That evening I was expected to take up my patron’s invite to the opening of the retrospective of French fin de siècle art, Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau and other such horrors. I changed and had a dram of the Tyrconnell. Evening crept in but I kept the lights out, moving from unlit room to unlit room, beginning to feel incorporeal, observing my shadow from the corner of my eye as it watched me in turn.
At the exhibition I very soon, very wearily, felt my turning out had been an error. The main room was packed by private equity barons and tedious academicians; and the art, as I’d anticipated, was sickly: a profusion of crowded, opulent scenes, women routinely and luxuriously naked, men bent double with gross desire – in short, it dripped with sex, the painter’s evident arousal barely masked by his brushwork. Still, the crowd had turned out for a highbrow turn-on, a spot of divine decadence. And wasn’t I slipping about among them, sipping my tepid white wine? Still, I felt mocked by it all. Was man no more than this?
And then – I found myself following the movements of a young woman, a pearl among the swine, stepping lightly from canvas to canvas like a school pupil discovering ‘the gallery’ for the first time, instructed to take notes. A belle dame, without doubt, but the real genius was in how she’d attired herself. The dark chocolate of her hair was fastened up, her dress looked to me classic Yves Saint Laurent – black watered silk, bias cut on the bodice, with a voluminous skirt, bluish in its blackness where the light from the chandeliers rippled.
Could she feel the weight of my gaze? I wasn’t concerned, for somehow it was as if I’d felt her eye on me first. I was intrigued, yes, for all my failing confidence of late – interested enough to keep looking, to see whose company she would join, whose arm she would take. Instead she turned, smiling slightly to herself, stepped through the crowd and directly out into the evening. I was quite certain her exit had been for my benefit alone. I set down my glass on a plinth, and pursued her.
She was wandering alone down Bankside, swaying eloquently in the gloom, poised in such a way as to make her seem less vulnerable than a young woman otherwise would on a dim-lit and near-deserted riverside walkway. For a while I kept a cautious distance – I had no notion yet of what I would say to her, if I had the nerve. The longer I followed, the less I felt capable, yet I followed still.
Then, twenty yards ahead of me, she stopped, turned, her expression unreadable in the dark. My lips parted but no sound came – what I heard instead was the slap of soles on concrete behind me, then the blur of a man running past, directly at her. I saw her alarm, felt some kind of entreaty in my head. Then she, too, was running, but hopelessly, in heels, and the man – sturdy, Slavic-looking, vehement – was onto her, grabbing her, restraining her. She cried out, and in that moment I knew this was my deliverance from the role of shabby voyeur. I had instead been appointed rescuer.
I waded into the tussle, gave her attacker a hard shove then threw a punch at his jaw, the connection solid, numbing my fingers but knocking him down. I seized her hand, then we were running together, heading for the flight of stone steps that would bring us up onto London Bridge. I was already struggling for breath when I heard him bounding up the steps at our heels, so I turned and kicked out at his face. He fell again, harder, down a dozen steps to land on his head and shoulder. Then he didn’t move. I turned, saw her wide-eyed face above me, took her arm again. And on we rushed.
Minutes later we were rattling past St Paul’s in the back of a black taxi. Facing one another, still we hadn’t exchanged one word I could remember. Her expression, which I had first taken for a kind of shell-shocked gratitude, now seemed rather cool and evaluating.
‘That man back there?’ I asked. ‘Did you know him?’
She shook her head, then abruptly laughed – a tinkling, musical laugh. ‘But happily for me, you came.’
I assumed then that I’d guessed correctly back at the gallery. At what stage she told me her name was ‘Dijana Vukovara’, at what point we agreed I should escort her all the way and up to her apartment on Cavendish … I simply can’t say, for our journey there felt as if borne up on a kind of tide, and I was giddy – the adrenalin of the ruck, perhaps, but I felt my pulse was steady, even a little slowed. The world about me had become fogged and torpid too; and it was as though we were alone in it, two alone together.
