Mr. Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

  ‘How do you do?’ I said, and we shook hands.

  ‘You know, Mr Fitch, the interest on your Classic Account scarcely offers an appropriate return on the sort of money you’ve just deposited. Our advisers are always available to help you with a financial programme.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘I’m going to have to explore various possibilities.’ I was already feeling burdened by the money. I went back to the flat with the trolley but I couldn’t bear to stay there. The place was filled with the goneness of Serafina but saying that doesn’t begin to describe how it was. I was used to being there alone for hours on end while she was busy with dinners at the Vegemania but her presence was always there. I know I sound gross talking about food so much but the kitchen particularly was ghastly now that she hadn’t been in it and wouldn’t be in it, handling things in that good way of hers, maybe singing softly to herself while she cooked. Gone, gone, gone.

  I put a few things in a weekend bag and walked down Earl’s Court Road to Penywern. Some of the tall white Victorian houses with pillared and balconied fronts were hotels and I cruised slowly past them waiting for one of them to reach out and pull me in.

  LORD JIM HOTEL, said the gilded letters on a green awning. Lord Jim! Conrad’s flawed hero, Chief Mate of the Patna, who abandoned what he thought was a sinking ship and left hundreds of Mecca-bound pilgrims to their fate. Quite an august entrance with broad steps, two white urns filled with healthy-looking vines, and three sturdy white pillars. Through the glass doors I saw an Art Deco chandelier, three tiers like an upside-down wedding cake and all pinky-orange and glittering like a beacon of tranquillity and elsewhere-ness.

  There was a beautiful black-haired girl at the Reception window. ‘Are your people from Bombay?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I was born here.’

  ‘Have you read Lord Jim?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did the hotel come to have this name?’

  ‘The original owners were Polish and they were big Conrad fans.’

  ‘Did they ever abandon ship?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  A room with a shower and toilet was forty-five pounds. There was a ten-pound deposit for use of the telephone. ‘How long will you be staying?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Can I tell you later?’

  ‘All right. Checkout time is twelve noon.’ She gave me the key to Room Twenty-one on the second floor and I took the lift up to it. By now I had settled into my new mode of perception, an ad hoc kind of thing in which each sequence put itself together in its own way. I opened the door into the high-ceilinged room and breathed a little sigh.

  This was a quiet place that had nothing in it that was personal to anyone; it was not the big blast of reality (and surreality) that waited outside; it was the limited reality of a small hotel room, like a simple melody played on a bamboo flute, cool as the plashing of water falling from level to level in the ferny-dappled sunlight of a garden. The soap dispenser over the sink charmed me. The upholstered headboard of the bed offered a muted view of distant mountains and winding rivers. The wallpaper gave me no backtalk, the bedspread and the carpet effaced themselves in pinks and greys. A print on the wall showed a foreground of something botanical, cow parsley for all I knew, with what might have been the South Downs in the distance.

  The mirror on the door had no pretensions to deep insights and contented itself with a generalised and simplified me. I looked out of the window and saw two chestnut trees. ‘Yes!’ I said, and took off my shoes and lay back on the bed. I notice that men in films often put their feet on a bedspread without taking off their shoes. Another thing they do in films in moments of stress or heavy portent is go to the sink and splash cold water over their faces and the backs of their necks. I don’t do that either.

  I had a half hour before I had to leave for my consultation with Jim Reilly; I rang the desk and asked the beautiful black-haired girl to call me in thirty minutes, then on an impulse I checked the two drawers of the bedside table for a Gideon Bible. There was none. I closed my eyes and had a tiny kip in which I dreamed of a dark place where I saw, far away, the green glow of Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s desk lamp.

  16

  Objectives?

