At the hotel, when I followed her into her room she was already drawing the curtains against the glare of afternoon sunlight. Now, of course, came the last-minute faltering, and I did not want to be there. I was tired of myself and my hungers, my infantile need to clasp and squeeze and suck that the accretion of years seems only to intensify. "You realise," I said, "that I am old enough to be your great-grandfather?" I laughed. She did not answer, only unbuttoned the neck of her dress at the back and pulled it over her head, becoming for a second a hooded black beetle with clawing antenna arms. The sound of her falling under things rustled along my nerves. "Do you know that Cranach Venus in the Beaux Arts in Brussels?" I said brightly, leaning on my stick at an angled pose. "The one in the big dark hat and rather interesting black choker?" It had struck me how like the painted woman this living one looked, the same sinuous type, with the same heavy hips and tapering limbs and somewhat costive pallor. "Cupid," I said, "hardly as high as her knee, is an angry toddler crawled all over by bees, although they always look to me, I must say, more like bluebottles. Do you know the one I mean?" She bent to turn the bed covers back, one breast, a silvered bulb, glimmering under the arc of her armpit. "Cranach," I said, "younger or elder, I cannot remember which, was a friend of Martin Luther, of all people. One wonders what the great reformer thought of those lewd ladies his chum so liked to paint." She was sitting on the bed now with her legs drawn up to her chest and her pale arms clasped about her shins. She was not looking at me, but gazed before her with a faint frown, as if she were trying to recall some elusive word or image. I leant my stick against the headboard of the bed and turned and swung myself into the windowless bathroom and locked the door.
Micturition, I find, is one of the lesser annoyances of old age; sometimes, indeed, the copious passing of water can be an almost sensual experience. My urine on this occasion smelt distinctly of grappa. I turned on the cold tap and half filled the handbasin and doused my hands, liking the water's steely coolness, its joggle and sway. Then I spent some time picking idly among her things, her salves and pastes and powders; their mingled fragrance was faintly, pleasurably repulsive. I unscrewed a cartridge of lipstick and applied the scarlet nub to the underside of my wrist, drawing a smeary mouth there, open as in a startlement of desire, and pressed my lips upon it, tasting the sticky, waxen sweetness. In the land of women I am always a traveller lately arrived. I studied myself in the mirror, the flecks of scarlet the lipstick had left on my mouth, then took a tissue and wiped them off, not without difficulty. Still I loitered. Even from within this tombal chamber I could sense the afternoon's hot pulsings all around outside. I put my ear to the door; not a sound. She would be under the covers by now, waiting for me, her leman, with her lemur eyes, waiting for me to come and devour her. I recalled the policeman standing in the kitchen the morning after Magda died. He was a short, muscular young tough fairly bursting out of his uniform, his hair shaved to within a millimetre of his bullet head, his scalp a shade of baby blue and pink. His name, improbable, and yet gruesomely appropriate, was Officer Blank. He had shaken my hand with the courteous solemnity of an opponent before the commencement of a duel, and stood now audibly breathing through his nose, his square jaw rotating around a wad of chewing gum. I had never been afforded the opportunity to study a policeman at such close quarters before, and in my hungover, tear-sodden state I was fascinated by the quantity and range of impedimenta that he carried about him, the bulky gun, clenched in its holster like a steel fist, the long black club, the handcuffs, the complicated, brick-shaped telephone, also in a sort of holster, hanging from his belt. What was most impressive, however, was his stillness, the way he just stood mere, in fathomless silence, hands set on angled hips and only that jaw moving, moving. There did not seem to be anything to be said, by either of us. When I offered to make him a cup of coffee he blinked and looked askance, as if I had advanced a faintly improper suggestion. We could hear the others moving about heavy-footed upstairs. I found it peculiarly embarrassing to have to stand and listen to them like this; it was like hearing someone using the lavatory, or eavesdropping on a couple making love. Officer Blank, perhaps also feeling the indelicate awkwardness of the moment, cleared his throat and shifted the gum from one side of his mouth to the other. "My Pa went the same way," he said, nodding. "Pills." I nodded too, and frowned in sympathy, and then there was silence again, except for those noises off. I could not think how last night I had got Magda up the stairs and into bed. I remembered the leaden weight of her arm across my shoulders, and the eerily contented-sounding, burbling little sighs she kept releasing into my ear, as if she were a drunken lover trying to whisper lewd endearments. Now here she was being brought down again, this time strapped to a stretcher, with the sheet pulled over her face so tightly that I could see not only the outlines of her nose and mouth but even the protuberances of her eyes. Officer Blank said something and with surprising nimbleness stepped quickly sideways past me and went out, and a moment later, clattering over the doorstep, they were all gone, so abruptly and so thoroughly it might have been not Magda's mortal remains they were removing, but a living felon who must be hustled off without delay to secure captivity. Through the window I watched them drive away, the ambulance, and the following police car. Around me the transformed house vibrated, as if I were standing inside the dome of a great bell that a moment ago had sounded its final peal.
