His limbs ached through and through, muscles hurting with effort as he pushed up the third flight of steps.
He had started off walking up the hill, a hollow feeling in the small of his back, as though he were slow in gaining the necessary velocity of escape. When he passed the taxi-rank by Adela's pensione, impulse turned to panic, and he threw himself at the mile of road that led up to Hilldyard's villa. He ran with spattering feet past scooters and tourists and familiar shopfronts, and felt revulsion coming up in waves from his stomach.
His lungs gave out on the third turn, when Positano revolved on its axis and the sea flattened out like a bedspread, here and there pricked by an islet, and the twists of the road threw vista upon vista across his path. He panted along, unable to think, but knowing that he had been in the centre of something awful. What had happened on the Sirenuse terrace was perfidy touching down, like the snout of a tornado, syphoning away all human decency. He was the point around which foul winds turned, and now, as he ran again, he was running to shed contamination, flaring along in the dire fear that Hilldyard had collapsed in horror.
He lived only in the present now. He had no concern for what the author might say to him. He was ready to endure anything.
The front door was locked. He grabbed the handle, tried the key Hilldyard had given him. The middle of the door budged under the weight of his shoulder but the top was fastened from within. He knocked hard, calling loudly. He waited, panting, keeping nothing in reserve for the moment when the door opened. He knew what the look in those eyes would mean. He tried to get his breath back. The air was too thin. An old woman with stockings sagging at the ankle gave him a wide berth as she passed along the alley.
He was faint. The blackness came back, rising like water in a tank. He thought he would expire on the step and bent double, reaching for the wall and becoming for an instant so weak that he did not care if the door opened and Hilldyard found him in a heap on the ground. He felt the stone under his palm and allowed himself to collapse against the door.
Sunlight poured on to the opposite wall. The sun was full on from somewhere up there, and the sky royal blue. He lay back, sweat on his chest, the veins on his neck throbbing, and felt himself levitated into the blue above, sky-diving into azure; and as he swooned in the depths of its colour, adrift in its purity, he felt the ghost of his original self steel into him and for a second he was torn apart by the searing beauty of the blue heaven. The sun had set things ablaze, splashingly, dazzlingly, and he was part of light. Light caught his hands, smote lines along the alley. He gasped at the pain of a sensation which seemed to stave him in at the temples.
He dropped on his knees like a penitent, put his finger through the letterbox, and yelled into the hall. He knew Hilldyard was there.
Back in his hotel room there was a moment of normality when he picked up the telephone and dialled and pretended that it was an ordinary day and that, if the telephone rang, James would pick it up, and Michael would say something quick before ringing off but know at least that he was OK. The phone rang endlessly, so he dialled again, and it rang endlessly again. He smacked the receiver down with frustration and lay on the bed thinking that one hour had passed since he left the hotel. The uncertainty was killing him.
Lying on his back he was prey to thoughts which afflicted him as physical pain. He imagined Hilldyard's cold body, skin grey, the spirit no longer present, the capacities of a remarkable mind switched off for ever.
'It can't be that bad,' he said, rising up and standing by the balcony. The sea was sparkling; the roofs below were a glinting white. Bougainvillaea covered balconies and courtyards.
One could not be a high priest of art and a fornicator. No man could stand by his art demanding its importance to humanity and be known as an adulterer, a near paedophile, the proximate cause of his niece's madness and his wife's death. If you believed in the novel as Hilldyard did; if you set a standard of moral consciousness by which to regard humanity, then you had to be exemplary. Every writer wanted posterity on his own terms and, for Hilldyard, posterity had just gone to the dogs.
Out on the street, running again, he thought about climbing over a garden wall to gain access. He could go in through a neighbour's house. Worry was beginning to exhaust him. He was flagging. He went past the shops and trattoria like a jogger, ducking under awnings and dodging parked cars, fists bunched. And then, as he approached a hairpin bend, he thought he saw Adela through the rear window of a black Mercedes that was coming into the bend from the opposite direction. He stood transfixed, then hurled himself in its path, hands up, shins fearing impact. Rubber rasped, the bonnet skewed sideways, a car in the opposite lane screeched to a halt, its nose ducking on a handbrake. A woman screamed nearby, and then the driver erupted, yelling in soprano outrage, shaking his fists, and Michael reeled back like a madman, turning on his heel and running off in the opposite direction.
Hilldyard's neighbours were not in. He beat his fists red proving the point.
He decided to run down to the tourist office in the centro. He wanted an English-speaking person who would know what to do. On the way, he passed the entrance to the police station and felt unequal to the ponderousness of official help. Further down, the tourist office was shut. Exhausted and dispirited, he wondered whether the Sirenuse could help him. He imagined himself at the desk of the five-star hotel trying to explain the crisis but he couldn't bear the thought of seeing Mahler or Hammond again.
He went into the church and sat on a bench in the gloom, inhaling the aroma of brass polish and incense. The confessional boxes were spaced along the wall. Candles flickered before side-altars. In the next pew an old lady blubberingly prayed. He threw his head back and gazed at the dim frescos on the dome above, at the altar cross, and the painting of the hooded virgin, her face fallen in sorrow. He felt the urge to pray even though he did not believe in God. Soon he was outside again, staring at the piazza.
He decided to write a note on a scrap of paper and stick it through Hilldyard's letterbox.
