Prodigies

by Francis King

  They rode home slowly, side by side. The dog had reappeared and now, at a distance, it followed them, head lowered, picking its way carefully over the icy terrain. As they approached the house, the animal mysteriously disappeared. She was never to see it again. In the days ahead, she would often think of it, with its dull coat, sticking up in tufts, and its long, greying muzzle, and wonder whether perhaps someone had shot it, as her father had threatened to do.

  The arm was badly bruised but not broken, the doctor, hastily summoned by Harriet, assured them. He rubbed some embrocation, smelling of turpentine, into it and then bandaged it up. It ached all that night, so that Alexine could not sleep, despite a dose of laudanum prescribed by the doctor and administered by Nanny Rose. But for once her chronic insomnia did not worry her, so that, instead of tossing fretfully, as she usually did, she lay absolutely still. All the time she thought of that frenzied embrace. It was as though by holding her so suffocatingly close, he had wanted to become one with her and so to wrest from her the knowledge of her inmost being, just as she had continually wanted to wrest that same knowledge from him. But the effort had been futile, and the belief that it could be anything else was only an illusion. She now no more knew what it was like to be him; and he, she was sure, now knew no more what it was like to be her. Physically, they had been closer than ever before; but they were no closer to each other in any other way.

  Chapter Seven

  EVEN THE MOST ARDUOUS TRAVEL, across the winter wastes of Russia or, on one occasion, by ship through often raging seas to Shanghai, had never before tired Philip or daunted him. But now he felt an ineluctable weariness. This was not a weariness of the bones or even of the flesh, such as he had often experienced in the past after some prolonged physical exertion – a day of riding over rough terrain, an ascent of a mountain, more than an hour of swimming in a rough, icy sea – but of the spirit.

  Even people who had seen him only a few months before were shocked by the change in his appearance – the eyes dull, the cheeks fallen in, the skin a leaden grey when they first set eyes on him. ‘Are you all right?’ they would ask him, suspecting some mortal illness in a man of his age. But then, in the course of doing business with him, having found that his mind was as alert and decisive as ever, that he could still drive the sharpest of bargains and that he could at once see through any attempt to deceive him, they would decide that they must have been mistaken.

  In Geneva, between a morning appointment that had ended sooner than he had expected and a late afternoon one, he had set off alone for a walk around the lake. But after a few minutes he had thought, as he had repeatedly been thinking, ‘What is the point?’, and had sunk on to a bench. Moodily he had stared out over the placid water, while two children, now screaming at each other and now laughing hilariously, repeatedly threw a stick for a chocolate-coloured labrador to retrieve. The noise jarred on his nerves – oh, why couldn’t they go and play somewhere else? Eventually they did so. But almost immediately an overdressed woman, with heavily rouged cheeks and yellow, high-buttoned boots, parasol in hand, walked towards him, with seductively swaying hips, peered at him, an elderly and obviously rich man in a homburg hat and a long black coat with a sable collar, and then seated herself on the other end of the bench. She kept stealing glances at him, clearly waiting for him to address her. Eventually she asked him for the time. Without answering, he rose with a sigh and began to trail slowly, leaning on his cane, back to the hotel.

  In Rome, he ordered dinner to be brought to his room. The waiter wheeled in the trolley, each of its dishes lurking under a silver cover, but the mere smell of the food nauseated him so that he continued to sprawl out on his bed, fully clothed, his gaze fixed on one of the covers, unnaturally dazzling under the light of the elaborate gasolier reflected in it. He thought: One hears of being love-sick. I am life-sick. It was not only the prospect of all that elaborate food, prepared in one of the finest kitchens in the country, that turned his stomach and made him want to retch. He had also lost all appetite for the intrigues, the jugglings, the confrontations and the collaborations that had once made these business tours far more thrilling than any love-affair. Now, like some great executant who has lost all interest in performing but who continues to do so with no loss of technical mastery, he could still outwit or outcharm all those with whom his business lay. But the work and the results of the work were dust and ashes. What was the matter with him? He repeatedly asked himself the question and could find no reply.

