watching for sharp stones on the bottom, with that self-forgetting smile and her skirts lifted to her hips, she was Rembrandt’s Saskia, sunk to the shins in her own world of umber and gold. One day it was so hot that she took her dress off altogether, pulled it over her head and threw it back for me to catch. She had been wearing nothing underneath, and advanced now naked out into the middle of the stream and stood there, up to her waist, her arms outstretched on either side, happily patting the surface of the water with her palms and humming—did I mention that she was an inveterate hummer, even though she had not a note of music in her head? The sun through the alder leaves scattered her about with flickering gold coins—my Danae!—and the hollows of her shoulders and the undersides of her breasts glimmered with reflected, swaying lights. Impelled by the madness of the moment—what if some rambler from the town had chanced upon the scene?—I waded in after her, in my khaki shorts and shirt. She watched me coming towards her, my elbows sawing and neck thrust out, and gave me that look from under her eyelashes that I liked to imagine she reserved for me alone, her chin tucked in and her lips compressed in a thin upturned impish arc, and I dived, down into the brown water, my shorts suddenly a sodden weight and my shirt clutching with breathtaking coldness at my chest, and managed to flip over on to my back—at that age, my God, I was as agile as one of those speckled trout!—and reached my hands around her bottom and pulled her to me and got my face between her thighs that at first resisted and then went shudderingly slack, and pressed my fish-mouth to her nether lips that were chill and oysterish on the outside and hot within, and a cold shock of water went up my nose and gave me an instant ache between my eyes, and I had to let go of her and flounder to the surface, flailing and gasping, but triumphant, too—oh, yes, every advantage I got of her represented a nasty, miniature victory for my self-esteem and sense of lordship over her. Once out of the water we scampered back to Cotter’s place, I with her dress in my arms and she naked still, a birch-pale dryad flickering ahead of me through the sunlight and shadows of the wood. I can still feel, as I felt when presently we threw ourselves panting on to our makeshift bed, the rough texture of her goosefleshed arms, and can smell, too, the excitingly stale tang of river-water on her skin, and taste the lingering, brackish chill between her thighs.
Ah, days of play, days of—dare I say it?—days of innocence.
‘Did she tell you why she did it?’ Billie asked.
She was perched before me on a high wooden stool with her tubular thighs in those tight jeans splayed and her glass held in both hands between her knees. I was confused for a moment, my mind having been off doing bold things with Mrs Gray, and thought she was referring to Cass. No, I said, no, of course not, I had no inkling why she did it, how could I? She gave me one of her balefully deprecating looks—she has a way of making her eyes seem to bulge that is distinctly unnerving—and I realised it was Dawn Devonport she meant. To cover up for my mistake I looked away, frowning, and fiddled with my glass of port. I said, sounding rather prim to my own ears, that I was sure it had been a mistake and that Dawn Devonport had not meant to do it. Billie, seeming to lose interest, only gave a grunt and glanced idly about the bar. I studied her puffy profile, and as I did so I had briefly a vertiginous sensation, as if I had been brought up short at the very lip of a high sheer cliff. It is a feeling I have sometimes when I look, I mean really look, at other people, which I do not often do, which no one does, often, I expect. It is linked in a mysterious way with the feeling that used to come over me occasionally on stage, the feeling of falling somehow into the character I was playing, literally falling, as one might trip and pitch forwards on one’s face, and losing all sense of my other, unacting, self.
The statisticians tell us there is no such thing as coincidence, and I must accept they know what they are talking about. If I were to believe that a certain confluence of events was a special and unique phenomenon outside the ordinary flow of happenstance I would have to accept, as I do not, that there is a transcendent process at work above, or behind, or within, commonplace reality. And yet I ask myself, why not? Why should I not allow of a secret and sly arranger of seemingly chance events? Axel Vander was in Portovenere when my daughter died. This fact, and I take it as a fact, stands before me huge and immovable, like a tree, with all its roots hidden deep in darkness. Why was she there, and why was he?
Svidrigailov.
I intended to go, I said now, to Portovenere, and that although I intended taking Dawn Devonport with me, she did not know it yet. I think that was the first time ever I heard Billie Stryker laugh out loud.
