They are lapdogs at the foot of my bed. One is charity, a pallid young man seeking alms for those he has decided are less fortunate than he. One is ostensible family, a besuited man with a monocled eye who claims a circuitous blood link. The third the church, in the incarnation of the old dame who strips away the dead candles in the cathedral.
I meet their sculptured faces with a smile. They remain taut and impassive. They probably think I am grimacing. I have gas.
I see their inner filaments. Their shadowed truths shimmer in the clear light of mind. They know I have no heir. The hyenas.
A shaft of light enters the room through a single window, bearing crumbs of dust that float like plankton in a sunlit grove of sea.
Weird thoughts emblazon my mind. The world is at my bed. What does it profit a man? What darkens a dark heart? What moment turns a man into a monster, or a saint?
My mind turns to chocolate and Spain.
The sweet steaming thermos of bitter Mayan brew that I drank with Penelope on the train to Cordoba, and its labyrinth of arches, flashes of red and white. The train was slow, but we were unburdened by time. I thought it was snowing outside, but Penelope said it was ash from the engine. Scruffy youths ran along the small stations we stopped at on the way, offering tea, pancakes or other comestibles on dented tin plates. She bought some olives and an orange. I bought the chocolate and smiled at her as I sipped. Beyond, the mountains were sparsely vegetated, and held promise of a past that could nourish the future.
A black figure looms in the doorway. The priest. Maria pushes in front of him. Before he can speak she turns him away. Not today, father, she says, he is in fine spirits.
If it’s not your money they want, it’s your soul.
Maria is a good soul. I know chef is wary of her, as are all the kitchen staff, but she is of staunch disposition, and a firm believer that order inspires confidence. I shall instruct Straddock to draft a codicil in her favour. I ask her to summon him. We rely on others for so much.
Penelope’s aunt had arranged for the Monseñor to guide us through the Mezquita. He greeted us with gold lit teeth. A gold cross hung across the chest of his black cassock; he sported a straw hat. On account of the sun, he said. He said his name was Luis de Souza.
He explained the history of the mosque and cathedral as we ambled among the striated archways. Penelope, with her linen robe and red lips, rhythmically dissolved and reappeared in the white and ruby light. She stood resplendent at the Mihrab, the gold air flitting about her. She was a woman well ahead of her era.
The Reconquista returned the mosque to Christendom, said the Monseñor. But it was over 400 years until the Conquistadors suppressed the Americas. You know, he added, they killed not for conquest, but because they thought it was God’s will. I thought of the chocolate in my thermos. Why did he say that?
‘I am glad to be living in history,’ he said.
I hear someone say, ‘He is not lucid.’
Was I speaking? I must have been speaking my dreams. How easily we conflate memory with the moment.
I raise my hand and announce, No, not lucid. Pellucid. I am pellucid. I see with the light of memory, the chiaroscuro of the mind.
The triad stares back stonily. Fucking poltroons don’t have the courage to speak to me. I yell, ‘Cats got your tongues?’ No response. I doubt I was comprehensible. I wave my arms at them to provoke a response. I must look like a mad man. A mad man on the verge of his last breath no doubt. I blow a raspberry.
Maria enters, tuts and leaves again. Then returns with a bedpan which she secretes beneath the bed.
The three of us – Penelope, the Monseñor and I – luncheoned in a café in the sun near the Mezquita. Penelope was radiant in her white dress and hat, her face in the shade of the eaves as she leant against the stucco walls of the eatery. Men stared at her as they sauntered by; she did not dress as per the time. The Monseñor sat full in the sun with his hat on. His eyes sparkled as we shared tapas and drank Verdejo. Drunk as I was on my companion, I tasted little of the food.
He regaled us with his history with Penelope’s aunt.
