I’d told Mr Rinyo-Clacton to come to Earl’s Court by underground because I wanted him to be down among non-millionaires in the rush hour, wanted him to be uninsulated by his wealth when he came to our meeting. He’d sounded so humble on the telephone! Until now, when I thought about him, it was mostly him in relation to me, not him in relation to himself and whatever made up that self. Now I found myself wondering what it was like to be Mr Rinyo-Clacton when he woke up in the morning and when he went to sleep at night. Katerina had said there was fear in him. Of what? Was it possible that he could be afraid of me? Had he ever actually killed anyone? I had no facts about him except those that were part of our brief history. He’d said he was serious about killing me but he’d also said, in his new humble mode, that people change, that he intended me no harm in this meeting that could be our last.
Serafina was out doing the shopping; the flat was full of dumbness and irresolution and I had a lot of time to get through before the meeting with Mr Rinyo-Clacton. I needed some music and I was cruising the CD shelves when I found myself humming the opening of the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 , the Pathétique, to which my mind was singing:
Earl’s Court at half-past five today —
what is it that he want to say?
‘Give me a break,’ I said, but I did want to hear that music and I didn’t have it on CD. There was a tape somewhere in the flat so I rummaged in boxes, behind books, through random stacks of this and that and ad hoc heaps of clutter for about an hour and a half while hot waves of aggravation flooded through me. Finally I gave up and went to the Music Discount Centre by South Ken tube station and bought the recording by Mikhail Pletnev and the Russian National Orchestra.
Funny, I thought as I left the shop and walked into the unblinking daylight, here I’ve got this poor bastard’s heart and soul, his life and death really, all digitalised on a little disc and I can play it straight through or start it in the middle or repeat each track several times or jump up and down on it and throw it in the dustbin. Destroy this one and there are hundreds of thousands more, recorded by every orchestra that’s internationally known and some that aren’t. The man himself is dead and gone but his misery is alive and well and available worldwide. T-shirts too, undoubtedly.
When I got home I slid the disc into the player and heard first the low hum of the darkness where the soul of the thing lived, then the bassoon slowly dragging itself all unwilling into the light. Oh, what a sad bassoon!
‘Kindred spirit?’ said Serafina, back from the shops.
‘He certainly knew what trouble was.’
‘Don’t we all.’
‘Yes, but not many of us are advised by a so-called “court of honour” to kill ourselves and then go ahead and do it.’
‘Look who’s talking.’
‘I wasn’t pressured into this thing I’m in.’
‘This thing we’re in,’ she said over her shoulder as she put things in the fridge. ‘Poor old Pyotr Ilyich lived in the wrong time and place for being queer. If he were alive in London now he’d be knighted and completely at home in the world of the arts and he wouldn’t need to compose a pathetic symphony.’
‘The word that Tchaikovsky used, according to my Oxford Dictionary of Music, was patetichesky, which means “emotional” or “passionate” rather than “pathetic”.’
‘Whatever. He was still a pathetic man.’
‘Fina, why do you sound so hostile?’
‘Because sometimes I think that when you met your new friend you connected with the real you. Maybe there are still bugs in this place, so I’ll say it loud and clear, CAN YOU HEAR ME, MR RINYO-CLACTON? SOMETIMES I THINK YOU AND JONATHAN ARE THE REAL ITEM AROUND HERE.’ Speaking to me again, she said, ‘If we both come out of this alive I might eventually get over your womanising but this other thing could really finish us.’
The music seemed to be begging forgiveness and looking for a way ahead. I put my arms around Serafina but she made herself rigid and turned her face away from me. ‘Maybe, Jonathan,’ she said, ‘you’ve got decisions to make.’
‘No, I don’t – the only future I want is one with you. What happened with me and him wasn’t primarily a sexual act for me.’
‘What was it then?’
‘You were gone and I didn’t think you’d ever come back and I felt so low and lonely …’
‘Go on.’
‘I wanted to be relieved of the burden of myself, of my manhood – I wanted someone else to take charge of me.’
