Sex & Genius

by Conrad Williams

  His note had been picked up from where it must have fallen. He went through the connecting door into the living room as though for the first time.

  The room had been cleared up, and the sofas faced each other again. The floor was tidy. Someone had shut the bureau, enclosing its chaos on itself, and replaced the lamps on the side-tables.

  On the glass table he noticed a bag which made him think that Frances had come back and that perhaps the two of them had gone out. He saw his note. Maybe Frances had cleaned the place up. The kitchen door was open. The window in the bathroom had been put on the latch. Everything seemed in order on the balcony where the wicker chairs and geranium pots were bleached in the brightness.

  He gave the policeman a provisional nod on his way back, showing that he was making good progress and grateful for his patience. It looked like Hilldyard had let Frances in after Michael's last visit. Possibly he had drawn back the bolt after reading Michael's note. Frances might have let herself in.

  He entered the bedroom, hand reaching for the light switch, and saw a glint in the darkness.

  He stopped. He was looking at an eye.

  The eye was unblinking.

  His chest tightened, and he felt strange as he pushed the door open and saw Frances on the bed. He must have gasped because the policeman was suddenly behind him and then the light came on, and Michael saw the short-haired girl with her head on the author's chest and her hand on his cheek and her body curled around the hump he formed under the sheets. She blinked as the light came on, fingers tightening.

  He could not move so the policeman went forward and knelt by the bed, looking into Frances's eyes, as he checked her cheek with the tips of his fingers. He touched Hilldyard's forehead with his palm then searched under the bedclothes for a wrist.

  The policeman crossed himself.

  Michael saw the empty bottles of sleeping pills on the table, and the empty glass.

  Hilldyard was gone, cold to the touch. He had put himself to bed and left his shoes in a neat pair on the floor.

  Out on the balcony he shouted at the wide view and heard his cry echo back as he dropped to his knees. He grabbed the balcony rail and gasped in a heart attack of panic. He swayed around biting his fingers as the shock of it exploded, like thunder after lightning.

  Soon there were people in the villa: a doctor, more police, an English-speaking Italian woman. He stood white-faced in the living room answering questions and looking through the bedroom door at a paramedic detaching Frances. When she came out she stared expressionlessly at him.

  Beyond her he could see the author's hand resting on bedclothes, and a body bag being carefully unfolded.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The sea spread wide and glinted in the hot light. Everything down there was picture-book tiny, little houses, squiggly roads, shelves of cultivation.

  He pushed back and looked around the balcony like a weightlifter about to heave a deadweight, loosening his limbs and compressing his will for the final effort. Any second he would climb over and jump wide.

  You had to gain momentum, a back and forth striding with clenched fists and set teeth, a surge of hate like a karate spasm to break through the barrier.

  The day was vast around him, a cathedral ceiling frescoed with galleon clouds. The striped hills were soaking up the sea-light. Autumn never ended in this place.

  He had checked out of Positano and come to Ravello and taken a room in a lovely hotel with huge bedrooms and Gothic windows and a maroon smothering of creeper on its stone walls. He wanted luxury and convenience for a couple of days.

  He had his breakfast in the dining room and looked at the other guests as if through Plexiglas.

  Once he was resolved, he began to feel numb. It was an unusual numbness, like an anaesthetic shot to a certain point of pain, leaving the mind free to plan details and make arrangements. For the past two days he had vomited every few hours, though there was nothing to sick up. His poor system was trying to expunge guilt, because guilt was attacking the body as well as the mind. Guilt was not content with mental torture. Guilt diversified into aches and breathlessness, heartache and giddiness, a poisoned gathering of self-disgust which would not stop.

  Hilldyard's suicide destroyed all hope of forgiveness.

  The Cimbrone Gardens were empty, and down below he could see neither people, nor cars. A nice day; the sun beamed.

  The impulse was coming and going in waves, and he could tell there would be a climax or peak and that he had to ride its energy to jump the rail. He sat down on the bench to prepare himself.

