in his high, winged armchair with his legs crossed and a brandy glass in his hand. Toby Taggart tells me it was JB who recommended me for the part of Vander. It seems he was there in the audience that disastrous night years ago when I dried on stage, a tongue-tied, goggling Amphitryon, and was impressed. I wonder what impressed him. What would he not be prepared to do for me had I dragged my way through to the final curtain? Now he sat there, at once glazed and alert, watching my lips intently as I spoke, as if he thought to read from them a different and darkly revealing version of the altogether too innocent-sounding matters that my words were meant to convey. No, he said hastily, interrupting me, no, he was sure there had been no one with Axel Vander in Liguria. This gave me pause. If I wished he would look up his notes, he went on, with a vehement gesture of the hand that was not holding the brandy snifter, but he believed he could say with certainty that Vander had been alone in Portovenere, quite alone. Then he looked away, frowning, and making a faint distressed humming noise at the back of his throat. There was a pause. So Vander, then, I said, had been in Portovenere, in fact. I felt like one who has been discharged from hospital with a clean bill of health but who arrives home only to find the ambulance waiting outside the house, its back doors wide open and two bored attendants standing in the street holding ready the stretcher, with its blood-red blanket. At my question JB turned back, I could almost hear the cogs in his neck grinding, and stared at me pop-eyed, opening and closing his mouth as if to test the mechanism before trusting himself to speak. He did recall, he said, the Nebraskan savant Fargo DeWinter, when he spoke to him in Antwerp all those years ago, mentioning something about an assistant who had worked with him on the Vander papers. I waited. JB blinked, gazing at me now in what seemed a fixed, faint torment. He had the impression, he said, with the wincing look of one trying in desperation to hold on to some fragile thing he knows he is about to let drop, and it was only an impression, mind, the merest hint of a suspicion, that it was this assistant and not DeWinter himself who had unearthed the goods, the real, that is the bad, goods on Vander and his questionable, to say the least, past. I waited again. JB went on staring and twitching. It was I now who felt I was about to let fall that breakable thing. When Cass was a little girl she used to say that as soon as she was grown-up she would marry me and we would have a child just like her so that if she died I would not miss her and be lonely. Ten years; she has been dead ten years. Must I set off in search of her again, in sorrow and in pain? She will come no more to my world, but I go towards hers.
Billie Stryker telephoned. I have come to fear these calls. She tells me there is someone I should speak to. I thought she said this person was a nun and I assumed I had misheard. I really must have my hearing seen to. My hearing, seen to—ha! There it is again, language playing with itself.
I have begun to look at Billie under a new light. Languishing for so long in the shadow of my inattention she seemed herself a shadow. But she too has her aura. She is, after all, the link between so many of the figures that most closely concern me—Mrs Gray, my daughter, even Axel Vander. I ask myself if she might be more than merely a link, if she is, rather, in some way a co-ordinator. Co-ordinator? Odd word. I do not know what I mean, but I seem to mean something. I used to think, long ago, that despite all the evidence I was the one in charge of my own life. To be, I told myself, is to act. I missed the vital pun, though. Now I realise that always I have been acted upon, by unacknowledged forces, hidden coercions. Billie is the latest in that line of dramaturgs who have guided from behind the scenes the poor production that I am, or am taken to be. Now what new twist of the plot has she uncovered?
The Convent of Our Sacred Mother stands on a bleak rise above a windy confluence where three ways meet. Here we are in the suburbs, yet I felt as though I had ventured on to a trackless wilderness. Do not mistake me—I am fond of spots like this, bleak and seemingly characterless, if that is the word, fond, I mean. Yes, give me an unconsidered corner any day over your verdant vales, your sparkling, majestic peaks. My scenic detours will lead you down littered streets where washing hangs from windows and slippered old parties with their dentures out stand in front doorways watching you. There will be slinking dogs going about their business, and children with dirt-smeared faces playing behind barbed wire on waste ground under a charred sky. Young men will put their heads far back and flare their nostrils and stare truculently, and girls in high heels and piled-up hairstyles will preen and flounce, pretending not to be aware of you, and screech at each other with the voices of parrots; it is always the girls who know there is an elsewhere, you can see them yearning for it. There are dustbin smells, and smells of mouldering plaster and rotting mattresses. You do not want to be here yet there is something here that speaks to you, something uneasily half remembered, half imagined; something that is you and not-you, a portent out of the past.
