Her gaze was fixed on Goodfellow’s face, though still he had not looked directly at her. Now he began to speak, in the same singsong manner as when a moment ago he had issued his challenge to us, but gently, tenderly, almost, in caressing soft insinuating tones. His was a strange voice, mellifluous yet not pleasant at all, wheedling, suggestive, the voice of a pander. More and more slowly he paced, speaking all the while, and slowly she turned with him, and at last they came to a stop, and something moved over the audience, a wave of something, moved, and was still. In the silence Goodfellow surveyed us with that tight-lipped, foxy smile of his that never reached his eyes. Lily’s look had gone entirely blank, and her arms hung at her sides as if there were no bones at all inside them. At long last Goodfellow looked at her. Carefully, as if she were some delicate figure he had just finished fashioning, he lifted his hand from her shoulder and passed it smoothly back and forth in front of her eyes. She did not blink, or stir in any way. Again the audience made that sighing, wave-like movement. Goodfellow turned his head and looked at us with a piercing, narrowed stare. How thin that smiling mouth, how red, a livid cicatrice. He took Lily’s hand in his and led her unresisting to the edge of the stage.
“Well?” he said, turning to us in the audience, his voice so soft as to be hardly heard. “What shall we have her do?”
One afternoon, long ago, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror in my mother’s room. I was on one of my solitary and aimless explorations about the house. The door to the bedroom stood ajar, and as I passed by a movement flashed in the corner of my eye, a glossy start and flinch, so it seemed, knife-coloured, as of an assassin in there surprised at his surreptitious work. I stopped, my heart thudding, and took a wary step backward, and my reflection stepped with me again into the tilted mirror on the dressing table, and I saw myself as someone else, a stranger lurking there, a figure of momentous and inscrutable intent, and an almost pleasurable shiver of horror swarmed briefly across my shoulder blades. I had that same feeling as I rose from my seat now and went forward, light on my feet as Mercury himself, and stepped nimbly on to the stage and stopped, head lifted and my arms swinging a little, in the stance of an athlete at the end of some graceful and strenuous display of skill. Odd, to be treading the boards again. There is only one stage; wherever the venue, it is always the same. I think of it as a trampoline, it has that spring, that queasy-making bounce; at times it sways and sags, at others it is tight as a drum-skin, and as thin, with only an endless emptiness underneath. There is no fear like the fear one knows up there. I do not mean the anxiety of fluffed lines or a wig coming unstuck; such mishaps mean less to us than an audience imagines. No, what I speak of is a terror of the self, of letting the self go so far free that one night it might break away, detach entirely and become another, leaving behind it only a talking shell, an empty costume standing there aghast, topped by an eyeless mask.
I took Lily’s hand, the one that Goodfellow was not holding, and pressed it in my own.
“My name is Alexander Cleave,” I said, in a loud, firm voice, “and this is my daughter.”
Before I rose I had not known what I would do or say, and indeed, I still did not rightly know what I was saying, what doing, but at the touch of Lily’s chill, soft, damp hand on mine I experienced a moment of inexplicable and ecstatic sorrow such that I faltered and almost fell out of my standing; it was as if a drop of the most refined, the purest acid had been let fall into an open chamber of my heart. Goodfellow seemed not at all surprised by my sudden appearance there before him. He did not start, or stir at all, but stood in an almost pensive pose, head held a little to one side and eyes downcast, his red mouth pursed in that smile of covert knowing, like the footman who has recognised the king in disguise and keeps the secret to himself, not out of loyalty, but other things.
