Chapter Thirty-Seven
Enid, having ignored the paintings completely, passed by Madame Tautphoeus’s room, and stopped when she realised that she hadn’t seen the elderly lady out for many days. She knocked. A confused stumbling sounded from within.
“Madame? Are you well? It’s Enid Trojczakowski. I just wanted to see if you were all right.”
The door opened, and the old woman, in a white robe, hair undone, face numbed by a blend of liquor and brutal self-reflection, opened her mouth to speak. A moth as much as fluttered out.
“Vanessa?” asked Enid.
The old woman’s twig-like fingers closed over Enid’s sleeve and drew her within.
In the dim brownness of the room, all curtain belts knotted fiercely, Madame Tautphoeus hobbled unconsciously through the motions of serving her guest some cold tea.
“Forgive me for saying so, Vanessa, but you don’t look particularly well.” Indeed, the lady looked to have somehow accumulated years in the span of weeks.
“Well, I’m still alive, aren’t I?” Technically, she was correct. “That’s more than I could say of some of the guests in this place, anyhow.”
Her voice was now the aural equivalent of something scribed by monks and left unread and forgotten on a shelf in a bricked-up room of a cloister recently deconsecrated and standing, slightly slanted, in dignified expectation of the wrecking ball.
“But you must think me fatuously old-fashioned,” she went on, as Enid couldn’t think of anything to say, “if I still consider being alive a blessing, rather than, say, an accident, or albatross.”
As Vanessa was being so blunt, Enid saw no reason not to be: “If you’re that certain you really are alive, then you’re one up on me, madame, at any rate.”
Vanessa waved that remark away with her brittle hand. “Tell me: have you made much progress in your investigation?”
“Investigation?”
That managed to raise a chuckle in the old bat. “You are still investigating the murders? How many have there been, now—eight? Twelve?”
“Only two, I’m happy to say.”
“You don’t count Inspector Pluck?”
“No—no, of course, you’re right.”
“For that was murder too—was it not?”
“I don’t really know.” Enid scratched the back of her neck. “An awful lot of these things depend on definitions, you know.”
“Yes, yes, I get you. If a bloodthirsty killing is committed by the community as a whole, it’s an execution. It’s justice. Is that right?”
She was smiling at Enid, as a gargoyle might, mocking and malevolent all at once. Enid tried to imagine her as a young woman. Would she have been attracted to a Vanessa Tautphoeus in her prime? If those eyes were clear, those cheeks smooth, that flesh taut and those breasts raised, Christlike, from the dead? Could the two of them, out in the normal world, ever have made a go of it? Giggling over handkerchiefs in the store, strolling arm-in-arm to the café like sisters, then back to a flat they shared, shut the blinds, and the red-bulb steam as their flesh melts into each other, like the dissolved detritus of candles coalescing after Mass? Or would the intuited condemnation of men, and their own shame, have pre-empted it?
“Frankly, I’m surprised you’re not incapacitated by guilt.”
Enid blinked. What had she seen on her face? “Pardon?”
“Hadn’t you declared to us all that you loved Thaddeus Pluck?”
“Oh. Did I say that?”
Once again, Vanessa laughed. “I suppose that your generation finds it hard to keep track of all your love affairs.”
“No, no, I’m not like that, madame. Not at all. No, I’ve—” Why not come out and say it? “. . .I’ve never had a love affair.”
“No?”
“No.” Enid felt, suddenly, a trifle embarrassed.
“Well. I’ve had many,” Vanessa laughed.
Enid thought about Pluck. His face was faded, like a picture coated in decades of dust.
“I was a different person, a few weeks ago,” she finally explained.
“Yes, yes. You young people can be born many times, many times, before you die, can’t you?”
“No. . .I don’t know. Do you have anything to drink?”
Vanessa, pleased, found something and poured it in a dirty glass for her. Enid gulped it gratefully, then continued: “I know I’m not a looker. I know I’m not sweet or dainty. I know anyone would be disappointed with my. . .with my body, or anything I could do with it.” Her eyes were closed, and the smell of oldness encircled her like soldiers round a castle. “All I can give, is my heart. I have so much. . .”
But the feeling came over her that she was being ridiculous, embarrassing, cloying. It wasn’t the alcohol, she realised, but the dismantling of her façade that she’d been undergoing since the start of her holiday. What was left of her?, she wondered in a panic. She stood up and searched the room for a mirror. There, on the bureau: it was so grimy she had to rub it with her sleeve, then looked inside, and found the same face she’d known all her life. Only it wasn’t so ugly now, she thought. It was a face of warmth, and elegance—and passion. If she were a man, she told herself, she would be delighted to call it the face of her wife. It was a face that never sought to deceive you; it could be trusted with your life. There was no reason, she understood now, to hide it away. If it were lathered in honey, and all the bears of the world were on her trail—so what? She would grasp her thumping heart in her hand, hold it out to the jungle and, if the jungle wished to devour it—she would let it. Better a devoured heart, she decided, than a withered one.