Dazzling the Gods

by Tom Vowler

  The girl was in the kitchen when he got back.

  ‘You should keep your ankle up,’ he said.

  She hobbled from one cupboard to the next, shifting cans and jars about. Her hair had braided itself from the salt and sand of last night, her smell nautical, like when the dog went in the sea. Her nails were mostly bitten down, a residue of varnish garnishing them, and whereas carrying her from the beach he’d thought her slight, she looked strong in the kitchen’s half-light. He watched her move from one end to the other, remembered the feel of her skin, warmth from the fire in it.

  ‘Do you not eat food?’ she said.

  She picked up a near-empty bag of pasta, inspected then dismissed it. He supposed food wasn’t a priority for him, more something that either happened or didn’t. He caught fish most weeks, went to the village shop now and then. Purple laver could be harvested when he wasn’t ­carrying back driftwood. They got pasties at the yard sometimes. As long as the dog didn’t go without.

  The girl moved to the window, seemed transfixed by the pewtered sea, the light ghosting across it, and he recalled his mother standing in the same spot, watching for hours the Atlantic’s endless nothingness, it somehow both inert and active. Something to be revered.

  He fetched wood for later. Outside, the day had got up into a frenzy. It was a house built on a tapestry of sound: a dozen different winds, waves that growled and pummelled. The rark of gulls and the seep seep of their young. And underscoring this, the sea’s white noise, coming without beginning or end from its machinery.

  When silence finally came, in the fragile spaces nature afforded it, it discomfited him, drew attention to his thoughts, to the things missing in a life. A wife and daughter. Where were they now? Abroad, he had last heard. There had been cards once, from his daughter at least, formal, alluding to little. And she had written to him in prison, and he’d slept with the letter beneath his pillow. It was in those years, before arriving here, that he truly learned what despair was.

  Autumn, having clung on as long as it could, now lapsed, its fragile, mellow light rinsed from the landscape a little more each day, replaced by something harsher. He tried to picture the garden in that other time, but couldn’t, remembering only a couple of weather-beaten benches corroding in the spumes of brine. He’d had plans for it after their mother died: a vegetable plot, a new stone wall to protect it from the Atlantic’s barrage. Now overrun with weeds, it served well as the dog’s toilet, the far side used occasionally by fly tippers, piles of rubbish he’d allow to accumulate until it threatened the beach below.

  The tide was approaching, liver-hued in the mid-­distance, awaiting its lunar calling. Membranes of wrack bisected the shingle, desiccating in the wind. A solitary figure a hundred yards out, digging for lugworm, and he could almost hear the slurp of mud as it was excavated. And beyond the figure, listing in sepulchral permanence, the wreck of an old herring boat, all paint peeled from its timber, its wheelhouse salt-eaten, hull heavily barnacled. To the west the island, little more than a snarl on the horizon, the sky above leached of colour. He walked across the garden to the cliff edge, its base benign in the sea’s absence, respite from the twice-daily union, and it was hard to imagine rock being undone by water, as if the land was exposed flesh, the sea a scalpel. The clan of wind ­turbines, so long a source of antagonism for the village, a benign apparition to the east. It was easy to trick the eye on such days, to render the sea two-rather than three-­dimensional, its horizon a height instead of a depth, a wall of water, amassing like some invader.

  Looking up to the window, he took some comfort at the girl’s presence, this good thing that he had done, knew that soon – later today, tomorrow – he would come back to the house, from the yard, from a walk, and she would be gone.

  Lucca: Last Days of a Marriage

  Even mid-morning the heat is the wrong side of tolerable. An ambient ferocity that consigns him to torpor between short bursts of activity, the discrete parts of the day bound by the searing onslaught. He’d left the hotel an hour ago, the wap wap of the room’s fan still occupying like rotor blades some frontier of his mind. He starts, as Pollex’s characters had, encircling the town along its walled walkway, stopping at each bastion, grateful for the leafy shade on offer. He felt the narrative ambled at this point, became part-travel guide as it documented how the wall was designed by Leonardo, how each of its four sides was given over to a different species of tree. The stonework, an actual guidebook informs him, acts today as a liminal boundary, dividing ancient from modern, contemporary life held at bay where possible. Pollex reminds readers the town had once rivalled Florence for prominence, that Caesar himself visited, Dante too while in exile. He could, of course, now edit such detail, mute the verbiage to his own satisfaction, the only reins a ghostly voice he is obliged to hear.

