Mefisto Read online

  to Janet

  Contents

  I MARIONETTES

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  II ANGELS

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  I

  MARIONETTES

  CHANCE WAS IN the beginning. I am thinking of that tiny swimmer, alone of all its kind, surging in frantic ardour towards the burning town, the white room and Castor dead. Strange, that a life so taken up with the swell and swarm of numbers should start, like a flourish between mirrors, in the banal mathematics of gemination. The end also was chance.

  There was a Polydeuces too, of course. Who only is escaped alone etcetera.

  We were not the first, of our kind, in our tribe. On my mother’s side there had been another pair, monovular also, though they both perished, their lives a brief day. Pity they weren’t bottled, I could have them for a mascot, my translucent little grand-uncles, fists clenched, frowning in their fluid. There is too a more subtle echo in the symmetrical arrangement of grandparents, Jack Kay and Grandfather Swan and their miniature wives. Thus the world slyly nudges us, showing up the seemingly random for what it really is. I could go on. I shall go on. I too have my equations, my symmetries, and will insist on them.

  When did my mother realize the nature of the cargo she was carrying? What archangel spoke? Dualities perhaps would fascinate her, glimpsed reflections, coincidences of course. A pair of magpies swaggering among the cabbages gave her a fright. Old sayings might strike her with a new significance: peas in a pod, two new pins, chalk and cheese. Maybe now and then she fancied she could hear us, horribly together in our crowded amniotic sea, crooning and tinily crying.

  She was herself undergoing a kind of gemination. Her condition did not so much change her as produce another person. Her ankles swelled, her hips thickened. Even her shoulders seemed broader, packed with soft flesh. She began to wear her hair pulled back in two tight, gleaming black wings and tied at the nape in a netted bun. When she went out to Ashburn, Jack Kay gazed at her mournfully and said:

  – Where is my girl gone, my little girl?

  She looked at him askance, unsmiling, and for an instant clearly he saw his own mother. He shook his great grizzled head.

  – Pah! he said sourly, you’re a woman now.

  I picture her, in that last springtime of the war. Mine is yet another version of her, not the mother she was becoming, nor the daughter Jack Kay had lost, but a stranger, silent and enigmatic, disconsolately smiling, like a dark madonna in the brownish sea-light of some old painting. The burden she carries under her heart weighs on her like a weight of sadness. She had not asked for this outlandish visitation. She begins to feel a secret revulsion. Blood, torn flesh, the gaping lips of a cut before the seepage starts, such things have always appalled her. In the butcher’s shop she cannot look at the strung-up waxen flanks of meat surreptitiously dripping pink syrup on the sawdust floor. She feels like a walking bruise, fevered and tumescent. Certain smells sicken her, of cooked cabbage, coal tar, leather. Images lodge in her head, anything will do, a cracked egg, a soiled dishrag, as if her mind is desperate for things with which to torment her. She cannot sleep.

  – I’m not well. I don’t feel well.

  – You must pray, child.

  His eyes glint behind the grille, his teeth seem bared in a smiling grimace. She can smell the altar wine on his breath.

  – I’m afraid.

  – What’s that?

  – I’m afraid, father.

  – Oh now. Ask the Blessed Virgin to help you.

  Everything crowds in on her. Her parents are evicted from the cottage at Ashburn, and move in with her. Her mother, already limbering up for death, soon fades into the county hospital. Jack Kay remains. He paces the house silently, looking at her out of tragic eyes, as if somehow everything were her fault.

  She cannot be still. She is suffocating. She takes long, aimless walks, dragging herself through the town and out along the Coolmine road, by the rubbish dump. One day a crow falls down dead out of a tree on her head. She does not know whether to laugh or scream. For weeks she will keep hearing the sudden thump, the crackle of feathers, and feel the limp, blue-black thing sliding down her front. The summer is hot. Europe is in ruins. She straggles home, and finds Jack Kay sitting on the window-sill beside the front door, swinging one leg, his big white hands folded on the crook of his stick. She says:

  – The key is there.

  – Key, what key? I don’t know about any key.

  – There! It’s always there!

