Mefisto (10 page)

We all went downstairs again, trooping in D’Arcy’s wake. He stopped in the hall and took off his glasses and polished them on a spotless white handkerchief. His eyes sprang back into his skull, two tiny, bright beads. He peered at us sightlessly, the lenses flashing in his hands.

– And there have been reports, he said. Something or other about money, some sort of freelance dealing. I shall be making inquiries.

He put on his glasses solemnly and looked hard at each of us.

– You will hear from us, I don’t doubt.

He advanced to the front door. Sophie was there before him, she opened it slowly, smiling eagerly into his face. He avoided her eye, and stepped out into the sodden dusk. His car waited on the gravel, a large, gaudy, gold machine, the roof stippled with rain. He buttoned his overcoat.

– Tell your Mr Kasperl, he said over his shoulder. He’ll be hearing from us.

– Oh, I will, Felix said seriously, I’ll tell him.

D’Arcy lingered, looking at Sophie’s tailcoat, at Felix’s attentive smile, at the traces of lipstick on my mouth. He was about to say something more, but a fat drop of rain from the guttering got down the back of his collar and he shuddered, his shoulder-blades twitching like wings. He turned and went quickly down the steps. Sophie waved until the rear lights of his car were out of sight down the drive. Felix scowled, grinding the fist of one hand into the palm of the other.

– How did he get in here, he muttered, that …

He saw me watching him, and grinned.

– Trouble up mine, eh? he said, winking. And up theirs, too.

I HAD A DREAM OF
D’Arcy, a huge figure descending slowly through a hole in the roof at Ashburn, swaddled in his rich, blond coat, his glazed eyes staring and his arms clasped on his breast. Rain fell after him through the gaping hole, and dead songbirds and twigs and bits of paper. Now, I thought, now everything will change, will end. But nothing happened. One day a letter came for Mr Kasperl, in a thick white envelope with D’Arcy’s name and the address of a firm of solicitors embossed on the flap. Felix held it to his ear and shook it gingerly, in mock trepidation. Mr Kasperl read it impassively and tossed it aside. Sophie reverently retrieved it. Among the marionettes lined up along the wall in her room, one had acquired an overcoat and pain ted-on glasses, and a rudimentary wig of black wool slicked down with glue.

My mother heard of D’Arcy’s visit from Uncle Ambrose. She nodded grimly. He would soon settle their hash, she said. Oh yes. She looked about her for agreement, then frowned, and turned away. Everyone was against her. First Aunt Philomena had deserted her, then Uncle Ambrose. Jack Kay’s dying had been a dereliction too. And now she was alone. She never mentioned Ashburn or its tenants by name, it was always
that place
, and
them
, her tensed mouth turning white. Then people fell silent, and looked at their hands, as if she had said something foolish, or tasteless, and they were embarrassed for her. How could they not understand? Something was being destroyed, trodden underfoot. She thought of the past. As a girl she had worked in a draper’s shop in the town. She had been happy in that dim sanctuary. The raw texture of life as she knew it in the cottage at Ashburn had given way here to the softness of silks and stuffs. The polished counters, the brass fittings, even the mirrors, had a satin feel under her fingers, sumptuous and cool. She had liked best the early afternoons, when business was slow, and she was free just to stand in the midst of all that peace, listening to the hushed voices of the other assistants gossiping in the linen department, while at the far end of the shop the draper, a plump man with half-glasses, drew out bolt after bolt of cloth and unfurled them with a deft flick of one white hand, beaming over his spectacles at the customer before him, who stood, in seamed stockings and a feathered toque, humming thoughtfully, a finger pressed to her cheek. But she liked too the Saturday late openings, when everything was noise and bustle, and the wooden cylinders on the overhead cables whizzed back and forth from the cash office, and the air was laced with a genteel tang of sweat. Haberdashery had been her department. She had a counter to herself, fitted with many minute drawers and glass panels and velvet display cases, like an elaborate toybox. She would finger dreamily the trinkets in her care, the spools of thread, the buttons, of ivory, bone, mother-of-pearl, the packets of pins and ranked, gleaming needles, and think of that paradise of grace and ease she had glimpsed across the green lawns of Ashburn.

Then she had married, and one day at the beginning of spring the draper called her into his private room behind the cash office. She stood motionless before his desk, trying to hold in her already burgeoning stomach. She watched his lips move. He would not meet her eye. When he had finished she said nothing. He threw his pencil down on the desk.

