She did not expect to be able to understand the full meaning and significance of what had been… of what had been put in place. If she were to understand, that would mean there was no mystery, and the mystery was essential. No, she must simply perform the rites in the way that was required. She did not doubt that she would know the rites and the proper manner of their performance. She would be told. She would be shown. Or it might be that she was already doing what had to be done, that she had been doing it all along. It might be that what she did, every smallest action, was in fact precisely what was necessary, without her knowing it. Thinking this, she experienced a moment of such intense – she did not know what to call it – such intense something, that it made her blench. Everything had a meaning, a function, a place in the pattern, and nothing would be lost.
She was glad when Vander in the bed fell into a doze again, leaving her alone to think. It was to do with him, he was at the very centre of it, he was that centre itself. Was it that she was meant to save him? She sat looking down at his ravaged head resting in the deep pillows as if sunk in gleaming marble. His blue-veined eyelids were like two miniature globes of the world set into his skull, mapped all over with the figurations of tiny, blue rivers. She felt shivery, she was shaking, as if the searing wind blowing outside were blowing in her, too, sweeping through empty spaces inside her. She rose as quietly as she could and went out and went to her room and packed her bag and brought it back to Vander's room. She was hanging a dress in the wardrobe when she looked in the mirror in the wardrobe door and saw that he was awake again, and had turned his head on the pillow and was watching her. He asked her what she was doing. She said she was unpacking. "I am going to stay here with you, and take care of you." His gaze was listless and remote. "I dreamt of my wife," he said. "She was with me, here, in the room." He was tired, tired and ill. His brain felt molten, swollen in its bowl of bone. Perhaps he really had suffered a stroke in the street that first day with her, or at that restaurant, yesterday. What would a stroke feel like? He tried to flex his arms, to move his good leg. The covers seemed uncommonly heavy. "I think I am paralysed," he said mildly, and seemed to find the notion almost funny. "I cannot move." Cass Cleave, rearranging his pillows, paused, leaning over him, and looked into his eyes. Is that how it was to be, she asked herself, would that be all her task, simply to take care of him? She saw herself tending here, the bed a sarcophagus and his swaddled corpse topped with its living head; she saw the days rise from dawn to burning noon, then the long, slow fall to evening and the night. The head would speak, it would be the oracle, it would tell her things; she would understand; she would be given to understand; she would know. Suddenly, with an animal quickness, he reached from under the covers again and clamped his clawlike hand on her wrist. His fingers were dry and burning. She looked at the agate nails, striate, chipped. He let her go, his strength failing; his hand withdrawing under the sheet was like an animal slithering away. White weals on her wrist, and then the blood rushing back, under the slackening skin. She bent and put her mouth against his ear, saying something in a hot whisper, saying something I could not make out. Her burning breath. Saying something.
TWO
Come, my ghostly girl, plump up my pillows and sit by me here and I shall tell you a tale, a tale I had thought to think of no more until you brought it all back. It begins long, long ago, in the town of Antwerp, with a stroll along those little winding streets the name to which I gave, inevitably, was the Vander Way. The corner of the square with the plane trees was the crossing point from my world into his. When I think of that spot the weather in it is always grey, the luminous, quicksilver grey of an early northern spring, the colour for me of the past itself. On our side, the street leading up to the square was very narrow, and had to climb a slight incline, at a tilt, the left-hand pavement set higher than its counterpart on the right, giving me a giddy, toppling sensation as I walked up it, always, for some reason, on the lower level. Instead of a shifting church spire and the fragrance of hawthorn blossom I have as memory-points the three golden balls over Wassermann's pawnshop – how did they keep such a high shine, I always wondered, were they made of real gold? – and the warm, cloying aroma of vanilla from the pastry shop on the corner of the square. The big houses in the terrace on the far side, the Vander side, beyond the trees, were tall and brown and many-chimneyed; in the frost-smoke of winter mornings their upper reaches would crumble into dreamy insubstantiality, like the diaphanous