There were not many other customers in the restaurant at that hour: a table of businessmen stabbing fingers at a map and an elegant woman in a grey pantsuit talking animatedly to a poodle seated on a chair opposite. After a time, a group of people converged on the restaurant talking loudly in foreign accents punctuated with expansive gestures and bird cries of delight.
‘Tourists,’ the acquaintance murmured regretfully.
A waiter approached the group and they opened their lips to display huge white smiles. Pink gums showed around the edges of their teeth. The waiter herded them gently but firmly into an arbour where their cries were muted and their bright clothes could not disturb the other diners.
An elderly man in a perfectly tailored cream suit and panama hat entered and made his way to the next table. He sat down, drawing out a long slim cigar. The waiter approached and lit it deferentially after snipping off its end, then, without being asked, a second waiter brought a coffee and a small glass of green liquid on a little tray. The girl watched him pour some of the green liquid into a spoonful of sugar and set a match to it. An emerald flame swelled and hovered above the spoon. When it had burned itself out the man dribbled the thick dark residue into his coffee, stirred and drank it.
At length, the aunt pronounced it time to go, refusing the offer of a lift home in the acquaintance’s car. They were going by metro, she explained, for the girl must learn to use the subterranean train system in case she wanted to attend the theatre or visit a gallery when her aunt was otherwise occupied. ‘But the metro,’ the acquaintance said doubtfully, ‘she should never use the metro after dark . . .’
‘I will explain all that needs to be explained in good time,’ the aunt said in a mildly peevish tone, and then the two women smiled acidly at one another and agreed to take tea together again very soon.
The girl had a photograph taken in a booth for her metro pass, and this was snipped out and slid into a laminated case which she slipped obediently into her purse. Inside the metro station, which was only a sort of corrugated tin shed with turnstiles and a ticket machine, there were windows where men and woman sat looking bored and annoyed. The metro platforms themselves were deep underground, the aunt explained, pointing to an escalator that would carry them down to the platforms where one boarded the electric trains.
It was a steep descent and the girl seemed to lean into the air that swelled out of the tunnel.
‘Hold tightly to the handrail,’ her aunt said sternly. ‘You could fall.’ The girl rested her hand on it and found it moved slightly faster than the steps, so that she kept adjusting her grip. The ascending escalator was alongside and the girl looked into the faces of people riding on it: a tired man cradling a briefcase as if it were a baby; a young couple twined and kissing voluptuously; two nuns; a group of drunk men singing an obscene song and leaning on one another; a swarthy man with a surly expression; a big woman with a beautiful wide-mouthed face and a stained ecru bodice; a young woman muttering rapidly to herself. The girl was entranced. She had not seen such people in the restaurant or shops or in the park.
The aunt murmured discreetly that one should not stare because aside from being a mark of ill-breeding, it virtually obliged some sort of intercourse. The girl did not see how any sort of exchange could be conducted with people going decisively in opposite directions, but she looked away obediently.
A short hall between two opposing platforms came into view at the end of the escalator. One went left or right through little archways to the platforms, the aunt explained, one side for metro trains going east and south, one side for those going north and west. Just before they reached the bottom where the silver teeth of a grille swallowed the escalator, an enormous gust of cold wind blew up into their faces from the depths, as if the earth itself had sighed. The girl gasped as it tugged her hair from its braids and licked the sweat from her upper lip.
‘I smell the sea,’ she said in wonderment.
The aunt sniffed surreptitiously but could smell only the oily escalator reek, under which lay an unpleasant tang of urine. She pursed her lips; her notion that the girl was mentally afflicted strengthened, for the city was far from the sea.
When they reached their platform there were only a few people waiting down the far end. Between them and the aunt and the girl, a lone man stood in a niche unwrapping an instrument. He wore corduroy pants with threadbare knees, a greasy blue shirt and an embroidered cloth cap from beneath which hung a narrow plait. A black dog with a faded bandana knotted around its neck sat by his feet. The girl felt a thrill when it looked at her with the same startled recognition as her aunt’s ebony maid.
