'What are you, eh? And what do you want in here? This is a library. Boys, I find, do not care for libraries. Perhaps you were looking for the kitchens.'
With a grunt of effort he slots the book in its place and clambers down. He seemed quite tall. Now it is evident he is no taller than James.
'Come, then, now you are here. Let me show you about. I am Collins, Mr Canning's librarian. I was with him in Spain and Italy. Oh, indeed, we were in Italy for many years. He speaks the language like a native. Can recite Dante by the hour. These shelves are history. Herodotus, Pliny, Tacitus. Homer. Here is philosophy. Aristotle, Bacon, Newton, Erasmus . . . Hobbes, Locke ... In this place, for which only Mr Canning and myself have the key, are certain rare and . . . particular volumes. How old are you, boy?'
'Thirteen.'
'You have amorous thoughts?'
'Amorous?'
'Ay. Hot thoughts. Lewd. Are you a peeper through keyholes? Are you inflamed by the heave of a bosom?'
James considers a moment the bosoms he has seen. Liza's once, white puppy-heads as she Ufted her shift one night in summer. The actresses at Farmer Moody's place. Grace Boylan's when she gave them to be squeezed by Gummer. He shakes his head. The librarian shrugs.
You won't be pestering me for the key, then. Where had we reached to? Philosophy? These shelves here are poetry, a particular favourite of Mr Canning's.'
He stops. Holds up his hand. He is listening, and looking over James's shoulder towards the door. He says: 'Did you hear them?'
James counts the fingers on the librarian's hand. One, two, three, four, five, six.
'It is the twins,' says Collins, and for a moment the oddest smile lives on his face. James turns. Two heads have appeared round the door. Four eyes examine him, then the heads withdraw and he hears the hiss of their slippers, running.
'After them!' The librarian prods James between the shoulder-blades. 'Make haste, or you shall lose them!'
James sets off in pursuit, stopping now and then to listen, then running on. He glimpses them on the stairs, then at the far end of a gallery, slipping through a doorway into the dusk of another passageway. For half a minute he loses the trail completely; then comes a muffled crash, a cry of'Damn! Damn!' He follows, finds the shards of porcelain, but no sign of the girls, no noise of their slippers.
They are in a room that he learns later to call the 'Hall of Statues'. The moon is wedged between two cypress trees outside
the window, and the statues throw long sharp shadows on to the marble floor. Men with coiled hair, their naked bodies slackly muscular, lean on spears or gesture wearily with absent arms. Women, goddesses, hands draped across breasts, heads without noses, eyes blank, staring inwards.
The girls are on a bench near the window, sleeping. He goes close to look at them. They are huddled together; their heads with high white brows lean one against the other. The eyes beneath their bloodless lids seem unusually large. Their mouths are small; the lips bunched, babyish.
One of the girls opens her eyes, very suddenly, as if her sleep has been a ruse. She smiles. 'I was dreaming of you,' she says. 'And now you are here.'
'How do you know me?'
'Mr Canning said you were to come here. And then I saw you from my window. Mr Canning said you look like any other boy but that you are not so, not at all. He would not have brought you if you were.'
'I have not seen Mr Canning. Not since I arrived.'
'Oh, you must not expect to see him. At least, not often. He will send when he needs you. My name is Ann. This is my sister Anna. We were in the circus before Mr Canning found us. We did not like it. You were in a circus too.'
James shakes his head. 'I was in a show. It was to sell medicine.'
'Was it a good medicine?'
'It was nothing. Nothing good.'
'Mr Canning gives us good medicine. He prepares it himself.'
'What is wrong with you?'
'Hardly anything, except that our heads sometimes ache and we are so tired we fall asleep in the middle of our sentences.'
'You are always with your sister?'
She laughs, a snort, as if he has said something amusing
though in questionable taste. 'Of course; and she is often such poor company. But soon we shall be apart and then I shall not see her for a whole week, or even a month, so when we meet we may have a conversation, like ordinary people do.'
