It came to me then, with drunken clarity, what I would do. Odd, how this random world insinuates its sly suggestions. I scrabbled among the papers on the desk and found the embossed card that had been lying there for a week and read with a rictus of contempt its curlicued and pompous blandishments. Chiarissimo Prof essore! Il Direttore del Convegno considéra un altissimo onore e un immenso piacere invitarla ufficialmente a Torino … I had intended to decline, of course, with a curt and scornful note, but now I saw that I must go, and make her come to me there. Where better to confront my ruin, if that was what it was to be?
When I had read the letter first my first thought had been to disappear, simply to stand up and walk out of my life, as I did once before, with remarkable, with outrageous, success. It would be less easy this time; then, I was no one, now there are people – a select band, but a band – across however many continents there are who know the name of Axel Vander; all the same, it could be done. I had my escape routes mapped out, my secret bank accounts primed, my sanctuaries sealed and waiting… I am exaggerating, of course. But for a minute or two I did entertain the thought of fleeing, and was entertained by it. It made me feel daring, dangerous; it made me feel young. I wondered if this wielder of the poison pen, whoever she might be, had known the effect her letter would have on me: was it possible she was allowing me time to cut and run? But where would I go to, really? Whatever plans I might have put in place, there was nowhere farther I could escape to beyond this tawny shore, last edge of what for me was the known world. No, I would not do it, I would not give her the satisfaction of hearing the clump and stumble of my clay feet as I fled. Better far to confront her, laugh in the face of her accusations – ha! I would lie to her, of course; mendacity is second, no, is first nature to me. All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's almost-anagram. And now my earliest exercises in the art, my prentice falsehoods, had come back to undo me.
I woke at five in spectral rain-light, not sober yet. For a second I expected Magda to give her familiar moan of mild complaint and turn over in the bed with an oceanic heave. I reached out a hand beside me to where she was not; the sheet there had a special, faintly clammy chill that I knew I must be imagining and yet was convinced I could feel. I lay with eyes still shut and lit my wake-up cigarette, then rose and walked barefoot into the living room, my dead leg thumping on the maple boards. I am not of an apocalyptic disposition, having seen so many worlds seem to end and yet survive, but that morning I had the certain sense of having crossed, of having been forced to cross, an invisible frontier, and of being in a state that forever more would be post-something, would be forever an afterwards. That letter, of course, was the crossing point. Now I was cloven in two more thoroughly than ever, I who was always more than myself. On one side there was the I I had been before the letter arrived, and now there was this new I, a singular capital standing at a tilt to all the known things that had suddenly become unfamiliar. The house had a tense and watchful aspect, as if resentful of my intrusion on its furtive doings at this unaccus-tomedly early hour. Phantoms of shadow hung about, trying not to be noticed. A window streamed with rain, and opposite it in the room a patch of wall rippled like dark silk. I stopped still and peered into the gloom, seeking a focus; there were times when Magda was there, a palpable presence, but not now, and the shadows were shadows only. From the garden I could hear the rain beating on the leaves and into the clay, and I pictured it, falling down straight and shiny as wires through the windless dawn.
The coffee machine was still at its diarrhoeal labours when the rain stopped abruptly. I never got used to the weather on that coast, it was always too orderly, too arranged; there the spring with its discreet matutinal downpours followed by days of seamless sunlight had none of the unpredictability, the flushed feverish-ness, of the springtimes of my youth. Arcadians complain of the climate, in their relaxed, wry way, but to me these conditions hardly constituted weather at all, product that I am of Europe 's bleak northern lowlands with their ice storms and slanting rain and skies of tumultuous cloud endlessly unscrolling eastward. I took my steaming mug into the breakfast nook, easing myself awkwardly between the bench seat and the table. The drenched garden, tousled and glittering, had the abashed look of something picking itself up after an unseemly tussle. There would be mist on the bay for half the morning, until the sun was strong enough to burn it off, as the weather forecasters would say. I like that phrase, to burn it off, the figurative, brisk assurance of it. Out there on that coast the elements are something to be patronised; even the not infrequent earthquakes are a sort of huge communal joke. In the first months after we moved into the house I used to love to sit like that of a morning, looking out on my avocado tree, my peach tree, at the humming-birds busy about the bush that I think is called hibiscus, listening in a state of tingling bliss to the early-morning news on the radio, impatient for the end when the risibly solemn-voiced announcer would inform me of what the day had in store for me, the highs and lows of temperature – never too high, never too low – the breezes pacific and soft as breaths, the fog's standing mirage. It was like being promised a succession of lavish and wholly undeserved treats.
