In the desperate idleness of one of those afternoons Billy hunted out the key to the cocktail cabinet—yes, the Grays possessed such an exotic item, for they were among the town’s more well-to-do folk, though I doubt anyone in the house ever actually drank a cocktail—and we broke into a precious bottle of his father’s twelve-year-old whiskey. Standing at the window, cut-glass tumbler in hand, my pal and I felt like a pair of Regency rakes looking down in high disdain upon a drably sober world. It was my first drink of whiskey, and although I would never develop a liking for the stuff, that day the sullen, bitter reek of it and the scald of it on my tongue seemed portents of the future, a promise of all the rich adventures that life surely had in store for me. Outside in the little square the wan sunlight of early spring was gilding the cherry trees and making the black, arthritic tips of their branches glisten, and old Busher the rag-and-bone man on his cart went grinding past, a wagtail scurrying out of the way of the frilled hoofs of his horse, and at the sight of these things I felt a sharp sweet ache of yearning, objectless yet definite, like the phantom pain in an amputee’s missing limb. Did I see, or sense, even then, away down the tunnel of time, tiny in the distance yet growing steadily more substantial, the figure of my future love, chatelaine of the House of Gray, already making her abstracted, dallying way towards me?
What used I call her, I mean how did I address her? I do not remember saying her name, ever, though I must have. Her husband sometimes called her Lily, but I do not think I had a pet-name, a love-name, for her. I have a suspicion, which will not be dismissed, that on more than one occasion, in the throes of passion, I cried out the word Mother! Oh, dear. What am I to make of that? Not, I hope, what I shall be told I should.
Billy took the whiskey bottle into the bathroom and topped up the telltale gap with a gill of water from the tap, and I dried and polished the glasses as best I could with my handkerchief and put them back where they had been on the shelf in the cocktail cabinet. Partners in crime, Billy and I were suddenly shy of each other, and I took up my schoolbag hurriedly and made my getaway, leaving my friend slumped on the sofa again, watching the unwatchable racers pounding through the electric snow.
I would like to be able to say it was that day, because I remember it so particularly, that I came face to face with Mrs Gray for the first, real, time, at the front door, perhaps, she coming in as I was going out, her face flushed from the thrilling air of outdoors and my nerves tingling still after the whiskey; a chance touch of her hand, a surprised, lingering look; a thickening in the throat; a soft jolt to the heart. But no, the front hall was empty except for Billy’s bicycle and an unpartnered roller-skate that must have been Kitty’s, and no one met me in the doorway, no one at all. The pavement when I stepped on to it seemed farther away from my head than it should be, and tended to tilt, as though I were on stilts and the stilts had squashy springs attached to the ends of them—in short, I was drunk, not seriously so, but drunk nevertheless. Just as well, then, that I did not encounter Mrs Gray, being in such a state of soggy euphoria, for there is no telling what I might have done and thereby ruined everything before it had even started.
And look! In the square, when I come out, it is, impossibly, autumn again, not spring, and the sunlight has mellowed and the leaves of the cherry trees have rusted and Busher the rag-and-bone man is dead. Why are the seasons being so insistent, why do they resist me so? Why does the Mother of the Muses keep nudging me like this, giving me what seem all the wrong hints, tipping me the wrong winks?
My wife just now climbed all the way up here to my eyrie under the roof, unwillingly negotiating the steep and treacherous attic stairs that she hates, to tell me that I have missed a telephone call. At first, when she put her head in at the low door—how smartly I encircled this page with a protective arm, like a schoolboy caught scribbling smut—I could hardly understand what she was saying. I must have been concentrating very hard, lost in the lost world of the past. Usually I hear the phone ringing, down in the living room, a far-off and strangely plaintive sound that makes my heart joggle anxiously, just as it used to do long ago when my daughter was a baby and her crying woke me in the night.
