‘Don’t you?’
‘No, I do not. Our files are full of letters from clients who tell us that their lives are better in every way because of the Excelsior Self-Realisation Programme. The difference between you and me is that you’re slumming and you think in a slumming way whereas I am an honest man selling an honest service and I take pride in what I’m doing. Maybe you should sign up for the course; I’ll even give you a discount although you’re no longer an employee. I’m serious – I think it would help you.’
‘I’m deeply moved by your concern, Sanjay, but I’m not sure I want to realise any more of myself than I’ve already done. Maybe I’ll try it in my next incarnation.’
‘Ah! Is this a racist remark I’m hearing?’
‘Not at all; if I had any best friends I’m sure some of them would be reincarnations. Bye bye, Sanjay. Have a nice life.’
‘And you.’
We didn’t shake hands.
As of that morning I had £204.28 in my account at Lloyds and £732.74 at the Halifax. The rent for the flat, due in eight days, was £450.
8
Room 18
I needed a quiet place where things weren’t happening too fast; I have often found tranquillity at the National Gallery so I went there now. There was a gentle rain coming down when I emerged from Charing Cross tube station; the streets were bright with reflections, the buses were intensely red. Trafalgar Square was crowded as always and on the National Gallery porch tourists heavy with lenses peeped through viewfinders at Nelson on his column, at the fountains jetting their white water into the grey rain, at the bronze lions, and at other tourists wet and gleaming.
I headed directly for Room 18, a tiny room containing only the black perspective box or peepshow by Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678). I’d been hoping to have it to myself for a moment or two but a Japanese couple were occupying both peep-holes. As they left, a rush of schoolgirls filled the room with the smell of rain, their hot and feral fragrance, and their chatter; then they were gone like a flight of starlings and I was alone with the peepshow.
It’s about as big as a medium-large fish tank and the peep-holes, one at each end, offer two apparently three-dimensional views of the interior of a seventeenth-century Dutch house: in it are a number of red side chairs with leather seats, on one of which is a letter with the signature of the artist; there are pictures on the walls; there are windows and there are doorways to other rooms. In one of those rooms a woman lies in a curtained bed. Is she ill, is she dying? No one knows. In another room a woman sits reading while a man outside the window looks in at her. Elsewhere a solitary broom, that frequent emblem of Dutch tidiness, leans against a wall. There is of course one of those patterned marble floors one sees so often in Vermeer and de Hooch; alternate black and white concentric squares encouraging belief in the idea of order in the universe. On the floor sits a black-and-white spaniel of some kind; from the look on that dog’s face I’ve always assumed it to be male. I call him Hendryk.
One side of the box is fitted with clear glass; probably in the seventeenth century that side was covered with translucent paper and the box placed near a window or a candle for illumination; now it has its own special lamp. When you look through the glass it becomes clear that the apparent reality seen through the peep-holes is all illusion: things are not always in proper scale or relation one to the other: seats and backs of chairs go up walls, legs lie on the floor; the head of the woman in the bed is like a pancake.
Hendryk has his lower part flat on the floor and his upper part going up the wall but when you see him through the peep-hole he sits solidly on the floor with space all around him. There are no lenses in the peepholes and no mirrors in the box; the illusion is achieved by distorting a two-dimensional painting and controlling the angle and field of view in such a way that an undistorted three-dimensional scene is made to appear through the peep-holes.
It would have been a great deal simpler and certainly no more time-consuming to build a three-dimensional model of this interior but no, the illusion is the thing; and to produce this illusion van Hoogstraten had to work out the most abstruse calculations in perspective before painstakingly painting the walls and floor of the box. And the custodian of this illusion, the one who steadfastly contemplates it and meditates on it, is Hendryk. Inside his painted head he has of course his own illusory thoughts; we’ve had many interesting conversations and as often as not I find him helpful. Today, however, Hendryk gave me nothing. ‘What,’ I said, ‘am I all alone then?’
