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Petra was three years old, a strawberry blonde with a high-domed forehead and pale blue eyes. Her eyes, I thought, were actually like Terence Stamp's. She imagined they looked like the eyes of the Grand Duchess Anastasia. A kind of celestial aquamarine, as Petra sometimes described them. There were times, I must say, when I thought they resembled aluminium.
We were in the park. She was sitting on the edge of an ornamental pond, where coloured fish wove about beneath the lily leaves and where the ripples from a central fountain faded out, and she was releasing the petals of a rose onto the surface of the water, petal by petal like little scarlet boats, when a boy of about five came up and swished the flotilla with a stick so that the petals were scattered as if by a violent wind. Petra sat very still, her back to the boy, then she lifted her head, turned her face towards where I was standing and, as if she could see me, she looked straight into my eyes and said, 'Why don't you kill him?'
I can tell you I was completely taken by surprise. It is not my business to go round killing people; all I am supposed to do is keep Petra out of harm's way. But the boy heard her and lost his footing and fell off the rim of the pond into the water. (It seems nobody was really looking after him.) And of course it was none of my concern to try to save him. He sat up, bawling in the shallow water, covered in green slime and weed, with the mud containing the accumulated shit of generations of bright fish, unable to understand what had happened. Petra's dress was splashed, but she simply continued to sit, silent now, on the edge of the pond, her silence backed by the rush of the water from the fountain.
First the boy's mother, and then Petra's mother, came dashing from different corners of the park, scooped their children up and bore them off. From behind a tree a shamefaced guardian appeared and followed the boy. Across her mother's shoulder Petra looked again into my eyes and smiled. She said nothing at all; she was known for being a quiet child with a strong will and the famous temper I have already mentioned. From a little church across the park the angelus was ringing. I recall that at the sound of the pretty bell Petra swung round in her mother's arms to face the source of the carillon and broke into a truly dazzling smile.
The lifetime bond between Petra and myself, forged at her birth, was changed and strengthened that day, charged with a special kind of electricity and emotion. Petra grew up to be an unusual adult who retained a close relationship with her guardian. And of course she didn't only have me working for her, she was one of those children born with the Halo Effect, the children everybody loves and prefers, the ones who don't seem to have to do anything to get their way. The ones with beauty and charm and talent-call it charisma. Petra was always able to generate an atmosphere favourable to herself, just with -- what -- her personality I suppose.
As a baby she was so pretty, with large eyes wide apart, broad cheekbones, neat little chin, dazzling smile, and not only did her grandmother and grandfather (she believed they were her parents) dote on her, the whole world wanted to pick her up and cuddle her and run its fingers through her red‚gold ringlets. Light, I swear it, emanated from that baby. She was like the sun glistening on fresh honey. People were drawn into the field of the halo that softly radiated from her. I have theories about these things, and I think that before Petra was born, when her real mother tried to abort her with a long steel knitting needle and half a bottle of gin and a hot bath, Petra got the message that she was desperately not wanted and responded to the murderous attack with a super, extra-tenacious hold on life. Having won against the killer knitting needle, she was going to continue to win and win and win.
Petra always called me Beau, addressing me thus on Christmas cards and suchlike, although she later began to spell it 'Beaux', when she discovered Ernest Beaux, the creator of Chanel No. 5. The name, to me, is neither here nor there. And that's an interesting little phrase-neither here nor there. I don't wish to bore you with theology, but I just note in passing that Thomas Aquinas said that angels move in discontinuous time. We can be now here, now there, with no interval of time in between. Neither here nor there; both here and there. When we move there are not two instants separated by time; between the beginning and the end of the movement there is no time at all. We are in the perpetual present, the eternal now. We might be, but of course people can't grasp that so well. Michael the Archangel (who is made, by the way, from snow) can be in three of the seven heavens at once. And there's a woman in Switzerland who is quite well known for entertaining angels and writing down the music they bring her, and she says they take four or five days to come from wherever they live. I'm not sure how she figures that-maybe they have had to tell her that so she will give them some peace. We can move faster than the speed of light if we want to, and this plays up with time and space -- it's an Einstein thing.
Return, now, to the park and you will see that although we are in rural Australia in the forties, the design of the park is European, some compromise between English and French. A high fence of fancy iron pickets surrounds a rectangle which is cut diagonally from each corner by gravel paths, between which are planted lawns and flower beds and European trees.
Green wooden benches beneath the trees; in the centre of it all a wide and shallow pond, circular, with water lilies and goldfish, and in the very heart a piece of large bronze statuary complete with nymphs, mermen, trumpets, vigorous acanthus leaves and gushing fountains. The semi-nakedness of the figures is both welcomed and ignored, it seems, by adults; whereas alert and knowing children such as Petra are fascinated, entranced by breasts and other suggestive bulges in the group. Larger than life these people, these creatures, recline, entwined, gesturing, waving, smiling, promising loud ecstasies from the middle of the pond.
The fountain is the most elaborate public object in the town, and there is a legend that it was sent here by mistake, that a factory in France muddled its orders, and this little town ended up with a fountain destined for somewhere very grand. The people of the town were so impressed, quite overwhelmed by the sight of such a glorious bronze scene of lust, desire and sexual frolic that they raised the funds to keep it. I don't know how much truth there is in the story.