The apartment was startlingly bare and semi-decrepit, as if vacant and awaiting renovation. Had she just moved in? I didn’t ask. As a habitat it seemed to mimic my own, a mere rehearsal-space for a life. The first of the double reception rooms, at least, had heavy old red drapes and matching armchairs. I sat as I was bade. She lit candles over the fireplace, one, two, three, then turned with a demure look.
‘Excuse me. I will retrieve what you need.’
She vanished through the partition doors. I rose and followed her. And the sight that met my eyes made me laugh aloud – for there was nothing whatsoever in the next room save for, centrestage, my cheval glass. I say ‘mine’ since I couldn’t believe it was anything but one of a kind. So the ‘logical’ explanation was that some form of sorcery had transported it. Suddenly she was standing there before the mirror, holding a decanter of sea-dark wine. But nothing came out of my fish-like mouth save for ‘You know, it’s the damnedest thing …’
We resumed our seats. She loosened her hair and it fell down as a braid, while she tilted her chin at me, girlish, haughty but amused. Now, in this setting, her dress for the night struck me more as a hired costume than a piece from her own wardrobe. Still, I sat there wholly pleased with myself, ‘the hero’. And this strange, slight-smiling girl seemed to find me worthy of her whole attention, as though she’d been waiting for me. We talked – rather, I talked, rambled, even – about the exhibition and its tackiness, London and its shortcomings, my life and its recent dysfunction, Malena’s leaving me, my sexual loneliness, my sexual preferences … She sat, never moved, yet my glass was never empty. Her eyes seemed to draw more light as darkness engulfed the room. But seeing her smile at me, I was so sure we would be in bed before midnight – if bed she had, somewhere in this shell of a dwelling. And so I minded not a great deal once the fog crept in.
Then I was home again, like I’d never left – waking blearily to morning shadows, heavy-headed and trapped in a nagging, goading state of semi-arousal. I admit I could have happily fucked a hole in a toilet-stall wall. But there was something else at work, another feeling, in the vicinity of my heart, some charm working on me. I got up, went to my closet, saw my cheval glass standing there, imponderable.
For what I think were some weeks thereafter, I visited her every night, my work-days slipping by in an agreeable daze, for I knew that within a few short hours I would be stepping over her threshold, back into her world, taking my chair, the wine poured, her perfect face before me – a sense of suspension so ripe it had the feeling of reverie. And yet when I think about how and why I paid her these calls – nothing occurs to me. Darkness seemed to billow outward, wrap itself round me, engulf me, then I was gone.
Even when we were apart, she seemed to be beside me, albeit in peculiar fugues I can’t recall. For sure I saw her continually, was good for little else. One night, at least, I broke the habit by accepting an invite to Grey’s, and over a succession of brandies I found I had to share with him some of my wonder. ‘There’s no fool like an old fool,’ said he, not unkindly, puffing amusedly on his Montecristo Robusto. Still, I had to see her, had to have her company. And when we were together I couldn’t imagine us apart, for all that each night ended in the same fashion, my return alone to the chilly envelope of my bed.
Then, one night, she came to call on me.
I was sitting in my living room, browsing the New England Journal under the standing lamp, curtains open to the night. The room was, as ever, full of recesses and shadows that no light could fully shift. I grew aware of a draught, but not from the window behind me – no, this came from before – from the armchair by the recess, out of the light, where, it now appeared
, someone sat.
‘Dijana …? Is that you?’
‘Doctor. Please. You’re not so sick. You expected me.’
‘But, how did you get in?’
She didn’t answer, only stood up and twirled. ‘How do I look?’
Her ‘look’ was well heeled and yet somehow second-hand, picked from a pawn shop or some vintage outfitter. She wore a black velvet Russian coat with folded cuffs and half-belt, a tad shabby. Glaring from the middle finger of her right hand was a gold ring set with a fat fake ruby.
‘Exquisite,’ I murmured.
‘Yes? Yes, I’ve decided – I chose well. It wasn’t my ideal, rather more necessity, mother of invention. But, it seems to have worked.’
I got up and lurched toward the tantalus. ‘Let me fix us both a drink.’
‘But why?’
‘Listen, I need a fresh drink.’
