The Universe of Things Read online

  We walked away, Suze glowering triumphantly. I thought I’d better not mention that to me the beautiful twins had looked somehow diminished… Like two colored shadows of their former selves.

  The next morning I saw Mrs. Brown again, for the last time. I was up early, Suze was in the shower. Mrs. Brown and her family were checking out. Germaine, the nanny, was directing the porter, who was carrying their bags out to the car. Marianina was with her. Celine and Carmen stood looking a little lost, while their mother validated her credit by passing an imperious hand across the ID screen. Mrs. Brown gave a sharp glance up at the stairs, where I was standing. She moved toward the door. Then Celine and Carmen… They melted. They flowed, they ran like liquid glass through the air. There was only one golden-haired figure, walking away.

  I rushed up to the desk. “Did you see that?” I demanded. “Did you see? Flavia! Tell me!”

  The desk clerk was our padrone’s daughter, a sensible and intelligent girl. For a moment I thought she was going to deny everything. Perhaps she realized the truth was the best way to suppress my curiosity. She looked up, with wise young eyes.

  “Dottora Lalande, two weeks ago a gentleman stayed here who was traveling with an eidolon, a hologram of his dead wife. We must set a place for her, serve dishes to her, arrange her room. He spoke to the digitally generated image as if it were alive. And though I know this is impossible, I am sure I heard the lady answer.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “And there was the family from Germany, with the teenage boy who had taken gene-therapy to cure a terrible wasting disease. He was completely well, it was a miracle. At night this boy stayed out late. He came back to La Fontana not quite himself, you understand? Luckily, he could leap and hit the night-bell with his muzzle, so the porter would let him in. It was easy enough to wash the pawprints from the sheets.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “One sees everything, in the hotel trade, and one mentions nothing. These things happen, they happen more and more. It’s best simply to accept them…and look the other way.”

  Mrs. Brown had left no address, but I managed to get Flavia to tell me she had been heading north, to the Lakes. Over breakfast I tried to convince Suze that we had to follow and somehow track them down. I knew she was already angry with me over the Browns, but I couldn’t help myself. I felt there was a disaster looming that I must try to avert. Suze accused me of being infatuated, either with Laura Brown or the heavenly twins. She refused to consider the idea of leaving Santa Margarita.

  When Suze and Bobbi went to the beach, I stayed behind.

  I took our guide-book and set out to explore the town, in the hope that some distraction would help me to think. I had not dared to tell Suze about my second strange experience. For one thing, I suspected that young Flavia wouldn’t back me up. But much as I hated to fight with Suze, I was desperate to unravel the mystery. What was happening to Celine and Carmen, and why? Had the desk clerk and I shared a hallucination? Or were Cinderella’s sisters really capable of vanishing into thin air?

  La cenerentola was waiting for me, there. She had climbed on the railings outside the Renaissance chapel. She was swinging from them, head down, her feet kicking in the air and her hair brushing the ancient stone of the porch steps. As I approached she flung herself down, carelessly scattering the passers-by, and stood glaring at me. She was wearing her favorite grubby shorts and tee-shirt. As soon as she saw that she’d been recognized, she ran away.

  Of course, I followed.

  Marianina didn’t run too fast. She made sure that I could keep up. Before long I found her waiting for me, in the small formal garden that surrounded the much-eroded remains of a Roman temple, on the edge of the pedestrianized center. It was a quiet place. This was the end of summer; the flowerbeds had been allowed to fade. The Roman fountain in their midst was dry, the benches round about stood empty. There was a chirping of insects, clear above the distant hum of traffic.

  Children, when they’re left to run wild, are uncouth creatures. They’ll tell silly, arbitrary lies if they feel caught out, but not one in a thousand will naturally invent the concept of polite conversation. Marianina didn’t say a word to me at first. She sat on a lump of carved stone, its meaning eroded beyond recognition, and examined a graze on her knee.

  “I thought you guys had left Santa Margarita.” I offered, oppressed by her silence.

  “We moved to a different hotel. We’re leaving tomorrow.”

