Athena (17 page)

I did not hesitate. ‘Scarcity,’ I told him, in a strong voice firm with conviction. My face, however, had a rubbery feel to it and I had some trouble getting my arms to fold.

‘Scarcity, eh?’ he said, and repeated the word a number of times, turning it this way and that, nodding to himself with his fat lower lip stuck out. ‘So it’s like everything else, then,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I answered stoutly, ‘just like everything else, a matter of supply and demand, what the market will bear, horses for courses, and so on. There are not,’ I said, ‘very many Vaublins in existence.’

‘Is that so?’ the Da said.

‘Yes, indeed. Scarcely more than twenty in the world, and few of them of such quality as the
Birth of What’s
-
her
-
name.’

In my mind I saw Morden’s big surly face and through the murk suddenly I had a glimpse of the far-off state of sobriety and a shimmer of unease passed over me like a gust of wind passing over the surface of a still pool; dark, fishy forms were down there, nosing about. The Da pondered in silence for a while, his chin sunk on his breast and his hands playing together like piglets in his lap. Then he roused himself and put an arm around my shoulder and gave me a quick squeeze. ‘Good man,’ he said, as if I had done him some large service, ‘good man.’ He pushed me firmly but not ungently out of the door. When I was on the pavement he leaned sideways and with two fingers gaily blessed me with the sign of the cross and produced a cracked cackle of laughter. ‘God go with you, my son,’ he said.

I stood listing slightly and watched as the big pink car slewed into Ormond Street and roared off with a great fart of exhaust smoke. I think I may even have waved, though feebly.

I decided at once that what I needed was more drink, and
set off for The Boatman. I found it eventually, after straying down a number of false trails. The pub was very dark and broody after the brightness of the afternoon streets. What month is it? October still? The barman was leaning on his elbows on the bar reading a newspaper and picking his teeth with a matchstick. I considered what would sit best with the remains of Gall’s firewater and decided on vodka, a drink I do not like. I threw back three or four measures in quick succession and left.

There follows a period of confusion and distant tumult. I stumped along as if both my legs were made of wood from the thighs down, and there was a fizzing in my veins and my sight kept twitching distractingly with a regular, slow pulse. I remember stopping on a corner to speak to someone, a man in a cap – God knows who he was – but I could get no good of him and lurched on, muttering crossly. A patch of sky, delicate, deep and ardent, fixed like a great sheet of limpid blue glass between the tops of two high, narrow buildings, seemed to signify some profound thing. I saw again from childhood a path through winter woods and was preparing to weep but got distracted. I bought an ice cream cone and when I had greedily sucked up the ice cream I lobbed the soggy cone into a litter bin five yards away from me with such accuracy and aplomb that I expected the street to stop and break into applause. I met Francie and Gall shuffling along like dotards with Prince stalking carefully at their heels. The dog’s fur seemed to crackle with a sort of electric radiance. Francie pawed my lapels and kept repeating something incomprehensible, his jaw making spastic movements as if his mouth were filled with stones. I do not know what I said to him but it must have been affecting, for he began to blubber and pawed at me with renewed fervour, until Gall gave a high whoop and clapped him on the back, which sent him into a fit of horrible, stringy coughing. They passed on. Prince lingered a moment, looking at me
speculatively as if it thought I might somehow be the explanation for all this amazing behaviour, then padded off after its master. That dog is going to bite someone, I’m convinced of it.

When I got home (shortly I shall say a word about home) the telephone in the hall was ringing. It had a tone of vehemence that seemed to suggest it had been ringing for a long time. I held it gingerly to my ear. There is something avid and faintly hysterical about the telephone that makes me always wary of it. The voice on the line was already in mid-flow. I thought it was Mrs Haddon. I leaned against the wall and laid my throbbing brow against its clammy coolness.
This place. Trying to murder me. I have to. You must, you must
. Not Mrs Haddon. Someone else. With a sudden surge of alarm I recognised Aunt Corky. Her voice boomed and rattled as if she were speaking from the bottom of an enormous metal tank. I bade her calm down but that only made her worse.

