I picked up my suitcase and made my way out of the burning flat. I wondered how long it would be before someone called for help. What mattered was that they waited long enough for all my mementos to beauty to be destroyed. I no longer needed them. I was about to rescue and possess the icon of beauty itself. As I got into the lift of my apartment block and shut the heavy black metal gates together, I could taste the acrid smell of burning in my mouth and hear the other-worldly screams of Lethe being burned alive.
I was euphoric – by burning my flat I had eradicated my solitary past in preparation for a future with Justine full of exquisite pleasure. As I climbed into the taxi I turned my head to take one last look at my flat. Flames were beating out of the windows of my top floor, angry and impassioned, demanding gratitude for their force of will. I never doubted their power to cleanse.
FIFTY-EIGHT
Outside Kings Cross was purgatory: beggars, drug dealers and pimps. Lost souls waiting for their bodies to return to them. The bright lights of London lit up around them, like the fires of Hell. Inside the station, the light that shone through the vaulting arches belonged to God. Stations always beguiled me. They seemed to me full of containment and the largesse of the soul. They were the gateway to the other side.
As the train moved out through the suburbs, I realized that this was the first time I had travelled out of London since I had met Justine. Justine had become terminally connected with the city, it was where I thought she had been imprisoned, where I had looked for her traces.
The train was almost empty. The windows were not tinted, but muddied with dirt. The gentle murmurs of the passengers served as a fluid melody to the rhythm of the train, like a stream of blood to the beating of the heart. The train rumbled on through the dark countryside. It was misty and foggy outside. But the sky above was as white as Justine’s flesh. The light was so bright that it hurt my eyes.
I was certain that light also lay in wait for me at the end of my journey. A light that would engulf any pain in the moment it took to blind me with its brightness. This light would be jealous of any pain, burn it out of existence. Only the angel of terror and pleasure would be left to hover above my head.
In the opposite compartment, twin girls were playing chess. Their profiles were identical, their movements synchronized. They could have been one person reflected in a mirror.
The train stopped at a small provincial town and an old woman got on. Much to my annoyance she sat down opposite me. Her damp grey hair fell in strands around her ears.
‘Would you mind not staring? It’s very rude,’ she suddenly said to me. Her breath smelt of linctus.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that I was,’ I said.
‘Well, you should have. You strike me as someone who is not very observant of someone else’s feelings. Or of your own, for that matter. You shouldn’t go through life with so little self-awareness. It could end in trouble.’
She was quite clearly insane, and I was relieved when she got off at the next station. I watched her stride along the platform. She was smiling. In spite of her age, she looked very far from death. Further away from it than I was.
FIFTY-NINE
It was late afternoon when I arrived in the small village that Justine had told me was in the vicinity of my final destination. The place was idyllic, on the verge of unreality – the pretty cottages looking as if they were made out of pillarbox-red cardboard, and the village pond out of coloured glass. I hired a convertible and followed Justine’s elaborate directions out of the village, to the stone pillars which formed the gateway to the drive. I turned up the driveway, the wind blowing across my face, the sun coming out in a last-minute appearance before nightfall. The avenue of trees cast shadows on the driveway, the leaves were just on the edge of turning gold. I had been here before.
Looking back now, as I write, I think the journey to Justine’s, that day, was the happiest of my life. No other emotion can compare to the sense of freedom, laughter and erotic anticipation of meeting someone with whom one has fallen in love. The danger involved in my journey heightened my excitement. If I had my life over, I would wish simply to be approaching forever the stone gates of the driveway and driving up through the shadows of the trees, the smell of leaves and grass in my head, the sunlight full on my face, with the first and only total sensation of freedom I have ever had.
The recognition of what was happening to me now, from the dreams that I had already had, reinforced my sense of Destiny. This was where I was supposed to be. The last few months had been leading up to the inexorable fact of the present moment. The sound of the birds, the fresh breeze, had all been experienced before in my dreams, to make their happening now a form of welcome, a kind of reward.
I turned the corner of the avenue to be faced with the Gothic house of my dreams. I stopped the car and walked out across the gravel. Looking up I saw someone at the window staring down at me from between the bars. The sun lit up the glass, blinding me for a second, and then went behind a cloud. I could now see the face clearly – it was a woman’s. It was Justine. Who else could it have been? There was a humming in my head as I approached the steps of the main entrance and walked up them, through the open door into the house.
SIXTY
The interior of the house was dark. The smell was what struck me first, or rather the absence of smell. In spite of the age of the house, the plethora of hard dark wood, the late eighteenth-century portraits which hung on the wall, and faded oriental rugs, there was no musky sweetness, no atmosphere of dust. The absence of smell had a curious effect: it made the interior of the house seem as if it were a backdrop, a fake, a trompe-l’oeil. Or a three-dimensional phantom that only appeared to have substance. I put my hand out to touch the bottom whorl of the oaken staircase.
Justine was somewhere in here. She was waiting for me to come to her rescue, at the top of the house, in the room with barred windows. There were no signs of life down here in the hallway. Neither were there any signs of the presence of her abductor. The main hall began to appear to me more like a stage set for some melodrama. But I knew that the reality of Justine was imprisoned somewhere above me, the soft voluptuous reality of her. Making love to her would be a consummation of the weeks that had led up to it, all the pain and design. My desire, once consummated, would justify reality. Or rather give back reality to what I saw around me. It would make life real.
I called out her name.
It hung in the air, seemed to mark the place and space in time. But there was no reply. I felt strangely unafraid. The abductor was obviously out of the house. It was all falling into place.
I made my way up to the top floor. I walked along the corridor, softly, to the room from where I had seen Justine look down at me, between its bars. However, to my surprise, the door was wide open. The small bare room was empty except for a pen and some sheaves of paper lying on a wooden table and a chair. The light fell in exactly the same way as it had in the background to the portrait of Justine. But Justine was no longer in the painting. Entering the room, I walked up to the window and looked out through the bars. Formal gardens reached out from the back of the house, tapering out into the smooth flat plains of wheat fields.