Six

ANNA SAT WITH HER hands resting on a piece of paper.

As she looked at it, it moved and flexed like water. Images bloomed and died, the colors merging and then just as rapidly draining away. Soon, as she watched with mounting confusion, even the paper itself disintegrated beneath her touch, and her hands sank through the watercolor cartridge sheet, through the table, through the air. Soon, her palms weighed down on her own body and passed through it.

She was made of nothing but filaments of dying color.

She looked around herself, and realized that she was in Oxford, in Roxburgh’s. There was no one at the small marble-topped tables, and no one behind the bar. The whole room, which stretched far back from The High, was dim: the lights were all turned down.

She could hear voices behind the lacquered screen that led to the office. They were talking about her. Occasionally, she would hear her name, as if someone was calling her. Then, there would be a blur of conversation. There was a distant humming noise, like a generator.

A movement close to her caught her attention. There was a book on the neighboring table, and its pages were turning. Pictures of gardens. Pictures of trees. Here was Bonnard’s “Almond Tree in Bloom,” with the blue pigment showing through the black-and-white branches. Paul Klee’s “Night Flowers.” Klimt’s “Rosebushes Under Trees.” She leaned forward, trying to remember exactly the way that the painting was composed, so that she could show Rachel. Three quarters of the canvas possessed by blue, gold, and greens. The bark of the trees, silver etched on gray. As she paused with her hand on the image, the page became fluid, and she could feel the coolness of the leaves brushing, whispering, against her skin. Plunging her hand deeper, she found it curling around the dense fluorescent mauve of Klee’s sky, as though every particle of the twilight, all the breadth of the evening, had condensed itself into a few square inches of texture that could be flexed in her grasp.

“Can she hear us?” someone said.

She looked up, turned her head.

The High, that gold-shaded street, was gone.

Anna stood up, and walked to the window.

There was a river where the road had been.

It was not the Cherwell—although, for a second, she thought that she glimpsed the Meadow on the first of May, and felt the brush of first light, coming down past Magdalen to hear the choir sing in the tower at dawn, and David at her side, and the whole of the Meadow populated with the fritillary, their deep mauve flowers, almost the exotic opium poppy, almost Chinese lanterns in the eerie stillness…

But it wasn’t the Cherwell.

This river was very wide and deep flowing. She could see whirlpools and eddies. It had no color at all. Everything was movement without tone or shade. She could see faces in the water; reflections of higher ground; wings and birds; rain slanting across the surface.

“She moved,” said another voice.

But it was the river that moved. Now she could see more clearly. The faces were scattered grasses and reeds; the contours were rocks. There were men in the water, and the lines they were hauling were attached to flat-bottomed boats. They were crossing rapids, forty men or more on each line, and the pilot standing up in the boat.

The noise of the water swelled in her ears; as she watched, its sound filled the scene. Now there was only rising water, and the lines broke, and the flat-bottomed boat spun around, slowly, in the current.

It came alongside her. She stepped aboard.

It moved off, rotating gracefully in the flood.