“Very well.” Her tone was brittle with resentment. “But we stay not one day longer than next Monday, do you understand me? This place is horrible and these people are horrible. Have you made that Shelley person understand yet that you and I are not brother and sister?”
“Oh yes,” he said hastily. Actually he had only got Shelley to stop referring to them as such.
“How does he think we could be, and be married?”
“I don’t know.” Incest is nothing unusual to this crowd, Julia, he thought—Shelley and his “sister,” Byron and his half sister—but it wouldn’t help to tell you that.
“And when will you abandon this ridiculous ‘Aickman’ name?”
“As soon as we leave,” he told her, not for the first time.
She turned her head parrotlike to peer out the window. “I would think you’d be more concerned about getting proper medical help for your own wife,” she said, “than applying your evidently inadequate skills to strangers. This eye that you’ve proven unable to do anything about is getting worse.”
I doubt that, he thought, unless you’ve managed to crack it.
Yesterday he might have taken this complaint as a good way to try to remind her of the Wengern and all the rest of the events of her life as Josephine, but after last night’s dinner he had finally given up trying to provoke that.
In the afternoon yesterday he had forcibly held her down on their bed and told her about Keats, and fleeing Rome, and living in Pisa and working at the university there, and he’d been optimistic when her sobs and protests had ceased and she had relaxed under him; but when he had got off her—and, in a tone made hoarse by hope, said, “Welcome back, Josephine"—she had sat up so jerkily that he had almost thought he heard the clatter of gears and ratchets in her torso.
She had stayed in her mechanical mode all evening, snapping her neck from one position to another and moving awkwardly as if on hinged limbs, and Claire had fled the dining room and young Percy Florence had burst into tears and demanded that his mother take him away from the “wind-up lady.” When she recovered, some hours later, she was Julia again.
And so he had abandoned, at least for the moment, the idea of calling Josephine back—he had decided that he was at least minimally better off with Julia than with the wind-up lady.
He was eerily sure that Josephine’s body was doing a perfect imitation of his dead wife, based on its two decades of close acquaintance with the subject; in effect he was only getting to know his wife now, six years after her death, and he was dismayed to find that he didn’t like her at all.
She had made it clear two days ago that she would not welcome any sexual advances as long as the two of them were still in this house, and he was sure that part of her chronic resentment arose from the fact that this declaration had not sent him packing.
The truth was that he no longer wanted sex with her. He knew now that he loved poor Josephine—who, for all he knew, might be dead herself, no longer even a dormant spark in her own abdicated brain.
The thought reminded him of Shelley’s agonized speculation that Allegra might still be alive and aware somewhere in her own nightmarishly revivified skull. We’re all prisoners in our own heads, he thought now as he considered the memories that bound himself, but at least most of us can speak to other people through the bars, and sometimes reach between them to clasp someone else’s hand.
“I did meet one gentleman here,” Julia went on, “an Englishman, last night on the beach. One of Shelley’s friends who came on that ship, I suppose. I hope he didn’t leave on it today. He’s a physician,” she added, emphasizing the word. Crawford was only a surgeon. “He said he could restore sight to my eye. He promised it.”
Crawford blinked in puzzlement for a moment—then he was on his feet, and leaning down to speak directly into her face. “Don’t go near that man,” he said harshly. “Don’t ever invite him in, do you understand me? This is important. He’s a … a murderer, I promise you. If you ever again speak to him I swear I will never leave here, and my London practice can go to hell.”
She smiled, visibly reassured. “Why, I believe you’re jealous! Do you really imagine that I’d flirt—or do anything more than flirt, at least—with another man, when I’m married to a successful doctor?”
He forced an answering smile.
Shelley launched the refitted Don Juan on Saturday—he and Williams and Roberts kept her out all day and well into the evening, slanting and tacking across the calm water of the Gulf, and returning her to her mooring only when the moon began to be veiled with clouds; Shelley’s spirits remained substantially restored until, during the late dinner, Claire tremulously told him that twice during the evening she had seen him pacing the terrace … before the Don Juan had returned.
Josephine only rolled her eyes impatiently and muttered something about alcoholism, but Shelley threw down his fork, got up, and pulled the drapes across the windows. “From now on we’ll keep these closed after dark,” he said.
Remembering Josephine’s meeting with what must have been the resurrected Polidori, Crawford nodded. “A good idea.”
Claire, halfway through her third tumbler of brandy, frowned, as if she could nearly remember some reason why Shelley should be opposed in this; she hastily drank some more of the brandy, and the momentary kinks of alertness relaxed out of her face.
There was something ill about Edward Williams’s smile that made Crawford stare at him even before he spoke. “But we can—we can open them later, can’t we, Percy?” Williams asked nervously. “I only mean that—that it’s sort of pleasant to be able to look out over the Gulf at night.”
Crawford glanced at Shelley, and saw that he had noticed it too.
“No, Ed,” Shelley said tiredly. “Look at the goddamned Gulf all you want during the day. The drapes stay closed from sundown to sunup.” He looked at Crawford and Josephine. “I think the Aickmans will be willing to … wash the windows with a solution that will help to enforce this.”
“Windows!” protested Josephine. “Impossible! My husband is a doctor, and I’m certainly no one’s maid! How do you dare to imagine that—”
“I’ll do it, Percy,” said Crawford quietly. “After everyone’s gone to bed.”
Josephine got up from the table and stormed into their room.
A couple of hours later, when the lights had been snuffed, Crawford smashed several dozen garlic cloves into a bucket of salt water, then dragged it into the dining room and pulled the drapes back and, with an old shirt, slopped the mixture across the window panes and the flat stones of the floor.
He was glad that there were no lights in the room, for he didn’t want to be able to recognize the several human forms that were bending and gesticulating silently in the darkness on the terrace outside.
Shelley and Roberts and the English boy Charles Vivian took the Don Juan out by themselves the next day, for Williams had a fever and only wanted to lie in bed all day. Crawford offered to examine him and do what he could in the way of prescribing something, but Williams hastily assured him that it wasn’t necessary. Crawford was nearly moved to tears to see the sick brightness in the man’s hitherto clear and humorous eyes.