The door opened with a bang and Sharon the child-nurse stuck in her carroty head and said, ‘Do you want the pot?’ Aunt Corky was scrabbling to stub out her cigarette. She shook her head furiously with lips shut tight. ‘Right-o,’ Sharon said and withdrew, then popped back again and nodded at the bristling ashtray and said cheerfully, ‘I’m telling you, them things will be the death of you.’
When she had gone I returned to the chair beside the bed and sat down. Aunt Corky, mortified, avoided my eye, breathing heavily through flared nostrils and casting about her indignantly with birdlike movements of her head. In the embarrassment of the moment I was holding my breath again; I felt like the volunteer in a levitation act, suspended horizontally on empty air and not daring to move a muscle. Aunt Corky with quivering hands lit another cigarette and blew a defiant trumpet of smoke at the ceiling. ‘Of course,’ she said bitterly, ‘she is nothing like him. She has I think no training, and certainly no feeling for things, no – no finesse. Where he got her no one can say.’ I said vaguely, ‘Well, she’s young, after all …’ Aunt Corky stared at me. ‘Young?’ she cried, a high, soft shriek, ‘young – that one?’ and began to cough. ‘No, no,’ she said impatiently, waving a hand and weaving a figure eight of smoke, ‘not the nurse, I mean her – the wife.’ A poisonous grimace. ‘Mrs Haddon.’ Whom, if I have the energy for the task, we shall be meeting presently. Aunt Corky got out her cartridge of lipstick again and with broad strokes moodily retouched the stylised pair of lips smeared over the ruined hollow where her mouth used to be, sighing and frowning; with the lipstick revivified she looked as if a tropical insect had settled on her face.
Was it on that visit or later, I wonder, that I told her about Morden and his pictures? Had I even gone to see him at that stage? See how you have loosened my grasp on chronology. I get as mixed up as a dotard. Things from long ago seem as if they had happened yesterday while yesterday itself grows ancient before today has waned. Once I used to date events from before and after the moment when you first confronted me on the corner of Ormond Street; then the day of your going became the pivot on which the eras turned; now all is flux. I feel as the disciples must have felt in the days of desolation between Calvary and the rolling aside of the sepulchre stone. (Dear God, where did that come from? Am I getting religion? Next thing I’ll be seeing visions.) Anyway, anyway, whatever day it was, that first or another, when I told her about my new venture, Aunt Corky went into raptures. ‘Art!’ she breathed, clapping a hand to her breastbone and putting on a Rouault face. ‘Art is prayer!’ At once I was sorry I had mentioned the subject at all and sat and looked gloomily at my hands while she launched into one of her rhapsodies, at the end of which she reached out a shaky claw again and grasped my wrist and said in a fervent whisper, ‘What a chance for you, to make of yourself something new!’ I sat back and stared at her but she continued to gaze at me undaunted, still holding on to my wrist and nodding her head slowly, solemnly. ‘Because, you know,’ she said, with a sort of reproachful twinkle, ‘you have been very naughty; yes, yes, very naughty.’ I would not have been surprised if she had reached up and tweaked my ear; I may even have blushed. Somehow I had imagined she would know no more of my doings in the years since I had seen her than I knew of hers. Infamy, however, is a thing that gets about. Aunt Corky let go of my wrist and patted me on the hand and lit yet another cigarette. ‘Death is nothing,’ she said with vague inconsequence, and frowned; ‘nothing at all.’ She gave a fluttery sigh and sat for a moment looking about her blankly and then slowly subsided against the dented pillows at her back and closed her eyes. I stood up quickly and leaned over her in consternation, but it was all right, she was still breathing. I prised the cigarette cautiously from her fingers and crushed it in the ashtray. Her hand fell away limply and settled palm upward on the sheet. She began to say something but instead her mouth went slack and she suddenly emitted a loud, honking snore and her legs twitched under the bedclothes.
