Mefisto (21 page)

I got her to the front room and put her on the sofa, propped against the armrest. Her head kept slipping down. I must have stood there for a long time, transfixed, just looking at her. Then I strode into the kitchen and back again, to the bedrooms, wringing my hands, looking for I don’t know what. I brought her ragged fur coat and wrapped it around her. I think I was talking to her all the while, I recall dimly the dull blare of a voice in the background, cajoling and hectoring, it can only have been mine. I recall too the Parisian delicacy of the spring morning, with faint traffic sounds and the clatter of pigeons, a puff of white cloud in the corner of the window, that big pale parallelogram of sunlight on the floor at my feet.

Then the ambulance arrived, and a curious, dreamy lentor took hold of everything. I suppose I expected a great commotion, sirens and the screech of brakes, boots on the stairs, shouts. Instead there was a polite ring on the bell, and two cheerful, burly men in uniform came in, carrying a rolled-up stretcher. They had an air of having known exactly what they would find. They went to work calmly, one wrapping Adele in a red blanket while the other unrolled the stretcher. Then together they lifted her deftly from the sofa, and fastened a leather strap across her shoulders and another across her knees, and one of them leaned down and brushed a damp strand of hair from her cheek. She was so pale, so peaceful now, like an effigy of a martyred child. Down in the street the radio in the ambulance muttered at intervals. They set the stretcher on the pavement while they got the back doors open. Adele woke up and looked about her wildly. She clutched my sleeve.

– What have you done? she said in a hoarse, weak wail. Oh, what have you done …

They put her in the ambulance then and took her away. In the building opposite that telephone was ringing again.

There was only one hospital she could go to, of course. I walked, silent as memory, along those familiar corridors. All was still. There were moments like that, I remembered them, when things would go quiet suddenly, for no reason, in the middle of the busiest morning, and calm would spread like ether through the wards. A radio somewhere was playing softly, and down in the kitchens a skivvy was singing. They told me Adele was sleeping, that’s how they said it, she’s sleeping now, as if sleep here were a special and expensive kind of therapy. And they gave me a cold look. But when I came back that evening she was awake, sitting up straight in a white bed, like an eager bird tethered to a perch, with her thin hands clenched on the counterpane and her neck stretched out. The room smelled of milk and violets, her smell. Felix was there, and Professor Kosok. The professor sat with his legs crossed, drumming his fingers on his knee and looking at the ceiling. I paused in the doorway.

– Here’s bonny sweet Robin, said Felix. What, no sweetmeats for the fair maid, no flowers fresh with dew?

Adele’s eyes were feverishly lit, and she kept laughing.

– Look at this place, she said, what am I doing here, I’m perfectly all right.

Her gaze slid past me, it would fix on nothing. There was an angry patch of red at the corner of her mouth, she scratched it with her fingernails, scratched and scratched. She was still in her slip, with her fur coat thrown over her shoulders. She had been pulling at her hair, it stuck out, blue-black and gleaming, like a tatter of feathers. Felix spoke to me behind his hand with mock solemnity.

– She is importunate, indeed distract.

He chuckled. Light of evening glowed in the window. Outside was the top of a brick wall, and a flat expanse of roof with a chimney like a ship’s funnel, belching white smoke. The professor shifted on his chair and sighed.

– It’s late, he said to no one in particular. I have to go.

But still he sat there, with eyes upcast, his fingers drumming, drumming. A moment passed, like something being carried carefully through our midst. Then Felix laughed again softly and said:

– Yes, boss, come on, it’s time we went.

At the door the professor hesitated, pretending to search for something in his pockets. He frowned. Adele would not look at him. Felix gave him a playful shove, and winked at me over his shoulder, and then they were gone.

I watched the blown smoke outside. The evening sky was pale. In the distance I could see the faint outlines of mountains. Adele kept her face averted. I tried to touch her hand but she took it away, not hastily, but with firmness, like a child taking away a toy.

– I have no peace, you see, she said. No peace. And what will I do here?

