— Adele has given up smoking, Father Plomer said. Haven’t you, my dear? A new life. She’s going to lead a new life.
And he smiled, blank-eyed and bland. Adele went on pulling the brush through her hair, stroke by stroke. Matron continued to look at me for a moment, then turned away, for the last time.
When I went to the chapel that evening Adele was not there. I was not surprised. She was in her room, asleep, stranded among the tangled sheets as if a wave had deposited her there. I sat for a while in the stillness, watching her. It was bright yet outside, but the blind was shut, a grey half-light suffused the room. Twilight, her hour. Hers too that lost, wan, tender shade of grey. Her lips were open, one hand lay on the pillow beside her cheek. I put the ampoules into the pocket of her dressing-gown and went out quietly and shut the door behind me.
The bus swayed and pitched along the narrow roads, wallowing on the bends, the gears roaring. Trees advanced at a rush into the headlights, their branches thrown up in astonishment, then plunged past us into the darkness again. I was in the seat by the door, near the driver, a lean, pale, taciturn man who sat with his bony knees splayed, turning the big flat steering wheel with a rolling motion of his arms, as if he were hauling in a rope. At the stops he would lean forward and rest his elbows on the wheel, his wrists crossed, and suck his teeth and gaze out at the road. We went through a village, and halted at a dark crossroads where an old man with a crutch got on. He paused on the step and looked at me, panting, his old mouth open toothlessly at one side. We climbed for a long time, then bounced across an open plateau, I could see faint stars low down to right and left, and a gibbous moon perched on the point of a far peak. Sometimes too, when the road wound back on itself, I caught a glimpse of the lights of the city far off in the distance behind us. Then we rolled down into a hollow and stopped, and the driver looked at me.
Different air, and the smell of pines, and a crisp wind, and stars. I watched the bus depart, the rear-lights weaving slowly up the side of the hill. Then quiet, and the sound of water. A dim light burned over the door of the pub, and there was a light in the dirty window too. I walked across the gravel. He must have heard the bus stopping, or maybe he was watching from the window. He hung back in the darkness of the doorway until he had got a good look at me, then he came forward with a hand lifted in greeting.
— Ah, Melmoth, he said softly. We’ve been expecting you.
When I think of that second visit to the Goat I imagine a long, low, turf-brown tavern with oil lamps and glinting copper mugs, and hams and things hanging from the rafters. The picture only needs a pot-boy in an apron and a merry old codger with curly side-whiskers and a meerschaum warming his shanks in the inglenook. Where do they come from, these fantasies? When I entered first the place seemed deserted. Fat Dan stood behind the bar, picking his side teeth delicately with the nail of a little finger. He wore a shirt without a collar, and a green sleeveless pullover, tight as a harness, that stopped halfway down his belly. He greeted me with a large, slow wink, involving less the closing of an eye than the opening sideways of his mouth.
— A hot toddy, Dan, for the traveller, Felix said.
We sat on stools at the bar. As I became accustomed to the gloom I picked out a few other customers here and there, big silent countrymen in caps and long, buttonless overcoats, whose eyes veered away like fish when they met mine. Felix watched me as I supped the steaming liquor. He was wearing plus-fours and argyle socks, and a cloth cap with a button in the crown.
— I’m glad you’ve come down, he said, really I am. It gets awfully monotonous here.
I told him Tony’s body had been found. He put a finger quickly to his lips and cast a meaning glance in Dan’s direction.
— Yes, he said quietly, I saw that too. Most sad. I was shocked, I can tell you.
I said nothing. He studied me with a rueful little grin.
— I say, he said, I hope you don’t think I was to blame, do you? I didn’t lead them to Chandos Street, after all. It wasn’t me they followed.
He took out his tobacco tin and lit up a butt, and watched me through the smoke, still smiling.
— Now don’t get down in the dumps, he said. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was just a sort of accident.
— An accident, I said.
He tittered.
— But of course, he said, you don’t believe in accidents, do you, I forgot. Everything is a part of the pattern. Well, perhaps poor Anthony’s demise is indeed a link in some grand plan, or plot, but that still doesn’t mean that anyone is to blame, now does it?
He smoked in silence for a while, brooding, then laid a finger on my wrist and said:
— And you’re not to worry, either. Just remember, ships must sail, eventually.
— They come back, too, I said.
He laughed.
— Oh, yes, he said. Die ewige Wiederkunft, eh?
Fat Dan approached, and leaned a forearm on the bar and inclined his head towards me in a confidential manner. Would I be wanting to stay? he wondered.
— Any friend of Mr Felix is welcome here, he said, breathing warm sincerity and smiling.
He led me up a narrow stairs, his great shiny backside swaying ahead of me. I remember him holding a candle, but surely that’s another fantasy. At the back his hair was shaved to the top of his head, where a boyish little lick stuck up. His neck was a big wad of red fat with bristles. On the landing he paused, panting softly, and looked at me with a sort of ogling grin, as though there were some faintly scandalous secret unspoken between us. He nodded back down the stairs, in the direction of the bar, and said:
— He’s a queer card, all the same though, what?
He showed me into a tiny room with a low, sagging ceiling, a single small square window, and an enormous brass bed. The wallpaper, embossed with flower shapes, had once been white, but was now a sticky amber colour, it seemed to have been varnished. The wainscoting was brown, the paint combed to look like grained oak. Dan stood gazing a moment in the doorway with a solemn air.
— This used to be the mammy’s room, one time, he said quietly.
He sighed, and more quietly still he added:
— Before she fell into flesh.
When he was gone I put out the light and sat on the bed in the dark for a long time. The moon was higher now, riding in a corner of the window. I could see the vague shapes of pines outside, swaying in the wind, and beyond them, far off on the sides of the surrounding hills, the little lights of cottages and farms dotted here and there, frail beacons in the midst of so much darkness. I heard the last of the drinkers leave and tramp away along the hill road, and then the sounds of Dan locking up for the night. A dog barked for a while in the distance, listlessly. My scars ached.
What was I thinking about?
Nothing. Numbers.
Nothing.
We tramped the hills for hours, Felix and I, day after day. The weather was windy and bright, the last of spring, the flushed air rife with the singing of larks. It made me giddy, to be for so long up so high. Everything tended skywards here, as if gravity had somehow lost its hold. White clouds would fly up from behind a granite peak, billowing upwards into the zenith. There was nothing to hold on to, all around us as far as the horizon stretched the browns and flat greens of bracken and bog. Then suddenly we would come to a turn in the path and find ourselves on the edge of a stony crater, with a steel-grey lake far below us and a little puff of pale cloud floating in midair.