Mefisto (6 page)

– Had a little rest, did we? Felix shouted playfully, wagging his head at him across the table. Had a little kip?

Sophie brought the saucepan from the stove and ladled a smoking dollop of dark-brown stew on to each plate. Felix waved an arm expansively, inviting me to join them. I sat down opposite Mr Kasperl.

Sophie poured out tea from a blackened pot. There was a little nest of cobwebs in the bottom of my mug. Mr Kasperl coughed moistly one, twice, and then a third time, inclining an ear, as if testing something inside him. The heat hummed, pressing on the house. Birds were singing weakly outside. The high, narrow room teetered above us, as if we were at the bottom of a deep shaft. A scalded spider bobbed to the surface of my tea, turning in slow circles. I felt Mr Kasperl’s gaze directed at me. We looked at each other for a moment. I fancied I could see something stirring, like torpid fish, in the dead depths of his eyes. He stopped chewing suddenly, and, puckering his lips, extracted a piece of gristle from his mouth and set it down with deliberation on the side of his plate. I looked away. Sophie was watching me, and so was Felix. They were all three watching me, with calm and somehow remote attention, as if they had turned to look back at me from the far side of a valley, waiting to see if I would come across and join them.

I MET FELIX IN
town one day. He came ambling along Owl Street with his hands in his pockets, whistling. I felt a spasm of that same excitement, a sort of eager fright, that I had felt the first time I saw him, in the grove above the meadow. I thought of turning aside, but he had already seen me. The street was narrow and steep, running athwart a hill above the harbour. The spire of the Church of the Assumption beetled over the rooftops, seeming somehow in flight. There was a smell of sea-wrack, and a gamy stench from a poulterer’s yard up a lane.

– Hello, whooper, he said. Going my way?

– No, I said, I …

– Oh well, I’ll go yours, then.

He grinned.

We walked down the hill towards the harbour. Sunlight lay along one side of the street, wedged at the foot of a deep diagonal of shadow. Few people were about. An old man in rags was crossing the road on a crutch. At each laborious step he brought his left foot down on the asphalt with an angry bang. He stopped in the gutter and waited intently, panting, as we went past. From this high place we could look out over the town, a huddle of dark geometry spread before us in the summer haze. Felix paused, and took a cigarette butt from his box and fingered it thoughtfully, picking charred crumbs of tobacco from the blackened tip.

– I’ve been talking to your auntie, he said. She says you’re a wizard with figures.

He struck a match and held the flame suspended, and glanced at me sideways.

– That right? he said.

Out in the harbour a marker bell was ringing and ringing. I could feel the blood flooding into my face. I walked on quickly, and Felix followed. Behind me the cripple banged his hoof, and, unless I imagine it, laughed.

We turned into Goat Alley. Already Felix knew his way about these back streets. He steered me across a sunny yard behind a fishmonger’s shop and down a narrow flight of slimed stone steps. A rat scuttled ahead of us, dragging a fish-head in its teeth. We came abruptly on to the quayside. The sea was high, swaying sluggishly beyond the woodworks like the smooth pale humped back of something living. A bronze pikeman, sombrely agleam in the sunlight, pointed a rope-veined forearm in the direction of the railway station. We crossed to the woodworks. Beneath us we could hear the tide’s vague slap and slither. Felix threw his fag-end into the water, it made a tiny hiss. In the harsh sea-light the whites of his eyes were soiled, and the skin around his eyes was taut, as if from a scorching, and scored with tiny wrinkles like cracks in a china glaze. The breeze brought me a waft of his breath, laden with the smell of smoke and the metallic tang of his bad teeth. I could smell his clothes too, with the sun on them, the shiny, pinstriped jacket with its prolapsed pockets and wilting lapels, the concertina trousers, the shoes like boats.

– Mr Kasperl was asking about you, he said. Wanted to know who you were. I told him. I said, he’s a prodigy, that boy. He was interested.

– Why, I said, why was he asking about me?

– Eh? Oh, I don’t know. The subject came up. Listen, here’s a good one. How does a lady hold her liquor? By the ears. Ha!

