I need hardly say I shed no tears in Cass Cleave's presence. As fond an old satyr I may have been as ever stumbled in the wake of fair-limbed nymph, but I had not forfeited all my instinct for cunning and concealment. I was careful to seem to be holding her at emotional arm's length. I laughed at her, and grasped her wrist and squeezed it in my iron claw until she turned pale with pain. Yet for all the swagger and strutting before her, there must at times have been in me a faltering, a flinching, an abject, beseeching light in glance or gaze, that even she, the self-obsessed, could not but recognise and know what was betokened.
I tried, I tried to know her. I tried to see her plain and clear. I tried to put myself into her inner world, but even at those moments, all too rare, when I managed to hack my way through the thickets of fantasy and illusion inside which she was trapped I – came only to an immemorial, childhood place, a region of accent-less and unemphatic prose, exclusive haunt of the third person. She would not be known; there was not a unified, singular presence there to know. She was one of those creatures – Magda was another such – who exist on a median plane between the inanimate and the super-animate, between clay and angels. Despite any claims to the contrary I may seem to make, I am an ordinary soul. My hungers are human, my aspirations mundane. On the lip of the grave I was happy and grateful to get my hands on a girl – should I deny it? And she, what did she want, of me? At the time I thought, because it was convenient to think so, that profit was what she was after, self-advancement, a little fame, or, if fame was not for the having, notoriety at least. How I misjudged her.
When did it happen, this famous falling in love, when did I drown in that Rubicon? Impossible to say, exactly, yet I fix on a certain remembered moment which when I call it to mind produces what seems the most telling, most piercing, pang of all the pangs of pain to which I am subject now. It was at the end of that term of imposed para-hospitalization in the hotel room, during which she would not let me out of her sight for more than minutes at a time. My liver had at last made a recovery of sorts from the alcoholic insults I had been piling on it for decades, and with a particular vengeance since coming to the city. Not since youth had I been entirely sober for a full day at a stretch, and now, after a fortnight without a drink, I was so clear-headed that I almost felt dizzy. I registered hardly a tremor anywhere, I, who had not known a completely steady hand since early manhood. I had that heightened sense of self-awareness, that scarcely bearable feeling of being open to the world like a wound, that was last experienced in childhood, when illness seemed a chrysalis out of which one would struggle into a new and quivering, still sticky, not quite opaque version of a former, less developed, self. Everything around me was intensely sharp and clarified and almost painful to the touch, and even to the sight. That day, the day which I am remembering, it was coming on for twilight, the wind had died, the air was hot and still, and I was standing by the open window of the hotel room, re-learning how to knot my tie – extraordinary how illness can deprive one of the simplest skills – and there was traffic below in the street, and there were the sounds of people, and birds of some variety were circling slowly at an immense height, if I leaned forward and craned my neck I could glimpse them up there in the powdery, purple, late sky. I had my back turned to Cass Cleave, but her three-quarters reflection was to be seen beside me in the mirror of the wardrobe door. Something in her attitude made me pause. She was sitting on the side of the unmade bed, motionless, barefoot, her shoulders slumped, holding her shoes one in each hand and gazing before her with a look of helpless desolation that seemed to me echoed somehow, and somehow made all the more awful, by the heartless, glaring whiteness of the bed sheet where she sat and the malignant glint of the mahogany headboard beside her. I had seen this look before, it came over her always when the intolerable difficulty of being uniquely and inescapably herself brought her like this to a baffled halt in the midst of some perfectly ordinary and trivial bit of life's necessary business. For her, a pair of shoes, left and right, could be as insoluble as any conundrum with which the world might confront her. I noted with a kind of horrified tenderness the translucent white skin at her temples where her pinned-up hair was drawn back, and the shape of her knees under the light material of her frock, and the twin faint gleams of reflected window light along her shin-bones. For a moment I was dazzled by the otherness of her. Who was she, what was she, this unknowable creature, sitting there so plausibly in that deep box of mirrored space? Yet it was that very she, in all the impenetrable mysteriousness of her being entirely other, that I suddenly desired, with an intensity that made my heart constrict. I am not speaking of the flesh, I do not mean that kind of desire. What I lusted after and longed to bury myself in up to the hilt was the fact of her being her own being, of her being, for me, unreachably beyond. Do you see? Deep down it is all I have ever wanted, really, to step out of myself and clamber bodily into someone else. Everything had gone still. I dared not move; I thought that if I tried to turn I would not be able to, as if the air had turned into a solid medium in which I was stuck fast. I fancied I could hear the faint calling of those far birds. Then she bent forward with a sigh and set her shoes on the floor, one beside the other, and the movement disturbed the air and made the mirror tremble, and a watery shiver ran across the glass, and the cries of the birds became the traffic noises in the street, and she stood up, and began to say something, and then I did turn to her, the real not the mirrored she, and at my look – in that moment I must have seemed the madder of the two of us – her eyes widened, and she wavered, seeming to shrink back and at the same time to lean irresistibly into me, and I put my ape arms around her and held her with such force in my decrepit, foul embrace that she gasped, and I felt the flutter of her expelled breath against my neck, and if I had been able to speak, I do not know what I would have said.
Despite such mysteriously intense passages, when I look back to then, which is still the recent past after all, it is strange how little I can see, how little remains that is not remote, diffuse, gone small and indistinct in time's misted-over window pane. Of the three-odd months – and the hyphen, by the way, is optional – that we were together, that she was with me, or I was widi her – I am not sure how to frame the thing – I retain only fragments, pitifully scarce. How did we pass the time, how fill the ordinary hours, the suspended mornings and torpid noons, the evenings that were all deserted corridors and air as dense as the shock-wave after an explosion? I see us sitting opposite each other at a table in the hotel's huge, muffled dining room, where the light falls down from the chandeliers like the light in a mortuary, and the waiters stand about in their cream jackets, fiddling with their bow ties and gloomily inspecting their fingernails. The only other regular is there, an elderly, silver-haired gentleman who lived permanently in a suite on the top floor, and had his own table in a corner by the mirrors, who makes subdued, knitting sounds with his knife and fork and at intervals will pause in eating to clear his throat delicately into a fine, white fist. These are the only sounds I hear, the clicking of the cutlery and the old man clearing his throat. We must have talked, Cass Cleave and I, or she at least must have talked to me, since she was forever talking, at table and in bed, on the streets, in trams and taxis, telling me things, but all that persists, in my ears, is a sort of deep, hollow hum, the kind of hum that lingers for a time in an auditorium after the audience has left. We did things together, she and I, visited places, museums and the like, as diligent as any pair of tourists. We went to Milan, to the Brera, to look at Mantegna's dead Christ and Bellini's Greek Madonna. We made an excursion to Genoa, and spent a pleasant afternoon there strolling in the vast cemetery of Stagione, where the air smelled faintly, sweetly, of the decaying corpses that lay under the clay and in marble vaults everywhere about, and she was fascinated by the larger than life-sized stone scenes of the domestic doings of the dead that lined the long, arcaded walkways. But even in my memories of those more memorable days, what I see of her is not her, but something far less substantial, a wavering presence that seems hardly more than the idle dream of an old man's afternoon. Is it simply because I was so old and she so young that I have kept so little of her? How could I be expected to see her clearly, peering rheumily as I must across the chasm of the years that yawned between us?