  “At the campsite in Mauro,” I said, “they called you la cenerentola: Cinderella, because of your sisters. Is it true? Did they make you feel left out?”

  The child flashed me one of her sly, hostile glances. “Mummy said to tell you, leave us alone. Stop following us. There’s nothing you can do.”

  Prince Charming, I thought, rejected the step-sisters, their artificial finery and their contrived attractions. He chose the dirty girl: with her little hands as rough as the cinders, her careless rags, her knobby knees, her insouciant independence. It was the same with Laura Brown. I had thought I understood everything, right from that first night, when she told me her story at L’Ecureuil. It had been obvious that she had not been interested in either of her children’s fathers. There was no adult lover in her life. Maybe she was one of those people who cannot tolerate another adult as a lover… That was why Marianina, scorned in public, had become the secret object of her affections, as the twins grew older.

  I could understand how a child like this, deliberately humored in all her native childish awkwardness (the sequences of DNA randomly recombined, no perfections but those of untamed chance and necessity) might seem the fairest, the true beauty. I could feel her troubling allure myself, and I’m no pedophile. She was so real. The Italian woman at the campsite had made up a vicious story that probably had no basis at all in fact. But a child can be corrupted, without any gross abuse… Now I saw that whatever the relationship between Marianina and her mother, the situation was not that simple.

  “What about your sisters. Will they be traveling with you?”

  “Oh, them.” A smug grimace. “I don’t think they’ll be around much longer.”

  I felt suddenly chilled. “What do you mean, they won’t be around?”

  “She hasn’t said. But I think Mummy’s taking them back.”

  Marianina slid to the ground, scouring the backside of those long-suffering shorts.

  “Taking them back? Back where?”

  “Back where they came from, of course.”

  La cenerentola had performed her errand. She’d had enough of my solemn eyes and stupid questions. She left, jumping over the stones and skipping away, without another word.

  Interlude: The Philosopher’s Dream

  I see a room in an appealing little hotel, somewhere in the north of Italy. It’s a room that Suze and Thea could have chosen: deceptively simple, with every modern comfort hidden in a tasteful, traditional disguise. Through the window I see (but this is pure invention) a view of forests and mountains, a long blue lake under a cloudless fairytale sky. There’s no getting away from it, we are in a fairytale. Mrs. Brown and her daughters, Thea and Suze; everyone else who shares our affluence. Our lives have become magical, by any sensible standards. Nothing is impossible; the strangest things can happen.

  I see a beautiful woman and the twin daughters who might be her sisters: daughters with that uncanny, replicant perfection of the optimized clone. She told me that their creation was her husband’s idea. I don’t know if I believe that, but in any case she has become tired of these flawless, sweet-natured dolls. The double mirror irritates her. The twins are sitting in a window embrasure, talking softly with each other. Perhaps they are deciding what they will wear tomorrow. They take comfort in clothes and make-up, because they know they have been superseded. I witness the transformation scene. I see how the two bodies are magically drawn across the room, and melt — at first resisting desperately, but finally calm — into the original of their fle
sh.

  It is a triumph that la cenerentola in the story might have longed for, before she dreamt of going to the ball. Fathers are chancy creatures, the handsome prince is a shadowy promise. But mother, even if you are not completely her own creation, is the first object of any child’s desire.

  Now Cinderella is alone, with the only handsome prince this version of the story needs. Poor Carmen, poor Celine. This time it is forever.

  Finale

  I don’t believe we’ll ever get tired of Bobbi. I don’t know which of us loves her more. But a long vacation brings out the strains in any relationship, and sometimes I wonder what would happen if we should tire of each other. We walk hand in hand, Suze and Bobbi and I, and suddenly I suspect that we’re taking up more space than three people should. I look up and see Suze a little further away from me than she ought to be. The air shimmers. For a moment there are two Bobbies… I am afraid that these moments may grow longer in duration. It won’t be possible to hide the embarrassing thing that has happened, except by moving on: going our separate ways with our separate daughters, and praying that no further dilution occurs.

