3/3
ALORY STOOD AT THE GATE OF TRINITY AND WONDERED.
It had been twenty-three years since he last walked through Cambridge.
He had walked from the station, the towers of Addenbrooke’s Hospital at his back, dodging bicycles on Parker’s Piece — academics in their daily migration and townies on an early-evening forage for bitter and crisps. He had pulled his suitcase, his worldly belongings, down St. Andrew’s Street, through Lion’s Yard to King’s Parade. Malory had thought very little over the past quarter century of the hours, years he had spent with Chelsea buns and Cumberland sausages in the tea rooms and butcher shops, in the tie-dyed emporia or at the fruitmonger’s buying organic papadums or bruised Prince Williams. Gone, all of them. Gone were the stalls in the market, where E. Power Biggs rubbed vinyl with Billy Preston, and Telemann shared a rack with Telephone Bill and the Smooth Operators. The ghosts of the Taboo Disco Club, the Whim, the Eros had taken up residence in Top-shops and H&Ms. Malory’s own back was scarred from his journey. His feet shuffled down Trinity Street thanks only to the motor of memory, his suitcase trailing like a minor moon.
Malory stood at the gate of Trinity and wondered whether he dared go inside. Henry VIII still guarded the entrance with a stone sword or chair leg or hank of mutton in one hand. The remnants of Newton’s garden sat between the gate and the chapel. Above and to the right, his windows — Newton’s windows, Malory’s windows, inset between the chapel and the bay window that had once been Newton’s loggia — still looked out on Trinity Street, still felt the shade of the anniversary apple tree. For seven winters and seven summers, Malory had sat behind those windows. He had read and he had thought. He had written nothing. Seven autumns of wood fires and moldering leaves, seven springs of thaw. Seven years of paths worn between those rooms and the chapel, the tea room of the University Library, the weekly bicycle ride to Whistler Abbey, and the occasional journey to organs on other greens, in other fens. There had been the High Tables, of course, and pints in the Portland Arms and the Eagle, Sunday lunches at the Spade and Beckett, long afternoons cross-legged on the carpet at Heffers or eating buns in the steamy intimacy of The Whim, and Saturday night Herbie Hancock marathons upstairs on Rose Crescent — the naïve entertainments of a student who might have had a special facility for organs and the history of science, but was otherwise just a normal lad who wanted to fit in, to be coupled to other pipes and sing less solo.
Newton, of course, was a resident of those windows for much longer than Malory — over thirty years, even if one subtracted the months that Trinity closed for the Plague and Newton traveled with his friend, the King, the Queen of Septimania. For the first time Malory wondered — was it mere coincidence that had brought him those two windows in Trinity? Or were all the other tenants, from Newton through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and much of the twentieth centuries also direct descendants of the Great Sir Isaac? Were they all kings of Septimania? Had they all been expelled from Paradise?
It had been seventy-two hours since Malory flew back from New York to Rome. International flights began again on September 15, only four days later than Malory had intended to return to the Villa Septimania. But intention no longer had much connection with what Malory experienced. For three days and three nights, Malory sat in the Good Knight’s Inn, fed, watered, and generally supervised by the Driver. During the days, the image of Louiza’s face from across the pond seemed no farther than the other side of the motel window. Malory felt certain that all he needed do was open the door to the room and she would be on the other side. But every time he turned the deadbolt with the intention of stepping out to find Louiza, to rescue her from whatever terror or loneliness she was facing, a magnetic force, as strong as the one that had pulled him to her that afternoon so long ago in the organ loft of St. George’s, turned on its pole and pushed him back into the room. Don’t, it said. Stay away. And at night, the red-bearded face of MacPhearson would blink with the regularity of the digital alarm clock. I’m watching you, Malory, it said. If you look for her, if you find her, I will take her from you. For three mornings, Malory awoke convinced of an awful truth — as long as he didn’t look, Louiza would stay alive. And Ottavia. Was MacPhearson looking for her too?
On the fourth day, the Driver drove Malory to Newark. He saw him up to Security, handed him his ticket and passport. Private planes were still grounded, but the Driver, on instructions from Settimio presumably, was able to find a seat in Business Class, if only for Malory himself. It was the first flight back to Rome. From his seat in the relative tranquility of the front of the plane, Malory could see lower Manhattan still smoldering below. Tibor was dead. Louiza, Ottavia, and perhaps even Cristina had disappeared. Smoke covered New York, clouds covered the Atlantic, and even gatekeepers like MacPhearson were confused.
But Malory hadn’t expected the destruction to reach as far as Rome. Outside Customs, he waited ten minutes, an hour for a driver, any driver, even Settimio. He joined the queue in the September heat and sat in the back of a Roman taxi for the first time in his life. Ruins. All he saw from the back seat were ruins, from the aqueducts to the Aurelian walls. The taxi drove past the Mattatoio in Testaccio, the crumbling slaughterhouse along the river, where once upon a time all the cattle of the Romans were carved and sliced to feed the imperial belly. There too smoke, if only from the afternoon dust. The taxi driver deposited Malory at the base of the Clivo di Rocca Savella. Malory pulled his suitcase up the cobblestones between the high walls that hid the villas on either side from the alleyway. He hadn’t walked up the Clivo in many years, had never noticed the scars of ancient wounds, the bricked-up archways of centuries, the rubble-filled omegas that had once led to other villas, other gardens perhaps. He passed a pair of Japanese girls heading down from the Aventino to the Tevere, to the Bocca della Verita, most likely, to pray to the goddess Audrey Hepburn. At the cancello to the Villa Septimania he stopped and rang the bell. He rang again. All was dark.
Malory sat for a good hour on a bench beneath the bitter oranges of the Giardino degli Aranci above the Villa. As the lights came on in St. Peter’s, he stood and wheeled his suitcase over to the parapet and looked down on the Tevere. The view wasn’t dissimilar from the view from the hidden garden of the Villa Septimania below. Except the view was public, open to anyone who turned right in front of the shaded portico of Santa Sabina and followed the gravel past semi-spliced teenage lovers and the occasional grandmother looking for a bit of orange zest for a torta. Below Malory, the late-summer plane trees shaded the sidewalk by the river. To his right, the Ponte Rotto and the arse end of the Isola Tiberina. How many times had he looked down at the hospital from his garden, the hospital where Louiza had given birth to their daughter? And for how many years had Malory neglected to see what was behind him — the massive buttress of Santa Sabina, whose cloister had housed that daughter, their Ottavia, for her first ten years.
Depending on how you looked.
Wasn’t that the way that MacPhearson had put it? Depending on how you looked, Ottavia was either his daughter or Tibor’s. Did that mean either Louiza’s or Cristina’s as well?