The heat of my thirteenth summer melted the days and nights together into a cauldron of gold. Time collapsed. Every morning seemed like a drained-blue memory of yesterday. At night, as I lay in bed, my window wide open to the sound of the owl, the heat of the day would slide insidiously into my bed beside me. The heat of the day kept me awake with its feverish stroking turning me from side to side and licking my skin with its hot tongue, as the moon hung quietly outside in the swollen sky.
One evening, the heat turned me out of my bed, pushed my naked body out with its hands. It forced me to run out of the house down to the lake, past the walled garden. A boat was moored to the small wooden pier. Rowing out into the centre of the mirrored lake I anchored over and below the moon. I stood for a moment balanced on the gunwale of the boat looking out into the night stillness. I dived. The cold water parted open for my body only to grab hold of me again in its icy grasp. I opened my eyes as I plunged down into its blackness, and it was as if I were flying up into the night sky.
Although I never reached the bottom, now, from the library where I write, I can imagine what it is like. At the bottom of the lake are starfish, as if they are stars fallen straight from the sky in the same pattern that they formed above. Rainbow fish dart like fireflies through the transparent water. Scarves of green weeds wave as if undulating in the breeze. At the bottom of the lake, I am sure, is the silent and profound version of what is above. Down there, at the bottom of the lake, just out of my reach.
That evening I surfaced to look out over the water at the white-pillared folly that palely glimmered within the shadows of the other side of the lake. Like a ghost, my mother, in transparent silk, her back turned to me, stood on its wide steps. One of her pilgrims stood beside her, his face reflecting blankly the light of the moon. From the centre of the cool water of the lake, I watched this strange man shut his forget-me-not eyes, as with her mouth she plucked out his heart through his open lips.
FOUR
When my mother aged, she aged inexorably and terribly. She covered the mirrors in Blenheim House in black net veils, as if in mourning for the lost beauty once reflected in them. The flesh that had once clung so tautly to her high cheekbones was pulled off the bone in jowls and lines, by remorseless invisible hands. Age clawed at the corner of her eyes and drew red veins across her face. But it was in the expression of her eyes that the price she was paying showed most.
For every new line that marked her face I added to my rooms an object of art. Kensington Gardens became a memorial to her loveliness. I felt pity for her: I understood about disfigurement.
My own face, however, seemed to grow younger rather than older as the years passed.
‘It is not natural,’ she said, ‘For experience to have marked you so little. It is as if life has not long enough fingers to touch you.’
As my mother’s beauty disintegrated, so did her mind. For her sense of identity was dependent on how she appeared. From being dry and elliptical her language metamorphosed into childish anecdote. The grace of her body turned into the forelegs of a seaside donkey. Every time I came to visit her I noticed that another Dresden shepherdess had lost her arm. The black smiling sand-boy that had stood by the side of the main stairs had had his nose knocked off – the white of the chipped porcelain glared out from beneath. Only when every precious art figurine in Blenheim House had lost a limb did I realize that this was not due to my mother’s clumsiness. Surgical precision had performed each amputation. She had gone around all the statues in the house, deforming them one by one. After her death I discovered the limbs in a large box marked in red felt-tip pen miscellaneous, which she had stored under her bed. Inside, piled up high, were legs, teeth, hands and ears, made of china, clay or coloured glass. I wondered if she had kept them there to gloat over, or if one day she had planned to stick the limbs back on. Our family motto had always been facta non verba.
FIVE
Beauty is spring-water cold. She doesn’t twist and weave and shadows only serve to accentuate her features. Her static opacity is like a mirror which refuses to reflect anything but itself.
My love of beauty is why I collect art. For art renders beauty immortal, traps her for eternity in amber. The painted details of a pure shaft of light, a creamy tuft of ermine fur, a bleeding jewel defy the passing of time. The art I collect must, of course, conform to the ideal. Art that does not is a lower form of life, a form of degradation.
After the thrill of seeing a beautiful object for the first time, my second desire is to possess her. I want to take her home, touch her, lock her up, take her out, look at her, stroke her, whenever I wish. If I had not been born into money, I would have become an art-thief.
Do not dismiss this compulsion to own what is beautiful as superficial, as only a matter of style. For the exquisite sense of pleasure I experience when gazing upon an object of beauty is more profound than any meditation on the nature of truth. You may think, perhaps, that this worship of beauty is dangerously romantic. That I have carved out for myself, within the maelstrom of the twentieth century’s final decade, an unnatural vacuum. And you would be right. For tell me, what is so good about reality? Would you prefer that I decorated my flat with famine victims, that I laced my floors with leprous skin?
SIX
It is as if I see the years of my life before I met Justine, through the water of a still pond. I collected art and went to dinner parties and talked to elegant, articulate people on a frequent basis whom I had no desire to meet again. I was in control of my life to the point of the absurd. The future had already happened. Yet at night the predictability of my life began to be disturbed by the recurrence of a single dream.
I am driving up a wide avenue lined at regular intervals by tall beeches. The silver light of their leaves is reflecting the blueness of the sky. The hot afternoon is being bled dry by the scarlet rhododendrons which flourish between the trees. I didn’t think that I had a destination.
It is only when I turn the corner of the avenue that I see the house. A huge Gothic house rears up in front of me like a leviathan raising its head out of the sea. Its skin is of dark grey stone. Gargoyles, grinning and gulping, with wide open mouths line its side. One of the gutters has broken and water trickles down in a line over the surface of its body eroding the greyness to reveal the white chalkiness beneath. Seeing the water, I realize that, in spite of the heat, it has only recently stopped raining. The sky behind its frame is of unlimited blue: unreally, as if a sheet of azure cellophane has been inserted behind the façade of the house. The flatness of the sky contrasts with the thick three-dimensionality of the house. To the right of the house grows a maze of dark green yew, standing taller than a man. In the dream I never reach the house, I always wake up just as I am turning the corner of the avenue and seeing the house for the first time.
Waking, I would lie outstretched on the horse-hair sofa, the disturbing memory of the dream diffusing in the lilac spirals of the opium I would occasionally smoke. It was through the sweetness of this smoke that the portrait, which hung above the swirling marble of the mantelpiece, invariably drew my eye.
SEVEN
The portrait was a full-length figure of a woman. She was sitting at a table, in a bare dark room with a window whose bars flung their shadows across the left-hand side of her face. On the table lay an open hook and a bottle of ink. The writing inside the book was hand-written not printed, in childish form. The script covered half a page. The actual words, however, were illegible. In her hand she held a fountain pen. A velvet dress clung to the contours of her body, her breasts offering themselves up to the viewer by the low cut of its Empire line.