Athena (15 page)

Did I believe her? Did it matter? Lolling there on our makeshift narrow bed in a daze of happiness I would listen to her for hours as she spun out her stories, and smoked her cigarettes, and picked at the callused skin along the side of her feet, now and then glancing at me sidelong, cat-eyed, gauging her effect, wondering how far she could go. In the early days, before I knew better, I would sometimes diffidently draw her attention to this or that discrepancy in whatever tale she was spinning and immediately she would retreat into a sullen silence outside which I would be left to stand, puzzled and repentant, with my nose pressed to the cold glass. I believed you, I believed you – how could you doubt it? Oh, my sweet cheat, I believed every bit of it.

Certain of her more outlandish claims retain for me even still a distinct tinge of authenticity at their core, even if the details were shaky. ‘My trouble is,’ she said one day, frowning as if into dark inner distances, ‘there is only half of me here.’ At first she would not explain, but sat with her arms clasped about herself, rocking back and forth and mutely shaking her head. At last, though, I got it out of her: she was the survivor of a pair of twins. Her double had come out dead, a tiny white corpse whose blood fierce little embryonic A. had leached from her to ensure her own survival.
A.’s mother let it be known that in her opinion the wrong twin had died. When as a child A. misbehaved, the Monster of Missoula, that Pasiphäe of the Plains, would chide her with the memory of little P. (a name had been chosen, a second christening gown had been bought). A. had grown up in a state of permanent, vague bereavement. She was a survivor, with the survivor’s unshakeable sense of guilt and incompleteness. When she had finished her story she turned on me a strange, solemn stare. ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘maybe you too had a twin that died, and they didn’t tell you.’ We held hands and sat side by side in silence for a long time, clinging to each other like children who have frightened themselves with stories of hobgoblins.

There were other ghosts. I recall … dear Christ, sometimes I falter. I recall one stormy late afternoon, it must have been at the beginning of November, when the first real autumn gales were blowing. The buffeted house shuddered in its depths and there was a thrilling sense of things outside – top hats, toupées, wrecked umbrellas – flying and falling in the scoured, steel-grey air. It was such weather as makes me think always of the far past, as if my childhood had been one long, tempestuous twilight. We were in the draughty bathroom on the second-floor return, the only one in the house that had water and a lavatory that flushed. The pipes banged and the linoleum was buckled and often the flame in the coffin-shaped geyser above the bath would extinguish itself spontaneously with a frighteningly understated
whump
. The wind that day leaked sighing through the window-frame and the keyhole and under the door, and the air was gritty with steam that swirled in the waxy effulgence from the bare lightbulb that must have been there since electricity first came to Rue Street. I was washing A.’s hair; we liked to play house like this (and, afterwards, mammies and daddies). She was in her slip, leaning over the big old chipped handbasin and clinging white-knuckled to the rim of it as if for dear life. I can see
her there, the pink tips of her ears, the dark comma of wetted hair at the nape of her neck, the pale taut skin of her shoulders stretched on their intricately assembled ailettes of moulded bone, the slippery, silken slope of her back bisected along the dotted line of vertebrae. She liked to have her hair washed. It gave her the jitters, she said. She would squirm and shiver, and stamp from foot to foot, mewling in protest and cringing pleasure. As I crouched over her, with a crick in my back and my jaw clenched, I suddenly saw my son. It must have been the shape of her head in my hands that conjured him. I used to wash his hair, too, bending over him awkwardly like this on brumous evenings long ago when he was a child and I was still his father. My hands must have remembered the contours of his skull, brittle and delicate as a bird’s egg, with those hollows at the temple as if a finger and thumb had pressed him there, and the bumpy little dome at the back where his hair was always tangled from the pillow. I shut my eyes and a wave of something, some awful burning bile, rose up in me and I tottered and had to sit down on the side of the bath.

