– She is importunate, indeed distract.
He chuckled. Light of evening glowed in the window. Outside was the top of a brick wall, and a flat expanse of roof with a chimney like a ship’s funnel, belching white smoke. The professor shifted on his chair and sighed.
– It’s late, he said to no one in particular. I have to go.
But still he sat there, with eyes upcast, his fingers drumming, drumming. A moment passed, like something being carried carefully through our midst. Then Felix laughed again softly and said:
– Yes, boss, come on, it’s time we went.
At the door the professor hesitated, pretending to search for something in his pockets. He frowned. Adele would not look at him. Felix gave him a playful shove, and winked at me over his shoulder, and then they were gone.
I watched the blown smoke outside. The evening sky was pale. In the distance I could see the faint outlines of mountains. Adele kept her face averted. I tried to touch her hand but she took it away, not hastily, but with firmness, like a child taking away a toy.
– I have no peace, you see, she said. No peace. And what will I do here?
She sighed, and shook her head, with an air of mild annoyance, as if all this were just something that had got in the way of other, infinitely more important matters that now would have to wait.
– I’m sorry, I said.
Distantly in the sky a great flock of birds soared and wheeled, dark flashing suddenly to light as a thousand wings turned as one. Icarus. Adele looked about her vaguely.
– They took away my cigarettes, she said. You’ll have to bring me some.
And for the first time since I had come there she looked at me directly, with that fierce, strabismic stare.
– Won’t you? she said. You’ll have to …
The door behind me opened, I turned, and matron stopped on the threshold and looked at us.
Order, pattern, harmony. Press hard enough upon anything, upon everything, and the random would be resolved. I waited, impatient, in a state of grim elation. I had thrown out the accumulated impedimenta of years, I was after simplicity now, the pure, uncluttered thing. Everywhere were secret signs. The machine sang to me, for was not I too built on a binary code? One and zero, these were the poles. The rushings of spring shook my heart. I could not sleep, I wandered the brightening streets for hours, prey to a kind of joyless hilarity. I was in pain. When I lay down at last, exhausted, watching the sky, the fleeting clouds, a dull, grey ache would lodge in the pit of my stomach, like a grey rat, lodging there. At ashen twilight I would rise, my eyelids burning, and something thudding in my head, and set off for the hospital.
There too a frantic mood held sway. I would arrive in Adele’s room and find her with Felix and Father Plomer, all three of them bright-eyed and breathless somehow, as if at the end of some wild romp. The priest was a frequent visitor, he would put his head around the door with a conspiratorial smile, and enter on tiptoe, plump and large in his black suit and embroidered stole, his glasses flashing. He clasped his hands and laughed, showing his white teeth and gold fillings. He was like a big awkward excited girl. He loved to be there. Let’s have a little party! he would say, and he would get one of the kitchen girls to bring up a pot of tea and plates of bread and butter. Before he sat down he would remove his stole reverently and kiss it, closing his eyes briefly. Then he would lift his hands heavenwards and softly say:
– Ah, freedom!
Felix he treated with a sort of tremulous familiarity, prancing around him nervously and tittering at his jokes.
– Oh, you have a wicked wit, he would say. A wicked wit!
And Felix would look past the priest’s shoulder and catch my eye, smiling, his thin lips stretched tight.
Adele sat up in our midst, with her stark white face and her fright of hair. She had changed her slip for a satin tea-gown with roses and birds, it made the room seem more than ever like an aviary. She laughed more and more too, but more and more her laughter sounded like the first startled screeches of something that had blundered on widespread wings into a net. Her eyes grew dull, a faint, whitish film was spreading over the pupils. She complained about the light, it was not bright enough, but when the venetian blinds were drawn up, or another lamp was brought, she covered her face and turned away from the glare.
Outside her door after one of our visits Father Plomer hung back with an air of solemn excitement and spoke to Felix and me.
– I mean to save her, you know, he said. Oh yes, she’s agreed to take instruction.
Felix reared back from the priest in wide-eyed wonder.