  He looks on mildly as she snatches up the doormat furiously and points. An agile beetle scuttles for safety. She crushes the key into the lock. Dank air in the hall, and a sullen silence as of things interrupted at furtive play. She begins to say something, but stops, catching her breath. Jack Kay, purblind in the gloom, almost collides with her, and steps back with a grunt. She is leaning against the wall, holding herself. When she turns to the light from the doorway her face is ashen, with a sheen of sweat.

  – Go get someone, she whispers. Quick!

  He opens his mouth and shuts it again.

  The sumptuous light of summer fills the bedroom. A lace curtain billows lazily in the wide-open window. It all seems so heartless. She thrashes slowly on the bed, shielding her face in her arms, as if trapped beneath a press of forms fighting in silent ferocity. Jack Kay has followed her up, and stands now in the doorway, goggling.

  – Get out! she cries. Get out!

  She understands at last what it means that the thing inside her is alive, alive.

  Jack Kay descended the stairs, stopping at every third step to look back at the bedroom door, muttering. It was not right she should shout at him like that, like a madwoman. He opened the front door cautiously. An ordinary afternoon in summer. He listened a moment, then stepped outside and closed the door behind him, holding the flap with his heel and letting it down quietly. Go get someone, he mouthed, wagging his head, quick quick! He spat. A dog approached him. He lifted his stick and the animal cringed, licking thin lips. The stick was a comfortable weight in his hand, good stout malacca worn to the texture of wax, with a hallmarked silver band and a steel ferrule. He frowned, trying to recall when or where he had come by it. He thought briefly of death, then tipped the brim of his hat over one eye and sauntered off across the square. And did not hear the cry that issued from the open upstairs window behind him, nor the second, weaker wail, that wavered, and sank, like a tiny hand going under.

  I DON’T KNOW when it was that I first heard of the existence, if that’s the word, of my dead brother. From the start I knew I was the survivor of some small catastrophe, the shock-waves were still reverberating faintly inside me. The mysterious phenomenon that produced us is the result, the textbooks tell me, of a minor arrest in the early development of a single egg, so that the embryonic streak begins dividing by binary fission. I prefer to picture something like a scene from a naughty seaside postcard, the fat lady, apple cheeks, big bubs and mighty buttocks, cloven clean in two by her driven little consort. However, the cause is no matter, only the effect. The perils we had missed were many. We might have been siamese. One of us might have exsanguinated into the other’s circulation. Or we mig
ht simply have strangled one another. All this we escaped, and surfaced at last, gasping. I came first. My brother was a poor second. Spent swimmer, he drowned in air. My father, when Jack Kay fetched him home at last, looked in dull wonderment at the scene: the infant mewling in its mother’s arms, and that lifeless replica of it laid out on the sheet.

  My mother feared I too would die. Jack Kay reminded her how his brothers, her homuncles, had succumbed after a day. She nursed me with a kind of vehemence, willing me to live. She would not let me out of her sight. She made a nest for me in the big drawer of the wardrobe in her bedroom. I see myself lying there, unnaturally silent, slowly flexing my bandy arms and legs, like a tortoise stranded on its back. When she leans over me I look at her gropingly and frown. My vague, bleached gaze is that of a traveller come back from somewhere immensely far and strange. At night she lay awake and listened to the furtive noises this new life made, the shufflings and soft sighs, and now and then what sounded like a muffled exclamation of impatience. Later on, when I had learned to walk, and could get away by myself, I developed a private language, a rapid, aquatic burbling, which made people uneasy. It sounded as if I were conversing with someone. Hearing me, my mother would pause outside my door, on the stairs, and I in turn, hearing her, would immediately fall silent. Thus we would remain, the two of us, for a long time, alert, motionless, listening to our own inexplicably palpitant heartbeats. Jack Kay, moustache twitching, wondered aloud if maybe I was wrong in the head.

