Dorothy, called Dottie, or Dot—even the diminutions of her name reducing her to next to nothing—a mere fortnight dead, is already, shockingly, this day in Venice, fading in his thought. It is as if she had not been sufficiently present, when alive, for her memory to flourish after death. She was a large woman, tall, that is, though not at all heavy. He recalls his surprise, the first time he held her in his arms, at the lightness of her; it was as if all her long bones, of which she seemed to have more than the normal quota, were hollow as reeds. He might have been embracing a tall, fragile bird, at once graceful and ungainly, a crane, perhaps, or an ibis. It strikes him how much in looks she resembled his mother, for they were the same type, pale, lean, angular.
She was secretive, was Dorothy, and led an endearingly furtive existence. The house where they lived for the years of their marriage was not extensive yet she could somehow manage to disappear in it for hours on end. An entire morning would pass without a sound from her, so that he would assume she had gone out—but where would she have gone out to?—then suddenly, padding from his study to the kitchen or the lavatory, he would chance upon her lurking in a passageway, or a doorway, or in the recesses of a room mysteriously made deeper and dimmer by her presence in it. She would start and turn towards him quickly, whipping her hands behind her back and widening her eyes in a panicked show of innocence, like a naughty child caught in the act. When he was with her he had always the impression that she was listening anxiously beyond him for something in the house, some small, telltale sound that would give her away. He wondered what she did all day long. She took up projects—gardening, exotic cooking, carpentry, even—but quickly tired of them. He could tell when a pastime had palled, for she had a particular way of laying a thing down out of her hands, a cookery book, a pair of secateurs, a ball of wool pierced heraldically with two crossed knitting needles, and turning vaguely away, with a vague sigh, trailing her fingers along a chair-back or the edge of a window-sill. The thing would stay there, where she had left it, until by a gradual process of transformation worked by time and neglect, its original identity would blur and it would become a mere object, inert and lifeless, its use almost forgotten, and as often as not he would be the one who in the end would put it away, discreetly, without comment. She had the guardedly distracted air of holding back some large revelation, or terrible confession. In the latter weeks of her life she grew increasingly remote, and he would catch her looking at him with a frowning surmise, as if she knew she knew him but could not for the moment recall just who exactly he was. He would say something then, softly, calmly, and yet would feel that he was calling out to her, more loudly than he had meant to, and she would start, and the light of recognition would dawn in her face and she would smile her radiant, helpless smile that seemed to start from a long way off and make its way to him over immense and difficult distances.
He wonders for how long she had been planning to go. Would she have made a plan, she who seemed to live as if each moment were discontinuous from all others? His mother was furious, at Dorothy and at him, insisting at first it must have been an accident, then accusing him and saying it was his fault, that by his neglect of her he had driven Dottie to her death.
When they took her body from the water there were stones in the pockets of her dress. How could she have thought a few stones would weigh her down and carry her to the bottom? Yet something had.
He accepted all his mother’s charges, and blamed himself—they always do, as if they were the lords of life and death—and blames himself still, when he remembers to. The nights are especially hard. He tosses on his bed, sweating and moaning and muttering imprecations, like a martyr being roasted on a grid. He must not have loved her enough, that must be it. When he was young, the lesson he learned from his mother, as much by cuffs as caresses, was that love is action—what you do, not what you feel—but perhaps, he thinks now, it was a false lesson, and that love is something else altogether, something he knows nothing of. He sees it, this love, hovering like the Paraclete above the heads of a fig-leafed Cranach couple, streaming divine grace down upon them in burning rays. Where was his soul when this pentecostal fire was falling from the sky?
And the girl, now, the girl in Venice, Alba, was she Dottie’s ghost, come back to comfort him? Perhaps she was. Sometimes a soul will be permitted a brief return from Pluto’s domain by that taciturn gate-keeper and his polycephalic hound, but I do not know if she was one of them—I only conduct them thither not thence, for Pluto is a jealous god and fiercely guards his dread domain. Yes, yes, I know, I tried to do Orpheus a favour, he was so heartsore, but look at the consequences. Poor Eurydice, and poorer Orpheus, first losing his wife, then losing her a second time, then losing himself and ending up a severed head bobbing on Hebrus’s little waves, singing still. I often think that for all our powers, or precisely because of them, we should not be allowed to meddle in mortal affairs, considering the catastrophes that our meddlings result in more often than not.
