Miss Vandeleur, the Miss Vandeleur I’m speaking of, not that there could have been so many others by that name, kept a boarding house in a village by the sea. She was related to my family in some way that I never did get to the bottom of. I suspect her relatedness was notional. There was an aunt on my father’s side, an elderly, genteel lady who dressed in muted shades of mauve and grey, and wore — can it be? — button boots, that were delicately craquelured all over with a web of waxy wrinkles. She used to give me sixpences warm from her purse, but could never remember my name, and I’ve returned the compliment now by having forgotten hers. It seems to me Miss Vandeleur had been companion of long standing to this venerable spinster — as to precisely what variety of companion she was I’m not going to speculate — and on the old girl’s death had become attached to us, a replacement, as it were, for the woman who had died, a sort of honorary aunt. At any rate, in the flat weeks towards the end of the season, when she had rooms standing idle, Miss V. would graciously invite us down to stay, at greatly reduced rates, which was the only way we could have afforded such a luxury.
Miss Vandeleur was a large, fair person with a mass of artificial blonde hair, which she wore loose and flowing. She must have been a beauty when she was young, and even yet, in the days when we knew her, she had the look of a ravaged version of the flower-strewing Flora to the left of the central figure in Sandro Botticelli’s much admired if slightly saccharine Primavera. I suspect she was aware of the resemblance — someone once, a suitor, perhaps, must have drawn her attention to it — given that unlikely mass of carefully kept corn-coloured hair and the high-waisted, diaphanous dresses that she favoured. In temper she was volatile. Her predominant mode was one of stately benevolence, out of which she might erupt at the slightest provocation into slit-eyed, venom-spitting rage. There had been a tragedy long ago — a pair of twins had deliberately drowned a playmate, as I recall — in which Miss Vandeleur had been somehow implicated, wholly unjustly, she insisted, and chance reminders or even the unbidden recollection of this injustice were the underlying cause of many a flare-up. Her dispiritingly unlovely house, which was called for some reason Lebanon, was roomy and rambling, with numerous tacked-on extensions and annexes, so that it seemed not to have been built but rather to have accumulated. Her private quarters were at the back, in what was little more than a lean-to of laths and tarred felt precariously and leakily attached to the kitchen. At the heart of this lair was what she called her den, a small square dim room stuffed with her treasures. Everywhere there were objets, of gilt and glass, of faience and filigree, crowding on sideboards and small tables, standing on the floor, nailed to the walls, suspended from the ceilings. Here was her private place, here she indulged her mysterious, solitary pleasures, and we were given to understand, we children especially, that any violation of its sanctity would bring down upon us immediate and frightful retribution. I hardly need say how much I itched to get in there.
I wonder if something has happened to the weather, I mean to the climate in general. I don’t pay much heed to the apocalyptic claims about the catastrophic effects those recent spectacular firestorms on the sun are having on the wobble or whatever it is in the earth’s trajectory, yet it seems to me something has changed in the decades since I was a boy. I am well aware how spurious can be the glow that plays over remembrances of childhood. All the same I recall afternoons of sun-struck stillness the like of which we don’t seem to have any more, when the sky of depthless turquoise held a kind of pulsing darkness in its zenith and the light over the felled land seemed dazed by its own weight and intensity. It was on just such a day that I at last got up the courage to penetrate Miss Vandeleur’s cluttered sanctuary, to break into her den.
I felt just now a sudden sweet rush of fondness for the little boy that I was then, in his khaki shorts and his sandals with diamond shapes cut out of the toes, standing there with his heart in his mouth, on the brink of the great adventure that his life would surely be. A mass of raw compulsions, inchoate fears, he hardly knew yet who or what he was. How quietly he closed the door behind him, how softly he trod upon those forbidden floorboards. In the summer silence the wooden walls around him creaked and the roof above him with its blistered coat of tar blubbered softly in the heat. Everything seemed alive, everything seemed to regard him with sharp-eyed attention. There was a smell of sun-bleached timbers and creosote and dust that seemed the evocative whiff of an already lost past.
As I’ve said, Miss Vandeleur was a keen collector, but she had a particular fondness for china statuettes — pink-cheeked shepherdesses and pirouetting ballerinas, blue-coated Cherubinos in powdered wigs, that kind of thing. My eye had fallen at once on a pair of these ornaments, which stood out by being twice as tall as the rest and of a more recent design. They represented a pair of society beauties from the ’twenties, slender as herons, with marcelled waves, clad, and barely clad at that, in clinging, floor-length gowns, one chlorophyll-green and the other a lovely shade of deepest lapis lazuli, the plunging necklines of which had nothing much to plunge into, their wearers being fashionably flat-chested, even to the point of androgyny. They seemed to me, with their wistful, condescending smiles and gloves that came above their boneless elbows, the very acme of elegance and jaded sophistication.
I wanted to steal them both, which just goes to show how young I was and how inexperienced in the light-fingered art, that art of which in time I was to become such an adept. Mere tyro though I was that day, however, I saw, dimly but definitely, that my greedy urge must be resisted. There was a reason, plain and obvious, though assuredly perverse, to take only one of these languid ladies. If the two of them were gone Miss Vandeleur might well not notice the loss, whereas if one remained, alone and palely loitering, the other was bound to be missed, sooner or later. You see how important it was for me, even at that earliest stage, that the theft be registered. This is why I must discount the stealing of that nice fat tube of zinc white: on that occasion I had fretted about Geppetto’s knowing I had taken it and not about the much more distressing possibility of his not knowing. And this is where the deeper, darker aspect of my passion becomes manifest. As surely I’ve said more than once by now, the rightful owner has to know he has been nobbled, though not, assuredly, who it was that did the nobbling.
Which would I take? The beauty in blue or her companion in green? There was nothing to choose between them except the colour of their gowns, for they had been formed out of identical moulds — identical, that is, except that they were mirror images, one inclining to the left while her twin inclined to the right. After much dithering, my palms moist and a trickle of sweat meandering down my spine, I settled on the left-leaning one. The green of her gown was the same shade as the dusting of leaves that tall trees put out in the earliest days of May, there was a delicate peach-pink spot on each of her cheekbones, and the overall lacquering, when I examined it closely, had a webbing of tiny cracks that were as numerous as but much, much finer than the cracks in my dead aunt’s button boots. What age was I that day? Pre-pubertal, surely. Yet the spasm of pleasure that ran along my veins and made the follicles in my scalp twitch and tingle when I folded my fist around that smooth little statue and slipped it into my pocket was as old as Onan. Yes, that was the moment when I discovered the nature of the sensual, in all its hot and swollen, overwhelming, irresistible intensity.
I still have her, my green-gowned flapper. She’s in a fragrant old cigar box tucked away in a corner of the attic here, under the eaves. I could have got in there and searched her out when I was up on the roof investigating the storm damage. Good thing I didn’t: she’d have had me on my knees with my face in my hands, sobbing my heart out in the midst of wrecked deck-chairs and stringless tennis racquets and the scent that lingers even yet of the autumn apples my father used to store up there, most of which every year went to rot before the winter was well under way.