A. must have felt that charge of grief pass through me, it must have crackled out of my fingertips into her scalp. She turned without a word, her hair in dripping rats’-tails, and took my head in her hands and pressed it to her breast. There was a scrawny, freckled place between her sternum and her collarbone that I found pitifully endearing, and there I nestled my ear and listened to the oceanic susurrus of her inner organs at work. I felt breathless and hiccuppy, as if I were at the end and not the beginning of a bout of tears. For I wept. Oh, yes, I am still a weeper, though I do not cry so often or so lavishly as of old. Was a time when hardly a day passed, or a night, that I did not shed my scalding quota. There is a barrier, a frontier of the emotions, where one must surrender – what is it: self-possession? dignity? grown-upness? – in exchange for the giddy and outlandish pleasure of abandoning oneself wholly to grief. It is not a crossing I often make. I weep, yes – but there are tears and tears. On the other side of
that final boundary the ground drops clear away and one topples slowly, helplessly, into oneself, with nothing to break the fall and nothing to grasp except armfuls of empty air. She led me back upstairs (my God, if we had met Morden then, or his man!) and we sat on the couch and she held my hands in hers while I sobbed my heart out. Plump hot tears fell on our knuckles, each one printed with a tiny, curved image of the window in which the raucous grey day was rapidly dying. I recall the noise of the wind, a huge, hollow trumpeting high up in the air, and leaves and bits of twigs blowing against the panes, though that cannot be right, for there are no trees in the vicinity; perhaps they were fragments torn from the buddleia bush down in the waste site beside the house? We had a double-barred electric fire, an antique affair she had salvaged from somewhere, which burned now at our feet with what seemed to me a baleful, gloating redness that reminded me of the coke fires of my childhood. Often nowadays I toy with the notion of breaking into the house – I’m sure everything there is much as it was – and rescuing something for a keepsake, that fire, or a smeared wineglass, or a tuft of lint, even, from between the floorboards, perhaps with one of her hairs tangled in it; what I really want, of course, is the chaise-longue, but even in my worst throes I have to laugh at the image of myself, sweating and swearing like a cattle drover, bumping that recalcitrant big brute down endless flights of stairs. All the same, what would I not give to be able to throw myself down on my face upon it now and breathe deep its fusty, exhausted, heartbreaking smell.

My memory is up to its tricks again, conflating separate occasions, for now as I sit there weeping with A. beside me it is I who am undressed, under the cheap bathrobe that she had bought for me, while she is got up for outdoors in one of her expensive black suits and a pair of those needle-sharp high-heeled shoes the sound of which on bare wooden floors still tick-tocks in my dreams, always, always receding. I have the
impression of a certain impatience, of exasperation, even, on her part; the tears of others, no matter how heartfelt, can be hard to tolerate. I was embarrassed myself, and even as I sobbed I had that hot, panicky feeling you get when the passenger beside you on a crowded bus begins to rave and curse. It was a long time since I had heard myself cry like this, so simply, so unaffectedly, with such heartfelt enthusiasm.

‘I lost him,’ I said, the words coming out in jerks and weepy plops. ‘He just slipped out of my hands and was gone.’

A. sat with her gaze fixed on the floor beside my bare feet and said nothing. Disconcerted I suppose by her silence I peered at her anxiously through the mica-glitter of tears; she had the glumly patient air of someone dutifully waiting for a familiar and not very interesting story to end. I suppose I needed to impress her then, to do in words the equivalent of taking her by the shoulders and giving her a good shake. Besides, I had to live up to those extravagant tears. So I sat swaddled in my robe, swollen and blotched, with my hands bunched in my lap, like a big, bruised baby, and told her of my poor boy who was born damaged and died, and of my wife, that by now archaic, Minoan figure, with whom long ago I wandered the world until one day we found we had used up world and selves, and I left her, or she left me, and I went into free fall.

I wonder if she believed my tale, my tall tale?

But how good it felt, telling her. The crepuscular light, the silence all about, and her beside me with her face half turned away. I have made her wear her veil again; how like a grille it looks: the confessional, of course. Oh, absolve me!

Down in the street the newsboys were crying the evening editions.

‘I know a man,’ I said, ‘who killed a woman once.’

She was silent for a moment, looking off from under lowered lashes.

‘Oh yes?’ she said. ‘Who did he kill?’

‘A maid in a rich man’s house.’ How quaint it sounded, like something out of the Brothers Grimm. The bad thief went to the rich man’s mansion to steal a picture and when the maid got in his way he hit her on the head and killed her dead. ‘Then they took him away,’ I said, ‘and locked him up and made him swallow the key.’ And from that durance he is still waiting for release.

Such stillness.

But why am I in my bathrobe, when obviously she has just come in from outside? I could feel the little slivers of chill air that fell out of the folds of her jacket (three bright black buttons, cutaway pockets, a narrow velvet collar: see, I remember everything) as she stood up and walked tick-tock tick-tock to the window and stood looking out with her arms folded and her face turned away from me. Sometimes I seem to glimpse it through another’s eyes, that simpler place, that Happy Valley of the heart where I long one day to wander, if only for an hour, hand in hand, perhaps, with my dead.