– Oi vay! he breathed, and put up a hand to hide the thin little mocking smirk he could not stifle.
Then for a while that romping air I used to find when I arrived in her room gave way to a tense, reverential atmosphere, in which something seemed to vibrate, as if a little bell had just stopped ringing. Once I even came upon them in the act of prayer, the priest down on one knee, a hand to his forehead and his missal open, and Adele lying back on the pillows with her hands folded on her breast and her eyes cast upwards, wan and waxen in her satin gown, like a picture of a drowned maiden laid out on the flower-strewn bank of a brook. But it did not last. One day she snatched the prayerbook from him with a laugh and flung it across the room, and although he hung about in the corridor with a wounded look she would not consent to see him any more.
– Don’t worry, padre, Felix said to him jauntily, she’ll find her own way to the light.
That night she was gay, she sat with her ankles crossed under the covers and an ashtray in her lap. She had put on lipstick and mascara, and painted her fingernails scarlet. She waved her cigarette about, fluttering her lashes and pouting like a vamp.
– He tried to put his hand under my clothes, she said. Imagine!
Felix fairly whooped.
– Oh my, oh my! he cried, clutching himself. So much for salvation, eh?
When he was gone she sat and plucked at the bedclothes, frowning. She would not meet my eye. She picked up a magazine and flipped through it distractedly.
– Listen, she said, you’ll have to get me something. That bitch will only give me that stuff, that method stuff, what do you call it, it’s no good.
She ceased turning the gaudy pages and sat quite still, her head bowed. There was silence. She dropped her cigarette into the ashtray and watched with narrowed eyes the thin blue plume of smoke pouring upwards.
– I can’t, I said. How can I.
For a moment she said nothing, and did not stir, it was as if she had not heard.
– Yes, she said quietly. That’s what he says, too. And then he laughs.
She looked up at me and tried to smile. The sore patch at the corner of her painted mouth was raw. Her lower lip was trembling.
– She gives you things, doesn’t she? she said. Pills, those things? You can ask her. You can say it’s for yourself.
She struggled up, overturning the ashtray, and knelt on the edge of the bed and clasped her arms around my neck and pressed her trembling mouth on mine. She began to cry. Lipstick, smoke, salt tears. That taste, I can taste it still.
– I’ll let you do it to me, she moaned. Everything, everything you want. Everything …
I STOLE IT FOR HER. I knew where to look, what to take. Matron was not at her desk, the key to the dispensary was in her drawer. I walked upstairs. It was teatime, no one paid me any heed. In a hospital even I could go unnoticed. I locked the dispensary door behind me. How quiet it was there suddenly, like being underwater, amid all those shelves of greenish glass, those phials brimming with sleep. I found what I had come for, but still I lingered, leaning by the window. It was a gusty twilight. A sky full of wreckage flowed overhead in silence. Down in the grounds a cherry tree whipped and shuddered, its fallen blossoms washing in waves back and forth over the grey grass. How many moments had I known like this, when everything faltered somehow, like a carousel coming briefly to a stop, and I saw once again with weary
eyes the thing that had been there all the time. I pressed my forehead to the glass. To stay here, to stay here forever, like this. To have it over, finally. She was up pacing the floor, holding herself tightly in her arms. She flew at me, where had I been! I handed her the tiny plastic ampoules. She thrust them into a pocket of her gown and stood a moment motionless, with a sort of vacant grin, gazing at nothing. Then she frowned. No, she muttered, no, the room wasn’t safe, there was no lock on the door, anyone could walk in. Besides, her things were not here, she had hidden them. She paced again, talking to herself, one hand stuck in her hair and the other tearing at the sore on her mouth. Then she halted, nodding.
– There’ll be no one there, she said. There’s never anyone there at this time, it will be all right.
She clutched my arm.
– Yes, she said, yes, it will be all right.
