The Ringmaster's Daughter Part 19

We pa.s.sed the police station and walked in silence through the town. From windows and cornices and small balconies fronting the street Amalfi's was.h.i.+ng hung out to dry, T-s.h.i.+rts and bras fluttered in the gentle breeze like the semaph.o.r.e signals from a simple existence. This humdrum life felt like the promised land to me now, but Beate's steps got faster and faster, it was almost impossible to keep up with her, and she didn't stop before we were down on the seafront. I didn't know where she lived, but our ways parted here.

I touched one of her shoulders, and she seemed to freeze.

'I don't understand,' I said.

'No, you don't understand,' she said. 'And I can't speak it either.'

She shook off the hand I'd laid on her.

'Are we never to meet again?' I asked.

'Never,' she replied. Then she added: 'Perhaps one of us must die. Don't you even understand that?'

I shook my head. She was out of kilter. Again I thought of Mary Ann MacKenzie. I didn't know what I'd set in train.

'Never again, then,' I said.

But she'd reconsidered. 'Perhaps we must see each other again,' she said now. 'In which case it should be tomorrow, but that will be the very last time.'

The frigidity with which she spoke this terrified me.

'Fine,' I said. 'Perhaps you'll come and have lunch with me at the hotel?'

She shook her head. She was bitter, so bitter. Then she said: 'We'll just take a walk ...'

'Yes?'

'We could go over the hills ... to Ravello.'

Ravello was a name I recognised. It was in the old house high up in Ravello that Wagner had composed Parsifal. It was just before his death; Parsifal was Wagner's last opus.

I didn't try to draw her out further, it was too painful for her. I had no strength left either. I'd been unable to say a word at my mother's funeral, that was disgraceful. Since then I'd been caught up in a maze, a maze of my own making, my own prison. I had built that labyrinth myself, but now I no longer knew how to find my way out of it.

I said: 'I've lived a miserable, empty life. You're the only person I've really cared for, you're the only person I really like.'

She went into another flood of tears. People had begun to throw glances in our direction.

A thought streaked through my brain, it was a straw to clutch at. 'You said yesterday that you'd tell me about your father,' I said. 'Do you remember?'

She s.h.i.+vered. Then she thought for a few moments, but her only reply was: 'I've said enough.'

For one brief second she leant up against me, resting her head beneath my chin in the way a puppy sometimes lies close into its mother because the world is just too large.

After all the tears and emotions I was again filled with tenderness towards her. I put my arms around her and kissed her brow, but she pulled away in one powerful movement and gave me a sharp slap, and then another. I couldn't tell if she was angry, I couldn't tell if she was smiling. She simply disengaged herself and was gone.

I had no dinner, I couldn't bear the thought of sitting in the dining-room, but luckily I had some biscuits and a packet of peanuts in my room. I seated myself at the desk and went on with my life-story. It was a way of collecting my thoughts, of calming down. I wrote of my meeting with Beate in Amalfi and of our trips to Pontone and Pogerola.

I have been sitting here for hours, the time is two a.m.

I've stood for a while in front of the window looking down at the sea beating in towards the Torre Saracena. The little man is still wandering about the room. As he walks he waves his bamboo cane and cries 'Swish, swis.h.!.+' Though I try not to let it, Metre Man's restlessness is naturally taking its toll on me.

It's two-thirty. Again, I've thought through all that's hap- pened during these past few days, and especially what happened with Beate this evening. I feel cold.

It's three a.m. Something terrible is dawning on me. It's as if I've committed a murder, it's like waking up after running down and killing a child while drunk at the wheel.

I'm cold, I feel nauseous.

I can't tell if my imagination is playing a trick on me again. I try to put down what I'm thinking, but my hands are trembling. She said her mother just dropped dead on her birthday, and only a few weeks later I met Beate in Amalfi.

It can't be true, my imagination must be playing another trick on me.

My heart is hammering in my chest. I've been out to the bathroom and had some water from the tap, but I still feel nauseated.

What did she mean when she called me a monster? It was because of Writers' Aid, wasn't it? Or was she referring to something else? I don't even dare to follow the thought through. I could never have brought myself to end one of my own synopses with anything so vile. It would have surpa.s.sed even my imagination.

Why aren't we supposed to meet again? She couldn't speak it, but she hinted that one of us had to die. I thought she was being hysterical. I asked her to talk about her father.

