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.That was the same bed, the one in the corner, the narrow cot with the bare mattress.She dared not go near it now.Five of the cheroots, probably the last ones he ever bought, lay in an untidy scrambled pile on a corner of one of the tables.There was no sign of a packet.She picked one up, slid it beneath her nostrils, sensing the fragrance of the tobacco and thinking about the time she had shared one with him, relishing the dampness of his saliva transferred to her lips.A delirious exhilaration moved through her, and for a moment her eyes lost focus on the details of the room.He had never travelled away from the island during his lifetime, even after the prizes and honours began to be bestowed.While she lay naked in his arms, exulting inwardly over the touch of his fingers as they rested on her breast, he tried to explain his attachment to Piqay, why he could never leave to be with her.It was an island of traces, he said, shadows that followed you, a psychic spoor that you left behind if you departed the island, but if you did you would become diffuse in some way that he could not explain.He would never be able to return, he said.He dared not try, because to do so might mean he would lose the trace that defined him to Piqay.For him, the urgency to leave was less powerful than the urgency of staying.She, feeling a different and less mystical urge, quietened him by caressing him, and soon they were making love again.She would never forget that one day they had spent alone together, but afterwards, in the years of silence that followed, she had never been sure if he even remembered her.Too late she had had the answer, when the messages arrived.Twenty years, four days.She heard large cars moving slowly on the gravel drive outside the house, and one by one their engines cut out.The blue haze was thicker now.She turned away from the lectern, aroused by her memories, but despairing because memories were all they could ever be.As she looked away from the dazzle of the window it seemed to her that the blue air was denser in the centre of the room.It had substance, texture.She moved her face towards it, her lips puckering.The haze swirled about her, and she darted her face to and fro, trying to detect some response from it.Streaks in the old residue of smoke, denser patches, coalesced before her eyes.She stepped back to see them better, then forward again to press her face against them.Smoke stung against her eyes, and tears welled up.The swirls took shape before her, making a ghostly impression of his face.It was the face as she remembered it from two decades before, not the one the public knew, the famous grizzled countenance of the great man.No time had passed for her, nor for the trace he had left.There were no features painted in the smoke, just the shape of his head and face moulded in the blue, like a mask, but intimately detailed.Lips, hair, eyes, all had their shapes, contoured by the smoke.Her breath halted momentarily.Panic and adoration seized her.His head was tilted slightly to one side, his eyes were half closed, his lips were apart.She leaned forward to take her kiss, felt the light pressure of the smoky lips, the brush of ghostly eyelashes.It lasted only an instant.His face, his mask, contorted in the air, jolting back and away from her.The eye shapes clenched tightly.The mouth opened.The lines of smoke that formed his forehead became furrowed.He jerked his head back again, then lunged in a spasm of deep coughing, rocking backwards and forwards in agony, hacking for breath, painfully trying to clear whatever obstructed him below.A spray of bright redness burst out from the shape that was his open mouth, droplets of scarlet smoke, a fine aerosol.She stepped back to avoid it, and the kiss was lost for ever.The apparition was wheezing, making dry hacking coughs, small ones now, weak and unhoping, the end of the attack.He was staring straight at her, terrified, full of pain and unspeakable loss, but already the smoke was untangling, dispersing.The red droplets had fallen to the floor and formed a pool on one of his discarded sheets of paper.She knelt down to look more closely, and trailed her fingertips through the sticky mess.When she stood again, her fingers carried a smear of the blood, but now the air in the study had cleared.The blue haze had gone at last.The final traces of him had vanished.The dust, the sunlight, the books, the dark corners remained.She fled.Downstairs she stood once again with the others, waiting in the great hall to be allocated to one of the cars.Until her name was spoken by one of the undertaker’s staff, no one acted as if they knew who she was or acknowledged her in any way.Even the man who had spoken to her stood with his back against her.The family and the other mourners spoke quietly to each other, clearly daunted by the seriousness of the occasion, by the thought of the crowds waiting in the road at the end of the long drive, by the passing of this man.She was given a seat in the last of the cars, bringing up the rear of the cortège.She was pressed against the window by the large bodies of two serious and unspeaking adolescents.In the crowded church she sat alone to one side, steadying herself by staring at the flagstone floor, the ancient wooden pews.She stood for the hymns and prayers but only mouthed the words silently, remembering what he had said were his feelings about churches.The tributes to him were formal, grand, spoken sincerely by illustrious men and women.She listened closely, recognizing nothing of him in their words.He had not sought this renown, this greatness.In the churchyard on a hill overlooking the sea, standing near the grave, back from the main group of mourners, hearing the words of committal distorted by the breeze, she was again alone.She thought about the first book of his she had ever read, while still at college.Everyone knew his work now, but at that time he was unknown and it had been a personal discovery.The persistent wind from the islands buffeted against her, pressing her clothes against her body on one side, sending strands of hair across her eyes
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