‘And what now? Are you expecting me to take charge of you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, what have you got in mind? What are your plans for the future?’
Something made me hold back from talking about the future until after my meeting with Mr Rinyo-Clacton. ‘I haven’t done that much planning.’
‘Now might be a good time to begin. I’m off to the Vegemania.’ As always when she went out, she left an absence behind her.
Tchaikovsky had apparently pulled himself together and was marching along purposefully with a snappy allegro molto vivace as if he was going in to win. I knew how it ended so I stopped the music, made myself a cup of tea, sat down at my desk, and began to write this.
33
Wimbledon Train
Early dark, November dark, November lamps and faces and shop windows and footsteps sharp and cold. People bursting from the silent-roaring ocean of the day and swimming upstream like salmon into the November evening. The finale of the Pathétique, the adagio lamentoso that I hadn’t listened to at home, was playing in my head and it seemed to me the proper soundtrack for Pizza Huts and Taco Bells and big red 74 buses novembering down the Earl’s Court Road. Fifty-three years old he was when he died, Pyotr Ilyich, nine days after conducting the première of the Pathétique in October 1893. Where was that court of honour now, that told him death would be a good career move?
I’m always early for every appointment, I can’t help it; it was only twenty past five when I reached the tube station and stood there smelling roasted chestnuts and waiting for Mr Rinyo-Clacton. ‘This could be the last time,’ he kept saying in my mind. How? Was it possible that he was dying, that he had tried to shelter from his own death in mine and now was relenting? I saw myself visiting him in hospital, being his comrade in his last moments. But the awful things he had done – his calculated seduction of Serafina and his various intrusions into our lives! How could I be the comrade of such a man? Whatever was about to happen, I felt now that he was the weak one and I was the strong one, and I liked that feeling.
Suddenly here came Katerina looking like a storm-driven ship about to smash itself on rocks. ‘Katerina!’ I said. She seemed not to hear me, but hurried into the station and down the stairs. I followed as she went through the turnstile with her travel permit; when I saw her go down to the westbound platform I bought a ticket to West Brompton and went down the stairs after her as a Wimbledon train pulled in.
Katerina made her way through the crowd, moving quickly past the refreshment kiosk, past the board that showed the incoming trains, past the Piccadilly Line stairs. She stopped by the next stairs as I caught up with her. The doors of the Wimbledon train stood open; passengers getting on pushed past those getting off as Mr Rinyo-Clacton stepped on to the platform and found himself face to face with Katerina.
‘Kandis?’ she said. She passed a hand over her eyes and shook her head in evident disbelief. ‘No, not possible – Theodor, is it you?’
Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s eyes opened very wide, his mouth was a silent O. He stepped back, the doors of the carriage closed on his coat, and the train moved out, dragging him along the platform and into the tunnel as people shouted and pointed. ‘No!’ I said. ‘Wait!’ But he was gone, and never said a word.
34
Magic No
So here I am – Jonathan Fitch on Chapter 34 of my story. I’m very superstitious and superstition creates its own rules: I knew it would be wrong to contrive to end th
is with a chapter total the same as that of Melencolia’s magic square but I thought it would be a good omen if it fell out that way. That’s not going to happen now: melancholy yes; magic no.
When I saw Mr Rinyo-Clacton step back and get caught in the carriage doors I said, ‘No! Wait!’ A useless thing to say, I know, but I was overwhelmed by a sense of this thing being cut off short, being stopped unresolved. I was shocked by the taking-away of his death from me by this weird deus ex machina. Dea, rather, this old woman who suddenly finished off a man who’d become some kind of a cornerstone of my existence. There were so many things to be worked out before I could be the hero of my story, and now the process would never be complete and I’d never be that hero.
Platform 4 was taped off and the station closed. People streamed out into Earl’s Court Road, marvelling at the drama that had heightened their reality. I told a London Transport policeman that I was a close friend and he directed Katerina and me to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.