We walked on. Our footsteps thudded on the tarred boards, the sea sucked and slapped. Felix talked and talked. He put on his funny voices, did impressions, recounted queer stories. He talked about the war, about the Germans and the Japs, and the sulphur bombs that were dropped on Dresden. He knew all the facts, the figures. He stopped suddenly and struck a pose, with one hand on his heart and the other pointing heavenward, and gaily sang:

He speculated about the last secret of Fatima, which is so terrible the Pope keeps it sealed in a vault in the Vatican. Maybe, he said, maybe it had something to do with the three dark days that will herald the end of the world, when nothing will light except blessed candles made of beeswax. He clapped his hands and cackled.

– Get that candle out! he cried. As the Mother Superior said to the nun.

We left the quay and walked up through the town. The main street was busy. Felix smiled on everything, as if all this, the streets, the people, the shop windows decked with corsets and carpenter’s tools, had been laid on specially for his amusement. The housewives doing their shopping eyed us with interest. They all knew Felix. He greeted them genially, waving and bowing, doffing an imaginary tri-corn, and all the while making disparaging remarks to me about them out of the side of his mouth. We passed by the malt store, and the place where the Horse River ran under the road, and so came to our square. We stopped under the trees, by the horse trough, a metal tub surmounted by an iron swan painted white, that spouted a weak jet of water through a rusted beak.

– Swan, Felix said, pointing. Ha ha.

This was where, years ago, the dwarf used to sit on his tricycle and talk to me, smoothing a hand on his oiled hair and shooting his immaculate cuffs. Felix lounged against the trough, his arms and ankles crossed. Suddenly I wanted to tell him something, anything, to confide in him, the urge was so strong that for a second tears prickled under my eyelids and my throat grew thick. He was watching me with a little smile, his eyes narrowed against the light.

– I’d say we’re a lot alike, you know, he said, you and me.

A flock of starlings rose from the trees and flew over our heads in a rush of wings, briefly darkening the air. My mother came to the front door of our house and stood with her sleeves rolled, watching us. Felix met her baleful stare with a mockingly apologetic smile. I turned my back on her. She went inside again, and slammed the door. Felix stretched himself, yawning. He considered the sky, the rooftops, the delicate green of the trees.

– But seriously, he said, figures, now, that’s very interesting. Mr Kasperl is very interested, really.

When I went into the house my mother said nothing. I went up to my room. My books, papers, pencils, were on the table, by the window. They wore somehow a knowing air.

I began to go out regularly then to Ashburn. My presence was accepted without remark, I might have been part of the household. Felix and I played cards at the kitchen table, and ate Sophie’s stews. I walked with her in the grounds, or explored the house with her. Mr Kasperl paid me no heed at all, except that sometimes when we came face to face unexpectedly he would give me one of his remote, dull stares and frown vaguely, as if he thought he might vaguely know me.

My mother wanted to know where I was spending my time now. She had preferred it when I shut myself away in my room, that silence above her head had been less alarming than these inscrutable absences. But at home these days I felt like an exile come back on a brief, bored visit. How small it all seemed, how circumscribed. At Ashburn the horizon was limitless. I moved in a new medium there, a dense, silvery stuff that flashed and shimmered, not like air at all, but a pure fluid that held things fixed and trembling, like water in the brimming jet of a fountain.

I brooded on Sophie as one of Mr Pender’s more difficult puzzles. She would not solve. There was a flaw in her, a tiny imbalance, that would not let the equation come out, it showed in the slope of her shoulders, in her delicate, long, lopsided face. Her walk was a swift, strong swimming in air. She favoured her left side, so that at every step she seemed about to veer away impetuously to the right, as if there were things out there clamouring softly for her attention. She was always moving, always ahead of me, I knew intimately the shell-like hollows behind her ankle-bones, the fissured porcelain at the backs of her knees, the syncopated slow wingbeat of her shoulder-blades. She seemed built not on bone but on some more supple framework. Her thumbs were double-jointed. She could pick up things with her toes. She was given to rushes of playful violence, she would turn on me suddenly with a gagging laugh and give me a push, or hit me hard on the shoulder with her sharp little fist. She had a way of stiffening suddenly with a gasp and clasping herself in her arms, as if to keep herself from exploding. Even at her stillest she gave off ripples of excitement, like a huntress poised behind a pillar with bent bow. She was a sealed vessel, precarious, volatile, filled to bursting with all there was to say. She might have been not mute but merely waiting, holding her breath. Her deafness was like vigilance. She would fix on the most trivial thing with rapt attention, as if anything, at any moment, might begin to speak to her, in a small voice, out of that huge, waveless sea of silence in which she was suspended. She communicated in an airy, insubstantial language consisting not of words but moving forms, transparent, yet precise and sharp, like glass shapes in air. When I was away from her I could not think how exactly she managed it. She seldom resorted to the sign alphabet, and then impatiently, making a wry face, as if she had been forced to shout. However, these quick, deft displays never failed to surprise and impress me. They seemed a sort of sleight of hand, adroit and faintly jubilant. Mr Kasperl, though he appeared to understand what she was saying, would make little response, but stand before her with his head lowered, looking at her blankly from under his brow, his mysterious thoughts elsewhere. Felix just laughed at her, waving his arms to fend her off, as if she were making preposterous demands of him.

