— Ah, wonderful! Felix cried. Doesn’t it make you feel like something out of Caspar David Friedrich?
He laid a hand on his heart and breathed deep, smiling for bliss, his eyes closed and nostrils flared. He was wearing his plus-fours and his cap, and carried a tall spiked stick. I watched shadows streaming like water down the far flank of the crater.
— What did you say about me to Leitch? I said.
He opened his eyes wide and stared at me in exaggerated startlement. Then he broke into silent laughter, the tip of his tongue coming out and quickly vanishing again.
— Why? he said slyly. Worried for your reputation, are you?
— That was a place to be, I said. Now I can’t go there any more.
At that he laughed out loud, striking his stick on the stony ground.
— Boo hoo! he said, sneering. Listen, that place is finished, you know it. They thought the old boy was doing something brilliant, until they found out he was using their precious machine to prove that nothing can be proved.
He walked to the edge of the path and lifted hieratic arms above the abyss, thrusting the alpenstock aloft.
— O world in chaos! he intoned. Blind energy, spinning in the void! All turns, returns. Thus spake the prophet.
He came back, hobbling and wheezing, a bent old geezer now, using his stick as a crutch, and squinted up into my face.
— Here’s place enough, and time, he said.
Wind swooped past us down the slope and wrinkled the steely surface of the lake. The sunlight sparkled. He took my arm and walked me along slowly, with priestly solicitude.
— Put yourself in my hands, he said. I have high hopes for you, you know. Really, I have.
We rounded another turn in the path and came out on a rocky ledge. From here we could see in the distance a dense blue smear of smoke that was the city. Below us was the pub, and the road winding away. He squeezed my arm against his ribs.
— What do you say, eh? he said. Think of the times we’ve had, you and me. And think of the future.
I went ahead of him, down the side of the hill. On the bridge over the little stream behind the pub I paused to swallow a pill. He stopped a pace behind me, with his head on one side, smiling faintly and scraping in the dust with his stick.
— And behold, he said, angels came and ministered unto him.
I left that night. Felix and I waited in the bar for the time when the bus would arrive. The setting sun blazed briefly in the window, then the shadows gathered. Fat Dan was offended that I would not stay. He wiped the top of the counter with slow strokes of a dishcloth, glancing at me soulfully now and then. In the end, though, curiosity overcame his sense of umbrage, and he edged closer and closer, wielding the cloth in ever narrowing sweeps, and spoke at last.
— Them burns, he said, did you get acid on you, or what?
Felix rolled his eyes.
— It’s the mark of Cain, Dan, he said.
I told my tale. Dan was enthralled, he had never heard such a thing, grafts, tinfoil bandages, all that. He folded his arms on the counter and leaned his plump breasts on his arms and gazed at me in awe, as if it were some marvellous feat I had performed.
— Holy God, he said, you’ve been through the wars, all right.
— And now he’s banished, in the land of Nod, Felix said.
Dan paid him no heed, but glanced about the bar, as if there might be someone who would overhear, and leaned closer to me with a portentous air.
— Come here, he said, come on here, now.
He took down a big iron key from a hook behind him, and lifted the flap of the counter and stood back to let me enter. I looked at Felix. He shrugged.
— Go ahead, he said. There are some things even I don’t know.
Dan led the way through a door behind the bar into a narrow, dim passageway with cluttered shelves and crates of bottles on the floor. There was a musty smell of apples and of clay. For a moment I felt I had been here before, long ago. We came to another door. Dan paused with the key in the keyhole.
— I knew you weren’t like them others he brings up here, he said. I knew you were different.
And he smiled and winked.
The room was small, and filled with things. A banked-up coke fire throbbed in the grate. By the fire, in a vast armchair, a vast woman sat. She had a great round head, like the head of a stone statue, and ragged sparse white hair. Her bloated face glistened in the glare of the coals like a glazed mask that had begun to melt. She wore a sort of gown of some heavy shiny black stuff, and a knitted jacket draped over her shoulders like a cape.
— This, Dan said, is Mammy.
Out of that swollen mask two tiny glittering eyes fixed on me an avid, unwavering stare. She did not speak. A window at the far side of the room looked out on to a scrubby bit of garden where a few hens were scratching in the dirt. The jagged tops of the pines stood stark as black teeth against the sky, as if a huge mouth were closing slowly around us. The hour was growing dark. Dan brought a chair for me and I sat down. Mammy smelled of peppermint, and of things that had been worn for too long next the skin. Each breath she took was a deep, harsh draught, it shuddered into her, subsiding, and then she was still for a moment, until the next one started. Dan sat down beside me, rubbing his palms on his knees, his big face shining.
— There’s not many are let come in here, he said loudly. Isn’t that so, Mammy?
He smiled sheepishly, gazing at her proudly, as if somehow she, not he, were the offspring. She ignored him, he might not have been there. Her hand lay on the armrest beside me, stuck like a stopper into the end of her fat arm. Her face was almost featureless, nose, mouth, cheeks, all had melted into shapeless fat. Only the eyes remained, undimmed. Since I came in her gaze had not shifted from me for an instant, it was at once remote and intent, as if she were not used to looking at human creatures. The air thudded softly, heavy with heat. The room crowded around us. There was a table, cabinets, cupboards, a brass coal scuttle, a sofa with its stuffing coming out, two china dogs eyeing each other on the mantelpiece, a porcelain ballerina in a tutu made of real lace, a silver cake-stand, a bookcase without books, a glass globe with an alpine scene inside it and stuff that would make a snowstorm, a bow of crimson satin saved from a chocolate box, a pair of toby jugs, a ship under full sail in a bottle, a coloured picture of Mary, the Mother of God, with a dagger piercing her heart. Dan was talking away, but I was not listening. The darkness deepened, the fire shone red. I wanted to leave, to get away, yet could not, a kind of voluptuous lethargy had taken hold of me, my limbs were leaden, like flasks filled with heavy liquid. And it seemed to me that somehow I had always been here, and somehow would remain here always, among Mammy’s things, with her little unrelenting eye fixed on me. She signified something, no, she signified nothing. She had no meaning. She was simply there. And would be there, waiting, in that fetid little room, forever.
The bus was late. Felix and I paced up and down outside the pub. The night was clear and starry. Felix was pensive, whistling softly through his teeth. He didn’t know why I was going, he said, why I wouldn’t wait a few days more. He would be leaving too, then. We might have gone together. He glanced at me sideways, trying to make out my expression in the darkness.
My expression.
— Can’t tempt you, eh? he said. Well, there’ll be another time.
I gazed away up the road. He touched my arm lightly.
— Oh, yes, he said, there’s always another time.