A clatter and crash woke them both at once. It was broad day. For the space of a held breath they lay staring at each other from pillow to pillow in baffled alarm. The crash came again. Cass Cleave rose and drew back the heavy inner curtains and opened wide the two tall panels of the window. A shutter outside had corne loose from its catch and was swinging against the wall. There were white horse-tails high in the scoured sky and over the whole city an oceanic wind was pouring in luminous billows. She leaned out and hooked the shutter fast. Vander sat up, bleary and blinking, smacking gummed lips, long strands of white hair floating and flickering about his head like charged electric filaments. "You," he said, glaring at her. "Still here." She did not answer, but came and started to rearrange the bedclothes around him. He made no move to help her, would not even shift his haunches to let her pull the sheet straight. "I am sick," he said. "Was I asleep?" Still she did not answer him. With a groan he got himself out of bed and shuffled past her into the bathroom and slammed the door. The bedclothes when she pulled them back released a stronger waft of his ashy, waxen odour. From the bathroom came the sounds of retching followed by a loud moan of fury and disgust. She went to the window again. In the building opposite a man was leaning out of his window, smoking a cigarette. She could see an office behind him, with a desk and papers and office machines, all stark and shadowless under the unreal, icy glare of strip-lights in the ceiling. They regarded each other for a moment in faint, humorous desperation, like two castaways trapped on their separate islands, the deep, unfordable channel of the street running between them. She could feel the wind buffeting the building.
She was hungry, and went to the telephone to order breakfast. The voice that answered her was shrill and tinny, seeming to come up to her from a series of deeper and still deeper, echoing cisterns. She could not think what to ask for. She thought she could hear the wind rustling in the receiver. The voice from the kitchen, losing patience, said something she could not understand and the line went dead. Vander came out of the bathroom, naked and white-faced and shivering. "I'm sick," he said again, not looking at her, and made for the bed, his shoulders hunched, rubbing his palms together with squeamish vigour, like a trepidant swimmer approaching the dreaded water's edge. There were chocolate-brown moles on his back, and long grey hairs sprouting on his shoulder blades, and the loose flesh of his lop-sided rump wobbled when he walked. She had never seen anyone so huge, so naked and so defenceless. She pondered in mild amazement the mystery of time and time's damagings. Soon, in a very few years, a decade at most, surely, he would be gone, and all that he had been and was now would be no more.
He had got into bed and pulled the covers to his chin. She could see the bristles on his sunken jaw glittering like spilt grains of sand. When the knock came she turned quickly with a wild look as if whoever it was outside might be about to hurl a shoulder against the door and break it down. For a moment she thought in terror that it might be the doctor come back to make sure that she had done all he had told her to do, that Vander was resting, that he had stopped drinking, that the graze on her arm had healed, that everything was as it should be and nothing amiss. It was not the doctor, however, but a waiter, bringing the breakfast she had not ordered. It was all set out on a sort of trolley that he could wheel into the room, leaning forward over it like a billiard player and casting his hooded gaze circumspectly to right and left as he advanced. He was an elderly, bald fellow; she recognised him, she could not for the moment think from where. He glanced from her to Vander behind her in the bed and frowned: there was breakfast only for one. It was all right, she said hurriedly, lifting her hands, it would be enough, it would do. She was afraid she would scream if he said a word, a single word. She contemplated the food with something like despair, helplessly. There were eggs, and cold meats, and slices of pale, glistening cheese, and bread rolls and rusks, and miniature pots of honey and jam, and jugs of milk and hot water with tea bags and sachets of instant coffee, and a big wine glass of impossibly orange orange juice under a frilled paper lid. The waiter wheeled the table to the window and turned it about, setting it just so, aligning it to invisible markers on the floor, and looked at her, and lifted the paper crown from the orange juice glass with a strange, grave movement of his hand, like a priest lifting the white cloth from the chalice, and she recognised him. He was the night porter, the one who had fetched her the glass of water and the napkin – how was it she had not known him straight away, how could she have forgotten? Vander's trunkless head said something to him in Italian that he seemed not to hear, or chose to ignore, and he continued gazing at Cass Cleave out of his dark and melancholy eyes that were just like the doctor's eyes. She scooped a jumble of coins from her purse and gave them to him, and he made a little bow with his head, bobbing it sideways and down with a little grimace denoting gratitude, and pocketed the coins and stepped past her nimbly and went to the door and turned and bowed again and silently, silently, withdrew.
Vander was watching her, turning his head on the pillow to follow her about the room with his eyes. He bade her eat. She brought a chair and sat down before the food. She was not hungry now. She was thinking. She was excited. Her gaze gleamed. She put a tea bag in the cup and poured hot water over it. She nibbled at one of the stale-tasting rusks. "You should not bite your nails," Vander said. "Look at them." They could hear the hot wind gusting outside, and in the room everything seemed taut and thrumming, and they might have been in the cabin of a ship under full-bellied sail. "I did see you come into that lecture room," he said, sullen and accusing, not looking at her now. "It must have been your ghost." She said nothing and took a sip of tepid tea. Thinking. "You came in," he said, "and sat down, and I was talking about the inexistence of the self." Suddenly he gave a loud laugh that ended in a cough, making the bed shake. He drew his hand from under the bedclothes and held it up for her to see. "With this I wrote those articles that you found," he said. "Not a single cell survives in it from that time. Then whose hand is it?" He, I, I saw again the empty bottle on its side, the mauve pills in my palm. I closed my eyes. I listened to the wind washing over the rooftops. The girl rose and came forward and knelt beside the bed and took my hand in both of hers and brought it to her lips and kissed it. I.
It was all so simple, so simple and so clear. She should have seen it from the start. The signs had been there all along, or rather, all along everything had been a sign, those high white peaks glistening in the moonlight that she had glimpsed from the train, the fat man who had almost fallen on her, the flock of pigeons at the station flying up out of shadows into the dawning sky, everything: the strange young woman at the Nietzsche house; the doctor taking her hand and making that sort of blessing over it; the child, singing. She had seen all this and yet not seen it. That was how it always was, with her, she would go along for a long time, just looking, noticing things, taking them in, but not connecting them, not recognising the connections; not understanding. It was only when the waiter had lifted the paper lid off the glass of orange juice, turning his wrist in that slow, solemn way, that at last it had come to her. It was as if a light had switched itself on in her head. Or no, no, it was as if she had been submerged in something dense and dark and suddenly had risen up and broken soundlessly through the surface into the light, the radiance. And it was all so clear, and so simple.
What was not clear was whether the signs were really signs, and meant especially for her, or if they were parts of the thing itself, the thing for which she had no name, yet; those parts, that is, that she was to be allowed to see, to notice, to register. The pattern she had suddenly discerned might be only a superficial aspect of a far deeper and infinitely more intricate order, to which she would never be allowed to penetrate. She would not mind if this were to be so. Indeed, she liked to think that there would be a level she could not reach, could never reach, a mosaic beneath the mosaic she had uncovered. A mosaic, yes, set in the floor of a temple, and she on her knees, the priestess bound to the shrine by immemorial, unbreakable vows. She even had her sacred sceptre, in the form of a fountain pen, with its profane relics wrapped safe inside it.