by WALL, ALAN
Dear Dr Helsey,
I am aware of the recent goings-on in this building involving yourself and a member of the staff here.
I have heard through the grapevine that you are up for a professorship. There has also been some gossip about your behaviour with a number of your female undergraduates.
If it were to come to the attention of the authorities that you deliberately set about getting a member of my staff drunk, then bringing her back to these premises to have sex: with her, I don't think your prospects would look very good.
I would be obliged if you did not return to the Signum for some time. I also think it would be wise of you not to attempt to contact Sylvie Ashton again.
Should you do so, I might feel obliged to take further action.
Yours sincerely,
HAMISH FLYTE
Director of Studies, The Signum Institute
Sylvie read it twice. 'I want a copy.'
'That's the only reason I didn't answer your calls.'
'I want a copy.'
'What are you going to do with it?'
'Never you mind, Tom. I want a copy. Photocopy it for me.'
He did as she said. He went to the end of the corridor, and photocopied the document.
'Do you want me to do some copying for you, Professor Helsey?' the secretary called from her office. Nothing out in the corridor ever escaped her notice.
'No thank you, jean. It's just the one sheet.'
Then he walked back to his room and handed it over. 'Looks like it's goodbye, then. I'm leaving the Signum.'
'I'm sorry.'
'Oh do stop saying you're sorry, for God's sake. Let's find something positive to say to one another; since we'll probably never be speaking again. '
'It was a beautiful evening,' he said, with evident sincerity, and held out his hand.
'Yes, I didn't think you were a bad fuck either, Tom.' With that she kissed him on the cheek, very gently, and left.
Rising Waters
Bernard Trasker MBE was back in the gallery, minus his wife. He was looking at the Nolan Rimbaud with intense interest. Finally, he emerged from his own reverie, stared at his watch and then shook it. It had stopped. He looked around him from wall to wall. Henry watched him from his seat behind the desk, and smiled. He spoke now, but only to himself.
Ah, I see you've finally noticed the clock, Bernard. Or rather its absence. There are no clocks in casinos; no calendars in hell. This isn't a casino, of course, and it certainly isn't hell - it's Shropshire, and really rather pleasant, but time still bends here all the same. If you ever go to Ramsgate you can still see the clock down by the harbour giving the local hour, permanently at variance with Greenwich Mean Time. I'm told in all French stations before the Great War each clock would give l'heure de la gare, five minutes slower than the time in Paris, and in those days to cross the US, you had to keep adjusting your watch every time you crossed the line. Here too in the Riverside Gallery the clock hands turn to a tempo of their own devising. Which is to say that they don't turn. Henry wouldn't have clocks in the gallery, and had no watch of his own. This, he felt, disadvantaged him not at all.
Time though. You certainly couldn't escape it by exiling the faces of clocks. He had been making a few mental notes while looking at a new book on the Vollard Suite: Rembrandt in Picasso's portrayal had become a mountain of fleshly curlicues, the ludicrous meanderings of elderly troubles and senescence.
Thus did Picasso anticipate his own decline. Thus did he point out in visual terms that time only gains its contours by passing you through its valley of shadows. The more decrepit Rembrandt becomes in the etchings the more firm-limbed and perfectly-contoured are the young women he gazes upon. Rembrandt is now a confusion of lines; old age a scrollwork of over-fussed confusion. Youth is clean, clear and fecund, but is that only in the eye of the artist? Is it a reality, this cleanliness, this clearness, or a creative achievement? Is it ever possible to make the distinction in any case? Henry had no idea.
'I'm going to buy it.'
'Quite sure, Bernard?'
'Quite sure.'
'I'll wrap it in brown paper before delivering it to your home.'
'I want to take it with me now. I've got the car outside.' Bernard made out his cheque, for a substantial amount, but Henry found it hard to believe it wouldn't be honoured. In any case he knew where the man lived. And they took it out together. Put it on the back seat.
'A glass of wine, Bernard?'