The boy twisted his ankle when he fell in the water. I've hurt my foot! he yelled. I've hurt my foot!
I said the mothers came running to the pond and gathered up the children, and that is certainly how it looked at that moment. I have no reason to suppose that the woman who claimed the boy was not his mother. And I know for a fact that Wanda, the young woman, you might almost say girl, who collected Petra, was Petra's mother. However, Petra did not know this. To all intents and purposes, Wanda was Petra's sister, and Lydia was the mother of both of them, as well as of a number of other children.
In the part of this story that I call The Footnote you will find my comments about some of this stuff, if you're interested. The universe is full of things to think about, if one can find the time. You will also get a fair bit of information about many a thing under the sun-try the story of 'The Snow Queen' for starters. I figure that if I want you to think of Petra as some sort of Snow Queen, you will need to have a look at the text of that story, and I want to save you the time of running about like a frantic rodent from one library to another only to be told by tired, bored or arrogant librarians that the book is out, lost, untraceable, being repaired, being processed. (When they say 'processed, being processed', I imagine they are turning books into cheese.) This library run would drive you mad, and the thought of it brings me out in a rash. Fortunately they have invented hypertext and interactivity just in the nick of time and so you can load the CD-ROM and click on 'The Snow Queen' and go for your life if that's what you want to do. Make links. Go-go-go. Hot spot!
Years ago, between jobs, I was staying at the beach and I read Sons and Lovers, and I kept wishing there was a way I could get a picture and some information every time there was a reference to a flower. That book has more flowers than Kew Gardens. If only, I thought, I could look over at the wall and see some sort of coloured projection of crimson roses or dahlias sodden with rain-'wet-black crimson balls'. I imagined how it would be if I could gradually add the pictures of the flowers, one after another, until the whole room-walls, ceiling, floor-was covered with them. Just a space in one wall for a window onto the sky, and a space in another for the door. And there I am, lost in the conservatory, one off-duty guardian angel reclining on some oriental sofa arrangement, reading a book. I first became interested in D.H. Lawrence because of all the stockings in the text, even elastic stockings and wooden legs, and then I discovered the flowers as well. Tall white lilies reeling in the moonlight-I liked that. Anyhow, my point is that these days you can switch to the image of the flower and back again with just a nibble of the mouse.
I think The Footnote is rather nice in its own way, by that I mean the good old-fashioned print version of The Footnote. If you don't want to use the CD-ROM, don't want to sit down at the PC and choof around the screen with a mouse, you don't have to worry. I've organised things so you can lie on the couch propped on silken cushions and idly move around in the book itself, choosing a hot spot and flicking over to the references in The Footnote. Not so 21st-century an approach as the CD-ROM -- probably closer to Scheherazade, depending a bit on the nature of your cushions.
You will probably have your own mental version of 'The Snow Queen' and the other stories in The Footnote, but I want you to have the chance to read my versions. Here you have my Narrative, and if all you have time to do is read The Narrative, that's okay. But you will discover that certain words in The Narrative have long entries in The Footnote, and at any time you can wander off into The Footnote and back again.
I imagine The Footnote as if it were the mud and slush at the bottom of a pond. On the surface of the water are the leaves and blooms of the lilies, in the form of The Narrative. Try going to water lilies or lotus in The Footnote.
And don't forget that you can always get into your gladrags and park the car in the basement of the theatre and go see whole performances of ballets about Snow White and Cinderella and so forth, some time. Or park the car in the car park next to the video shop and take out the video-well, there are plenty of things you can do. If you do go to the theatre, you might look up to the ceiling and catch a glimpse of me, or at least some of my colleagues. We like to get out. There are usually dozens of us drifting around the ceiling of the Paris Opera. And another place we like to go-we sing in the choirs of all the great cathedrals, in major basilicas and in minor basilicas. I actually enjoy going off to tiny country churches and joining in the singing. Once I started singing at the Windmill Hill Methodist Church, but Petra was so embarrassed I had to stop.
I think it is worth setting down some of the bare, plain facts about Petra's past, as Petra herself had a habit of offering only what can charitably be called romantic versions of these things. Since she died I have been looking for work and so I have had the perfect opportunity to write all this up, get straight some of the facts (insofar as I know them). Petra was not in truth the youngest child of Lydia and Stephen Penfold, bootmakers, but their grandchild, offspring of red-haired Wanda and a mysterious stranger. Petra gets the mysterious stranger part right, conjuring up for herself a fabulous heritage. I have heard her tell people she was adopted by Lydia and Stephen, that she was the child of, for example, a Russian nobleman, a Spanish count, a wandering musician, a Swedish scientist, a gypsy dancer, according to her mood and her audience. The story that was current for about the last thirty years of her life was that she was descended from French royalty, in a line from Catherine de' Medici, a nasty piece of work to choose for an ancestor.
Wanda died young, without ever revealing the identity of Petra's father; perhaps it's just as well. It has crossed my mind that Wanda's father was also Petra's father, but then I have seen so much of that kind of thing in my time that I have an over-suspicious mind. And I believe Petra died without ever knowing for sure that the people she thought were her parents were in fact her grandparents, and that Wanda was not her mad sister, but her mother. It was not my job to tell Petra these things.

 
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