She sighed, and shook her head, with an air of mild annoyance, as if all this were just something that had got in the way of other, infinitely more important matters that now would have to wait.

– I’m sorry, I said.

Distantly in the sky a great flock of birds soared and wheeled, dark flashing suddenly to light as a thousand wings turned as one. Icarus. Adele looked about her vaguely.

– They took away my cigarettes, she said. You’ll have to bring me some.

And for the first time since I had come there she looked at me directly, with that fierce, strabismic stare.

– Won’t you? she said. You’ll have to …

The door behind me opened, I turned, and matron stopped on the threshold and looked at us.

Order, pattern, harmony. Press hard enough upon anything, upon everything, and the random would be resolved. I waited, impatient, in a state of grim elation. I had thrown out the accumulated impedimenta of years, I was after simplicity now, the pure, uncluttered thing. Everywhere were secret signs. The machine sang to me, for was not I too built on a binary code? One and zero, these were the poles. The rushings of spring shook my heart. I could not sleep, I wandered the brightening streets for hours, prey to a kind of joyless hilarity. I was in pain. When I lay down at last, exhausted, watching the sky, the fleeting clouds, a dull, grey ache would lodge in the pit of my stomach, like a grey rat, lodging there. At ashen twilight I would rise, my eyelids burning, and something thudding in my head, and set off for the hospital.

There too a frantic mood held sway. I would arrive in Adele’s room and find her with Felix and Father Plomer, all three of them bright-eyed and breathless somehow, as if at the end of some wild romp. The priest was a frequent visitor, he would put his head around the door with a conspiratorial smile, and enter on tiptoe, plump and large in his black suit and embroidered stole, his glasses flashing. He clasped his hands and laughed, showing his white teeth and gold fillings. He was like a big awkward excited girl. He loved to be there. Let’s have a little party! he would say, and he would get one of the kitchen girls to bring up a pot of tea and plates of bread and butter. Before he sat down he would remove his stole reverently and kiss it, closing his eyes briefly. Then he would lift his hands heavenwards and softly say:

– Ah, freedom!

Felix he treated with a sort of tremulous familiarity, prancing around him nervously and tittering at his jokes.

– Oh, you have a wicked wit, he would say. A wicked wit!

And Felix would look past the priest’s shoulder and catch my eye, smiling, his thin lips stretched tight.

Adele sat up in our midst, with her stark white face and her fright of hair. She had changed her slip for a satin tea-gown with roses and birds, it made the room seem more than ever like an aviary. She laughed more and more too, but more and more her laughter sounded like the first startled screeches of something that had blundered on widespread wings into a net. Her eyes grew dull, a faint, whitish film was spreading over the pupils. She complained about the light, it was not bright enough, but when the venetian blinds were drawn up, or another lamp was brought, she covered her face and turned away from the glare.

Outside her door after one of our visits Father Plomer hung back with an air of solemn excitement and spoke to Felix and me.

– I mean to save her, you know, he said. Oh yes, she’s agreed to take instruction.

Felix reared back from the priest in wide-eyed wonder.

– Oi vay! he breathed, and put up a hand to hide the thin little mocking smirk he could not stifle.

Then for a while that romping air I used to find when I arrived in her room gave way to a tense, reverential atmosphere, in which something seemed to vibrate, as if a little bell had just stopped ringing. Once I even came upon them in the act of prayer, the priest down on one knee, a hand to his forehead and his missal open, and Adele lying back on the pillows with her hands folded on her breast and her eyes cast upwards, wan and waxen in her satin gown, like a picture of a drowned maiden laid out on the flower-strewn bank of a brook. But it did not last. One day she snatched the prayerbook from him with a laugh and flung it across the room, and although he hung about in the corridor with a wounded look she would not consent to see him any more.

– Don’t worry, padre, Felix said to him jauntily, she’ll find her own way to the light.

That night she was gay, she sat with her ankles crossed under the covers and an ashtray in her lap. She had put on lipstick and mascara, and painted her fingernails scarlet. She waved her cigarette about, fluttering her lashes and pouting like a vamp.