‘Doctor. You need a fresh liver. A fresh “look” altogether. To slip inside of something altogether new. Wouldn’t you say?’
I stood there and by her slight smile I knew – yes, it was past time for me to lay hands on her. The challenge of her eye, if nothing else, surely invited me.
‘I’m sorry, did you want to examine me, doctor?’
She unbuttoned the coat, under which, remarkably, she was naked, then shrugged the black velvet off her shoulders. As she walked toward the stairs I studied her sway, the serpent line of her notched spine, loose hair lustrous on her shoulder-blades. She half-turned her head, presumably to observe my progress, though all she saw was that I wasn’t moving. It was almost too regnant a performance.
‘Is this your party piece?’ I managed to say.
‘It has been known’, she murmured, ‘to have an effect.’
I drained my glass as I studied her, that European body drifting down the upstairs landing, through my bedroom door. At last I mounted those stairs, followed her footsteps, found her there, ready and waiting. With what languor she’d spread herself across my bed! I got down over her, kissed her mouth, feeling her hard teeth behind her lips. I touched her, the impress of her flesh chill, firm, waxen.
You will imagine, then, the sudden sickness I felt in the realisation that I wasn’t functioning – would not, for whatever unearthly reason, be capable of the deed. I just couldn’t understand it. She, however, grinned at me, a kind of gleeful pity. I sat up onto the edge of the bed, riled, humiliated. In the silence a cloud, bloodred, seemed to descend over my eyes. And then I heard her – as I would hear myself think. Was she whispering in my ear? Or was her voice inside my head?
‘Uroboros …’, she seemed to breathe, and I felt the sharp prod of a nail at the faded tattoo on my bicep. ‘Such a fine mind is yours, doctor. Long and twisting, rich in turns and courses, pulsing with invention like venom. Your body, though … ah, already so close to a spent vessel. Shame, such a shame. Just a little more time, a little more surrender to gravity’s pull, and you will be an old, old dog, all gone in the teeth. And then, sad to say, who could possibly care?’
Had I really believed for one moment this virago was the late, great love of my life? It now seemed she’d been sent to torment me. I could see her reflected behind me in the glass of the Schiele print on my wall – ‘Girl, Semi-Nude, Reclining’, and speaking to me still.
‘No conquests left for you, doctor. Only shipwrecks. The past then more painful, as life bears you ever closer to nothing, or worse. While the creases in your forehead deepen, your skin turns sallow, eyes sodden and dull. A face cursed by “character”, a body abandoned by Nature, bound for the bone-yard …’
She had sat up, curled herself round me from behind: her fingers entwined at my waist, her breasts on my back, her chin on my shoulder, her mouth at my ear.
‘And you are your body, Robert. Nothing else. There is no person apart from a body. I know you know that.’
I nodded, seething. ‘What am I supposed to do about it now?’
‘Doctor!’ Again she prodded me with one red fingernail. ‘You are “supposed” to die. Rotted from inside by your own poison. Autolysis, putrefaction—’
Hearing that I seized her hands and wrenched them from me, threw my weight against her, back down onto the bed. ‘Are you even here, with me? Because I’m thinking you could be me, just in a woman’s skin, saying back to me all the stupidest things I ever thought—’
Through my spitting rage She grinned up at me. Then Her eyes turned eight-ball black, Her cheeks and nose collapsed into a pool of putrescence: instantaneous and appalling liquefactive necrosis.
I suppose I must have jumped ten feet back from Her, the fear of God in me, landing painfully on the floor. But when She rose from the bed Her face was restored, Her smile serene.
I made it to the bathroom on my hands and knees, there to vomit into the bowl. When I dared return to my bedroom it was deserted, but I glimpsed Her figure through the door to the closet, and I followed Her in. She was standing by the cheval glass, gazing at me evenly, then She was gone.
* * *
The next morning I dressed and left the house, decided to walk to the underground. But my steps were heavy, my eyes dark, the crowded streets indistinct. I felt I’d aged overnight. I returned home, sequestered myself. Come the evening I was listening to Bartók’s String Quartet #1, staring out through my window at an orb of a moon in all her high, mesmeric splendour. Then She was at my shoulder, Her breath in my ear.