  A young couple kiss against a centuries-old trunk, incautious, solipsistic. From their lack of wilting he figures them locals, Tuscans for whom the heat is a frivolous matter, who know nothing of wet Tuesday mornings on the M25. He imagines what it would take to interrupt them, what measure of sound or force would untwine the pair, remembers on some level the exhilaration they are feeling. It’s not that he begrudges them exactly; more that he wishes to point out love’s inexorable arc.

  He removes his hat, fans himself before walking on. On waking he had been surprised at the absence of a hangover, and the assessment had indeed been premature, the sun now drawing it from deep in him and for a moment he thinks he might be sick. Cretino!

  A waft of sweet buccellato arrives from below, and after pretending to himself that he is hungry, he takes the next set of steps down into the old town.

  His task, he supposes, is an unusual one, though literature boasts its share of posthumous publications, books part-finished, part-edited upon the author’s demise. That Pollex set much of the novel in Tuscany was, initially, a source of delight on learning he would be required to visit, to immerse himself in the region’s underbelly, let la terra permeate him. Much of the book’s closing chapters take the form of notes, and so it was deemed necessary to work on it in situ, to strive for a resonant denouement. But the undertaking has now become burdensome, not least because Pollex’s characters were witnessing a marital ­collapse to mirror his own.

  He’d worked with Pollex for the first couple of novels, books that sold in moderate number, establishing the man as a seasoned mid-lister, unremarkable yet in possession of a steady and loyal readership. His own poor health had seen a parting of ways for the next work, a colleague ­stepping in, presiding over what turned out to be Pollex’s ‘breakthrough’ book, a genre-bending tale set in postapocalyptic Glasgow that bore no resemblance to the ­lyrical realism preceding it. Had it been a debut, nobody would have touched it, least of all his own publishing house; they were simply honouring a contract, assembling a novel they suspected wouldn’t sell.

  But sell it did. Despite an age of endless, readily available analysis, nobody really knows why a book does well: a series of favourable reviews, celebrity book clubs, influential bloggers – all play their part, but guarantee nothing. Word of mouth is still the overarching factor, and how do you measure that? Within two months of publication, Pollex was the author everyone wanted to interview, to pastiche. The rights sold in thirteen territories, film options arrived soon after. Some of the parties are, he suspects, still going on now.

  So it was a surprise when they asked him to return to edit Lucca, the locum colleague jettisoned at the author’s request. From the early drafts, however, it was clearly going to be a difficult book: not at all the anticipated sequel in terms of style or content; more a return to his earlier oeuvre but with even less commercial appeal. As the book’s editor he was frequently drawn in meetings to comment on its plot, its formula – its comparisons to The Previous One – and he’d searched hard for a balance between cryptic and tantalising. In truth it was obvious Pollex regarded his departure an artistic compromise too far, despite the economic freedom it best
owed him with. It was as if he was saying, Look I can write a bestseller if I want to. Now let me return to the real stuff.

  The sun is directly overhead now, chromic and irrefutable. He needs to find a café, sit in shade and rehydrate. Later, when it is cooler, he will drive up into the hills to the north, navigate the serpentine road into the Apuan Alps, where the marble Michelangelo himself once quarried renders the great slopes as if snow-clad. Then, if he’s not too tired, on to the verdant valleys of Garfagnana. Pollex mentions the region several times, though his characters are too preoccupied by hostilities to visit, its treatment in the book providing, he senses, excessive adornment, self-congratulatory prose. And yet he is drawn to the place simply from Pollex’s vicarious descriptions, a Shangri-La where, apparently, the silence is absolute, the terrain timeless. He told Pollex on more than one occasion that the allegory of the couple not making it to the hills was strained, that why describe it all if no action takes place there. But as with other counsel he offered during their early editorial exchanges, the sales of Lucca’s predecessor allowed Pollex to resist.