– After all, he broke out petulantly, this is a fashion shop, my girl, and look at you!

She walked the long length of the shop, trailing her finger on the counter, to the door and the grey, March day, feeling a flash of pain inside her like a flaming sword.

These are the things she thought about, these are the things she remembered.

On my way out to Ashburn I would stop sometimes at Coolmine. I liked to wander among the dust-hills and the lakes of broken glass, there was something grimly satisfying in such a wide expanse of waste. The lorries from the factories had built up a ramp of sand and rubble, down the steep sides of which I would wade, feeling a thrill of panic as the whole bank for yards around began to shift and slide. All sorts of things surfaced in these slippages and slowly sank again into the churning rubble, rusty springs and die-punched metal plates, and volutes of steel shavings with pleated edges and a nude, subterranean gleam. The tinkers had got in again. Something had happened to them, though. They did not hunt for scrap metal any more, but sat about in dazed huddles, fighting and weeping, and drinking out of big brown bottles. They would shout at me as I went past, calling me a fucking cunt and offering me a drink. They had ravaged faces, and maddened, bloodshot eyes. Occasionally one of them would heave himself up and hobble after me, trying to tell me something, waving a ragged arm. I remember their mouths, soft, shapeless holes, like half-healed wounds.

Work at the mine was going slowly. There had been roof-falls and flooding. The men were not happy, I would meet them trudging home at evening, begrimed and sullen, the whites of their eyes flashing. Felix was fed up.

– Time to move on, he said. Nothing left here. Look at it.

We stood on the edge of the ramp, above the pit-head. Men were coming up out of the hole, others were going down. The lorry sat drunkenly at the side of a dirt track, where it had broken down one day, never to go again. We could see Mr Kasperl sitting in the cab, with his charts and his cigar. A grey wind swarmed up the ashen slope, bringing us a whiff of sulphur from the railway yards beyond the road. Off in front of us there was a broad salt marsh, and beyond that, in the distance, the sea. All wrong, though, surely, this geography, or do I mean topography? It doesn’t matter. Felix beat his hands together in the cold.

– Yes, he said, time to get out.

We walked along the ramp. Below us, at the foot of the slope, a trickle of water slid between banks of smooth blue mud. Once I had seen a kingfisher there, a flash of opalescent silk, skimming the surface. Today the water reflected an iron sky.

– What about you, bird-boy? Felix said. Fancy coming with us? You could be with your Leda. We could go, oh, anywhere. Foreign parts. See things. Wild horses on the plain of Muscovy, camel trains in the Sahara. The jungle, nigger girls stamping around a fire stark naked. Or what about the far north? Eskimo women are slippery as eels, they’ll put their tongues anywhere.

He laughed.

– What do you say?

I said nothing. We went down the slope and along the track in the direction of the gate. I was thinking, I was thinking about – oh, nothing, I was thinking about nothing. Suddenly Felix laughed out loud and clapped me on the shoulder.

– Oh, Malvolio! he cried. Your face!

Mr Kasperl was eyeing us through the murky windscreen. Felix waved to him gaily.

– Get away from him, too, he said, his beck and call.

He took my arm.

– And you, he said, you should get away from him as well. Seriously, I mean it. He’s too … too negative. Me, now, I’m for positive things, rules, order, certainty. That’s how we’re alike, you and me. You don’t believe me? Well, you’ll see. The world is wide. I have plans.

We heard the explosion then, or felt it, rather, a sort of shiver under our feet. For a moment afterwards all was still.

– Oops! Felix said softly, and snickered.

A confused shouting arose. A puff of smoke climbed rapidly into the air above the pit-head, turning itself inside out. It looked oddly festive. Mr Kasperl was scrambling down from the lorry. Figures had begun to totter on rubber legs out of the mouth of the mine. We ran towards them. I wanted instead to run away, but I could not stop myself. How vivid the blood looked, on their blackened faces. They were making an odd, wailing sound. A man whose trousers had been blown off knelt in the mud, weeping, his hands clasped as if in prayer. Another stood and cursed, swinging his fists at anyone who came near him. I noticed he had lost an eye, there was just a purplish mess where it had been. Smoke was pouring out of the mine, and down in the depths someone was screaming steadily, in short bursts, like a baby, going ah! ah! ahh! Mr Kasperl stood stiffly atop a hillock of shale, in a statuesque attitude, fists clenched at his sides and head thrown back, looking at the scene about him with an expression less of shock, it seemed, than a sort of scepticism, as if it were all a show got up to fool him, and he had seen through it. He turned a suspicious eye on Felix, who lifted up his hands and stepped back with a laugh, shaking his head.