Although an atheist – a radical position for a woman at the time – she was working at a Catholic hospice on the outskirts of Havana. She had nursed him through a bout of enteric fever, applying her own salves and unguents, and he had fallen in love with her. But she declined his offer of marriage, which, while disheartening, was not unexpected. He was, after all, only a poor fisherman at the time, and could not offer her a wealthy future. He substituted the Church for her as his One Great Love and took holy orders. Although Cuban born, his vows to the Church meant he fled with the Spanish to Spain after the Americans besieged Santiago in 1898.
How easily we replace one’s heart with one’s purpose.
My head aches. Or is that just another rumour? So inured are we to pain that joy hurts when it descends. Purgatory is the burnishing of joy upon the soul, the sculptor’s gouge of chisel on marbled splendour. So easily do we slip to unrepentant memories.
I am joyless, surrounded by joyless hordes.
We left the Monseñor and retired to our pensione for the siesta. But we did not sleep. Penelope said we had not been in Spain long enough to have adopted their customs. I said I was too preoccupied with her to sleep.
She laughed and said, ‘Silly man,’ and placed her hat on the mahogany side table. She unpinned her red hair and let it fall about her shoulders. Never had I seen a more magnificent specimen.
She yielded to my kiss, placed a hand on my chest and pushed me gently back. She unclasped her necklace and laid it next to her hat. Then she unravelled my cravat and placed it beside the necklace. A line of items evolved in sacral order. She unbuttoned my collar and then bade me remove my coat. Then she ran her fingers through my hair and kissed me with shining eyes.
She raised a slender leg on to a chair, and, reaching beneath her dress, unhooked her stocking and rolled it down to her ankle. I looked on with wide eyes.
You should see you, she said gleefully as she unravelled the other stocking. Rather than place it in the line of items she tossed in the air where it floated down with a diaphanous debauchery to the floor.
Come, she said, and turned to the bedroom.
I snigger at my audience. Turds. They have not known such delights. I sigh and let my body sink into the mattress. It threatens to swallow me whole. I acquiesce and fall, but fall nowhere. I float. The world has removed itself from under me and I am suspended in the void, like a planet that spins but does not spin, a thing of air that is not air and not in air. I am a patina, a veneer, a shape whose life has passed through him. No event is weightier than any other, no moment of more gravity than the next.
I can hear their breathing though. ‘Yes I am alive, still, you callous bastards,’ I shout. ‘More alive than you in fact’. I am life itself, distilled to a mote of being, conscious, aware.
Mad man. What moment provokes my wrath?
Someone calls Maria. Someone, maybe the same, lifts the frailty that is my hand and presses two fingers upon the wrist. They agree it is not my time. Craven fools. Maria enters. They explain. She tuts, and pulls my bedclothing up. The Watchers smile.
‘There is plenty of time,’ she says to them. ‘You need not stay.’
They do not move. The lure of wealth can lead a man to petulance or patience. This lot are the latter.
We spent a fortnight in Cordoba. By day we made love, fervently, carelessly, and fell into an indolent slumber that only the midday heat could disturb. In the later afternoon, we escaped the heat in the Mills of the Guadalquivir, the Caliphal Baths or other sights. At night we explored the markets.
They were bright and active. People promenaded arm in arm in the hot summer air. Waiters in coloured livery served platters of food to patrons at outdoor tables. Music blared from inside the taverns where the click of castanets and clatter of heels was countered with shouts and applause. The dark was thick above the shop rooves and the Minaret behind, and the yellow streetlights replenished the festival of market life.
Each night we strolled and chose a café on a whim, and dined on octopus and olives, chicken and rice, salads made from tomatoes and beans and peppers and calamari. We drank sangria, coffee and danced to bands of minstrels who played guitar and drums and flutes.
We fell into bed in the early morning, laughing and singing and clinging to each other’s bodies, to our souls and their desires unfettered. We slept as cosseted birds in the cage of our own desiring.
She was my queen, my heart, my captor, my rapture, my centre of being.
I wake. I am alone. The Little Tribe has gone. They will return no doubt, or send an envoy. One tires of waiting. I am not waiting. I am determining when.