And then he understands. It is something in the way they are nestled together on the bench like the two halves of an ink blot. He asks: When are you to separate?'
When we are sixteen. Mr Canning has promised us.'
'How old are you now?'
She is asleep. The other sister is looking at him. *You tire us out with so much talk. Why are you not in bed?'
Why are you not in bed, since you are so tired?'
We like it here. We Hke to look at the statues. We like that one especially.' She points to the corner of the room. A squat figure with a great tumescent cock thrust to the sky. 'Mr Canning says he is the god of gardens. Priapus. We call him . . .' She whispers a name James cannot hear, then giggles, a sharp hysterical sound. The other sister does not wake. Her big head lolls on her chest.
James asks: 'How long have you been here?'
She shrugs one shoulder. 'Since Mr Canning found us . . . We are having our likeness done. Mr Molina does it. Perhaps he will paint you too if you come.'
Where does he paint you?'
She points upward, a gesture as wearily elegant as any of the statues. Then she too is asleep.
For a long time he stands, observing their sleep, waiting to see if one of them will wake. He feels towards them a kind of kinship; not a warm emotion, not friendship. Mr Canning, then, is a collector, and he, James Dyer, like the twins, like Mr Collins, has been collected. Or in his case, stolen. He is quite untroubled by it. Canning will serve as Gummer has served. And there are things in this house, things that he wishes to know more of. A six-fingered librarian; two girls as one. What did Gummer call
him once? Rara avis. How many of them are there here, in Mr Canning's gilded cage?
It is many days before he speaks to them again, though several times he sees them walking in the park beneath twin white parasols, Ann and Anna, waiting for their sixteenth birthday. Twice he has seen them accompany one of the servants to the little house that stands on a rise near the lake. The servant always carries a bucket; full when he goes, empty - to judge by the way it swings upon its handle - on his return. As for Mr Molina's studio, he cannot discover it. He has begun to wonder if the painter exists only in the twins' mind.
Whenever he is bored or wishes for some company, he goes to the library. Mr Collins - as Viney before him, both men quickly aware of the boy's capacity to absorb knowledge - persuades him to slide the leather volumes from their shelves and read. Not poetry, of course, or stories - the boy is blind to them - but books of anatomy, books of maps, books of experiments; books with complex seductive diagrams, books of astronomy, geometry . . . With Mr Collins at his shoulder, December rain on the windows, candles flickering against the long afternoon twilight, James stumbles through some pages of Latin in Harvey's De Motu Cordis. But it is the pictures which snare him: the world beneath the skin; the skein of guts, the globes and bulbs of the great organs; the sheets of muscle strapped around the trellis of the bones; the intricate house of the heart, veins and arteries radiating, curling, branching into tiny tributaries.
Through the slough of the year, Mr Collins feeds the boy Borelli
and Malphigi ('/ have sacrificed almost the whole race of frogs . . .'); Fabricius of Padua; and from its high shelf, the librarian on tiptoe in his mobile pulpit, Vesalius's anatomy, De Humanis Corporis Fabrica, the title page showing the great man, knuckle deep in the abdomen of a female cadaver at the theatre of public anatomy in Padua. James even learns a dozen vv^ords of Greek.
Molina's studio, discovered by James as he discovers everything in this house - the chance turning of a handle, a
door untried - is high among the warren of servants' quarters, above the crowns of the trees, level almost with the circling of the rooks. It is cluttered with the painter's domestic junk: paint-streaked shirts, cups and kettles, empty wine bottles, a large broken clock, brushes in jars of fluid. A grey cat squats by a plate of fish-heads, undisturbed by the boy's presence. Molina has his back to him, does not turn from his canvas but reaches back with one hand to wave the boy to a seat, some exploded oriental couch near where the girls are sitting. The twins seem stunned by the fixity of their pose, their dress sparkling, their faces feverish in the light from a dozen candelabras.