'I won't actually.'
So Henry was left alone in his gallery, with a gap on the wall he'd have to think about filling. The payment meant he didn't have to worry about a number of things he probably wouldn't have worried about very systematically anyway. But the knowledge that he wasn't worrying about them would have worried him. In one sense he was sad to see the Nolan go. It was such a dry, scorched, arid painting. Rimbaud having the sockets of his heart and mind burnt out. It had seemed to him like a talisman against floods and drowning. Something so dry even the Severn could never come near it. He could not understand why he had become so obsessed by the notion that the things he most loved would be taken away in the waters. He knew it wasn't logical, but then how much of life ever was?
Henry opened one of his better bottles to celebrate. He stood at the edge of the gallery's garden and stared at the Severn.
'Why, do I know you are going to take something away from me? You or one of your sisters?'
*
He woke at three that morning, shouting, choking, fighting away the sheets that were sheets of water, coughing the sludge out of his lungs.
'It's all right, love. All your minotaurs are safe and so are you.' Mane's arms were around him, gently caressing.
'I'm going to move them all to the top floor tomorrow,' he said. 'Or I'll never get another decent night's sleep.'
The Shipwreck of the Singular
Summer turned to autumn and then winter. The chronicle of events, as ever, unfolded. The revelation of Lady Pneuma's eating habits, and some of her other habits too, sexual and financial, destroyed the Delta Foundation. She didn't go to prison, all the same, even though some like Patrick Gregory felt that she certainly should have done. The last he heard of her she was starting up a public relations company in Wisconsin under another name, and he had a queasy feeling it would be a great success. She had re-married, apparently. Her new husband was very old, and very rich.
Deva appeared finally, with no cuts, at ten 0' clock in the evening on BBC 4. It was acclaimed. It was finally given two prizes, one for the script and one for the direction. John Tamworth and Owen Treadle were reconciled, if they'd ever in truth been unreconciled. And they had a new production on their hands, Claparède's Drawing Pin. 'Ground-breaking' it was being called. Owen now lived in a flat in the same block as John, having agreed with Sylvie what proceeds should come to him from her house, which had been sold for a substantial price. Henry Allardyce had moved all his Picassos up to the top room of the Riverside Gallery, where he sat every evening, staring at them and then down at the river. He was glad of the space he had placed between the minotaurs and the water. He had also met all of Marie' s children, and had almost brought himself to be civil to her elder son, whose self-important financial wizardry represented everything he most detested in life.
At least the bumptious young fellow wouldn't be needing to borrow money from them.
And as for Sylvie, she had sold up for more than she expected, settled matters with Owen, and moved to Whitstable, where she now had a four-storey Edwardian house looking out over the sea. It was within twenty minutes drive of the university. There the students seemed to like her, and she liked them, so far. If there was a Hamish about, she had not yet encountered him. Hamish had already left the Institute, but not before Sylvie had phoned him a number of times.
'I have an interesting document here, my friend. It's a letter from you to Dr Tom Helsey, who I gather is now Professor Helsey.' She then read him the text of the letter. There was a
silence she greatly enjoyed. 'I gather you have been pensioned off with all sorts of enhancements, Hamish. I can't help thinking that if this piece of paper comes to light, your pension might get de-enhanced.' She'd kept the line alive long enough to hear his deep breathing, then she'd rung off. She'd performed variations on this routine for several weeks, until she'd grown bored. Let the bastard crawl off into a corner and die.
Ex-Detective-Inspector Patrick Gregory had watched Deva more times than he could recall, despite the pain it undoubtedly caused him. He could never see the rape scene without feeling momentarily nauseous, without foreseeing his daughter's death in a ramshackle hut on the west coast of Scotland.
'I only hope you realise how good you were, my love. That takes acting beyond acting. They've even given you a posthumous award, but that's not going to bring you back.'