  In Bologna, shaving himself on a whim – his beard was always carefully demarcated to an area below his lips – instead of calling in the hotel barber to do so, he stared at his grey, doleful reflection in the bathroom mirror and then lifted the razor and laid its blade across his throat, just above the prominent adam’s apple. Gently he drew it across the sagging flesh, feeling nothing. Beads of blood appeared, like a dotted line incised in red ink across a sheet of parchment. He reached for the towel and held it to his throat. Later that morning, a chamber-maid would retrieve the towel from the floor, see the blood on it, and call to another of the chamber-maids to show it to her. But they repeatedly found even odder things in the rooms that they cleaned, and soon the maid had thrown the towel into a huge wicker basket with all the other soiled towels. For the next few days Philip wore an unusually high collar and cravat.

  At last, after a visit to Milan, all his lucrative business had been transacted, and he thought that, if he were now to die, his wealth would be even more impressive than ever. It was then that he added a codicil to his will, leaving a major part of his fortune to Alexine and nothing whatever to the boy whom all those who knew him in the Netherlands and many who knew him in other countries, assumed to be his son. He summoned the manager and one of the assistant managers of the hotel to his room and had them witness the document, which he then sealed in an envelope and handed to his secretary, Hans, telling him: ‘ Keep this – in case anything should happen to me.’

  Later, as he said goodbye to Hans, one of whose aunts lived in Florence and whom he was about to visit, he handed him a wad of banknotes, amazing him with a generosity remarkable even for him, and said tersely: ‘ Enjoy yourself.’ In two weeks, he said, he would be back at the hotel, where he would spend a night before the two of them returned to the Netherlands together. ‘Are you sure you don’t wish me to accompany you, sir?’ Hans asked, since he had so often done so on previous occasions when Philip had taken a brief holiday. ‘I’d be happy to cancel my visit to my aunt.’ ‘No.’ There was no explanation. On his departure, Philip left most of his luggage behind at the hotel.

  He had decided to journey south, first by the newly built railway and then on by ship to Sicily, to visit his friend the German Baron. He had visited him twice in the past, and on each occasion, free of all the stress of doing business now in one city and now in another in a variety of languages and with a variety of characters, he had at last been able to relax and to enjoy himself in a manner that was rarely possible anywhere else. As he now sat in the railway carriage reserved by Hans for his sole use, he was conscious that an essential part of his being had fallen away, as the flywheel might detach itself from the machinery of a watch, and he thought, though with growing pessimism, that perhaps in the tranquillity of the little seaside village he might now find it again.

  Physically the long journey was nothing to him. But still that aching weariness of the spirit persisted. On the ship there were three Italian men known to him, through the business, for many years. They too were going to Sicily, to Palermo, where they planned to build an hotel. The men tried to get him to drink and play cards with them, but he made the excuse that he preferred to remain up on deck to watch the changing coastline. In fact, the coastline, with huge, ungainly black birds – what were they? he vaguely wondered – wheeling above it, interested him not at all.

  The Baron’s small thatched house, in a cranny by the sea between two abrupt cliffs, was deserted – as the coachman who took him there had already war
ned him. Philip tried the doors but all of them were locked. In the distance a dog, alerted by the sound of the carriage wheels jolting over shale, barked with a maniacal persistence. Finally, Guido, the male of the elderly couple who looked after the Baron in their lazy, laughing fashion, limped down the hillside path that led from their ochre-coloured villino high up above the main house, to say that two days before the Baron had had to leave for Frankfurt. The wife whom he so rarely saw was dangerously ill, perhaps dying, perhaps already dead. Since the old man knew Philip, who had always tipped him and his wife lavishly, he offered to fetch the key, along with his wife to prepare a meal and a bed in the guest-room.

