for Phoebe
‘Things don’t end; they just accumulate.’
Jonathan Fitch
Contents
1 Mr Rinyo-Clacton
2 Serafina
3 At The Opera
4 The Low And Delicious Word
5 The Goneness Of Serafina
6 Our Beginning
7 Herbert Sledge
8 Room 18
9 Katerina
10 The Oasis
11 Yes Or No
12 Now, Then
13 Sayings Of Confucius
14 What If?
15 The Lord Jim Hotel
16 Objectives?
17 Two Minds, One Thought
18 Where’s Ruggiero?
19 Whichever Way You Turn
20 At Zoë’s Place
21 Maybe Loss
22 So Many Are
23 Several Possibilities
24 Hendryk Not Quite Himself
25 A Useful Idea?
26 Insect Life
27 Lumps Of Time
28 The Tomb Of Victor Noir
29 Yes And No
30 Tombeau Les Regrets
31 Camomile Tea
32 Tchaikovsky’s Sixth
33 Wimbledon Train
34 Magic No
35 Smaller
36 The Face Of Dieter Kandis
37 All There Is
38 The Kakemono Of Kwashin Koji
By the Same Author
1
Mr Rinyo-Clacton
He was in formal gear, black tie. A tall man and broad, rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes, military moustache, black hair greying at the temples – early fifties was my guess. Looked posh, looked like a man who was used to the best of everything. My vision was a little unreliable but he was in sharp focus, coming up the stairs towards me with an interested expression on his face. This was in the tube station at Piccadilly Circus and I was sitting on the floor in the corner at the top of the stairs where you go down to the left for the eastbound platform and to the right for the westbound. The prevailing smell was of hamburgers and frying. With the sound of many footsteps the world went past me coming and going. In a poster on the wall a large black rugby player hurtled towards me at full speed. ‘IMAGINE A TRAIN HURTLING TOWARDS YOU AT FULL SPEED,’ said the poster. ‘NOW DOUBLE IT.’
Mr Best-of-Everything stopped in front of me. ‘No instrument,’ he said. Big voice and he talked like a BBC correspondent, Martin-Bell-in-Sarajevo sort of thing. ‘Nothing for coins to be dropped into, so you’re not busking. Are you begging?’
‘No.’ I wasn’t sure why I was there. I’d been drinking a lot since Serafina left and I sometimes found myself doing odd things in unexpected places.
‘Thinking about the Big What-Is-It, are you?’
‘What’s the Big What-Is-It?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I don’t think I want to.’
‘Perhaps another time.’
‘Are you cruising or what? Do I look like a bit of rough to you?’
‘You look like a bit of misery. If you fancy a chat we could meet this evening at the opera. They’re doing Pelléas with Celestine Latour – best Mélisande since Mary Garden. Turn up around seven and an usher will show you to my box.’ He took a card out of a silver case and handed it to me.
‘Why me?’ I said. ‘What do you want?’
‘Come to the opera and we’ll talk about it.’
‘Which opera? Covent Garden or the ENO?’
He winced. ‘Please – the idea of Pelléas in English is abhorrent. Must go now. See you later. Or not, whichever.’ In the fresh breeze he made as he passed me I smelled money and something else, medicinal and disciplinary, that I thought of as bitter aloes. As far as I know I’ve never smelled bitter aloes but the name suggests the smell I have in mind. The card said, in an elegant little typeface:
T. Rinyo-Clacton
2
Serafina
Long black hair. Sometimes it fell across her face like a raven’s wing. Even in repose she seemed to be standing on some bleak northern strand, howling at the grey waves with her hair whipping in the wind. There is a Scottish expression: ‘to dree one’s weird’. To undergo one’s destiny is what it means and you could see that happening in the long beauty of her face that was sometimes softly rounded and sometimes like the blade of a knife. Her great dark eyes under the flare of their black brows seemed always to be looking into a darkness beyond the light; her elegant mouth seemed murmurous with spells, succulent with kisses, speechless with sadness. She bought her clothes at cancer and multiple-sclerosis charity shops – droopy jumpers and long swinging print skirts worn with steel-toed boots. She looked thin in her clothes but the nakedness of her long body offered surprising curves and pearly roundnesses, aloof and exciting. So beautiful and strange she was, my Serafina, so magical. How could I have hoped not to lose her!
