Ah, days of play, days of—dare I say it?—days of innocence.
‘Did she tell you why she did it?’ Billie asked.
She was perched before me on a high wooden stool with her tubular thighs in those tight jeans splayed and her glass held in both hands between her knees. I was confused for a moment, my mind having been off doing bold things with Mrs Gray, and thought she was referring to Cass. No, I said, no, of course not, I had no inkling why she did it, how could I? She gave me one of her balefully deprecating looks—she has a way of making her eyes seem to bulge that is distinctly unnerving—and I realised it was Dawn Devonport she meant. To cover up for my mistake I looked away, frowning, and fiddled with my glass of port. I said, sounding rather prim to my own ears, that I was sure it had been a mistake and that Dawn Devonport had not meant to do it. Billie, seeming to lose interest, only gave a grunt and glanced idly about the bar. I studied her puffy profile, and as I did so I had briefly a vertiginous sensation, as if I had been brought up short at the very lip of a high sheer cliff. It is a feeling I have sometimes when I look, I mean really look, at other people, which I do not often do, which no one does, often, I expect. It is linked in a mysterious way with the feeling that used to come over me occasionally on stage, the feeling of falling somehow into the character I was playing, literally falling, as one might trip and pitch forwards on one’s face, and losing all sense of my other, unacting, self.
The statisticians tell us there is no such thing as coincidence, and I must accept they know what they are talking about. If I were to believe that a certain confluence of events was a special and unique phenomenon outside the ordinary flow of happenstance I would have to accept, as I do not, that there is a transcendent process at work above, or behind, or within, commonplace reality. And yet I ask myself, why not? Why should I not allow of a secret and sly arranger of seemingly chance events? Axel Vander was in Portovenere when my daughter died. This fact, and I take it as a fact, stands before me huge and immovable, like a tree, with all its roots hidden deep in darkness. Why was she there, and why was he?
Svidrigailov.
I intended to go, I said now, to Portovenere, and that although I intended taking Dawn Devonport with me, she did not know it yet. I think that was the first time ever I heard Billie Stryker laugh out loud.
___
In former times the only access to those little towns was from the sea, for the hinterland along that coast is formed largely of a chain of mountains the flanks of which plunge at a sharp angle into the bay. Now there is a narrow railway track cut through the rock that runs under many tunnels and affords abrupt, dizzying vistas of steep landscapes and inlets where the sea gleams dully like stippled steel. In winter the light has a bruised quality, and there is salt in the air and the smell of sea-wrack and of diesel fumes from the fishing boats that crowd the tiny harbours. The car that I had hired turned out to be a surly and recalcitrant beast and gave me much trouble and more than one fright on the road as we travelled eastwards from Genoa. Or perhaps the fault was mine, for I was in a state of some agitation—I am not a good traveller, being nervous of foreign parts and a poor linguist besides. As we drove I thought of Mrs Gray and how she would have envied us, down here on this blue coast. At Chiavari we abandoned the car and took the train. I had difficulty with the bags. The train was smelly and the seats were hard. As we chugged along eastwards a rain storm swept down from the mountains and lashed at the carriage windows. Dawn Devonport watched the downpour and spoke out of the depths of the upturned big collar of her coat. ‘So much,’ she said, ‘for the sunny south.’
From the moment when we stepped on to foreign soil she had been recognised everywhere, despite the headscarf and the enormous sunglasses that she wore; or perhaps it was because of them, they being the unmistakable disguise of a troubled star on the run. This prominence was something I had not anticipated, and although I was a largely disregarded presence at her side or, more often, in her wake, I still felt unnervingly exposed, a chameleon that has lost its adaptive powers. We were due that day at Lerici, where I had booked hotel rooms for us, but she had insisted on seeing the Cinque Terre first, and so here we were, uncertainly astray on this cheerless winter afternoon.