I managed somehow to find a taxi, a large, ancient, wallowing machine that seemed to progress in a series of sliding loops, as if it were spinning with locked wheels along the surface of a frozen river. I sat in the middle of the back seat with my arms outstretched and my hands braced on the plastic seat-cover. Buildings rose and toppled in the windows on either side and strange, staring people reared up and then dropped away behind us like ragdolls. The driver was a squat man with a flattened hat set squarely on a large, loaf-shaped head; he bore a remarkable resemblance to a stand-up comedian of my youth whose name I could not remember. He crouched over the steering wheel with his nose almost touching the windscreen. He seemed to be very cross and I wondered uneasily if when I had first got in I had said something to offend him that I had since forgotten. We slalomed on to the coast road. The sun was muffled in strands of insubstantial cloud and there was an unearthly,
creamy luminance on the sea. The effects of the alcohol were fading and the acid of dread began to eat into my befuddled understanding. Hesitantly my mind reached out a feeler and touched this and that fizzing contact point – the pictures, Inspector Hackett, the Da and the Da’s musclebound minder – and at each place I experienced a sharp little shock of fright.

We laboured up the hill road, gears groaning, and came to a slipping stop outside The Cypresses. I got out and spoke into the microphone and heard the lock disengage. How high up here we seemed, almost airborne. A seagull hanging overhead made a raucous, cackling noise disturbingly reminiscent of the Da’s cracked laugh. When we arrived at the house the driver objected when I asked him to wait, but in the end he capitulated and sat hunched over the wheel in a sulk and peered after me suspiciously as I went into the porch and knocked at the glass door. My eyeballs burned in their sockets like cinders and there was a taste of hot rust in my mouth. The Haddons were waiting for me, standing side by side in the hall, him stooped and watchfully diffident and she staring off rabbit-eyed and grimly chafing her wrist. I could not help admiring again those nice legs of hers. ‘Mr Morrow,’ she said. There are times when I regret having chosen that name.

‘Yes yes,’ I said majestically, holding up a hand to silence her, ‘I have come to take my aunt away.’

This was as much of a surprise to me as it was to them, and the force of it stopped me in my tracks and I stood swaying. The Haddons looked at each other and Mrs Haddon gave her head a toss.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t think there’s any need to talk to us like that.’

Like what? I must have been shouting. We all hesitated for a moment, seeming to turn this way and that uncertainly, then wheeled about, all three, and marched in the direction
of Aunt Corky’s room. When we got to the foot of the stairs, however, Mr Haddon deftly sloped off. His wife did not register his going but marched on ahead of me, her sensible shoes pummelling the stair-carpet. Those legs.

I discovered Aunt Corky in consultation with her priest. Father Fanning was a weary-eyed young man, tall and thin and somewhat stooped, with a plume of prematurely white hair that gave him the look of a startled, ungainly bird. He wore a clerical collar and a green suit and sandals with mustard-coloured socks. He bent on me a keen regard and shook my hand warmly. ‘Your aunt has been telling me about you,’ he said with a curious emphasis that smacked to me of effrontery. Aunt Corky clasped her hands. ‘Oh, he has been so good, Father,’ she cried. ‘So good!’ Father Fanning made a steeple of his hands under his chin and smiled and nodded and let fall his eyelids briefly, like a stage cleric. My aunt was wrapped in a tea-gown with elaborate flame-coloured designs leaping up at back and front. She sat on the edge of the bed with the priest standing beside her; they might have been mother and son. Her feet were bare; the sight of an old woman’s toenails is hardly to be borne. I found myself struggling with a rising tide of impatience, treading water and bobbing about annoyingly. I greeted my aunt in a level, accusing voice, and Mrs Haddon, as if she had been awaiting this cue, darted out from behind me and shouted at Aunt Corky, ‘Mr Morrow has come to take you away!’ There was an expectant silence as they waited on me. I understood, my mind grimly clicking its tongue at me, that there was no way out of what I had got myself into. A headache started up like a series of hammer-blows and made it seem as if I were being forced to bend towards the floor in definite but imperceptible stages. I asked Aunt Corky brusquely if she was ready. She glanced at me wildly and a shadow of panic, I thought, passed over her face. Mrs Haddon was suddenly brisk. ‘She’s all packed and ready,’
she said to me, and went to the wardrobe by the window and like a magician’s assistant threw it open with a flourish to reveal empty hangers and bare rails and a bulging carpetbag on the bottom shelf. ‘We have only to pop her into her dress and she’s all yours!’

Sharon the nurse was summoned and Father Fanning and I were banished to the landing, where we loitered uneasily in an ecclesiastical fall of light from the coloured window there. I felt aggrieved and sorry for myself. I would have liked to hit someone very hard; Father Fanning must have mistaken for self-congratulation the speculative glint in the eye with which I was measuring him, for he nodded again with his eyelids gently closed and said, ‘Yes, you’re doing the right thing, the decent thing.’ I looked at my feet. The priest lowered his voice to a holy hush. ‘You are a good man,’ he said. Really, this was too much. I demurred, giving a sort of leonine snarl and baring my side teeth at him. With gentle firmness he grasped my arm and shook it a little. ‘Yes, it’s true,’ he said, smiling wisely; ‘a good man.’ He lifted a finger, with which I thought for a moment he was going to tap the side of his nose at me; instead he pointed aloft and his smile turned faintly maniacal. ‘The man above is the one who’ll judge,’ he said. ‘Oh yes?’ I said. ‘Then God help me.’ His brow buckled in puzzlement but he continued gamely smiling.

