The Infinities (13 page)

Now she trails along the hall behind Roddy Wagstaff and her brother, the one slim and vaguely beige, the other broad-bummed and big-shouldered. The heels of Roddy’s narrow, neat shoes make a crisp tap-tapping on the black flagstones. In fact, when looked at closely the flags are not black, she has noticed it before, but an unpleasant, shiny deep brown, like the colour of burnt toffee or of the thick pelt of some large extinct animal. This hallway, which leads under a shadowy arch into the big square black-and-white central hall of the house, always stirs in Petra a memory, if memory is what it is, of something she cannot quite grasp, something out of a past too far for her to remember, too long ago indeed for her to have known, in the last century, it must have been, or in the one before or even the one before that again. It is to do with a man, heavy-set, scowling, though she does not see his features at all clearly, in old-fashioned clothes and high boots, standing here and not
wanting to do something, to accede to some request or command, but knowing he will have to, will be forced to. That is all there is to this ghostly manifestation, the man looming here, bullishly sullen—does he wear something around his broad neck, a knotted scarf, or a stock?—on a summer day like this one, with the grandfather clock ponderously ticking and a splash of molten daylight from the open front doorway reflected in the mirror of the hall-stand. She is sure the man is one of Ivy Blount’s forebears. She does not doubt that this memory of him, or vision, or whatever it is, though impossible, is real, too, in some way.

When she looks back to see what the phantom man would have seen—the front door open, the mirror shining—she notices Roddy Wagstaff’s case standing on the doorstep, where her brother left it, having decided he had carried it far enough.

They pass under the archway into the chequered hall, the two young men going ahead, Roddy’s heel-taps suddenly making a sharper sound in this taller space, and Petra behind them, she now with Roddy’s pigskin case in her hand. The air in the hall has a faint sweetish fragrance—dry rot, Duffy suggests, with satisfaction—and the light coming down from the tall windows seems somehow bruised. Roddy has not said a word to her yet, not a real word. She will wait for him to look at her, to look at her properly, so that she is sure he is seeing her, and then she will smile, and not turn aside, but hold his gaze for as long as he holds hers. That is what she will do.

Meanwhile
, on a blast of divine afflatus, I am wafting Adam the elder across the seas to where together we shall invent Venice. Forty years ago, more. It is wintertime, and the city’s vaunted charms are all crazed over by the cold. There are caps of snow on the bronze horses outside St. Mark’s and a freezing mist is suspended along the canals and under the quaint, toy bridges. He is sitting in a restaurant, upstairs, at a corner table, with a view across the canal to where the wedding-cake façade of a white church, which he knows he should know the name of, gleams phantasmally through the midday murk. In some corner of the low-slung sky a weak sun is shining and each wavelet of the leaden canal waters is tipped with a spur of sullen, silver-yellow light. He eats lamb chops and drinks a melony tokai from
Friuli—today he can recall that wine as if he were tasting it again, the tawny flash and oily sway of it in the glass, the sour-sweet tang of the fat, late grape. He is grieving for his wife, newly dead. Grief is the shape of an enormous globe that has been thrust unceremoniously into his arms; he totters under the unmanageable, greasy weight of it. Thus burdened he has fled to the sinking city where he knows no one and there is no one who knows him.

And promptly a stranger approaches his table and introduces himself. He is a long-limbed fair smooth-faced person with a narrow head and high cheekbones and a somehow inappropriate ginger moustache which he keeps fingering as if he knows it is not quite the thing. He wears English tweeds, though he is no Englishman, and an unlikely canary-yellow waistcoat and a matching yellow silk handkerchief that droops negligently from the breast pocket of his houndstooth jacket. His name, presumably his surname, outlandishly to Adam’s ears, is Zeno, and he claims to be a count, though from what line or by favour of which monarch he does not say. He makes polite and easy conversation—the weather, the outrageous prices in this restaurant, the slovenly ways of the Venetians—and presently, after three or four thimblefuls of grappa at the bar downstairs, the two of them are crossing the canal in a gondola. The winter afternoon is all salt and smoke and the harsh cries of seagulls. Adam sits in a huddle on the damp wooden seat with his thin raincoat pulled tight around him. He seems to himself a hollowed-out vessel with something rattling around inside it, the dried pea that his formerly solid self has shrunk to. At his back the gondolier, a gnarled old-timer wearing a short pea-coat over his regulation striped jersey, plies a long, amber-coloured oar and croons
snatches of a barcarole. The boat wallows in the wash of a passing launch. Vague rain drifts out of the air.