‘I told you, it is better not to look at anyone,’ the aunt admonished. ‘Men like that call themselves musicians but they are beggars, or worse.’ She flushed slightly.
The ghostly subterranean wind blew again, and the girl’s hair and clothes fluttered wildly. Her aunt was glad that her own coiffure was firmly lacquered, and that her clothes had substance enough not to be trifled with by the draft. She tried to take shallow breaths, certain the air was laden with the germs of these odd and unsavoury people who lingered between the arches. Thinking of her acquaintance, the aunt told the girl never to go beyond the end of the platforms, which narrowed into ledges that ran away down the dark tunnels.
‘The workmen use them when they repair the rails or the signals. The metro is very old and there are disused stations and tunnels and bricked-up stairways and goodness knows what else where you could easily lose your way,’ she said. It had been many years since she had used the metro and it seemed to have been allowed to lapse into a queer sort of anarchy. If only the girl had the wit to be afraid, but clearly she did not.
A moment later, the metro train, a sleek snake of silver, burst from the tunnel and sighed to a halt beside the platform, where its doors glided open with a soft hiss. The girl and the aunt entered the nearest carriage and found a seat. ‘Never make the mistake of entering the metro when people are going to work in the morning or leaving work in the evening, for it is impossibly crowded,’ the older woman warned. She spoke of pickpockets, but in her eyes there was something more than hands feeling for a purse. ‘You must also avoid the metro when there are too few people around,’ she added.
When they reached the correct stop, they stepped out onto the platform and mounted the moving stair to return to the surface, where the aunt explained they were within walking distance of their apartment. At the top of the escalator there was an old beggar woman gazing downward.
‘A storm is coming!’ she cried. ‘See how it has turned my soup sour!’ She pointed accusingly to a battered metal boiler sitting squatly and incongruously in a tattered pram upon which hung a multitude of bulging plastic bags. The crowd split smoothly into two streams which passed either side of the old harridan, everyone averting their eyes. But several young men with army greens and shaven heads stopped to jeer. One had a swastika tattooed on his scalp, the aunt noted, wondering if the girl knew what it was, what it meant.
They made to pass the old beggar woman who, without warning, plunged forward and caught the girl by the wrist. The aunt gave a little shriek and batted uselessly at the clutching hand, the blackened fingers reminding her of the dark, leathery paw of an ape.
The old woman had eyes only for her pale young captive. ‘Do you know what it means when soup goes sour?’ she demanded.
The girl shook her head in wonderment.
The old woman leaned close enough that the girl could smell her earthy reek. ‘It is a sign,’ she said, eyes aglitter.
The aunt wrenched her free with a strength born of indignation, and hustled her firmly away, before taking out a tiny lace-edged handkerchief and rubbing hard at the girl’s wrist. The old beggar woman’s fingers had left a perfect print of grime on her pale skin, but the mark seemed indelible as a bruise.
‘Never mind,’ she comforted herself. ‘I have carbolic soap that will remove it.’
It was night when they came out of
the station and the girl was surprised, for they had entered the metro in daylight. Their underground journey had not seemed so long, but of course time might move differently with the weight of so much earth pressing down on it.
They made their way past shops and restaurants and houses behind neat little wrought-iron fences with lace-curtained windows through which she could see people laughing, talking, reading and smoking. She thought of the web of metro tunnels deep down in the chill dark earth beneath all this, and wondered if what had been wild and untamed in this land had not been destroyed, but had retreated and leaked or crept down into the metro. She thought of the old man in the cream suit conjuring his green flame with its dark residue and imagined that what lay below the city might sometimes rise up in spectral threads or strange furtive flames.
That night, she dreamed the tunnel dream again, but this time it was the metro and the old beggar woman with her pram had found her way into it.
‘What are you looking for?’ she asked the girl in a raw crackle, clutching her wrist.
