flower, which it cannot have been, so late in the season. The sun of noon was shining, and a white butterfly was negotiating its drunken way across the burnished lawn, and even in my anxiety I could not help but note the strikingly formal, the almost classical, composition of the scene, the two young figures there, arms hieratically lifted between them, his hands clasping her wrists, with the garden all around them, in the blue and gold light of summer, two wild things, nymph and faun, struggling in the midst of subdued nature, like an old master’s illustration of a moment out of Ovid. Cass was at her most feral, and I think the poor fellow was more than anything amazed to be so violently tackled, otherwise God knows what he might have done, for he looked to be as strong as an ape. I was still sprinting down the garden path, bits of gravel flying out from under my heels like bullets, when with a great heave he lifted her bodily by the wrists and set her behind him like a sack of not very heavy stuff, and resumed his dogged way toward the house. For the first time then they both noticed me. Cass gave an odd sharp cough of laughter. The boy’s step faltered, and he stopped, and as I drew level with him he moved aside deferentially on to the grass to let me go past. As I did, I caught his eye. Cass was trembling, and her mouth was working in that awful sideways shunting movement that it did when she was most intensely agitated. Fearing a seizure was imminent I put my arms about her and held her, resisting, against me, shocked as always by the mixture of tenseness, of fierceness and of frailty that she is; I might have been embracing a bird of prey. The boy was looking all about the garden now, at everything except us, with what in another would have been an expression of profound embarrassment. I spoke to him, something foolish and stilted, hearing myself stammer. He made no response, and suddenly turned and loped away, silent and swift, and leapt the low wall on to the harbour road, and was gone. I led Cass to the house. The crisis in her had passed. She was limp now, and I almost had to hold her up. She was muttering under her breath, inveighing against me, as usual, swearing at me and weeping in fury. I hardly listened to her. I could only think, in pity and a kind of crawling horror, of the look I had caught in the boy’s eye when he had stepped aside to let me pass. It was a look such as one might receive out of a deep-sea diver’s helmet when the air pipe has been severed. Way down in the dazed depths of that murky sea in which he was trapped, he knew; he knew.
I think that was the day Cass cut off her hair, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, with her mother’s big sempstress’s scissors. It was I who found the shorn tresses strewn on the tiles; I would not have been more shocked had they been splashes of blood. I went to her bedroom to find her but the door was locked. By this stage of early womanhood she had discovered scholarship, and spent the most part of her days shut away in her room overlooking the garden and the harbour, reading in her histories, rummaging back and forth in relentless pursuit of facts—I can still hear the flap and shirr of the heavy pages turning—and writing furiously in her notebooks. The labour was at once a torment to her and a palliative. All that summer she had been engaged on a scheme to plot in maniacal detail Kleist’s last three hours on earth, then abruptly one day she abandoned that and began instead researching the lives of the five children that Rousseau had by his Therese, all of whom, for their own good, he had consigned to foundling hospitals. We spent a pleasant week together in Paris, where I strolled the boulevards and sat at sidewalk cafes while she tried to trace the orphans’ fate through old books and documents at the Bibliotheque Nationale. How restful it was to be there, in the autumnal city, with her immured in these safe and pointless labours; I felt like the worldly wise duenna in an Edwardian novel of international manners. In the evenings Cass would come back to our hotel with inky fingers and library dust in her hair, and we would change, and drink an aperitif, and stroll out to a restaurant, the same one every night, run by a studiedly irascible Basque —what a shoulder-shrugging old fraud he was—where we would dine together in companionable silence, making a handsome couple, I don’t doubt, me with my profile, and she sitting upright like a watchful sphinx, that fine heart- shaped head of hers poised on its pale and slender neck. Afterwards we would go to the cinema, or is it the Comedie Francaise, where she would translate the lines for me in a stage whisper that on one occasion almost got us thrown out of the theatre. In the end, of course, her project on the philosopher’s misfortunate children came to nothing; the offspring of the great leave scant trace upon the page of history. I still have a bundle of foolscap sheets scrawled with notes in her disordered, very black, barbed-wire hand. They are already decaying at the edges.
