It occurred to me that she might have been offering me money. Why else all this talk of the Hon. Mr. Mac’s love of science and his philanthropical bent and of the inheritance she had of him — why else the sudden impassioned intimacy, the desperate seizing upon my hand? Gently I disengaged from her, feeling like a young lady of genteel upbringing who has just been invited by a fat old madam to come for a try-out at the brothel. We turned and went back into the hotel, I embarrassed and she very thoughtful. And the next time I saw her, she was dying.
Was it the next time? Did I only encounter her twice? I do not remember. It was Benny, naturally, who took me to see her in that hospital in the mountains. High summer it was up there, the sound of cowbells impossibly close in the clean, thin air — I thought at first it was a recording that the hospital was piping into the rooms, instead of the usual soothing music. Madame Mac had been wandering back and forth across the continent for months, like a wounded animal searching for a place in which to die. Bald and bloated, she lay uncovered on the narrow white bed like something vegetable that had been thrown there, her eyes swivelling agitatedly and her fingers plucking at the sheet. Despite the circumstances she was tricked out as usual in her varicoloured bobs and bows. I tried not to see her large bare mottled knees. The Alpine sun shone in the window with gay indifference. At first I thought she did not know me but then she clutched my hand hotly in hers — again! — and started to tell me in a gabbled whisper about something that had happened a long time ago, even the drift of which I could not grasp. I pretended to understand, however, and tried to seem interested — oh, that sickly smile that smears itself over one’s face on these occasions! — but Benny tugged at my arm and made a little moue of discouragement, and I stepped back, and Madame Mac let go my hand and of all things gave an exasperated sigh of laughter, as an aunt would sigh ruefully over a doted-upon but unmannerly nephew, and I felt clumsy and churlish, and snatched my arm away from Benny and walked out of the room. Whether or not I met her on more occasions than the ones I remember I do not know, but I do know that was to be the last I would see of her.
A little later on that occasion we found ourselves, Benny and I, standing on a deep, glassed-in balcony where wooden loungers were set out in a row, each with its folded red wool blanket and rubber pillow, while in front of us there sprawled a lavish view of jagged, snow-clad peaks that seemed to jostle each other rowdily in their eagerness to impress and charm. It was midday and staff and patients alike must have been at early lunch for not a soul was there save us two. Benny took the opportunity to smoke a clandestine cigarette, holding it corner-boy fashion in a cupped fist and stowing the ash in a pocket of his jacket. I have always envied smokers the little ritual they are allowed to indulge in twenty or thirty times a day, the lighting up, the long drag, the narrowed eye, the slow exhale. I tried to say something consoling to him but could think of nothing. Nor could I think why I had to be here — what was Madame Mac to me, or I to Madame Mac? Yet I had the impression of having been drawn despite myself into a kind of restive intimacy. Not only Benny had a filial aspect now, we both might have been a pair of grown-up brothers brought uneasily together at the bedside of a dying parent. Benny puffed and sighed, sighed and puffed, scanning the room as if in search of something that should be there but was unaccountably missing. Then he said a very strange thing, the import of which I did not understand, and still do not. “There is no need for you to worry,” he said, frowning in the direction of my knees. “Everything will be all right.” How portentous he made those simple words sound. I nodded, still saying nothing. Why was he reassuring me, when he was the one who would shortly be bereaved? I might have asked, but did not. My unwillingness had something to do with the place, I think, the elevation, and that unnervingly neat row of extended chairs, and the big window tilting over us, and those preposterously picturesque mountains sparkling in the unreal noonday light.
I never allowed Ursula to meet Benny or Madame Mac — I wonder why. She shied from the notion of them, from the very mention of them. I think she suspected something libidinous in my relations with them, as if they had inveigled me into a cabal the rules and rites of which were grounded in the flesh. I do not say she imagined orgies, with me inscribing runes and magic formulae in blood on Madame Mac’s big bare bum while Benny Grace stood by with whip and manacles urging me on, no, nothing so coarse as that. Only she is something of a priestess of the pure, and in those two, or in the idea of them at least, she saw personified, I think, all the temptations of the base world and its steamy pleasures. But, after all, was she entirely wrong? She would save me from myself; that was her mission from the outset. She had the determination for it. Young though she was when we first met there was already something settled about her, something finished, a high fine gloss — finished, settled, polished, and yet wonderfully vulnerable, too. She had a certain dainty unsteadiness in the region of the knees that I found irresistible, a matter of disbalance not due to ungainliness but to the care and vigilance with which she picked her way over the world’s treacherous terrain. That is how I see her in my mind, my dear sweet wife, stepping towards me delicately, frowning in concentration, eyes down and elbows lifted and her hands out flat on either side as if pressing on shelves of air for support, her knees brushing together and her heels a little splayed and her head lowered for me to see the parting in the centre of her hair, a perfect, snow-grey groove. Yet I wonder if I asked too much of her, or, worse, perhaps, too little. There is a primitive tribe that lives deep in the jungles of Borneo, or New Guinea, maybe, it does not matter which, a sturdy little people with potbellies and blackened teeth who eat their ancestors and pickle the heads of their enemies, or the other way round, I forget. The female of the tribe wears a bone through her nose and distends her earlobes enormously by inserting hoops in them, while the male — surely I am making this up? — the male prosthetically extends his virile member by inserting it into a long, narrow shoot of bamboo, held erect before him at a sharp angle by means of a length of plaited cord tied to the tip, the tip of the bamboo, that is, and then looped back and tied in turn around his skull. At puberty these males undergo a ceremonial initiation in which each is presented not only with his bamboo stick and yard of string but also takes possession of a carved wood figurine, semi-abstract though suggestive of a fat little featureless woman, not unlike, I suppose, their little fat mothers. Very impressive, in their vernacular way, these totems, I have seen them in museums. When the boys receive them the dolls are already immensely old, handed down through succeeding generations, smoothed and polished by use and time. Their purpose is to be a lifelong comfort and companion, and also, most importantly, to act as a repository of all doubts, fears, violent urges, vengeful desires — to be an object of comfort and veneration, but also a whipping-boy, or a whipping-girl, as one might say. I wonder if Ursula has been something like this for me. It is a dark thought, and one I do not willingly entertain.
Children were a surprise to me, the second one no less than the first. Absurd to say so, I know, but it is true. Surely on both occasions that unignorably accumulating bulge in my wife’s middle region should have cushioned me from the shock of the inevitable issue. But not a bit of it, the thing sent me stumbling in a daze, not once but twice. The most unnerving thing about these conjured creatures that were suddenly there, by a piece of biological sleight of hand, was their incontrovertible otherness. I know, I know, every other is other, necessarily. However, with Ursula, for instance, and even to an extent with Dorothy, the two human beings I have been closest to in my life, if I exclude my mother, which for the moment I do — in my wives, I am saying, there was a passionate cleaving to me that gave at least the illusion of getting over that gap, the gap of otherness, an illusion that was far harder to effect when the object of one’s baffled regard were these minute brand-new beings that were either uncannily quiet or at the slightest slight turned puce with rage. The boy I found particularly alarming, and not just because he was the first. He was like one of those babies in the cartoon films, chubby face plugged with a soother and bald save for a single question mark of hair, who suddenly reaches a brawny arm out of the cradle and delivers poor Sylvester the cat an uppercut that sets his eyeballs spinning and crowns him with a crooked halo of exploding stars. That was me, the same stunned reeling, the same goggling, cross-eyed stare. The girl was altogether different, lying there still and watchful, as though being born were a trick that had been pulled on her the aftermath of which she was certain would be even more violently mortifying than the event itself.