How he loved her, loved her at that instant, beyond anything he had known before.
Felicity saw him. She caught his eye. He did not know how to look at her. His own eyes wobbled, then dropped. He stepped into the room and busied himself at the drinks table. He took a paper cup and filled it brimful of dark red wine.
When he next looked up, the crowd had blocked his view again, and he could hear Felicity asking someone to phone the hospital again to see when Wally’s arm would be attended to. Her Voorstand accent was clear and crisp. It cut through the humming, sighing Efican voices like a silver knife.
He stepped back into the doorway and raised himself on his toes. Someone had, at last, taken pity on Felicity — Claire Chen. Vincent had always thought of Claire Chen as a limpet on Felicity’s life — low-life dramas, breakdowns, abortions, bail money. But now she was the one who sat on the bed and laid her ringed hand on the baby’s foot.
When she did this, the room quietened.
She began to stroke the baby’s twisted foot. ‘Isn’t it amazing?’ she said. You could hear her nerviness. ‘All the bones and skin,’ she said.
Felicity asked Claire, ‘Would you like to hold him?’
Sparrow Glashan moved sideways and blocked Vincent’s view again. Vincent left the doorway and pushed in past Annie McManus.
‘Sure,’ Claire said, ‘I’ll hold him.’
As the baby passed from its mother its spindly arms sprang out like a spider and Claire flinched and screwed up her face. The actors watched. Vincent watched. He could see by the way she pulled her chin into her neck — everything in her wanted to thrust the child away.
Claire did the thing Vincent knew he was expected to do himself — touched the lipless little tragedy, stroked its gaunt little praying mantis head. It was very quiet in the square, high-ceilinged little room.
‘See,’ Felicity said, speaking generally, smiling, fondly, like a mother.
‘Feel,’ Claire invited, her little brown eyes flicking about the room — she had done the brave thing, but she did not want to do it a second longer. ‘It’s so amazing.’
Vincent felt the crowd stir and shift. He imagined eyes looking for him.
‘Feel,’ Claire repeated. Vincent looked down at the floor, avoiding her eyes.
Annie McManus turned and looked at him. Her pretty face had no expression — she did not know he was Felicity’s lover, no one did — but Vincent was convinced the opposite was the case and he pushed forward, to escape her. He bumped into the critic for the Neufeine, who turned, and then, misunderstanding his intention, stepped to one side to let him through. A path then opened up before him, and he walked it — what else was he to do? — squeaking on his crepe-soled shoes.
At the bed he looked into my mother’s eyes, and gave a melancholy kind of shrug which gave no indication of the wild, confused state of his emotions.
But then he held out his square, soft hands — their palms soft as the underbelly of an animal — and fitted them around Tristan’s chest cage, hooked under my arms, and lifted me out of Claire Chen’s sweating embrace, slowly, smoothly into the air.
When he had me held aloft, all he could think was that he was going to faint.
No one spoke, no one made a sound. They left him there, alone, teetering on the edge. He glanced around the room, his eyes weak with need, his mouth oddly shapeless. Only Moey Perelli gave him any sign — pushed his own mouth into the shape of a grin.
‘He has intelligent eyes,’ Vincent said. ‘He’s not beautiful, but he has intelligent eyes.’ And then he embraced me. He was harsh and awkward — pushed his beard into my eyes and ears, grazed my skin, held me too tight, nearly tripped as he tried to walk a little closer to Felicity. He landed heavily on the bed. Felicity stretched out her light, tense hand and grasped at his knee.
Moey began to talk, very loudly, about his security dossier (which he claimed to have seen), and somebody pulled a cork from a bottle of case-latrine.
‘He has extraordinary eyes,’ said Vincent. It was not easy for him. It took everything he had. He sat beside Felicity and made a little seat for me with his fat hairy arm. He supported my head with his fleshy pectorals.
Felicity held his knee and smiled and bit her lip.
Moey came — his head shining now he had removed his wig — and held out a long finger with wide tombstone fingernails.
Vincent took Felicity’s hand — not something he normally did in company. ‘He has a strong grip,’ he said.
Felicity nodded, and blew her nose.
‘Whose turn is it to pick up the reviews?’ she asked.
*
Voorstand Intelligence Agency and Department of Supply, the latter being the Efican secret service. The two services worked closely at all times, it sometimes being said that the DoS’s loyalty lay with the VIA, not with the elected government of Efica.
11
What Bill could not stand was: why must they deny there had been a tragedy? Why must they all smile and coo? When Felicity put out her hand and tried to hold Vincent’s old fat knee, he felt he was in an alien country where you could not even guess what might be going on. So while he believed he could feel the horror running through the room like a shiver, all he saw was smiling faces. All these actors — not one of them in touch with what they felt.
‘I’ll get the zines,’ he said.
‘No, mo-chou. You should be here with us.’
‘It’s no trouble,’ Bill said, his eyes full of poison. ‘I need the air.’
Felicity frowned at him. He saw the need in her eyes, but she was sitting next to Vincent and Vincent had his fat valsir where he was so clever at placing it — on the moral high ground.
Three minutes later, alone on the ramp in front of the theatre, Bill unscrewed his hip flask and took a long swig, spat the wine out on the bricks.
The Feu Follet bus, a three-ton Haflinger with big slab sides and small decal-spotted windows, was parked right in front of the theatre. He found Felicity’s sandals sitting on the dashboard. He picked up and flung them deep into the dark body of the van.
He let the clutch out so hard you could feel the prop shaft thunk and he accelerated out into Gazette Street in loud metallic first gear, shifting noisily into second as he passed the brightly illuminated taxi base. He pulled across the tram tracks and turned right, away from the Voorstand Sirkus and the Mater Hospital down towards the port.
He thought: that’s it, I’ll keep on driving and never come back, but the truth was, of all my maman’s admirers, he was the one who needed her the most. She had altered his life. She had taken him into the company when he was nineteen years old, a cambruce. He had fallen out with a travelling circus over his wages. Fearing a beating from the proprietor and his brothers, he had run away to Chemin Rouge and there he had wandered down Gazette Street and discovered a free Wednesday-night performance of Hamlet.
He was dirty, starved, down to 120 pounds when he saw my maman play Ophelia. He sat in the dark, Row P, and fell in love.
That night he slept in the lane behind the Feu Follet. Next day he walked out into the suburbs and stole roses, hollyhocks, snapdragons, whatever he could find, and next evening he brought them to my maman at the Feu Follet. It was the same the next night, and the night after that.
At first she joked about him, teased him, said she was too old for him. But she never seemed too old to him. He loved the language she used, the language she knew. He told my maman he was the best voltige* artist in the southern hemisphere. And although he had never been inside a theatre until he walked into the Feu Follet, he told her he was going to be the best actor in Chemin Rouge. He asked her for books about acting and she could not refuse him. She gave him her precious first-edition Stanislavsky with her neck tingling and her eyes feeling loose and unfocused. He read the whole three volumes of An Actor Prepares, one volume a day. He argued with it. He was very handsome. He had a long flexible back, and dancing passionate eyes that never left her face. He was nineteen, a baby, but she could not withstand it.