Not allowed to remember the glory that had been, the Necropolis put up a cocksure front, belied by the failure of the once great stores and hotels to live up to the past sumptuousness which their premises still evoked. The shops with the grandest windows were not bursting with expensive items. You could get tables at the best restaurants on the day you wanted them. And there was a thriving black-market trade in memorabilia of better times — even, one might say, in memory itself.
Had they not been in love and on an adventure, each emboldening the other, Ailinn and Kevern would not have gone there.
Kevern’s father must have warned him against going to the Necropolis a hundred times over the years, but when he tried to recall his actual words Kevern couldn’t find any; he could only see the prematurely old man opening and closing his mouth, dressed in his oriental brocade dressing gown, arthritic and embittered, his back to the fire — a fire that was lit in all weathers — angrily smoking a cigarette through a long amber Bakelite cigarette holder, listening with one ear to the footsteps of walkers (snoopers, he called them) passing the cottage to get to the cliffs. Except for when he wore a carpenter’s apron in his workshop, he dressed, in Kevern’s recollection of him, no other way. Always his brocade dressing gown. Had he just arrived and was waiting for the rest of his clothes to follow, or was everything packed in readiness for departure? Had he for the space of one day in all the years he’d lived in the cottage made peace with the idea that it was his home?
His mother the same, though she didn’t dress as though to face down a firing squad. They could have been master and servant, so fatalistically elegant was he, so like an item of her own luggage, a bundle of rags — the bare necessity to keep out the cold — was she.
Whether she had formed an independent view of the Necropolis, or ever been there herself, Kevern didn’t know. She didn’t talk to him about things like that. The past wasn’t only another country, it was another life. But he thought he recalled her seconding her husband, saying, in her weary voice, as though to herself — because who else listened — ‘Your father is right, don’t go there.’
Kevern suddenly felt guilty realising that he too left his mother out of everything. He put his hand on Ailinn’s knee as though in that way, from one woman to another, he could make it up to her — the mother he had trouble remembering.
Ailinn took her hand off the wheel and put it on his. ‘Use both hands,’ he said, frightened she meant to play pat-a-cake with him while she was driving. ‘Please.’
‘Well I’m looking forward to this,’ she said, hiding her apprehension.
‘Me too. I’m looking forward to my first Lebanese.’
‘Or an Indian.’
‘Or a Chinese.’
‘And I can see if I can get my phone fixed,’ she said.
‘I didn’t know anything was wrong with your phone.’
‘It rings sometimes and when I answer there’s no one there. And occasionally I hear an odd clicking when I’m on the phone to you.’
‘How come you’ve only just mentioned this?’
‘I didn’t want to worry you.’
‘You think someone’s listening in?’
‘Who would want to do that?’
‘Search me. . Gutkind?’
‘Why would he want to listen in to my conversations?’
‘Who knows? Maybe he wants to be sure you’re not in any danger from me — the lady killer.’
They both laughed.
Kevern didn’t mention his crazy thought. That the person bugging her phone might have been his dead father, making sure she was the right woman for his son.
‘Is there such a thing as retinal hysteria?’ Kevern asked as they approached the city.
Ailinn remembered an old English novel she’d read about a newly and unhappily married Puritan girl visiting Rome for the first time, the stupendous fragmentariness of the pagan/papal city — they were one and the same thing for her — passing in fleshly and yet funereal procession across her vision, throbbing and glowing, as though her retina were afflicted. So yes, Ailinn thought, a person’s excited emotional state could affect the way he saw. But why was Kevern’s emotional state excited or, more to the point, what did he think he was seeing?
‘Zebra stripes,’ he said. ‘And leopard spots. And peacock feathers. Have we taken a wrong turn and driven into the jungle?’
‘You don’t think you could be hung-over?’
‘You were with me last night. What did I drink?’
‘A migraine then?’
‘I don’t get them. I feel fine. I am just blinded by colour.’
She had been too busy concentrating on the roads, which she feared would be more frightening than any she was used to, to notice what he had begun to notice as they approached the Necropolis. But he was right. The Necropolitans were dressed as though for a children’s garden party. The moratorium on the wearing of black clothes, declared in the aftermath of THE GREAT PISSASTROPHE in order to discourage all outward show of national mourning (for who was there to mourn?) was honoured now only in the breach, they thought. Neither Ailinn nor Kevern thought twice about wearing black. But the Necropolis appeared to be obeying it to the letter still, as though seeing in the prohibition an opportunity for making or at least for seeming merry. What neither Kevern nor Ailinn had anticipated was the difference this abjuration of black would make to the look of everything. It was as though the spirit of serious industry itself had been syphoned out of the city.
But it wasn’t just the vibrant colours of the clothes people wore that struck them, but the outlandishness of the designs. The further in they drove the more vintage-clothes stalls they passed, until the city began to resemble a medieval funfair or tourney, on either side of the road stalls and pavilions under flapping striped tarpaulins piled high with fancy dress. Kevern rubbed his eyes. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a policeman snooping around my house in the hope of uncovering a single family keepsake, and here they go about in their great-grandparents’ underthings as bold as brass.’
Ailinn laughed at him. ‘I doubt the stuff is genuinely old,’ she said.
He thought he could smell the mustiness of antiquity on the streets. Mothballs, rotting shawls, old shoes, greasy hats, the forbidding odour of people long forgotten and garments that should have been thrown away. ‘What do you mean not genuinely old?’
‘Like your Kildromy-Biedermeier. I’d say they’re fake vintage.’
‘What’s the point of that?’
‘What’s the point of your Kildromy-Biedermeier? It’s a way of eating your cake and having it. This way they can cock a snook at the authorities without actually doing anything wrong. I think it’s fun. Why don’t we stop so you can buy me a crinoline and some cowboy boots? And I’ll buy you a Prussian officer’s outfit.’
‘To do what in?’
‘Ask me to dance. Take me into the woods. Whatever Prussian officers do.’
‘Did,’ he corrected her. ‘There are no more Prussian officers. I hate this playing with everything.’
‘Oh, Kevern, where’s your sense of fun?’
He smiled at her. It pleased him when she bested him. ‘Not everything is amenable to fun.’
‘You think we should be solemn about the past?’
‘I think we should let it go. What’s past is past.’
Had she not been driving she’d have rolled her eyes at him.
But she knew now he did not always say what he believed.
ii