  He takes a long drink from a fountain in the piazza, the water rarefied, seemingly ancient, and he imagines it cleansing him of toxins and memories, imagines remaining under its flow for the rest of the day. It is only when his stomach swells in discomfort and he senses an audience that he withdraws his head and converges on a nearby café.

  He orders a coffee in Italian, the waiter responding in English. What is it they pick up on? The attire, the accent, the general unease in posture? And why English? Couldn’t he be Dutch or Finnish or Israeli? He once quizzed a taxi driver on the matter the only other time he’d visited the country.

  You English are so polite, the man had said. An Italian would be on his phone, telling someone where and what he ate last night, which restaurant he was going to this evening. But mostly it’s the shoes. You wear such bad shoes.

  Vero.

  When his wife left last year – a sudden though not unexpected departure – his physical appearance became a source of concern for the first time in a decade, the separation ushering in a mid-life crisis of sorts. Scrutiny revealed tufts of errant hair accumulating from his nostrils and ears, a stomach that bore testimony to endless lunches with authors – a culture of indulgence despite the sus­picion people were about to stop buying books. His wardrobe, he realised, boasted a spectrum of beiges and browns, most of it bought more than five years ago. His hair, once profuse and lustrous, had long ago begun the retreat crown-ward.

  He joined the gym, vowed to cycle to work. Researched what was fashionable, purchased some clothes he suspected would remain unworn. In the end he settled for having his teeth whitened, a procedure that served only to draw attention to the weathering of his other features. Grande cretino!

  Is there someone else, he had asked her as she packed that day, and he could see that there was.

  He considers buying a paper, if only to parade it to the waiter when he returns, but such haughtiness is beyond him today. Instead he sits back, adjusts the chair to be in consistent shade. Above him, perhaps two floors up, there is some kind of commotion, an instant in which the natural order of things is displaced, and he looks up at the blaze of colour alighting from the wall. The departing jay, he realises, has a gecko writhing between its talons, the bird rising in near silence into the thermals. He looks around but is the only witness to this remarkable yet trivial spectacle. A few moments later the jay is little more than a speck over one of the town’s churches, and then, despite the unbroken blue canopy, there is nothing.

  Such a demise has its appeal, he thinks, swift and efficient, a final journey above all you have inhabited, the lizard oblivious on all but the most primal level to what was playing out, its brain eliciting a flush of chemicals to evoke fear, before . . . what? Resignation? Nothing? For his own amusement he bestows the gecko with superior cognisance, imagines it thinking: this is something that hasn’t happened before. Of it being thrilled by this novel vantage point.

  The waiter places his coffee down wordlessly, attends to another table. The absence of insincere small talk found in other countries is, he has discovered, refreshing, allowing him to fully attend to the melancholy. Pollex’s couple had been here a little later in the year, when the town was immersed in its month of celebrations, the climax of which is the procession of the Holy Cross, a pageant that departs from San Frediano Basilica, a trail of lumini, a thousand candles and lamps snaking through the town to the cathedral. Again the symbolism is clumsy, Pollex using the parade to signify the journey his characters are on, the lights, on reaching the Duomo, finally extinguished.

  The coffee, as ever, is good and he senses his hangover receding a little, vows to take up smoking again. He watches a middle-aged couple loiter in front of the Basilica, perhaps on the cusp of an argument. The standoff is broken, their ensuing embrace an extended one. Above them is a golden mosaic, an enthroned Christ and, after counting them, he supposes the apostles. He wonders if Pollex’s frequent references to religion represented something beyond character introspection, that somewhere beneath the surface prose lay clues to the author’s fracturing mind.

