Odd, that Arcady should have been the place where I ended up, so far from everything that I had once known. It was in the wrong direction entirely; by rights, I should have been borne the opposite way, like so many others, into the heart of the calamity, the toppling towers, the fire storms, the children shrieking in the burning lake. When I got to Arcady and looked back, however, I saw that everything I had done had been pushing me relentlessly toward it, as if the essays published, the addresses delivered, the honours won, had been so many zephyrs wafting me irresistibly westward, from Europe to Manhattan, to Pennsylvania, to the plains of Indiana, to bleak Nebraska – such harsh poetry in those names! – and then in a last, high leap, over the mountains and down to that narrow strip of sunlit coast where I came to rest with a soundless, dusty thump, like a spaceman stepping on to an unknown planet. Unknown, that is the apt word. The place was always alien to me, or at least I was an alien in it. The fact is, I was never there, not really. I took no part in town life, such as it was. I did not buy a car. I never went on that delicate, spindly, far-famed red bridge. Walking in Arcady's steady sunlight, that seemed trained on me always like the light of an impersonal but ever-watchful eye, I would close my mind to the present and be again in the city where I was born, and walk again in the narrow, secret streets where I walked as a child, and see again the spires and the huddled roofs and the frozen fields beyond, scattered with tiny figures at work or play, as in one of those hackneyed Dutch genre scenes of mingled labours and festivities. Oh, what would I not have given in those unvarying Arcadian days to catch even for an instant the flash of rain-light on an April road in Flanders! And yet, I should have been at ease in Arcady. There, everyone had previously been someone else, at some time, in some entirely other existence, just like me. In all the years I lived in the town I never met a single person who had been born there. Where are you from? Arcadians would ask of each other, and stand smiling, brows lifted and lips expectantly parted, anticipating a story, a history. They would confide the most intimate details about themselves and their pasts, and give that characteristic shrug, shrugging it all off. The future was their legend. I, of course, fascinated them. Unlike the comrades I had left behind in New York, they were not interested in me as a political exemplar, but flocked to me nevertheless, filled with curiosity and wonder, as if they were visiting some ancient, hallowed site of immemorial rituals, battles, bloody sacrifice. They would walk around me, viewing me from all angles, wishing they had brought their cameras and their guidebooks. I encouraged them, the most agreeable or at least the most useful of them, welcomed them, accommodated them, until I judged my authenticity had been sufficiently attested, and then I shut fast the gates and let the portcullis come crashing down, and stay down, its rivets rusted fast.
Magda felt even more displaced than I did in lush and leafy Arcady. She had almost liked New York, its teeming streets, the bustle and the crowds and the ceaseless clamour of human concourse. The farther west we went the more of life was leached from her. The air in those vast spaces we travelled through dried her out, hollowed her out. In Arcady the young frightened her, from the boy on his bicycle who hurled the rolled newspaper against our front door first thing every morning with vicious energy, to the under-age hoodlums racing each other on motorbikes up and down the umbrous avenues, turning the air rancid with exhaust fumes. She began to hide from the world, hardly venturing out of the house and never without me to accompany her. I cannot recall at what point exactly I realized that her mind was decaying. Perhaps the defect was there all along, a spongy patch she had been born with in her brain, that had spread steadily until all within her cranium had turned to pulp. When did she develop her taste for toy food? I would find lollipop sticks stuck to the floors, crumbs of cake between the covers of the bed, candy wrappers floating unflushably in the lavatory bowl. Frequently now I would come into the house to meet her standing in the hall regarding me with a wild, unrecognising look. I would hear her talking to herself, in the bathroom, or on the stairs, a hushed, urgent whispering. Then one morning she walked into the kitchen leaving behind her across the floor a trail of little turds as flat as fishes, and I knew the time had come when she must go.
In the hotel lobby a coach load of elderly tourists was checking in, with much complaining and bickering; they, like me, had suffered delays and loss of luggage. I paused on my stick outside the lift and looked about. Where was she, this persona?Two fat businessmen sat on low armchairs facing each other across a lower table, intent and watchful, as if in preparation for a bout of arm wrestling. A girl with red hair was hiding in the corner of a couch, with a bag at her feet, waiting for someone, hoping not to be noticed. A painted hag passed by, lost in the folds of a fur coat, with a pug dog in her arms. I went toward the reception desk but could not reach it for the milling tourists. I considered simply walking out the door and away, clearly I saw myself go, except that in my imagination my damaged leg was repaired, and my step was youthful, and rapid, and carefree. Even before she spoke I had sensed her behind me. It was the girl, of course, the girl with the red hair; I should have known. Tall; pale; freckles on her nose; eyes that were – what? – greeny-blue, yes, and flecked with amber. I noticed her tall girl's way of standing, one leg back, the forward knee bent, trying to take an inch off her height. She was holding her bag protectively before her with both hands on the strap, as if to ward off a feared and confidently expected assault.