Day fails before the advancing dusk. I am there again, as if the moment cannot end. The wind bellows mutedly in the street and the window shudders, great indistinct dark clouds are churning like soiled sea-waves above the huddled roofs. My tears have dried, my face feels like glass. In the tin-coloured light at the window A. was turning to shadowed stone and when she spoke it was with a sibyl’s unreal voice. She began to tell me the story of how when she was a schoolgirl in Paris she had run away from the convent and spent a night in a brothel, going with anyone who wanted her, twenty or thirty faceless men, she had lost count. She had never felt so real and at the same time detached, floating free of herself, of everything. She lifted her hand and made an undulant gesture in the dusk’s dimming glow. ‘Like that,’ she said softly. ‘Free.’

5.
Capture of Ganymede
1620
L.E. van Ohlbijn (1573-1621)

Oil on copper, 7¾ × 7 in. (19.2 × 17.8 cm.)

Although he is not best known as a miniaturist, van Ohlbijn puts his skills, modest though they may be, to finest use when working on a small scale, as we can see from this charmingly executed little scene, a curiosity among this curious collection. What strikes us first is the artist’s determination to avoid sentimentality – a determination the true result of which, some commentators believe, is a complete absence of
sentiment
, surely not the effect that was intended: a case, we may say, of throwing the bath-water out with the baby, or boy, in this instance. That doesn’t sound right. Van Ohlbijn has combined in this work the homely skills of the Dutch genre painter that he was, with some scraps of learning brought back with him from a winter spent in Venice and Rome in the early 1600s. We detect influences as disparate as Tintoretto, in the dash and dramatic pace of the piece, and Parmigianino in the curious elongation of the figures, while the almost vertiginous sense of elevation and dreamlike buoyancy anticipates the skyborne works of Gaulli and Tiepolo. There is evidence also, in the softness of textures and the diaphanous quality of the paint surface, that van Ohlbijn on his Italian journey studied with application
the work of Perugino and Raphael. The figure of Ganymede is admirably fashioned, being both an individual, wholly human boy (the painter is said to have used his son as a model), and an emblematic representation of ephebic beauty. How affecting is the conjunction of the creatural grace and delicacy of this young male, with his Phrygian cap and his mantel thrown back over his shoulder, and the ferocity and remorseless power of the feral bird that holds him fast in its terrible talons. In the eagle’s muscled upward straining, its fierce eye and outstretched neck and flailing, bronzen wings, are manifested the power and pitiless majesty of the god. This is not our Father who is in Heaven, our guardian in the clouds; this is the
deus invidus
who kills our children, more Thanatos than Zeus Soter. Although the boy is bigger than the bird we are in no doubt as to which is the stronger: the talons clasped upon the narrow thighs are flexed with a peculiar delicacy yet we can feel their inescapable strength, while Ganymede’s outflung arm communicates a deeply affecting sense of pain and loss and surrender. The gesture is at once a frantic appeal for help and a last, despairing farewell to the mortal world from which the boy has been plucked. In contrast, the attitude of the boy’s father, King Tros, standing on the mossy pinnacle of Mount Ida, seems overstated and theatrical. His hands are lifted in impotent pleading and tears course down his cheeks. We do not quite credit his grief. He has the air of a man who knows he is being looked at and that much is expected of him. Why, we wonder, has the artist’s judgment failed him here? Has he allowed an access of anxiety or personal sorrow to guide his hand into this overblown depiction of paternal distress? Those tears: he must have painted them with a brush made of a single sable hair. Remember how I showed them to you through the magnifying glass? Your breath forming on the picture, engreying the surface and then clearing, so that the scene kept fading and coming back as if appearing out of a
mountain mist. There was a tiny mole on your cheek that I had not noticed before, with its own single hair. ‘Why would he bother?’ you said. So that one day, my love, you and I would lean with our heads together here like this in the quiet and calm of a rainy afternoon and be for a moment almost ourselves. Hebe in the clouds looks on as the boy is borne towards her in her father’s claws. Does she see in him the usurper who will take her place as cupbearer to the deathless ones? She holds in her hands the golden bowl the god will take from her, his daughter, and give to the mortal boy. Everyone loses, in the end. Some little time after completing this painting van Ohlbijn, in grief at the loss of his beloved son and, so it is said, abandoned by a mistress, drank poison from a gilded cup and died on the eve of his forty-eighth birthday. The gods have a sense of humour but no mercy.