Shroud (16 page)

Between the three of them they got Vander to his feet and heaved him across the pavement to the car, wheeling him forward lurchingly on his corners as if they were walking a wardrobe. Then there was the difficulty of getting him into the low front seat. He was a dead weight, yet in the midst of the struggle, as she leaned under him to support him, her neck wedged into his hot, damp armpit, Cass Cleave heard him chuckle to himself, or thought she did. Even when they had got him into the seat at last his stiff leg kept rolling out again, with comic obstinacy, until Bartoli braced it with the toe of his dainty shoe and at the last moment, like a penalty kicker in reverse, pulled his foot back smartly and slammed the door. They were about to drive away when the waiter came running with the bill they had forgotten to pay, and Bartoli, the wings of his nostrils turning white with fury, had to get out and wave the fellow's complaints aside and thrust a wad of money into his hands. At the hotel, when they were manoeuvring the drunk man up the steps, the automatic glass door kept opening wide with doltish promptness and immediately swinging shut again, as an outflung elbow or a splayed foot temporarily broke the beam of its electronic eye, while in the narrow street a line of backed-up vehicles bellowed and fumed behind Bartoli's abandoned, cowering little car. In the bedroom Franco Bartoli, with Vander's arm clamped on his neck, lost his footing and began to topple over, slowly, quakingly, and to keep themselves from falling they all three had to let go their hold on Vander, who stood swaying for a moment and then pitched forward and crashed face down on the bed with the force of a felled tree. Cass Cleave went and sat down quietly on a chair, and Bartoli stepped back, panting, and brushing his hands down the front of his jacket and hitching his lapels, like a chucker-out who has just succeeded in throwing a particularly truculent trouble-maker into the street. Kristina Kovacs had got Vander on to his back on the bed now and was taking off his shoes. Cass Cleave, trembling, stood up and went to the window and pulled the curtains closed against the daylight, not knowing why she did it, except that it seemed the necessary thing to do. Suddenly shadowed, the room took on a devotional aspect, and Vander's form supine on the bed and the two spectral people standing by him might have been, she thought, the figures at the centre of an altar-piece.

Kristina Kovacs was looking about her with interest, frowning, as if she had just realised that this was the place where she had lost something once, and were wondering if it might be here still. Franco Bartoli, anxious to be gone, plucked at her sleeve, trying to draw her toward the door. He told Cass Cleave that he would telephone later, and she nodded; she wanted them to go away now, quickly. But at the doorway Kristina Kovacs lingered, still with that distracted frown. "He should not drink," she said, as if to herself, shaking her head. "He really should not drink." Bartoli took her arm then in both his hands and pulled her after him into the hall. However, they must have stopped at the front desk on their way out, for presently, as Cass sat quietly by the bed in the room's sanctified stillness, there came a sharp tap at the door, and a very thin, elegant, elderly man in a pale, shining suit stepped inside. He was, he said, the doctor, making it sound as if there were only one doctor in all the city. He had an Eastern look. His face was swarthy, thin and fleshless, his eyes were dark but not unkind; his sparse hair was dyed black and heavily oiled, and had a fragrant smell, of sandalwood, she thought, although she was not sure she knew the smell of sandalwood. He was carrying a real doctor's bag that snapped open like the thick-lipped mouth of a fish, releasing an ancient and familiar odour. She looked as closely as she dared at the strangely radiant, pearly cloth of which his suit was made; it was less like cloth than a kind of metal, marvellously fine and soft, shining at all angles in the light of the bedside lamp. He waited while at his direction she unknotted Vander's tie and opened his shirtfront, then sat down on the side of the bed with one foot raised and resting on its toe, and listened to Vander's heart, and lifted his eyelids and shone a light into his eyes, and looked into his ears with the light, and prised open his mouth and looked in there, too. Then he took out of the depths of his bag an old-fashioned metal syringe with a glass barrel, and a small glass phial of clear liquid and held the phial upside down and inserted the needle through the rubber seal that was, she noted with interest, exactly the same colour as the inner tube of a bicycle wheel; perhaps, she thought, it was made from the same kind of rubber, and she marvelled again at how despite their seeming disparity so many things are secretly the same. The doctor was working Vander's arm up and down at the elbow like the handle of a water pump. Then there was the business with the swab of cotton that always made her shiver. She watched as the needle first made a dent in the flaccid skin and then broke through and sank smoothly at an angle into the vein. When he had put away the needle and the empty phial the doctor sat for a long moment motionless, as if it were to him and not to Vander that the calmative had been administered. Then he looked at her. "And you," he said, "you have hurt yourself?" He pointed to the scrape on her elbow. "I fell," she said. He nodded, and took her hand in his; his long, slender fingers were dry and smooth, like jointed lengths of smooth, dry wood; with his other hand he made a peculiar gesture, moving it sideways, up and back, imparting a sort of blessing, it might be. His breath smelled of tobacco and something warm and sweet. In the quiet of the room the only sound was Vander's soft and steady breathing. The doctor peered closely at the graze on her arm but then seemed to lose interest and released her hand and looked away again, thinking. She imagined where he might live. In her mind she pictured it, the big, silent, gloomy apartment, smelling like him of tobacco smoke and sandalwood and that sweetish something, with big, dark, vague furniture, and photographs in tarnished silver frames showing pale, solemn-faced children, his brothers and sisters, dead or scattered now, and stern-eyed elders, his father, thin like him, in a high collar, his mother as a girl, wistful and wan. How could there be so many people in the world, she wondered, so many lives? Not to mention the countless dead.

