The Gospel Of Judas (24 page)

She sits, hunkered down and leaning against the low wall on the terrace, observing the paint dry (acrylics dry fast, she tells me) and rolling stuff into a loose cigarette, and smoking calmly as she looks. She keeps her things in a leather wallet hung round her neck and pushed down the front of her T-shirt, hanging between her narrow breasts. ‘You want a smoke?’ She smiles, not caring one way or the other. She doesn’t care, one way or another, about anything.

She paints Leo amongst the tombstones, Leo amongst the memorials, Leo on fire in the anteroom to hell.

It was raining in Rome, the basalt paving slick with water and glistening with lights. He paid off the taxi. The porter’s cubicle was closed, like a market stall that has been shut up for the night. He took the lift up to the top and climbed the remaining stairs to his flat. The smell of freesias greeted him, the vivid smell almost overpowering in the closeted air. There was a bunch of the flowers in a vase on the table in the living room. They must have been put there by Madeleine. She must have come to the flat during his absence, let herself in and left the flowers for him to find on his return. He could hear her saying it: ‘You need some colour in here. You need a woman’s touch.’

Women were colour; men were grey – clerical grey.

He smiled at the mute message of the flowers. A plea? A question? A statement. Say it with flowers. But what exactly was she saying?

He washed approximately and went to bed. Exhaustion edged around his thoughts, eroding their coherence,
dragging them down into the idiocy of dream and nightmare, a nightmare in which Madeleine tried to tell him things that he didn’t understand, Madeleine and Judas, the one faithful, the other betraying. But which was which?

He woke early and showered. The smell of freesias was still heavy in the air, a smell which now seemed almost sickly, like the scent that his mother had worn, something old-fashioned and redolent of a past that could never be captured, never conquered. Eating breakfast he tried to turn his thoughts to the lecture he would deliver that morning. Banal, ordinary thoughts to dispel the demons. But Judas whispered in his ear, his voice quiet and measured as it sounded across the centuries of faith and doubt:

…
he died and did not rise and I myself witnessed the body in its corruption
…

And other thoughts crowded in. Madeleine and freesias. Madeleine in that loft under the sloping ceiling, padding on bare feet into the bathroom to wash the evidence of their love-making from her body. Her matter-of-factness, her acceptance of what he was and what he wasn’t. He drank coffee and ate some cheese that he had found in the fridge and tried to place her within the chaos of his mind. Madeleine naked beside him, her flesh soft and warm, a negation of faith and vocation, a fragile grasp on humanity.

Who is worthy to open the scroll?
he thought.

It was only after he had eaten that he found the note lying on his desk. He unfolded the paper with trepidation, without knowing what to expect, without even recognising her handwriting: with a flash of inconsequence he realised that he had never seen anything in her hand.

Dear Leo
, he read,
I think you had better telephone me
.

But it was not signed Madeleine, nor even Maddy, nor, as he supposed it might have been, merely initialled
M
. It was signed
Jack
.

A terrible stillness. The words again, their careful grammatical accuracy, their diplomat’s caution, hiding everything and betraying nothing:
Dear Leo, I think you had better telephone me
.

But he didn’t. The telephone lay there on the floor, but he didn’t pick the receiver up. He made his way down the stairs to the entrance of the
palazzo
. There were many things to face: a lecture theatre of students with varying degrees of interest, a woman with whom he might or might not be in love, a future in which he might or might not be apostate, a husband who knew everything. His world was, perhaps, on the edge of dissolution. He would face the various fracturing parts in his own time.

The porter was in his cubicle. His face hung in the dusty pane of the window like a piece of dirty material: an expression of concern and suspicion was scrawled across the fabric. ‘
Signor
Neoman.’ That was how he managed the name, emphasising the novelty of it, accentuating the raw newness. Neo-man. What did the man want? Something about the electricity? Something about the water, or the cleaning of the stairs? What could it be?

‘
Signor
Neoman, there’s been an incident.’ Incident is the word he used.
Incidente
. There are shades of meaning. Accident; incident. Leo paused beside the sign that announced to a waiting world that the Casadei Palace was open to the public during the hours of 10.00–13.00 and 16.00–17.30, but not on Monday. The man came out of his cubicle. Perhaps it was the first time Leo had seen him outside his box. He was surprised to find that he was small, reaching no higher than Leo’s chest. Leo barely even knew his name.
Mimmo, he was known as Mimmo. ‘The police were here,’ the man said. ‘The day before yesterday. In the afternoon. The
signora
…’

‘Yes?’

