The sea spread wide and glinted in the hot light. Everything down there was picture-book tiny, little houses, squiggly roads, shelves of cultivation.
He pushed back and looked around the balcony like a weightlifter about to heave a deadweight, loosening his limbs and compressing his will for the final effort. Any second he would climb over and jump wide.
You had to gain momentum, a back and forth striding with clenched fists and set teeth, a surge of hate like a karate spasm to break through the barrier.
The day was vast around him, a cathedral ceiling frescoed with galleon clouds. The striped hills were soaking up the sea-light. Autumn never ended in this place.
He had checked out of Positano and come to Ravello and taken a room in a lovely hotel with huge bedrooms and Gothic windows and a maroon smothering of creeper on its stone walls. He wanted luxury and convenience for a couple of days.
He had his breakfast in the dining room and looked at the other guests as if through Plexiglas.
Once he was resolved, he began to feel numb. It was an unusual numbness, like an anaesthetic shot to a certain point of pain, leaving the mind free to plan details and make arrangements. For the past two days he had vomited every few hours, though there was nothing to sick up. His poor system was trying to expunge guilt, because guilt was attacking the body as well as the mind. Guilt was not content with mental torture. Guilt diversified into aches and breathlessness, heartache and giddiness, a poisoned gathering of self-disgust which would not stop.
Hilldyard's suicide destroyed all hope of forgiveness.
The Cimbrone Gardens were empty, and down below he could see neither people, nor cars. A nice day; the sun beamed.
The impulse was coming and going in waves, and he could tell there would be a climax or peak and that he had to ride its energy to jump the rail. He sat down on the bench to prepare himself.
In front of him, spaced along the balcony, were seven busts. They had been placed there by a former owner of the property: academic sculptures in white marble dividing the view like figureheads. They embodied what Hilldyard had proclaimed: the nobility of man before the vastness of creation, and, after every season's tourists had departed would remain, like sentries of consciousness. And when, in another year, the tourists flocked back with their zoom lenses and silk scarves, the statues would greet them, standing between the spaces of the view and mutely endorsing the peculiar rapture that attended that extraordinary prospect. And as he slumped against the bench, his heartbeat echoing in his head, the bars on the rail were like lines in which sight became trapped and compelled into blue heaven, and it came to him like a blizzard in the eyes that he was there again, seeing what Hilldyard had seen and loved, and feeling the old exaltation again, the view steeling into his soul, as though he were absolved by the will to die, were allowed to feel joy again, the joy of the dazzling sky and glimmering water and the cradled vastness of the Tyrrhenian Sea, an influx of happiness, his better self coming back, his bond with Hilldyard blessing him as he rose from the seat and crossed to the balcony, and put his hands on the rail and looked steadily at the drop, the universe opening for him; and he sucked in his breath, feeling the lovely heat of the sun, and raised a leg over the rail, hands tight, his foot finding a hold on the other side, swinging his weight around, so that he was standing with his back to the view, the snaking roads a hundred yards beneath, the garden ahead of him with its high pines and vermilion trellises.
Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight, all calm, still calm, twenty-five, twenty-four, breeze around his ears, a cerulean wash in his eyes, twenty-one, fingers white-knuckled on the rail, goodbye fingers, familiar fingers, innocent fingers, eighteen, seventeen, not long, fifteen, halfway, fifteen, remember Christine, so clear, so present, twelve and eleven, joining you, my angel, a hot rush, like a gust of wind through the breast, ten and nine, yes, force down, force onwards, grit your teeth, eight, seven, oh God, bloodshot hydrangeas and smeared colours, down now, six, fingers off, five, four, three, chest erupting, let drop, two, oh Christ, now, got you, goodbye, eyes shut and drop and what? The eyes, what? Claw back. Oh Christ, see her, see her. Ah, no, can't be. Not now. There she is. Oh God. Sideways. Christine, he calls. Christine!
A staggering half-run, hardly supported by his poor heart, down this path, that path, through borders, around bushes, across slippery grass, statues on his right, sundials on his left, shoe in mud, ankles in brambles, a headlong, helter-skelter shambles of a run to the place where he thought he had seen her. He stared with tear-smudged eyes in every direction, heart overwhelming him as though he would die of confusion. He stood at a crossroads in the path, a bedraggled scarecrow of a person, heard only birdsong, the grunt of a lorry in the valley.
