Then I understood why Henry had written “Dunce.”
Faced with Illud aspicis non vides I also was a dunce.
I sat on the slippery synthetic quilt and wondered who I could call on to translate. It was then, staring at those framed pink and pale blue prints one finds only in hotels, that I realized I really had no friends at all.
For years and years I had lived in the lazy conceited happy world of coupledom, something so deliciously contained by private language and its own sweet intolerances of everyone outside. I knew a lot of people, of course, and was habitually affectionate with many, but I had locked the door when Matthew died. I was a sudden spinster. My mother and father were dead. My sister would no longer talk to me.
Illud aspicis non vides.
In all those years of being a secret mistress, I had fancied myself at home with solitude but I had never once felt this stone weight of loneliness inside my throat. There was now no one to call but he whose kindness I had abused already.
When Crofty answered I heard music, something rather difficult, I thought, by which I meant—beyond my education.
“I’m sorry,” I said when he answered, but of course I was much relieved.
“Hang on.”
The music was turned down. He was slow in returning.
“I interrupted you. I’m sorry.”
“My darling,” he said, “there is nothing to interrupt.” I remembered that he had once been part of a couple too.
From my open window I could see two men support a very drunk young girl, a poor wobbly creature with silly shoes, plump legs, short skirt. Jesus help her. I could not watch.
“Where are you? Not still at that bloody pub?”
“It’s what they call Happy Hour.”
There was a pause. Crofty said, “Would you like me to come and sit with you?”
It would have been such a great relief. But of course I could not.
“How is your Latin?” I asked.
“Rusty.”
“But probably serviceable?”
“Possibly.”
“What does this mean: Illud aspicis non vides?”
“Where is the beak?” he asked and I realized he was slightly squiffy.
“You know where the beak is,” I said. “And I would be astonished if you had not read it.”
“Do you know, my dear,” he said, and it was clear to me that he was topping up his glass. “Do you know, I find the notion that mysteries must be solved to be very problematic. You know what I mean? Every curator finally learns that the mysteries are the point.”
“Please don’t tease me.”
“No, I am serious. Why do we always wish to remove ambiguity?”
I thought, why do you always want to polish silver half to death?
“Without ambiguity you have Agatha Christie, a sort of aesthetic whodunnit. But look at any Rothko. You can look and look but you never get past the vacillations and ambiguities of colour, and form, and surface. This is so much ahead of the ‘analytical clarities’ of your Josef Albers.”
“He is not my Albers.”
“He was Matthew’s Albers.”
“He was, yes.”
There was another pause.
“This is my project,” I said. “You gave it to me.”
“Indeed I did. I hope I was not too meddlesome?”
“Eric, I lost everything I lived for. You gave me this. If it is a mystery, that’s fine with me. But you gave it to me.”
“Yes, dear girl, I did.”
“Then why give it to her?” I hadn’t meant to say that, but I had. The swan was mine. Henry was mine.
Eric gave himself a splash. “What do you mean?” he asked wetly.
“This is mine.”
“Indeed,” he said, “but what is ‘it’ exactly?”
“The Latin.”
“So you wish to know how it translates?”
“Yes I do.”
“You want to know what it says?”
“Yes.”
“Illud aspicis non vides. It means, You cannot see what you can see.”
“Oh shut up,” I cried.
“It means, You cannot see what you can see.”
“No,” I said. “No it doesn’t.”
“Sweet Cat,” he said. “Call me whenever you wish.”
The phone went dead.
The marrow of my bones was filled with hurt, envy, rage that this mad rich girl was stealing everything from me, including Angus, that is, the carrier of that same spiralled mechanism that made my beloved’s upper lip, that wry funny taut muscle in the shadow of his famous nose.
You cannot see what you can see, said Sumper. What a load of rubbish.
WHEN I WAS AWOKEN it did not occur to me that such an enormous noise might be made by rain. But rain it was, the most unimaginable torrent cascading off the roof and falling, backlit, like Victoria Falls, deep and blue.
I had told Eric to shut up.
There was a sort of banging on the wall outside. Was it a hurricane? Should I shelter in the bathroom?
I saw the shadow of a ladder, waving, slamming against the wall. I thought they will break the glass and I have no slippers to protect my feet. Then there was a very wide white man in shorts, crawling up against the weight of water, his body flat against my glass. I saw his belly button and the black hair on his skin, as if some creature of the unconscious was breaking through the membrane of a dream. I could hear thunder through the rain. I sat holding my sheets across my breasts.
The water roared. I thought, I am totally alone in some hellish place; of all the people on the earth, Eric Croft has been the kindest, the most forbearing, bending when he had no requirement to bend, giving without expecting thanks.
Shut up, I had said.
The world will end like everything must. I think the ladder fell off the roof. The rain kept pouring. Men were shouting. There was nothing I could do that was not ridiculous.
There were now flashing yellow lights in the streets. Then another ladder. Men in bright blue waterproofs climbed past my window. Who in London wore blue waterproofs? I did not know the stigmata of disaster.
At two o’clock I was alone at my window, observing the empty flooded street. Next morning I departed, with a light soft bag of clothes on one shoulder and my handbag underneath my arm. My clothes were no longer clean, and if I selected a white linen shirt it was only because I knew I could use hydrogen peroxide to remove the sweat stains once I was at work.
A greater olfactory challenge was presented outside the pub where I found surface water rushing down the road. Basements had been flooded. The drains in the street were bubbling with very nasty-smelling water.
The old pharmacist had his doors open and I caught a glimpse of him, standing on a high and dangerous ladder. He had thrown sodden cardboard boxes into the street and from them rose what was, I suppose, sulphur dioxide, although there was ammonia as on the day before, and I was forcibly reminded of all those rich sulphur compounds that accompany human decay. I thought of the bacteria, fungi, the protozoa, the way our bodies attack themselves when we die. I did not like this idea, not at all. I preferred to think of us as something dry and crumbly, with no relation to the moisture-laden sheen of our decay.
Security inspected my dirty laundry, bastards. Later, in the fume cupboard I removed my shirt, applied the hydrogen peroxide and finished the job with a hairdryer. Done. Fresh, not really.
Amanda had not logged off. Her big screen was filled with spewing spill and a chain of protesting voices. Were they children or adults? Dessgirl, Mankind40, Miss Katz, Ardiva, Clozaril—who would know? To read their comments was to live inside a howl. Was this Amanda’s underworld?