I was in the hall, waiting inside the door, when she came down at last, stepping from stair to stair with careful deliberation, watching herself as she did so, as if descending like this were a skilled manoeuvre she had only lately learned to execute. I thought, jarringly, of Magda. Slowly the girl came to meet me, avoiding my eye, or no, not avoiding, but looking through me as though I were not there. Yet I knew she knew what I would do. I seemed to be no longer drunk; on the contrary, I felt violently sober. She stood in the circle of my arms quite still and stiff; I might have been a cascade of water falling about her but not wetting her. Her lower lip stood a little prominent of the upper, so that she seemed in permanent expectation of receiving a drop of some sacred distillate from above, yet now when I leaned my head forward I had trouble finding her mouth; when I did, I took that soft, protruding bud of flesh between my teeth. As I kissed her she did not close her eyes, and neither did I, and so we stood and stared into each other, surprised, almost aghast. I caught again from her skin that faint, flat, medicinal smell. It reminded me of something: violets, was it? Her shoulder blades flexed under my hands like hard, stiff wings, flexed, and were still. Clear as if it were being projected before my wide-open eyes I saw myself in the house on Cedar Street sitting opposite Magda at the table in the breakfast nook, feeding her the tablets, picking them up one by one from my cupped palm and dropping them into her offered mouth. It was at midnight, I could faintly hear a clock chime in the next-door house; a moth was bumping against the black and shining window. All around was silence, not a sound save of that baffled, winged thing blundering against the glass. Magda's hands rested flat before her on the table; her fingernails were chipped and there was grime under them. How calm she was, how docile, watching me steadily, with keen interest, it might be, as I poured out the glass of water and put it into her hands. Here; drink. I had told her the tablets were a special kind of candy. They were violet-coloured. I released Cass Cleave from my embrace. Still she did not stir, but stood and looked at me, calmly attending me and the possibility of what I might do next, with Magda's very gaze.

At the hotel, when I followed her into her room she was already drawing the curtains against the glare of afternoon sunlight. Now, of course, came the last-minute faltering, and I did not want to be there. I was tired of myself and my hungers, my infantile need to clasp and squeeze and suck that the accretion of years seems only to intensify. "You realise," I said, "that I am old enough to be your great-grandfather?" I laughed. She did not answer, only unbuttoned the neck of her dress at the back and pulled it over her head, becoming for a second a hooded black beetle with clawing antenna arms. The sound of her falling under things rustled along my nerves. "Do you know that Cranach Venus in the Beaux Arts in Brussels?" I said brightly, leaning on my stick at an angled pose. "The one in the big dark hat and rather interesting black choker?" It had struck me how like the painted woman this living one looked, the same sinuous type, with the same heavy hips and tapering limbs and somewhat costive pallor. "Cupid," I said, "hardly as high as her knee, is an angry toddler crawled all over by bees, although they always look to me, I must say, more like bluebottles. Do you know the one I mean?" She bent to turn the bed covers back, one breast, a silvered bulb, glimmering under the arc of her armpit. "Cranach," I said, "younger or elder, I cannot remember which, was a friend of Martin Luther, of all people. One wonders what the great reformer thought of those lewd ladies his chum so liked to paint." She was sitting on the bed now with her legs drawn up to her chest and her pale arms clasped about her shins. She was not looking at me, but gazed before her with a faint frown, as if she were trying to recall some elusive word or image. I leant my stick against the headboard of the bed and turned and swung myself into the windowless bathroom and locked the door.

Micturition, I find, is one of the lesser annoyances of old age; sometimes, indeed, the copious passing of water can be an almost sensual experience. My urine on this occasion smelt distinctly of grappa. I turned on the cold tap and half filled the handbasin and doused my hands, liking the water's steely coolness, its joggle and sway. Then I spent some time picking idly among her things, her salves and pastes and powders; their mingled fragrance was faintly, pleasurably repulsive. I unscrewed a cartridge of lipstick and applied the scarlet nub to the underside of my wrist, drawing a smeary mouth there, open as in a startlement of desire, and pressed my lips upon it, tasting the sticky, waxen sweetness. In the land of women I am always a traveller lately arrived. I studied myself in the mirror, the flecks of scarlet the lipstick had left on my mouth, then took a tissue and wiped them off, not without difficulty. Still I loitered. Even from within this tombal chamber I could sense the afternoon's hot pulsings all around outside. I put my ear to the door; not a sound. She would be under the covers by now, waiting for me, her leman, with her lemur eyes, waiting for me to come and devour her. I recalled the policeman standing in the kitchen the morning after Magda died. He was a short, muscular young tough fairly bursting out of his uniform, his hair shaved to within a millimetre of his bullet head, his scalp a shade of baby blue and pink. His name, improbable, and yet gruesomely appropriate, was Officer Blank. He had shaken my hand with the courteous solemnity of an opponent before the commencement of a duel, and stood now audibly breathing through his nose, his square jaw rotating around a wad of chewing gum. I had never been afforded the opportunity to study a policeman at such close quarters before, and in my hungover, tear-sodden state I was fascinated by the quantity and range of impedimenta that he carried about him, the bulky gun, clenched in its holster like a steel fist, the long black club, the handcuffs, the complicated, brick-shaped telephone, also in a sort of holster, hanging from his belt. What was most impressive, however, was his stillness, the way he just stood mere, in fathomless silence, hands set on angled hips and only that jaw moving, moving. There did not seem to be anything to be said, by either of us. When I offered to make him a cup of coffee he blinked and looked askance, as if I had advanced a faintly improper suggestion. We could hear the others moving about heavy-footed upstairs. I found it peculiarly embarrassing to have to stand and listen to them like this; it was like hearing someone using the lavatory, or eavesdropping on a couple making love. Officer Blank, perhaps also feeling the indelicate awkwardness of the moment, cleared his throat and shifted the gum from one side of his mouth to the other. "My Pa went the same way," he said, nodding. "Pills." I nodded too, and frowned in sympathy, and then there was silence again, except for those noises off. I could not think how last night I had got Magda up the stairs and into bed. I remembered the leaden weight of her arm across my shoulders, and the eerily contented-sounding, burbling little sighs she kept releasing into my ear, as if she were a drunken lover trying to whisper lewd endearments. Now here she was being brought down again, this time strapped to a stretcher, with the sheet pulled over her face so tightly that I could see not only the outlines of her nose and mouth but even the protuberances of her eyes. Officer Blank said something and with surprising nimbleness stepped quickly sideways past me and went out, and a moment later, clattering over the doorstep, they were all gone, so abruptly and so thoroughly it might have been not Magda's mortal remains they were removing, but a living felon who must be hustled off without delay to secure captivity. Through the window I watched them drive away, the ambulance, and the following police car. Around me the transformed house vibrated, as if I were standing inside the dome of a great bell that a moment ago had sounded its final peal.