I am never at ease in the presence of sleeping people – that is, I am even less at ease with them than I am when they are awake. When I was married, I mean when I still had a wife and all that, I would have preferred to spend my nights alone, though of course I had not the nerve to say so. It is not so much the uncanny element of sleep that disturbs me, though that is disturbing enough, but the particular kind of solitude to which the sleeper at my side abandons me. It is so strange, this way of being alone: I think of Transylvania, voodoo, that sort of thing. There I sit, or, worse, lie, in the dark, in the presence of the undead, who seem to have attained a state of apotheosis, who seem so achieved, resting in this deeply breathing calm on a darkened plain between two worlds, here and at the same time infinitely far removed from me. It is at such moments that I am most acutely aware of my conscious self, and feel the electric throb and tingle, the flimsiness and awful weight, of being a living, thinking thing. The whole business then seems a scandal, or a dreadful joke devised by someone who has long since gone away, the point of which has been lost and at which no one is laughing. My wife, now, was a prompt if restless sleeper. Her head would hit the pillow and swish! with a few preparatory shudders she was gone. I wonder if it was her way of escaping from me. But there I go, falling into solipsism again, my besetting sin. God knows what it was she was escaping. Just everything, I suppose. If escape it was. Probably she was in the same fix as me, wanting a lair herself to lie down in and not daring to say so. To be alone. To be at one. Is that the same? I don’t think so. To be at one: what a curious phrase, I’ve never understood exactly what it means. And I, what must I be like when I sleep, as I occasionally do? Something crouched, I imagine, crouched doggo and ready to spring out of the dark, fangs flashing and eyes greenly afire. No, no, that is altogether too fine, too sleek: more like a big, beached, blubbery thing, cast up out of the deeps, agape and gasping.
What was I …? Aunt Corky. Her room. Afternoon sunlight. I am there. The cigarette I had crushed in the ashtray was still determinedly streaming a thin, fast, acrid waver of blue smoke. I waited for a while, watching her sleep, my mind empty, and then with leaden limbs and pressing my hands hard against my knees I rose and lumbered quakingly from the room and closed the door without a sound behind me. By now the patch of parti-coloured light from the big window on the landing had moved a surprising distance and was inching its way up the wall. It is odd how the exact look of that afternoon glares in my memory, suffused with a harsh, Hellenic radiance that is sharper and more brilliant, surely, than a September day in these latitudes could be expected to furnish. Probably I am not remembering at all, but imagining, which is why it seems so real. Haddon was waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, stooped and unctuous and at the same time sharply watchful. ‘She is a handful, yes,’ he said as we walked to the door. ‘We were forced to confiscate her things, I’m afraid.’ ‘Things,’ I said, ‘what things?’ He smiled, a quick little sideways twitch. ‘Her clothes,’ he said; ‘even her nightdress. She had us demented, walking out of the place at all hours of the day and night.’ I smiled what must have been a sickly smile and nodded sympathetically, craven as I am, and thought with a shiver, Imagine, just imagine being him.
It was a surprise, when I stepped out into the world again, how bright and gay everything seemed, the sun, the gleaming grass, those Van Gogh trees, and the big, light sky with its fringe of coppery clouds; I felt as if I had been away on a long journey and now all at once had arrived back home again. I legged it down the drive as fast as I could go, but when the gate had shut itself behind me I paused and pressed the bell again and the hidden speaker squawked at me as before. But I don’t know what it was I had thought I would say, and after some moments of impatient, metallic breathing the voice-box clicked off, and in the sudden silence I felt foolish and exposed again and turned and skulked away down the hill road.
