”Yes.”
Danby did really think there was no point in his seeing Miles. It was not just that Danby hoped to get the stamps. Though of course he did hope to get the stamps. Anybody would.
”Do you think he’s getting senile?”
”Certainly not, Adelaide. He gets confused sometimes, but his mind’s very clear really.”
”He will talk so about spiders. I think he imagines them.”
”I suspect he attracts them. Have you noticed how his room is always full of spiders?”
”Horrid things! How long do you think he’ll last?”
”He sinks under a complication of disorders. Could be ages though.”
”You said he wouldn’t talk business anymore and it was a bad sign.”
”Maybe. But he’s got a terrific will to live, poor old fellow.”
”I can’t see why anyone would want to go on living when they’ve got like that. Whatever can he look forward to?”
”The next drink.”
”Well,
”When you are old, Adelaide, you will find that life is just as desirable as it is now.”
”My auntie’s senile. She’s got completely gaga. She thinks she’s a Russian princess. She talks some sort of gibberish she thinks is Russian.”
”Funny how mad people go for titles. By the way, is your other cousin still out of work?”
”Will Boase! He’s not even trying to get work! He just draws National Assistance. They give them too much.”
”He could do that painting job for us. He needn’t tell the National Assistance people.”
”He went to grammar school. So did Nigel.”
”I daresay, Adelaide, but I’m afraid I haven’t any intellectual work to offer him just at the moment!”
”He ought to be in a proper job. You paid him far too much last time.”
”Well, one likes to help. He’s quite unlike Nigel, isn’t he. It’s odd to think they’re twins.”
”They’re not identical twins. I wish you hadn’t got Nigel to work here. It wasn’t my idea.”
”Well, that was not for charity. He’s terribly good with Bruno. It’s almost uncanny.”
”What are Bruno and he always
”I don’t know. They shut up like clams when I come in.”
”I think they’re talking about sex, about girls.”
”Girls? Nigel? Mmmm.”
”Fancy Bruno being interested in sex at his age.”
”A topic of enduring fascination, my dear Adelaide.”
”But he can’t
”We all live in a private dream world most of the time. Sex is largely in the mind.”
”I’ve never noticed that you thought it was! I think Nigel knows all about it.”
”About sex? No one knows that, my dear. You have to specialize. I intuit an interesting and unusual specialist in our Nigel.”
”You’d need to be an odd sort of man to want to be a nurse.”
”It’s a very honourable profession, Adelaide.”
”Don’t be silly. Do you think Nigel takes drugs or something?”
”He is a bit mystical. But I doubt it. One has enough creepy-crawlies in one’s mind without positively encouraging them. Nigel has some sense.”
”Well, I’m sure he takes something or other. His face is getting all lopsided.”
”I think Nigel’s rather beautiful.”
”You’re mad. He’s a demon.”
”I rather like demons, actually.”
”He gives me the creeps. I wish he wasn’t here. I’m terrified he’ll guess about us.”
”We’re quite shut off in this part of the house, dear kid. Don’t be so anxious about Nigel. He’s sweet and perfectly harmless.”
”He isn’t. I know him. He’s bad. He’d tell people.”
”Well, it wouldn’t matter.”
”It would. You know I don’t want people to know.”
”All right, kid, all right. Sleepy-byes, sleepy-byes.”
The image of Gwen moved upon Danby’s closed eyes. She was slowly turning her head towards him. Her heavily curled dark brown hair crept on her shoulder, tangled in her cameo brooch. The great-eyed brown glance gathered him into its close attention. “Here comes your old comic relief, Gwen my darling.”
There was another image which sometimes came with sleep and which was terrible. Gwen had been drowned in the Thames. She had jumped off Battersea Bridge to save a small child which had fallen from a barge. The child swam to the shore. Gwen had a heart attack, became unconscious, and drowned. Danby identified her dripping wild-haired body at the mortuary. It was just like Gwen, he told himself over the years, to jump off Battersea Bridge in March to save a child who could swim anyway. It was just the sort of lunatic thing she would do. It was typical. Comic, really.
Adelaide said, “Bruno told me yesterday that spiders existed a hundred million years before flies existed.”
”Mmmmm.”
”But what did the spiders eat?” Danby was asleep, dreaming of Gwen.
3
Nigel, who has been sitting cross-legged on the floor outside Danby’s bedroom, listening in the darkness to Danby and Adelaide talking together, rises silently, elegantly, his legs still crossed. There is nothing more now to be heard within except a counterpoint of snores. He glides up the stairs to his own room, enters, and secures the door.
It is dark in the room. The door is locked, the curtains thick as fur. Deep somewhere in the darkness a single candle is burning. Nigel in black shirt, black tights, rotates without stretched arms. The furniture against the wall is sleek and flat. The brown walls fold away into receding arcs about the glimmering sphere where Nigel turns and turns, thin as a needle, thin as a straight line, narrow as a slitlet through which a steely blinding light attempts to issue forth into the fuzzy world.
Concentric universe. Faster and faster now sphere within sphere revolves and sings. The holy city turns within the ring-of equatorial emerald, within the ring of milky way of pearl, within the lacticogalactic wheel, the galaxy of galaxies, that spins motionless upon a point extensionless. The flake of rust, the speck of dust, the invisible slit in the skin through which it all sinks down and runs away.
The candle has grown into a huge luminous cylinder made of alabaster or coconut ice. It glows palely from within and impulsates and breathes. Nigel has fallen upon his knees. Kneeling upright he sways to its noiseless rhythm song. In the beginning was
In the dimness he is squatting huge and blocks the sky. Little hands vibrate like hairs but he squats huge and broods on self. His idly stirring foot may crush a million million while he scratches, fidgets, brushes away a myriad buzz of littlenesses whose millennia of shrieking are to him the momentary humming of a gnat which between two fingers he idly crushes as he squats still and broods on self.
The humming light is waxing, the mountainous black is waning, the screaming is swelling into a harmony, a dazzling circlet of visible sound. Two indistinct and terrible angels encircle the earth, embracing, enlacing, tumbling through circular space, both oned and oneing in magnetic joy. Love and Death, pursuing and pursued.
The sounds diminish and in the empty pallid azure the golden quoit spins away. At last, it has become a spot of