edifices in the background to a Memling or a Tintoretto. They had shutters, and wrought-iron balconies, and here and there one of the tall windows would afford a glimpse of the opulent life within: a blazing chandelier, a bowl of roses on an antique table, a slender woman in silk standing with one arm folded and an elbow cupped in the palm of her hand, smoking a cigarette and looking down upon the world with an expression of lazy dissatisfaction. The Vander apartment itself was a numerous succession of high, cool rooms painted silvery white, or Greek blue, or deep, rich red. To my youthful, hungry eye the furnishings, all that brocade and ormolu and dark, gleaming wood, seemed the very epitome of taste and discreet luxury, although I suppose in reality it was just the usual high-bourgeois clutter. The Vanders did not seek to hide the fact of their wealth. Vander senior was a diamond merchant, an occupation that in a city other than ours would have seemed excitingly louche and exotic. He was very shrewd and careful behind a breezy manner. He travelled a great deal, to Amsterdam, Paris, London, and I suspect kept a mistress in more than one of those cities: he had a way of fingering his small moustache and smiling drowsily to himself that betokened a rich mental store of voluptuous images. His wife was a large, fretful woman, soft as a pigeon, big-bosomed and broad-beamed, with very round, starting eyes, of a washed-out blue that was almost colourless, and that gave her a permanent look of surprise and alarm. Everyone addressed her as Mama, even her husband. Axel treated his parents with indulgent disdain, affecting to be amused by their complacencies and pretensions. "Typical of their kind, of course," he would say, and heave a languid sigh. "I know I should hate them, but I can't." The apartment also housed a number of Vander relations, aunts and uncles, a brace of distant cousins, elderly, timid, curiously ill-defined persons, who kept out of sight as much as they could, as if fearing to risk expulsion by drawing attention to themselves. On Sunday evenings they would dispose themselves about the shadowy corners of the drawing room to listen with mournful earnestness as Mama Vander sang lieder to the piano accompaniment of her husband, or sometimes an unwilling Axel. She had a lachrymose mezzo voice that quavered perilously on the lower notes. She favoured the more saccharine songs of Schubert and Robert Schumann. These recitals would leave Axel shaking with mingled mirth and exasperation. He was a more than passable pianist. When we were at school together he had tried to teach me one or two easy pieces, without success. "Oh, you are hopeless,"he would say, and call me Hanswurst, and make a play of punching me in the chest. He was right. I could not keep the tunes in my head, and my outsized fingers – Hanswurst was right – wallowed over the keys like two huge handfuls of raw sausages.
In those days – I am speaking now, my dear, of fifty years ago, and more – the Vander's were for me the very ideal of what a family should be: civilised, handsome, amused and amusing, at ease with themselves, knowing precisely their position in the world. I see myself moving amongst them, my face on fire with their reflected light, like a rough youth who has been invited up from the stew of groundlings to take part, in however small and passive a role, in the performance of a marvellous, sophisticated, glittering comedy of manners. If I had not exactly been spawned in an estaminet, as the poet so prettily puts it, our place – I would never have thought to call that low, dim warren an apartment – was the opposite of where the Vander's grandly resided. Our family shared no candlelit Saturday night dinners abuzz with lively dispute and multilingual jokes, enjoyed, or endured, no Sunday song recitals; shouts, shrieks and the sound of many siblings exchanging energetic blows were our weekend music. We lived an underground life; I have a sense of something torpid, brownish, exhausted; the smell is the smell of re-breathed air… But I do not intend to oppress you with reminiscences of my family. It is not that they are any longer an embarrassment to me – I have so many, more recent, things to be ashamed of – but because, because, well, I do not know. Father, mother, my older brothers and sisters, those botched prototypes along the way to producing me, and the many younger ones who were always under my feet, they have in my memory a quaint, outmoded, in some cases badly blurred, aspect, like that of the incidental figures standing about self-consciously in very old photographs, smiling worriedly and not knowing what to do with their hands. Among them I was too big, in all ways; I was the giant whose head threatened to knock a hole in their ceiling, whom they must feed and tend and humour, and encourage away from the windows lest the neighbours look in and be frightened.