Says Molina: 'Ya estd . . . rest now.'
He steps around the canvas, drops the brush into a champagne flute, stretches mightily.
He says: 'So this is the boy they have told me about.' They hold each other's gaze, the painter nodding his head: a tall, gaunt man with thick eyebrows, and a head of thick brown hair tied in a black ribbon. 'And have you come to be painted, my friend?'
The twins say: 'You must finish us first!'
'Have no fear,' replies Molina. 'Your immortality is almost complete.'
The twins jump up from their couch, stand before the canvas, clap their hands delightedly.
'Will you paint us afterwards} Will you? James, you shall never
guess what has happened! Mr Canning says he shall present us at court! Imagine!'
Molina laughs. 'Perhaps James can go too and dance with you at a ball. One after the other. You must ask them now, James. They will be in great demand. My dears, you must sit again, a little while more . . .'
'We're bored! We want to talk to James.'
'James will sit here with us and Hsten to your chatter. Now, like before, yes . . . Your hand, Anna, more so . . . perfect. Now I paint.'
Molina works. When the twins have fallen silent, have entered again the trance of their pose, he says to James: 'The measure of an artist is the quaUty of his attention. You understand? The way he is looking at his subject. Perhaps that is also the measure of a man, no? Tell me, James, you like your new home?'
'Well enough.'
'So, so. I understand you have a very special, hmm, ability. No feeling, no . . . sensation. Truly I cannot imagine such a thing.'
Says James: 'What is your "ability"?'
'This, my friend. Only this poor business with the paint. Look, they are asleep. It is their condition. They must share the same blood. It is not enough. You think they are pretty? I show you something. When they sleep like this you can fire a pistol and they do not wake.'
Molina walks up to the girls, reaches down and takes hold of the hem of their dress. 'Come, James.'
He ravels up the material. Four plump legs in red stockings tied with ribbon above the knees. Four white thighs, very nude, and two neat beards of tight coppery curls. The join is at the hip. Molina takes James's hand, places it just where the flesh is fused; the confluence of bone and blood. There are tears in his eyes.
'It is so soft, no? So . . . No se como se dice ... It feels as if, a little push, and your hand would be inside. I saw this, James, one
time in my home, in Granada ... A man, a Moor, a healer ... he reach into a boy's flesh and take out a part that is bad. No knife, no blood. I saw this myself. The boy had some pain, but little. His mother held him. The Moor reached in . . . like he pulled a fish from a pool. I would like to paint them without their clothes but they are timid. I think if I give them a little wine. Then perhaps they will do it.'
James gently palpates the flesh. He is wondering how the major organs are shared between the twins: bowel and colon, spleen, kidneys, pancreas . . . what if there were not enough, if, for example, they shared a single liver? Was there some way of knowing beforehand, or only once they were on the table? Did Mr Canning know?
Molina lifts the boy's hand away, covers the girls with their dress.
'Have you ever painted, James?'
'At school I used to draw things. I found it easy.'
'I think so. These are painter's hands you have. Artist hands.' He looks at the boy, smiles. It is a kindly, a pitying smile. 'You really feel nothing, my friend?'
James shakes his head. He does not care to be pitied.
'No pain?'
'Never.'
'And pleasure? You feel pleasure?'
No one has asked him this before. He looks at the cat gnawing daintily at the last of the fish-heads.
'Pleasure?'
Certainly there are things he likes: the knowledge in Mr CoUins's books, certain foods, the orrery. Canning's wealth. Are these things pleasure? Or did Molina mean something different, physical, a sensation? In some remote and virgin world within, he knows the answer. Pain, pleasure. He has glimpsed their coast, their high cliffs; smelt in dreams the loaded offshore breezes. But still he is
surrounded by a calm insensate sea; his ship high-sided, inviolable, its great grey pennants streaming. How could it be otherwise? It is a thought he does not entertain.
Molina is by the canvas again, working white into blue on the old dinner plate that serves him for a palette.