Maria bubbles in, bearing a gleaming urine bottle in one hand. Really, she is prophetic in her care. And yet she manages the indignity of it with a wry pragmatism, leaving me relieved, literally. As she carries off the warm jug she says, ‘I’ve made fresh tea and toast.’
The breakfast revives my spirits. As I eat – laboriously as old men do – she busies herself tidying the room for the Triad.
Emboldened by the meal, I ask if she has family. She pauses mid-task and says, ‘My husband was a plasterer, but was invalided after an accident. He is confined to a wheelchair. I work to pay for our needs’.
I ask if she has children and her face lights up. ‘Two boys,’ she says. ‘They have both grown up and left home. One is training to be a doctor, the other to write for television.’
She reaches into her apron pocket and retrieves a creased photo. Two young men stare out at me, smiling and bright faced. They have the long hair of the day, and large collared shirts, but they are fine young men. I fancy I see Penelope in them: the slope of her eyes, the angle of her smile. How readily we conflate the present with the past.
When we motored to the Alhambra, up the winding roads that climbed the Sierra, Penelope complained of sickness. We paused at an olive farm to drink coffee and eat breads and vegetables and oils, but she felt quaint. A vertigo had formed within her, and an unsettling radiance shimmered throughout her body. She only took a mild tea.
We rested for a few days, and she stayed in bed. We visited the palace. She leant against the pillars of the laced marble colonnades. In the central garden she vomited and we returned to our rooms.
I read Freud and Nietzsche in the warmth of the sun that flooded through the window and gazed at the beauty in my bed. Even when ill she was beautiful. I kissed her forehead and she apologised for her weakness and hid herself in my embrace.
She was too ill to travel so our rooms became our home for the next two months. She said she did not want a doctor. She said she felt well, but sick, luminous, but darkly unsettled. She threw up regularly, and ate little more than toast with oil and lukewarm tea. She encouraged me to go outside and enjoy the town. I stayed and adored her from my seat by the window.
Then one morning she rose and declared herself recovered, and showed me the swelling in her belly.
I remember I shrieked with joy, and leapt to enfold her in my arms, my heart bursting with love and gratitude and wonder. In Cordoba I did not think I could love her more, yet here she was, beauty brazen with the gift of life. We kissed and I sang and laughed and held her tight. We fell on to the bed and made love with an inevitability, a sense of this is what is meant to be, has to be, and we are freed in the joyous current.
After, I raised the proprieties of the age, but she held up a hand and said, I will not be confined, and have no need to curtail our travels. I feel well now, and am ready to embrace Spain and grow our child. When I asked if she would at least be married, she said, I am my aunt’s niece. Let us be lovers now, and when the child is born we can return to London as husband and wife. Then she sat up and added, But right now, I want to eat a steak.
What an extraordinary woman. How ready to take a hold on life. My heart had exploded.
Maria approaches me with a large bowl, a sponge and a white towel. Steam wafts from the bowl. She sets the bowl down and unbuttons my pyjama top. The sponge is hot and comforting on my chest. She lifts my left arm up. In a single swipe from armpit to wrist I am cleaned. Then she lifts my right arm and repeats. Each is followed by a rub down with the towel.
‘Roll over,’ she says. I turn away from her, reliant on her pushing to expose my skeletal frame. Again the hot water is a balm to my aged body, again she polishes me with the towel. She pulls clean pyjamas from the tallboy, and works my arms into the top. Then she pulls down the bedcovers and says,
Pants off.
I am exposed. Spindly spotted legs and nobbled knees are not noble. Especially with the twisted right leg. Without hesitation she scrubs me down. Even my withered cock and balls get the once over, followed by the towel down. They do not respond. They are like so many winters past, gone and grey with only memories to enchant them. I obey her hand pressure and turn on my side again. My arse gets a going, even the crack in the shrunken buttocks. Then the towel, then new pants and then the weight of the bed covers returns.