3
At the Opera
‘Sexiest voice in the business, that Latour,’ said Mr Rinyo-Clacton. ‘So mysterious, her Mélisande, so haunted and haunting, so full of death! First words out of her mouth are “Ne me touchez pas!” Don’t touch me! But she’s expecting to be touched, she’s a kind of touchstone – people reveal themselves by what they do with her; she seems so vulnerable that she makes things happen. She’s afraid that Golaud is going to tear her clothes off and have her right there by the pool in the wood; maybe in some way she even wants it, who knows? Why is she crying when we first see her? What was done to her before Golaud found her by the pool? What about that golden crown glimmering under the water, eh? Is that her lost virginity or what?’
Although I’d heard bits of Pelléas et Mélisande here and there I rarely went to the opera and I’d never seen it before or read anything about it. Seeing it now from Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s box I found that the story, the music, and the staging took me to a place where I couldn’t be sure of anything; all of it seemed to be speaking to me in a way that I didn’t understand. The dark wood through which Golaud followed a trail of blood, the pool by which Mélisande huddled so pitifully – the look of them troubled me.
With the help of the surtitles I followed the action carefully. When Golaud asked her if anyone had hurt her Mélisande said, ‘Everyone,’ and I felt guilty; she looked like Serafina. What had they done to her? She didn’t want to say. She said her golden crown had fallen into the water. Golaud said he could see it glimmering down there and it was very beautiful. Where had she got it? He’d given it to her, she said. Who? Her answer to that was that she didn’t want it. Golaud noted that the pool wasn’t very deep and he could easily reach in and retrieve it but Mélisande threatened to throw herself into the water if he did – not much of a threat really, if the water was that shallow.
Golaud kept trying to find out where she’d come from but he couldn’t get a straight answer out of her. She said she’d run away, that she was cold, that she’d come from far away. She marvelled at his grey hair, she asked if he was a giant. Partly she acted as if she could be picked up but she also behaved like an animal wary of traps.
When Golaud suggested that she come with him she said she’d rather stay alone in the wood. When he asked her a second time she said, ‘Where to?’ He said he didn’t know, that he too was lost. Then she went with him. The music had murmured and surged like the sea, full of darkness and death.
‘What do you think of it so far?’ said Mr Rinyo-Clacton.
‘Golaud isn’t right for her,’ I said.
‘That’s why it isn’t called Golaud et Mélisande,’ he said. Sparkling and rosy-cheeked Mr Rinyo-Clacton with his silver card-case, slurping oysters and sipping Cristal ‘71, a champagne so far beyond my means that I’d never even heard of it. And I
, too, sipping Cristal ’71 and slurping oysters that smelled of the sea in Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s crimson and gilded box at the Royal Opera House, our refreshments catered by his minder with hands that looked capable of crushing a skull like a walnut. He also was in formal attire and almost invisible in his attendance. Except for the hands. I thought his name might be Igor but it was Desmond.
‘I have an odd collection of books,’ I said. ‘One of them is an archaeological dictionary.’
‘Ah!’ said Mr Rinyo-Clacton, squeezing lemon juice on to an oyster.
‘You call yourself Rinyo-Clacton,’ I said. The Cristal ’71 was like liquid velvet and my worods, my woordos, my words came out of my mouth in such a way that I felt entirely other than what I was used to. ‘Rinyo-Clacton is the name given to a Late Neolithic pottery style found in Scotland and in southern England.’
‘What are we but clay,’ said Mr Rinyo-Clacton, ‘and infirm vessels all. One million pounds.’
The long darkness of Serafina’s hair! The raven’s wing of it sweeping over my face! Gone! ‘One million pounds what?’