  In front of him, spaced along the balcony, were seven busts. They had been placed there by a former owner of the property: academic sculptures in white marble dividing the view like figureheads. They embodied what Hilldyard had proclaimed: the nobility of man before the vastness of creation, and, after every season's tourists had departed would remain, like sentries of consciousness. And when, in another year, the tourists flocked back with their zoom lenses and silk scarves, the statues would greet them, standing between the spaces of the view and mutely endorsing the peculiar rapture that attended that extraordinary prospect. And as he slumped against the bench, his heartbeat echoing in his head, the bars on the rail were like lines in which sight became trapped and compelled into blue heaven, and it came to him like a blizzard in the eyes that he was there again, seeing what Hilldyard had seen and loved, and feeling the old exaltation again, the view steeling into his soul, as though he were absolved by the will to die, were allowed to feel joy again, the joy of the dazzling sky and glimmering water and the cradled vastness of the Tyrrhenian Sea, an influx of happiness, his better self coming back, his bond with Hilldyard blessing him as he rose from the seat and crossed to the balcony, and put his hands on the rail and looked steadily at the drop, the universe opening for him; and he sucked in his breath, feeling the lovely heat of the sun, and raised a leg over the rail, hands tight, his foot finding a hold on the other side, swinging his weight around, so that he was standing with his back to the view, the snaking roads a hundred yards beneath, the garden ahead of him with its high pines and vermilion trellises.

  Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight, all calm, still calm, twenty-five, twenty-four, breeze around his ears, a cerulean wash in his eyes, twenty-one, fingers white-knuckled on the rail, goodbye fingers, familiar fingers, innocent fingers, eighteen, seventeen, not long, fifteen, halfway, fifteen, remember Christine, so clear, so present, twelve and eleven, joining you, my angel, a hot rush, like a gust of wind through the breast, ten and nine, yes, force down, force onwards, grit your teeth, eight, seven, oh God, bloodshot hydrangeas and smeared colours, down now, six, fingers off, five, four, three, chest erupting, let drop, two, oh Christ, now, got you, goodbye, eyes shut and drop and what? The eyes, what? Claw back. Oh Christ, see her, see her. Ah, no, can't be. Not now. There she is. Oh God. Sideways. Christine, he calls. Christine!

  A staggering half-run, hardly supported by his poor heart, down this path, that path, through borders, around bushes, across slippery grass, statues on his right, sundials on his left, shoe in mud, ankles in brambles, a headlong, helter-skelter shambles of a run to the place where he thought he had seen her. He stared with tear-smudged eyes in every direction, heart overwhelming him as though he would die of confusion. He stood at a crossroads in the path, a bedraggled scarecrow of a person, heard only birdsong, the grunt of a lorry in the valley.

  He smothered his face and let out a gasp of tainted breath. Clutching his shoulder he stared back towards the belvedere. Agony ran through him like a poison, and for a moment Michael thought he would pass out.

  Panting, he sat down on the ground, drawing up his knees, but the effort was too much and he fell sideways, resting his head on the ground.

  She was forty feet away. Visible through a gap in the hedge. She had put her easel in front of an opening in the trees. He gazed at her and felt a tingling around his arms and the back of his neck. His hand when he raised it was shaking v
iolently, and he let it drop, let it rest on his hip, let it alone. Behind him he heard soft, amicable voices, a man and woman.

  Thick hair, a khaki jacket, jeans. She was painting quickly, before the light changed or somebody interrupted her.

  He kept his eye on the figure and felt a limitless subsiding, a caving in, as though the shock of coincidence took the wind out of his sails. Drops of sweat released themselves from his hairline and slid down his face.

  The image shimmered and fragmented, and then realigned into clarity: the figure of a woman, the easel, the looming sky and sketchy mountain, the population of leaves on the trees, a dense, swarming mass of greenery, surrounding her, muffling the air, colonising vision. It was all he could do to sit in a trance and stare at the back of a girl he had already seen twice in Positano.

