Mrs Osmond dismantled her hat and squinted at the panes. She fidgeted uncomfortably. ‘Charles, what is going on? — I’ll have to get my glasses.’ She subsided helplessly.
‘Julia! You’ve never needed your glasses before to see these. Now tell me, what can you see?’
‘Well, the row of houses, and the gardens…’
‘Yes, what else?’
‘The windows, of course, and there’s a tree..
‘What about the sky?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, I can see that, there’s a sort of haze, isn’t there? Or is that my eyes?’
‘No.’ Wearily, Renthall turned away from the window. For the first time a feeling of unassuageable fatigue had come over him. ‘Julia,’ he asked quietly. ‘Don’t you remember the watch-towers?’
She shook her head slowly. ‘No, I don’t. Where were they?’ A look of concern came over her face. She took his arm gently. ‘Dear, what is going on?’
Renthall forced himself to stand upright. ‘I don’t know.’ He drummed his forehead with his free hand. ‘You can’t remember the towers at all, or the observation windows?’ He pointed to the watch-tower hanging down the centre of the window. ‘There — used to be one over those houses. We were always looking at it. Do you remember how we used to draw the curtains upstairs?’
‘Charles! Be careful, people will hear. Where are you going?’
Numbly, Renthall pulled back the door. ‘Outside,’ he said in a flat voice. ‘There’s little point now in staying indoors.’
He let himself through the front door, fifty yards from the house heard her call after him, turned quickly into a side road and hurried towards the first intersection.
Above him he was conscious of the watch-towers hanging in the bright air, but he kept his eyes level with the gates and hedges, scanning the empty houses. Now and then he passed one that was occupied, the family sitting out on the lawn, and once someone called his name, reminding him that the school had started without him. The air was fresh and crisp, the light glimmering off the pavements with an unusual intensity.
Within ten minutes he realized that he had wandered into an unfamiliar part of the town and completely lost himself, with only the aerial lines of watch-towers to guide him, but he still refused to look up at them.
He had entered a poorer quarter of the town, where the narrow empty streets were separated by large waste dumps, and tilting wooden fences sagged between ruined houses. Many of the dwellings were only a single storey high, and the sky seemed even wider and more open, the distant watch-towers along the horizon like a continuous palisade.
He twisted his foot on a ledge of stone, and hobbled painfully towards a strip of broken fencing that straddled a small rise in the centre of the waste dump. He was perspiring heavily, and loosened his tie, then searched the surrounding straggle of houses for a way back into the streets through which he had come.
Overhead, something moved and caught his eye. Forcing himself to ignore it, Renthall regained his breath, trying to master the curious dizziness that touched his brain. An immense sudden silence hung over the waste ground, so absolute that it was as if some inaudible piercing music was being played at full volume.
To his right, at the edge of the waste ground, he heard feet shuffle slowly across the rubble, and saw the elderly man in the shabby black suit and wing collar who usually loitered outside the Public Library. He hobbled along, hands in pockets, an almost Chaplinesque figure, his weak eyes now and then feebly scanning the sky as if he were searching for something he had lost or forgotten.
Renthall watched him cross the waste ground, but before he could shout the decrepit figure tottered away behind a ruined wall.
Again something moved above him, followed by a third sharp angular motion, and then a succession of rapid shuttles. The stony rubbish at his feet flickered with the reflected light, and abruptly the whole sky sparkled as if the air was opening and shutting.
Then, as suddenly, everything was motionless again.
Composing himself, Renthall waited for a last moment. Then he raised his face to the nearest watch-tower fifty feet above him, and gazed across at the hundreds of towers that hung from the clear sky like giant pillars. The haze had vanished and the shafts of the towers were defined with unprecedented clarity.
As far as he could see, all the observation windows were open. Silently, without moving, the watchers stared down at him.
The Singing Statues
Again last night, as the dusk air began to move across the desert from Lagoon West, I heard fragments of music coming in on the thermal rollers, remote and fleeting, echoes of the love-song of Lunora Goalen. Walking out over the copper sand to the reefs where the sonic sculptures grow, I wandered through the darkness among the metal gardens, searching for Lunora’s voice. No one tends the sculptures now and most of them have gone to seed, but on an impulse I cut away a helix and carried it back to my villa, planting it in the quartz bed below the balcony. All night it sang to me, telling me of Lunora and the strange music she played to herself…
It must be just over three years ago that I first saw Lunora Goalen, in Georg Nevers’s gallery on Beach Drive. Every summer at the height of the season at Vermilion Sands, Georg staged a special exhibition of sonic sculpture for the tourists. Shortly after we opened one morning I was sitting inside my large statue, Zero Orbit, plugging in the stereo amplifiers, when Georg suddenly gasped into the skin mike and a boom like a thunderclap nearly deafened me.
Head ringing like a gong, I climbed out of the sculpture ready to crown Georg with a nearby maquette. Putting an elegant fingertip to his lips, he gave me that look which between artist and dealer signals one thing: Rich client.
The sculptures in the gallery entrance had begun to hum as someone came in, but the sunlight reflected off the bonnet of a white Rolls-Royce outside obscured the doorway.
Then I saw her, hovering over the stand of art journals, followed by her secretary, a tall purse-mouthed Frenchwoman almost as famous from the news magazines as her mistress.
Lunora Goalen, I thought, can all our dreams come true? She wore an ice-cool sliver of blue silk that shimmered as she moved towards the first statue, a toque hat of black violets and bulky dark glasses that hid her face and were a nightmare to cameramen. While she paused by the statue, one of Arch Penko’s frenetic tangles that looked like a rimless bicycle wheel, listening to its arms vibrate and howl, Nevers and I involuntarily steadied ourselves against the wing-piece of my sculpture.
In general it’s probably true that the most maligned species on Earth is the wealthy patron of modern art. Laughed at by the public, exploited by dealers, even the artists regard them simply as meal tickets. Lunora Goalen’s superb collection of sonic sculpture on the roof of her Venice palazzo, and the million dollars’ worth of generous purchases spread around her apartments in Paris, London and New York, represented freedom and life to a score of sculptors, but few felt any gratitude towards Miss Goalen.
Nevers was hesitating, apparently suffering from a sudden intention tremor, so I nudged his elbow.
‘Come on,’ I murmured. ‘This is the apocalypse. Let’s go.’
Nevers turned on me icily, noticing, apparently for the first time, my rust-stained slacks and three-day stubble.
‘Milton!’ he snapped. ‘For God’s sake, vanish! Sneak out through the freight exit.’ He jerked his head at my sculpture. ‘And switch that insane thing off! How did I ever let it in here?’
Lunora’s secretary, Mme Charcot, spotted us at the rear of the gallery. Georg shot out four inches of immaculate cuff and swayed forward, the smile on his face as wide as a bulldozer. I backed away behind my sculpture, with no intention of leaving and letting Nevers cut my price just for the cachet of making a sale to Lunora Goalen.