Despite such mysteriously intense passages, when I look back to then, which is still the recent past after all, it is strange how little I can see, how little remains that is not remote, diffuse, gone small and indistinct in time's misted-over window pane. Of the three-odd months – and the hyphen, by the way, is optional – that we were together, that she was with me, or I was widi her – I am not sure how to frame the thing – I retain only fragments, pitifully scarce. How did we pass the time, how fill the ordinary hours, the suspended mornings and torpid noons, the evenings that were all deserted corridors and air as dense as the shock-wave after an explosion? I see us sitting opposite each other at a table in the hotel's huge, muffled dining room, where the light falls down from the chandeliers like the light in a mortuary, and the waiters stand about in their cream jackets, fiddling with their bow ties and gloomily inspecting their fingernails. The only other regular is there, an elderly, silver-haired gentleman who lived permanently in a suite on the top floor, and had his own table in a corner by the mirrors, who makes subdued, knitting sounds with his knife and fork and at intervals will pause in eating to clear his throat delicately into a fine, white fist. These are the only sounds I hear, the clicking of the cutlery and the old man clearing his throat. We must have talked, Cass Cleave and I, or she at least must have talked to me, since she was forever talking, at table and in bed, on the streets, in trams and taxis, telling me things, but all that persists, in my ears, is a sort of deep, hollow hum, the kind of hum that lingers for a time in an auditorium after the audience has left. We did things together, she and I, visited places, museums and the like, as diligent as any pair of tourists. We went to Milan, to the Brera, to look at Mantegna's dead Christ and Bellini's Greek Madonna. We made an excursion to Genoa, and spent a pleasant afternoon there strolling in the vast cemetery of Stagione, where the air smelled faintly, sweetly, of the decaying corpses that lay under the clay and in marble vaults everywhere about, and she was fascinated by the larger than life-sized stone scenes of the domestic doings of the dead that lined the long, arcaded walkways. But even in my memories of those more memorable days, what I see of her is not her, but something far less substantial, a wavering presence that seems hardly more than the idle dream of an old man's afternoon. Is it simply because I was so old and she so young that I have kept so little of her? How could I be expected to see her clearly, peering rheumily as I must across the chasm of the years that yawned between us?

As time went on the matter that had brought her to me in the first place came up between us with less and less frequency. When I thought of it I would make a renewed effort, more or less determined, to get her to disclose the full extent of what she knew about me and my shady, not to say shrouded, past, but always without success. Why would she have told me, when she thought that my not knowing what she knew was the hold that she had over me? I admit that more than once I resorted to force in trying to extract a confession from her. I can see her still, in the hotel room, crouched in the narrow space between the bed and the wall where I had pushed her to her knees, her face, pale with pain, turned back to look up at me as I lean over her, with my horrible grin, twisting her arm past the level of her shoulder blade and threatening to break it if she will not tell me all – all, mind! – that was told to her that day in Antwerp by Schaudeine the fixer. How curiously calm she is, how solemn-seeming, despite the hurt that I am doing to her. It was, of course, a game that we were playing. By now, what mattered was not what she might know about my paltry misdeeds. Whatever I may say, all along I had been waiting for, hoping for, someone to spring out at me like this with my secret held in her hands and threatening to show it for all the world to see. What is the good of a secret, where is the power in it, if no one knows of its existence? In peril now of imminent exposure, and the disgrace, revulsion and general mockery that would inevitably follow, my attitude was one not of dread so much as a sort of jaunty fatalism. Where before I had skulked in trepidation, afraid and yet not knowing exactly what it was I feared, now I saw myself as besieged, stalwart, a roundhead suddenly become a cavalier. I felt, I confess it, quite the dashing villain.

But let me try, once more, a last time, while the mood is on me, to describe how it really was between Cass Cleave and me. I propose a series of scenes, as in a frieze, depicting a pale girl capered about by an old man, against the background of a marble cityscape. The oldster is in motley, masked and plumed, pinned all over with diamond patches, with a monstrous codpiece strapped under his belly. In each of the panels he is striking an elaborate attitude for the girl's benefit. Now he is the gay blade, hand on hip, now the demon lover, rampant, irresistible, now the unresting scholar with his taper and his book. The girl stands before him gazing upon these antics with a patient expression, forbearingly, a dreamy Columbine, waiting for him to doff the mask and motley; how eerily he reminds her of her father, playing his parts. See, here they are now, in the heights across the river, on a narrow, upwardly curving road overhung by dark trees. It is a deserted, sultry, knife-grey evening, and Franco Bartoli, that lugubrious Innamorato, has invited them to dinner. They are alighting from a taxi. She helps the old boy with his walking stick and his useless leg. She tries not to let him see her seeing the palsied shaking of his big, white-knuckled hand clamped on the handle of the stick. A waft of warm wind sways the trees, silvering the leaves; she thinks again not for the first time how the city seems to breathe, wearily, like a living, ancient thing. She takes the old man's arm and they set out across the road. For a second she sees him looming naked above her, huge and scrawny and sagging, hair wild and eyes ablaze, his old mouth open. Then she sees herself holding him; she is like the anatomically impossible Madonna in that painting they saw somewhere, cradling a giant Christ on splayed knees with no more effort than if she were dandling a babe.