‘She fell. That’s what they think.’

‘
Fell?
’ Tripped on the stairs. Fell over a chair while she was in his flat putting the freesias in the vase. Sprained her ankle. Broke something? Her wrist, perhaps. Perhaps she tripped and in trying to save herself she put out her hand and broke her wrist. But why, in heaven’s name,
the police
? The speed of the human mind is remarkable. So is its inability to face the obvious.

The porter laid a confidential hand on Leo’s arm. He was a lugubrious character. In the time that Leo had known him – no more than a few weeks – he had never demonstrated a glimmer of emotion: but now he contrived a glistening of the eyes. Now he even squeezed Leo’s arm, as though to show some kind of solidarity ‘She came to put flowers in your flat. I said
buongiorno
to her and she smiled at me and said
buongiorno
back and she had a bunch of flowers in her hand. She looked like she always does. Happy, you know what I mean? And she fell.’

‘What do you mean,
fell
?’

The man looked anguished, as though it were his fault, as though he were somehow to blame, as though it was all owing to his carelessness, his dereliction of duty. ‘From the roof.
Signor
Neoman, the
signora
is dead.’

Panic. Panic manifested in the flesh, the panic of the agoraphobic, the panic of someone who cannot bear the void of the open street, who stands on the edge of the pavement and fancies himself on the edge of a cliff with emptiness below and a clear sensation that the whole world is tilting
in order to thrust him over the gulf. Fear like an ache in the bones, deep and hollow, the kind of pain you know you are going to have to live with for months and years.

He ran out into the street, distractedly, as though looking for something. It was a day of scirocco, the south wind that comes from the Sahara Desert laden with heat and damp and sand. There was a high blanket of cloud, a cloying warm blanket above the tilted roofs of the city. The alleyway behind the Palazzo Casadei was a narrow canyon between the old, crumbling cliffs. One of the outer reaches of the ghetto. Round the corner from the small grocery store –
Minimarket
, it announced hopefully – there was nothing, no shops, no bar, no
trattoria
. There were only drainpipes and mute back doors and the uneven ribbon of black paving stones like the scales of a snake’s back. A cul-de-sac led off the alley into the body of the Palazzo Casadei. There was a barricade across the entrance, a barrier of galvanised steel with a battered notice in baby blue saying
POLIZIA
. He pulled the thing aside. There were bins at the far end and a rusted fire-escape ladder that led upwards to nowhere. On the ground he found a smear of sand and some dark substance in the fissures between the stones. Someone had placed a small bunch of flowers against the wall.

He walked. Rome lay exhausted beneath the cloud, like a corpse beneath a shroud. It was a place where everything imaginable happened and presumably would happen again, a place where nothing was remarkable. Madeleine was not remarkable, Leo was not remarkable, their poor, stunted relationship was not remarkable, death was not remarkable. He walked without direction. He walked unsteadily over blocks of basalt, down between the ochre and umber walls of the Campo Marzio, the Field of Mars where bits of the ancient city show through
the mediaeval like bones poking though the flesh of a corpse.

Panic is a pagan thing born of the great god Pan, that mysterious deity who stands in the shadows behind the cold light of Olympian reason. Leo felt pure, pagan panic: a shortage of breath, a sensation of tightness in the chest, as though his sternum was gripped in a vice, a feeling of enclosure and exposure at one and the same time; a feeling that he must be somewhere else other than here. He walked. For an hour or more – whatever happened to the restless group of students awaiting his lecture? – he just walked. And then he fetched up near a post office where there was a line of telephone booths. He had the number on a piece of paper in his wallet.

Over the phone Jack’s voice seemed perfectly calm. ‘I was wondering when you’d get back,’ he said. ‘Where were you? Maddy said something about London.’ She might have been still there, just there, standing right beside him at the phone.

‘That’s right,’ Leo said. ‘London. Jack, what happened?’ People walked past the booth, an anonymous street crowd. Tourists, kids, a gypsy woman with a baby at her breast.