‘Kandis?’ I said to Katerina, ‘Theodor Kandis, was that his name?’
‘That was his name.’
‘Who was he?’
She stifled a sob and shook her head. We took a taxi, and all the way to the hospital she sat with her hands over her face, speechlessly rocking back and forth.
35
Smaller
Accident and emergency at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital: cloistered and quiet, full of quickness and slow time, close to but distant from the crawling traffic in the Fulham Road and the rain now making the streets shiny. Sister Melanie Quinn, large and well-built, reminded me of Melencolia, whose face, as I recalled it now, was quite a nice one, friendly even. She drew aside the curtain of the cubicle and there he was, completely submissive to Death.
‘There was no damage to his face,’ she said, and lifted the sheet. His face looked much smaller than usual, softer and younger, not sulking at all. The eyes were closed.
‘That’s him,’ I said. ‘T. Rinyo-Clacton.’
‘That’s him,’ said Katerina. ‘His face is just exactly the same as his father’s.’
‘Are you next of kin?’ said Sister Quinn.
‘I’m his mother,’ said Katerina.
36
The Face of Dieter Kandis
‘To know what is coming,’ said Katerina, ‘and to be able to do nothing about it is not good. When Hitler came to power in 1933 I was nine years old, but already when I was seven I was seeing in my dreams the railhead and the chimneys at the end of the journey. My father was a well-connected lawyer who thought of himself as more German than Jewish. He and my mother did not take my fears seriously, they thought I am a hysteric. When they finally realised what was happening it was already too late.
‘About Auschwitz I tell you only what concerns us now. I was on the list for medical experiments but this did not happen. Dieter Kandis was one of Mengele’s assistants. He helped with the experiments and he helped himself to any females he fancied. His name actually means ‘sugar-candy’. This was in 1942. I was eighteen then and pretty, and after he raped me he took me off the experiment list and installed me in his quarters.
‘He had a piano there and a good collection of music; he himself was not very advanced but when he found that I was he made me play for him every evening. He was particularly fond of Haydn sonatas. So I was a well-fed whore who played the piano while other women were tortured and starved and worked to death. And there was the smell from the crematoria. My parents by then were dead.
‘In 1943 I became pregnant by Kandis and he told me I will go back on the experiment list if I try to abort it. So I didn’t. The child, a son, was born on the fourth of November. Kandis named him Theodor, ‘gift of God’, and handed him over to the eugenics people for research in what they called ‘cross-breeding’. I didn’t see him again and for these many years I didn’t know if he is alive or dead. I don’t think he ever knew who his mother was.
‘Towards the end of 1944 I was again and again seeing Russian soldiers in my dreams. Kandis had me moved to the IG-Farben barracks where the forced-labour women lived. These workers did not get the famous Buna soup but were properly fed. He gave me some money and he said, ‘Thank you for the Haydn. Tschuss.’ Then I didn’t see him again.
‘When the Russians came in January 1945 I walked out of there with the forced-labour women, mostly Poles.’ She rubbed her left wrist. ‘Since then I have tried not to meet anyone else who was at Auschwitz.’
In the light of the blue bell-flower lamp her face was soft and dreamy. Her glass was empty and I filled it again. On her wall Melencolia also had a soft and dreamy look. A whole lot of woman, Melencolia: drawn by Dürer but promising opulence of the Rubens sort under her clothes. The child, perhaps I’d been too hard on him in the past; he was, after all, only a little fellow. Had he been crying? The dog was sleeping as before; the polyhedron flaunted its many facets. The sound of the rain and the drops running down the window panes curtained us in and made the room more cosy. I said to Katerina, ‘When I saw you hurrying to the tube station, did you know then … ’
‘That he was my son? I think I almost knew. In our very first session, when I suddenly pulled my hands away from yours it was because I saw the face of Dieter Kandis bending over me. I have seen his face often in dreams but this was a very strong apparition when I was fully awake. The second time it happened was when you put the bundle of money into my hands. It hit me like a bolt of lightning, I thought my heart would jump out of my body. It happened again when I held the book in my hands. Then, this afternoon, it was like a film in my head: this man with the face of Dieter Kandis on the Wimbledon train coming to Earl’s Court. When I saw him get off the train and I spoke to him, he looked at me as if the name hit him also like a bolt of lightning from the past.’