  I feel a tender, retrospective concern, mixed with a trace of contempt, it’s true, for this baffled little boy who moves through my memories of those first years in watchful solitude, warily. I clung to the house. My bedroom looked down through two tiny windows into the square, it was like hiding inside a head. I seemed to myself not whole, nor wholly real. Fairytales fascinated me, there was something dismayingly familiar in them, the mad logic, the discontinuities, the random cruelty of fate. I was brought to a circus, I remember it, the noise, the flashing lights, the brass farts of the band, the incongruous scent of crushed grass coming up between the seats. There were tumbling midgets, and a woman with a snake, and a brilliantined contortionist, thin as a blade, who sat down on his coccyx and assembled a series of agonized tableaux with the stony detachment of a pornographer displaying his wares. It was the clowns, though, that really unnerved me, with their pointy heads and rubber feet and oddly diffused yells, the way they kept tormenting each other, the way the short one would stand bawling in frustration and seeming pain and then whirl round suddenly and smash his lanky companion full in the face with terrible, steely insouciance. I sat without a stir throughout the show, gazing down into the lighted ring with wistful avidity, like that boy in the story who longed to learn how to shudder.

  My mother took me for walks, first in a pram, then tottering ahead of her on a sort of reins, then dawdling farther and farther behind her along the hedgerows. Sometimes we went as far as Ashburn and wandered through the unkempt grounds. She showed me the cottage where she was born, behind the stables. Ashburn would be for her always an idyll. The life of the big house, at the far fringes of which she had hovered longingly, she remembered as a languorous mime to the music of tick-tocking tennis balls across green lawns and the far-off bleat of the huntsman’s horn on frosty mornings, a scene small and distant, yet perfectly, preciously detailed, atinkle with tiny laughter, like a picture glimpsed of eighteenth-century aristocrats at play in a dappled glade. In the midst of this pretty pastoral stood the cottage, where the frog king Jack Kay had reigned. Here her memories were more precise, of whitewash, and rats in the thatch, the tin bath in front of the fire on Saturday nights, a speckled hen standing on one leg in a patch of sun in the kitchen doorway. And the endless squabbles, of course, the shouting, the boxed ears. Now the stables were falling, the forge where Jack Kay had worked was silent. One day, on an overgrown path, under a huge tree, we met Miss Kitty, the last of the Ashburns of Ashburn Park, a distracted and not very clean maiden lady with a great beaked nose and tangled hair, who talked to us calmly enough for a bit, then turned abruptly and ordered us off the estate, waving her arms and shouting.

  There were other spectacles, other frights. I have only a single recollection of Grandfather Swan, a big effigy sitting up in bed laughing in the little house in Queen Street. It was Easter morning, and I was five years old. The sick-room smelled of pipe tobacco and piss. There was a window open beside the bed. The sunlight outside glittered after a recent shower. Grandfather Swan had been shaving, the bowl and cut-throat and bit of looking-glass were still beside him, and there was a fleck of fresh blood on the collar of his nightshirt. His hands trembled, apart from that he seemed quite hale. But he was dying. I was conscious of the solemnity of the occasion. Hard fingers prodded me between the shoulder-blades, and I stepped forward, gazing in awe at the old man’s taut white brow and big moustache, the agate nails, the swept-back spikes of iron-grey hair that made it seem as if some force were dragging the head away and up, to the window, to the shining roofs, to the spring sky itself, pale blue and chill like his eyes. He must have talked to me, but I remember only his laugh, not so much a sound as something that surrounded him, like an aura, and not at all benign. For a long time death was to seem a sort of disembodied, sinister merriment sitting in wait for me in that fetid little room.

  And yet, I wonder. Is this really a picture of Grandfather Swan, or did I in my imagination that Easter morn wishfully substitute another, tougher old man for this one who was doomed? I mean Jack Kay. The laugh, the alarming fingernails, the wirebrush moustache stained yellow in the middle, all these are his, surely? Jack Kay. To me he was always eighty. He wore his years like a badge of tenacity, grimly, with a kind of truculence. But let me have done with him. He lived at Ashburn, and worked the forge. He was an intermittent drunkard. He married Martha somebody, I forget the name, a scullery maid at the big house. They had children. They were unhappy.