‘Later,’ he said as the house lights dimmed, the audience murmured, coughed, and shifted from buttock to buttock; the conductor appeared, bathed briefly in his spotlight, bowed to us, then faced the orchestra and lifted his baton. The curtain went up, the music and the voices rose and fell like the sea, after a time becoming Mélisande’s song as she combed her hair in the tower window. ‘Mes longs cheveux descendent…’ she sang. ‘My long hair goes down to the door of the tower; my hair is waiting for you …’ said the surtitles over the stage, and I began to cry as Mélisande, leaning from her tower window, let down her long, long hair to cover the face of Pelléas.
4
The Low and Delicious Word
Rising and Falling like the sea, the powerful Mr Rinyo-Clacton, long and strong, managing me with a firm hand in the dark wood of his shadowy bedroom, on silken sheets among the glints and gleams of gold and silver, porcelain, bronze, ebony, tinted mirrors, coloured glass, and the smell that I thought of as bitter aloes. In the black marble fireplace the flames flickered and purred. ‘Say it!’ he whispered in my ear as he rode me. ‘Say it, the low and delicious word death!’
My head was still going round. ‘Death!’ I said. ‘Death, death, death, death!’
‘Yes!’ He came, and still holding me to him, quietly began to weep. ‘“Whereto answering”,’ he murmured brokenly, ‘“the sea,
Delaying not, hurrying not,
Whisper’d me through the night, and very plainly
before daybreak,
Lisp’d to me the low and delicious word death,
And again death, death, death, death …”’
Serafina! I thought, remembering the taste of her on my tongue, the fragrance of her skin, the scent of her hair. The music of Pelléas et Mélisande was still with me, rising and falling, surging like the sea, death glimmering in moonlight on the water. Serafina! Far away, the land receding in the night to leave the horizon empty in the dawn.
‘How was it for you, Jonny?’ said Mr Rinyo-Clacton.
I shook my head. I’d never before had sex with another male. What did it mean? I hadn’t been too drunk to know what I was doing. Was I losing my manhood?
‘Nothing to say? Still the shy little virgin?’ He slapped my thigh. ‘I hadn’t planned this,’ he said, ‘but we might as well begin as we mean to go on …’
‘I don’t think I want to go on.’ I pulled away and turned to face him. The champagne had worn off somewhat. His skin was blotchy, his breath was bad. I felt sore and thought I might be bleeding. He hadn’t used a condom. How many others had he done this with? Why had he been weeping?
‘What I mean,’ he said, ‘is that I must be master – you understand?’
‘You’ve just given a pretty good demonstration of that, I think.’
‘I’m not talking about sex now. When I saw you sitting on the floor in the tube station I thought I saw death looking out of your eyes. Was I right?’
I picked my clothes up off the floor and started to get dressed. I wondered if there was anyone buried under the floorboards, and yet that room with its glints and gleams, its flickering shadows and its smell of bitter aloes had an atmosphere that I felt rather at home in. Good God! Had I wanted this? The shadows were peopled by African figures, most of them with erect members. I was stood by a low black bookcase, on top of which was a primitive-looking clay pot, greyish-black and decorated with a simple geometric pattern of grooves. It was about nine inches high, eight inches wide at the top, tapering to six at the bottom. It was like the illustration in my Dictionary of Archaeology: Rinyo-Clacton, Late Neolithic. It was filled with black pebbles. I held some in my hand, heard them clicking in the tidewash, heard the sighing of the sea. ‘What you saw looking out of my eyes was most of a bottle of gin,’ I said.
‘It seemed like more than gin to me.’ He was still naked, flaunting himself.
‘That’s your problem,’ I said, turning away.
‘Why had you drunk so much gin that you sat down on the floor in Piccadilly Circus tube station?’
‘Serafina’s gone.’ I needed to hear myself saying her name to him; it was like chewing a razor blade. In our flat were plants that she watered faithfully; I never remembered the names of them except the cyclamen and the one that hung in front of the window, sunlight through its leaves: the Russian vine. The cyclamen seemed to me a secret self of Serafina, as if it might at some time speak in a tiny Serafina voice and explain everything to me.
