a ride in Nice in an Amilcar GS—a very nice little sports car of the time—by a very glamorous Italian mechanic, Benoît Falchetto.”
Barbara thought: What it would be to be invited to drive off with a glamorous young mechanic, and an Italian to boot! And one called Benoît Falchetto …
“Anyway,” she continued, “as they drove off, the scarf which Isadora had been wearing got caught in the back wheel of the sports car. It was made—the scarf—of very strong silk and when it wound round the wheel it tightened round Isadora Duncan’s neck. She was pulled out of the car and bumped along behind until the Italian mechanic stopped. But by then it was too late.”
She glanced at the young man. I haven’t even asked his name, she thought. I’ve picked him up in the hotel car park and I have no idea what he’s called. Bruce? Andrew? Mark? …
The young man felt gingerly at his neck, loosening the scarf slightly. “Not a nice way to go.”
“No indeed. Even if it immortalises one.” Hugging the side of the road, Barbara put her foot down on the accelerator. “You know, I’ve always thought that immortality comes at a price. If you look at the career of anybody who’s achieved enough to be immortal, there’s a cost. Neglected family, a relentlessly demanding muse, deep, driving unhappiness—it’s all on the balance sheet.”
“I wouldn’t want it,” said the young man.
“No. Moi non plus.”
They were breasting a blind rise in the road. To the east, the land dropped away into a valley; cattle grazed, a tractor moved slowly across an as yet unploughed field. As Auden observed in his “Musée des Beaux Arts,” disaster always took place against a background of very ordinary life: Icarus fell from the sky while a ship went innocently on its way, while a farmer tilled his fields. So too, against a backdrop of the quotidian, did the knot of the scarf now suddenly fall apart, releasing a yard of tightly knitted wool in colourful stripes; and, while these ordinary country things were happening in the nearby field, the scarf snaked out backwards, too quickly for any movement of the hand to arrest it, and, by dint of aerodynamics and gravity, found its way to the revolving hub of the sports car’s near-side rear wheel.
It happened so quickly, just as it had happened in Nice all those years ago: the scarf was caught in the hub and wound up immediately, tugging with sudden and brutal force at the young man’s neck. Feeling the unexpected pressure, he opened his mouth to shout, but the sound was blocked by the immediate occlusion of airways as the scarf tightened around his throat. Not that a cry of alarm was necessary: Barbara had seen it happen and immediately slammed on the brakes, bringing the car to a halt in a squeal of burning rubber. For a moment she could not believe that it had happened, that the accident she had described had come to pass, as if in neat illustration of some safety lesson.
She grabbed at the scarf around the young man’s neck, struggling to insert her fingers into the tightly wound loops. But she could not get purchase and he was turning red, his face suddenly puffed up. She almost panicked, but did not, because the idea came to her of reversing the car, which she now did, crashing the gears.
It was the right thing to do, even if the right thing may sometimes come too late. To reverse the car is not the solution to an ordinary accident; one cannot just drive backwards, and in doing so bring a broken vehicle to wholeness again. But in such an accident as this, one can reverse and unwind that which is wound up; in theory, at least.
56. O Venus
“I’M TERRIBLY SORRY.”
It sounded trite, almost a parody of an inhibited apology; but what does one say to somebody whom one has almost strangled, even if it is largely the fault of the victim for wearing too long a scarf and ignoring a cautionary tale? And the situation was made all the more difficult by the fact that Barbara did not know the name of the young man who was sitting in her now static car, gingerly touching his neck. She should have asked him at the beginning, she thought; introductions become more embarrassing the further one gets from the initial encounter.
“And I don’t even know your name,” she blurted out.
He managed a smile. “Hugh.”
She peered