I came back from men to now and remembered Cass Cleave. Cautiously I pressed the door handle and opened the door and stepped out into the bedroom's tense and waiting twilight. Ah, child, woman, forgive me.
She could not sleep. The room in the half dark was phantasmally still, like the so many sick-rooms of her childhood. It was late, long past midnight. The air in the room was heavy and hot. In the light of the single lamp beside the telephone Axel Vander lay sprawled across the disordered bed, naked and asleep, breathing through his mouth, an arm thrown up awkwardly as if he had fallen backwards trying in vain to ward off a blow that had knocked him senseless. She moved away from him and rose cautiously and stood at the foot of the bed, looking down at him. The hair on his chest was grey. She could see the sinews in his shrunken arms, the shin-bones inside the stretched, paper-white skin of his legs. His face was ashen, and there was a perfectly round spot of hectic colour printed high on each cheekbone, neat as a dyer's stamp. He was breathing so softly she wondered if he might be only feigning sleep. She saw him in her mind rearing up and catching her by the wrist, could almost feel the grip of those ancient talons on her flesh. She drew up the sheet and laid it over him and he stirred and tensed and then went slack again. She was still leaking from him, she could feel the hot stickiness between her legs. The first time, when he had come out of the bathroom at last and heaved himself on top of her, she had thought of one of those huge statues of dictators that were being pulled down all over Eastern Europe. Crash. It was quickly over. They had lain together in the shadows then, lain there all afternoon long, until the day died, and the night came on. They were like survivors, she thought, washed up on this foreign but not unfriendly shore. Between bouts of dozing he had cradled her in the crook of his old arm and told her stories about himself when he was young; she listened idly, knowing it must be all lies, or nearly all. He did not know that she knew who he really was. Would she tell him? Not yet; not yet. Flakes of ash from his cigarette fell on her breast, tiny, warm, weightless kisses. She tried to picture him at the age he had been when the newspaper photograph was taken, restless, violent, insatiable, stretching out with both hands, straining to grasp at a future that now was long ago in the past. Then he had thrown himself on her again, and this time it was different, he was all chest and churning elbows and quaking thighs, straining and heaving, until she thought she might split in two clean down the middle. He seemed so angry. Then there was the smell of almonds, and then… When he was done he had pushed her aside without a word and gone to sleep, but she could not follow him, for all that she was exhausted. Now she had been awake for hours. Everything was so strange, all pulled out of shape and littered with torn-up things, like a stretch of shoreline after a storm. This old, old man. All at once, as she stood there gazing down at him, he was not he, or he was he and also not. She frowned, trying to unravel it. Perhaps it was simply that he was asleep and hence not present to her even in his presence. No, that was not it, sleep was not the agent, sleep only served to hold him still, the sudden stranger, so she might concentrate on what it was of him that was not there. She heard his harsh laughter in her head and imagined his eyes snapping open, the good one fixing her, the blinded one staring wildly past her into the nothing that it saw.