The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [121]
Norval scrutinized her pale, makeup-less features, radically short hair and tattered clothes. She was in utter disarray, he said to himself, the words floating back from his audition. Rattlings of death and rings of muted music made her goddess-like body rise, expand, tremble like a ghost …
“I’m Teresa, Mrs. Pettybone’s daughter. Are you … hearing-impaired?”
“No, sorry, I’m just a bit … lost. Well, more than a bit. Wholly. I went up those steps, you see, and …”
“Unmotivated steps.”
“ … and then I … I’m sorry?”
“They’re called unmotivated steps—they lead nowhere. My grandfather liked them for some reason, liked the irrationality of it all. So do I, for that matter.”
The hall light began to flash on and off. “Teresa?” a high voice clucked from below. Mrs. Pettybone’s. “Are you all right, dear? Is that boy violating you? He’s from the theatre!”
“I’m fine, Mother!”
“And he’s French!”
“You can go back to sleep, Mother!” To Norval, sotto voce, she said, “We’d better talk in here. Can I offer you a drink?” She smelled the beer on his breath. “A coffee?”
Norval glanced at the neckline of her shirt, which had slipped to reveal the lace of a white bra. “Well, yes, fine …”
“It’s just that … I haven’t talked to anyone in a while, apart from my mother. And doctor. I’m sort of in quarantine.”
“You’re in quarantine? For …?”
“You name it, it’s a long list. I think I managed to thoroughly scare my doctor—he said if I was a building I’d be condemned.”
“That’s … some bedside manner.”
“He probably thought I was going to disintegrate right there in his office. But enough of that, I must sound like some doddering hypo chondriac. Come.”
Ignoring an amber light inside him, and the strictures of Mrs. Pettybone, Norval entered Teresa’s bedroom. It was a sty, looking and smelling of sickness, a tornado aftermath of laundry and magazines and empty mugs and medicine bottles and half-filled crossword puzzles and pages ripped from sketch books and bordelloish antiques like brass oil lamps and pewter candle snuffers … A series of candles illuminated two De Chiricos on the wall— deserted piazzas, illogical shadows, dark arcades, hidden danger—as well as paintings of her own showing shuttered summerhouses, neglected parks, marble steps overrun with weeds, paths strewn with dead leaves. Two small charcoal drawings lay on the floor: one of her mother, decades younger, and one of herself, with long wavy tresses to the waist.
After closely examining the latter, Norval sat down in a teetering wicker chair. Teresa plugged in a kettle. Under the flickering candlelight he got a better look at her: early twenties, fair and frail, sickly pale, eyes so preternaturally blue as to be from another species or universe. It was while looking into these eyes that Norval had a shocking premonition: her future, however short, would be entwined with his.
“How in God’s name did you end up here?” Teresa asked with a faint smile. She had full, naturally crimson lips and teeth as white as toothpaste. “We haven’t had guests for ages.”
“Gally gave me the address.”
“Gally Santlal? Are you serious? And you told my mother?”
“It’s the only reason she opened the door.” Norval rooted around in his pockets and pulled out an empty cigarette pack. “Do you smoke, by any chance?”
“The doctor asked me the same question. I said no and he said, ‘Well, you might as well.’” Teresa took two cigarettes out of a jar and tapped them on the back of her hand. One match lit both. “So how is Gally these days? What’s he up to?”
Norval shrugged. “I don’t know that much about him. He’s a glazier … as I guess you know.” He took the offered cigarette, drew on it as though it were his last. “He’d just finished replacing windows in some church. Which were smashed or stolen. In Hucknall? Let’s see … oh, his wife died, which is why he could join me for—”
“His wife died? You’re kidding. I didn’t know that. Recently?”
“No idea. But he didn’t seem all that shaken.”
Teresa poured tepid water into a mug, emptied a packet of instant coffee into it.