Mefisto (5 page)

Mr Kasperl came in from Ashburn to the hotel every morning and sat in the dining room for an hour, drinking coffee and brooding by the window. People passing by in the street peered in at him, not inquisitively, but with a faint, dreamy smile, forgetting themselves. It was as if something such as he had long been expected, and now it had arrived at last, and was only a little disappointing. Sometimes Felix came with him, and prowled about the hotel with his hands in his pockets, talking to the waitresses and the kitchen staff and the girls who did the beds. He made them laugh. He had an actorly way of speaking, in asides, as it were, as if for the benefit of an invisible audience. He put on different voices too, it was hard to know which one was his own. When he told a joke he would laugh and laugh, and go on laughing after everyone else had fallen uneasily silent, as if there were behind the joke something far funnier that only he knew. He was a scream, everyone said so. Only Mr Kasperl seemed impervious to his wit. The fat man would look at him blankly, in silence, and Felix would turn and tiptoe away, doubled up in soundless mirth, a hand clapped over his mouth and his eyebrows waggling.

Aunt Philomena was captivated. Felix and Mr Kasperl were so different from the usual clientele at Black’s, the travelling salesmen and the fat-necked cattle-buyers, so coarse, so prosaic. This pair were like something she herself might have invented, for she was given to fantasies, and saw herself always at the centre of some impossible drama. She shared the family home in Queen Street with Uncle Ambrose. When she came to our house now she wore a look of triumph, as if with the arrival of Felix and the fat man all her wild flights had somehow, at last, been vindicated. She told us of Mr Kasperl’s little ways, how he liked his coffee strong and boiling hot, and how some days he would stir himself suddenly and call for a glass of brandy, and drink it off in one go, with a brisk snap of the head.

– And that coat! she cried. And the galoshes!

His English was not good, it was hard to understand him. His accent made the things he said seem at once profound and quaint, like ancient pronouncements. He was very educated, he had studied everything, philosophy, science, oh, everything! He had given up all that now, though. Saying this, she put on a tragic face, as if she too had renounced weighty things in her time, and knew all about it. I thought of Mr Kasperl sitting alone by the blazing window in Black’s, glooming out at the town like a decrepit god overseeing a world, weary of his own handiwork, but stuck with it.

– What is he doing here, anyway? my mother said. What does he want?

She did not like at all the thought of these people moving into Ashburn, her Ashburn. Aunt Philomena frowned, pursing her vermilion mouth.

– I don’t know that he wants anything, she said with dignity. What would he want, here?

No one could answer that. She cast an arch glance about her.

– In fact, she said, he’s something to do with mining …

Jack Kay snorted.

– Foreigner, is he? he said. Some class of a jewboy, if you ask me.

The subject had provoked in him a mysterious, smouldering rage. Aunt Philomena delicately ignored him.

– An engineer, I believe, she said mildly.

– Engineer, my arse! Jack Kay shouted, and struck his fist on the arm of his rocking-chair.

He glared around him. A dribble of spit had run down his chin. He sucked it up angrily. There was silence. Aunt Philomena cleared her throat and lifted her eyebrows, touching a fingertip to her blue-black perm, to the hem of her skirt, to the mole on her humid upper lip.

– Well! she said softly, expelling a breath, and rose haughtily, like a ship’s figurehead, and swept out of the house.

I WENT OUT TO
Ashburn day after day, and crouched in the little grove above the sunlit meadow. It was there that the girl found me, as I hoped, no, as I knew she would, came up behind me without a sound one afternoon and put her hand on my shoulder. I turned, I could feel my face grinning madly. She stood very close to me, examining me intently with her eager, lopsided smile, and made a sort of mewling sound at the back of her throat. I felt as if I had come face to face with a creature of the wild, a deer, perhaps, or a large, delicate, fearless bird. I started to say something, but she shook her head, and touched a finger lightly to her ear and lips, to show me she was deaf, and could not speak.