  He leaves some coins on the saucer. As young lovers in Paris, they had once fled from a bistro without paying. It wasn’t planned, but they had little money and the food had been ordinary, the service lacklustre and, at times, rude. He’d assumed she was joking, but the moment, fuelled by the bottle of red they’d shared, gained a silent traction, and before he knew it they were shuffling towards the door, giddy with the thrill of the thing, feeding off each other’s daring. They assumed nobody would notice, imagined a gradual realisation at the end of the evening, the English couple who’d had cassoulet and shared ­dessert. An acceptable loss. But they were barely a 100 yards away when one of the larger waiters burst from the door behind them, shouting, running, brandishing something. He’d wanted to turn back, announce it was all a prank, but instead they ran and ran, finally finding succour in a crowded bar where they removed their jackets, melted in to the gloaming with a large group of musicians. They’d sensed the man occupying for a while the fringes of the room, but their cover proved adequate. He never told her how afraid he’d been.

  He crosses the square, stops to watch a puppet show with a dozen others. He is in no hurry, Lucca – the ancient Lucca – one of the few cities to permit this. He cuts through the lattice of medieval streets, imagines Pollex imagining his characters, manipulating them to his aesthetic end. Occasional fissures between buildings afford a glimpse of the tree-topped Guinigi Tower, the town’s totemic landmark, its lofty garden of oaks incongruous amid the firmament. He should climb the steps, count them as she tended to all considerable staircases, childlike in her tallying. Often, if descent failed to match in total accent, she would negotiate them again.

  Did he know even then that he was only borrowing her? If he had, he chose to ignore it, ignore the sand as it fell through their hourglass. The someone else turned out to be a colleague, encountered on a research trip to Mexico; he hadn’t wanted the details but she’d told him anyway. Old love rendered ordinary by new.

  He emerges into a smaller square, a large poster boasting a Bob Dylan concert (though closer inspection reveals the date has passed), another reminding visitors that Puccini was born here. Below them a father and daughter set up a keyboard and amplifier, test the volume, the girl placing a soft hat on the ground. He thinks to listen for a while, sit somewhere, order a bicchierino of grappa. Instead he follows the signs to the botanical garden, judges it to be somewhere he can make notes on the manuscript.

  The garden, a triangular plot in the south-east corner of the town, turns out to be small, the woman taking his money keen to point out that, despite its size, they still have more than 200 species of plant. A pair of sculptured lions guard the gate above her, and he imagines Pollex admiring them. Inside there is a series of large ceramic medallions illustrating milestones in the garden’s history, such as the planting
of its prized Lebanon cedar in 1822. He locates the giant tree, stands beneath it, tries but fails to contemplate such longevity, its silent majesty commanding veneration. It is older than War and Peace, than Moby Dick, and he understands, now that it is too late, her affection for the natural world. On the grass beyond the tree, a small boy is trying to assemble some sort of glider, the child’s face scrutinising the parts, as if not knowing where to start. He thinks to walk over, squat down and help, but deems this a source of potential disquiet in today’s climate, the gesture doubted. Instead he finds a bench in some shade, takes out the parts of the book he has brought.

  It was three days before anyone found Pollex, the garage not thought to be in use. The absence of a note seemed odd at first, a man who’d spent his life curating words, strangely silent. There had been a will, instruction left for the work-in-progress to be edited before publication, ­suggesting he’d intended to complete it first. To those on the outside there had been few if any signs. Rumours circulated, of a writer who sensed his creative well had run dry, who realised Lucca would be mauled by critics. He wrote to Pollex’s widow, offered commiserations to her and their children. She replied, declining the offer to have any input into the novel, remarking that she was sure he’d do a fine job.

  He thinks of how he will tie up the loose ends, wonders what Pollex had in store for his couple; there seemed little prospect of reconciliation, and yet he is tempted to leave open the possibility. Pollex’s agent was equally unaware of the man’s state of mind, could shed no light on what path the final few chapters should take. As for the earlier sections, he’d apply the same process he would to a finished work, asking only, can the book live without this? Regardless of how strong the writing was, how beautiful or poignant or insightful, if the answer was in the affirmative, it was culled.