He lay in bed for a while with a headache from the previous night’s drink and a dry throat, looking at his ceiling and thinking back over the years of encountering women. He thought of the way he had set an affair in motion between Jonty and Eva, whom he had loved when he was thirteen years old. And after introducing them he had watched them first kiss on the pebbled mucky beach of Morecambe Bay as the tide was going out, feeling something heavy collapse down through him to the ground. He could remember that sensation as clear and awful as if it had happened only yesterday. Eva had left him romantically vulnerable, he liked to think, and that’s why he had avoided love ever since, even if he had been with a few women in the parlour of Pedder Street after his needle had finished on them, their breathing fast together, their bodies aching and after a point coordinating. But it had been so long ago, that original offence, that the face of the girl he held responsible was gone, and only the feeling of damage remained. Now he was the true keeper of the experience. He had wanted to preserve it as Riley had kept his tattoos fresh and bright with Nivea lotion, because it seemed a meaningful thing to do. And in polishing it up like a brass fixture he had worn it down to its hub, until it was nothing. Eva could no longer be conjured up to explain his aversion and trepidation in matters of the heart. She would not suffice as an icon of pain and disappointment, her ghost, her sign could no longer be used convincingly to hold him back.
Since her, his mother had passed away, and though it had not been his choice to love Reeda and there had been no catastrophic disqualification of her love for her son, it was a wrenching emotional blow to lose her in the end. From that he had healed. It had been a less personal loss of love. Riley had scarred him up far worse with his fanatical abuse, he had opened channels in Cy that meant if he wasn’t careful to keep them covered or pursed closed, the unstemmed passage of fury and scorn might occur, the overspill of reservoirs on the darker side of him. Riley had made him want to hate and fight, he had shaded Cy in. For a full decade the big man had been an excuse for sabotaging potential relations — he could not court with Riley as a manipulative joker in the deck, a scathing father who would tell a girl about her cunt over a cup of tea and a slice of cake. Dwelling on it he knew there was now an absence of a male plan-foiler or a symbol of female loss to propel towards an affair in order to avoid it or break it. There was nobody but he, alone, to ruin love. And now there was Grace, Grace with her dark eyes and her qualities and her horse.
He rose from bed and poured a glass of water and drank it. Then he drank another and refilled his glass. He felt hollow in his torso. Spacious. And nervous to be thinking about that which he was thinking. There was a strong presence in the room and he turned round suddenly to look behind him as if having caught sight of another being, but nothing was there, just a rumpled bed. Then he had the definite sensation of something moving on the periphery, just out of sight, waiting at the edge of him, restlessly, treading between memories, between his ribs and lungs, and nudging softly at the vacant chamber, knocking very timidly. Wasn’t it always a question of opening doors? His mother and Mrs Preston behind the sororal, screeching parlour door? Eliot Riley on the other side of number eleven Pedder Street? The blue cabin door at the top of the gangplank walkway up to the Adriatic? A key in the lock of a door in America that turned the wrong way? His heart was empty now and something of a mystery. And so one rainy spring morning at the start of a new decade he lifted the latch, opened it, and let Grace in.
After that she seemed to be everywhere, but nowhere convenient that he could talk to her or put in his eyes an expression that would inform her of what was on his mind. He saw her riding down the boardwalk on Maximus, seated high above the throngs of people, all the strolling couples and the sugar-smeared, skipping children, the men in straw summer hats with canes and the ladies perspiring against mink in the rolling wicker chairs pushed by young black men. She was in costume, with a suit of sequin and a comb of purple feathers in her hair. She was standing up on the horse’s rump bare footed, rising and falling steadily as he moved, dropping circus flyers to the pedestrians below. He tried to attract her attention but the crowd was too thick and noisy. Later that day he closed the booth for an hour and went to watch her perform in the circus. He had not been since witnessing the demise of Lulu, had sworn he would never return, but it seemed to be a mitigating motive. To loud trombone music and cymbal clashes the horse cantered briskly into the tent then round the ring with his tail held out while Grace swapped her feet with her hands on his back. She was strong, lithe, well constructed. But the face under the make-up seemed not to be hers.
Mornings and evenings he would pause outside her doorway, wondering if he should knock and ask her a question, something pithy and impressive, or ask her to join him for a drink. She seemed seldom to be home and when she was he often heard other voices in her rooms and shyness prevented him from announcing himself. And always, night after night, he would watch from his window for the silhouette theatre of her life to appear on the wall, her shape cut out by light like a paper chalked shape from a seamstress’s pattern. As if even the cast outline of her was enough encouragement for his affection to grow.
At Varga he watched her play in two Wednesday chess tournaments. Ordinarily he would not have bothered to observe them, he was not terribly fond of the game, and he knew only its most basic arrangements and rules. He preferred to sit at the bar counter and pass idle conversation with friends and new acquaintances, or simply soak up the atmosphere, sitting quietly after having barked and intimidated and prattled on at customers all day long. But now he stood against the doorjamb and twice watched her make it to the final round, and lose. She was apathetic towards those contestants that she beat, barely offering a handshake lest it distract her from her prevailing concentration, and almost spiteful in her mannerisms of exasperation when they stalled on the last few moves, crossing her arms, pinching the bridge of her nose, knocking on the table top. She was a player of tempo. She kept her own pace and lost patience if it was interfered with. Habitually she would touch the base of her neck when she played, the spot at the V of her hairline. When she was finally put out she was enthusiastic towards her victor, as if in unforeseen admiration of the competitive skills that had ousted her from the proceedings, but her display seemed to have about it the marked kiss of an impending assassination. It unnerved Cy, this lack of graciousness in winning and the fire in her eye that kindled over defeat, the passion of the high-duel. There was something backwards about it, arse over tit as Riley would have said. And indeed like Riley she seemed to thrive on certain conflict where other humans tiptoed on eggshells around it. Her voice rose in argument in the gaming room as readily as did the voices of others. But he did not want to liken her to Eliot Riley. And so quickly he put the similarities out of his mind. The observers liked to pass comment on the gaming and offer analysis of strategy. There was a strange thrill to their voices, a muffled equivalent to the screaming elation and post-match autopsy of a ball game. From this Cy gleaned snippets of information about Grace’s game and translated them into personality — he realized he could question strangers about her with it seeming to be no more than topical or sporting curiosity.