  We have beaten the stern old gods of the nineteenth century. But in escaping from them, could it be that we have let something wild and dangerous back into the world? Our magical technology may have unsuspected costs. In the end, stretched and spread over the world as we are by our desires, perhaps Suze and I will vanish like Mrs. Brown’s perfect twins. We will lose hold of our fantastical riches and fade away, like the ball-dress, the pumpkin-coach, the rat coachman…in this case leaving nothing behind, not even a glass slipper.

  April 1998

  Grandmother’s Footsteps

  Pride Comes Before a Fall

  The site meeting was intense: the operations so major and the discussion of them so deep, I felt as if Don and I ought to be wearing hard hats and carrying clipboards. By the end of it we were exhausted. Donald and Mr. Hann (the house doctor) walked towards the front door, still consulting as they negotiated the scaffolding. Suzy was asleep on Don’s back. Dear child, she’d been as good as gold, her little face puckered up seriously as she listened and peered over her daddy’s shoulder. I hung back.

  I muttered something about wanting to take another look downstairs, but I didn’t intend to be heard. I wanted to do something that was private; or maybe just too foolish for public attention.

  It was mid-February then, and already cold gloomy dusk at the end of the working day. The plumber, the electrician, and Mr. Hann’s own hench-persons had packed up and left while he was giving us the benefit of his really wonderful bedside manner. I climbed down the dark stairs that at present ended in planks laid across a pit, found the power cable that hung over a naked ceiling joist, and pressed the switch. Inside the dangling grey bulb, a twisted ribbon bow of incandescence seemed to be struggling against the odds — as if rising damp was a reinforcement of darkness. Our basement looked awful, really awful, like a drained abscess or a drilled-out tooth. I stepped out into the middle of what had once been a room and tried to remember it the way I had first seen it. The house had been standing empty then, and even with all its problems the price had been almost more than we could afford. There’d been a fearsome sense of urgency: feeling the developers at our backs; seeing the dry rot and the damp busily working away. I would collect the key from the agent and come down here with Suzy nearly every day, to wait for yet another surveyor, house doctor, or rot expert. Suzy practically learned to walk in this basement.

  She was an early walker: at barely ten months old she began to toddle. It was here, in the shadow, in the musty emptiness, that she had taken some of her first wobbly, triumphant steps.

  Now it looked more like an archaeological dig than anywhere people might live. Or like the crime scene of a mass-murder inquiry. When our friends (we had to show them; couldn’t keep such a spectacle to ourselves) came round to admire, they all said the same thing: “Have they found the body yet?” But in spite of all the trauma we knew we were doing the right thing. Ever since the baby was born, and before, we’d known that this was coming. It was the house move that marked the actual completion of the change in our lives that she had wrought, and this was the only way that was right for us. We needed to live in a place that had its roots deep in the past but cleared out and remodeled entirely to our specifications. We needed the old and the new fused together, in our bricks and mortar as in our lives.

  I waited for the presence of the old house to come back from wherever it had been driven; by blaring pop music and the thunder of power tools. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe in atmosphere. I had never owned a house before. I wanted to rediscover the emotional meaning of the step that I was taking: something that had been obscured by the panics and crises of the last weeks. I closed my eyes, with the fugitive feeling that I was taking some kind of risk. Yet it was peaceful down there, despite the cold and the damp, oozy smell. The burr of traffic far away sounded mild as a lullaby after the way it shouted in the busy street below our flat. When I knew I was calm, when I’d accomplished that subtle but unmistakable transition into neutral awareness, I opened my eyes.

  I saw an old woman by the hearth: in front, that is, of the gaping hole where our restored Victorian fireplace would be. She sat upright in a straight-backed armchair. She was crocheting; a white heap of work lay in her lap. She didn’t see me. She was quite absorbed, her face bent with a severe yet half-vacant expression: the expression that goes with a task that occupies the hands and empties the mind. Her skin looked soft as rose petals — the delicate, just faintly crumpled complexion of a placid grandmother, cheeks that you knew would be soft to the touch as a baby’s.