‘Who are you?’ I said.
In the glass I saw Her reflection put a finger to Her lips. But I heard Her voice in my head, saying something so absurd and awful, vertigo-inducing, I simply couldn’t accept it. I faced Her.
‘What do you want? Why are you taunting me?’
‘My intention is to guide you. In midlife, through these woods. Because you wish for a vita nuova? Is that not so? You should say it. We have no secrets here.’
‘It’s what I would want if I could have it, yes. As would anyone. What of it?’
‘Be sure of what you wish. Is it really the new? Or only the old that you had but lost? To be the great artist, in your physical prime, admired, sought after, loved by the woman you love …?’
‘What more is there to want than that?’
‘But doctor, somebody else has that life now …’
She laid hands on my shoulders, pressed me back round as to face the darkened window – only now we stood side by side at the doorway of some strange bedroom, its features limned by merest moonlight, its atmosphere one of sensual post-coital sleepiness. Killian MacCabe lay across the bed, pale sheets ruched at his groin, something Roman about his sculpted torso and tight dark curls. Then it was as though a breeze rustled through me, and Malena, naked as he, joined him on the bed. They curled into one another, whispering so low I couldn’t hear. She laid her head on his chest, he took her long hair in his hands, picked it up and let it pour down softly from his fingers. Were I an honest broker, I would have said they were beautiful together.
But the freezing I felt in my heart was so wretched, I couldn’t speak, even though a plea to them to cease, desist, was pulsing in my head. I believe Vukovara could hear me, but She remained impassive at my side. If I could have got my hands around MacCabe’s throat in that moment then, no question, it would have been the end of him.
But reality reclaimed us: a buzzing sound between my ears. It was my front-door intercom, and in the blink of an eye I was opening up to Grey. In my disoriented state I was quite sure Vukovara would disappear – fade into the walls, evaporate through the mirror. Nonetheless I was trying to semaphore to Grey that I needed to be alone when I heard Her trill over my shoulder, saw Grey’s eyebrows lift. She had sat Herself down with a drink, ready to receive company. I could hardly contain my anxiety, afraid Her merest touch might prove lethal to my friend. And yet somehow we made it through the risible charade of ‘a drink’. The moment I’d seen Grey out, I knew She was gone – leaving me to brood over why She had revealed Herself in this manner.
I did not see H
er again for some days. Evidently I was being left to stew. Grey called, told me frankly that he felt I could do far better than my latest ‘sweetheart’. I assured him She and I were through. And I wished that were so. But She had got claws into me – about the ruin of my life, the bad joke of my beaten-down dolour. Even with my headspace free of Her voice, nonetheless I felt Her insinuations probing and clinging like a tongue, insistent, irresistible. She had planted something in me – a hatred, an intolerable burning envy I hadn’t cared to confess to myself, of the man who stepped into my shoes.
* * *
That stage of my harrowing came to a head without warning on a night that Calder paid me one of his little visits. I was sorry, in a way, for my dull, morose manner – hardly good company for a hormonal young buck – but he appeared blithe once I’d poured him a dram and listened to him itemise the delights of his latest squeeze. Then I saw his gaze lift off me and I followed it. Vukovara was descending the staircase – fully clothed at least, in a clinging, stretching black dress.
‘Och I’m sorry, Rab,’ Cal blurted, ‘Didn’t know you’d a friend.’
‘Nor did I, Cal.’
She rounded my chaise longue and slid onto his, close beside him. ‘This is the son of the great Grey …?’ Her eyes shone in the half-light, and I didn’t care for how She looked at him – he alarmingly glad of the attention, figuratively flexing his young muscles.
‘Leave the boy alone,’ I snapped. ‘He has enough female fans of his own age.’ Cal, I saw, didn’t care for that ‘boy’. By the same token, perhaps, he chose not to dally. With the door shut on him, I confronted Her with a glare. But the contempt in Her eye was immovable.
The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Page 26