It strikes me suddenly how like cloisters were those corridors, with their arched ceilings, their statues and their lilies, that quiet that was not quite silence. She hurried ahead of me, keeping to the wall, a barefoot wraith. She led me to the chapel. It was a little vaulted cell hung with flags and pennants and holy pictures in big brown frames. A stained-glass window, from which the last light was fading, depicted the assumption of the Virgin in pinks and gaudy blues. There were daffodils on the miniature altar. A brass oil lamp with a ruby-red globe was suspended from the ceiling on a heavy chain. The place, festooned and dim, had a jaded, vaguely sybaritic air, like the tent of a desert chieftain. There was a smell of wood and wax. The silence here too was somehow murmurous, as if thronged with lingering echoes. Adele reached behind a picture of a skewered St Sebastian and brought out a plastic bag that had been taped with sticking plaster to the back of the frame. We stood for a moment in the holy hush, with our heads together, admiring her treasures. There was a little bottle and a spoon, a rubber dropper, and a disposable syringe, its needle bent, that she had salvaged from a waste bin. I was thinking of another occasion, when we had stood like this, in each other’s warmth, our breath mingling. Outside the wind was blowing. Her hands trembled. The wounded saint considered us with his level, sad, lascivious gaze.
She knelt at the step in front of the altar to blend her brew, while I sat on a bench and watched. She worked with loving, rapt attention, biting her lip and frowning, forgetting herself. I hardly knew her, kneeling there, transfigured, lost in her task, a votive priestess. Now and then she had to stop and wait for the shaking in her hands to subside, and looked about her dimly, with unseeing eyes. She lit a stump of penny candle and set it on the step and warmed the mixture in the spoon. Then she sat back on her heels and rolled the sleeve of her gown to the shoulder. Her naked arm glimmered in the fading light. She found a vein, and squeezed and squeezed until it stood up, plump and purple, gorged with blood. At first the needle would not penetrate, and she prodded and pushed, making a faint mewling sound and arching her back. Then suddenly the tip went in, and the swollen skin slid up around it, like a tiny pouting mouth, drawing the fine steel shaft deep inside itself, and she pressed the plunger slowly, while the pulsing vein sucked and sucked, and at last she leaned her head back, her eyelids fluttering, and exhaled a long, shivering sigh.
I knelt on the cold floor and held her. She stared at me sightlessly. Her hand, still holding the syringe, lay limply beside her on the step. I crushed the chill silk stuff of her gown in my hands.
– You promised, I said. You promised.
I lifted her up and walked her to the door, and made her stand with her back to it so that no one could come in. She put one arm across my shoulders, and with the other held my head in a fierce embrace, grinding her chin into my jaw. Her thighs were cold. I listened in vague wonder to my own hoarse quickening gasps. The back of her head beat dully against the thick oak door. She was laughing, or crying, I don’t know which.
– You’ll get more for me, won’t you, she said into my ear. Say it, say you’ll get more.
– Yes, I said, yes.
But I did not have to get it, I had it already, enough to keep her going for weeks, it was still in my pocket, enough to keep us both going, for weeks.
And so at the same time evening after evening we came there to the chapel, and I gave her that day’s ration of peace, and in return she opened her gown and briefly held me, gasping, pressed to her shivering flesh. I recall the quiet around us, the light dying in that garish window, and the smell of the place, like the smell of coffins, and the vague clamour of teatime outside in the wards, a noise from another world. Afterwards we would sit for a long time together in the dim glow of the flickering altar lamp, as another day died and night came on. Sometimes an old woman in a dressing-gown would creep in and kneel for a while, sighing and mumbling, with her face in her hands. She paid us no heed, perhaps she never noticed us. It was May, the month of Mary, fresh flowers were placed on the altar every day, daffodils, and tulips, and lilies of the valley. Adele sat with head bowed and her hands in her lap, so still she seemed hardly to breathe. I told her about numbers, how they worked, how simple they were, how pure. I do not know if she was even listening. I told her too about that moment on the mountain, how it had come to me afresh, with more weight than ever, that under the chaos of things a hidden order endures. A kind of rapture thickened in my throat, I gagged on it as if on grief. She leaned her shoulder wearily against mine.