  He stayed for an hour on the ground, damp going through the seat of his trousers, pine needles tickling his bare calf, the smell of leaves and rotting cones investigating his lungs. Intermittently he would shake, little spasms. A headache came and went, and the pain in his shoulder seemed gradually to dim, and eventually he felt able to stand up, which he did very slowly. And when he tried to walk he was surprised that his body co-operated. He stretched, orienting himself. The sun had moved around the sky, pushing long shadows in front of the cypresses. The day was fading.

  He went closer, and as he neared the flight of steps, the view opened sideways and he could see her dipping her brush and marking her picture and staring intently.

  He gazed at her as though holding the thread of a memory that went back through the years, to something overlayed but gathering now, Christine in France, up in the hills, painting one fine summer evening a great, wide Claude Lorraine canvas of a view. He had sat on a hay bail and watched her from behind as she stood by the easel, working rapidly to catch the light. He was spellbound by the view.

  The valley was dramatically sidelit, poplars incandescent, mown fields beaming Labrador gold, and yet amidst the brilliance night was gathering, a presentiment of darkness that slowly encroached on the hilltop blaze. One moment the landscape was a patchwork of greens, richly sombre, colours at the height of tone; the next a scene of dying intensity, distances merging, detail blurring. And as the sunset conflagration waned – the upper sky becoming nostalgic, streaked with russet and opal; a cloud igniting in final baroque splendour before the sun viscously sank into the horizon – the valley filled up with dusk, an inky mist that engulfed the foreground, engulfed Christine. Soon they were losing each other, losing themselves in the dark.

  He helped her with the easel back to the car and before long they were driving through the lanes, Christine in the passenger seat, paint on her fingers, her eyes on the road, Michael exhaling cigarette smoke as he steered and changed gears, marvelling that she was his love and that they had been together before that transient light.

  * * *

  He lay on his back along the length of the bed, clothed. His hands were clasped together. Light from the lamp half-caught his face but he felt nothing of its heat. His breathing was slow, silent. His legs motionless.

  A door banged in the hotel corridor, cutting off remote voices. Cisterns hissed, footsteps came and went. Downstairs in the dim restaurant a couple sat on their own, secretively talking. The man at the reception desk folded his newspaper and licked his underlip.

  Outside in the street the air was still and cool, spreading its autumn dew on the bonnets of cars and the plastic seats by the caffè . Beyond the piazza, where an old man sauntered under lamplight, darkness crowded in. It was a moonless night, and the trees in the Cimbrone Gardens were lost, the bushes and flowerbeds invisible. Darkness dwelled over statues and pathways and out across the thick blackness of the sea. The trees were blind to the mountains and the mountains did not know they were there, and even the grunt of a car on a hairpin bend vanished into the folds of night.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Her face was different.

  She was tired, of course, and guilty, and that left a mark. But there was something else, too, about which she could do nothing. Her face showed experience, the aspect of an older person – a kind of knowledge that affects the complexion, as though it were no longer possible to play certain roles. And, of course, she was nervous. Her composure was constantly failing. She had come on an impulse and to hell with the red eye and blotchy skin and wrecked composure.

  There was a knock at the door.

  He stood by the bed with his back to the door. He had been dressing slowly.

  She half-entered, keeping the door as a shield.

  'Michael?'

  The sound of Adela's voice was so unexpected that he did not immediately turn.

  She closed the door behind her.

  'Your hotel told me you were in Ravello,' she said nervously. 'I've been everywhere searching for you. Checked every hotel.'

  He did not know where to look.

  She came further into the room.

  His heart was beating hard; he turned to face her.

  She returned his look searchingly, in fear of his reaction, which he could not conceal.

  She had no right to be here. Her presence was inadmissible. Michael could not believe the sight of her. He stared at her, though as he stared at the familiar face he saw something new, and this held him.