Did he know me? I do not like to think he did. Lily sighed; she had the intent, turned-in expression of a sleepwalker. I spoke her name and a little languid tremor went through her, and she gave a shivery sigh, and was still again. Goodfellow shook his head once, and clicked his tongue, as if in mild admonition. He had yet to meet my eye. I caught his smell, a thin, rancid, secretive stink. Behind him, off at the entrance to the tent, the canvas flap hung open a little way, framing a tall, thorn-shaped glimpse of the sunlit square outside. In here, the khaki-coloured air was dense, and had a bruised tinge to it. The audience sat in puzzlement, waiting. Throats were cleared, and there was an uneasy laugh or two, and someone said something, asking a question, it seemed, and someone gave what seemed a muffled answer. Lily had begun to sway a little, back and forth, her arms outstretched to Goodfellow and me as we held her between us. Now he looked at me. Yes, yes, I think he knew me, I think he knew who I was, am. I saw myself reflected in his eyes. Then with the faintest of shrugs he let go his hold on Lily’s hand. She swayed again, sideways this time, and I put my arm around her shoulders, fearing she might drop. As I led her down from the stage someone booed at the back, and laughed, and the trumpeter leaned out and blew a brassy note at us, but halfheartedly. Heads turned to watch us as we went past. Outside the tent, Lily drew back, blinking in the harsh sunlight. I smelled the tethered horses, and remembered the boy in the square that day, on his pony, in the rain. Lily, with a hand to her face, was quietly weeping.
I marvel at the superabundance of summer. This evening, leaning chin on fist at my little window, I can see the last of the geraniums and smell their citrusy scent; the air swarms with midges; in the west a fat sun squats in a sky of palest pink and leek-green and Marian blue. These are the dog days, when Sirius rises and sets with the sun. As a boy I knew the stars, and loved to speak their names over to myself, in celestial litany, Venus, Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, the Bears, great and lesser. How I loved the coldness of those lights, their purity, their remoteness from us and all we do and all that befalls us. Where they are is where the dead live. That is what I believed, as a boy. The gulls are making a great to-do. What is it that ails them? Perhaps they are angels who have been sent down here to Hell. There is a commotion in the house, too. I hear what seems to be a woman wailing. It is a cry that unwillingly I recognise. It has been coming to me for a long time, through an immensity of space, like the light of a distant star, of a dead sun.
5
Swish, and the curtain goes up on the last act. Place: the same. Time: some weeks later. I am at my table, as before. But no, nothing is as before. The geraniums are finished, save for a few drooping sprays. The angle of the sun on the garden has shifted, it does not shine in at my window any more. The air has a new chill to it, there are gales, and the skies all day are a deeper blue and piled high with clouds, dense, billowing ranges of copper and chrome. I avoid all that outside stuff, though, when I can. It is too much for me. The world has become a wound I cannot bear to look at. I take everything very slowly, with great care and caution, avoiding all sudden movements, afraid that something inside me might be stirred, or shattered, even, that sealed flask in which the demon lurks, raging to get at me. Throughout the house deep silence reigns, a silence as of the sickroom. I shall not stay long.
The tragedians are wrong, grief has no grandeur. Grief is grey, it has a grey smell and a grey taste and a grey ashy feel on the fingers. Lydia’s instinct was to struggle against it, vainly ducking and clawing, as though grappling with an attacker, or trying to fend off a pestilence out of the air. Of the two of us, I was the luckier; I had been in practice, so to speak, and had come to quietude, a kind of quietude. When at last I left the safety of my little room that evening, the evening after the circus, the scene that met me was strikingly reminiscent of the one the day before, when Lydia had arrived and I had found her in the hall and she had shouted at me for not coming sooner to greet her. There she was now, again, in her leggings and smock, and there too was Lily, barefoot, just as they had been yesterday—I think I was even holding my fountain pen. Lydia still wore her charlady’s headscarf, and her smock today was white, not red. Her expression… no, I shall not attempt to describe her expression. When I saw her, what came into my head immediately was a recollection of something that happened once when I was with Cass, when she was a child. It was summer, and she was wearing a white dress made of layer upon layer of some very fine, translucent, gauzy stuff. We had just stepped out of the house, we were going somewhere together, I cannot remember where, it was some outing we were on. The day was sunny, with thrilling gusts of wind, I remember it, the gulls crying and the mast-ropes of the boats in the harbour tinkling like Javanese bells. A group of half-drunk loud young men was in the street, all vests and belt buckles and menacing haircuts. As they went reeling past us, one of them, a blue-eyed brute clutching himself by the wrist, turned about suddenly and with a flick of his hand, the palm of which bore a broad gash from knife or broken bottle, threw a long splash of blood diagonally across Cass’s dress. He laughed, a high, crazed whinny, and the others laughed too, and they went on, down the road, staggering, and shouldering each other, like a skulk of Jacobean villains. Cass said nothing, only stood a