As I went along under the beneficence of the September afternoon’s blue and deepening gold my heart grew calm and I felt another pang like the one that had pierced me wh
en I smelled the eucalyptus at the gate. What paradisal longings are these that assail me at unconsidered moments when my mind is looking elsewhere? They are not, I think, involuntary memories such as those the celebrated madeleine is supposed to have invoked, for no specific events attach to them, no childhood landscapes, no beloved figures in rustling gowns or top-hats; rather they seem absences, suddenly stumbled upon, redolent of a content that never was but was only longed for, achingly. This mood of vague, sad rapture persisted even when I got back to the city and my steps took me unresisting and only half aware along the river and down Black Street in the direction of Morden’s house. Some part of me must have been brooding on him and his secret trove of pictures stacked in that sealed room. The street was quiet, one side filled with the calm sunlight of late afternoon and the other masked in shadow drawn down sharply like a deep awning. The Boatman’s double doors stood open wide and from the cavernous gloom of the interior a beery waft came rolling. A three-legged dog passed by and bared its side-teeth silently at me in a perfunctory way. Someone in an upstairs room nearby was listlessly practising scales on an out-of-tune piano. Thus does fate, feigning unconcern, arrange its paltry props, squinting at the sky and nonchalantly whistling. I stood on the corner and looked up along Rue Street at the house with its blank windows and broad black door. I was not thinking of anything in particular, just loitering. Or maybe in that impenetrable maze I call my mind I was turning over Morden’s proposition, maybe that was the moment when I decided, in the dreamy, drifting way that in me passes for volition, to take on the task of evaluating and cataloguing his cache of peculiar pictures. (There it is again, that notion of volition, intention, decisiveness; am I weakening in my lack of conviction?) Suddenly the door opened and a young woman dressed in black stepped out and paused a moment on the pavement, checking in her purse – money? a key? – then turned and set off briskly in the direction of Ormond Street. I know you always insisted you saw me there, skulking on the corner, but that’s how I remember it: the door, stop and peer into purse, then turn on heel without a glance and go, head down, and my heart quailing as if it knew already what was in store for it.
I am not naturally curious about people – too self-obsessed for that – but sometimes when my attention is caught I will go to extraordinary lengths to make the most banal discoveries about total strangers. It’s crazy, I know. I will get off a bus miles before my own stop so I can follow a secretary coming home from the office to see where she lives; I will traipse through shopping malls – ah, those happy hunting-grounds! – just to find out what kind of bread or cabbages or toilet rolls a burdened housewife with two snotty kids in tow will buy. And it is not just women, in case some bloodhound’s nostrils are starting to twitch: I follow men, too, children, anyone. No doubt a first-year psychiatry student could put a name to this mild malady. It’s harmless, like picking my nose or biting my nails, and affords me a certain wan pleasure. I am saying all this in my defence (though who my accusers might be I do not know): when I set off that day in surreptitious pursuit of that young woman, a perfect (oh, perfect!) stranger, I had no object in mind other than to know where she was going. I am aware how strident and implausible these protestations of blamelessness sound. Certainly someone observing us making our way along that street, she in sun and I slinking after her on the other, shadowed side, might well have pondered the advisability of alerting a policeman. She was dressed in a short-sleeved black dress and impossible high heels, on which she teetered along at a remarkably swift pace, her purse clasped to her breast and her slender neck thrust forward and her head bent, so that as she clicked along she seemed to be all the while peering over the edge of a precipice that was steadily receding before her. Very pale, with black hair cut short in page-boy style (my Lulu!) and high, narrow shoulders and very thin legs; even at this distance I could see her little white hands with their pink knuckles and ill-painted nails bitten to the quick. On this calm, bright day she looked odd in her black dress and those black silk seamed stockings and gleaming black stilettos; a new-made widow, I thought, off to hear the reading of the will. When she came to the corner of Ormond Street she paused again, daunted, it seemed, by the crowd and the noise and the stalled herds of rush-hour traffic throbbing in the sun. She glanced over her shoulder (that was when you saw me) and I turned away quickly and peered into a shop window, my throat thick with fright and gleeful panic, for this is how I get, all hot and fluttery, when I am in full pursuit and my quarry hesitates as if sensing a waft of my hot breath on her neck. After a moment I noticed that the shop I had stopped in front of was derelict and that the cobwebbed window in which I was feigning such interest was empty. When I turned to look for her again she was gone. I hurried to the corner but there was no sign of her. As always when the object of my morbid interest eludes me like this I felt a flattish sensation, a mixture of disappointment and not quite comprehensible relief. With a lighter step I turned to go back the way I had come – and there she was right in front of me, so close that I almost collided with her, standing motionless in a plum-coloured pool of shadow with her purse still primly clutched to her breast. She was older than I had at first supposed (her age, I have just counted it on the calendar, was twenty-seven years, four months, eleven days and five hours, approximately). The glossy crown of her head came up to the level of my adam’s apple. Hair really very black, blue-black, like a crow’s wing, and a violet shading in the hollows of her eyes. Identifying marks. Dear God. Absurdly, I see a little black pillbox hat and a black three-quarters veil – a joke, surely, these outlandish accessories, on the part of playful memory? Yet she did reach up to adjust something, a strand of hair or a stray eyelash, I don’t know what, and I noticed the tremor in her hand and the nicotine stains on her fingers. With her small, pale, heart-shaped face averted she was frowning into the middle distance, and when she spoke I was not sure that it was me she was addressing.