‘I don’t know.’
The woman shook her grizzled head. ‘Then you must learn or you will never find the shape of your heart’s desire.’
‘I don’t understand,’ the girl said.
The woman looked sad. ‘Then all is lost.’
The following day, the aunt chose which of the stiff new dresses the girl was to wear with which shoes and which cardigan to carry in which bag. The girl let herself be turned this way and that by the aunt and by D’lo, who said, ‘She fine. She sho’ lookin’ fine.’ D’lo had a voice than flowed as thick and golden viscous as warmed sap. The girl liked to hear her talk, and wondered what might be imparted in that voice, in the absence of her aunt.
They had been invited to luncheon and the aunt suggested they walk, since their destination was in the neighbourhood. They passed through a small park and the aunt reminisced about her poodle, , who had been walked there. He had died, but the aunt said passed away, dabbing at her eyes sentimentally and interpreting the girl’s silence as respect for . She told herself the child was perhaps only a little slow, and that was not so detrimental in a girl as in a boy. Indeed, looking at the mess her sister had made of her life, it might be said that cleverness was more of a disadvantage to a woman than anything else.
The girl was thinking about her dream, for it seemed to her that she had seen something in the tunnels just before the old beggar woman appeared. Something huge and white.
Their hosts’ apartment was stylish, with blond leather furniture and chilly, gleaming, marble floors. There were clear vases of yellow irises, heavy cream silk curtains and paintings in muted colours, but also many blank walls which had their own beauty. Most of all, there was empty space filled with shafts of sunlight.
Privately the aunt thought the apartment ostentatiously bare, though of course she admired her hosts’ exquisite taste. She preened when they insisted that her own apartment was much nicer, for this was exactly her own opinion.
Their host appeared with the daughter of the house and the girl was introduced to them both. As the man took her hand, an odour arose from him as if he carried something old and musky in his pocket. Instinctively the girl pulled her hand from his fingers when he made to press it to his lips. The other girl reached out a slender white hand and bobbed slightly, her eyes amused.
‘My daughter is just returning from her piano lesson,’ their hostess explained. The daughter smiled at the aunt and her niece and asked questions prettily, tossing a head of radiant honey curls adorned with a pink ribbon. The three adults smiled.
It became clear that the visit had been arranged in order that the two girls, who were the same age, could become friends, but though the girl answered the daughter of the house gravely, both understood at once that they had nothing in common. Under different circumstances, one would become the victim of the other.
The aunt regretfully compared the pink and gold feminine flirtatiousness of her friend’s daughter with her sister’s solemn child. Out of loyalty, she murmured to her hosts that the girl was very shy, having lived in isolation with only her parents for company.
As they ate a crumbly dark fruitcake and drank raspberry sirop, the girl was subjected to a smiling inquisition by their hosts. Her responses dissatisfied because she would only answer what she was asked. She could not be persuaded to elaborate on the one thing the adults wished to know but could not openly ask: what had caused her parents to part.
‘She is delightfully unspoiled,’ the friend murmured to the aunt when they were preparing to leave. The aunt smiled but took this as the criticism it was, and on the way home spoke disapprovingly about her friend’s husband, who was the president of a firm that had lately been accused in the newspapers of bribing a politician to secure a government contract. She might acknowledge the girl’s deficiencies, she thought to herself wrathfully, as was her familial right, but other people should be more restrained. She was now glad she had not followed her initial impulse and issued an invitation to the small party she had planned in honour of the girl’s birthday, which was two weeks away. Given the girl’s limitations, a party could only be a social disaster.
A fortnight later, a box arrived from the girl’s father and also a parcel from her mother. They had been sent separately, but perversely, the same carrier brought them to the apartment. They were a day early, but the aunt suggested the girl open them in case they contained something perishable.