She takes a fresh cloth and finishes with my face, the sponge cribbing the grime from my chin and eyes, the towel betraying my scoured skin to the fresh air. Then she retreats, bowl and towel in hand like left over sacraments after the Eucharist.
I feel cleansed and ready to take on the Watchers.
In the ensuing months Penelope became unstoppable. She strode up the hill to the Alhambra and did not rest in her tour of the entire palace. She was outspoken at the screens and the arches, the citadel and internal pool, and quizzed the tour guide about the details of its history.
After we retired to our hotel room where she slept briefly and then demanded I meet her libido. Then we were out again to dine, where she laughed and held my hand and seduced me over and over with her longing gaze.
Nor did she tire as we travelled to Seville, where she led me through the Alcazar, the Giralda, the palaces and parks, and the many gardens of the grand city and its maze of cobbled streets and shops. On our last night there we attended a performance of The Barber of Seville. After she caressed my cheek with her hand and said, My Count Almaviva, amor e fede eterna, si vegga in noi regnar.
Then we were off to Cádiz, then Marbella then Malaga. We swam, we danced, we ate and made copious love. We applauded local musicians, wondered at ancient sites and revelled in the sunlight of the Mediterranean. And all the while we watched her belly grow as we lay in the crumpled sheets of our hotel beds. Each night, caressing her gibbous belly, I said, Amor e fede eterna, si vegga in noi regnar. May our love and faith eternally reign in us.
The dogs are crazed with hunger. Their eyes follow my every move, such as they are. It is good to be wanted. Rufus is my favourite. He licks my hand when it falls off the bedside before Maria shoos him off.
He noses the arm of one of the Bed Enders – Cyclops the Monocle – but he does not respond. ‘Atta boy!’ I say. Candle lady leans away from him, so he turns to the door with a despondent wag of his tail. I turn to the window.
It was only as we headed north again to Madrid that she began to slow down, more as her mind turned to the task of childbirth and rearing. In the mornings I found her staring into the void and when I asked she replied, Planning for the Arrival.
We took lodgings near the Retiro, in a spacious apartment overlooking the park, with plenty of sunlight and adequate room for staff to attend. Penelope rested in the large bed chamber and we spent many a happy day strolling the park or sitting in cafes, savouring the last days of our independence and the forthcoming arrival of our child.
We engaged a midwife and the most experienced medical support we could find. In our mind we were free, and ready. The world seemed charmed. There were rumours in other parts of Europe of unrest and a build-up of arms, but here the monarchy was stable, the economy of Spain growing, the social life vibrant and the standard of living high. Not only had I completed my grand tour, but I would return a man married to the most modern and excellent of women and a father to newborn issue. No man could be happier.
The Three Heads reappear. Monocle Man has shaved. Charity man has not. His beard is unkempt and his long hair pinned back in a knotty bun. I don’t see how women go for that sort of thing. Church charwoman wears the same cardigan. It has a food stain on the cuff.
‘What do you want from me?’ I say. None speaks. I should put my fingers to your wrists and test for your pulses. Sponges. Who sent you?
Who can cure a riven soul? (Did I say that last phrase?)
They shuffle.
I wait for an answer, but none is forthcoming. ‘Pricks.’ I say. ‘You’re here on orders from above, to mark respect for the dead and ensure both coffins and coffers are filled.’
A fly buzzes in the shaft of sunlight. It thumps the window and lands on the sill in a web, where it struggles until the arachnid trips over and injects it with its green venom. How easily life betrays us.
Maria’s head pokes around the door then recedes again.
On the morning labour pains started I left Penelope to the ministrations of the midwife and doctor. At that time men did not attend the birth. I never understood why, we were there at the conception.
I went to a nearby café and tried to read. I stared out at the street, the passing carriages, the elegant ladies in their long dresses and feathered hats, men in suits. A number did not wear a necktie, and did not look any less appealing for that.
After a couple of hours I took a walk about the lake. I did not want to stray too far from the apartment, lest a footman or a nurse summon me to my child.
