Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(81)

“Isobel.”

She woke up and clutched at me. She pushed her face blindly into my chest. She trembled.

“China!”

It was February, a year or two after we had met. I didn’t know it, but things were already going wrong for her. Her dreams had begun to waste her from the inside.

She said indistinctly: “I want to go back home.”

“Isobel, it was only a dream.”

“I couldn’t fly,” she said. She stared up at me in astonishment. “China, I couldn’t fly.”

At breakfast she hardly spoke. All morning she was thoughtful and withdrawn. But when I suggested that we walk down to the Danube via the Basilica at St. Stephen’s, cross over to Buda and eat lunch, she seemed delighted. The air was cold and clear. The trees were distinct and photographic in the bright pale February light. We stared out across the New City from the Disney-white battlements of Fishermen’s Bastion. “Those bridges!” Isobel said. “Look at them in the sun!” She had bought a new camera for the trip, a Pentax with a motor-wind and zoom. “I’m going to take a panorama.” She eyed the distorted reflection of the Bastion in the mirror-glass windows of the Hilton hotel. “Stand over there, China, I want one of you, too. No, there, you idiot!” Snow began to fall, in flakes the size of five-forint pieces.

“China!”

For the rest of the day—for the rest of the holiday—she was as delighted by things as ever. We visited the zoo. (“Look! Owls!”) We caught a train to Szentendre. We photographed one another beneath the huge winged woman at the top of the Gellert Hill. We translated the titles of the newsstand paperbacks.

“What does this mean, ‘Nagy Secz’?”

“You know very well what it means, Isobel.” I looked at my watch.

I said: “It’s time to eat.”

“Oh no. Must we?” Isobel hated Hungarian food. “China,” she would complain, “why has everything got cream on it?”

But she loved the red and grey buses. She loved the street signs, TOTO LOTTO, HIRLAP, TRAFIK. She loved Old Buda, redeemed by the snow: white, clean, properly picturesque.

And she couldn’t get enough of the Danube. “Look. China, it’s fucking huge! Isn’t it fucking huge?”

I said: “Look at the speed of it.”

At midnight on our last day we stood in the exact centre of the Erzsebet Bridge, gazing north. Szentendre and Danube Bend were out there somewhere, locked in a Middle European night stretching all the way to Czechoslovakia. Ice floes like huge lily pads raced toward us in the dark. You could hear them turning and dipping under one another, piling up briefly round the huge piers, jostling across the whole vast breadth of the river as they rushed south. No river is ugly after dark. But the Danube doesn’t care for anyone: without warning the medieval cold came up off the water and reached onto the bridge for us. It was as if we had seen something move. We stepped back, straight into the traffic which grinds all night across the bridge from Buda into Pest.

“China!”

“Be careful!” You have to imagine this—

Two naive and happy middle-class people embracing on a bridge. Caught between the river and the road, they grin and shiver at one another, unable to distinguish between identity and geography, love and the need to keep warm.

“Look at the speed of it.”

“Oh, China, the Danube!”

Suddenly she turned away. She said: “I’m cold now.” She thought for a moment. “I don’t want to go on the aeroplane,” she said. “They’re not the real thing after all.”

I took her hands between mine. “It will be okay when you get home,” I promised.

But London didn’t seem to help. For months I woke in the night to find she was awake too, staring emptily up at the ceiling in the darkness. Unable to comprehend her despair, I would consult my watch and ask her, “Do you want anything?” She would shake her head and advise patiently, “Go to sleep now, love,” as if she was being kept awake by a bad period.

I bought the house in Stepney at about that time. It was in a prettily renovated terrace with reproduction Victorian streetlamps. There were wrought-iron security grids over every other front door, and someone had planted the extensive shared gardens at the back with ilex, ornamental rowan, even a fig. Isobel loved it. She decorated the rooms herself, then filled them with the sound of her favourite music—the Blue Aeroplanes’ “Yr Own World”; Tom Petty, “Learning to Fly.” For our bedroom she bought two big blanket chests and polished them to a deep buttery colour. “Come and look, China! Aren’t they beautiful?” Inside, they smelled of new wood. The whole house smelled of new wood for days after we moved in: beeswax, new wood, dried roses.

I said: “I want it to be yours.” It had to be in her name anyway, I admitted: for accounting purposes.

“But also in case anything happens.”

She laughed. “China, what could happen?”

What happened was that one of my local drivers went sick, and I asked her to deliver something for me.

I said: “It’s not far. Just across to Brook Green. Some clinic.” I passed her the details. “A Dr. Alexander. You could make it in an hour, there and back.”

She stared at me. “You could make it in an hour,” she said.