The parcel contained a sleeveless shift of white silk with small leaves sewn in white satin thread around the hem and neckline, beaded with seed pearls. It was far too young, the aunt thought. Worse, the card from her sister specifically bade the girl wear the dress on her birthday because the mother had dreamed of her in it. The aunt thought this a ludicrous and even irresponsible thing to confide, but only admired the needlework in a lukewarm voice.
The girl fingered the dress, wondering what her mother had dreamed.
The box from her father contained roses. Not long-stemmed roses with tender pink buds, which the aunt would have deemed appropriate for a young girl, but a dense tangle of crimson buds nestled amongst dark green leaves, with stems that curled impossibly in on themselves and fairly bristled with thorns. The colour of them as well as their barbaric confusion confirmed the foolishness of her sister’s choice in a husband.
At first the roses seemed to have no scent, but that afternoon, when they returned from an exhibition at a gallery, the whole apartment was filled with their perfume.
The following morning, the aunt woke in fright from a dream in which she had been running naked through a forest of wild red roses, pursued by some sort of animal. Wrapped in a soft lace nightgown under chaste pink linen, she patted her plump belly and told herself she ought not to have drunk coffee so late in the evening. But when she opened her bedroom door, the smell of the roses was so powerful that she blamed them for her dreams. Panting, she broke her own rules and struggled to open some windows.
Later, as she set a dainty birthday breakfast table, she glanced from time to time with real loathing at the roses, which had opened during the night and now gaped in a way that struck her as frankly carnal. She nibbled at the haunch of a marzipan mouse as she set its companions on a small glass platter, consoling herself that at this rate the petals would be dropping by midday and the flowers could reasonably be disposed of by evening. Beheading the mouse with a neat, sharp bite, she thought of the pictures she had seen of her sister’s husband and reflected that she had always known there was something wrong with him. A doctor should look ascetic and have slender, white pianist’s fingers and soft, limp, blond hair, but the man was swarthy and his hands were as big and rough as those of a village butcher.
She shuddered to think of such hands on her body and wondered how her sister had borne it. She folded pale green napkins, and remembered her own birthday at this age. There had been an elegant party to which silver-edged invitations had gone out. She had worn lavender taffeta and a m
atching chiffon scarf in her hair, and she had met her guests with skin as pink and cool as ice-cream waiting to be licked. But the boy she had hoped would kiss her had gone to the garden to wait, and when she had been delayed, had embraced another girl instead. The aunt had come out into the moonlight in time to understand that her moment of romance had been stolen. It seemed to her now that there was an inexorable current flowing from that night to this apartment and this day, where she stood as virginal as the girl for whom she was sugaring pink grapefruit slices.
Her eyes misted at the thought of the life of connubial bliss that had passed her by, but then the stairs creaked and the girl appeared in a sea-green nightgown. The aunt could only gape, for the pale, dull girl had become a ravishing sylph with high, flushed cheekbones and heavy slumberous eyelids fringed in sooty black lashes that drooped over eyes so dark they appeared to be all pupil. Her lips were red and swollen, as if she had spent a night of bruising passion.
‘You . . . you look . . .’ the aunt began, then stopped in confusion.
‘I dreamed I was lost,’ the girl murmured, rubbing at her eyes with hands balled into childish fists.
Remembering her own dream, the aunt wondered if it was possible for a dream to have wrought this astonishing change. Then common sense prevailed and she told herself the girl had a fever, that was all. Illness produced such hectic beauty; she ought not to have opened the windows.
The girl was thinking about her dream in which she had run along a wind-scoured, sea-scented tunnel. She had glimpsed a white beast running ahead of her and had followed it until she had lost herself. She had come quite suddenly to a place where all of the metro tunnels converged in one huge, barrel-vaulted cavern with many entrances and exits and much graffiti. The cold ground had been clammy under her bare toes, the walls stained by seepage that oozed from cracks and congealed on the floor in overlapping circles of sulphur yellow and livid purple. The smell of the sea had been overpowering there, and then came a drumming as if the cavern were actually under the ocean.