Her hard pale eyes, set wide apart in her face, contained the knowledge that nothing was of any consequence outside of how she looked. Her gaze did not look directly at me, but coyly, to one side. This meant I could look at her to my heart’s content. By looking away she put herself even more on display to me. This oblique sacrifice of herself sealed my love.
In the half-state of consciousness that smoking opium induced in me, I could look at this portrait with contentment for the entire day until evening fell and she would turn her head towards me and smile. The background of the picture would change also. Instead of sitting in the shadowy room she would be sitting in a formal garden. Just to the right of her would stand a line of yew trees which I could see, on closer inspection, formed the side of a maze. What never changed about the picture, no matter how many times I looked at it, was the plaque on the lower edge of its gilt frame which read Justine.
This was how I spent the last days of my life until my mother’s death. Interior, self-reflexive days where the source of all my pleasure were my day and night dreams. Drugs and absolute solitude gave me ultimate control over my life. My solipsistic universe could never stray from the strictures that I set it.
EIGHT
On the day that I discovered my mother’s body I had driven up to Blenheim House, one early summer afternoon, for tea. For the past year my mother, in spite of being physically fit, had taken to her bed. It was her way of hiding from the world. She could no longer hear the gaze of others. However, her self-confinement had weakened her. What had started off as a gesture had become an ending in itself.
That Sunday afternoon it was raining outside as I made my way down the lonely corridors of the house that I had once played in as a child. I softly knocked on the same bedroom door through which I had used to watch my mother dressing for dinner. As there was no reply I assumed that she had fallen asleep and I opened the door and entered. But her unmade bed was empty, the sheets trailing on the floor. I could hear behind the closed door of the adjoining bathroom, the slow relentless sound of a tap dripping. Walking up to the door I noticed that the carpet beneath my feet was damp and soft like moss. Water was seeping from underneath the bathroom door. I turned the handle of the door and it opened easily.
The naked body of my mother lay in the overflowing bath. What shocked me more than the fact that she was dead was the extent to which her body had been ruined by age. When I had last seen her naked the fullness and suppleness of her flesh reflected in her mirror had entranced me. Now her breasts were slack and pendulous. Varicose veins scoured her legs, like purple buds about to burst into bloom. The shape of her body was concealed by roll upon roll of fat. Blood spiralled into the water in arabesques from her swollen split wrists. The make-up that she had so carefully applied to her face before cutting her wrists had smeared. Mascara ran down her cheeks in black lines like the bars of a cage.
I bent down over her and carefully lifted her body out of the bath. I carried her out into the bedroom where I placed her as gently as I could onto the bed. I dried her body and wiped the remaining make-up from her face. But this revealed the second mask of her age-ravaged skin. With the aid of her make-up, I tried, as she had tried, to restore back to the face some of its youth and beauty. I tried to paint the blood back into her lips and the blush of life back into her cheeks. In vain I tried to repair the damage of mortality.
Evening had fallen by the time I walked back out through the house. I passed by the various statues and figurines, with their absent limbs, that stood about the rooms. One by one I knocked them down, hearing them crash to the floor behind me. They broke into such tiny pieces, which scattered across the floor, that mending them would have proved impossible.
NINE
My flat seemed cool and at peace as I entered it later that same night. I lay down on the sofa and took out my opium pipe. It was of ivory, ornately carved with woodland animals. Deer and squirrels leapt and clambered over its stem. The pipe had been bought purely for aesthetic reasons, for its intricate decoration, and I had only begun to use it for its original purpose after I had started to handle it and realized that its patterns demanded to be read. The pleasure of using the pipe became entwined with the pleasure of the drug until the two became indistinguishable: just as the figures of the leaping deer were inseparable from the actual structure of the pipe.
The sweet taste of the opium was pleasantly nauseous and my gaze fell inevitably on to the portrait of Justine. To my shock a change had come over her expression: the consolatory quality of her beauty had disappeared. Her face had grown malevolent, her eyes had narrowed, and the book that she had been writing had fallen to the floor as if she were no longer interested in the mere construction of words. I had the strong impression that she was angry that she was still trapped inside the room and that her painted background had not been transformed into the garden where she preferred to sit. I shut my eyes to block out her anger that seemed directly aimed at me. When I opened them she had returned to her normal posture serene and self-contained, her eyes looking off to one side. However, after this incident I perceived a distinctly erotic edge to her beauty which had not been there before.
TEN
Looking back now, I see that it was only natural that I should first meet Justine at a funeral. Justine and Death had a natural affinity for each other: they followed each other around. Her icy demeanour enticingly challenged the warm and passionate breath of death. Death as soon as he laid eyes upon her, would have wanted his way with her. It was just that Justine played hard to get.
At the altar, my mother lay in the open coffin surrounded by the whiteness of lilies. Her ruined beauty now lay on display to the world. The service was simple and apart from the Priest there were only three people at the funeraclass="underline" myself, my mother’s maid and a woman who was standing three rows in front, her back turned to me. She was wearing a dress which was cut low at the back so that I could see the sinuous muscles that twisted like snakes under her skin. Often now, when I think of Justine, it is of her back, of her turning away from me, walking away. Her back is the place from where it is always safe to watch. She was sheathed in beige silk, the colour of shadowed snow. Even from the back I could tell that she would cost me too much.
The arches of the Norman church that we stood beneath reproduced in their fluid form the curve of her shoulder. The combination of proportion and grace which was the architecture of the church, also formed the body of the woman. I still had not seen her face and as I waited for a glimpse of it I fantasized the various ways in which the bones might be sculptured. However, I had no doubt in my mind that her face would be devastating, that she would in one pure way devastate me.
The stone of the church was pale gold, like her hair, and light shone through the blood-red of the stained glass casting shadows on both. The church smelt of dust.
Only when the coffin was carried down the aisle by the bearers, did I catch a glimpse of her face as she turned to look at it. It was Justine. The face of my painting had been brought to life in front of me. The image had been made flesh. Except the flesh of this Justine was chiselled out of ice. No facial expression disfigured the Madonna-like purity of her face. The look as she followed with her eyes my mother’s coffin down the aisle had the indifferent but focused attention of a child. In the moment of recognition this stranger had been frozen into my heart. As soon as I saw her, I wanted her for my own. To place her in my flat in the best position for the light.