‘Never, dear boy!’ said the voice of Mr Rinyo-Clacton. Yes, there he was, no more smartly dressed than I, wearing jeans and a blue anorak, his smell compounded and intensified by the wet Gore-Tex.
‘Have you been following me?’ I said.
‘Not really. You just happened to be ahead of me as I was coming here. That dog is really something, eh? That dog is at the heart of the illusion of reality, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I’d prefer not to say just now if you don’t mind.’
‘Mind? Why should I mind? I respect your intellectual privacy. Let’s have lunch, shall we?’
‘Thank you but I think I need to be alone for a while.’
‘Right you are, Jonathan. I’m off then, see you tonight at the opera.’
I didn’t say anything. I watched him go, then I tried Hendryk again and again he gave me nothing. I abandoned the peepshow and fell back to a secondary position, Room 16 and de Hooch’s The Courtyard of a House in Delft. The clean-swept courtyard and its tutelary broom, the goodwife with her daughter, and seen through a red-brick archway, the shadowy figure of a second woman with her back to the observer, standing like a sentinel guarding that cloistered domesticity – everything in that picture invited me to rest awhile in its quiet world. But today there was no rest. I had a solitary lunch at The Brasserie, then I went out into the rain again.
9
Katerina
‘Hello,’ said a woman’s voice.
‘Is this Katerina?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve got one of your handbills and I think I need a no-bullshit modern psychic. Can I make an appointment to see you?’
She didn’t answer. After a few seconds I said, ‘Hello? Are you there?’
‘Sorry, I was still listening to your voice.’ Her own voice was very shapely, with a slight German accent. ‘You want to see me?’ She said it as if she meant the actual seeing, and there came to mind the Caspar David Friedrich painting of his wife, seen from behind, standing at a window and looking across the River Elbe at a row of distant poplars.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You sound as if you’re standing at a window looking across a river.’
‘Like the Friedrich painting? No, I’m standing in the kitchen looking at a dripping tap. What is your name, please?’
‘Jonathan Fitch.’
‘Your voice troubles me, Mr Fitch. What do you think I can do for you?’
‘I don’t know, but talking to you seems to be the next thing for me to do. What do you charge?’
‘Twenty-five pounds if I can do something, nothing if I cannot. It comes and goes – sometimes yes and sometimes no. I’m seeing blue eyes, fair hair. Am I right?’
‘Yes. What else do you see?’
‘Nothing. I’m hearing that you’re afraid, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Me too. This is not unnatural to the human condition. Even sometimes it is useful. Can you be here in a quarter of an hour or so?’
‘Yes, I can.’
‘OK, you come, we talk – we see how it goes.’ She gave me her address. ‘I am Flat A; the name on the buzzer is Bechstein, like the piano.’
She was in Earl’s Court Road, a little way past the Waterstone’s at the corner of Penywern Road, in one of those big white Victorian houses converted to flats. When I came up the steps I saw a silver-haired woman looking out of the front window. I buzzed the Bechstein button, said I was Jonathan Fitch, and she came to the door. In he
r sixties, I thought; hair in a Psyche knot. She would have been a beauty when young – quite tall, with the daring look of one who might have parachuted behind enemy lines. Wearing an old grey cardigan and a faded print dress. Black stockings and snakeskin shoes that must have been fifty years old. I wondered if she was seeing into my mind where my night with Mr Rinyo-Clacton was replaying itself more or less continuously.
‘So,’ she said, shaking my hand, ‘here are you and it’s very bad, that I already feel. Come in.’ From the next floor came the sound of Pelléas et Mélisande. Also the smell of something with a lot of garlic. ‘Mr Perez,’ she said, ‘in the flat above me, is a heavy Debussy-user.’
‘It’s a small world.’
‘He wears two-tone shoes, carries a malacca cane, and has an extensive record collection that I have come to know very well. Being psychic I predict Ravel within the next hour.’ Pelléas and the smell receded as she closed the door of her flat behind us.
