8
I RELIVED THAT moment on Sophie’s bed so often in my mind that the details wore out, became hollow, leached of solidity. I alone was always real there, always intensely present. Suddenly I had a vivid sense of myself. I held myself poised, balanced in air, as if I were some precious, polished thing that had been put with ceremonial care into my hands. It was not the kiss that mattered so much, but what it seemed to signify. A world had opened up before me, disordered, perilous and strange, and for the first time in my life I felt almost at home.
But when I next saw Sophie I experienced a tiny jolt of surprise. She had so throbbed in my imagination that now, when I confronted the real she, it was as if I had just parted from her more dazzling double. She must have caught a flicker of that shock in my eyes, for she smiled strangely, and turned and walked away slowly, looking back at me over her shoulder. That was the day she took me to Mr Kasperl’s room.
I did not notice her taking me there. We were just trailing aimlessly about the house, as we so often did. But when she pushed open his door I remember feeling a vague, almost pleasurable qualm, as if I were being seduced, gently, with sly blandishments, into hazard. He was not there, he was at the mine. The room was vast, high-ceilinged, crowded with big ugly pieces of furniture, bureaux, a chest of drawers, his enormous, rumpled bed. There was a hushed, watchful atmosphere, as if something had been going on, and had stopped when we came in. It was raining outside, a summer storm was on the way. Sophie wandered to the streaming window and stood with her forehead against the glass, looking out dreamily into a green, liquid world. I glanced at Mr Kasperl’s papers strewn on the bed, his books, his ordnance maps, his charts of the underground workings at Coolmine. There was a big black notebook, thick as a wizard’s codex, with a worn cloth cover and dog-eared pages. I picked it up idly and opened it, and at once it began to speak to me in a strong, clear, familiar voice. I sat down slowly on the edge of the bed.
It was the work of years. Page after page was crammed with calculations, diagrams, algebraic formulas, set out in a minute, square script. Much of it I could not understand. Quaternions, matrix theory, transfinite numbering, I had barely heard of such things. I noticed there were things we had in common, however, a particular fondness for symmetries, for example, for mirror equivalences, and palindromic series. But his was a grandmaster game, and I was a novice. Such intricacy, such elegance! I read on, enraptured. Everything beyond the bed became blurred, as if a kind of luminous dusk had fallen. The girl seemed to flit about the room, there one moment, gone the next, like a vague attendant seen from a sick-bed. For a while she was standing beside me, her hip negligently touching my shoulder, but when she went away it was as if I had imagined it, that warmth, her shadow, her hand resting at her side. The storm arrived, peals of thunder rolled across the sky, rattling the window-frames. The air had a sulphurous glow. Then suddenly it was calm again, and I looked up in undulant rain-light and found Mr Kasperl standing in the doorway, in his drenched dustcoat, watching me.
He entered the room heavily, mopping the rain on his brow with a large red kerchief. He took off his coat, and, without looking at her, handed it to Sophie. The rain stopped, and the sun came out suddenly, with an almost audible swish, blazing in the window. I closed the notebook quietly and laid it back on the bed. Mr Kasperl paid me no heed, yet his manner was not unfriendly. Sophie fetched a hanger for his coat, and hung it in the window to dry in the sun. He moved here and there about the room, with that slow, deliberate walk, rolling on the balls of his feet. He opened a box of cigars that stood on top of a bureau, selected one, sniffed it, trimmed the end, and lit up. I thought of sidling away quietly. He worked at his cigar unhurriedly, getting it going evenly, then turned at last and came towards the bed. I stood up. He stopped, not looking at me still, and drew a bead on the black notebook, one eye half shut, as if it were a distant target, then picked it up and riffled through the pages. He found what he was looking for, and turned to me, tapping a finger on the page. It was a series of field equations, elegant but enigmatic, their solutions all dissipating towards infinity. He contemplated them for a moment with what seemed a grim satisfaction, then put the open notebook into my hands and walked away from me, leaving cigar smoke, and a faint smell of damp cloth and coal. I sat down on the bed again. The door opened and Felix put in his head. He looked at me with his thin smile, narrowing his eyes.
— I was looking for you, he said, and here you were in the temple, all the time.
He followed his head into the room, one hand in a pocket, scratching his groin. Mr Kasperl padded past him and went out, his silent back stooping through the doorway. Sophie turned to the window again. I put the notebook away.
Jack Kay fell ill. He sat at the range in his rocking-chair, a plaid rug about his knees. He was cold, he said, cold, glaring resentfully at the sunshine streaming in the kitchen window. His large white hands lay motionless in his lap, like a pair of clumsy implements fallen from his grasp. He would not eat. Amber puddles began to appear on the floor under his chair. The doctor was called, and ordered him to bed. We lifted him from the rocker, my father, Uncle Ambrose and I, and carried him upstairs. He lay against us stiffly, a big chalk statue, mute and furious. He was unexpectedly light. The years had been working away at him in secret, hollowing him out. We propped him in bed against a bank of pillows and stepped back, brushing our hands. He gazed up at us fearfully, like a child, his mouth working, his fingers clamped on the fold of blankets at his chest as if it were the rim of a parapet behind which he was slowly, helplessly falling. Days, the doctor said, a week at the most. But the weeks went past and still he lay there, watching the light in the window, the surreptitious sky. He would talk to no one, but raged in silence, like a man betrayed. He developed bedsores, I had to turn him on his side while my mother basted him with ointment. His skin was dry but supple, like wrapping paper with something soft inside it, and I thought of those soft parcels my mother would have me carry home for her from the butcher’s when I was a child. In the narrow bed he looked huge yet insubstantial, a great bleached dead husk, inside of which the living man still cowered, peering out through the eyes in panic and a kind of amazement. Summer was ending, but still the weather held, as if to mock him. His mind began to wander. He would lie for hours talking to himself in a furious undertone. Sometimes he shouted out suddenly, and threw himself from side to side, plucking at the bedclothes, like a footless drunkard trying to get up and fight. One day he fell out of bed, we found him on the floor in a tangle of sheets, waving his arms weakly as if to ward off an assailant. His pot was overturned.
— Oh, look what you’ve done, my mother said. Just look!
He glared at her, suspicious, bewildered, afraid.
— Mother, he said gruffly, are you there, mother?
He groaned. There was no way out of the huge confusion into which he had blundered. He let us lift him into bed, and lay back on the pillows meekly. He turned his eyes to the window, and one fat, lugubrious tear ran down his temple, over the livid vein pulsing there.