The house, tall and shabby, is in a narrow lane behind the Salute. The ochre stucco of the front is missing in continent-shaped patches, which show the brick and clay-like mortar underneath. It is apparent from the dankness in the rooms and the silence hanging over everything like dust sheets that no one has lived here for a long time. In the windows of the living room there are views of the Giudecca and, beyond that, out over the lagoon to the great hydrogen-powered breakwater, recently erected to save the city from imminent inundation, that appears a low, dull silver beading strung along the curved horizon. On a squat table in the middle of the room there is set an enormous chipped marble head of Zeus—why, hello, Dad!—neckless, with a tight crown of curls and a pubic beard, seeming sunk to its chin in the wood and wearing an expression of puzzlement and slow-gathering indignation. In an armchair facing this irate godhead Adam sits, hapless and distracted, his hands resting limply in his lap with palms upturned, like one of the
commedia dell’arte’s
mournful clowns. The Count, who has not taken off his overcoat, produces a bottle of red wine and two goblets of purple Murano glass. He has the blandly unimpedable manner of a circus ringmaster. The wine is as cold as stone and so thick it makes Adam’s gorge rise. Outside, the air has turned to the colour of inky water. In a window opposite him the parchment-brown dome of the Salute looms. He feels spongy and raw all over, he has felt like this for a fortnight, sodden with grief, flayed by guilt. He had always thought bereavement would be an inward process only, a malady of the soul, and is dismayed by its brute physical manifestations. His eyes scald, his lips are cracked, even
the follicles of his hair seem to simmer and twitch. He is convinced he has developed a smell, too, a rank hot meaty odour, and there is a brackish taste in his mouth that nothing will shift. And yet, too, he is swept at intervals by a gust of what seems to be, of all things, euphoria, a trembling giddiness the like of which he has not known since he was a boy on the last afternoons at school before the summer holidays. How is this?—as if he had wanted his wife to die, as if he had longed all along to be rid of her. This is surely an appalling thought and yet, at the mercy of grief the inquisitor, he is compelled to think it.

The young woman when she arrives is called Alba. Her skin is of an impossibly delicate paleness—Adam thinks of ice, of breathed-on glass, of the cool hard creamy-silver sheen of a pearl. She perches on the arm of his chair. Her gaze moves here and there, settling with mothlike inconsequence on random objects, his wine glass on the table, the frayed edge of a floor rug, the god’s outsized, glaring head. She has a look, at once dreamy and expectant, as if she were awaiting the imminent arrival of some as yet unguessed-at, marvellous thing. When she shifts her position on the chair-arm and puts a hand briefly on Adam’s shoulder to steady herself he twitches as if a ghost had touched him. The Count beams upon them both and seems mentally to rub his hands.

The bedroom is bare of all furniture save a large low square bed with a not entirely clean white cover and no pillows; above it on the whitewashed wall hangs an iron crucifix, which instead of a crucified Christ has four studs of ruby glass set one into each of its extremities. Adam savours the sudden candour of being with a stranger in a strange room, unclothed, in broad or at least broadish daylight; how cool the air feels against his skin, how
poised the stillness, poised and somehow archaic. Alba has stepped out of her dress in one flowing, stylised movement, like a torero, the object of all eyes, trailing his cape in the dust before the baffled bull; underneath, she is naked. She looks to the side, downwards; her eyelids are so shinily pale and fine that Adam can see clearly all the tiny veins in them, blue as lapis. He takes a floating step forward until his chest is barely touching the tips of her nipples, behind which he senses all the gravid tremulousness of her breasts. She puts her hands flat against his chest and leans into him in the simulacrum of a swoon, making a mewling sound. Her hips are goosefleshed and he can feel all the tiny hairs erect on her forearms. When he kisses her hot, soft mouth, which is bruised a little at one corner, he knows at once that she has been with another man, and recently—faint as it is there is no mistaking that tang of fish-slime and sawdust—for he has no doubt that this is the mouth of a busy working girl. He does not mind.

They conduct there, on that white bed, under the rubied iron cross, a fair imitation of a passionate dalliance, a repeated toing and froing on the edge of a precipice beyond which can be glimpsed a dark-green distance in a reeking mist and something shining out at them, a pulsing point of light, peremptory and intense. His heart rattles in its cage, a vein beats at his temple like a slow tom-tom. When they are spent at last, and that beacon in the jungle has been turned low again, they lie together contentedly in a tangle of arms and legs and talk of this and that, in their own languages, each understanding hardly a word of what the other says. Alba, twisting a lock of her hair round and round a finger, pauses now and then to explore with the tip of an agile tongue the mauve bruise at the side of her mouth. She is from
somewhere in the north—she waves towards the window behind her, showing him a damp, unkempt armpit—Bergamo, it sounds like, hence perhaps her pale skin and paler hair, for he imagines Bergamasks as blond, laughing types, he does not know why.