‘Are you dead certain this was your son?’
‘I have many doubts about many things, Jonathan, but when I know something I know it.’
‘And now he’s dead.’
‘Now he’s dead, yes. But the past doesn’t die.’
37
All There Is
I had met Mr Rinyo-Clacton on a Monday. On Thursday of the following week he was dead. Eleven days. That whole thing with him from beginning to end, that’s all it was: eleven days. Well, no, actually. Because things don’t end; they just accumulate. It was only three months ago that he died; it seems longer.
That Thursday evening after identifying the body Katerina and I bought a bottle of Glenfiddich, went to her flat and drank more than half of it. ‘What about the funeral?’ I said. ‘The phone’s ex-directory but maybe if I go round to the flat Desmond will tell me.’
‘Wait,’ she said.
On Friday the papers reported the death and said that the name was thought to be an alias but there was no mention of a funeral.
Saturday morning a motorbike messenger brought me a parcel wrapped in brown paper. For a weird moment I wondered if it might be Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s head. When I’d undone the paper and the bubble-wrap I found the Rinyo-Clacton pot I’d seen in his bedroom. ‘What are we all but infirm vessels?’ I said.
‘Did you say something?’ said Serafina from the kitchen.
‘Not really.’ The pot had no lid but was covered with brown paper secured by masking tape. Taped to the paper was an envelope on which was written, in neat block letters, NO FUNERAL. In the envelope were the torn pieces of the document that began:
I, Jonathan Fitch, being of sound mind and with my faculties unimpaired, not under duress or the influence of any drugs, hereby assign to T. Rinyo-Clacton …
I took the pot in both hands and shook it gently. The contents shifted with a soft and whispery sound. I removed the brown paper and saw, as I had expected, greyish-white ashes. Serafina came over to have a look. ‘Is that who I think it is?’ she said.
‘Probably.’
‘Give it to Katerina – she’s his mother after all.’
I rang up Katerina, and that evening while Serafin
a was at the Vegemania we went to the Hungerford Bridge. The weather was wet and blowy; we were both wearing anoraks, and the rain pattering on my hood made me feel roofed and indoors. To the man huddled in a blanket at the near end I gave a twenty-pound note. ‘Compliments of Mr Rinyo-Clacton,’ I said. He gave me a suspicious look but thanked me.
Traffic was heavy on the bridge: people full of Saturday night heading for their culture fix on the South Bank. Katerina and I walked through and around puddles to the bay where Mr Rinyo-Clacton and I had stood looking down at the dark river. ‘Shining golden goblets,’ he had said, ‘but the wine is black water; that’s all there is, now and for ever.’
The wind had died down; the air was calm and still; the view sparkled through the rain. To our right the Festival Hall beckoned, Come! To our left Charing Cross Station signalled, Go!
I looked at Katerina. ‘Do you want to say anything?’
She shook her head.
I held the pot out over the water. ‘That’s all there is,’ I said, and turned it upside-down. Just then there was a sudden gust that blew some of the ashes back on to Katerina and me. I let go of the pot, watched it fall, had almost the sensation of falling with it, saw and heard the splash as it filled and sank. ‘Now and for ever,’ I said as I wiped the ashes off my face and anorak.
38
The Kakemono of Kwashin Koji
Now I’ll never know what Mr Rinyo-Clacton wanted to talk about that Thursday. Had he had a change of heart? Was he going to call the whole thing off? Was he perhaps terminally ill and wanted to die with a clear conscience? Or had he in fact been writing a novel and had decided to abandon his researches and perhaps the writing as well? Had he meant this meeting to be our last conversation and he would then step out of my life or was it to be the last time for us to talk and our only meeting after that would be at the time of my death?