"He will sleep," the doctor said, looking askance at Vander, and then at her again, and smiled, as if it were a magic trick that he had worked. "He will sleep, and then, in the morning, he will wake."

He went away. She sat again on the chair by the bed with her hands in her lap and listened to the sounds of the day subsiding around her, a long, languishing, myriad-voiced sigh. The crack in the curtains turned from molten white to amber to a rich, arabian blue. The last time she had watched over Vander sleeping he had seemed to elude her, drifting out of himself in that strange way, but now, unconscious rather than asleep, he was more vividly present than if he had been awake; lying like that on his back, with his eyes closed, frowning, as if he were concentrating on some puzzle or problem, he somehow populated the room, making it seem there were others here besides him and her, a silent, unseen gathering. But perhaps it was not Vander who was making this effect, perhaps these were not his phantoms, but hers. She went to the window and looked out and up, and saw the moon's scurfy silver face gloating over the city.

Later, Vander woke up. At first he did not know where he was or what had happened. She told him what the doctor had said. "You are exhausted, and poisoned by alcohol. You must not drink so much." He was not listening. He ordered her to switch on more lights, and when she would not he flailed from side to side on the bed, searching the wall for the switches, but then flopped back on the pillows, groaning in anger and despair. He asked where were Bartoli and Kristina Kovacs, where had they gone to. "I told them you are my father," she said, and he lifted his head sharply and looked at her. "You are mad," he said. "And I am a fool." He demanded that she fetch him things, a glass of wine, food, cigarettes, a book to read, slurring his words, his dead eye wandering in its socket. After a while he fell asleep again. He still looked angry. She pulled the bed covers over him and went to her own room, going warily along the corridors, fearful of encountering a fellow guest, or, worse, one of the hotel staff. She thought there was someone behind every door, ready with a hand on the knob to spring out and… she did not know what they might spring out and do, the springing out itself would be enough.

Her room had the look of having undergone a subtle alteration: it was as if a band of intruders had come in and shifted everything around and then put it all back exactly as it had been. She changed out of her soiled skirt, and ran hot water in the bathroom and bathed her grazed elbow. She brushed her teeth, and stood for a long time motionless at the mirror, holding the toothbrush, not looking at herself. She did not know what to do. She returned to the bedroom and sat on the side of the bed and telephoned her mother and told her she was coming home. She kept her hand cupped over the mouthpiece and spoke in a whisper, as if there were someone in the room to overhear her, and her mother had to keep asking her to repeat what she had said. There were silences in which she could hear her mother's breathing. She thought of their voices flying through the darkness, over the city's roofs and then the countryside and then the high, white peaks and then other cities and then the sea and then… and then… "Your father has left me, by the way," her mother said, with a hard little laugh. "He has gone back to what he still calls home, to live with the ghost of his Mammy." She did not reply. She was wondering how telephones work. Do the wires carry the actual words, or are the words turned into signals, impulses, that are then turned back into words again? How would that be done? There must be a device in every phone to encode what is being said as it is said and to decode it again immediately at the other end. But where would it be, such a device? Would it be in the telephone itself, or in the thing she was holding, the what do you call it, the receiver? "Are you all right?" her mother said, unable to suppress a note of impatience in her voice. Was she all right? She did not know. Gently she hung up, and thought she heard the click of the connection breaking, like a tongue clicking, an instant before the line went dead. So her father had left, at last; she was glad. She waited a moment and picked up the receiver again, wondering why it should be called only the receiver, never the sender. She had not said goodbye. The line snarled softly at her, busy with reproof. Again she hung up, and waited for her mother to call back, hunched forward tensely with her arms tightly folded across her chest, gazing unblinking at the phone. But it did not ring. How could it? She had not told her mother where she was. She thought of the moon that she had looked at from the window in Vander's room, with all that space around it, that darkness.

