I thought only of him, that time. That one time.
Then, the house. People crowded around the gates, pushing each other aside to make a way for my car. They stared at me curiously. Some women waved as the car slowed, leaning forward to try to see me, spot who I was or who they thought I might be. The gates opened to an electronic signal from the dashboard of the car. They closed behind, as the car moved at a more stately pace up the drive. Mature trees in the park, mountains behind, glimpses of the cerulean sea and dark islands, far away. It was painful to look around at a view I had once thought I would never forget.
On arrival I stood silently in a reception room with other mourners, knowing no one, feeling what I sensed was their silent disdain. My suitcase stood on the floor outside the room. I moved away from the cluster of people and went to an inner door, from which I could see across the main hall towards the wide staircase.
An elderly man detached himself from the group and followed me. He glanced up the stairs.
‘We know who you are, of course,’ he said, his voice unsteady.
His eyelids fluttered with apparent distaste and he never looked directly at me. What struck me most was the facial similarity. But this man was old! In my sudden confusion I felt embarrassed, unable to make a polite guess as to who he was. My first thought was he might be the father, but no, that was wrong. I knew his parents had died many decades ago, long before we met. There was an identical twin brother he had told me about, but he said they were alienated. Could this now be that twin, a living likeness? Twenty years had passed and you never imagine what changes there might be in someone you have not seen. Was this how he had looked before he died?
‘My brother left clear instructions for us to pass on to you,’ the man said, solving the mystery, but too late for me to respond courteously. ‘You are free to go up to his room if you wish, but you must not remove anything.’
So I made my escape and went quietly and alone up the staircase to this room beneath the eaves. But now I was trembling.
A faint blue haze remained drifting in the room, a vestige of his life. The room must have been empty for several days, yet the light mist of the air he had breathed remained.
With a sudden flowing of renewed unhappiness, I remembered the only time I had lain with him, curled up naked on the bed beside him, glowing with excitement and contentment, while he sucked in the acrid smoke of the cheroots and exhaled it in a thin swirling cone of blueness. That was the same bed, the one in the corner, the narrow cot with the bare mattress. I dared not go near it now, could barely glance at it without the pain of loss.
Five of the cheroots, probably the last he ever bought, lay in an untidy scrambled pile on a corner of one of the tables. There was no sign of a packet. I picked one up, slid it beneath my nostrils, sensing the fragrance of the tobacco and thinking about the one I had shared with him, relishing the dampness of his saliva on my lips. A delirious exhilaration moved through me and for a moment my eyes lost focus on the details of the room.
He had never left the island during his lifetime, even after the prizes and honours began to be bestowed. While I lay naked in his arms, exulting inwardly over the touch of his fingers as they rested on my breast, he tried to explain his attachment to Piqay, why he could never leave to be with me. It was an island of traces, he said, shadows that followed you, a psychic spoor that you left behind if you departed the island. If you did you would become diffuse in some way that he could not explain. He said if he followed me when I left he would never be able to return to Piqay. He dared not try, because to do so would mean he would lose the trace that defined him to the island. For him, the compulsion to leave was less powerful than the urgency of staying. I, feeling a different and less mystical urge rising in me again, quietened him by caressing him, and soon we were making love again.
I would never forget the time we had spent alone together, but afterwards, in the many years of silence that followed, I had never been sure if he even remembered me.
Too late I had the answer, when the first message arrived. Twenty years, six weeks and four days. I had always kept count.
I heard large cars moving slowly on the gravel drive outside the house, and one by one their engines cut out.
The blue haze was thicker now. I turned away from the lectern, aroused by memories, but despairing because memories were all they could ever be. As I looked away from the dazzle of the window it seemed to me that the blue air was denser in the centre of the room. It had substance, texture.
The haze swirled around me. I moved my face towards it, puckering my lips. I darted my face to and fro, trying to detect some response from it. Streaks in the old residue of smoke, denser patches, coalesced before my eyes. I stepped back to see them better, then forward again to press my face against them. Smoke stung against my eyes and tears welled up.
The swirls took shape before me, creating a ghostly impression of his head and face. It was the face as I remembered it from two decades before, not the one the public knew or the grizzled countenance of the old man glimpsed on his identical brother. No time had passed for me, nor for the trace he left. The features were like a mask, but intimately detailed. Lips, hair, eyes, all had their shapes, contoured by the shifting wafts of smoke.
My breath stuttered, halted momentarily. Panic and adoration seized me.
His head was tilted slightly to one side, his eyes were half closed, his lips were apart. I leaned forward to take my kiss, felt the light pressure of the smoky lips, the brush of ghostly eyelashes. It lasted only an instant.
His face, his mask, contorted in the air, jolting back and away from me. The eye shapes clenched tightly. The mouth opened. The lines of smoke that formed his forehead became furrowed. He jerked his head back again, then lunged in a spasm of deep coughing, rocking backwards and forwards in agony, hacking for breath, painfully trying to clear whatever obstructed him below.
A spray of bright redness burst out from the shape that was his open mouth, droplets of scarlet smoke, a fine aerosol. I stepped back in horror, trying to avoid it, and the kiss was lost for ever.
The apparition was wheezing, making dry hacking coughs, small ones now, weak and unhoping, the end of the attack. He was staring straight at me, terrified, full of pain and unspeakable loss, but already the smoke was untangling, dispersing.
The red droplets had fallen to the floor and formed a pool on one of his discarded sheets of paper. I knelt down to look more closely and trailed my fingertips through the sticky mess. When I stood again, my fingers carried a smear of the blood, but the air in the study had cleared. The blue haze had gone at last. The final traces of him had vanished. The dust, the sunlight, the books, the dark corners remained.
I fled.
Downstairs I stood once again with the others, waiting in the great hall to be allocated to one of the cars. Until my name was spoken by one of the undertaker’s staff, no one acted as if they knew who I was or acknowledged my presence in any way. Even the man who had spoken to me, the brother, stood with his back against me. His hand was linked affectionately around the upper arm of a short, grey-haired woman, speaking quietly to people as they stepped outside to join the cortège. Everyone seemed daunted by the seriousness of the occasion, by the thought of the crowds waiting in the road at the end of the long drive, by the passing of this great man.
I was given a seat in the last of the cars, bringing up the rear of the cortège. I was pressed against the window by the large bodies of two serious and unspeaking adolescents.