In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [66]
He came through the last of the trees into the open area and everything was in darkness, as if the owners had packed up and left. He had expected to see rectangles of light. Now he lost all perspective and did not know how fully he would have to turn to be aimed back at his cottage. He needed some context of the human. A dog on a chain, a window, a sound. He turned once more and saw moonlight on the lake. But there was no moon. He realized it had to be light from the boathouse. The landscape, the blueprint of the compound, sprang back into his brain. He walked towards the water knowing where the low shrubs were, the stone hedge, the topiary he could not see. He slipped inside the boathouse and listened for sounds of activity. Nothing. With a pulley-chain used for hoisting up boat engines he swung up onto the first roof which was like a skirt around the upper cabin. He walked up the slope. The woman named Anne was sitting inside at a table.
Light from an oil lamp. She faced the water, her night window, and was writing hunched over the table unaware of anything else in the room. A summer skirt, an old shirt of her husband’s, sleeves rolled up. She glanced up from the page and peered into the kerosene of the lamp. The mind behind the gaze did not know where it was. Caravaggio had never witnessed someone writing before. He saw her put down the fountain pen and later pick it up, try it, and realizing the nib was dry, lift the tail of her shirt to wipe the dry ink off the nib, preening the groove, as if the pause was not caused by the hesitation of her mind but the atrophy of the pen. Now she bent over earnestly, half-smiling, the tongue moving in her mouth.
If she had turned to her right she would have seen his head at one of the small panes of glass, the light from the oil lamp just reaching it. He thought of that possible glance and moved back further. He thought of all those libraries he had stepped into in Toronto homes, the grand vistas of bookcases that reached the ceiling, the books of pigskin and other leathers that fell into his arms as he climbed up the shelves looking for whatever valuables he imagined were there, his boots pushing in the books to get a toe-hold. And then from up there, his head close to the ceiling, looking down on the rectangle of the rooms, hearing his dog’s clear warning bark, not moving. And the door opening below him – a man walking in to pick up the telephone and dialling, while Caravaggio hung high up on the bookcases knowing now he should move the second he was seen up there in his dark trousers and singlet, as still as a gargoyle against Trollope and H.G. Wells. He could land on the leather sofa and bounce into the man’s body before he even said a word into the phone. Then go through the French doors without opening them, a hunch of his body as he breaks through the glass and thin wood, then a blind leap off the balcony into the garden, where he would curse his dog for the late warning, and take off.
But this boathouse had no grandeur. The woman’s bare feet rested one on top of the other on the stained-wood floor. A lamp on the desk, a mattress on the floor. In this light, and with all the small panes of glass around her, she was inside a diamond, mothlike on the edge of burning kerosene, caught in the centre of all the facets. He knew there was such intimacy in what he was seeing that not even a husband could get closer than him, a thief who saw this rich woman trying to discover what she was or what she was capable of making.
He put his hands up to his face and smelled them. Oil and rust. They smelled of the chain. That was always true of thieves, they smelled of what they brushed against. Paint, mushrooms, printing machines, yet they never smelled of the rich. He liked people