  At once, as soon as he had set foot in the untidy, dusty, sprawling house, that broken fly-wheel trembled, jerked forward, jerked forward again, and then began to move with all the strong, pulsing regularity of the past. As he smelled the sauce cooking for the pasta and simultaneously gazed out through a window encrusted with dead flies at a long, empty stretch of sand, with a horizon streaked with orange and yellow behind it, he felt that what he had lost, seemingly forever, he had miraculously regained. He went into the kitchen, where the woman stood at the stove and the man was, with extreme deliberation, placing dishes and cutlery on a tray. He began to talk with them in an Italian far superior to the Baron’s– even though the Baron had been living in the house for at least a decade. Soon all three of them were laughing. As their joking continued, Philip even caught the inflections of the Sicilian dialect and was able to reproduce them.

  That night, a lamp beside him, he took down at random from their shelves one work of pornography after another from the collection built up by the Baron over a lifetime. Many of these books were centuries old, some extremely valuable. They were arranged without any system and many of them had suffered from damp and the depredations of insects. Philip turned the pages, reading a sentence or a paragraph here and there, and pausing to smile over a woodcut or etching. Eventually he opened a desk drawer and found in it some of the sepia photographs, each subject carefully posed on a rock, at the prow of a boat, on the long, narrow, crumbling veranda, or on the shore with the wide sea and the even wider sky as a background, that the Baron, a pioneer photographer after he had abandoned his sketch-book for the newly invented camera, himself had taken. The Baron would not object to this opening of the drawer or the viewing of its contents. The two men had often passed the photographs back and forth between them in the past. Looking at the photographs, Philip felt a joy well up in him from a source that, in the past days, he had thought to have dried up forever. For the first time since he had started on his travels, he slept deeply, hand under cheek, with no troubling dreams.

  He was up early the next morning. After the chill of the Netherlands and even northern Italy, it seemed unseasonably warm. In only his nightshirt and a wrap found in the Baron’s wardrobe, he sat out on the veranda and watched the sun rise, spokes of orange light radiating out with increasing intensity from around a huge, pink bank of cloud, as he awaited the arrival of Guido’s wife, Maria, to prepare his breakfast for him. For the first time for several days, he had an appetite. The appetite was not merely for food, but also for life. As she made the coffee and sliced the rough peasant bread, Maria sang to herself in a throaty voice that might almost have been a man’s. The song, La Piccola Colomba, was a sad one, about a small girl’s pet rock-pigeon that one day flies up into a clear blue sky and is lost forever, but the sound of it, coming through the window now open behind him, only increased his feeling of joy.

  Having eaten his simple breakfast, so different from those brought to him in the luxury hotels in which he had recently stayed, he sat on out there on the veranda, doing nothing and happy to be doing nothing after so much frenetic activity. He stared out to sea, at one moment wishing that he had the energy to go back into the house and fetch the Baron’s telescope, in order better to see a steamship that, trailing a ribbon of greyish-blue smoke behind it, was crawling past, an iron insect, far out to sea.

  When he did return to his bedroom, he saw that Guido, trained in the task by his employer, had laid out his clothes – the suit, the shirt, the cravat, the clean underwear – for the day ahead. The soiled underwear and shirt of his long journey south had vanished, presumably to be washed and ironed by Guido’s wife. He put on the clean underwear and reached out for the shirt. Then he dropped it to the floor. He was used to servants constantly picking things up for him, and so thought nothing of leaving it there. He went into the Baron’s room, next door to his, and opened the vast Biedermeyer wardrobe. The wood of it was warped and he had to tug at the door. He inspected the clothes hanging inside it and then opted for an open-necked peasant shirt of a rough, yellowing cotton, and a pair of worn trousers, one leg of which was frayed at the end. Then his eye caught the wide-brimmed straw hat on the shelf above the clothes, and he reached up for that.

