I stood up cautiously and eased my jacket from under the sleeping young woman and put the chair away and took up my key and left the room. As I was closing the door I glanced back at the bed under its low canopy of lamplight, but there was no movement to be seen, and no sound save that of Dawn Devonport steadily breathing. Was she, too, at peace for the moment, for a moment?
The corridor had its hush. I shied from the lift—its narrow double doors of dented stainless steel gave off a sinister shine—and took the stairs instead. They delivered me to an area of the lobby that I did not know, with a lavish palm in a pot and a cigarette-dispensing machine, as big as an upright sarcophagus, with a darkly opalescent shimmer down its side, and for a moment I lost my bearings entirely and experienced a flicker of panic. I turned this way and that, swivelling on a heel, and at last located the reception desk, off beyond that dusty splurge of palm fronds. Ercole the night manager was there, or at least his head was, in profile, for that was all of him I could see, resting so it seemed on the counter, behind a plate of boiled sweets. I thought of Salome’s grisly prize on a platter. Those sweets, by the way, are a convention left over from the days of the old currency, when they were offered in place of pocketfuls of negligible change. The things I retain, memory’s worthless coin.
I approached the desk. It was high, and Ercole was seated sideways behind it on a low stool, reading one of those old-style comic-books with curiously washed-out photographs instead of drawings. He glanced up at me with a mixture of deference and faint irritation, his droopy eyes looking more disconsolate than ever. I asked if it would be possible for me to have a drink, and he sighed and said of course, of course, if I would please to go to the bar he would come immediately. However, as I was walking away he spoke my name and I stopped and turned. He had put away his comic and risen from the stool, and was leaning forwards slightly, in a confidential attitude, supporting himself on fists set down before him on the desk, one to each side. I went back slowly and—devoutly, I was about to say. Signora Devonport, he asked, was everything all right with her? He spoke softly, with a breathy catch, as if in the aftermath of some ritual of sorrow and lamentation. Those melting eyes seemed to feel my face all over, like the fingertips of a blind seer. I said, yes, that everything was well. He smiled, gently disbelieving, as I saw. I did not know what he meant by this question, I did not know what he intended by it. Was it a caution? Had Dawn Devonport been heard banging on my door, had she been spied entering my room in distress? I am always uncertain about hotel rules. In the old days, if a lady were to come at night clandestinely to a gentleman’s room the house detective would have been up like a shot and collared them both, or the lady at least, whom he would have assumed was no lady at all, and driven her out into the snow. After a searching pause Ercole nodded, regretfully, I thought, as if I had disappointed him in some way. So many lies and petty evasions he must deal with, night after night. I tried to think of something to add in mitigation of whatever wrong I was guilty of in his sad brown eyes, but in vain, and instead I turned away. For all that, however, I felt I had been delivered, I do not know how, a benediction of some kind, my forehead crossed with chrism and my spirit salved.
The bar when I found it was unexpectedly new and sleek, with dark mirrors and black marble tables and low lamps that seemed to shed not light but a sort of radiant shadow, and gave the place a deceptive cast. I picked my way through this dim, glassy maze and settled myself on a tall stool at the bar. Behind the bar was another mirror, with shelves of bottles in front of it that were lit from below in an eerie fashion. I could barely see myself, reflected in fragments behind the bottles, where I seemed to be ducking and hiding even from myself. I waited for Ercole to come, and drummed my fingers. It was late, after a long day, yet I felt not at all tired or in need of sleep—on the contrary, I was almost painfully alert, the very follicles of my hair simmering. What could be the cause of this state of strange elation, strange expectation? Behind me someone coughed softly and, as it seemed, interrogatively. I turned quickly on the stool and peered into the gloom. A person was seated before a small table close by, calmly regarding me. Why had I not noticed him when I came in? I must have walked straight past that very table. He was leaning back in a low black leather armchair with his legs extended before him and crossed at the ankles and his fingers steepled in front of his chin. At first I did not know him. Then a chance dart of light from the illuminated shelves behind me slid across the lenses of his spectacles and I recognised the man I had met earlier at the front door of the hotel, the man with the snow on his shoulders. ‘
He indicated the armchair opposite him, and I sat down. He was definitely younger than I, as I saw now, yes, a lot younger. I also noticed that the bottle was still full—had he indeed been waiting for me? How had he known I would come? He leaned forwards and, unhurriedly, with deliberation, filled our two glasses almost to the brims. He handed me mine. The heavy red wine looked black on the surface, with purple bubbles jostling around the edge. ‘It is an Argentinian vintage, I am afraid,’ he said. He smiled. ‘Like me.’
We raised our glasses in a wordless toast and drank. Wormwood, bitter gall, the taste of ink and luscious rot. We both leaned back, he opening his arms in a curious, flowing, arching movement and shooting his cuffs, and I thought of a priest in the days of the old dispensation turning from the faithful and setting down the chalice and lifting his shoulders and his arms in just that way, under the chasuble’s heavy yoke. He introduced himself. His name was Fedrigo Sorran. He wrote it down for me, in a page of a little black notebook. I thought of far plains, the roaming herds, a hidalgo on a horse.
Ercole came and looked at us, and nodded, and smiled, as if all this had been arranged, and went away again, padding softly on flat feet.
What did we talk about at first, the man from the south and I? He told me he liked the night, preferring it to daytime. ‘So quiet,’ he said, smoothing the air before him with a flattened palm.
We drank some more of the bitter wine. And what, I asked, did he do? He considered my question for a moment, smiling faintly, and joined his fingers together again and touched the tips of them lightly to his lips. ‘I am, let us say,’ he said, ‘in mining.’ This formulation seemed to amuse him. He directed towards the floor a mock- significant glance. ‘Underground,’ he whispered.
My mind must have wandered then, sent astray by the wine and the lack of sleep, or perhaps in fact I did sleep, a little, in some way. He had begun by speaking of mines and metals, of gold and diamonds and all precious elements buried deep in the earth, but now, without my knowing how, he had ranged out into the depths of space, and was telling me of quasars and pulsars, of red giants and brown dwarfs and black holes, of heat death and the Hubble constant, of quarks and quirks and multiple infinities. And of dark matter. The universe, according to him, contains a missing mass we cannot see or feel or measure. There is much, much more of it than there is of anything else, and the visible universe, the one that we know, is sparse and puny in comparison. I thought of it, this vast invisible sea of weightless and transparent stuff, present everywhere, undetected, through which we move, unsuspecting swimmers, and which moves through us, a silent, secret essence.
Now he was speaking of the ancient light of galaxies that travels for a million—a billion—a trillion!—miles to reach us. ‘Even here,’ he said, ‘at this table, the light that is the image of my eyes takes time, a tiny time, infinitesimal, yet time, to reach your eyes, and so it is that everywhere we look, everywhere, we are looking into the past.’
We had finished the bottle, he was pouring out the dregs. He tipped the rim of his glass against mine and made a ringing note. ‘You must take care of your star, in this place,’ he said in the softest of whispers, smiling, and leaning so far forwards in the chair that I could see myself reflected, doubly reflected, in the lenses of his spectacles. ‘The gods watch over us, and are jealous.’
___
It was a hot summer, that summer of Mrs Gray. Records were broken, new ones were set. There was a drought that lasted for months, water was rationed and stand-pipes were set up at street corners where vexatious mothers had to queue with buckets and saucepans, complaining, their sleeves pugnaciously rolled. Cattle died in the fields, or went mad. Gorse fires burst out spontaneously; entire hillsides were left blackened and smouldering and for hours afterwards the air in the town was acrid with smoke that made a scratch in the throat and gave everyone
