Ghosts (25 page)

I
MUST HAVE LOOKED
like something out of a Bible story, toiling up that stony track in my soiled suit with my cardboard suitcase in my hand and my collar turned up against the wind. I should have been on my knees, of course, or, better still, barefoot, with staff and falcon, like the penitent pilgrim I was pretending to be. I could still feel the sway of the sea, and of that other sea of gin sloshing around inside me, and the ground kept rearing up under my feet in the most alarming way, like a carpet with the wind under it; I stumbled more than once, making the stones fly and getting grit in my shoes. I could hear myself breathing. I always know I am drunk when I can hear myself breathing; it sounded as if I were carrying a large, fat, winded man on my back. At the gate I paused to gather my wits but that only made my head spin; I set off again sternly, marching up the path to the front door like a wooden man, snorting and muttering, with my head thrown back and swinging my free arm. I rapped the knocker smartly and turned and surveyed the scene before me, chest out and nostrils flared, snuffing up the air.

I had to knock a second and then a third time before Licht came at last. He opened the door a crack and stuck out his little face and peered crossly past my shoulder, the tip of his
sharp little nose twitching. I told him my name and he pursed his lips and sniffed.

‘Oh, it’s you, is it,’ he said. I thought he might shut the door on me, but after a moment of sullen indecision he stood aside grudgingly and motioned me in. ‘I’m Licht. The Professor said you were coming.’

He sniffed again.

The hallway was high and hung with shadows. I experienced a mysterious shock of recognition: it was as if I had stepped inside myself, into the shadowed vault of my own skull.

‘He’s working,’ Licht said truculently. ‘There’s a room ready for you.’ That seemed to amuse him.

He shut the door, fussing with the lock. I stood breathing; I could feel a horrible, tipsy leer slipping and sliding uncontrollably about my face. I seemed to be floating in some heavy, sluggish substance, a Dead Sea of the mind. I had a sense of vague, violent hilarity, and there was an inner roll and lurch as if something inside me had come loose and was yawing wildly from side to side. Licht still would not look directly at me but eyed vexedly a patch of the floor between us with his mouth pursed and a hand twitching in his pocket and one leg jigging. Never still, never still. I did not know what to say to him. At bottom I am a shy soul – yes, yes, I am, really. My kind always are. When I hear on the wireless a report of some grimy little atrocity – the bloodstained body discovered in the wood, the pensioner beaten to death in his bed, the mother-in-law dismembered and packed in a trunk and sent off on the night mail to Dundee – I think at once not of the victim, as I know I should, but of the other one, the poor, shivering, dandruffy, whey-faced fellow in his sleeveless pullover and cheap shoes, with his shaking hands and haunted eyes, caught there, frozen in the spotlight, realising with a falling sensation in the pit of his stomach that he will never again have a moment’s privacy, never a
second he can call his own, that they will poke at him and probe him and ask endless questions and then put him in the dock to be gawped at and then send him for life – life! – to that panopticon where he will not even be able to void his bowels without an audience looking on. This is how you lose yourself, this is how they wrench you out of what you thought you were and hang you up by the hair and invite the world to gather round and point and laugh and take a shy at you for free. And all the time of course you know you deserve it, deserve it all, and more.

‘You look awful,’ Licht said with satisfaction and grinned uncontrollably and bit his lip. ‘Were you seasick?’

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Just a little, just a little … tired.’

I tramped behind him up the stairs. The upper flights grew progressively narrower and our footsteps thudded ringingly on the uncarpeted boards. My room was cramped and low, with peeling wallpaper and a tilted floor. I could see why Licht had been amused. There was a rush-bottomed chair – a relic of St Vincent – and a pine dressing-table and a coffin-sized wardrobe. On the floor beside the bed there was a worn, blue and grey rug. (How many more such cells must I invent?) One of the panes in the little window was broken and someone had mended it by wedging a bit of cardboard in the hole. Pigeons had got in, there were droppings on the sill and down the wall, hardened to a whitish stuff, like coral. The window framed a three-quarters view of indistinct greenery and the corner of a sloped field. I put my suitcase on the bed and looked about me. There was a steady, pulsing hum in my head as if a delicately balanced pinion spinning in there had developed a wobble.