  Or at least Martha was. I do not see her clearly. She and Granny Swan died about the same time. They blur into each other, two put-upon old women, somehow not quite life-sized, dropsical, dressed in black, always unwell, always complaining. Their voices are a faint, background murmur, like the twittering of mice behind a wainscot. They must have had some effect, must have contributed a gene or two, yet there remains almost nothing of them. In the matter of heredity they were no match for their menfolk. All the same, there is a memory, which, though neither woman is really in it, is their inspiration. One of those windy damp days of early autumn, with a sky of low, dove-grey cloud, the shining pavements plastered with leaves, and an empty dustbin rolling on its side in the middle of the road. Someone had told me my granny was dead. The news, far from being sad, was strangely exhilarating, and there on that street suddenly I was filled with a snug excitement, which I could not explain, but which was somehow to do with life, with the future. I was not thinking of the living woman, she had been of scant significance to me. In death, however, she had become one with those secret touchstones the thought of which comforted and mysteriously sustained me: small lost animals, the picturesque poor, warnings of gales at sea, the naked feet of Franciscans.

  I don’t know which of the two women it was that had died. Let the image of that silvery light on that rainy road be a memorial, however paltry, to them both.

  My father in these early memories is a remote, enigmatic and yet peculiarly vivid figure. He worked as a tallyman for a grain merchant. He smelled of chaff, dust, jute, all dry things. He had asthma, and a bad leg. His silences, into which a remark about the weather or a threat of death would drop alike without trace, were a force in our house, like a dull drumming that has gone on for so long it has ceased to be heard but is still vaguely, disturbingly felt. His presence, diffident and fleeting, lent a mysterious weight to the most trivial occasion. He took me to the Fort mountain one day on the bar of his bicycle. It was September, clear and still. The heather was in bloom. We sat on a ditch eating sandwiches, and drinking tepi
d milk out of lemonade bottles that my mother had filled for us and corked with twists of paper. The sanatorium was high up behind us, hidden among pines except for the steep-pitched roof and a tall cluster of chimneys, closed, silent, alluring. I toyed dreamily with the thought of myself reclining in a timeless swoon on the veranda up there, swaddled in blankets, with the dazzling white building at my back and the sun slowly falling down the sky in front of me, and a wireless somewhere quietly playing danceband music. My father wore a flat cap and a heavy, square-cut overcoat, a size too big for him, that smelled of mothballs. He pointed out a hawk wheeling in the zenith.

  – Take the eye out of you, he said, one of them lads.

  He was a short man, with long arms and bowed legs. His head was small, which made his trunk seem weightier than it was. With those limbs, that sharp face, the close-set dark eyes, he had something of those stunted little warriors, the dark-haired ones, Pict or Firbolg, I don’t know, who stalk the far borders of history. I can see him, in pelts and pointed shoon, limping at twilight through the bracken. A small man, whom the vengeful gods have overlooked. A survivor.

  Sometimes I catch myself dreaming that dream in which childhood is an endless festival, with bands of blond children sweeping through the streets in sunlight, laughing. I can almost see the tunics, the sandalled feet, the white-robed elders watching indulgently from the olive tree’s shade. Something must have fed this Attic fantasy, a game of tag, perhaps, on a Sunday evening in summer, the houses open to the tender air, and mothers on the doorsteps, talking, and someone’s sister, in her first lipstick, leaning at gaze out of an upstairs window.

  The town was twelve thousand souls, three churches and a Methodist hall, a narrow main street, a disused anthracite mine, a river and a silted harbour. Fragments of the past stuck up through the present, rocks in the stream of time: a Viking burial mound, a Norman tower, a stump of immemorial wall like a broken molar. History was rich there. Giraldus Cambrensis knew that shore. The Templars had kept a hospice on the Spike peninsula. The region had played its part in more than one failed uprising. By now the splendour had faded. There was too, I almost forgot, the great war against the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I had watched the final rout: a priest punching in the belly a skinny young man in a mac, the crowd shouting, the bundles of The Watchtower flying in the air. And there was a celebrated murder, never solved, an old woman battered to death one dark night in her sweetshop down a lane. It was the stuff of nightmares, the body behind the counter, the bottled sweets, the blood.