Once, many years later, Adam saw her again—Alba, I mean, not Dorothy, for he sees her every day, in a manner of speaking. This second sighting took place not in Venice but some small landlocked Italian city, he cannot remember which one. He was sure it was she, although it was the merest glimpse he had of her, in the street, in the midst of shuffling crowds. She looked no older than she had that afternoon in the house under the Salute, but she was changed, greatly changed. She was in a wheelchair, being pushed by another young woman, short and round and of a resentful aspect, with a frizz of red hair like so many filaments of copper wire bristling with electricity. This person also Adam was convinced he recognised. Was she not there, in the background, that day in Venice, when he was trying to leave and got into a wrangle over money with the Count? The Count, though firm about his fee, remained amusedly forbearing, showing the faintly rueful, patient smile of an adult being haggled with by a clamorous child over sweets, while, yes, there behind him this red-headed, fat young woman prowled the room in seeming anger, smoking a long cigarette and ejecting smoke in thin quick jets, like squirts of venom. How strange, the way they come and go, memory’s figments. The wheelchair in which Alba sat, or better say was held fast, was of the old-fashioned kind, black, with a wooden hoop, worn smooth by long use, attached to the wheels on either side for the occupant to grasp and propel herself onwards, or backwards, for that matter, and two handles behind should she need to be pushed, which evidently, today, she did. She was clutching the padded arms of the chair and leaning forward urgently, her upper body twisted tensely off to one side, as if her helper had started off pushing her without warning while she was in the act of trying to pull herself up forcibly out of the seat. Her feet, with those slightly splayed, blunt toes that he surprised himself by remembering so clearly, were braced on the foot-rests, as if she might be about to make another desperate and doomed attempt at leaping up and effecting an escape. She wore a childish pair of transparent, cheap pink plastic sandals. The look of thrilled expectancy that he had remarked that afternoon in front of the god had become one of furious distraction; the marvellous thing she had been waiting for would not come, now. She was talking to herself, her lips moving in a slack, rapid mumbling, like a penitent in the confessional gabbling out a litany of sins and urgently demanding forgiveness. He might have hailed her, might have followed after the two of them and accosted them, but what would he have said, what done? Instead, he went on standing there in the lemony sunlight of the Italian noon, and saw again Venice in winter, the grimy air and the wheeling gulls, and gnarled old Charon the boatman crooning for his coin.
II
Rex the dog is the first to spy the stranger toiling over the crest of the hill from the direction of the railway line. It’s long past noon and a hazy stillness has settled over the fields. The trees stand seething in the heat. The air is grey-blue and lax. Everything shimmers. The man is short and fat and rather than walk he seems to roll along wobblingly, like a floppy tyre come loose from its wheel. He wears a
black suit and a white shirt open at the collar. He keeps to the shaded side of the road. He seems to be in some distress—he must be sweating, in that suit. He is an unlikely apparition, on foot, on this leafy hillside. Rex is not surprised, however, for he has lived among people long enough to be accustomed by now to their frequently inexplicable ways. His sight is not what it was but his other senses are as keen as ever, his sense of smell in particular. He lifts his nose, which is the size and texture of a wet truffle, and sniffs the air, scanning for any hint of the man that a straying breeze might bring him. There is a tiny gland high up inside his muzzle, almost between his eyes, that can detect a single molecule of scent—and they boast of their opposable thumb! He is standing in the gateway at the end of the drive. Despite his age he cuts a commanding figure, with his square brow and thick-set shoulders. His tail has the elegant sweep of a frond of palm moving in a breeze. He strains his old eyes to make out the man’s face but it remains a whitish blob. He produces one of his deep, far-carrying barks, which starts out in his belly and makes him give a little hop on his front paws. He turns his head to look back at the house. No door has opened, no one has appeared on the steps, not even a curtain twitches. Should he allow the stranger to enter, if he means to enter?
Which, as it turns out, he does. He arrives at the gate, gasping a little and dishevelled. Man and dog regard each other, then the man clicks his tongue and extends a hand and pats the dog’s head, and the dog wags his tail. The stranger has a strong dark juicy smell, very pungent, a foreign smell, redolent of far away. “Hello, Rex,” he says affably. Rex is astonished. How does the man know his name? He is smiling, too. “Anyone home?” he asks, and shades his eyes with his hand and peers up the drive in the direction of the house. He has a bald pate ringed by a laurel-wreath of shiny black curls, an unhealthy-looking, bulbous face, white as a plate, and a nose like a broken little finger; his chubby, babyish hands seem pushed like corks into the ends of his fat arms. From the breast pocket of his suit he takes out a large white handkerchief and mops his brow and the pendulous bag of grey, froggy flesh under his chin. He steps past Rex on to the drive, and an ancient instinct urges the dog to sink his teeth into the fellow’s ankle, but instead he sets off ambling in his wake, letting his hot tongue loll in the blissfully cool though dusty air.
Petra is upstairs in what is grandly called the morning room. It is a gloomy and inhospitable place and people rarely come up here, at morning or at any other time of day—the house has many such unused rooms—and she can work undisturbed. She has spread out her textbooks and medical dictionaries on the half-moon table with the spindly legs that stands against the wall opposite the windows. The table, which is old, has a wonderfully rich patina, and there are many deep and blackened scars in the surface of it, though the edges of them have been smoothed by age. How many others before her over the years have sat here like this, at this table, working, in the silence of a summer day? She pictures herself as someone looking on would see her, bent over her papers, pen in hand, like an engraving in an old book of a scholar at work on some legendary, abstruse concordance. Although she is right-handed she holds the pen as a left-hander does, her fist curled in on itself and the sharp knuckles white where the bones gleam under the stretched skin.