Licht hovered on the threshold with a hand on the doorknob, frowning hard at the wardrobe.

‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re another expert, are you?’

‘An expert?’ I said blearily.

‘On art.’ His lip curled on the word.

‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘no, not at all.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘One is enough.’

We stood a moment saying nothing, each thinking his own thoughts. I felt a weight in my jacket pocket and brought out the half-empty gin bottle. We both looked at it dully.

‘How is the Professor?’ I said.

He glanced at me sharply.

‘He’s all right,’ he said. ‘Why?’ I had no answer to that. He looked away from me again and nibbled the nail of his little finger. ‘So you were in jail,’ he said and tittered, and then quickly recomposed his sullen glare. ‘What was it like?’

‘Like hell,’ I said. ‘Very warm and crowded.’

He nodded, thinking, still chewing his fingernail. We might have been talking about the weather.

‘I wouldn’t like that,’ he said, ‘jail.’

‘No,’ I said.

He slid a rapid glance across the floor and let it settle somewhere near my feet.

‘Bad, was it, yes?’

I said nothing. Still he waited, eyes aglitter with eager malice, hoping for the worst, I suppose, for some tearful cry or terrible, blurted confession. The wind in the chimneys, the gulls, all that: the strangeness of things. The strangeness of being here – of being anywhere.

‘When did you get out?’ he asked.

‘Yesterday,’ I said, and thought: Yesterday!

Licht nodded.

‘I’ll tell Professor Kreutznaer you’re here,’ he said. ‘We have our tea at five o’clock.’

He tarried a moment more, then muttered something under his breath and abruptly withdrew, shutting the door behind him with a soft bang.

I sat down on the side of the bed with my hands on my knees, gazing at the floor between my feet and sighing the while, in a kind of weary and not wholly unpleasant dejection.
Thus the prodigal son must have felt – shaky, dazed, a little hollow – as the haunch of veal was wheeled in and the infuriate brother slunk away gnawing his knuckles.

Professor Kreutznaer did not fall upon my neck. The first thing that struck me about him was how plausible he appeared, how authentic, at least when looked at from a decent distance; compared to him I seemed to myself a thing of rags and smoke, flapping helplessly this way and that at the mercy of every passing breeze. I had met him once before, many years ago, in a golden world now gone. He had hardly changed at all; I do not imagine he has ever been much different from what he is now. I see receding versions of him – young man, boy, babe in arms – all nestling inside each other, each one smaller than the next and yet all the same, with the same big bloodless head and filmy stare and that same air of standing somehow sideways to the world. He is calm, remote, taciturn, possessed of a faintly shabby imperium; he is, or was, at least, a legend in the world of art, foremost authority on Vaublin, frequent guest at I Tatti in the great days, co-author with the late Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures of that controversial monograph on Poussin, consultant for the great galleries of the world and valued adviser to private collectors on however many continents there are. It used to be said that a Thyssen or a Helmut Behrens would not lift a finger in the auction room without first consulting Kreutznaer. Yet when Licht ushered me at last into his presence and left me there, the thing I felt most strongly was the urge to laugh. Yes, laugh, as I want to laugh for instance in the concert hall when the orchestra trundles to a stop and the virtuoso at his piano, hunched like a demented vet before the bared teeth of this enormous black beast of sound, lifts up deliquescent hands and prepares to plunge into the cadenza. I was immediately ashamed of
myself, of course, convinced this tickle of raucous glee must be the self-protective reflex of the second-rater before the spectacle of excellence, the guffaw of the half-educated in the presence of the scholar. I thought of a monkey leaping among the palms, pointing and shrieking and hilariously hurling excrement as the famous naturalist in his baggy shorts comes tramping down the jungle track on the heels of his burdened bearers, his nose buried in his field-notes. It has always been thus with me. Even in what I like to think of now as the renaissance period of my life, when my interests were catholic and everything was a matter of perspective, I always worried that I would burst into shrieks of laughter in the face of this or that grand savant and so show myself up for the hopelessly shallow creature that I am. But then sometimes too I comfort myself with the thought that, as someone or other has rightly pointed out, shallowness has no bottom. Is it any wonder I went to the bad?