Later, when he had pushed the note through the old man's door, and was wandering past vegetable stalls in the upper part of town, he saw a gate which snared his curiosity and drew him through an arch into the cemetery, which was perched on the edge of the hill and open to a view of the pink sea and the rosy yonder of mountainside villas. The stems of three pine trees divided the view.
He eased down on to a bench and gazed at the trees, letting his breath come back and his limbs solidify with exhaustion before noticing the girl he had seen before. She was right there, at the bottom of the cemetery, by an easel; dead still.
He started and missed a heartbeat as though electrocuted by the sight of her. It was a vision that returned to haunt him in the middle of the night when he lay on the bed in his stuffy room hounded into wakefulness by a dream of Rick Weislob and Bambi licking icecreams, and Frank Coburn venting fire and brimstone from a cathedral pulpit in a sermon about morals and the Hollywood system.
He lay arms wide across the mattress and felt his heart accelerate from a dead beat into grim thudding. He needed to swallow air. He could not move, was stuck where he lay. Panic went through him as the day's faces returned to haunt him: Mahler and Weislob, Coburn and Hammond, Adela, who seemed sketchy, as though she were already fading into the past tense to which she now irreversibly belonged, until he smelled her scent on his pillow and recoiled from the shock of it.
And as the agony abated and he was forced to remember again her head in his groin and the golden sands of her cascading hair, he went on to think more easefully of the girl painter in the cemetery, a person unknown to him, but belonging to him in the way that images do when they fuse the uncannily familiar with the sharply unexpected.
He lay in darkness, cocooned by the night. He could not understand how he had come to be so bad. He marvelled at the awfulness of what he had done. He was responsible, he knew. That was the astonishing thing. Blame was inescapable. There was no coming to terms with that; merely the living of it.
He did not care much whether he lived or died.
In the morning he spoke to the hotel manager. She tried to call Signor Correggio using a number in the telephone book, but either the number was wrong or the solicitor was out; so he asked her to call the police. After a lengthy exchange that seemed to cover a number of other topics he was told that a police car would collect him from the bottom of the steps and they would drive up to Hilldyard's house.
The day was beautiful. The bonnet of the car shone as it approached. Even the moustache of the carabiniere seemed to shine as he rolled down the window and told Michael to get in the back. The car smelled clean inside, of after-shave and upholstery.
They drove to the top of the town. Michael directed him into the alley behind Hilldyard's house.
They arrived at the front door. The situation had been explained.
The policeman assessed the exterior wall of the building before stepping forward and knocking on the door.
They waited absently. Michael's throat was dry.
After a respectful interval the procedure was repeated, three sharp knocks followed by a smoothing of moustaches and a glance around the alley.
Michael felt the silence drumming on his ears. He began to feel weak.
It was now legitimate for the policeman to go to stage two. He raised his hand to the door knob and turned it.
The door opened.
Michael blenched with surprise. The policeman turned to watch his reaction. They stood outside looking in through the hall. Light flooded in from the living room.
He went in first, and the policeman followed supportively, removing his cap and brushing his feet on the mat.
His note had been picked up from where it must have fallen. He went through the connecting door into the living room as though for the first time.
The room had been cleared up, and the sofas faced each other again. The floor was tidy. Someone had shut the bureau, enclosing its chaos on itself, and replaced the lamps on the side-tables.
On the glass table he noticed a bag which made him think that Frances had come back and that perhaps the two of them had gone out. He saw his note. Maybe Frances had cleaned the place up. The kitchen door was open. The window in the bathroom had been put on the latch. Everything seemed in order on the balcony where the wicker chairs and geranium pots were bleached in the brightness.
He gave the policeman a provisional nod on his way back, showing that he was making good progress and grateful for his patience. It looked like Hilldyard had let Frances in after Michael's last visit. Possibly he had drawn back the bolt after reading Michael's note. Frances might have let herself in.
He entered the bedroom, hand reaching for the light switch, and saw a glint in the darkness.
He stopped. He was looking at an eye.
The eye was unblinking.
His chest tightened, and he felt strange as he pushed the door open and saw Frances on the bed. He must have gasped because the policeman was suddenly behind him and then the light came on, and Michael saw the short-haired girl with her head on the author's chest and her hand on his cheek and her body curled around the hump he formed under the sheets. She blinked as the light came on, fingers tightening.
He could not move so the policeman went forward and knelt by the bed, looking into Frances's eyes, as he checked her cheek with the tips of his fingers. He touched Hilldyard's forehead with his palm then searched under the bedclothes for a wrist.
The policeman crossed himself.
Michael saw the empty bottles of sleeping pills on the table, and the empty glass.
Hilldyard was gone, cold to the touch. He had put himself to bed and left his shoes in a neat pair on the floor.
Out on the balcony he shouted at the wide view and heard his cry echo back as he dropped to his knees. He grabbed the balcony rail and gasped in a heart attack of panic. He swayed around biting his fingers as the shock of it exploded, like thunder after lightning.
Soon there were people in the villa: a doctor, more police, an English-speaking Italian woman. He stood white-faced in the living room answering questions and looking through the bedroom door at a paramedic detaching Frances. When she came out she stared expressionlessly at him.
Beyond her he could see the author's hand resting on bedclothes, and a body bag being carefully unfolded.