*
As the autumn term finished, Sylvie decided that she needed a break, a serious break. There was money in the bank, the divorce proceedings were almost complete, and for the first time she could remember she felt easy about her work and her life. She thought of Owen and Chester and the Signum Institute, and it all seemed like another life, an alien life she'd been redeemed from. A labyrinth she'd finally escaped.
And that's why she bought the last-minute airline ticket to Bangkok, at a price so low it made her laugh. Thailand, where she had been once before, many years before, but she could still remember the astounding politeness of the men, the agile beauty of the women, the blazing colours of their clothes; the glorious beaches. Ah yes, those glorious yellow beaches.
She'd had an affair. Was that the right word for it? Can an affair only last a fortnight? Sexual relationship sounded so clinical. How many years ago was it now? Ten, twelve? One of the smiling young men had come up to her and introduced himself. Exquisitely mannered as he was, he had peered with undisguised curiosity at the flesh her bikini left uncovered. They had slept together in her little rented hut that night. His first blonde western woman; so she reckoned anyway, despite his insouciance about it all. It struck her as pretty likely that another like him might come along now. She deserved him, after all, what with Owen, Tom Helsey and all the rest of it. Even though her body had spread a little here and there - outgrowths of flesh, simultaneously soporific and wayward. She had stayed home and worked for the last five months. But she had eaten too. And had the odd bottle of wine. No matter. Once he was into the softest part of her, she would make him happy, whoever he was. And he wouldn't notice in the dark, not once she got going. She might give the bikini a miss though, just for the moment. Keep herself tantalisingly covered in white and blue muslin. She looked in the mirror. She didn't have anything to worry about yet, except possibly impregnation, by the wrong party at the wrong time. But then all that needed seeing to anyway, didn't it? So it didn't seem very likely, just at the moment. God, when was she going to sort all that out? Not now, that was for sure. Might be some serious work needed there. Poking around inside her with their pincers and blades. But not now. Not now.
She arrived safely enough, but God she was tired. Something about flying, speeding you up and wearing you down at the same time. Was it the cosmic rays at great heights - didn't they move through you with unexpected rapidity, leaving you seriously sieved-out and wonky? Owen had had some sort of theory about it, which he'd often treated her to, but then Owen had had theories about lots of things.
She was on the beach called Khao Lak, gazing at her book of images when the noise finally reached her. The birds had fallen silent hours before, dogs had all set off inland, quietly, their tails twitching down like dowsing sticks, but no one had noticed this on December 26th 2004. Now the tsunami was hurtling towards her at five hundred miles an hour. She looked up and saw how the ocean had risen to its full height and started running. It was arriving back in a terrible hurry to swallow the earth once more. In the last few seconds she had time to stand, register the panic of all those around her, turn and start to make her escape along with the rest of them, but she travelled no more than a few feet before the deluge covered her, sweeping her along in its raging current. Her lungs were filling with salt and water. She was soon unconscious. One of the thousands of bodies swirled about with all the cars, wooden houses and telegraph poles; the desks, chairs, bicycles and beds; the swollen bodies, both large and small, before the sea surged back out once more, most of its human inventory still undeposited on earth. So many bodies moving with the currents somewhere, rising and falling.
Coda
You can't grieve for a void. That's why weeping relatives on the news ask for the bodies back, so they might be properly buried and mourned. That's why widows travel half-way round the world to see where their soldier husbands fell in battle. Even a little urn filled with ashes will suffice. Something to put down in the earth, somewhere to cut words in stone. And that was why Sylvie's mother wept each day on the phone to Owen when he called her. He even drove over to see her; though they had never much liked one another.
'She must be dead, mustn't she? She would have contacted us by now.' At sixty-five, Sylvie's mother had dyed her hair orange. This, it seemed to Owen, made her look even madder than she had before. She had always alarmed him. Hardly surprising Sylvie's father had divorced her.
'She must be dead, my little Sylvie. It's been four weeks. I managed to get through to the British Embassy over there, but they didn't seem to know any more than we do. She's dead, Owen. She is, you know My daughter's dead.' She wept, and Owen found himself on the verge of tears too. Sylvie had already exited his life, but he really hadn't wanted her to leave everyone else's too. Not like this.