The door opened and Aunt Corky issued forth at a shakily regal pace, tottering between the nurse and Mrs Haddon, who supported her on their arms. She wore a bulky fur coat with bald patches and a rakishly cocked hat with a veil of stiff black net (yes, a real veil, not one I have imagined for her). In that raggedy fur she bore a striking and obscurely distressing resemblance to an ill-used teddy bear I had been much attached to as a child. She looked at Father Fanning and me and her lip trembled, as if she feared that we might laugh. We descended the stairs with funereal slowness, the
women going ahead and the priest and I behind them with our heads bowed and our hands clasped at our backs. A vague and restive band of old women waited in the hall to bid Aunt Corky farewell. I spotted the silked and sashed Miss Leitch among them but she showed no sign today of imagining that she knew me. They were murmurously excited, being unused, I suppose, to the sight of one of their company making an escape from that place not only in a conscious but also a vertical state. On the step of the porch Aunt Corky halted with a surprised and even distrustful air and looked about her at the lawn and the trees and the sea view as if she suspected the whole thing was a false front put up to deceive and lull her. The taxi driver was unexpectedly solicitous and even got out and helped me to lever the old woman into the passenger seat; perhaps she reminded him also of some worn-out, treasured thing from the past. She took off her hat and veil and eyed the
no smoking
sign pasted to the dashboard and sniffed. Mr Haddon appeared, lugging Aunt Corky’s bag, and the driver had to get out again and stow it in the boot. We started up with a cannonade of shudders and exhaust smoke, and Mr Haddon stepped away backwards from us slowly, like a batman pulling away the chocks. From the porch the gathering of ancient maenads waved wiltingly, while Mrs Haddon stood to one side looking angry and ill-used. Sharon the nurse ran forward and tapped on the window, saying something, but Aunt Corky could not get the window open and the driver did not see the girl, and we drove off and left her standing alone and uncertain, biting her lip and smiling, with the big, spindly, gruesomely festive house hanging over her. ‘Don’t look back!’ my aunt said angrily in a shaky voice, and pulled her neck down into her fur collar.
Oh dear God
, I was thinking, mentally wringing my hands,
what have I done?

How odd it is, the way the familiar can turn strange in a moment. Home, what I call home, took one look at Aunt
Corky and went into a sulk from which it has not yet fully emerged. I felt like an errant husband coming back from a night on the tiles with a doxy hanging on his arm. My flat is on the third floor of a big old crumbling narrow house on a tree-lined, birded street with a church at one end and a cream-painted, uncannily silent convent at the other. I inherited the place from another, real aunt, who died here, sitting alone at the window in the quiet of a summer Sunday evening. You will want to know these details, I hope. I have two big, gaunt rooms, one giving on to the street and the other overlooking an untended, narrow and somehow malignant-looking back garden. There is a partitioned-off kitchen, and a bathroom one flight down on the return. I should have brought you here, I should have brought you here once at least, so you could have left your prints on the place. The other tenants … no, never mind the other tenants. Brown light stands motionless on the stairs and everywhere there is the treacly smell of over-used air. We are a quiet house. By day despite the traffic noises we can hear faintly the tiny, dry staccato of typewriters in the offices on either side of us, though lately these lovely machines, which always make me think of the spoked car-wheels and cinema organs of my childhood, are being replaced increasingly by computers, whose keyboards produce a loose clatter like the sound of false teeth rattling. I like, or liked (your going took the savour from things), the vast, useless sideboard, the blue-black circular table with its breathed-on, plumbeous bloom, the dining chairs standing poised and wary like forest animals, the startled mirrors, the carpets that still smell of my dead aunt’s dead cats. These rooms have a secret life of their own. There seems to be always something going on. When I walk into one or other of them unexpectedly – and who is there that would expect me? – I always have the impression of everything having halted in the midst of a stealthy and endless occupation that will quietly start up again as soon as
I am out of earshot. It is like living in the innards of a vast, silent and slightly defective clock. Aunt Corky, when we had finally negotiated the three flights of stairs – it is evening by now – looked about her in the half-light with a last reserve of brightness and said, ‘Oh: Berlin!’ and like a surly child the place turned its back on her, and on me.