– He tried to put his hand under my clothes, she said. Imagine!

Felix fairly whooped.

– Oh my, oh my! he cried, clutching himself. So much for salvation, eh?

When he was gone she sat and plucked at the bedclothes, frowning. She would not meet my eye. She picked up a magazine and flipped through it distractedly.

– Listen, she said, you’ll have to get me something. That bitch will only give me that stuff, that method stuff, what do you call it, it’s no good.

She ceased turning the gaudy pages and sat quite still, her head bowed. There was silence. She dropped her cigarette into the ashtray and watched with narrowed eyes the thin blue plume of smoke pouring upwards.

– I can’t, I said. How can I.

For a moment she said nothing, and did not stir, it was as if she had not heard.

– Yes, she said quietly. That’s what he says, too. And then he laughs.

She looked up at me and tried to smile. The sore patch at the corner of her painted mouth was raw. Her lower lip was trembling.

– She gives you things, doesn’t she? she said. Pills, those things? You can ask her. You can say it’s for yourself.

She struggled up, overturning the ashtray, and knelt on the edge of the bed and clasped her arms around my neck and pressed her trembling mouth on mine. She began to cry. Lipstick, smoke, salt tears. That taste, I can taste it still.

– I’ll let you do it to me, she moaned. Everything, everything you want. Everything …

I STOLE IT FOR HER
. I knew where to look, what to take. Matron was not at her desk, the key to the dispensary was in her drawer. I walked upstairs. It was teatime, no one paid me any heed. In a hospital even I could go unnoticed. I locked the dispensary door behind me. How quiet it was there suddenly, like being underwater, amid all those shelves of greenish glass, those phials brimming with sleep. I found what I had come for, but still I lingered, leaning by the window. It was a gusty twilight. A sky full of wreckage flowed overhead in silence. Down in the grounds a cherry tree whipped and shuddered, its fallen blossoms washing in waves back and forth over the grey grass. How many moments had I known like this, when everything faltered somehow, like a carousel coming briefly to a stop, and I saw once again with weary eyes the thing that had been there all the time. I pressed my forehead to the glass. To stay here, to stay here forever, like this. To have it over, finally. She was up pacing the floor, holding herself tightly in her arms. She flew at me, where had I been! I handed her the tiny plastic ampoules. She thrust them into a pocket of her gown and stood a moment motionless, with a sort of vacant grin, gazing at nothing. Then she frowned. No, she muttered, no, the room wasn’t safe, there was no lock on the door, anyone could walk in. Besides, her things were not here, she had hidden them. She paced again, talking to herself, one hand stuck in her hair and the other tearing at the sore on her mouth. Then she halted, nodding.

– There’ll be no one there, she said. There’s never anyone there at this time, it will be all right.

She clutched my arm.

– Yes, she said, yes, it will be all right.

It strikes me suddenly how like cloisters were those corridors, with their arched ceilings, their statues and their lilies, that quiet that was not quite silence. She hurried ahead of me, keeping to the wall, a barefoot wraith. She led me to the chapel. It was a little vaulted cell hung with flags and pennants and holy pictures in big brown frames. A stained-glass window, from which the last light was fading, depicted the assumption of the Virgin in pinks and gaudy blues. There were daffodils on the miniature altar. A brass oil lamp with a ruby-red globe was suspended from the ceiling on a heavy chain. The place, festooned and dim, had a jaded, vaguely sybaritic air, like the tent of a desert chieftain. There was a smell of wood and wax. The silence here too was somehow murmurous, as if thronged with lingering echoes. Adele reached behind a picture of a skewered St Sebastian and brought out a plastic bag that had been taped with sticking plaster to the back of the frame. We stood for a moment in the holy hush, with our heads together, admiring her treasures. There was a little bottle and a spoon, a rubber dropper, and a disposable syringe, its needle bent, that she had salvaged from a waste bin. I was thinking of another occasion, when we had stood like this, in each other’s warmth, our breath mingling. Outside the wind was blowing. Her hands trembled. The wounded saint considered us with his level, sad, lascivious gaze.