blender with cutlery fed into it, all smashed and mangled. He went to his dressing room and put on a pair of grey trousers and a white shirt that crackled as he shrugged it over his shoulders. When he looked at himself in the mirror he couldn’t stand the sight of himself. His shirt. He hated the whiteness of it. He couldn’t bear the … non- colour. He tore it off, shuddered at his loathing of it, hurled it across the room. He went up close to the mirror, inspected his face, pressed the soft skin beneath the eyes, saw it wrinkle but not return to its former smoothness. Age. Is the inside wrinkling like the outside? Are small creases forming in the brain so that I go to bed liking white shirts and wake up hating them?
He put on a green shirt.
Back in the bedroom he had a sudden memory flash as he looked at the rucked-up dark-blue sheets of the bed. Ines had always wanted white, but he couldn’t sleep in white sheets. There it was again, that anti-white tendency. They’d settled on light blue. Falcon had a curious perception of himself as an eccentric, as his father had described some of the English collectors he’d known. No, that was a neat lie slipped in there by his ego. He saw himself as Ines must have seen him — an old man with ways and habits, except forty-five was not old. When he was fifteen, forty-year-olds were old. They all wore suits and hats and moustaches. Now that he was thinking about it, he realized that he wore suits all the time; even at weekends he wore a jacket and tie. Ines had tried to get him into light sweaters, jeans, those long-sleeved knit shirts done up to the neck, even collarless shirts which were impossible for him to wear. The lack of structure. He liked a shirt and tie because it held him together, made him feel enclosed. He hated looseness and bagginess. He liked made-to-measure suits. He liked the sensation of a shell that a good suit gave him. He enjoyed its protection.
Protection from what?
There was that hurtling sensation again. This time, rather than shudder out of it, he tried to examine it. It was like film fast-forward, but that wasn’t quite right because there was no progress — quite the opposite. Not regression, but stasis. Yes, that was it. He was standing still while his past caught up with him. The idea there and then gone like debris flashing past a window. And where did that come from? Debris flashing past … The dream came back to him from the sleep that he’d thought had been dreamless, which was why he’d woken with a start. He knew where the dream had come from. He’d read an account of the aftermath of the PanAm flight 103 crash over Lockerbie in Scotland. A man had woken up in his house to find a row of passengers, still in their seats, in his garden and … they all had their fingers crossed. That pitiful detail had driven the horror of the bombed plane into Falcon’s mind; it had stayed with him and now the memory had resurfaced. The noise. The vital, vital debris flying past the window — bits of turbine, wing trim — and then thrown out into the yawning night, hurtling through the thin blackness, the mind incapable, only instinct fighting back to less dangerous times, the roller coaster, Magic Mountain, Oh, we’ll be all right, fingers crossed. The unseen ground rushing to meet them. The blacker black. The unstarred kind. Oh God, the whole world upside down. We were never meant for this. What use ‘Brace! Brace!’ now? This really is economy class. And we’ll be
But he hadn’t. He’d woken up. There’d been no impact. His mother had told him — his first mother or his second mother? — one of them had told him that as long as you didn’t hit the ground in a dream you’d be all right. Ridiculous. You’re in bed. The things you’ll believe.
He knelt down and tied up his shoelaces, knotted them tight, enclasped his feet so that they were sure and steady, reliable. This was not a time for stumbling about, slopping around in the yellow leather babouches he’d bought because they reminded him of his father, which was what he’d worn as he worked — barefoot or babouches, never anything else.
It was exasperating, this constant resurfacing.
He went out of the room into the arched gallery overlooking the patio. It was warm. The air breathing around the pillars was as soft as a young girl come to kiss him. He sucked in the exotic air that suddenly filled his head with the scent of possibility. The black pupil of the still water in the fountain in the patio looked up at the night. He shivered. All these houses look in on themselves, he thought. I’m walled in. The sides encroach. I have to get out. I have to get out of myself.
He started down the stairs but turned back to the gallery, to his father’s studio. The drawer of keys had gone. Encarnacion. Strange, he thought, with a name like that and I so rarely see her. Here she is, supposedly endlessly assuming bodily form, but she never appears. I only see evidence of her activity. He walked to the gate because he could see now that a key had been left in the lock and hanging from a piece of string, another key. He stroked his palms with the tips of his fingers. Damp. His hands had always been dry and cool. Ines had remarked on it. When they were lovers he used to be able to just run his hands down her hot back and it would make her press her stomach into the bed, push her bottom up to him, offer her sex to him. Those cool, dry hands on her skin. By the end of their marriage she was calling him the fishmonger. ‘Don’t touch me with those blocks of ice!’
He turned the key. One, two and a half. The latch clicked open. The door swung noiselessly. Who had oiled those hinges? The fantastic Encarnacion? His heart pounded as if he knew something was about to happen. He took the key from the lock, closed the wrought-iron gate.
At this end of the gallery his father had put bars over the openings of the arches, obsessed with security as he always was. Falcon walked the length of it, the flat black water of the fountain rippling in his vision. He paced back to the door in the middle, the heavy mahogany door with its prominent panels jutting out, saying ‘Do not enter’ or perhaps even more demanding: ‘Do not enter unprepared’.
The second key slid into the lock, turned easily. It was all encouraging. He pushed on the heavy door, the first resistance. It opened on an absurd creak, like a vampire’s coffin. He giggled. Nervous as Leda when she saw that swan bracing its wings. One of his father’s little jokes about women who trembled under the surge of his charisma. He fumbled for the switch.
A huge empty wall spattered with paint came up under the halogen glare of the lights. The end where his father used to work. Five metres by four metres of worked-on wall. The vestiges of four canvas squares seemed to float under the dribbles and slashes of paint. One end of the wall closest to the window was almost totally black, thick with paint as if he’d worked there on ideas crowded with pending doom. There was a predominance of red over the rest of the wall, which was not a colour that had featured much in any of his work since the Tangier nudes — voluptuous lines laid over blocks of Moroccan colour — touareg blue, desert ochre, raw sienna, terracotta and then the reds, the whole range of blood reds from capillary crimson, to vein vermilion, to deep arterial amaranthine. They all said it was in the reds. The life flow. But he hadn’t used red since Tangier. The paintings he made of details of Seville rarely used red. The abstract landscapes were green and grey, brown and black and always suffused with a mysterious light from an unknown source. Light which the
In remembering these words Falcon had stopped in mid stride, as ridiculous as those mime artists down Calle