2. The Rape of Proserpine 1655
L. van Hobelijn (1608-1674)
Oil on canvas, 15 × 21½ in. (38.1 × 53.3 cm.)
Although the grandeur of its conception is disproportionate to its modest dimensions, this is van Hobelijn’s technically most successful and perhaps his finest work. The artist has set himself the task of depicting as many as possible of the elements of the myth of the abduction of Demeter’s daughter by the god of the underworld, and the result is a crowded, not to say cluttered, canvas which with its flattened surface textures and uncannily foreshortened perspectives gives more the impression of a still life than the scene of passionate activity it is intended to be. The progression of the seasons, the phenomenon which lies at the heart of this myth, is represented with much subtlety and inventiveness. The year begins at the left of the picture in the vernal meadow by lake Pergus – note the opalescent sheen of water glimpsed through the encircling, dark-hued trees – where Prosperpine’s companions, as yet all unaware of what has befallen her, wander without care amidst the strewn violets and lilies that were let drop from the loosened folds of the girl’s gown when the god seized her. In the foreground the great seated form of Demeter presides over the fertile summer fields, her teeth like barley pearls (or pomegranate seeds?) and with cornstalks wreathed in her hair: a grotesque, Arcimboldoesque figure, ancient yet commanding, the veritable mother of the mysteries. To her left, at the right of the picture, the trees that fringe the headlands above the narrow inlet of the sea have already turned and there is an autumnal smokiness in the air. Sunk here to her waist in the little waves the nymph Cyane, cursed by the god of death, is dissolving in her own bitter tears, while at her back the waters gape where Pluto has hurled his sceptre into the depths. On the surface of the water something floats which when we take a glass to it reveals itself to be a dark-blue sash: it is Proserpine’s girdle, the clue that will lead her grief-demented mother to the underworld in pursuit of her lost daughter. The placing of the girdle in the sea is one of van Hobelijn’s temporal jests, for when we examine the figure of Proserpine suspended
above the waves we note that the girdle in fact has not yet fallen from her waist: in this painted world all time is eternally present, and redeemable. With what consummate draughtsmanship has the painter positioned in the pale, marine air the flying chariot with its god and girl. The arrangement of vehicle, horses and passengers measures no more than five centimetres from the flared nostrils of the leading steed to the tips of Proserpine’s wind-rippled hair, yet we feel with overwhelming immediacy the full weight of this hurtling mass of iron and wood and flesh that is about to plunge into the gaping sea. With its sense of suspended yet irresistible violence the moment is an apt prefigurement of the rape shortly to take place in Tartarus. The god’s swarth features are set in a grimace of mingled lust and self-loathing and his upraised arm wielding the great black whip forms a gesture that is at once brutal and heavy with weariness. Proserpine, a frail yet striking figure, intensely realised, seems strangely unconcerned by what is occurring and gazes back over her shoulder, out of the frame, with an air of languid melancholy, caught here as she is between the bright world of the living and the land of the dead, in neither of which will she ever again be wholly at home. Beyond her, in the background at the top of the picture, Mount Etna is spewing fire and ash over a wintry landscape laid waste already by the wrath of grief-stricken Demeter. We see the broken ploughshare and the starving oxen and the farmer lamenting for his fields made barren by the goddess in her rage at an ungrateful earth that will not give up to her the secret of her daughter’s fate. And so the round of the seasons is completed. We think of other paintings with a seasonal theme, the Primavera, for example, but van Hobelijn is not that ‘Botticelli of the North’ some critics claim him to be, and his poor canvas with its jumbled perspectives and heavy-handed symbolism is utterly lacking in the poise, the celestial repose, the sense of unheard music sounding through its pellucid airs, that make of the Italian painter’s work a timeless and inexhaustible masterpiece. However, The Rape of Proserpine wields its own eerie yet not inconsiderable power, fraught as it is with presentiments of loss and disaster, and acknowledging as it does love’s destructiveness, the frailty of human wishes and the tyrannical and irresistible force of destiny.
Athena Page 4
