'He does!' Steep said, with a sudden fury. 'What are those damnable books of his if they're not accusations? Every picture, every word, like a knife! A knife! Here!' He slammed his fist against his chest. 'And I would have loved him! Wouldn't I?'
'You would,' said Rosa.
'I would have treasured him; made him my perfect child.' Steep rose from his chair now, and approaching the bed, he gazed down at Hugo. 'You never saw him. That's the pity of it. For him. For you. You were so blinded by the dead you never knew what lived there, right under your nose. So fine a man, so brave a man, that I have to kill him, before he undoes me, utterly.' Steep looked up to Rosa. 'Oh be done with it,' he said. 'He's not worth the breath.'
'Be done?' Hugo said.
'Hush,' Rosa said. 'Clear your mind. It's easier.'
'For you maybe-' he replied, trying to sit up. But the light pressure she had upon his chest was all she needed to keep him in his place. And the thump of his heart was getting louder, and the weight of his lids heavier. 'Shush ...' she said, as though to a troubled child, 'be still ...'
She leaned a little closer to him, and her warmth and her breath made him want to curl up in her arms. 'I told you,' Steep said softly, 'he'll see you one last time. But you won't see him, Hugo.'
... oh ... God ... no...'
'You won't see him.'
Again, he tried to rise up out of the bed, and this time she let him come a little way, far enough for her to slip her arm around his body and draw him closer. She had started to sing: a soft and lilting lullaby.
Don't listen to it, he told himself, don't succumb. But it was such a gentle sound - so calm and reassuring - that he wanted to fold himself into the woman's arms and forget the brittleness of his bones, the hardness of his heart; wanted to sigh and suckle-
No! That was death! He had to resist her. There wasn't strength enough in his limbs to free himself. All he could hope to do was put some important thought between his life and the song she was singing; anything to stop him dissolving in her arms. A book! Yes, he would think of a bo ok he might write when he'd escaped her. Something that would touch and change people. A confessional, perhaps, told with all the vitriol he could muster. Something sharp and bracing, as far from this saccharine song as possible. He'd tell the truth: about Sartre, about Eleanor, about Nathaniel- No, not Nathaniel. I don't want to think about Nathaniel. It was too late. The boy's image appeared in his head, and with it the lullaby, full of sweet melancholy. He couldn't fully understand the words, but he got the gist. They were words of reassurance, telling him to close his eyes and sink away, sink away to the place beyond sleep where all the good children of the world went to play. His eyelids were so heavy now he was looking through slits, but hecould see Steep, watching him from the bottom of the bed, waiting, waiting ...
I will not give you the satisfaction of dying, Hugo thought, and so thinking turned his gaze towards Steep's mistress. He couldn't see her face, but he felt the fullness of her breasts beside his head, and dared think there was hope for him yet. He would fuck her in his imagination; yes, that's what he would do: put his erection between himself and death. He would strip her naked in his mind's eye, and pin her down, make her sob with his assault till her throat was too raw for lullabies. He started to move his hips against the coverlet.
She stopped singing. 'Oh now...' she murmured, 'what are you doing?' She pulled her blouse aside to indulge him, and his undisciplined mouth sought out her nipple, found it, and sucked. Her hand went down under the sheet, under the band of his pyjamas, and touched him, tenderly. He shuddered. This wasn't what he'd planned; not at all. He was still a child, despite what she was stroking; still a baby, melting in her embrace like grey butter.
Some other story! Quickly, he had to think of some high and adult thought to speed the beat of his heart, or it would all be over. Ethics? No. Holocausts? No. Democracy, justice, the fall of civilization; no, no, no. Nothing was grim or great enough to save him from the breast, from the stroke, from the ease of lying here and letting sleep take him into darkness.
He heard his heart booming in his head, like syrup on a timpano. He felt the blood in his veins thicken and slow. He could do nothing. Nor, now, did he want to. His eyelids flickered closed, his lips lost their hold upon the nipple; and down he went, down and down, until there was no further left to fall.
CHAPTER IX
Will was awakened by the sound of the telephone ringing, but by the time he cleared the surface of sleep it had stopped. He sat up in bed, fumbling for his watch. It was a little after four: cold, dark and still. He listened a moment, and heard Adele say something, her words, which he failed to grasp, becoming sobs. Turning on the lamp, he found his underwear, pulled it on and went out onto the landing in time to hear her putting down the phone. He knew what she was going to say before she turned her streaming face up to him. Hugo was dead.
If it was any comfort, the doctor on duty told them when they got to the hospital, he had died peacefully, in his sleep. Very probably heart failure, a man his age, having taken such a beating; but they'd know more tomorrow. Meanwhile, did they want to see him?
'Of course I want to see him,' Adele said, clutching Will's hand. Hugo was still in the bed where they'd talked with him twelve hours before, his head propped on the mountainous pillow, his beard laid on his chest like a knitted platter.
'You should say your goodbyes first,' Adele said, hanging back to let Will approach the bed. He had nothing to say, but he went anyway. There was something faintly artificial about the whole scene - the sheet too perfectly smoothed, the body too symmetrically laid - why should he not also play a part? Bow his head, pretend to be bereft? But standing there looking at the manicured hands, and the veins on the eyelids, he could only hear the contempt that had issued from this man over the years; the disparagement and the dismissals. He would never hear that litany again, but nor would he ever earn his way out of it, and there would be pain in that, by and by.
'That's it then,' he said softly. Even now, though he knew it was absurd, he half expected his father to open a quizzical eye and call him a fool. But Hugo had gone wherever the sad fathers go, and left his son to his confusions. 'Goodnight, Dad,' Will murmured, and turning from the bed let Adele take his place. 'Do you want me to stay with you?' he asked her.
'I'd rather you didn't, if you don't mind. I'd like to say a few things, just him and me.'
He left her to it, wondering what she would say when he'd gone. Would there be tearful professions of love, unleashed now that she didn't fear his censure? Or just a quiet chat, his hand in hers; a gentle admonishment that he'd slipped away so suddenly, a kiss on his cheek with her goodbye. The thought of that moved him far more than the body had. Loyal Adele, who had built her late life around his father, made his comfort her ambition and his affection her touchstone, murmuring in the ruins.
Assuming she would take her time with Hugo he didn't head for the car park, which was garishly lit, but took a side door out into the hospital's modest garden. There was enough light shed from the windows for him to be able to see his way to a bench beneath a tree, and there he sat to ponder things for a while. After a few minutes he heard motion in the canopy overhead; then a few tentative trills, as the first birds called up the day. In the east there was a merest sliver of cold grey. He watched it like a child watching the minute hand of a clock, determined to detect its motion, but its increments defied him. There was more to see around him, however. Rose-bushes and hydrangeas, a wall covered with creeping vine, the murk still too thick to put colour on the blooms, but rising by the moment, like a print developing in a tray, the tones dividing. On another day, he might have been enraptured, his eyes greedy for the sight. But now there was no pleasure in either the bloom or the day that was sculpting it.