‘I thought of you,’ Jack’s voice said. ‘Of course I did, considering where it happened. Your flat, I mean. I’m sorry, I’m maybe not quite as articulate as I should be. But I thought of you and I didn’t really know how to get in contact.’

‘That’s quite all right.’ Why should it be quite all right? Why should Jack be half apologising, and Leo refusing the need for apology, as though some kind of solecism had been committed?

‘I don’t know if the magistrate will want to see you …’

‘Jack, what happened?’ Leo repeated. ‘In God’s name what happened?’

‘In God’s name, is it?’ There was the faint breath of a laugh on the other end of the line. ‘I wonder if that’s quite accurate.’

‘Just tell me what happened.’

There was a pause. ‘I suppose you’d better come round.’

Jack was entirely calm, that was what was so terrifying. He was as calm as if he was in the midst of some diplomatic negotiation, with the police, with the embassy, with the magistrate’s office, with some officially constituted body for the management of corpses. The phone would ring and he would pick it up with a faint frown and stare at the floor as he spoke, and issue instructions in measured tones as though making important but passionless decisions, the kind of thing one might do when buying a house, or taking a new job, or negotiating a new trade agreement. ‘I can’t come for the moment,’ he said to one of the callers. ‘I’ll be with you as soon as possible, but I can’t at the moment.’

Leo looked round the familiar room. Madeleine watched him from a silver frame on top of the piano. She seemed to smile, almost as though she had this all planned. On the floor beneath the piano was a copy of an English newspaper. He saw the small headline down at the foot of the page:
DIPLOMAT’S WIFE IN ROOF PLUNGE
. He felt renewed panic, a sense of the pure randomness of things.

There was a pause and the phone rang again and quite suddenly Jack was talking in a different pitch, with a softer, gentler tone. ‘Mummy’s hurt herself,’ he said in this counterfeit child’s voice. ‘Yes, I’ll be coming to see you soon. Meanwhile you look after Boot for me. Will you do that, Katz? Yes, everything’s quite all right. You two just be good, and soon I’ll be there.’ He replaced the receiver with infinite care.

‘What happened?’ Leo asked. ‘Can’t you tell me what happened?’

‘She’s dead. That’s what happened.’

‘But how?’

There was someone in the kitchen, a dutiful and earnest woman whom Leo vaguely recognised. She came out now and asked Jack if he wanted anything and he said no, thanked her courteously and denied that he wanted anything at all, even a cup of tea. ‘I wish they’d stop fussing,’ he said to Leo when the woman had retreated. ‘I know they mean well, but I wish they’d stop fussing. This is the FCO pulling out the stops, you see. Rallying round, they call it, as though … as though what? The flag, I suppose. Rallying round the flag. The fucking Gatling’s jammed and the square’s broken and they’re all rallying round.’ He looked away, towards the piano with the pictures of the family, towards the window, beyond which lay the rest of the world. Towards the bluebottle that hammered its head against the pane with a desperate insistence. ‘Did you know she had a key?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Key?’

‘To your flat.’

Leo found himself measuring his answers, wondering where they might lead. He couldn’t read the shifts and allusions of this situation, the matter-of-factness of it all, the undercurrent of familiarity. ‘From when you helped me move in, I suppose.’

Jack nodded. ‘They found the flat locked, you see. The police got the porter to open it. And they found the key on the table. Of course they call it an accident for the moment. That’s what the magistrate said. Incidentally, she’ll want to interview you.’

‘Who will?’

‘The magistrate, Leo. The magistrate.’ Jack’s tone was of studied patience, the kind of tone he might have used with a stupid child.

‘And you don’t think it was an accident?’

He smiled the smile of a diplomat who knows he has scored a point in the negotiations. ‘My dear Leo,’ he said quietly. ‘I
know
it wasn’t.’

‘You
know
?’

Jack looked at him. Leo wondered, what goes on behind the face, behind the eyes? What goes on in the grey jelly that lies behind that fine forehead? In the confessional one never saw the face. There was nothing more than a dim shadow laying bare its soul without ever revealing its features. Gender you knew. And social class. And sometimes, but not always, you could guess at intelligence and education. But you never saw the face with its look of panic, its mask of shame. ‘I’m surprised she never told you,’ Jack said, ‘seeing how close you were. I would have thought she would have confided in her great friend, her father-confessor …’