"I am Catherine Cleave," she said. "I'm called Cass."
We sat in the lobby, facing each other from either end of the leather couch, the girl bolt upright with her fists on her knees, her raincoat beside her and her bag on the floor; she had the slightly dazed, disbelieving air of a refugee who no more than an hour ago had made it across the border under fire. I was irritable. The water splashing in the ornamental pond kept distracting my attention: what imbecile had thought to put ferns and a fountain there? I like things kept to their proper place. I studied the girl, or young woman, as I supposed I would be required to think of her. The aspect she presented was at once striking and dowdy. I noted the fine bones of her wedge-shaped face, the delicate, slightly inflamed pink at the canthus of her eyes, the blonde down on her arms and on her long, bare, bony shins. She was telling me in hurried and disjointed detail of a research project she had been engaged on, for years, it seemed, to do with Rousseau's children, if I recall; I barely listened. I was thinking how disappointed I was. I had expected someone far more formidable than this. She might have been a student of mine, one of the more desperate types, from the old days, when I still had to have students. So she hoped to make her name by exposing me, did she? Well, she might succeed, but at a cost, and what a cost, to herself no less than to me, I would make sure of that. As she talked, her eyes, unnaturally wide and bright, kept darting here and there over my person with a flickering, fascinated intensity, so that I felt I was being very rapidly assembled, a sort of living jigsaw puzzle. A faint, fast vibration came off her, as if there were something inside her spinning without cease at terrible, soundless speed. I interrupted the gabbled history of Jean-Jacques' abandoned brats to ask if she would like to have some breakfast and she looked at me in a sort of panic and vehemently shook her head. I felt as if I had come face-to-face on a forest path with a rare and high-strung creature of the wild that had paused a second in quivering curiosity and would in another second be gone with a crash of leaves. I knew the type. They always sat in the highest tier of the lecture hall, fixed on me hungrily, never speaking a word unbidden. I looked at the deep, shadowed cup above her clavicle and was surprised to feel my old libido rubbing wistfully its callused claws. I am afraid I always did favour the crazed ones.
When I enquired where she came from and she told me I said it was a grand place, home of many fine and famous poets. How could I, even on the telephone, have missed that burr, that brogue? I asked which hotel she would be staying at, and saw from the way she faltered and frowned that she had nowhere to stay. Good. Perhaps there would be a room available here, I said smoothly, lifting my eyebrows at her. She looked about dubiously at the marble floors, the chandeliers, blinking. But yes, I said, she must stay here, I was sure there would be a vacancy, I would go and arrange it, right away. As I hauled myself to my feet I saw with obscure satisfaction how she had to check herself from reaching out a hand to help me. At the desk she waited silently at my elbow; in her stillness she was still vibrating. Yes, I announced, turning to her, all airy blandness, there was a suite available, would she like that? Mutely she looked at me. I smiled. "Something more modest, then?" Her forehead reddened. The sleek young man behind the desk was stony-faced. I set a registration card before her and offered her a pen, which she declined, and instead brought out a fountain pen of her own from the pocket of her blouse. She bent to write, with a schoolgirl's frowning haste. I tried to read the address she was putting down, but could not make it out. Her handwriting startled me in its violent uncontrol; the spiked letters in slanting lines were like so many rows of smashed-up type. Deftly I snatched the key the clerk was offering her, and picked up her bag, too, before she could reach for it. She reddened again. I drank her blushes like sips of the most refined and precious cordial. For certain, I would have fun with this one! She turned toward the lift and I followed her. Wide shoulders, long haunches, and much, much too tall. Side by side we ascended, eyes cast upward. She smelled sharply of sweat as well as something dull and faintly medicinal; I sensed a past of institutions – schools, and more than schools; sanatoriums, perhaps? Perhaps her lungs were bad. I was not sure if people have bad lungs, any more. How widely one's musings range on these peculiar, these extraordinary, these fantastical, occasions.