I went off to the bathroom, and when I returned, haphazardly shaven and putting on my tie, this time Magda was there, in her old grey dressing-gown with the frayed drawstring, sitting in the nook where I had sat. She looked as solid as an armchair, with hands laid flat along her thighs and a yard of flannel stretched between her splayed knees, and my heart gave a sideways knock and for a second I was afraid I would fall over. This is how I best remember her in that house, planted there in the neuralgic light of early morning, the iron hair severely parted down the middle and the heavy braids coiled against her head like two outsized earphones, her callused feet bare, her brooding, inexpectant gaze fixed slightly off to one side of me. Today she held her face turned away a little, at a characteristically watchful angle. It seemed that she might speak, if I waited long enough. But then I blinked and she was gone, and my heart settled down grumpily to its accustomed, rocky measure. Why could she not leave me alone? She had wanted to go, I was sure of it, so why must she keep coming back like this? My coffee mug stood at the place where she had appeared, still with its faint plume of steam; it had the look of the smoking barrel of a gun.
Unnerved, I went into what was known, I do not know why, as the lounge. It was the dimmest room in the house; a lamp had to be kept burning wanly there, too, day and night. Perhaps that was the reason people were always unwilling to linger in the room, despite the sofa and the easy chairs and the invitingly jumbled bookshelves. People? What am I saying? There never were people, to speak of, except me, and Magda. We did not encourage visitors; we were not sociable; we barely knew the names of our nearest neighbours; it was how I had insisted it should be, and Magda had willingly complied, at least I think she did so willingly. I sat down on the couch, crapulent and tired and squelchy with sudden, sweet self-pity. I never feel more acutely the pathos and perils of my life as in the early morning, the very time when I should be full of renewed hope and vigour. Briefly my resolve faltered; why was I going on this journey, what did I think I would achieve? I clasped a hand under my knee and heaved up my dead leg and banged it down on one of the little tables, making the lamp-bulb jump and blink. What choice did I have, but to go?
There was a single window in the room, large and long, giving on to a narrow walkway and the siding of the next-door house. Day had fully taken hold now and the window was a big rectangle of wettish sunlight slashed through with diagonals of indigo shadow; against the gloom in which I sat it might have been a painting, garish and flat as a primitive depiction of a tropical scene. I remarked inwardly again how uninsistent was the sunlight in this part of the world, a matt radiance, unvarying and calm, that would fill every square inch of the day like a bright, colourless gas, seeming not to have its source in the sky but to shine out of the very things on which it was falling, the buildings white as sugar cubes, the pastel motor cars, the burnished, black-green trees that lined every street like so many dreamy guardians. I noted too, more immediately, the dustiness of the room. Since Magda's going I had made no attempt at maintaining the place; I was not even sure where the cleaning things were stored, though I thought surely there must be a broom, a mop, a pail…? I had been under the impression that Magda had kept a daily woman, who came when I was not there, but although I waited in on successive mornings, no one turned up. Perhaps I only imagined gleaming-black Jemima, with her rolling eye and stupendous bosom and cotton-white headscarf tied in a top-knot. Then did Magda do all the household chores herself? I do not know why this possibility should be surprising, but it is. Now, with her gone, dust lay everywhere undisturbed, a fine, soft, mole-coloured fur, cut through by a pathway maze that marked out the pattern of my widowed life in the house: door to hall, kitchen to table, bathroom to bedroom. The margins of my world were disappearing, crumbling into this grey penumbra of soft dirt.