The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2. Adam Thirlwell

a postcard from your mother. They’re near Malta, somewhere called Gozo.’

      ‘Give it to me.’ Maitland felt the card in his hands. ‘Gozo – that was Calypso’s island. She kept Ulysses there for seven years, promised him eternal youth if he’d stay with her forever.’

      ‘I’m not surprised.’ Judith inclined the card towards her. ‘If we could spare the time, you and I should go there for a holiday. Wine-dark seas, a sky like heaven, blue rocks. Bliss.’

      ‘Blue?’

      ‘Yes. I suppose it’s the bad printing. They can’t really be like that.’

      ‘They are, actually.’ Still holding the card, Maitland went out into the garden, feeling his way along the string guide-rail. As he settled himself in the wheelchair he reflected that there were other correspondences in the graphic arts. The same blue rocks and spectral grottos could be seen in Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks, one of the most forbidding and most enigmatic of his paintings. The madonna sitting on a bare ledge by the water beneath the dark overhang of the cavern’s mouth was like the presiding spirit of some enchanted marine realm, waiting for those cast on to the rocky shores of this world’s end. As in so many of Leonardo’s paintings, all its unique longings and terrors were to be found in the landscape in the background. Here, through an archway among the rocks, could be seen the crystal blue cliffs that Maitland had glimpsed in his reverie.

      ‘Shall I read it out to you?’ Judith had crossed the lawn.

      ‘What?’

      ‘Your mother’s postcard. You’re holding it in your hand.’

      ‘Sorry. Please do.’

      As he listened to the brief message, Maitland waited for Judith to return to the house. When she had gone he sat quietly for a few minutes. The distant sounds of the river came to him through the trees, and the faint cry of gulls swooping on to the banks further down the estuary.

      This time, almost as if recognizing Maitland’s need, the vision came to him quickly. He passed the dark cliffs, and the waves vaulting into the cave mouths, and then entered the twilight world of the grottoes beside the river. Outside, through the stone galleries, he could see the surface of the water glittering like a sheet of prisms, the soft blue light reflected in the vitreous mirrors which formed the cavern walls. At the same time he sensed that he was entering the high-gabled house, whose surrounding wall was the cliff face he had seen from the sea. The rock-like vaults of the house glowed with the olive-black colours of the marine deeps, and curtains of old lace-work hung from the doors and windows like ancient nets.

      A staircase ran through the grotto, its familiar turnings leading to the inner reaches of the cavern. Looking upwards, he saw the green-robed figure watching him from an archway. Her face was hidden from him, veiled by the light reflected off the damp mirrors on the walls. Impelled forward up the steps, Maitland reached towards her, and for an instant the face of the figure cleared …

      ‘Judith!’ Rocking forward in his chair, Maitland searched helplessly for the water jug on the table, his left hand drumming at his forehead in an attempt to drive away the vision and its terrifying lamia.

      ‘Richard! What is it?’

      He heard his wife’s hurried footsteps across the lawn, and then felt her hands steadying his own.

      ‘Darling, what on earth’s going on? You’re pouring with perspiration!’

      That afternoon, when he was left alone again, Maitland approached the dark labyrinth more cautiously. At low tide the gulls returned to the mud flats below the garden, and their archaic cries carried his mind back into its deeps like mortuary birds bearing away the body of Tristan. Guarding himself and his own fears, he moved slowly through the luminous chambers of the subterranean house, averting his eyes from the green-robed enchantress who watched him from the staircase.

      Later, when Judith brought his tea to him on a tray, he ate carefully, talking to her in measured tones.

      ‘What did you see in your nightmare?’ she asked.

      ‘A house of mirrors under the sea, and a deep cavern,’ he told her. ‘I could see everything, but in a strange way, like the dreams of people who have been blind for a long time.’

      Throughout the afternoon and evening he returned to the grotto at intervals, moving circumspectly through the outer chambers, always aware of the robed figure waiting for him in the doorway to its innermost sanctum.

      The next morning Dr Phillips called to change his dressing.

      ‘Excellent, excellent,’ he commented, holding his torch in one hand as he retaped Maitland’s eyelids to his cheeks. ‘Another week and you’ll be out of this for good. At least you know what it’s like for the blind.’

      ‘One can envy them,’ Maitland said.

      ‘Really?’

      ‘They see with an inner eye, you know. In a sense everything there is more real.’

      ‘That’s a point of view.’ Dr Phillips replaced the bandages. He drew the curtains. ‘What have you seen with yours?’

      Maitland made no reply. Dr Phillips had examined him in the darkened study, but the thin torch beam and the few needles of light around the curtains had filled his brain like arc lights. He waited for the glare to subside, realizing that his inner world, the grotto, the house of mirrors and the enchantress, had been burned out of his mind by the sunlight.

      ‘They’re hypnagogic images,’ Dr Phillips remarked, fastening his bag. ‘You’ve been living in an unusual zone, sitting around doing nothing but with your optic nerves alert, a no-man’s land between sleep and consciousness. I’d expect all sorts of strange things.’

      After he had gone Maitland said to the unseen walls, his lips whispering below the bandages: ‘Doctor, give me back my eyes.’

      It took him two full days to recover from this brief interval of external sight. Laboriously, rock by rock, he re-explored the hidden coastline, willing himself through the enveloping sea-mists, searching for the lost estuary.

      At last the luminous beaches appeared again.

      ‘I think I’d better sleep alone tonight,’ he told Judith. ‘I’ll use mother’s room.’

      ‘Of course, Richard. What’s the matter?’

      ‘I suppose I’m restless. I’m not getting much exercise and there are only three days to go. I don’t want to disturb you.’

      He found his own way into his mother’s bedroom, glimpsed only occasionally during the years since his marriage. The high bed, the deep rustle of silks and the echoes of forgotten scents carried him back to his earliest childhood. He lay awake all night, listening to the sounds of the river reflected off the cut-glass ornaments over the fireplace.

      At dawn, when the gulls flew up from the estuary, he visited the blue grottoes again, and the tall house in the cliff. Knowing its tenant now, the green-robed watcher on the staircase, he decided to wait for the morning light. Her beckoning eyes, the pale lantern of her smile, floated before him.

      However, after breakfast Dr Phillips returned.

      ‘Right,’ he told Maitland briskly, leading him in from the lawn. ‘Let’s have those bandages off.’

      ‘For the last time, Doctor?’ Judith asked. ‘Are you sure?’

      ‘Certainly. We don’t want this to go on for ever, do we?’ He steered Maitland into the study. ‘Sit down here, Richard. You draw the curtains, Judith.’

      Maitland stood up, feeling for the desk. ‘But you said it would take three more days, Doctor.’

      ‘I dare say. But I didn’t want you to get over-excited. What’s the matter? You’re hovering about there like an old woman. Don’t you want to see again?’

      ‘See?’