The high-ceilinged front room, the one I’d seen from the street, had nothing in it but a table and two chairs. There was an Art Nouveau lamp on the table making a little pool of light in the dusk that was gathering in the room. The white walls were bare except for a large framed print of Dürer’s Melencolia.
I hadn’t looked at that engraving for a long time, and seeing the darkly brooding winged woman or angel now I was struck by the energy of her brooding, the power in it; her thinking was not simply contemplative, it was going to make something happen: what with the dividers in her hand, the plane and saw, the hammer and tongs and other ironmongery, she seemed to be in the planning stages of some decisive action. The sandglass behind her right wing – surely that indicated that time was running out. And the bell nearby – for whom and for what would it ring? Or had it already rung? That sleeping dog, was she going to let it lie? And what about the polyhedron – was that not a reminder of the many sides of everything? Angel or woman, Melencolia with her wings could rise above the immediate problem for a longer view. The dog, such a very thin dog with its ribs sticking out, looked like a greyhound, a dog that hunts not by scent but by sight – it sees its prey and gives chase. On the wall behind the figure in the picture was a magic square in which all the numbers added up to thirty-four whether you did them vertically, horizontally, or on the diagonal.
Melencolia was not alone in the picture. Seated by a ladder and a pair of scales (Justice?), either close by or on the polyhedron (hard to make out which), was a surly winged infant, possibly asleep or perhaps just sulking. Was he the child of Melencolia? The picture seemed full of clues and portents, like a whole deck of Tarot cards. Undoubtedly Dürer, when he engraved Melencolia in 1514, had his own symbology in mind but now the picture was alone and independent of its maker; it could say what it liked, speak freely to any stranger and differently to each. I was troubled by that surly child; what would he grow up to be?
‘You like melancholy?’ said Katerina. ‘For you it’s a normal state, yes?’
‘It is now.’
‘Maybe before now also. It’s a natural state, melancholy – like fear. Both belong to the human condition. Now I am going to tell you something that I’m wondering about: apart from this session we’re going to have now I have a feeling that some kind of connection exists or is going to exist between you and me, a link of some sort, a Verbindung. Strange, yes? Do you feel that?’
‘I don’t know – when the handbill was given to me I felt as if I’d been waiting for it.’
She moved behind me. ‘I’m just going to put my hand on the back of your neck,’ she said. Her touch was light, her hand cool and dry. ‘Now, come and sit down. We talk about this.’
We sat at the table facing each other. She was wearing silver earrings, little owls. It was getting dark outside and the two of us in the lamplight were reflected in the window. The room behind us was lost in shadow. The glass bell-flower shade of the lamp was a delicate blue; the light through it seemed to come from a time when all kinds of questions had better answers than they do now. At the base of the lamp was a graceful little woman, bronze not spelter, whose figure was more revealed than concealed by the clinging drapery loosely belted at her hips. She had a quill pen in her right hand and her left held one end of a scroll that was balanced on her thigh. Her bare right foot was forward; her left rested lightly on a book. Her hair was loosely pinned up at the back and she wore a wreath in it – laurel, I thought. Her eyes were downcast, her sweet face pensive. I put my hand around her and ran my thumb over her belly and down her thigh. The room grew darker beyond the circle of the lamplight.
Katerina was looking towards the street and absently rubbing her left arm. The sleeve of the cardigan slid up and I saw numbers on her wrist. She offered me a cigarette; I shook my head. Did I mind if she smoked, she asked, and when I said no she lit up, took a deep drag, and coughed for a while. ‘I thought I am already dying from so many cigarettes,’ she said, ‘but no, still I am here. Many times I have foreseen my death and many times it has not happened. Some psychic I am. Give me your hands. May I call you Jonathan?’
‘Please do.’
‘Jonathan, do you know why I put my hand on the back of your neck?’
‘I think so.’
‘Shall I say what I am feeling? I think it will not be a big surprise for you.’
‘Yes, say it.’
‘Death is following you.’