But the day was long. I could not comprehend how it could take so long. The streets went quiet for siesta, such as it was in the bustling capital, and then revived. The sun began to sink. The streetlights blinked on, a reminder of modernisation of the grand city. I ate. I took a sherry, and then a bottle of wine.
Eventually, at around midnight, one of Penelope’s chamber maids, looking very glum and red eyed, bade me accompany her to our rooms.
There I found the doctor and midwife enveloped in the thick stink of medicinal alcohol and a dank air of grief. In an anteroom, the doctor explained to me what had occurred, in words I barely heard. A haemorrhage, blood loss, a breach, fever, a newborn girl, but motherless. Their faces were filled with pity and fear and sorrow and dejection. The midwife hung her head. The doctor simply sat while grief inundated my soul.
I do not know how long I sat there, helpless, bereft of direction, grieving for my poor betrothed, keening for her ordeal. There were glimpses of sunlight when I finally rose and asked to see her.
The doctor said, ‘The child or her mother?’
My heart cleaved in two. I had lost a wife but had a daughter. With which did my greater responsibility lie?
I went to farewell my beloved. The staff had cleaned the room and she lay in state, her visage a placid and beatific veneer. I wept again and kissed her cold lips and then stolidly rose and asked to see my child.
A wet nurse brought her to me, in a different room away from her mother. I held the infant and wept some more, and felt the wormlike minutiae of her fingers in my clumsy hand.
My situation was forlorn and untenable. I was a man with expectations who faced the prospect of returning home with a daughter born out of wedlock, with no understanding of how to raise a child, or offer her respectability in a society that did not value the freedom of love we had enjoyed.
Was what I did callous? It is the question that has haunted my whole life: I left her in the care of the Sisters of the Order of the Servants of Mercy in the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama with a generous bequest for her care and education, and returned to London.
Less than a year later, the dogs of war were unleashed when a Serbian rebel shot the Archduke of Austria, and plunged the world into a tumult of savagery, blood and gore. I sought to drown my sorrow by enlisting early and attempting dare devil raids upon the enemy, but I was only left lame when a shell shattered my femur.
After my convalescence I turned my rage to the running of the family munitions factories, supplying endless quantities of shells and rifles to the front. I kept secret the madness of the spirit that drove my every action; to the onlooker I was a paragon of industry and patriotism. But each shell I produced was a tear I shed for the loss of my beloved. An illness spread wastefully on the bloodied earth of the battlefield.
The war ended and Britain regrouped, licking its victorious wounds. Our fortunes did not diminish upon the armistice, however. There were conflicts aplenty in the interwar years. The largest being the Spanish Civil War where we supplied Franco’s army. It was here that I lost any contact I had with the good Sisters and do not to this day know if their convent survived the war. I heard they were taking in injured republican fighters, but this may have been a rumour.
World War II was profitable, similarly the Cold War it spawned and the Korean War that followed. The impending Vietnam War provided an opportunity to maximise the sale of the company. As the only surviving member of my family I left with an inordinately princely sum, and the wilted memory of the woman I had loved all those years ago and the child I had relinquished. I never married, or fathered any more children. I spent my retirement in the arms of immense privilege and a riven soul. The war in Vietnam still rages.
In my mind, figures come and go, spectral penumbra of the past. The sentry at the Cordoba Mosque. The Monseñor, smiling and hot in the summer glare. The neck of our driver and his trimmed hairline. The train station vendors and their buoyant grins. The downcast eyes of the staff in Madrid. The shattered corpses of my comrades on the Marne. The earnest lines of workers – mainly women – pumping out shell after shell in grimy conditions. The woman who kissed me in the Strand upon declaration of the Armistice.
Penelope in all her varied and fascinating forms. Her flowing robes, her nakedness, her captivating smile, the vigour of her stride, the rounding of her belly, the light kiss she blew me as we parted that morning for her delivery. A neonate in my arms, shut-eyed and oblivious as to who or what I was.