Lily has been scrabbling at my door, wanting me to take her to the circus. I can hear faintly the tinny music that has been blaring out from tannoys this past hour, interspersed with frantically enticing announcements of the Grand Opening Performance, which is to begin at noon. I told her repeatedly to go away. The circus, indeed—what next? Perhaps she thinks I really do want to adopt her, not realising that my heart is as hard as Jean Jacques’s ever was. She whined and wheedled for a time, then went off muttering. She is a little wary of me, I think, when I am up here in my alchemist’s cell, busy about these mysterious scribblings. There is something at once unsettling and tantalising about a locked door with someone sitting behind it hour on hour in silence. When I knocked at Cass’s room that day, standing in the corridor clutching a hank of her hair, I had the feeling that I always had on such occasions, a mingling of dread and vexation, and a peculiar, stifled excitedness—Cass, after all, is capable of anything. And I felt foolish, too. A buttery lozenge of late sunlight lay fatly on the carpet runner at my feet. I spoke through the door to her and got no response. There was the circus music—no, no, that is now, not then; things are running together, collapsing into each other, the present into the past, the past into the future. My head feels full of something. It must be the effect of the heat. I wish this oppressive weather would break.
My phantoms were my own, exclusively mine, that was the point of them. We were a little family together, the three of us, the woman, child, and me the surrogate father. And what a fatherhood it was, absolute and unquestioned, for everything, their very existence, depended on me. Why now have they deserted me? More—why have they deserted me and left this air of accusation behind them, as if it were I who had exorcised them, instead of, as it feels to me, the other way about? I know, I know, I let others in, first the Quirkes, now Lydia, but what of it? These interlopers are merely the living, while what
She cut off all her russet hair and threw it on the floor for me to find. Eventually she unlocked the bedroom door, I heard her do it, and I waited a moment, taking a breath. Inside, she had returned to her table by the open window, and was pretending to write, with books and papers stacked around her in a semicircle on the floor, her little crenellated keep. Bent there over the page she was for me in a flash a child again. I stood behind her. She writes with violent thrusts of her fist, as if she were not writing but, on the contrary, endlessly crossing out. The tufts of hair stood out from her skull like a fledgeling’s ruffled feathers. How defenceless seemed the suddenly bared back of her neck. The day had hazed over, and the garden beyond the window lay in silence, leadenly. High up in the dully luminous sky, immensely far, the swifts, those sharks of the air, were acrobatically at feed. At last she paused and looked up, not at me, but at the world outside, her pen suspended aloft like a dart she was about to throw. When she frowns, the pale patch of skin above each ear develops a wrinkle, an effect I had not seen since she was an infant. The swathe of hair I was holding had a cold, silken, inhuman texture; I laid it on the table beside her elbow.
“Did you tell her?” she said.
“Your mother? No.”
I was remembering, I am not sure why, the afternoons when I used to collect her from the music academy. She was nine that year. She had decided she wanted to learn to play the piano, it was one of her whims. She had no aptitude. She kept at it through a whole winter, though. I would wait for her in the draughty vestibule, vacantly reading the announcements on the notice board, while other pupils came and went, the quiffed mama’s boys with their violin cases like miniature coffins, the girls pasty and glowering, in awkward shoes. Every time the swing door opened a flurry of damp wind would burst in and make a rowdy scene for a moment before being subdued by the gauntly disapproving atmosphere. Now and then one of the teachers would come wandering through, dowdy in tweed skirts and sensible shoes or fingering a despondent tie, distracted, bored, irritable, all of them always seemingly in search of something they had mislaid. There was a touch of bedlam to the place. A soprano’s sudden shriek from some high chamber within would rip the air redly, or a drum-roll would come pounding down the stairs like the footfalls of a rotund inmate making a bid for freedom. Five-finger exercises tinkled, precise, monotonous and insane. At the end of her lesson Cass somehow always contrived to appear from an unexpected direction, up the narrow basement steps when I was watching the double doors of frosted glass that led to the concert room, or from the concert room itself when I had thought she would have been upstairs. How small she looked in those surroundings, under the dusty chandelier, glared at from their shadowy niches by laurel-wreathed busts of the great composers. She would advance with a quick yet somehow hesitating step, shyly, wearing an unfocused dreamy smile, as if she had been doing something not quite proper, her music case gripped tightly under her arm. She