She made her way back through the hushed, humming corridors. Vander was still asleep. She leaned over him, smelling the sick-room smell he gave off, of ash and candle wax and urine. A tiny, fish-scale glitter was visible between the not quite closed lids of his blind eye. She watched the cords in his throat stretching and straining with each breath he drew. She sat down and resumed her vigil. She was calm now, but she knew she would not sleep. She still had that sensation, that had begun after her seizure at the restaurant, of being afloat, dulled and motionless, like a fish in a stream, while everything rushed past her on all sides, the world itself and all that was in it, dense, clear and swift. What time it was when she heard the child singing she did not know, only that it was late, the middle of the night. Perhaps she had been asleep, after all, in a kind of sleep, sitting there by the bed, for certainly when she heard the child she thought that the sound had wakened her. And as sometimes when the dreamer is suddenly roused the dream vanishes, so now whatever it was that had been going through her head, dream or musings or memories, all vanished on the instant, leaving only this moment, in this room, in the lamplight, with the old man breathing on the bed and the sound from the corridor of the child, singing. It was not one of her voices, it was outside her, outside the room, real, a thin, high, wordless crooning. She sat and listened to it for a while, unafraid. It was not so much a sound as a part of the silence, a part of the night, there and not there, like darkness, or the air itself. She went to the door and opened it cautiously. She expected to find the child standing outside, on the very threshold, face lifted, singing to her, but no, there was nothing, and no one. She looked up and down the corridor; it was deserted. She stepped out, and the door shut itself behind her; it was all right, she had the key, Vander's key, she had it in her hand. She walked to where the corridor turned. A faint breeze came from around the turn and put its ineffectual hands against her face, her bare arms. She held back, and saw herself walk forward again. The child was a boy, or a boyish girl, perhaps, very small, a miniature being, more like a midget than a child, with a sharp little white face and a cap of black hair coming down on the forehead in a widow's peak. It was sitting, reclining, really, on the carpet, on the floor, outside a door that was shut, in a peculiar, twisted posture, supporting itself on one elbow. It had a sort of doll that it was playing with. Hearing her cautious step it stopped singing at once and looked up at her with a wide, solemn stare, seemingly unsurprised by her appearing like this, silently, on silent feet. Its lower lids hung a little loose of the eyes, so that from where she was standing she could see the inner edges, two narrow crescents of glistening membrane that were the same texture as the little mouth's pink, parted lips. The doll it was playing with was made of wool, a stuffed beige wool torso and beige limbs and a knobbly, bald head, all swollen and worn; the face, she saw, had no features. Losing interest in her, the child resumed its whining song and set the fat doll to a wallowing, drunken dance. She wanted to say something, but she did not think the child would understand her, whatever the language in which she spoke. So she simply stood and watched it playing, and listened to its droning song. Then the door where it was lying was opened inward suddenly, opened wide, with a suck and a gust, and although all she could see of the room was a wedge of lamplight and the leg of a chair, she had a sense of drinks and discarded clothes and smeared supper plates perched on sofa arms. A voice spoke, and was answered from farther within by a lazy laugh, and a man's shirt-sleeved arm came down and grasped the child under its shoulders and lifted it briskly up and in. The last she saw of it were its withered little legs, dangling jointlessly, like the useless nether parts of a ventriloquist's dummy as it is whisked away into the wings under its master's arm at the end of the act. She went back to Vander's room and without undressing lay down beside him on the bed and fell at last into a depthless sleep.