– I have to get out of this place, she said. Help me.
A bell was ringing, they would come in soon to say the rosary. I rose to go. She looked up at me, out of her dark, dazed eyes.
– Help me, she said.
Felix listened to me, he understood. That’s it, he said, that’s it! smiling and nodding, urging me on. To know, to do, to delve into the secret depths of things, wasn’t that what he had always urged on me? And now he would help me. He had contacts, he had influence. There were people other than the professor, there were other machines, too, bigger, and better, oh yes, yes, he would show me! I liked to listen to him talk like this, it set up a kind of excited hum inside me that had alarm in it, and presentiment, and dark pleasure. And if now and then I looked up unexpectedly and caught him watching me with a merry eye, smiling that artful smile of his, well, I didn’t care.
In the afternoon sometimes I walked about the city with him. We went to the zoo, one of his favourite haunts. He found everything irresistibly funny there. He would stand in front of the tiger’s cage, or in the torpid gloom of the alligator house, and fairly split his sides. The animals in their turn watched him with what seemed to me a puzzled, wary eye. Oh look, look! he would cry, in a transport, clutching my arm and pointing a trembling finger at a baboon picking at its purple arse, or a hippo trying to mount its mate.
– What a strange old world, all the same, he said, that has such monsters in it, eh, Caliban?
He met people there, they would step out from behind a tree, or lower a newspaper and look at him with a humid stare. There was something about them, an air of tension and vague torment, that fitted with the place. They might have been peering through invisible bars. When he spotted them he would laugh softly to himself and walk over rapidly and talk to them, keeping his back to me. He never referred to these encounters afterwards, but fell into step beside me again and blandly took up talking where he had left off. But some days I noticed him looking about with a watchful eye, and a trace of strain crept into his smile, and he kept to open ground.
– If you ever have to look for me, he said, you know where I’ll be, don’t you?
We were walking by an ornamental lake. The day was overcast, the air a sheen of damp pearl. He was eating a pink ice-cream cone, and kicking idly at the ducks crowding the churned mud of the water margin.
– I mean, he said, if you can’t find me, if I’m not around. When matters become complicated, a period of withdrawal is the best thing, I find.
He glanced at me and grinned. A black swan sailed past us in silence, with its chaste, bashful mien. The ducks gabbled. He tossed the la
st of his ice-cream into their midst and there was uproar. On a little island in the lake a pair of monkeys swung and chattered in the branches of a dead tree.
– We should stick together, Felix said. We’re two of a kind, you and me.
He linked his arm in mine then, and we went through the gate and up the hill to the bus stop. The city was below us, crouched under a lowering sky. We were stopped in traffic by the river when the rain came on, rattling against the side of the bus. It ceased as abruptly as it had begun, and a pale wash of sunlight fell across the rooftops and the shining spires, and at a great height a solitary white bird soared against a bruise-coloured wall of cloud. How innocent it all was, how unconcerned, I remember it, the drenched light, the spires, that bird, like a dreamy background, done by an apprentice, perhaps, while in front horses plunge and blackamoors roll their eyes, and a poor wretch is dying tacked to a tree.
In Chandos Street we found Liz huddled on the steps outside the front door. When we approached her she flinched and put up her arms to protect her face. There was a livid bruise under her eye, and her lower lip was split and caked with blood. She would not stand up, but cowered against the door with her knees pressed to her chest. I knelt beside her, but she turned her face away from me with a sob. Felix stood before her with his hands in his pockets, tapping one foot.
– Tony being impetuous again, is he? he said. That boy is so excitable.
Liz mumbled something. One of her front teeth had been knocked out, it was hard to understand her.
– Come again? Felix said, leaning down with a hand cupped to his ear.
– He’s gone! she cried.
There was silence, save for her muffled sobs. It was growing dark in the street. Felix considered her pensively, jingling coins in his pocket.
– Gone? he said softly. How do you mean, gone?
She squeezed her eyes shut, but the tears kept coming. Her lip had begun to bleed again. She held herself by the shoulders, trembling.
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