– Don’t look at me, boss, he said. I have an alibi.

Some sort of gas had exploded in one of the tunnels. Two men had been killed, a dozen were maimed. The story was in all the papers. They misspelled Mr Kasperl’s name. Felix was not mentioned, which provoked one of his rare bouts of rancour. For days he would speak to no one, but kept a sullen, injured silence.

SPRING CAME EARLY
that year – no, I’m wrong, it came late. But when it came it was glorious. I recall the jonquils blowing on the lawn at Ashburn. All work at the mine had stopped. The roof supports rotted. People said the place was haunted, ghostly rumblings were heard underground, and sometimes at night a bluish radiance was seen flickering above the pit-head. Each morning at nine Uncle Ambrose arrived in his car and sat outside the house for an hour, and then drove slowly, sadly away again. Mr Kasperl kept indoors, creaking up and down the stairs and through the empty rooms. I would come across him in old corners, standing motionless, like a stalled automaton, glazed, absent. A sort of paralysis had settled on him. He would sit in his room with the black notebook open on his kness, staring blankly at the pages. He looked strange, not like the rest of us. He might have come from a country where no one else lived.

One morning early I arrived in the attic and found Felix crouched in the corridor outside Sophie’s room. He put a finger to his lips and pointed. Her door was ajar. She was still in bed, lying on her side, with a hand under her cheek and her eyes closed. A luminous white mist pressed in the circular window above her, lit by a pale sun. Her clothes were draped untidily on a chair beside the bed. Mr Kasperl stood a little way from her, as if sunk in thought, palping his fat lower lip with a finger and thumb. Outside, under the eaves, a pigeon sounded its soft, lewd note.

– Watch! Felix hissed gleefully, gripping my wrist. Watch now!

Mr Kasperl took a step forward to the side of the bed and paused, watching Sophie’s face. Then, laboriously, his boots groaning, he knelt down by the chair and gathered her clothes in his arms and buried his face in them, snorting softly. Felix let slip a little moan of laughter, and clapped a hand to his mouth. Mr Kasperl was oblivious, nosing deep in the bundle of silks, devouring their secret fragrances, his fat old shoulders trembling. Sophie had opened her eyes, and lay unmoving, watching him. Now she looked towards the door and saw us there, our faces pressed to the crack. She smiled.

– Oh, look at him, look! Felix whispered in ecstasy. Oh, the dirty old brute!

Felix too was lying low. There had been a row at Black’s, when relatives of one of the men who had died tried to attack him, and he had to escape out the back way. He was indignant. Why were they after him? It wasn’t his fault. Probably one of those dolts – maybe that very Paddy or Mick himself, or whatever he was called – had lit up a fag down there. But feelings were high in the town. My mother listened to the talk, and decided the time had come to act. I arrived home one evening to find her ironing her best dress, her white cotton gloves, banging the iron down on the board with angry strokes. Uncle Ambrose was there, flushed and frowning, staring at the floor and trying to control the jitters in his knees. My father cocked a wary eyebrow.

Next morning Uncle Ambrose called for them in his car. My mother was already waiting, sitting by the window in the parlour, with her handbag and her hat and her white gloves. It was a Sunday in May, I remember the sun in the window, the heavy reek of her face powder. My father, shaved and brushed, limped down the stairs, muttering. Uncle Ambrose wrung his hands unhappily. He cast a furtive glance at me, his adam’s apple working. We had both been seduced by Ashburn, after all. He seemed strapped into his tight suit. The three of them stood on the pavement in the sunshine for a moment, confused a little by the light, the gay breeze, the trees delicately coming into flower. Then Uncle Ambrose led the way to the car, and settled himself in the driving seat with his accustomed care. He held the steering wheel at arm’s length, as if he were afraid of it, and pumped the pedals and fiddled with the choke while the others got in. My father sat beside him, my mother took the back seat. She was saying something to me, but the window was shut, she could not work the winder, then the car shrieked as Uncle Ambrose trod on its underparts, and the last thing I saw, behind the reflected stage-set sliding on the glass, was her blurred face speaking without sound as she was borne away.