The caller, Lydia said, was a woman, whose name she did not catch, though she was unmistakably American. I waited. Lydia was looking dreamily beyond me now, out through the sloped window in front of my desk, to the mountains in the distance, pale blue and flat, as if they had been painted on the sky in a weak wash of lavender; it is one of the charms of our city that there are few places in it from which these soft and, I always think, virginal hills are not visible, if one is prepared to stretch. What, I asked gently, had this woman on the phone wished to speak to me about? Lydia with an effort withdrew her gaze from the view. A film, she said, a movie, in which it seems I am being offered a leading part. This is interesting. I have not acted in a film before. I enquired as to the movie’s title, or what it is to be about. Lydia’s look grew vague, I mean more vague than it had been up to now. She did not think the woman had told her what the title is. Apparently it is to be a biopic, but of whom she is not sure—some German, it seems. I nodded. Had the woman perhaps left a number so that I might call her back? At this Lydia lowered her head and frowned at me from under her eyebrows in solemn silence, like a child who has been asked a difficult and onerous question the answer to which she does not know. Never mind, I said, no doubt the woman would phone again, whoever she was.
My poor Lydia, she is always a little dazed like this after one of her bad nights. Her name, by the way, is really Leah—Lydia is a mishearing of mine that stuck—Leah Mercer as was, as my mother would have said. She is large and handsome, with broad shoulders and a dramatic profile. Her hair these days is a two-tone shade of what used to be called salt-and-pepper with, in the undergrowth, a few uncertain sallow lowlights. When I met her first her hair had the lustre of a raven’s wing, with a great silver streak in it, a flash of white fire; as soon as the silver began to spread she allowed herself to succumb to the blandishments of Adrian at Curl Up and Dye, whence she returns hardly recognisable after her monthly appointment with this master colourist. Her glossy, kohl-black eyes, those eyes of a desert daughter, as I used to think them, have lately taken on a faded, filmy aspect, which makes me worry about the possibility of cataracts. In her young days her figure had the ample lines of one of Ingres’s odalisques but now the glory has fallen and she wears nothing but loose, billowing garments in muted hues, her camouflage, as she says with a sad laugh. She drinks a little too much, but then so do I; our decade-long great sorrow simply will not be drowned, tread it though we will below the surface and try to hold it there. Also she smokes heavily. She has a sharp tongue of which I am increasingly wary. I am very fond of her, and she, I believe, is fond of me, despite our frictions and occasional tight-lipped disagreements.
We had a dreadful night, the two of us, I with my dream of having been replaced in Lydia’s affections by an androgynous writer of Gothic tales, and Lydia suffering one of those nocturnal bouts of mania that have beset her at irregular intervals over the past ten years. She wakes, or at least leaps from the bed, and goes dashing in the dark through all the rooms, upstairs and down, calling out our daughter’s name. It is a kind of sleepwalking, or sleeprunning, in which she is convinced our Catherine, our Cass, is still alive and a child again and lost somewhere in the house. I get up groggily and follow her, only half awake myself. I do not try to restrain her, heeding the old wives’ caution against interfering in any way with a person in that state, but I keep close in case she should trip over something and I might be able to catch her before she falls and save her from injuring herself. It is eerie, scurrying through the darkened house—I do not dare switch on the lights—in desperate pursuit of this fleeting figure. The shadows throng us round like a silent chorus, and at intervals a patch of moonlight or the radiance from a street-lamp falling in at a window will seem a dimmed spotlight, and I am reminded of one of those tragic queens in the Greek drama, raging through the king her husband’s palace at midnight shrieking for her lost child. Eventually she tires herself out, or comes to her senses, or both, as she did last night, sinking down on a step of the stairs, all in a heap, shedding terrible tears and sobbing. I hovered about her helplessly, not knowing quite how to get my arms around her, so amorphous a shape did she appear, in her sleeveless black nightdress, her head hanging and her hands plunged in her hair that in the dark looked as black as it was the first time I saw her, walking out into summer through the revolving door of her father’s hotel, the Halcyon of happy memory, the tall glass panels of the door throwing off repeated, glancing bursts of blue and gold—yes, yes, the crest of the wave!