Darconville's Cat (71 page)

  The first snow fell on Christmas Eve. The city of
London took it beautifully, becoming in the pure white snow a
panstereorama of powdered buildings, glistening streets, frosted
windows, and not a light shining anywhere without its attendant
corona. They went out in the afternoon, with Isabel wearing
positively huge mittens, and attended a lovely festival service at
St. Giles Cripplegate, singing Christmas carols, with each of them
holding a candle, and in the beauty of each and every moment they
grew even closer and more in love. At dusk they had drinks at the
Cadogan Hotel where, happier than Darconville had ever seen her,
Isabel wore her golden hair down and the black velvet Russian dress
he’d once given her, with multicolored flowers sewn in panels down
the front. She was beauty appurtenant to grace itself, and for a
moment he feared that a mortal such as she might, upon a
thunderbolt, be suddenly spirited away from him and enviously taken
up to the laps of the bosky gods.

  And then they set off through the snow in the
direction of Southwark for their Christmas dinner at the old Anchor
Tavern, situated on an obscure but romantic waterside lane by the
dark-working Thames. It was a night like nothing else on earth, not
so much for the crackling fire and candles, nor the traditional
rejoicing, nor the delicious fare of roast beef, Yorkshire, and
Christmas pudding, but rather because it all touched to the heart
of symbol itself, foreordained somehow by fate as if to assure at
least two small insignificant people that the possibility of a
supreme incomprehensible peace had not gone from the world and so
perhaps never would: it was one with the other, one through the
other, one in the other, one for the other, always. It wasn’t only
love. God had visited them.

  It was very cold and late when Darconville and
Isabel left the inn and stepped into a blowing snowy wind that
glanced even colder off the river. Inexplicably, he suggested that
they walk up to London Bridge, but Isabel, as her feet were
freezing, suggested they could postpone
that
and
laughingly pulled him in the opposite direction; urging her,
however, he somehow prevailed—and so up they went and, once there,
looked over the water toward the reflecting lights of the dark city
across the way. Without a word, he placed a small box in her hand.
Her eyes filled with tears as she opened it: it was a diamond-ring.
“I love you,” she whispered, her face outshining it by far, as he
slipped it on her finger. “I will always love you.” And flushed
with ardor, she kissed him, wrapping herself around him in an
embrace, as ivy does an oak, so long it seemed she might get the
heart out of him, and there they remained, hovering forever,
holding each other so close no one could have known they lived,
unmoving in the past perfect tense until the bells of Southwark
pealed midnight to wake them to a new birth, whereupon, walking
slowly across the bridge in a snowfall of fable, they went home
together in silence hand in hand.

  The time inevitably came a week or so later for
Isabel to leave, a prospect that both of them, characteristically,
preferred not only not to mention but to ignore entirely during the
course of her stay. Darconville, however, could bear the thought of
her absence no more, no longer; he needed her; and as long as he
lived he would never forget how simply the fact of her needing him
manifested itself and confirmed in him the decision he’d come so
resolutely to make, for in the airport, as he watched Isabel from a
distance walk through the crowds to embark, he saw almost
despairingly, until he pointed, that she had turned the wrong
way.

  *  *  *  *  *

  Darconville woke up with the roar of the plane
taxiing into Washington, D.C. It was just past five, with the sun
westering. There was no time to lose if he was to keep his
appointment in Fawx’s Mt., and he went quickly to the Piedmont
terminal, where he found out, luckily, a flight south—stopping at
Charlottesville—would be leaving at 6:05 P.M. He waited at the
departure door, grip in hand: not thinking of Spellvexit, not
thinking of Harvard or his class, not thinking at all. And then he
was aboard again, airborne, and after a short flight was soon
coasting down over the Blue Ridge mountain range into the tiny
airport on the outskirts of Charlottesville, Virginia. As he
disembarked, Sol went dead on the horizon and sputtered angrily
out, leaving a dirty light behind in the sky. At dusk, the trees,
transfixed, stiffened. His hot heart hurt, so intensely did he want
to see Isabel, and that she was suddenly near him caused a flood of
indrawn, in-winding, inseverable emotions he couldn’t quite sort
out. He forgot his suitcase and only because there had been so few
passengers on the flight was that noticed. An attendant ran it out
to the cabdriver who was asking double-the-fee to take him into
Fawx’s Mt., but, thrusting a handful of bills through the window,
Darconville banged the door shut—and the taxi shot off.