‘Ah!’ said Mr Rinyo-Clacton, putting on a dressing-gown, ‘Serafina’s gone and that’s why you sat down on the floor in the tube station.’
‘Something like that.’
‘I understand perfectly: she was everything to you, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘So it was as if the world had been pulled out from under your feet and you had to sit down.’
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe you found yourself not caring very much whether you lived or died.’
I shrugged.
‘I have a sure instinct in these matters,’ he said, ‘and I say again that I saw death looking out of your eyes. And if the death in you wants to come out, as I think it does, I’ll buy it for a million pounds and give you a year to enjoy the million.’
‘You want to buy my death for a million pounds!’
‘That’s what I said: one million pounds, cash.’
‘What kind of a weirdo are you?’
‘The kind with lots of money.’ His lips, I noticed, were wet. He had ugly hands, hairy and with thick fingers. ‘Death fascinates me,’ he said, ‘how there’s one in each of us, waiting for its time. There’s one in me as I speak to you but it’s in no hurry. Yours, on the other hand, seems eager to come out. I want to watch it as one watches a woman undressing in a window; I want to think about how I’m going to fondle it and taste it when the time comes. Your death will be a juicy thing for me; when I was in you I could feel it, shy but ardent, responding to me.’
I remembered a dream: Serafina and I crossing a lion-coloured desert until there mysteriously appeared before us an oasis, the feathery palm trees real in a way that only palm trees in dreams are; there were wild asses drinking at a shining dark pool in which the palms were reflected. I said, ‘What would the actual arrangement be?’
‘As I’ve said, I’ll give you one million pounds cash and one year to live. During that time I’ll naturally want to stay in touch, visit you now and then, generally cultivate your ripening death. It’ll be exciting for both of us, I think.’
‘What happens at the end of the year?’
‘Not necessarily precisely at the year’s end but whenever I choose after that I’ll harvest you. It will be quick and merciful; you’ll cease upon the midnight with no pain and your troubles will be over. If there’s any money left I’ll see that it goes to a loved one or the charity of your choice.’
‘Would you do the harvesting yourse
lf or would Desmond do it for you?’
‘I’ll do it.’
‘Have you ever killed anyone before?’
‘Gentlemen don’t tell.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve never had a proposition like this before. It’s a big step to take, isn’t it.’
‘Next to being born I’d say it’s about the biggest.’
‘May I think about your offer?’ I heard myself say that and I couldn’t believe it. What was going on in my mind?
‘It’s definitely not to be undertaken lightly. Consider it carefully, dream about it even. Pelléas again tomorrow night – I’ll be in my box. Desmond will drive you home.’
In the lift I looked away from the mirror in which Desmond and I were reflected. The fluorescent light was both dim and unsparing. When we came out of the building the air on my face was cold but not refreshing.
Even at midday Belgravia looks like a necropolis to me but at least one has a sense of life going on not too far away; at three o’clock on this October morning, however, Eaton Place with its long vistas of sepulchral white-pillared black-numbered porticos seemed a street of ghost dwellings on a dead planet; I wondered what might be listening to my footsteps. Maybe this is a dream, I thought – a desert dream instead of an oasis one.
Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s motor, said Desmond when I asked him, was a 1931 King’s Own Daimler. It was in more than mint condition, a grand and stately shining black machine upholstered in leopardskin and with a bit more under the bonnet than had been available in 1931. It had of course the usual amenities: bar and escritoire, TV, telephone, fax, tape and CD players and a sound system of upper-class fidelity. This car, a fit conveyance for emperors, kings, sultans, and heads of public utilities, smelled like a life I had no idea of and slipped through the late-night streets like a shining shadow in a silent dream. I thought of Mélisande’s golden crown glimmering beneath the water. ‘Have you been with Mr Rinyo-Clacton long?’ I asked the back of Desmond’s head.
‘Yes.’
‘Has he done this sort of thing before?’