Then he walked off, laughing, into the night.
The hill road gleamed, the pines sighed, the light from the lamp over the door of the pub shivered in the wind. Absence, absence, the forlorn weight of all that was not there.
25
THE LILAC WAS IN bloom in the hospital grounds. The first frail venturers of the season were out in their slippers and their dressing-gowns, holding up their shocked ashen faces to the sun. On the roof gay puffs of white smoke streamed away in the wind, they made the building seem for a moment a great ship bounding through the blue. The entrance hall was a glare of light. A sparrow had got in somehow, and was beating its wings against the glass in the corner of a high window, I can hear it still, that tiny, frantic commotion. They stopped me at the desk.
— Are you a relative? they said.
A shaft of sunlight thronged with dust-motes stood aslant the stairs, like a pillar falling and falling.
Mother.
I walked down a corridor, waited in a room. There was a table, plastic chairs, a vase of dried flowers. Time passed, an age. I was there, and not there. At last Father Plomer arrived, and stood before me with his soft hands clasped. He was not wearing his spectacles, without them his eyes had a raw, damaged look. He shook his head, as if over some mild disappointment, or some inclemency of the weather.
— I’m sorry, he said.
Icarus. Icarus.
Full is the cup.
I wanted to see her room. The bed had been stripped, the waste bin emptied, the locker door stood open. And yet, for me, she was there, there in all that was missing. Had it ever been otherwise? I leaned my head at the window, watching the smoke on the roof, the little clouds, the far, shadowy hills. A frozen sea was breaking up inside me. Father Plomer paced softly, his leather soles creaking.
— She was found in the chapel, you know, he said. I take that as a great sign, that she would go there, to be at peace.
He paused and looked at me, with that naked, groping gaze, then paced again, creaking.
— Of course, the question is, he said, where did she get that awful, awful stuff, and so much of it. The powers that be have their suspicions, and if they prove right, a certain person, I can tell you, will be losing her position here, and very soon, at that.
Again he glanced at me, with a meaning look, and nodded slowly once. Do I imagine it, or did he rub his hands?
I found Professor Kosok at the flat in Chandos Street. He was sitting by the window in the kitchen, in his overcoat and hat. One fist lay clenched before him on the table. His eyes were red, fat tears rolled down the greasy sides of his nose. They had given him her things in a plastic bag: her handbag, her fur coat, her flowered tea-gown. He looked at me wearily.
— Where is your order now? he said.
She was his daughter, did I mention that?
I walked through the bedrooms at the back. How grandly the sun dreamed here, falling down through the great windows, light from another time. I stood and wept. Summer! The garden was in blossom. A pigeon landed on the sill, spoke softly, and flew away again.
When I left I took her syringe with me, in its velvet case, as a keepsake.
A part of me, too, had died. I woke up one morning and found I could no longer add together two and two. Something had given way, the ice had shattered. Things crowded in, the mere things themselves. One drop of water plus one drop of water will not make two drops, but one. Two oranges and two apples do not make four of some new synthesis, but remain stubbornly themselves. Oh, I don’t say I had not thought of all this before, only that now I could not think of anything else. About numbers I had known everything, and understood nothing.
I lost the black notebook, misplaced it somewhere, or threw it away, I don’t know. Have I not made a black book of my own?
Grief, of course, and guilt. I shall not go into it. Pain too, but not so much as before, and every day a little less. My face is almost mended, one morning I’ll wake up and not recognize myself in the mirror. A new man. I stay away from the hospital. What is there for me there, any more? I want no protectors now. I want to be, to be, what, I don’t know. Naked. Flayed. A howling babe, waving furious fists. I don’t know.
Have I tied up all the ends? Even an invented world has its rules, tedious, absurd perhaps, but not to be gainsaid.
Sometimes still I have the feeling, I think I’ll never lose it, that I am being followed. More than once, as well, I have turned in the street at the sight of a flash of red hair, a face slyly smiling among the faceless ones. Is it my imagination? Was it ever anything else? He’ll be back, in one form or another, there’s no escaping him. I have begun to work again, tentatively. I have gone back to the very start, to the simplest things. Simple! I like that. It will be different this time, I think it will be different. I won’t do as I used to, in the old days. No. In future, I will leave things, I will try to leave things, to chance.