‘I’m not sure whether it’s following me or I’m following it.’
‘I can feel your uncertainty and I feel the closeness of death but I don’t know what this is all about.’
‘I’d rather not explain just yet; first I’d like to know what you’re getting from me because I don’t quite know where I am with what’s happening.’
‘OK – I try to feel what goes on in you where the words are not. Two, I get: death times two. Here I am confused with these two deaths.’ She let go of my hands and brought her own together on her chest with their knuckles touching. ‘One is real, it threatens from the outside; the other is in the mind and it threatens with the mind, yes?’
‘I hope it’s only in the mind. I’ve got three months ahead of me before I can be HIV-tested.’
‘You have been with a man?’
‘Once only, last night.’
‘No protection?’
‘No protection.’
She was quiet for a few moments. Upstairs the murmurous sea-changes of Pelléas, still in Act One, stopped and the Ravel trio for piano, violin and cello, the one featured in the film Un Cœur en Hiver, began. Serafina and I had listened to that trio in my flat the first time we made love; I remembered her undressing for me, the poignancy of her body in the lamplight, the pearliness and the shadows.
‘So,’ said Katerina, ‘you have played arsehole roulette and now you are afraid. I have several clients who have come to me like this. Sometimes, not always, I can see what other people cannot but I have never been able to see into the future and I can’t say what will be three months from now.’
She took my hands again. ‘In each of us lives the little animal of the self: nothing to do with the mind, it goes its own way; there is no talking to it. Sometimes it wants to live; sometimes it wants to die. Maybe you are in hospital for surgery, and while you are anaesthetised the little animal of the self makes up its mind. “OK,” it says, “this time I don’t die.” Or it says, “That’s it – I have had enough and it’s time to pack it in.” So now I listen for what the little animal of you is saying and it says yes and also it says no. It’s a little confused, I think.’
‘So am I.’ Upstairs, Ravel was cut off halfway through the first movement and Berlioz came on with Symphonie Fantastique.
‘What is it with this Mr Perez?’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘His thoughts are sad; he has many regrets. Talk to me about yourself. Have you now become a convert to love between men?’
‘No, it’s just that I seem to have come unglued since Serafina left me.’ Then of course I had to tell h
er all about Serafina.
‘Jonathan,’ said Katerina, ‘this that you have told me about you and Serafina is of course a big thing in your life but it is not – how shall I say it? – too much off the beaten track. Left to yourselves, the two of you would either find a way of getting past this together or going ahead separately. What I think is the big priority here is this death business. Something comes into my mind now and I say it; perhaps it is stupid but I say it anyhow. Have you ever read a book by the American writer John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra?’
‘No.’
‘In the front of it, for an epigraph, there is a tiny little story, only a paragraph it is, by Somerset Maugham: a merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the market and there the servant is jostled by a woman whom he recognises as Death. She makes what he thinks is a threatening gesture so he hurries home and says to his master, “Please lend me your horse. I saw Death in the market and she threatened me, so I want to ride to Samarra to get away from her.” The merchant lends him the horse and then he goes to the market and accosts Death. “Why did you threaten my servant?” he says. “That was not a threatening gesture,” says Death. “It was one of surprise. I was startled to see that man in Baghdad today because I have an appointment with him this evening in Samarra.”’ She blew out a big cloud of smoke. ‘Tell me your thoughts about this story.’
‘My first thought is that in this story Death is a woman. Until now, whenever I’ve read of Death as a person or seen it pictured it’s been male. Somerset Maugham was homosexual; maybe for him Death was a woman. Of course there’s a feminine element in every man.’
‘In you?’
‘In every man.’
‘What do you think it wants, your feminine element?’
‘Katerina, I thought you were a clairvoyant, not a shrink.’
‘Have you ever watched Oprah Winfrey? These days everybody is a shrink. Don’t answer me if you don’t want to.’
‘I don’t know what my feminine element wants but I think my masculine element is tired and full of uncertainty.’