  There was always a nameless air of desolation on
that backroad to Fawx’s Mt. It was a stretch of gloomy, uninhabited
land where life in whatever form seemed long ago to have become
extinct, and yet if one looked closely—up the fire-roads, beyond
the pamets, into the woods —certain wretched dwellings could be
spied: shotgun shacks; ax-mortised cabins with flour-sacking in the
windows; rabbit-box houses with wooden wings sticking out and
draped over with old blankets and faded clothes. And
there
, Darconville noticed, was the infamous roadside
diner: Klansman, I greet you! They passed into a semi-populated
area where some fiddleheaded horses were cropping the mow-burnt
fields, stubbled with straw and bits of corn-nubbin. Shikepokes
flew across the sky which was growing ever greyer. The lowering
October twilight silhouetted the ravines of rampikes, corruption,
and bog, making a derisive comment, somehow, on the idea that the
force that guided nature was benign. In the west, the very last of
the tender light disappeared and was replaced by a misty belt of
grey-green. Dar-conville was somehow only able to discern in the
spooky hillsides and clawing branches styxes, birds of ill-omen,
alastors. It could have been a rookery of pterodactyls or
humpbacked, be-shawled creatures with red eyes, spined wings, and
torturous cries, a world of agelasts and executioners and cannibals
who sat ready to spring. If God created nature, thought
Darconville, perhaps He Himself is not
in
nature, that
depraved place, for want of another, wherein are foolishly fumbled
up the apports of that bleak séance over which perhaps we
credulously preside only to know Him. Another landmark. They were
close now. Darconville rolled down the window. “Hurry,” he said,
when over the hill a dusty little village came into view.

  It was Fawx’s Mt.

  A few hambacked townies in swamper hats, looking
like Chalco-lithic forerunners, were sitting on nailkegs in front
of the general store, eating moon-pies and drinking cups of
parched-corn coffee. But Darconville kept to his directions: left
at the fork, first right—stop. He got out. The moon was auriform,
in its first quarter. A spreading pool of nightwind wet the air.
The blue dusk chilled Darconville’s sweatdamp ears as he wondered,
for the first time now, whether Isabel would take this appearance
to be an expression of his passion, a compromise with it, or a
violation against it: whatever, it was too late. He saw lights in
the house and checked his watch—seven o’clock, exactly. There was a
woodsmoke aroma down by the hollows, and the croak of frogs, a
variable plunk, clung, or jug-a-rum, could be heard across the
street in the glades where old hickory pines and dark stands of
junipers sent a terebrinthic musk out of the shadows. He picked up
his suitcase and started to walk toward the house.

  Suddenly, Darconville stopped short. He peered
forward. Isabel’s blue car was parked in the driveway, slightly
dented as before, but with an uncharacteristic addition on the back
fender: it was a bumper-sticker. His mouth went dry as a limebasket
as he read the words on it—”
Sailors Have More Fun
.”

  Then night fell like a guillotine blade.

  LXXII

  Who?

  The nightingale and the cuckoo sing both in one
mouth.

        —Old Proverb

  THE RURAL CLOAK of blackness slowly dwindled down to
a single figure stepping out of the shadows. Swallowing, Isabel
Rawsthorne staggered back from the door and clapped both hands over
her mouth, her face pale as if paralyzed by the flash of a
lightbulb: a ghost wearing a body. All her life seemed to have
taken refuge in her eyes. She couldn’t speak but with a gesture
suggestive of caution, the alarmed maneuver he’d so often seen
before, quickly saw him inside to shut the door as fast as
possible. Who are you with, thought Darconville, from whom you turn
away, at whom you dare not look? She shut her mouth tightly, her
face flushing with heat, the enhanced beauty which this warmth
might have brought being killed by the rectilinear sternness of
countenance that came therewith.