___
In former times the only access to those little towns was from the sea, for the hinterland along that coast is formed largely of a chain of mountains the flanks of which plunge at a sharp angle into the bay. Now there is a narrow railway track cut through the rock that runs under many tunnels and affords abrupt, dizzying vistas of steep landscapes and inlets where the sea gleams dully like stippled steel. In winter the light has a bruised quality, and there is salt in the air and the smell of sea-wrack and of diesel fumes from the fishing boats that crowd the tiny harbours. The car that I had hired turned out to be a surly and recalcitrant beast and gave me much trouble and more than one fright on the road as we travelled eastwards from Genoa. Or perhaps the fault was mine, for I was in a state of some agitation—I am not a good traveller, being nervous of foreign parts and a poor linguist besides. As we drove I thought of Mrs Gray and how she would have envied us, down here on this blue coast. At Chiavari we abandoned the car and took the train. I had difficulty with the bags. The train was smelly and the seats were hard. As we chugged along eastwards a rain storm swept down from the mountains and lashed at the carriage windows. Dawn Devonport watched the downpour and spoke out of the depths of the upturned big collar of her coat. ‘So much,’ she said, ‘for the sunny south.’
From the moment when we stepped on to foreign soil she had been recognised everywhere, despite the headscarf and the enormous sunglasses that she wore; or perhaps it was because of them, they being the unmistakable disguise of a troubled star on the run. This prominence was something I had not anticipated, and although I was a largely disregarded presence at her side or, more often, in her wake, I still felt unnervingly exposed, a chameleon that has lost its adaptive powers. We were due that day at Lerici, where I had booked hotel rooms for us, but she had insisted on seeing the Cinque Terre first, and so here we were, uncertainly astray on this cheerless winter afternoon.
Dawn Devonport was not as she had been. She was prone to flashes of irritation, and fussed constantly with things, her handbag, her sunglasses, the buttons of her coat, and I had a vivid and unsettling glimpse of what she would be when she was old. She was smoking heavily, too. And she had a new smell, faint yet definite behind the masking smells of perfume and face powder, a flat dry odour as of something that had first gone rank and then become parched and shrivelled. Physically she had taken on a new and starker aspect, which she wore with an air of dull forbearance, like a patient who has been suffering for so long that being in pain has become another mode of living. She had grown thinner, which would have seemed hardly possible, and her arms and her exquisite ankles looked frail and alarmingly breakable.
I had expected her to resist coming away with me, but in the end, to my surprise and, I confess, faint unease, she needed no persuading. I simply presented her with an itinerary, which she listened to, frowning a little, turning her head to one side as if she had become hard of hearing. She was sitting up in her hospital bed, in her faded green gown. When I finished speaking she looked away, towards the blue mountains, and sighed, which, in the absence of any other, I decided to take as a sign of acquiescence. The resistance, need I say, came from Toby Taggart and Marcy Meriwether. Oh, the noise they made, Toby’s bass rumblings and Marcy shrieking like a parrot down the transatlantic line! All this I ignored, and next day we simply took to the air, Dawn Devonport and I, and flew away.
It was odd, being with her. It was like being with someone who was not entirely present, not entirely conscious. When I was a very little boy I had a doll, I do not know how I came by it; certainly my mother would not have given me a girl’s toy to play with. I kept it in the attic, hidden under old clothes at the back of a wooden chest. I called it Meg. The attic, where one day years later I was to glimpse the shade of my dead father loitering irresolutely, was easy of access by way of a narrow set of wooden stairs running up along the wall from the landing. My mother stored onions up there, spread out on the floor; I think it was onions, I seem to remember the smell, or maybe it was apples. The doll, that must once have had abundant hair, was bald now, except for a scant blonde fringe at the back of the skull stuck in a clot of glittery yellow gum. It was jointed at the shoulders and the hips but its elbows and knees were rigid, the limbs moulded in a bowed shape so that it seemed to be locked in a desperate embrace with something, its twin, perhaps, that was no longer there. When it was laid on its back it would close its