*
So they'd buried her already in their minds. Poor Sylvie. Then they had to get their mental shovels out and dig her up again. Despite the battering she received from the flood, Sylvie survived.
She realised who she was again one day in a shanty hospital, hastily constructed, ten miles inland from the coast. She was surrounded by human wreckage of one sort or another, and found it very hard to walk at first. When a British official finally turned up weeks later, she had the greatest difficulty speaking to him. She was flown back to England. A visiting lecturer had been given her courses to teach, using some of the notes which Sylvie herself had posted on the university's website, but she assured the dean that she would be giving her own courses again very shortly, even if she could only keep herself upright with the help of a walking-stick. She had already managed to start driving again, which was how she had arrived at the Riverside Gallery. She'd quelled her mother's wailing finally, and the day before she'd had her reunion with Owen and John. So now she had come over to see Henry, without telling him of her visit beforehand. It was a very rainy day and she could no longer distinguish the rain from his tears as he stood out in the drive with his arms about her; he had seen her through the window making her difficult way down the drive and had run out to meet her.
He held her by the shoulders and looked at the marks on her face. She would never look quite the same again, that was for sure. The ravine across her forehead mapped out the point where she had collided with something very hard, with all the force of the tsunami behind her. He led her under the awning, out of the rain, and pulled her towards him as they stood in silence for what might have been minutes. Sylvie had no idea; she had lost all sense of time.
'You really did get a battering, didn't you? It must have been terrible.'
'Don't remember anything about it, Henry, to be honest. It's as though it all happened to someone else, someone who was travelling under my name at the time. For weeks I remembered nothing. I just lay there and hurt. Then bits of me started to come back. But not the tsunami. That's never come back. Maybe it was too big to remember. No space inside large enough to contain it. If I could only find a photograph of myself being swept along in the water . . . You always had the right idea, watching out for the flood, but you were looking in the wrong direction, my love.'
'Knew it was going to take something prec
ious from me. Always knew that. Strange, isn't it? Didn't expect it to ever bring it back though.' He kissed her, very gently, on her bruised and cratered cheek. 'Can you really remember nothing about it?'
'Nothing. I've started looking through photographs. As if, if I could see the pictures of it, I might meet myself coming the other way. Can you understand that?'
'Yes. I think I can. Something to do with the persistence of vision?'
'What isn't?'
Then the children started filing out of the bus and down the drive. Sylvie looked at Henry, and Henry smiled, almost apologetically.
'It's the talk I do for Shropshire schools, remember. On Picasso.
Today's the day.'
'Mind if I stay and listen?' Henry shook his head.
So Sylvie sat on the chair he provided for her as Henry did his usual number. It was all carried off with good humour and a deft lightness of touch, but he couldn't disguise the formidable knowledge that lay beneath it, as he spoke of Ambroise Vollard and Picasso. He went through the etchings and engravings one by one, pointing to details and encouraging the children to think about why the artist had made the choices he had. He explained to them that they themselves were the young people staring at the minotaur, and that the minotaur took many forms. Some of them might be destined to become minotaurs one day. In which case, they'd find that they were both hunters and hunted.
'We live inside this dark place, all of us, and the future is only ever an inch away. The future is all those people approaching with lights. So where do we find the strength to step out into the future? By swallowing the past: that's the secret. You mustn't ever let the past swallow you. You can check this with your biology teacher when you get back, but I think you'll find that time swallowed turns to energy inside you. Digest it slowly, then let it transmute inside your intestines. Your acids can dissolve it, don't ever doubt that, even a rhinoceros skin properly cooked will go down through the heart of you and come out; it might even come out as one of these images. That's what he did, you know. That's why we're still looking at all these pictures you see about you. He swallowed the past and never let the past swallow him. That's the one thing everyone in this room can learn.