  I’ll never have a face like that. I think too much, argue too much; sometimes I don’t sleep very well.

  She looked very sure of herself, this old lady by my hearth — planté la, as the French say — as if she had a perfect right to be there, as if nothing could possibly move her. She had a disquietingly contemporary look, too, for a ghostly emanation. She was no Victorian granny but a nicely preserved old lady of the present day: a collector of recipes from tv cookery shows, a comfortable reader of fat, glossy Family Sagas. The vision persisted, growing more clear as I stared: feeding on I don’t know what scraps of information in the pattern of darkness and shattered brickwork. The white cobwebs of newly exposed dry rot floated through granny’s head, became the crochet on her lap and the deft soft hands at work.

  Then I began to hear her breathing. That was nasty. The whole basement seemed to echo with it: a heavy, asthmatic gasping, as if somebody was dying. It was a filthy noise. It even occurred to me that maybe someone was dying, in the basement next door.

  After a minute or two it stopped, and I left. Donald was waiting in the car. The baby — still asleep — was strapped into her chair in the back. He had left the driver’s seat for me. I got in and we sat there holding hands rather helplessly. Don couldn’t have looked more depressed if Mr. Hann had been a real geriatrician and we’d been hearing serious news about a beloved relative. But it wasn’t that bad. We’d known that we were taking on a challenge; we would win through.

  “Well? What did you get just then, anyway. What’s it like, this character we’re going to live with?”

  Of course he knew what I’d been up to. He knows me. We were very close, Don and I. Which is something I wouldn’t have thought worth saying a few years before — we’re married, aren’t we? But I’d seen so many relationships turning sour, the bad old stuff coming to the surface under the pressure of two careers and the childcare thing. I knew better how to value what we had.

  “A bit shattered at the moment,” I said. “A little bruised and battered. But structurally sound.”

  I could have told him I had seen the spirit of our house alive and well and sitting cozily by its own fireside. But I didn’t. I don’t like petal-cheeked grandmothers: those foot-binding, petrol-pouring pillars of society. If I’d had to have an image of an old woman, I’d
rather it had been a bag lady. And besides, there was that horrible noise. I didn’t think Don wanted to hear about a desperately sick neighbor just now. He heaved a huge sigh. Money! Where was all the money going to come from?

  “We’ll survive, Rose.”

  “Of course we will.”

  A Woman’s Work Is Never Done

  We moved in. So much to do, so many layers of dirt, decay, and neglect to be stripped away. We were poor again, after years of double-income, low-outgoings prosperity: it was going to have to be mostly our own work. Days were spent at work or camping out on the roughly habitable upper floors. Every evening we plunged into a world of chemicals and power tools and paint, hour by hour. Down in the basement our kitchen-to-be was still a disaster. The sunny terrace overlooking the garden, where I imagined perfect al fresco breakfasting, was heaped with rubble, the kitchen walls oozing a black tarry bitumen mixture that obstinately refused to “dry out.” We had a makeshift arrangement in the room that would be Don’s den: the fridge in a corner, the kettle and a microwave sharing his big old desk; we did the washing up in the bathroom.

  It was fun at first, a great joke: trying to keep the turps substitute out of the butter, the chili sauce off of the builders’ receipts. Don and I hardly saw each other. At night we would meet at the door of the fridge, foraging for beer and chocolate, like the hunter and the gatherer meeting briefly to share an underdone chop and a handful of berries. We joked that the house had succeeded, where the world had failed for years, in segregating our lives. His tasks, her tasks.

  Anatomy of a fireplace: collect the tools, the can of stripper, the gloves, the mask; shroud the surroundings; set to work. The top layer was white paint: under that, the green; under that an incredibly sticky blue, which clung devotedly to the detail of the molding. The first coat of all had been dark brown. Why the devil did anyone ever want to paint a black cast iron fireplace dark brown? There was a lot of buried treasure in this house: things loveable and rich in detail in a way you never see in modern dwellings. There was also an amazing amount of pure, wilful ugliness.