So there we are in the turret room, with the transparent sky of morning all around us, he seated in his sea-captain’s chair and I standing meekly before him, exchanging solemnities with him and trying to keep a straight face while with protruding lower lip he read over yet again my letter of introduction from the administrator of the Behrens Collection. I was still three-quarters drunk, but the hot, brassy taste of gathering sobriety was in my mouth and I could hear in the distance the dull tom-tom beat of an approaching headache. It was like being up before the beak – and I should know, after all. Presently, however, and most unexpectedly, another sensation came over me, a sort of burning flush, which it took me a moment to identify. It was shame. I mean the real thing, the sear, the scald, the pure, fat, fiery stuff itself: shame. Do you know what it is to feel like that, to cringe and writhe inside yourself as if your flesh were on fire? It is not given to every man to know without the shadow of a doubt that he is a scoundrel. (It takes more
courage than you think to name yourself as you should be named. You do not know what it costs to bring yourself to that pass, I can tell you.) I wanted to abase myself before him, to cast myself down at his feet with cries and imprecations, drumming my fists and weeping, or wrap my arms around his knees and cry my sins aloud and beg forgiveness. Oh, I was in a transport. In the end, however, I only put my head back and snuffled up a deep breath, like a diver surfacing, and brought out with a certain ceremonial air the fact of our previous meeting, as if it were the broken half of the precious amulet that would identify me as the long-lost son of the palace, despite my rags and sores. He stiffened, I thought, and rolled his soft-boiled eyes at me suspiciously.

‘We met?’ he said. ‘Where was that?’

‘At Whitewater,’ I said. ‘Oh, twenty years ago. We were house-guests there one weekend. We walked together in the gallery, I remember; you spoke of Vaublin.’

Talk about another life! The windows of the great house filled with greenish summer light and the pictures on the walls like high doorways opening on to other, luminously peopled worlds. The Professor wore black that day, too; for all I know it may have been the same outfit as the one he was wearing now, the same rusty velvet jacket and tubular trousers and boots so old the uppers looked as if they were made of crěpe paper. He had reminded me, I remember, with his big body and little legs and great, round, suet-coloured head, of one of the mighty Germans, Hegel, perhaps, someone like that, someone solemn and ponderous and faintly, unconsciously ridiculous. It struck me how he managed to be both abstracted and sharply watchful. What did we talk about as we paced the polished timbers of that long, high gallery, stepping through blocks of sunlight streaming in the immense windows? I can’t remember, though I can see us there, clear as anything. The Professor, however, was firmly sceptical.

‘No no,’ he said brusquely, ‘you have mistaken me for someone else.’

I persisted gently, determined to establish my connection, however tenuous, with the great days of Whitewater when Helmut Behrens was still alive and I had not yet forfeited my place in the realm of light. I should have married his daughter, I would be master there now, would even have a Vaublin of my very own. Whitewater! I think of permed girls in old-fashioned tennis shoes and pleated skirts and slacks – remember slacks? – and the grass green as it only can be in memory, and gin-and-tonics on the terrace and everyone smoking, and all day long that general air of idleness shot through with languid lusts. When I conjure up those days I feel like old Adam pausing in anguish in the midst of the stony fields, mattock in hand, pierced by paradisal visions of a past now hardly to be believed in. The more I insisted, the more firmly the Professor denied we had ever met; a sort of tussle resulted, elaborately polite, of course, I pushing and he pulling, our teeth gritted. It was all very awkward and in the end embarrassing. We fell into a rueful silence and looked out of the windows for a while, he fiddling with things on his desk and I standing behind him with my hands plunged in the pockets of my jacket; we must have looked like something out of one of Munch’s more melancholic studies. A sea-fret had blurred the far dunes and clouds the colour of wood-smoke were piling up from the horizon, and as we watched, two thick, butter-coloured pillars of sunlight stepped slowly over the far, unmoving waves; sometimes even Dame Nature overdoes her effects. The Professor cleared his throat, huffing and frowning. He dropped Anna Behrens’s letter on the desk and sat brooding, palping his lower lip with a thumb and forefinger.

‘A very great collection,’ he said.