The apartment building where Bartoli lives is old but instead of a front door there is a sheer pane of plate-glass that at first they take to be black and opaque. Vander flourishes his stick and presses the doorbell with the point of it. They hear the bell's nasal buzzing far off somewhere inside. They wait, blankly contemplating their own faceless shadows standing before them in the glass. In the sombre, wind-tossed air of evening she is for a moment suddenly someone else. Light floods the hall – the glass is clear, not black – making it a stark white cell, with Franco Bartoli stepping into it. At sight of him Vander begins to breathe heavily down his nostrils, as if he had just ceased from punching someone. "Behold!" he says with a snicker. "A shape all light…!"

Nimbly the little man advanced toward them, like a clockwork toy in a toy-shop window, seeming as always to fleet along on the tips of his toes, and perkily smiling. He paused within and pressed a button in a panel on the wall and the glass door slid aside smoothly. He welcomed them with a gesture of his body that was part curtsey and part pirouette, and reached up and seized Van-der's upper arm in a manly grasp, while simultaneously bending to brush his warm, dry lips over the back of Cass Cleave's hand. "Two of you!" he said. "What a good surprise." Cass Cleave had not been invited, but Vander had insisted she must come, and here she was. Bartoli shooed them ahead of him down the hall, flapping his tiny hands. He was wearing a tight little suit and a white shirt with big stiff cuffs and a tie of sky-blue, shiny stuff. Vander trailed his stick along the floor, making the rubber tip squeal on the marble tiles. Now a steel door thick enough to seal a vault confronted them. Bartoli rapped the metal with his knuckles, remarking proudly what an effort and expense it had been to have it installed. Vander was peering at him closely with a frown. "The beard!" he said now, and laughed. "You have shaved it off!" And indeed he had, revealing babyishly plump, pale cheeks and a prominent button chin with a notch in it. He blushed and lowered his eyelids bashfully, and turned aside and pressed something and the steel door opened. All inside, in contrast to the glass and marble and metal of the entrance hall, was old worn wood and thick brown drapery and uneven, creaking parquet. The lighting was low and yellowish, seeming to emanate weakly from the walls themselves, and there was a faintly unclean, elderly, old-fashioned smell. They heard voices from a farther room. They moved along a book-lined passage, picked their way across a mysteriously unlit space where unidentifiable dim objects loomed, and entered a lofty, narrow dining room crowded with large pieces of furniture, overpowering and dark. Seated at the dinner table, their faces lifted expectantly, were Kristina Kovacs, and a burly, self-consciously handsome, middle-aged man with a swept-back mane of oiled, iron-grey hair. As Vander and Cass Cleave were being led in, there entered simultaneously through an opposite door a tiny old lady swathed in black lace, whom they took to be Bartoli's mother. Fixing on Bartoli, the old woman launched at once into voluble speech, lifting a pair of trembling brown claws. Bartoli too held up his hands, shushing her, and sought to introduce the large man to Vander and Cass Cleave, but his efforts were drowned by the old woman's unstoppable cawing. Taking her by the shoulders he turned her about and gave her a firm little shove, and she tottered out of the room through the door where she had entered, still gabbling. The large man rose and reached across the table and shook hands vigorously with Vander while bending on Cass Cleave a keen, appraising glance. Bartoli was moving around the table fussily, pulling back chairs and straightening the cutlery. Vander leaned down and said something to Kristina Kovacs, and she smiled up at him and patted his hand where it rested briefly on her shoulder. Cass Cleave stood canted awkwardly with one foot crossed on the other and her hands behind her back, staring blankly into an abyss. Bartoli now was rapidly clearing an extra place for her at the table, and the grey-haired man and Kristina Kovacs had to shift their chairs, and for a moment all was confused movement and murmuring, while Vander looked on in smiling, large enjoyment. There entered then a second old woman, smaller even than the first. Her round little face was perfectly smooth, and she had a tiny, sharp, curved nose like a finch's beak. This, it turned out, was the real Signora Bartoli. She stood in the doorway and looked upon the company with an expression of placid enquiry, sweetly smiling, as if she had heard their voices and had wandered in to see who the strangers might be. Her son shouted at her to be seated; she was quite deaf. The grey-haired man was offering Cass Cleave a cigarette from a silver holder. Bartoli, having manoeuvred his mother to her place, stood beside his chair at the head of the table, beaming. Now the first old lady reappeared, bearing aloft in both frail hands a broad platter of rice. Bartoli poured the wine. The rice exuded the under-arm aroma of wild mushrooms. The tiny cook retreated to the kitchen. They sat. They ate. He said. She said.