– Listen to her! he would say to me merrily. She’s mad, mad!

And she too would laugh, and mime exasperation, shaking a playful fist in his face.

Felix was always busy, in a vague, haphazard way. He never seemed to finish anything, or to have started anywhere, but was always just doing. The keys he had been sorting the first time I came to the house lay for weeks on the kitchen table. He would walk up and stand looking at them, his hands in his pockets and his chin sunk on his breast, and heave a histrionic, weary sigh before wandering off to tackle some other obscure task. He spent hours prowling about upstairs, rummaging in closets and under beds, or going through the wardrobes that stood, like broad sarcophagi, in dank dressing rooms and faded boudoirs, still thronged with clothes, the moth-eaten relics of generations of Ashburns. He would salvage odds and ends of antique outfits – a pair of check plus-fours, a mildewed dinner jacket, a cricket umpire’s floppy hat – and wear them around the house with bland aplomb. I came upon him one day in the grounds, strolling through the trees in baggy tweeds and a norfolk jacket and carrying a rusty shotgun.

– Thought I’d take a bang at the birds, don’t you know, he said. Care to be my loader?

It had been raining, and now a sharp sun was shining. The drenched woods glittered. We walked along a winding path. There were rustlings and slitherings all about us in the grass, under the leaves. I had not rid myself of a faint unease in his presence. I always answered his remarks too eagerly, smiled too quickly at his jokes, as if to hold him at arm’s length. He made fun of everything. He pulled faces at Mr Kasperl behind his back, imitating his matronly walk. He would throw back his head and feign loud laughter, as if someone had said something wonderfully funny, until Sophie, with the inept cunning of the deaf, began to laugh along with him, then he would put up a hand and hide his face from her and chuckle, winking at Mr Kasperl and me. Yet it was not his mockery I feared. We came to a viridian field. The verdure shimmered. A little band of grazing deer saw us and fled silently into a copse. We paused, and Felix looked about him, beaming.

– What a paradise it seems, all the same, he said. I sometimes wonder if we deserve this world. What do you think, bird-boy?

He laughed and sauntered on, hefting the shotgun in the crook of his arm. We walked along the margin of the field until we came to the high hedge and the drive. The house was handsome with the sun on it, the windows ablaze. Birds swooped through the rinsed air, the great trees stood as if listening. For a moment I experienced a pure, piercing happiness, unaccountable, fleeting, like a fall of light. A delivery boy was coming up the drive behind us on his bike, pedalling leisurely, with one hand on the handlebar and his knees splayed. I knew him. His name was Clancy, a short, muscular fellow with a swatch of coarse black hair and a crooked jaw, and a bad cast in one eye. He wore big boots with cleats, and a long, striped apron. He had been in my class at school years ago. He was a dunce, and sat at a desk by himself in a corner. The teachers made fun of him, holding up his copybooks for us to see his slovenly work, while he crouched in his seat and looked around at us murderously out of his crooked eye. Sometimes on these occasions he would break down and weep, shockingly, like an adult, in pain and rage, coughing up jagged sobs and clenching his inky fists helplessly in his lap. Now, spying me ahead of him, he stopped whistling abruptly, and the front wheel of his bicycle wobbled. Felix halted, and waited, watching him. He dismounted and crossed to the other side of the drive, and plodded along slowly, bent low and pushing the bike, frowning to himself as if a very important thought had just occurred to him. The bicycle was a sturdy black machine with small thick wheels, and at the front an enormous wicker basket filled with parcels.