This is a marked day in the progress of her encyclopaedia of human morbidity, to which she has given the title Florilegium Moribundus Humanae—she is not sure if the Latin is correct but she is pleased with the sound of it—for she has just finished her entry on azotaemia, the last of the As, and tomorrow will make a start on the Bs, with bacillaemia, or possibly Babinski reflex, although strictly the latter is a symptom not a disease. She is writing in the quarto-sized blank manuscript book with the repeated fleur-de-lis design on the cover that her father brought home to her one year, from Florence, she thinks, it was, for her birthday. She writes with a steel pen, in lavender ink, with vigilance and concentration, always anxious not to make a blot. She likes the scratchy sound the nib makes on the heavy, cream-laid paper. To ensure the lines are straight she uses a ruler and a special implement with a toothed metal wheel to trace a ghostly track along which to write. She hears faintly, all the way from town, the Angelus bell. A trapped fly buzzes in a corner of the window behind her; the sound is like that of a tiny electric motor with an intermittent fault. She is not thinking of anything, especially not of Roddy Wagstaff, resting in his room after the rigours of his two-hour train journey. She is calm. Her mind floats like a hair on water. She writes along the ghostly dotted line: an abnormal concentration of urea and other nitrogenous bodies in the blood—
She had heard Rex barking down at the gate and at first paid no heed, but now something, some registering nerve between her shoulder-blades, alerts her that someone is approaching the house. She rises from the desk and goes to the window, still with the pen in her hand. She sees the man coming up the drive, with Rex at his heels. She draws back a pace, for fear of being seen herself. She hears the harsh sound of the man’s tread on the gritted surface of the driveway. Watching him, she feels a sharp leap of misgiving, like the needle of mercury shooting up the barrel of a thermometer. She wonders who he can be, and how he got here, and what he might want. She does not like strangers coming to the house, especially like this, on foot, seemingly out of nowhere. It is her father being ill that has upset everything, and it is this that has brought this man now, too, she is sure of it. She is not sure what to do. Someone will answer his knock and let him in, but maybe he should be refused entry—maybe he should be sent on his way at once, without delay.
Abruptly she turns and flies from the room and across the landing and down the stairs two at a time, three at a time, and hauls open the heavy front door just as the man is lifting his hand to the knocker. He rears back in startlement, and Petra starts, too, so that they are both equally surprised, he at her and she at herself. There is the sense not of a door having opened but of a panel being slid aside between two worlds, and the outdoors seems to her unnaturally bright, as if lit from above not by the sun but by unseen giant lamps. She is breathing hard, and her cheeks are flushed. The man smiles. He says something she does not catch, his name, it must be. Rex, behind, puts out his head at the side of the man’s knees and looks at her, questioning, uncertain. She moves back, jerking her arm out stiffly from her side in a curt invitation to the man to enter. He steps forward, stumbling a little on the raised stone threshold, and moves past her into the hall with his teetering, wincing gait—he is like a comically overweight ballet dancer whose shoes are too small and pinching him terribly. “Do you mind if I sit?” he says, although he has already plumped himself down in the tall, forbidding black armchair with wings that stands beside the hall-stand; she has never known anyone to sit in it before. “Pouf!” the man says, ballooning his cheeks. He takes out his handkerchief and mops his face again. His pasty skin gleams as if covered all over with a fine film of oil. His fat lower lip hangs loose, and she can see the tip of his tongue, pointed and greyly wet. “Sorry,” he says, with a desperate smile, panting harder to show her how out of breath he is. “Hot.” He glances questioningly downwards—she is still holding the pen, poised as if to write, on air. She puts her hand quickly behind her back. She remembers the sound of the fly against the window-pane, its buzzing wings; to be trapped like that, she thinks, sealed off inexplicably from all that day and air and light outside, how terrible. “Your name,” he says, and taps a finger to his forehead. “I know I should know it.”
Rex stands in the doorway watching them with keen alertness, swishing his tail warily from side to side.
“Petra,” she says. Why should he have known her name?—how would he have known it?
“Petra. That’s right.” He casts about him absently. Seated, he has sunk into himself, and seems to have no neck, and his head moves like a large, heavy ball set in a shallow socket.
“My father can’t see anyone,” Petra says, more stridently than she had intended. “I mean, he’s not well.”
She looks to the open doorway, a tall box of light, where Rex still stands, with his tail still going, swish, swish. She is the only one, apart from the dog, who has seen this man, the only one who knows he is here. She could tell him to go now, could order him to leave, and no one in the house would be the wiser. If she shuts the door he will stay. But would he go, even if she told him to? From the ugly, throne-like chair he is looking up at her fatly from under his eyelashes, his small moist valve-like mouth twisted up to one side in a smile of friendly amusement.
Whoever, whatever, he claims to be, I, Hermes the messenger, I know who he is. Et in Arcadia ille—They told Thamouz the great god Pan is dead, but they were wrong. If he misbehaves, as I know he will, I shall box his ears, the scamp.
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