Susannah and Jane and Nancy and Ruth adored Duncan, because he had charm and he knew how to use it. They were flattered when he wanted to take pictures of them looking ethereal in graveyards. And they were fascinated by his background, because he came from genuine bohemian stock. His real name wasn't Duncan; it was something fancy like Donecan, or Duncannon, but he'd changed it because he was fed up with it being misspelled. Duncan's great-uncle had hung around with Kurt Schwitters, the Dadaist, and Duncan's father had also been a famous painter — though not so famous that any of us had heard of him. Even better, there was a rumour that his parents had once been involved in a menage a trois which had scandalized tout Paris. Duncan didn't talk about his family at all, but his reticence made the little that leaked out all the more tantalizing. Politely but firmly he discouraged all attempts at intimacy, and concentrated instead on his art. He worked hard, he always worked so hard, battering away at his personal muse, turning out beautifully photographed cemeteries by the score.
My own muse wasn't quite so complicated. It came in fits and starts — mostly waiting in the wings until I felt the need for attention. Then it would take centre stage and dance the fandango. One time, for instance, I added pieces of broken razor-blade to my latest collage. It was hailed as an artistic triumph, especially when one of the tutors slashed his finger and had to be rushed to hospital. Another time, I constructed a landscape out of calves' liver. Before the day was out it was swarming with flies and there were complaints about the smell, but still it was acclaimed as another tour de force. No one ever thought to ask how I was going to make a living out of artistic arrangements of offal and razor-blades. The tutors believed in Fine Art as a pure concept unsullied by commercial opportunism. They didn't care what happened to us in the world outside.
But the art served its purpose. No one could ignore it, not even Duncan. He took the bait — though hooking him was one thing, reeling him in was another. It became the central obsession of my life. He was the last thought I had before going to sleep, he was present in my dreams, and he was there in my head as soon as I woke up. And in the studio one evening, as I was packing up to go home, he came up to me and asked me out. Afterwards, I danced home in triumph. This was what I'd been waiting for. This was all the proof I needed — I was not an ordinary person, I possessed the power, and Duncan belonged to me.
And life, for a while, was like a dream. He was the teacher I'd been looking for; he showed me around town, gave me books to read, took me to Chinese restaurants and Japanese films — he liked samurai movies, and did a great impersonation of Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo. He showed me round his favourite cemeteries, and I watched him take photographs, though for some reason he never took any of me. He always said he was going to, but he never got round to it. He promised that one day he would show me Pere Lachaise, in Paris. It was the best cemetery in the world, he said. Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison were buried there.
The funny part was — I'd fantasized about him so much that, in the flesh, he was disappointing, not nearly as exciting as I'd first imagined. Sex was no more than satisfactory, conversation brittle and superficial. We traded trivialities, and talked about popular culture, and that was it. I wanted passion and intensity, but he kept that part of himself locked away. Given time, I would have decided he wasn't worth the effort. Given time, I would have extracted what I needed, and moved on.
But time was what I didn't get.
One evening, I was alone in the etching department, up on the top floor. I had signed up for a crash course in etching because Duncan was going to be there all week, transferring some of his photographic designs on to plates, and I liked to keep an eye on him. That afternoon he had left early to return some borrowed equipment, but I'd stayed on. I'd rolled a layer of etching-ground on to a fresh plate and blackened it with one of those medieval-looking torches they still used in the department, the sort I imagined would be carried by villagers when they stormed the Transylvanian castle. I was working on the latest in a series of severed heads. I'd already done Salome, and Isabella with her pot of basil, and now I was more than halfway through Medusa.
I could hear the faint noise of traffic outside, but the room seemed cut off from the rest of the world. The air was heavy with hot wax and lavender, and the smell was making me sleepy. I'd just finished scratching the last of the snakes into the lampblack and had slipped the plate into the acid. I was engrossed in the tiny bubbles when I heard someone humming. The tune was familiar, but I couldn't place it.
I looked up just in time to see her come in, and go directly to the desk where Duncan had been working. She stopped humming and studied his half-finished plate. Her head was bowed, and I couldn't see much of her face because her hair fell forward in a dark curtain, and she was bundled up to her chin in big fur. She was dressed all in black, like me, but her clothes didn't look as though they came from the Oxfam shop. She was smaller than me, and skinnier too, beneath all the wrapping. She had the tiniest hands and feet I'd ever seen; they were encased in black leather gloves, and in black leather boots with pointed toes and peculiar curved heels — I had never seen boots quite like those before. She was dressed as if for winter in Siberia, though the evening was unusually mild. The weathermen were attributing the unseasonably high temperatures to a drifting band of volcanic dust which was giving us a series of spectacular blood-red sunsets.
She bent over Duncan's desk, and — without removing her gloves — scribbled something on a scrap of paper. Then she stood up straight again, and the way she held herself you would have thought she was taller than she really was. As she turned to leave, her gaze met mine for the briefest instant. There was no surprise, because she'd known I was there all along — those eyes knew everything there was to know.
But she wasn't interested in me, not in the slightest. She broke eye contact almost immediately, and just before she disappeared she started to hum again. It wasn't until the humming had faded that I finally put my finger on the tune: one of Verdi's greatest hits, the drinking song from La Traviata.
I felt cold all of a sudden, as if she had left a breath of winter behind, but there was no particular sense of dread. Just fuzziness, as though I were coming round after anaesthetic. I went over to read her note. The handwriting was spindly, a trail of ink left by wandering spiders.
'Duncan — the DeMille, tomorrow night, nine o'clock. Violet.'
Violet, I thought. What an unusual name.
Chapter 2
Duncan said, 'I think I'm in love,' and the blood rushed to my head. For a few seconds I was flying higher than I had ever flown before — higher than I would ever fly again as long as I lived. I thought he was talking about him and me. This was the Age of Innocence, before the Fall.
I could be forgiven for getting it wrong, because for the last half hour we'd been discussing my favourite topic of conversation — me. Or rather, Duncan had been talking, and I'd been lapping it up. He'd been telling me what an extraordinary person I was, how rare, how talented, and how privileged he was to know me. I should have guessed something was up.