  It was a bewilderment that became awkwardness:
somehow every move and motion of hers made her legs, even more
over-essex’d in the thigh now than he’d remembered, a perverse
caricature of what once she feared, waterbulge, keech, a symmelian
effect as if the lower limbs had literally fused from rumprowl to
root. Her hair had lost its gloss. There are no faults, however, in
something we want badly, and Darconville hugged her desperately,
closing his eyes only to avoid seeing again what had immediately
come to his attention.

  Isabel was not wearing her ring.

  Instinctively, Darconville wanted to tell her he
loved her, but her face had changed—there was now a force of irony
in it, the almost malignant joy of some sudden but unshared
surprise, yet there was still that dreadful pallor, like some kind
of psychic face in a photograph. He followed her into the kitchen
where, greeting him with a note of hollow but booming effusiveness,
her mother clapped her ironing board shut and discreetly withdrew
to another room, the complicated significance of the look that
passed between the two people, however, not being lost on him. They
were alone now. Isabel did not speak. Darconville tried to smile.
They both seemed to be judiciously waiting out the hesitation of
some mutually pre-accepted worry or doubt or embarrassment that
perhaps it might somehow vanish to ease the historical import the
moment seemed to hold.

  It wasn’t the fatigue of the long trip down, it
wasn’t that he hadn’t eaten all day, it wasn’t the studied
formality he felt all about him, no, it was nothing he could
actually name—but Darconville began to experience a melancholy that
drained his bones to vacuums. He smiled lovingly at her
nevertheless and gently tried to lift her chin; it wouldn’t lift.
The note of the note of a thing is a note of the thing itself: he
mentioned the bumper-sticker on the car. It seemed ludicrous. The
air in the kitchen, however, loaded with the phlogiston of unspoken
words, seemed about to explode. Had someone, he asked, given it to
her?

  Isabel’s profoundly lowered head suddenly came up
fast with an almost diabolical half-smile in its eyes—a look of
hers he’d never seen before. She’s a complete stranger to me, he
thought. She seemed to be trying to control a happiness within her,
despite the fact that he was suffering, despite the fact that she
saw
that, and, more, it seemed to confess with a kind of
premeditated felicity to her own lack of power to please him with
whatever reply he became increasingly more desperate to know,
confirming the face to be its own fault’s book. Dar-conville began
to hear devils crisscrossing over his head. He experienced a
sensation of starting to fall.

  The dizziness began to overtake him. And all of a
sudden the angel, Rikbiel, in the company of his Holy Wheels
descended to try to minister to him, saying:
You will struggle
up from green valleys into the mountains. You will recognize
another valley on the other side, when suddenly the mountain
whereupon you stand shall melt away under you. Then the two valleys
will become just one wider lowland with you standing there in the
middle of it. You shall travel thence to mountains far away to
discover them likewise into disappearing, suddenly find that there
is no end to the mountains, and realize that all the leveling of
mountains outside yourself has caused a leveling within. You don’t
know where you are any longer, but you mustn’t fall, my child. No,
you musn’t fall, can you hear us
? But Darconville knew he was
falling. He could feel himself falling into a monstrous vortex,
reverberant with noise, loud with light. He couldn’t stop.

  He remembered falling a million miles away. He
remembered as he fell slowly through the air how the known
strangely became the unknown. He remembered trying to fix his
falling attention on Isabel’s lips to catch her words quicker than
his ears might as he asked her a direct question. He was smiling,
reaching out for her—but suddenly something was wrong with her
face, a hardness in the eyes, a coarseness of expression flickering
over her lips. Her scar whitened. And then a bubble burst, and then
a world. Isabel said, “I love someone else.”

  Darconville went pale as a dishclout. His head
detonated, like Goliath who took the stone—
thud
!—flat in
the sinciput, and perspiration, like lace, broke upon his face. His
hands began to tremble uncontrollably as blindly he reached for the
table to steady himself. But he was falling slowly, slowly falling,
and, as he fell, he felt his soul fly out of his mouth making a
sound like, “W-who?”