John Banville - Shroud

But look! here is Kristina herself, and Franco Bartoli as well, sitting with us at the table in the shade of the awning, listening to the girl, who is talking to them, and laughing, in the strangest way. How did they come to be here without my noticing? I have no recollection of them arriving, joining us, ordering these glasses of wine they are toying with. I hear Cass Cleave telling them about someone called Mandelbaum, who comes to call on her. These are the words she uses: "He comes to call on me." The two sit facing her, upright on their chairs, fingers fidgeting on the stems of their wine glasses, blandly frowning with widened eyes and eyebrows lifted, polite and mystified. The girl leans forward at the table, her legs twined about each other and one foot hitched behind an ankle, and speaks very rapidly, stumbling over words, winding a lock of hair around a finger, tightly round and round, and giving that strange, snuffly laugh, as if what she is telling them were the drollest thing. Mr. Mandelbaum has a smell, she is saying, a smell of almonds, that goes ahead of him and warns her that he is on his way. Then he arrives and catches her in his arms and squeezes her, and squeezes, until all the breath is squeezed out of her and she falls down. Seeing that I am attending now, or trying to, out of an alcoholic haze, she gives me a bright, desperate smile, her eyes at once burning and blurred. To my distorted sight she looks like one of those hideous folded-in cubist portraits in which the face is presented simultaneously full-on and in profile, you know the kind of thing I mean. With perfect calm and no surprise I see that she is mad. "He smells of almonds," she said, "Mr Mandelbaum." Her smile stopped as if a light in her face had been switched off and she picked up her glass – or was it mine? – in both hands and drank deeply of the dark wine, watching me above the rim. The lunch things had been cleared, and I was holding a glass of… what is it? Grappa again, it must be. The sun was burning the back of my neck. How was it that no one seemed to have noticed that for some time I had not been here? Where was it I had been? In Prague, yes, with Kristina Kovacs, in her salmon-coloured slip. Cass Cleave, her head back and throat throbbing, finished the last of the wine in a great gulp and set down the glass with a bang and looked at me again. Her expression had gone lopsided, as if the profile half of the portrait now had slipped a fraction. She stood up unsteadily and turned and plunged off into the dim interior of the restaurant. The awning flapped, a car roof flashed. Kristina Kovacs cleared her throat and stirred. "You say she is writing your life?" she said, doubtfully. Franco Bartoli smirked at that. "She is your biographer?" he said to me. "Ah." He palmed another smirk. "Ah, I see." With his shiny bald brow and pouting mouth and scant, soft, downy, slightly reddish beard, he has the look, little Franco, of a rare and precious domestic animal, spoilt and ill-tempered from too much coddling. The rimless spectacles perching on the bridge of his neat nose were almost invisible. I wonder why it is that I despise him so. He began to speak now, in a tone of hushed and sibilant fury, of a fashionable French scholar who had agreed to come to the conference and give a paper and then had cancelled at the last minute. "Nearly alike," I said loudly, interrupting him. "Your Frenchman. Bator, Bartoli: nearly the same." I laughed, and held my grappa glass aloft and waggled it at the waiter leaning sullenly against a vine-clad trellis. "Bator the gnome," I said. "I met him once. Nasty, brutish, and short." The place had emptied, we were the last customers. I could hear myself breathe, a low, stertorous roaring, as if there were a bellows working inside my skull, always in me a sign of incipient drunkenness. There was a watery glare on the white tablecloth, and the objects on it, knife, fork, oil bottle, pepper grinder, stood each one at an identical angle to its own shadow, looking as if they had been set there just so, like chessmen, or runes for me to read. The waiter, scowling, brought the bottle of clear poison, poured; I drank. I tried to light a cigarette and fumbled the match and scorched my fingers and swore. Bartoli and Kristina Kovacs were looking at me in an odd, not to say alarming, somehow mechanical, fashion, sitting very still, very straight, like a pair of magistrates, their hands folded before them on the table, their eyes unblinking. "I know you killed your wife," Franco Bartoli said. I coughed, spluttering grappa. "What?" I croaked, gagging. "What?" Kristina Kovacs patted me solicitously on the back. "He says," she said, "you dropped your knife." Sure enough, there it was, the knife, on the ground; its blade, seen there between my knees, had an evil, knowing gleam. I leaned down to pick it up. Kristina Kovacs rose, purse in hand. I made to grab her; I demanded to know where she was going, afraid suddenly to be left alone with Franco Bartoli. She directed a small, dry smile at me. "I am going to see what has become of your biographer," she said. She made her way between the tables and went into the restaurant, where Cass Cleave had gone before her. Franco Bartoli with a fingertip rolled a bread crumb back and forth slowly on the tablecloth, pensive and tense. "You know she is dying," he said, and looked at me. "Kristina, I mean." His eyes were invisible behind the sunlight flashing on the lenses of his spectacles. And at once I understood that he and Kristina Kovacs were lovers. It came to me, just like that; excess of drink often has a clairvoyant effect on me. How long had the affair been going on, I wondered? Perhaps – and somehow this was funny – perhaps it had only just begun, perhaps as recently as last night. Franco must have seen the light of realisation in my face, for he lowered his eyes quickly and began rolling another pellet of dough, more agitatedly this time. I pictured them in bed after the act, Kristina unsleeping and disconcertingly tearful, and Franco with his pot belly and his little-boy's hands, his shoes with the lifts in them tucked discreetly under the bed, making a silent rictus as he stifled yet another yawn; then, out of the dark, Kristina's awful, blurted announcement of her illness, and Franco thinking at once of the dry feel of her flesh and the brown stench she had panted out of her already failing lungs while he was bouncing up and down on her, and he would want to leap up and flee back along the trail of his discarded clothes between bed and door, and run down the hotel corridor, the stairs, along the street, out of the city itself, away! but having instead to lie there, paralysed with dismay, not daring to stir a finger for fear of bringing everything, this woman, her distress, her life and impending death, all crashing down around his unwilling ears. Then the hours of talk, all her terrors tumbling out, her anguish, using up the air in the room until he could barely breathe. Would she have told him about that afternoon with me in Prague, the drapes drawn and she crying out and my dead leg between her thighs thumping its grotesque tattoo on the mattress? She would; oh, she would. "Have a drink," I said to him, smiling almost fondly into his face. "Have a drink with me, Franco, for the sake of old times." He would say nothing, and would not lift his eyes. "I know you killed her," he said in a whisper hoarse with hate. "I know you did." Kristina came back then, frowning. "The girl," she said, and looked at me. "I asked through the door, but she told me to go away. She sounded…"

There are moments, I know them well, when all goes lax and vacant suddenly, as if all the air had rushed out of things, and the people caught in the moment hesitate, feeling displaced, jostled somehow to one side of themselves. Kristina Kovacs put her purse on the table. Franco Bartoli made as if to rise from his chair but changed his mind, and for some reason looked faintly abashed. I leaned far back and peered upward, expecting something to be there, above me, but saw only the swarming air, and the edge of the awning and a tracery of leaves wreathed through with the smoke from my cigarette, and an invisible jet, very high, inscribing its gradual double chalk-mark across the zenith. That breeze again. The sun on the parked cars. The river, shining.