He smothered his face and let out a gasp of tainted breath. Clutching his shoulder he stared back towards the belvedere. Agony ran through him like a poison, and for a moment Michael thought he would pass out.
Panting, he sat down on the ground, drawing up his knees, but the effort was too much and he fell sideways, resting his head on the ground.
She was forty feet away. Visible through a gap in the hedge. She had put her easel in front of an opening in the trees. He gazed at her and felt a tingling around his arms and the back of his neck. His hand when he raised it was shaking violently, and he let it drop, let it rest on his hip, let it alone. Behind him he heard soft, amicable voices, a man and woman.
Thick hair, a khaki jacket, jeans. She was painting quickly, before the light changed or somebody interrupted her.
He kept his eye on the figure and felt a limitless subsiding, a caving in, as though the shock of coincidence took the wind out of his sails. Drops of sweat released themselves from his hairline and slid down his face.
The image shimmered and fragmented, and then realigned into clarity: the figure of a woman, the easel, the looming sky and sketchy mountain, the population of leaves on the trees, a dense, swarming mass of greenery, surrounding her, muffling the air, colonising vision. It was all he could do to sit in a trance and stare at the back of a girl he had already seen twice in Positano.
He stayed for an hour on the ground, damp going through the seat of his trousers, pine needles tickling his bare calf, the smell of leaves and rotting cones investigating his lungs. Intermittently he would shake, little spasms. A headache came and went, and the pain in his shoulder seemed gradually to dim, and eventually he felt able to stand up, which he did very slowly. And when he tried to walk he was surprised that his body co-operated. He stretched, orienting himself. The sun had moved around the sky, pushing long shadows in front of the cypresses. The day was fading.
He went closer, and as he neared the flight of steps, the view opened sideways and he could see her dipping her brush and marking her picture and staring intently.
He gazed at her as though holding the thread of a memory that went back through the years, to something overlayed but gathering now, Christine in France, up in the hills, painting one fine summer evening a great, wide Claude Lorraine canvas of a view. He had sat on a hay bail and watched her from behind as she stood by the easel, working rapidly to catch the light. He was spellbound by the view.
The valley was dramatically sidelit, poplars incandescent, mown fields beaming Labrador gold, and yet amidst the brilliance night was gathering, a presentiment of darkness that slowly encroached on the hilltop blaze. One moment the landscape was a patchwork of greens, richly sombre, colours at the height of tone; the next a scene of dying intensity, distances merging, detail blurring. And as the sunset conflagration waned – the upper sky becoming nostalgic, streaked with russet and opal; a cloud igniting in final baroque splendour before the sun viscously sank into the horizon – the valley filled up with dusk, an inky mist that engulfed the foreground, engulfed Christine. Soon they were losing each other, losing themselves in the dark.
He helped her with the easel back to the car and before long they were driving through the lanes, Christine in the passenger seat, paint on her fingers, her eyes on the road, Michael exhaling cigarette smoke as he steered and changed gears, marvelling that she was his love and that they had been together before that transient light.
* * *
He lay on his back along the length of the bed, clothed. His hands were clasped together. Light from the lamp half-caught his face but he felt nothing of its heat. His breathing was slow, silent. His legs motionless.
A door banged in the hotel corridor, cutting off remote voices. Cisterns hissed, footsteps came and went. Downstairs in the dim restaurant a couple sat on their own, secretively talking. The man at the reception desk folded his newspaper and licked his underlip.
Outside in the street the air was still and cool, spreading its autumn dew on the bonnets of cars and the plastic seats by the caffè . Beyond the piazza, where an old man sauntered under lamplight, darkness crowded in. It was a moonless night, and the trees in the Cimbrone Gardens were lost, the bushes and flowerbeds invisible. Darkness dwelled over statues and pathways and out across the thick blackness of the sea. The trees were blind to the mountains and the mountains did not know they were there, and even the grunt of a car on a hairpin bend vanished into the folds of night.