‘Yes,’ said Julian. ‘Almost perfect, do you think?’
I brought my wandering eyes back into a semblance of straightness.
‘Is Helena here?’ I asked.
He was startled by my question, but nodded, and waved his hand at the house.
‘Yes, I think she’s about somewhere.’
He watched me curiously, but I had not the energy to be prudent. Aristotle’s eyes were closed, and his chin was sinking slowly down to rest on his breast. I left them, and went through the french windows, and found myself in a large, totally empty room. The walls and ceiling were painted a frozen blue, and the floor was of bare polished wood. Someone had to be insane to keep a room so indecently bare. I crept across the echoing floor and through a door into a dining-room, where five or six stark pieces of modern furniture stood in mutinous silence, as though, when I entered, they had halted in the midst of an electric dance, and were impatient for me to be gone, so that they might continue. There were other rooms, all of them extraordinary in some way. In that house, I was ridden by a nameless unease. The upper storey had a maze of white corridors flanked with closed and ominously silent doors. Each corridor found its way to a conclusion on the balcony, which ran, without the protection of a hand-rail, around the perimeter of the open courtyard. I peered up into the blue square of sky, and my horror of spaces, enclosed and open, worked on me a rare treat of terror.
‘Highly dangerous, don’t you think?’ Julian said.
He stood behind me at an entrance to a corridor, one hand against the wall, the other in the pocket of his jacket. He came to my side and we looked down into the courtyard. Down there Aristotle sat, morosely eyeing the fountain, while he in turn was morosely eyed by the sleepy dog.
‘Yes,’ said Julian, with a little sigh. ‘Highly dangerous. For some reason, the architects refused to put up a barrier. Or perhaps it was the builders, a dispute of some kind. A senior official of the French embassy once fell from here into the fountain, during a party. He was very drunk.’
With a slow sweep of his hand he traced the line of the Frenchman’s descent. He pursed his lips, and sadly shook his head, but then I caught him glancing at me, and he could contain himself no longer. He began to laugh.
‘I must admit it was all great fun. You know, I think I shall have another party soon. What do you think? Will you come?’
He looked at me with his head on one side, and his eyes, well yes, what the hell, they did, they twinkled.
‘Yes, I’ll come,’ I said.
‘Good, good. Seen Helena? No? She must be around somewhere.’
We stood together quietly. Julian frowned, and looked at his toe, which drew an invisible parallelogram on the smooth stone of the balcony. He was going to ask a question, I knew, and I had a message from somewhere which told me: fend it off, quick. I lifted a finger and opened my mouth, but I was not quick enough.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I have a proposition. How would you like to become the boy’s tutor, Yacinth, you know, hmm?’
I called down that uplifted finger, but my mouth stayed open.
‘Eh?’
‘A tutor. You. For Yacinth.’
He watched me now with an unsettling scrutiny, his head thrown slightly back, lips parted, eyebrows raised, like a conductor waiting for the piercing sweetness of that first note of the flute which tells him yes, this performance will be perfect.
‘Brush up his English and so on.’ A twitch of the baton. ‘He’s extraordinarily precocious for his age, and we just cannot find a suitable school.’ A lifting of a rosebud of fingers.
‘What age is he?’ I asked.
The question seemed profound at the time. Julian chose to ignore it.
‘You could still keep your job at Rabin’s, and just spend a few hours up here each evening. What do you say? — Oops, there goes Aristotle, insulted again, must go —’
He scampered off into the corridor, and I heard him clattering away down the stairs, calling the Colonel’s name. If Sesosteris heard him, then he gave no sign of it, but went on plodding across the gravel, through the tunnel and away. Julian appeared below me, a hilariously foreshortened figure capering past the fountain with the dog snapping joyously at his heels. There was the sound of a car starting up, and of wheels squealing on the gravel. The notion came to me that, had Aristotle not given him an excuse to leave me, Julian would have had to find some other means of escape, for I was convinced that he had been perilously close to laughter when making me that proposition.
I wandered down through the house again, and in a room somewhere at the back I found Helena, standing by a window looking down on the city. The sun laid a tender light on her face. She wore a short skirt of some bright design, and a white silk shirt with ruffles at the throat. Her hair was loose, burning on her shoulders. How can I say what I felt, how could I say it then? I did not try. I shall not try now. Only I think of certain summer days when the air itself seems to sing, and I think of the perfection of silence caught by the best music; I think of Botticelli’s maiden of abundant spring. The essence of such things is the love that I have lost, the one I never had. I am still talking about torment. She looked at me. Expecting someone else, it took a moment for my presence to register on her face. I rushed across the room, swept her up in my arms, covered her mouth with kisses, and then found myself still standing like an idiot in the doorway, my gob gaping. I had had one of those moments when the desire suffices for the action. She said,
‘Ben. I did not think you would come. Julian said that he had met you. I did not think … shut the door.’
Almost a year. Deserted autumn, the wind rattling the olive trees in the square, and a yellowed sheet of newspaper (Get Fix Best Beer) rearing up with singular viciousness and wrapping itself around my legs. The air is filled with strange mournful voices and snatches of awful songs. Then the days dwindle down, September, December, and a glass-hard Christmas eve with sunlight as brittle as a communion wafer, and a wind with teeth in its jaws coming down from the northern mountains; a new year, no different from the old except in number, and that intolerable ache, which might be love or cancer, grinding the breast bone, and now here, here, here at last. While I closed that door, she moved away from the window and sat down demurely on the couch, her knees together leaning sideward, as, with a rush of tenderness, I remembered they were wont to do. Her quiet pale hands were in her lap. She bit her lip and would not look at me. I stood before her. If we spoke, then I can recall no words. That scene reproduces only a deafening hum. She reached forward and touched me with a fingertip. Yes, I was real. She had not thought that I would come, but there I was, as small as life. I knelt before her and put my head into her lap. It seemed to descend with the gigantic slowness of a planet falling. Her cool fingers played about my face, tentatively touching it here and there, expressing a lost, sad helplessness before such a weight of love.
‘Ben, Ben, Julian will see us.’
I caught the wisp of an odour of hot musk from her, which spoke of dealings with the moon. I put my arms around her round little knees. A rose stood on the table near me, and I watched it let fall a petal, like a single drop of blood. I tried to recall when it was that another such flower had been part of the stage-settings for another such momentous instant of the farce which I call my life.