  Her countenance was somehow damaged. It was as though everything that had happened in the last few days had left its mark, worked through in her skin; so that she was disarranged, compromised; and all this she presented with an open gaze, as though it were a kind of evidence, and his reaction, which she would not miss, a kind of proof.

  'Michael.' There were tears in her eyes. 'I feel so terrible. I can't believe what I did.' She wiped her cheek. 'If I hadn't said those things, he might still be alive.'

  She did not move towards him. She understood everything Michael might think of her, had taken that as read.

  He stood with his hands by his sides, and noticed the lines in her forehead and a strand of grey in her hair.

  'Sorry,' she said, dabbing her eyes. 'I'm sorry.'

  He had not expected to see her again, and now it was strange just to look at her.

  She let him gaze at her for a moment, but then glanced away. Her hand fluttered, something she was not able to say, could not manage. And then she was motionless and silent.

  Eventually she walked around the end of his bed, moving towards his window and its view of the mountain. She stood by the window and let time pass, as though by standing there and accustoming him to her presence she was referring to something. And when she turned and looked back at him, her expression had changed again.

  'Why are you here?' he said.

  There was silence.

  She hesitated, and then she looked at him fearfully. 'Had you ever thought that now he's dead it doesn't matter? I mean, he's lost everything, but we don't have to.'

  He listened sternly.

  'I know it sounds awful.' She frowned. 'But the damage has been done.'

  He was still dazed by an interminable sleep. He had decided to stay one more day. There were things to think about, processes to conclude.

  She came back towards him, looked at him squarely. 'Have you torn up the contract?'

  The contract was at the bottom of his case.

  Michael shook his head.

  'Why not?'

  He stared at her.

  'Why not, Michael?'

  He was unable to say why, unable to speak.

  She breathed out. The colour was coming back into her cheeks.

  'Adela, please . . .'

  'He's dead! Nothing you can do will bring him back!'

  For a moment he was stunned, as though a gun had gone off, and he looked at her with a kind of fear. Her expression was incredible.

  She came around the end of the bed, came up to him, gave him the look of an honest woman who will not be rebuffed. 'I want us to carry on where we left off.'

  The proposition was deplorable, absurd
. He shook his head. 'But you have no real feelings for me!'

  'That's where you're wrong. I've all kinds of feelings for you. You wanted me to prove them with impossible conditions, conditions imposed by your unassailable integrity. You couldn't just let things happen!'

  He shook his head again.

  'Why did you betray him then? Was it a whim? I don't think so. It didn't feel like whimsy. It felt like passion. Uncontrollable passion. You did something wrong, but in the name of passion, and whatever happened afterwards, you can't undo that.' Suddenly, her voice was thick. 'I know how you feel. I know what you're up against. And I'm saying, please God, it doesn't have to be like this. Give yourself a chance. Let me help you.'

  She turned away, almost humiliated.

  It was strange for him to be the victim of her pleading again, to feel it coming in waves against him. Her stamina was incredible. She felt what she said absolutely, as though just by feeling it she could change things. And Michael realised then that he believed her, even when she lied. Her desire fused everything together, made one issue out of several things; and the fact she was here, running the gauntlet of his anger and incredulity, was a form of consistency. If her nature were different to his, she was at least true to it.

  She moved to sit on the end of his bed. She gave him a tired look: the look of a person who has nothing to hide.

  He sat down, too; rested his back on the pillow.

  They stared at each other for a moment.

  He had been at this juncture before; the point where some part of him collapsed before her insistence, as though he were always obliged to hear her out. Perhaps it was because he wanted to know her view of things, to see how she construed what had happened to them.

  'What are you proposing?'

  'That we get on a plane. Talk to Shane. Do what we were going to do.'

  He looked at her starkly. 'Make the film?'

  'You've got the rights. Your deal with Shane can be signed off again. He still wants to direct the film.'