He tells her about Dorothy who has died. He marvels at how easy it is, suddenly, telling it all to her, out loud, with not a word of it understood.

In a little while he rises from the white bed and wanders off through the house until he finds himself in what appears to be the kitchen, an odd, elongated room, also white, that makes him think, disconcertedly, of a milking parlour, with a lofty ceiling and a row of frosted-glass windows high up along one wall. Zeno the Count is there, still in his overcoat, seated at a small round table on which stands, aptly enough, a glass of milk, partly drunk. The Count, who is taking his ease and smoking a cigarette, greets him with an open-handed gesture, in the papal manner, smiling. Adam is conscious of being shirtless and barefoot. He sees, in the stark light reflected from the walls, that the Count is older than he had seemed at first. His sideburns are grizzled and there are broken veins in his nose and in the pouches under his eyes. Adam senses a large weariness in him, the weariness of an old actor in the middle of a long run in a poor part. Yet perhaps he really is a count, last of a line as old as the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, reduced to pandering to bereft and needy travellers such as this one that he chanced upon today. He points to the glass of milk and then pats his belly and smiles wincingly and says,
“La solita ulcera.”
He goes on smiling; his expression is one of calm and not unkindly knowing. Adam sits down opposite him, suddenly exhausted, and folds his arms before him on
the table and rests his forehead on them. He is cold. Shivers pass across his back in spasms like gusts of wind on the surface of the sea. Bells are tolling slowly all over Venice. He weeps, making no sound. The Count rises and taking off his overcoat comes and drapes it on his shaking shoulders.
“Poverino,”
the old man murmurs, “you are cold.” Adam weeps on.

Dorothy, called Dottie, or Dot—even the diminutions of her name reducing her to next to nothing—a mere fortnight dead, is already, shockingly, this day in Venice, fading in his thought. It is as if she had not been sufficiently present, when alive, for her memory to flourish after death. She was a large woman, tall, that is, though not at all heavy. He recalls his surprise, the first time he held her in his arms, at the lightness of her; it was as if all her long bones, of which she seemed to have more than the normal quota, were hollow as reeds. He might have been embracing a tall, fragile bird, at once graceful and ungainly, a crane, perhaps, or an ibis. It strikes him how much in looks she resembled his mother, for they were the same type, pale, lean, angular.

She was secretive, was Dorothy, and led an endearingly furtive existence. The house where they lived for the years of their marriage was not extensive yet she could somehow manage to disappear in it for hours on end. An entire morning would pass without a sound from her, so that he would assume she had gone out—but where would she have gone out to?—then suddenly, padding from his study to the kitchen or the lavatory, he would chance upon her lurking in a passageway, or a doorway, or in the recesses of a room mysteriously made deeper and dimmer by her presence in it. She would start and turn towards him quickly, whipping her hands behind her back and widening her
eyes in a panicked show of innocence, like a naughty child caught in the act. When he was with her he had always the impression that she was listening anxiously beyond him for something in the house, some small, telltale sound that would give her away. He wondered what she did all day long. She took up projects—gardening, exotic cooking, carpentry, even—but quickly tired of them. He could tell when a pastime had palled, for she had a particular way of laying a thing down out of her hands, a cookery book, a pair of secateurs, a ball of wool pierced heraldically with two crossed knitting needles, and turning vaguely away, with a vague sigh, trailing her fingers along a chair-back or the edge of a window-sill. The thing would stay there, where she had left it, until by a gradual process of transformation worked by time and neglect, its original identity would blur and it would become a mere object, inert and lifeless, its use almost forgotten, and as often as not he would be the one who in the end would put it away, discreetly, without comment. She had the guardedly distracted air of holding back some large revelation, or terrible confession. In the latter weeks of her life she grew increasingly remote, and he would catch her looking at him with a frowning surmise, as if she knew she knew him but could not for the moment recall just who exactly he was. He would say something then, softly, calmly, and yet would feel that he was calling out to her, more loudly than he had meant to, and she would start, and the light of recognition would dawn in her face and she would smile her radiant, helpless smile that seemed to start from a long way off and make its way to him over immense and difficult distances.