s doings, Sophie to her developments, Croke to die, the children to grow up and become other people. This is what happens. What seems an end is not an end at all.
‘What a start you gave me,’ Felix said to me amiably, ‘rearing up out of the dark like that. I thought you were Old Nick.’
It was as if all along we had been walking side by side, with something between us, some barrier, thin and smooth and deceptive as a mirror, that now was broken, and I had stepped into his world, or he into mine, or we had both entered some third place that belonged to neither of us. He lit one of his cheroots, bending his narrow face to the flare of the match in his cupped hands. A flaw of smoke shaped like Africa assumed itself into the leaves above him. Behind the tobacco smell I caught a faint whiff of his own unsavoury, stale stink. I found it hard to keep a hold of him, somehow. He kept going in and out of focus, one minute flat and transparent, a two-dimensional figure cut out of grimed glass, the next an overpowering presence pressing itself against me in awful intimacy, insistently physical, all flesh and breath and that stale whiff of something gone rank. He began to sing to himself softly, in a jaunty voice, crowingly.
Allo, allo, who’s yer laidy friend,
Who’s ’at little girl I sawre yer wiv larst night?
He mused a while, gazing into the thickening shadows.
‘I cannot set my foot on board a ship,’ he said, ‘without the memory coming back of sailing to the frozen northern pole. I wonder, have you ever been up there? The tundra and the towering bergs, the sun that never sets: such solitude! such cold! And yet how beautiful, this land of ice! We sailed out of Archangel and due north we ploughed our way, all day, and all the night, for weeks. And then one morning when I looked out from the deck I saw the strangest sight: a figure, in the distance, on a sled, a giant man, it seemed, with whip and dogs, at great speed travelling on the floes, due north, like us. And then another — ’ There he paused, and said: ‘I think you know this story, though?’
A drowsy bird in the branches above us stirred a wing. The stream muttered to itself. Felix considered me with his head on one side.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘don’t I know you? I mean from somewhere else. Your face looks familiar.’
The last light was ascending in the zenith. Stars swarmed. A big white gloating moon had hoisted itself clear of the velvet heights behind us.
‘Time to go, I think,’ he said. ‘I had thought of staying for a bit, but now you’re here there is no need. Definitely de trop, what?’ He lowered his lashes almost shyly and smiled a thin-lipped smile that made it seem as if he were nibbling a tiny seed between his teeth. ‘Anyway, you’re inviting me to leave, aren’t you. Luxe, calme et volupté, eh?’
In the gathering dark the trees kept lisping the same slurred phrase over and over. Felix sighed and unwound his legs and nimbly scrambled down from the wall. ‘Time to go, yes,’ he said, brushing himself off, and linked his arm in mine and together we set off down the hill towards the bay. On the brow of the hill he paused and looked back and laughed and waved a hand and softly cried:
‘Farewell, happy fields!’
None of it was as I had thought it would be. I do not know what I had expected — some sort of tussle, I suppose, a contest on the road, maybe even fisticuffs, and then me pushing him protesting down to the boat, his nose bleeding and his collar sticking up and his heels furrowing the dust. What did I think I was, the avenging angel of the Lord? No, Felix would not fight, he would go quietly, or pretend to. I know his type, I know it only too well.
‘And you are going to stay here, are you?’ he said. ‘You have it all worked out?’ He laughed in the dark. We could see below us now the lights of the harbour and the dark bulk of the waiting boat crouched at the jetty. We heard the noise that the island makes, that deep, dark note rising through the gloom. We paused to listen, and Felix struck a dramatic pose and inclined an ear and shouted out softly in a stage-actor’s voice, making it seem uncannily as if it were someone calling to us from an immense distance:
‘Thamous! Thamous! The great god Pan is dead!’
And laughed.
We walked on.
‘You know I too knew the Professor, long ago?’ he said. ‘Oh, yes. As you are now so I was once, his friend, his confidant.’ He squeezed my arm against his side and I felt the meagre armature of his ribs. ‘Tell me,’ he said in a confidential tone, ‘do you respect him? I mean, is he a great man, do you think? I thought so, at first. Alas, we all have our weaknesses. You realise that painting is a fake? Yes, more of gilt in it than gold, I fear. Poor Miss Behrens was taken in. Do you know her too? What a coincidence! She does not know she bought a fake. I may tell her, or I may not. What do you think? Which is better, ignorance or enlightenment? The Professor was the one who verified it. And made a killing on it, of course. Not for the first time either.’ He chuckled. ‘Curious phrase, that, don’t you think — a killing?’