Fourteen The golden lock

I have to hurry now. I can see the end, glimmering far up ahead of me, as if it's a roadside motel, on a dark night, in the rain. A last-chance postwar motel, where no questions are, asked and none of the names in the front-desk register are real and it's cash in advance. The office is strung with old Christmas-tree lights; behind it a clump of murky cabins, the pillows fragrant with mildew. A moon-faced gas pump out front. No gas though, it's run out many decades ago. Here's where you stop.

The end, a warm safe haven. A place to rest. But I haven't reached it yet, and I'm old and tired, and on foot, and limping. Lost in the woods, and no white stones to mark the way, and treacherous ground to cover.

Wolves, I invoke you! Dead women with azure hair and eyes like snake-filled pits, I summon you! Stand by me now, as we near the end! Guide my shaking arthritic fingers, my tacky black ballpoint pen; keep my leaking heart afloat for just a few more days, until I can set things in order. Be my companions, my helpers and my friends; once more, I add, for haven't we been well-acquainted in the past?

All things have their place, as Reenie used to say; or, in a fouler mood, to Mrs. Hillcoate, No flowers without shit. Mr. Erskine did teach me a few useful tricks. A well-wrought invocation to the Furies can come in handy, in case of need. When it's primarily a question of revenge.

I did believe, at first, that I wanted only justice. I thought my heart was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives when we're about to do something harmful, to someone else. But as Mr. Erskine also pointed out, Eros with his bow and arrows is not the only blind god. Justitia is the other one. Clumsy blind gods with edged weapons: Justitia totes a sword, which, coupled with her blindfold, is a pretty good recipe for cutting yourself.

You'll want of course to know what was in Laura's notebooks. They're as she herself left them, tied up with their grubby brown string, left for you in my steamer trunk along with everything else. I haven't changed anything. You can see for yourself. The pages torn out of them were not torn out by me.

What was I expecting, on that dread-filled May day in 1945? Confessions, reproaches? Or else a diary, detailing the lovers' meetings between Laura and Alex Thomas? No doubt, no doubt. I was prepared for laceration. And I received it, though not in the way I'd imagined.

I cut the string, fanned out the notebooks. There were five of them: Mathematics, Geography, French, History, and Latin. The books of knowledge.

She writes like an angel, it says of Laura, on the back of one of the editions of The Blind Assassin. An American edition, as I recall, with gold scrollwork on the cover: they set a lot of store by angels in those parts. In point of fact, angels don't write much. They record sins and the names of the damned and the saved, or they appear as disembodied hands and scribble warnings on walls. Or they deliver messages, few of which are good news: God be with you is not an unmixed blessing.

Keeping all this in mind, yes: Laura wrote like an angel. In other words, not very much. But to the point.

Latinwas the notebook I opened first. Most of the remaining pages in it were blank; there were jagged edges where Laura must have ripped out her old homework. She left one passage, a translation she'd made-with my help, and also with the help of the library at Avilion-of the concluding lines of Book IV of Virgil's Aeneid. Dido has stabbed herself on the burning pyre or altar she's made of all the objects connected to her vanished lover, Aeneas, who has sailed away to fulfil his destiny through warfare. Although bleeding like a stuck pig, Dido is having a hard time dying. She was doing a lot of writhing. Mr. Erskine, as I recall, enjoyed that part.

I remembered the day she wrote it. The late sunlight was coming in through my bedroom window. Laura was lying on the floor, kicking her sock feet in the air, laboriously transcribing our scribbled-over collaboration into her book. She smelled of Ivory soap, and of pencil shavings.

Then powerful Juno felt sorry for her long-time sufferings and uneasy journey, and sent Iris from Olympus to cut the agonising soul from the body that still held onto it. This had to be done because Dido was not dying a natural death or one caused by other people, but in despair, driven to it by a crazy impulse. Anyway Proserpine hadn't yet cut off the golden lock from her head or sent her down to the Underworld.

So now, all misty, her wings yellow as a crocus, trailing a thousand rainbow colours that sparkled in the sunlight, Iris flew down, and hovering over Dido, she said: As I was told to do, I take this sacred thing which belongs to the God of Death; and I release you from your body.

Then all warmth stopped at once, and her life vanished into the air.

"Why did she have to cut off a piece of the hair?" said Laura. "That Iris?"

I had no idea. "It was just a thing she had to do," I said. "Sort of like an offering." I'd been pleased to discover that I had the same name as a person in a story, and wasn't just named after some flower, as I'd always thought. The botanical motif, for girls, had been strong in my mother's family.

"It helped Dido get out of her body," said Laura. "She didn't want to be alive any more. It put her out of her misery, so it was the right thing to do. Wasn't it?"

"I guess so," I said. I wasn't much interested in such fine ethical points. Peculiar things happened in poems. There was no point in trying to make sense of them. I did wonder though whether Dido had been a blonde; she'd seemed more like a brunette to me, in the rest of the story.

"Who is the God of Death? Why does he want the hair?"

"That's enough about hair," I said. "We've done the Latin. Now let's finish the French. Mr. Erskine gave us too much, as usual. Now: Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains."

"How about, don't interfere with false gods, you'll get the gold paint all over your hands?"

"There's nothing about paint."

"But that's what it really means."

"You know Mr. Erskine. He doesn't care what it means."

"I hate Mr. Erskine. I wish we had Miss Violence back."

"So do I. I wish we had Mother back."

"So do I."

Mr. Erskine hadn't thought much of this Latin translation of Laura's. It had his red pencil slashes all over it.

How can I describe the pool of grief into which I was now falling? I can't describe it, and so I won't try.

I riffled through the other notebooks. History was blank, except for the photograph Laura had glued into it -herself and Alex Thomas at the button factory picnic, both of them now coloured light yellow, with my detached blue hand crawling towards them across the lawn. Geography contained nothing but a short description of Port Ticonderoga that Mr. Erskine had assigned. "This middle-sized town is situated at the junction of the Louveteau River and the Jogues River and is noted for stones and other things," was Laura's first sentence. French had had all the French removed from it. Instead it held the list of odd words Alex Thomas had left behind him in our attic, and that-I now discovered-Laura had not burned, after all. Anchoryne, berel, carchineal, diamite, ebonort… A foreign language, true, but one I'd learned to understand, better than I ever understood French.

Mathematicshad a long column of numbers, with words opposite some of them. It took me a few minutes to realise what kinds of numbers they were. They were dates. The first date coincided with my return from Europe, the last was three months or so before Laura's departure for Bella Vista. The words were these: Avilion, no. No. No. Sunnyside. No. Xanadu, no. No. Queen Mary, no no. New York, no. Avilion. No at first.

Water Nixie, X. "Besotted."

Toronto again. X.

X. X. X. X.

O.

That was the whole story. Everything was known. It had been there all along, right before my very eyes. How could I have been so blind?

Not Alex Thomas, then. Not ever Alex. Alex belonged, for Laura, in another dimension of space.