Prince. She overrated virtu, individual agency, in much the same way Signor Mantissa overrated the fox. Perhaps one day one of them might ask: what was the tag-end of an age if not that sort of imbalance, that tilt toward the more devious, the less forceful?
She wondered, standing stone-still at the crossroads, whether the old man had trusted her, had waited after all. She prayed that he had, less perhaps from concern for him than from some obvoluted breed of self- aggrandizement which read the conforming of events to the channels she'd set out for them,
as glorious testimony to her own skill. One thing she had avoided - probably because of the supernatural tinge men acquired in her perception - was the schoolgirlish tendency to describe every male over the age of fifty as 'sweet,' 'dear,' or 'nice.' Dormant in every aged man she saw rather his image regressed twenty or thirty years, like a wraith which nearly merged outlines with its counterpart: young, potent, possessing mighty sinews and sensitive hands. So that in Captain Hugh it had been the young version she wished to help and make a part of the vast system of channels, locks and basins she had dug for the rampant river Fortune.
If there were, as some doctors of the mind were beginning to suspect, an ancestral memory, an inherited reservoir of primordial knowledge which shapes certain of our actions and casual desires, then not only her presence here and now between purgatory and hell, but also her entire commitment to Roman Catholicism as needful and plausible, stemmed from and depended on an article of the primitive faith which glimmered shiny and supreme in that reservoir like a crucial valve-handle: the notion of the wraith or spiritual double, happening on rare occasions by multiplication but more often by fission, and the natural corollary which says the son is doppelganger to the father. Having once accepted duality, Victoria had found it only a single step to Trinity. And having seen the halo of a second and more virile self flickering about old Godolphin, she waited now outside the prison, while somewhere to her right a girl sang lonely, telling a tale of hesitation, between a rich man who was old and a young man who was fair.
At length she heard the prison door open, heard his footsteps begin to approach down a narrow alleyway, heard the door slam to again. She dug the point of her parasol into the ground beside one tiny foot and gazed down at it. He was upon her before she realized it, nearly colliding with her. 'I say,' he exclaimed.
She looked up. His face was indistinct. He peered closer at her. 'I saw you this afternoon,' he said. 'The girl in the tram, isn't it.'
She murmured assent. 'And you sang Mozart to me.' He did not look at all like his father.
'A bit of a lark,' Evan bumbled. 'Didn't mean to embarrass you.'
'You did.'
Evan hung his head, sheepish. 'But what are you doing out here, at this time of night?' He forced a laugh. 'Not waiting for me, surely.'
'Yes,' she said quietly. 'Waiting for you.'
'That's terribly flattering. But if I may say so, you aren't the sort of young lady who . . . I mean, are you? I mean, dash it, why should you be waiting for me? Not because you liked my singing voice.'
'Because you are his son,' she said.
He did not, he realized, have to ask for explanation: wouldn't have to stammer, how did you meet my father, how did you know I was here, that I would've released? It was as if what he'd said to the Gaucho, back in their cell, had been like confession; an acknowledgment of weakness; as if the Gaucho's silence in turn had served as absolution, redeeming the weakness, propelling him suddenly into the trembling planes of a new kind of manhood. He felt that belief in Vheissu gave him no right any more to doubt as arrogantly as he had before, that perhaps wherever he went from now on he would perform like penance a ready acceptance of miracles or visions such as this meeting at the crossroads seemed to him to be. They began to walk. She tucked her hands around his bicep.
From his slight elevation he noted an ornate ivory comb, sunk to the armpits in her hair. Faces, helmets, arms linked: crucified? He blinked closer at the faces. All looked drawn-down by the weight of the bodies beneath: but seemed to grimace more by convention - with an Eastern idea of patience - than with any more explicit or Caucasian pain. What a curious girl it was beside him. He was about to use the comb for a conversational opening when she spoke.
'How strange tonight, this city. As if something trembled below its surface, waiting to burst through.'
'Oh, I've felt it. I think to myself: we are not, any of us, in the Renaissance at all. Despite the Fra Angelicos, the Titians, Botticellis, Brunelleschi church, ghosts of the Medici. It is another time. Like radium, I expect: they say radium changes, bit by bit, over unimaginable spaces of time, to lead. A glow about old Firenze seems to be missing, seems more a leaden gray.'
'Perhaps the only radiance left is in Vheissu.'
He looked down at her. 'How odd you are,' he said. 'I almost feel you know more than I about the place.'
She pursed her lips. 'Do you know how I felt when I spoke with him? As if he'd told me the same stories he told you when you were a baby, and I had forgotten them, but needed only to see him, hear his voice, for all the memories to come rushing back undecayed.'
He smiled. 'That would make us brother and sister.'
She didn't answer. They turned into Via Porta Rossa. Tourists were thick in the streets. Three rambling musicians, guitar, violin and kazoo, stood on a corner, playing sentimental airs.
'Perhaps we are in limbo,' he said. 'Or like the place we met: some still point between hell and purgatory. Strange there's no Via del Paradiso anywhere in Florence.'
'Perhaps nowhere in the world.'
For that moment at least they seemed to give up external plans, theories and codes, even the inescapable romantic curiosity about one another, to indulge in being simply and purely young, to share that sense of the world's affliction, that outgoing sorrow at the spectacle of Our Human Condition, which anyone this age regards as reward or gratuity for having survived adolescence. For them, the music was sweet and painful, the strolling chains of tourists like a Dance of Death. They stood on the curb, gazing at one another, jostled against by hawkers and sightseers, lost as much perhaps in that bond of youth, as in the depths of the eyes each contemplated.
