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11

Angelica’s Grotto
    ‘Evening shadows make me blue,’
sang Connie Francis,
‘when each weary day is through. How I long to be with you, my happiness.’
The honey of her voice, the sweet sadness of the words and melody made his throat ache. Pictures riffled in his mind: rain streaming down windows; night roads unwinding in the headlamps’ beams; sunpoints dazzling on the sea; nakedness and firelight, glimpses, sounds and smells of youth and love and sorrow.
    ‘Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool’ was the next track on the CD. Klein sang along with it as he went to the bookshelves and took out
Darkness and Light: the inner eye of Odilon Redon.
He turned to the Oannes lithograph with its caption, ‘
I, the first consciousness of chaos, arose from the abyss to harden matter, to regulate forms.’
In the blackness where he hovered Oannes coiled and uncoiled the serpentine length of himself. Under his pharaonic headdress his face was dark in the dimness. Were his eyes open?
    ‘Oannes,’ said Klein, ‘can you see me? I know you can hear me because you live in my mind. Are you a god or are you something else? Will you speak to me?’
    No answer.
    Klein went back to his desk, where he sat facing thebookshelf-blocked fireplace. On the white wall above and to the left of the Meissen figure on the mantelpiece hung one of the few original works of art that he owned, a 1910
Pegase Noir
by Redon, oil on canvas, 76 × 102 cm. Thirty years ago he’d brokered several profitable deals for a Swiss collector and this painting had been his fee. In earlier works Redon had shown his winged horses variously as captives and victims, unable to fly, defeated by forces that drained their energies and crippled their wings; but this Pegasus was a triumphant creature whose primal darkness contained the light of its resurgent vitality. Its black was suffused with purple, ultramarine blue, cerulean, crimson, subtleties of rose, and it reared up in an effulgence of reds and oranges, its wings full of lift and the gathered power of its haunches recalling Redon’s sun horses and hippogriffs. Hannelore had said, looking at it after the making-up that followed one of their rows, ‘It’s like our marriage – full of darkness but it flies.’ Klein shook his head and went to pour himself a drink.
    Returning to his desk and the computer he called up:
    NAKED MYSTERIES
The Nudes of Gustav Klimt
    No additional words had appeared since the last time he’d looked at the screen. He opened one of his Klimt books and looked at the painting of Pallas Athene wearing the mask of the Gorgon on her breast. ‘Wisdom,’ he said. He considered Medusa’s dread rictus and her loosely hanging tongue. He quit the word processor program, switched on the modem, double-clicked on the Internet icon, and clicked once on Connect. The modem chirped its dial-up and trilled, twanged, and roared through its connectionsequence. He watched impatiently as the computer logged on to the network, and when he arrived at the Internet homepage he went to the Yahoo search engine.
    ‘Everybody’s somebody’s fool,’ he said. ‘There’s no fool like an old fool and there’s a first time for everything.’ He took a deep breath, typed SEX in the box, and clicked on Search. Scrolling down the results he clicked on Sexuality, clicked again on Oral Sex, and found a page of text with instructions for performing cunnilingus. ‘Give me a break,’ he said, and closed the page. Ignorantly but determinedly he pressed on until he found websites with free samples showing a whole range of sexual activities in clinically detailed photographs. Videos, live performers, telephone fantasists and other services and goods were also available, demotically described and payable by cheque or credit card, sometimes to be invoiced under names like Opticom and Allegro and sometimes more straightforward ones.
    ‘Oannes, you strange fish,’ said Klein, ‘is