She stepped away from me through the young trees, looking back and gesturing for me to follow. I hesitated, and she nodded vigorously, beckoning and smiling. She wore the same flowered skirt she was wearing the first time I saw her, and a white blouse damp-stained at the armpits. We walked up the meadow. The day was hot, with a listless breeze. Everything seemed to quiver faintly, the air, the grass, the very trunks of the trees, as if all had been struck a huge, soft blow. I glanced at the girl and found her inspecting me avidly, her eyes gleaming and her smiling lips compressed, as if I were something she had caught, and intended to keep. The house, glimpsed through the trees, with the sun in its windows, flashed out at me its impassive signal. We came to a cart track and she took up a stick and scratched her name in the stony clay. Sophie. She pointed to herself, trying to say it, the pale pulp of her tongue lolling between her teeth.

We came to the house, and climbed the steps to the front door. Sophie produced a huge iron key from a pocket of her skirt. In the hall a rhomb of sunlight basked on the floor, like a reclining acrobat. The wallpaper hung down in strips, stirring now in the draught from the doorway like bleached palm-fronds. There was a dry, brownish smell, as of something that had finished rotting and turned to dust. On the threshold a barrier seemed to part before me, an invisible membrane. The air was cool and dry. There was no sign of life. Dust lay everywhere, a mouse-grey, flocculent stuff, like a layer of felt, cushioning our footfalls. We went into a large, darkened room. The shutters were drawn, bristling with slanted blades of sunlight. There was a skitter of tiny claws in a corner, then silence. Sophie opened the shutters. The room greeted the sudden glare with a soundless exclamation of surprise. An armchair leaned back, its armrests braced, in an attitude of startlement and awe. We stood looking about us for a moment, then abruptly Sophie took my hand and drew me after her out of the room and up the wide staircase. She ran ahead of me through the shuttered bedrooms, flinging them open to the radiant day. She laughed excitedly, making gagging noises, her chin up and jaw thrust out as if to prevent something in her mouth from spilling over. I could still feel, like a fragment of secret knowledge, the cool moist print of her hand in mine. I followed her from window to window. The hinged flap of a shutter came away in my grasp like a huge, grey, petrified wing, another collapsed in a soft explosion of rotted wood and paint flakes and the brittle husks of woodworm larvae. Higher and higher we went, the house becoming a stylised outdoors around us, with all that light flooding in, and the high, shadowy ceilings the colour of clouds, and the windows thronging with greenery and sky.

The attic was a warren of little low rooms opening on to each other like an image repeating itself into the depths of a mirror. It was hot and airless up here under the roof. Outside, swifts were shooting like random arrows in and out of the eaves. In what had been a schoolroom I put my hand to a globe of the world, and immediately, as if it had been biding its time, the lacquered ball fell off its stand and rolled across the floor with a tinny clatter. Sophie showed me a narrow room with a sloped ceiling and one circular window, like a wide-open eye. There was a bed, and a bentwood chair, and a washstand with a pitcher and a chipped, enamelled basin. Under a bare lightbulb two flies were lazily weaving the air. This was her room. The window held a view of treetops and far fields. We went along a dim corridor. I glanced through a half-open doorway and saw Mr Kasperl reclining on a vast, disordered bed in his waistcoat and boots, smoking a cigar and studying what appeared to be a large chart or map. Appeared to be, I like that. He looked at me briefly, without surprise, then turned back to his work.