  Out in the overgrown garden, its grass a yellowish brown and its flowers almost all shrivelled, he heard Guido chopping wood. Soon, when this strangely unseasonable warmth – una estate di San Martino, Guido’s wife had called it, shaking her head and saying that such a second summer always meant a subsequent winter of illness – had ended, fires would be needed. Philip walked out into the garden, the sun warm on his face and his neck bare, so that a number of dot-like, dark brown scabs showed where the razor had cut it. He wanted a boat, he said. Was he going to fish? the old man asked. No, no, he didn’t think so. He might swim. The old man was astonished. The season for swimming was long since over, he protested, it was out of the question, even the two English padrone who lived on the other side of the headland and who swam long after everyone else had ceased to do so, had given up. Philip laughed. ‘Well, we’ll see,’ he said. Then he added boastfully: ‘I’ve swum in Norwegian fjords in October.’ But that meant nothing to the Italian. Guido put down his axe on the chopping block and hurried off up the hill. Eventually a boat appeared. A thirtyish man, unknown to Philip, was pulling at the oars with brown, muscular arms, Guido was seated in the prow, and a boy, of about the same age and build as Sammy, was seated at the tiller.

  Guido and the man, but not the boy, got out of the boat and the man then tethered it to the rotting jetty with large, ungainly but surprisingly deft hands. Guido and the man were both disappointed when Philip made no protest at the high price first quoted by the man in what he had imagined would be a long period of bargaining. ‘Fine. Good. Let’s go.’

  ‘Do you want to take some water with you, signore?’ Guido asked.

  ‘Some wine would be better.’

  Guido walked back to the house, eventually to return with a fiaschetta of the raw, almost black wine of the district, and a tumbler. In his absence, Philip talked to the boatman, marvelling that, in this warmth, he should be wearing a knitted woollen vest. Eventually the man seated himself on the beach and began to pick with the nail of a forefinger at a callus on the sole of his bare foot. From time to time Philip surreptitiously glanced over to the boy. But the boy, now perched on the farther gunwale of the boat, was looking out to sea, totally uninterested in the conversation between Philip and the man who was presumably his father.

  With long, steady strokes the man rowed the boat out over the placid sea. Then he stopped, his forehead glistening with sweat, and called out to the boy to take over. Philip was amazed that, when the boy rowed, the boat moved far faster than when his father did. Philip pointed to three high rocks, which he remembered from previous visits, when he and the Baron had taken it in turns to row and the Baron had kept catching crabs and had eventually given up, ‘absolutely worn out’ as he put it in the English that they usually spoke to each other, and let Philip once more take over. ‘Let’s go over there,’ he said. ‘There!’ The boatman said that those rocks were known as Le Tre Madre – no, he did not know why, he added when Philip asked the reason. The highest of these rocks arched over to make a tunnel, wide enough for a boat to enter.

  Philip said that he thought that he would swim in t
he tunnel. The water was so beautiful, a limpid blue, and he could see small fish flickering about just below its surface. But he did not give that as his reason for wishing to swim there, since he thought that the boatman would think that fanciful of him. The boatman protested – No, no, it was far too cold, if he was determined to swim then it was far better to do so closer in to shore. But Philip, already stripping off, only laughed. The boatman was stupefied that a man so much older than himself should be prepared to undertake something so unpleasant. Not since he was a young boy had the boatman ever entered the waters to swim.

  In only his drawers, Philip poised himself on one side of the boat. He looked across at the boy, but once again, staring back through the tunnel of rock, he refused, with what struck Philip as a deliberate obstinacy and even unfriendliness, to return the look. Then he dived.

  After a long summer of intense heat, the water was still amazingly warm. He first swam out through the tunnel to the other side and then, glimpsing the ruin of a church high up on a hillside, made for its direction, almost as though, despite its distance, he was proposing to visit it. At last tiring, he turned over and floated on his back. He shut his eyes, he almost slept.