Why would the canny Sisters build their mother house—their mother house!—on such a spot? Maybe the building, painted mantle-blue and many-windowed, as commodious as one of Heaven’s promised mansions, was designed originally for some other purpose, was a barracks, maybe, or maybe a madhouse. The sky seemed impossibly low this day, the bellied clouds as if resting on the ranks of chimney pots and the rooks skimming down in deep, long arcs on to the wind-polished grass, seeming pressed upon by the weight of that sky and steering themselves by the ragged tips of their wings.
Sister Catherine was a brisk little body with a smoker’s cough. I would not have taken her for a nun at all. Her hair, grizzled like mine but cut shorter, was uncovered, and her habit, such as it was, square-cut from grey serge, looked to me like the kind of outfit that librarians and businessmen’s dowdy secretaries used to wear in my young days. When exactly was it that nuns stopped dressing the part? One must go far to the south, nowadays, to the Latin lands, to find the true original: the heavy black skirts to the ground, the hood and wimple, the big wooden rosary slung about the non-existent waist. This person’s legs were bare, her ankles thick. Strain though I might I could not see in her a likeness of her mother. She was home, she told me, on vacation, her word, from the mission fields abroad. At once I pictured a vast sandy tract under a white and pitiless sun, all scattered about with skulls and bleached bones and bits of glass and glittering metal lashed with thongs to painted sticks. She is a doctor as well as a nun—I remembered that coveted microscope. Her accent has a New World edge. She chain-smokes, Lucky Camels being her brand. She still wears those thick-lensed specs; they might have been from her father’s shop. I told her that Catherine was, had been, my daughter’s name. ‘Called Kitty, too, like me?’ she asked. No, I said: Cass.
There was an inner cloister where we walked, a stone-flagged, arcaded corridor around four sides of a gravelled courtyard with an open sky above. On the gravel there were palms growing in tall Ali Baba pots, and a trellis trailing some variety of winter-flowering climber with a pallid and despondent bloom. Despite my overcoat I was cold, but Sister Catherine, as I suppose I must go on calling her, in her thin grey cardigan, seemed not to notice the raw air and the wind’s insidious, icy fingers.
It seems I was mistaken about everything. Nobody knew about her mother and me. She had told no one what she had seen in the laundry room that day. She was lighting a cigarette, and had her hands cupped around a match, and now she looked up at me sideways with a glint of the Kitty of old, scornful and amused. Why, she asked, had I imagined that everyone knew? But I thought, I said in bewilderment, I thought the town was rife with talk of how her mother and I had carried on so disgracefully throughout that summer. She shook her head, detaching a flake of tobacco from her lip. But her father, I said, had she not told him? ‘What—Daddy?’ she said, spluttering on a mouthful of smoke. ‘He’d have been the last one I would tell. And even if I had told him he wouldn’t have believed me—in his eyes Mumser could do no wrong.’
We walked on. The wind moaned among the stone arcades. I was suffering the same constraint that used to take hold of me in the old days in face of Kitty’s mockery and sly merriment. And how peculiar it felt, being here with her, after all these years, this tough little person giving off puffs of smoke like an old-fashioned steam train and shaking her head in happy wonderment at my ignorance, my deludedness. They used to say she was delicate; obviously they were wrong. Even if, she was saying, even if it had been proved to her father that for months his wife had been up to monkey business with a boy of—what age had I been then, anyway?—he would have done nothing about it, for he loved Mumser so desperately and held her in such helpless awe that he would have let her get away with anything. Saying these things, she displayed no rancour against me, the me of now or the me of then. She did not even seem to feel I had done wrong. I, on the other hand, was in a sweat of shame and embarrassment. Monkey business.
But Marge, I said, stopping short as I suddenly remembered, her friend Marge, what about her? Well, she said, stopping too, what about her? Surely, I said, she would have told what she had seen. She frowned, peering up at me as though I had lost my senses. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘Marge wasn’t there.’ This I could not take in at all. I had seen them in the doorway of the laundry room, I remembered it distinctly, the two of them standing there, Kitty in her pigtails and her round glasses and lardy Marge breathing through her mouth, both staring in that
