Shroud

I walked on. A stream of motor cars was flowing swiftly through the square, separating into two cha

Presently I realised that I had lost my way, and I had to stop at a street corner to consult the crumpled map the hotel clerk had given me. I was squinting up in search of a street name when I registered the girl, on the corner opposite, looking in my direction. She was tallish, fair, neither pretty nor plain; I would not have noticed her had she not seemed to be regarding me with a smile, knowing, not unfriendly, as if I were someone she had met long ago, in faintly discreditable circumstances. She stepped forward into the street, squeezing between two cars parked closely nose to tail. Was she coming to accost me? The prospect made my pulse quicken, and I did not know whether to wait for her or flee. Who were all these people, the flower seller, Carrot Head, now this girl, and what did they want with me? The lorry had already braked, its tyres locked and shrieking, when it struck her. I had the sense of her spi

Why such upset? This was not the first violent end I had witnessed. Was it that it was another of death's heartless demonstrations that even the young are not immune to its capricious singlings-out? No, that is too obscure. Perhaps it was simply because the girl had seemed to be looking at me, had seemed to know or recognise me, might even have been about to speak to me. But why should that make the encounter, if such it could be called, so unsettling? In certain circles, admittedly rarefied, mine is a well-known face. I am used to strangers recognising me. They will pause, the young in particular, and look at me, shyly, or with resentment, or more often just that slow, dull, witless stare, as if it is not the real me they are seeing but a representation of me, an animated model set up for their free and exclusive scrutiny. So why should the girl's attention have made me want to take to my heels? Oh, but I knew, I knew of course, why I was agitated: it was not the girl I was thinking of, it was Magda. When she was alive I could hardly be said to have given her a second thought, while now she was constantly on my mind, if only as a shadow, the solitary spectator sitting in the benches above the spotlit ring where the gaudy and increasingly chaotic performance of who and what I am pretending to be is carried on without interval. She lingers there, unwilling shade, wishing to be gone, perhaps, yet curious to see the not so grand finale, with its tumbling clowns and bowing acrobats and trained animals doing their last lap. Only in death has she begun to live fully, for me.

Strange, but try as I may I ca