Sophie led the way downstairs again. Little tremors of excitement still ran through her. Now and then a tiny, high-pitched flute-note, like a restless sleeper’s sigh, flew up of its own accord out of her throat. She showed me things she had found about the place, an elaborate doll’s house, a dressmaker’s dummy on a stand, stark as an exclamation mark, a box of marionettes with tangled strings and splayed limbs, like a heap of miniature hanged men. She crawled on hands and knees into a closet under the stairs and dragged out a trunk of mouldering fancy-dress costumes. She watched me eagerly, with intensity, her eyes fixed on my face, my lips. Then she frowned, and pushed away the marionettes and shut the lid of the trunk, and sat back on her heels and sighed, as if these things, these dolls and dresses and bits of silk, were things she was telling me, and I was not responding. In a moment, though, she was up again and running down the hall, beckoning me to follow. She opened a heavy, studded door on to a little room rigged up as a photographic studio. The place was cluttered with parts of antique cameras and foxed packets of chemicals and stacks of glass negatives. The light was dense and still. Sophie sat down on a bench with a bundle of dog-eared, grainy prints in her lap. She patted the place beside her, inviting me to sit. There was a faint, feverish hum in the hot air, and a sharp, chemical tang. Gravely I examined the pictures as she passed them to me one by one. She had been through them before, she had her favourites, a close-up of a stout baby with the head of a blank-eyed caesar, a crooked shot of a donkey wearing a straw hat, a formal portrait of servants arrayed like an orchestra on the front steps of the house on some long-ago summer afternoon. Towards the bottom of the pile the subjects changed. Here was a back view of a large lady in a bustle leaning over a balcony, while behind her a whiskered gentleman gazed in lively surmise at a plump, cleft peach he was holding in his hand and about to bite. There were studies of the same couple, he in drooping leotard now and she stripped to her corset, posing on an ornate bed in postures at once lewd and oddly decorous. There was something sad about them, these jet and pearl-grey ghosts, whose future was already our past. The final picture was of the woman alone. She sat naked astride a straight-backed chair, grinning into the camera, with her hands on her bulging hips and her legs thrust wide apart. Her sex, defenceless and thrilling, was like some intricate, tasselled creature brought up from the secret depths of the sea. I cleared my throat and looked sideways at Sophie. She was watching me again, with that intent, expectant smile. There were violet shadows under her eyes, and a faint, dark down on her upper lip. She had a milky odour, with something sharp in it, like the smell of crushed nettles. Her hair was a hot, heavy mass, I could sense it, the dark weight of it, the thickness. She put aside the pictures, and we left the studio and wandered into a large, long room with glass-fronted bookcases lining the walls and plaster mouldings on the ceiling. The bookcases were empty. French windows gave on to the glare of the sweltering day, making the room seem a vast, dim tent. There had been intruders here, there was a broken window-pane, and dead leaves on the carpet, and in the corner on the floor a huge, rusted turd. I opened wide the windows and stood looking out. Stone steps led down to a sunken garden with waist-high grass. The air throbbed, big with heat. A little brown bird flitted up into a tree without a sound. Sophie put a record on an ancient gramophone and cranked the handle. There was a splutter and a hiss, and a wobbly orchestra struck up a waltz. The music swayed out on the summer air, quaint and gay. She knelt in a sagging armchair, with her hands folded along the back of it and her chin on her hands, watching the disc go round and round. I wondered if she could feel the music, a kind of drunken buzzing in her head, as of someone a long way off playing on paper and comb. The waltz tottered to a close, and she took off the record and put it back carefully in its sleeve. I can see it still, that scene, the shiny arm of the gramophone, curved and fat like the arm of a baby, and the chrome nipple twinkling at the centre of the turntable, and Sophie’s slender hands lifting the record. What else? The way the turntable continued spinning silently, with comic, breakneck haste, like a dog chasing its tail. What else? The burgundy-red label of the record. The picture on the label of the little dog chasing its tail, no, listening, with one ear cocked. What else? The brown-paper sleeve, with one corner turned down. What else? What else?

Felix was sitting in the kitchen, sorting through a collection of old keys of all shapes and sizes spread before him on the table. The room was narrow, with a high ceiling and low windows, their sills level with an unruly patch of lawn outside. There was a chipped sink, and an angry-looking, soot-black stove. The sink was stacked with soiled crockery, and something was bubbling sluggishly in a battered pot on the stove. Felix looked at me and grinned.

– Well, he said, if it isn’t Sweetsir Swansir. Can’t keep away from us, eh?

Sophie peered into the steaming stewpot and wrinkled her nose. She brought plates and mugs and set them out on the table, shoving Felix’s keys unceremoniously to one side. He leaned back with a lazy sigh, studying me idly, one arm hitched over the back of his chair and his thin mouth stretched in a smile. I heard a step behind me. Mr Kasperl had appeared in the doorway.

– And the dead arose and appeared to many! Felix murmured.

The fat man sat down at the table, lowering his bulk heavily on to the chair, which cried out in protest under him. He gouged a knuckle into his eyes, then sat gazing blearily at his plate.