Free Shroud by John Banville

solemn way she lay down on her back before me on the bed, as if she had been felled by the awesome force of her own passion. I bit her lips until they bled, I licked the soles of her feet. Now she was asking me what I would speak on tomorrow at the conference, and Franco Bartoli popped up like a toy man at my elbow and, smoothing a hand on his fine, soft, gleaming beard, said with a roguish smirk that surely Professor Vander could have only one subject, here, in Turin . . . ? I did not know what he was talking about. “I have prepared nothing,” I said. I wanted him to be gone from my side. I was picturing the sprinkle of freckles in the hollow between Kristina Kovacs’s pale, mismatched and somehow melancholy breasts. Behind her now the smoky city stretched away to the mountains in the distance with their furled rim of cloud. She was still gazing up at me with that wry, intimate smile. She has, or had, a habit of moving her head very slightly from side to side, as if she were swaying in time to the measures of a slow, inner melody. I felt unwell. The sour wine had parched the linings of my mouth. I leaned out to set my emptied glass on the table and took the opportunity to elbow Bartoli as if by accident in his little paunch, which made me feel better, then stamped away from him and Kristina Kovacs with pointed rudeness and planted myself before one of the glass walls with my back to the room, glaring bleakly out over the city. Behind me the buzz of conversation faltered briefly and caught itself up on a higher, more brittle note: Axel Vander being a boor, as usual. As I had at the hotel window that morning, I imagined again how I would seem to someone looking up from the streets below, an airborne figure, suspended on an angled stick and perhaps about to plummet, a decrepit, lost archangel. Once more I experienced a burning, bile-like rush of self-pity, pure and unfocused. Kristina Kovacs came and stood beside me, a breathing presence, the crown of her head level with my shoulder. I fancied I caught a whiff of her breath, warm, brownish and bad. Together we looked out at the distant mountain ranges. “I think I have been found out,” I heard myself saying, in a tone of laboured, unconvincing lightness. “I had a letter. Someone has been looking into my past. She is coming here.” I glanced sidelong at Kristina, and smiling she returned my glance. “She?” she murmured, shaking her head. “Oh, Axel, have you been foolish again?”
    I was instantly abashed and angry at myself. I could not think why I had confided in her. She knew nothing about me or my past, the real or the invented one. What was she to me but an afternoon of mostly simulated passion in an overheated hotel room in a snowbound city I would never return to? I have always supposed it was those few hours in bed that had prompted the belated review she wrote of After Words. The review was a light piece, intended to be teasingly allusive; it had struck an incongruously frivolous note amid the weighty lucubrations of
Débat.
The letter of thanks I sent to her when the piece appeared had cost me much effort. I had sought to match her sly, arch tone, but the result was unsatisfactory in a way I could not quite make out. Her note in reply was all innocence and warm affection, with no mention of our tryst. Now I wondered uneasily if perhaps she did know more about me than she pretended, about my past, I mean, my interesting past. Well, what did it matter any more? That harpy even now on her way from Antwerp would likely be the end of me. I was, I realised, looking forward to the prospect of destruction. Yes, let it come, I thought, almost gaily, I shall welcome it! All at once, in place of the anger and self-pity of a minute ago, I had a sensation of incipient weightlessness, as if at any moment I might float upward, wingless and yet wonderfully volant, and drift away free, into air, and light, the empty, cold and brilliant blue.
    “I am dying, Axel,”