James asks: What is in the house by the lake? I have seen a servant go there. The twins go too.'
Molina nods, still intent upon his mixing. 'That is one of Mr Canning's most wonderful . . . things. Of course, he does not tell the world. Only his friends; the learned gentlemen.'
'You have not said what it is.'
'That is because I wish you to see it with . . .' Molina searches in the air for the word. '. . . a clean mind.'
^You will take me?'
'I will take you.'
'When?'
'Tonight.'
'What else does Mr Canning have?'
'Many things. Many. There is the boy from the moon.'
'That I do not believe.'
'There are people, James, who would not believe in a boy who feels no pain.'
What does he look like, this boy?'
'Very strange, and then, not so strange at all. Not very big or small. No horns. You shall see him too. One day.'
James studies the side of Molina's head but there is nothing to learn there. The painter is utterly absorbed. He is painting the blue of the girls' eyes and finding blue elsewhere.
The cat has finished its meal. It licks its paws, very thoughtfully.
Dusk brings an hour of light; the world flares up. There is colour, birdsong: the grass capped with silver. An hour, then clouds,
night-bearing, sweeping in over the hills, the village, the lake. The light recedes into a slender golden tower. In the house, servants hurry from room to room lighting candles. The fires are stoked, shutters barred.
James meets Molina on the back stairs. The painter winks, swings a key from his hand.
'Ready?'
They exit through a low door at the side of the house. Molina has taken a lantern from one of the servants, a feeble light but sufficient to see the next two, three footsteps. They do not talk, not until they reach the house by the lake. The house is small, a mock temple. A statue of Neptune stands beside it, pot-beUied, dyspeptic, frowning towards the lake. Molina scratches the key against the lock.
What you are going to see, James, Mr Canning found near the island of Capri. It is said the Emperor Tiberius also possessed such a one. That he used it for his pleasure.'
The lock gives. Molina opens the door, cautiously, as if whatever is'upon the other side may take fright. James follows. The stench of fish is physical in the air. The light of the lantern marbles the surface of a pool. Molina crouches by the edge of it.
'Come, my friend. It will not harm you.'
But James is not afraid, he is suspicious. He is thinking of Gummer, holding up his bottle of trash above the wide-eyed crowd. Is Molina duping him?
There is a movement, the writhe of a shadow in the bottom of the pool. James kneels beside the painter, stares down into the water.
Molina says: 'Did you see?'
James says: 'I saw nothing.'
He croons like a lover: 'Venga, carina, venga! The water breaks, the light zig-zags crazily over the surface. A form is thickening, rising towards them, parting the slack muscle of the water. A shape - a head? - skims just below the skin of the pool. There is a flash of bronze, a cry, gull-Hke, forlorn, av^^ul. For an instant James sees it, outlined in the boil of its own movement; an eye, unmistakably human, unmistakably alien; a powerful blonde shoulder, a long arched back, a tail trailing black weeds and crusted with shells; the broad ragged comb of its fin. It cries out again, turns up its belly, the white and rose of its breasts, and dives, pulsing its tail, passing beyond the shallow net of their light. The water slaps against the stone edge of the pool; slowly, slowly settles.
Mohna eases himself up. He gestures to the boy to go ahead of him, out of the room, then he pulls the door shut, locks it, pockets the key. It has started to rain. The rain shows in the surface of the lake like a field of tiny white flowers. They run to the house, and as they run. Canning's dowdy marvel swims deeper into the lairs of the boy's brain, and circles there, stirring dreams, currents of unease.
January freezes. February brings a sudden thaw. The rivers lap their banks, the roads turn to mush. On the feast of St Valentine's James receives a locket of hair bound with a length of thread. Also a riddle, the spelling wildly idiosyncratic. When next he meets the twins he looks to see which of them is missing a scissor-bite of hair, but among the rings and curls, the sheer abundance, it is impossible to tell. It is from them both perhaps. If they suffered the same thoughts, why not the
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