It was just to gain time, but she was startled and claimed she'd said enough.

I feel sick, and it's not the thought of Beate, or even the thought of our intimacy up in the Valley of the Mills that has made me feel wretched. I am the object of my own disgust, I feel sick at the mere thought of myself.

I've been out to the bathroom again and drunk more water. I stood there a long while looking at my own reflection. I had to struggle not to retch into the sink. I, too, have high cheekbones. And I've also got something of my mother's eyes.

It's four o'clock. I've started a cold sweat. Life has shrivelled and shrunk, all that's left of it is skin and bone.

I'd pinned every hope for the future on Beate and now it's all gone.

It was when I told the story of the ringmaster's daughter that she really tensed up. She said that I shouldn't have told the story, that it was stupid, terribly stupid. She didn't say that she'd heard the story before, but perhaps that was what she meant. She hinted that I should never have told the tale of the ringmaster's daughter all those years ago. If she hadn't managed to remember the story herself, her mother would certainly have jogged her memory about the funny man who'd helped her into her dress and told her about the little girl who'd got separated from her daddy deep in the Swedish forests.

Poor Maria has pa.s.sed away now. She died on 19 February on her fifty-eighth birthday. She wasn't ill, but her life just wasn't meant to continue. She was twenty-nine when Beate was born, and now Beate's twenty-nine. It couldn't be mere coincidence.

Maria was only meant to survive until her daughter was precisely the same age as she'd been when she'd so rashly allowed herself to be seduced by The Spider. Then, both she and her daughter would meet their nemesis, a sentence of shame that was as logical as it was inevitable. At the same time, I would suffer humiliation, too. And thus we'd all be reunited in ignominy and disgrace. I knew from previous experience that ogres and demons were only too adept at working in unison.

I may hear more about Wilhelmine Wittmann tomorrow.

But even now I realise that it must be Beate who's been hiding behind that strange pseudonym. That was her secret.

There were enough stories to share during the long years Maria and her daughter lived together. Perhaps some of them had been bedtime stories, for I'd told Maria some nice fairy tales, too. So, the stories I'd conjured up for Maria had a.s.sumed a life of their own, and now Beate had begun to take them one by one, first Das Schachgeheimnis and then Dreifach Mord post-mortem. Maria sent no token until her daughter had grown into an adult, literate woman.

She'd been a bit bashful when she told me she wrote, and I should be the world's number one expert in that sort of difference. I suppose you feel a trifle awkward publis.h.i.+ng a story as your own, when the truth is that it's been s.n.a.t.c.hed from the lips of another person.

Triple Murder Post-mortem. I start, I'm scared by own t.i.tle.

In a way all three of us have already felt the swish of death's scythe. But there are two of us left, three including Metre Man.

I'll have to beg to be allowed to raise up the poor circus girl who's collapsed in the ring. She sank into the sawdust and the ringmaster violated her there. After all those years in exile she'd found her way back to her father, but he'd shown so little understanding of the ways of destiny that he'd desecrated her. He had already run away from the great book circus in Bologna. There would be no more perform- ances.

Maybe in a few hours' time I'll hear the story of a mother and a little girl of almost three who lived for a while in Sweden, but who soon left and moved to Germany. Or perhaps they never lived in Sweden, perhaps the ring- master's daughter was born in Germany; Maria's parents were living there at the time, that was another thing I'd forgotten.

The mistake was that I wasn't kept informed. It was Maria's fateful attempt to get far enough away from the monstrous silk mill, to prevent The Spider ever sinking his fangs into her again. I wasn't even allowed to know the girl's name, that was a dreadful mistake. Every father should know the name of his own daughter.

Another mistake was of more recent origin, and it had been mine. I'd completely fallen for Luigi's prattle about a conspiracy of downtrodden writers. As a result I hadn't introduced myself to Beate properly. The thought that I should ever meet 'Poppet' again hadn't even crossed my mind. I'd hardly even considered how old the little girl must be now, let alone visualised her as a grown-up woman.

It is night, but still I occasionally hear the sound of a scooter down on the coast road. I've been standing for a while watching the light from a boat moving far out. Now and then the lantern disappears in the trough between waves and then appears again. There's a crescent moon, but even though it's on the wane, it sheds a broad stripe of silver across the sea.

I have seated myself at the desk once more. I sit staring at a ridiculous coat-stand in the bedroom. It looks like a scarecrow and makes me feel like a small bird.