They are like the passing of storms, limpid and bereft.
Maria enters the rooms and pushes the curtains back to fluff in some light. The Three Stooges return. She asks them to leave. This will be interesting. Apparently I have some business to attend to. At my age.
Monocle protests that he is family and should stay.
‘No me estás escuchando,’ she says sharply. ‘Ponerse las pilas’.
‘You’re not listening,’ I translate for them. ‘Get your skates on! I have no idea why they are to leave but this is fun.’
They go. Maria turns to me and says, ‘Mr Straddock will be here presently.’
Ah, that’s why.
I thank her and say, ‘You speak Spanish.’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘How is that?’
I know I am being too intimate, but I am too late in life to observe proprieties. She is after all the only person in the house worth talking to.
She sighs and stands by the bed. She is a lithe woman, despite her sixty years. I am a good twenty-five years older. The years of hard work embedded in her face belie an underlying grace. She could have been a model in her youth, and a catch for many a suitor.
‘I was an orphan’, she says. ‘I was born in Spain in 1913, and raised by nuns. English is my second language. I came here in thirty-nine, just before the War broke out.’
The room has stopped. Time has stopped. The sunlight is a stationary beam. No dust moves, the spider lies in wait, the air is motionless. I stare at her. Does she see me? She stands still. Who is waiting for the command to move?
I say, ‘Tell me, what was the name of the convent where these nuns lived?’
She says, ‘The Sisters of the Order of the Servants of Mercy, in the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama, outside Madrid.’
Time inhales, the sunbeam pulses, the dust is lit, and the spider’s fangs are raised.
I say, ‘Do you know who your mother was?’
She drops her head. ‘No, she says. She died giving birth to me. The father gave me up to the nuns.’
Time in an eruption of breath rewinds, the sun pulls out and night returns then the sunset rises the dust spins and flips upwards and the spider savages its prey while shells rise and smoke and cordite flee skyward my leg cracks in repair the Channel boat sucks in smoke clouds swim the sky blinks and then, before me, stand the nuns, in their sombre black, one with a bundle containing a new life with her tiny fists full of uncertain tears.
I gasp. Maria says, ‘Are you alright, sir?’
I say, ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘Of course,’ she says, ‘Sir Jasper Montgomery Faircliffe.’
I let out a cry and attempt to raise my arm towards her, but a spectre appears in the doorway. It is large and darkly prodigious, and in the dim shadow of the door frame I recognise the Reaper himself with features drawn and forbidding.
I push my back to the pillow. I have witnessed Death before, in too many dismal forms, and I am ready to face him myself, but not now. Not at this moment. Not when a loss has been recovered, a joy of great agony and exaltation is to be unearthed. I rail at his untimeliness and the injustice of the moment. ‘Get out!’ I cry. ‘Get out! It is not my time! There is much to be done!’
My voice is hoarse and my frail arm twists in front of me in a vain effort to expel the ghost.
The figure pauses, and says quietly, ‘I am sorry Sir Jasper, if I have come at an inopportune time. But, given – if you will pardon the expression – your circumstances, I thought I should come as soon as your maid called.’
I am startled. The impudence of the ogre. I look at Maria, who says, ‘It’s Mr Straddock. You asked me to summon him yesterday.’
I sink back on my pillow and let out a cry of relief.
My visitor says, ‘Is it appropriate that I attend you, sir?’
‘Mr Straddock,’ I say, laughing, ‘forgive my outburst, please. I have never been more glad to see you. You know Maria?’
‘I do’, says Straddock. ‘You will recall I engaged her via the agency. She presented with impeccable credentials.’
‘Yes, impeccable,’ I say. ‘She is extremely important in this household.’
I turn to Maria who is at the door and say, ‘Stay, Maria, please stay. You are very much needed. I have a story to tell and we have great work to do.’
And for the first time in months I have the strength to sit myself up without Maria’s aid.