  I took the Edgware Road train to Notting Hill Gate and the Central Line from there to Chancery Lane. The afternoon reality was a low-budget sort of thing; I wasn’t sure that everything I saw even had a back to it. None of the people in the underground had speaking parts and many of the faces were blank. The Gray’s Inn Road scenery had been done without much detail – a shop that sold secondhand office furnishings and another that cut keys were fairly realistic but I doubted that the doors actually opened and closed. The Morgenstern building was a little more convincing – a pseudo-Bauhaus thing with practical glass doors.

  The security man at the reception desk looked me over critically but I brazened it out, signed in, and took the lift to the third floor. ‘Jonathan Fitch to see Jim Reilly,’ I said to the smart young woman who greeted me. She asked me if I’d like a coffee, I said yes, and she showed me to a conference room filled with business-grade sunlight.

  Jim Reilly appeared shortly; he looked and sounded pretty much like me. There are probably a lot of people in the potential-realising-and-maximising-business who look and sound like us – decent, clean-cut types with good teeth, firm handshakes, and clear eyes that don’t blink too much. Jim had about two kilos of bumph under his arm which he laid on the dark and shining table. He took a sheet from the top and handed it to me. ‘I’ve put together a little agenda here’, he said, ‘of the points I’d like to cover in this first meeting.’ I looked at the agenda:

  1 MORGENSTERN – WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE OFFER

  2 CLIENT HISTORY

  3 CLIENT OBJECTIVES

  4 INVESTMENT PHILOSOPHY – BUILDING THE PYRAMID

  5 PORTFOLIO PRIORITIES – CAPITAL GROWTH OR INCOME?

  And so on for a dozen or more points. My eyes travelled down the agenda but my mind had already fixed on Point 3: CLIENT OBJECTIVES! Did I have any, and what were they? The smart young woman brought in coffee and I drank it while Jim Reilly went on for quite a long time like a TV with the sound turned off. Every now and then he paused to remove some of the papers from the top of the two-kilo stack and place them before me while I nodded or tilted my head to one side appreciatively and made such verbal responses as my mouth could manage. Objectives!

  Jim Reilly was looking at me expectantly; it seemed to be my turn to speak. ‘I think I’d like to invest some of the money in a business,’ I heard myself say.

  ‘Have you a particular business in mind?’

  ‘A restaurant.’

  ‘Right.’ He made a note. ‘Any idea of how much you’d want to set aside for that?’

  ‘Not yet but I can find out. And I’d like the rest of the money to produce income for two people to live on.’

  ‘Marriage plans?’

  ‘It’s always a possibility.’ I told Jim I’d be in touch when I was further along with my restaurant thoughts and I left feeling very much a man of the world.

  17

  Two Minds, One Thought

  I wonder if riding the Central Line east and west across London is more easeful than going north and south? Travelling from Chancery Lane to Notting Hill Gate I felt, I don’t know – at home? Yes, that’s the right way of putting it. I felt at home beneath the surface of things, out of the light of day, between here and there. Yes, the betweenness of it was good, nothing was final; everything was in suspension, not yet precipitated by the forces I felt in me and around me. I believe everything I read about ley lines and force-fields and the power of earth and stones. London clay must have some power as well. ‘What are we but clay, and infirm vessels all,’ Mr Rinyo-Clacton had said.

  The rush hour hadn’t begun yet, the faces and the spaces were of the afternoon calm. A man with an accordion came into the train at Tottenham Court Road, one of those terribly extrovert buske
rs with a weatherbeaten face and a gravelly voice. The woman bottling for him had a similar face and eyes like an owl. ‘Ladies and gentleman!’ said the accordion man in a peat-bog accent, ‘a little music for your entertainment between the hither and the farther shores of your journey!’

  I always give money to buskers in the corridors of the underground but I hate it when these gravelly-voiced extroverts come into my carriage through the London clay beneath the surface of things. Naturally the first number he played was ‘Caravan’ and with it came the Place des Vosges and the feathery palms and the dark and shining pool. O God! I thought, why didn’t you make me a better man?

  ‘God bless ya, love,’ said the woman with the owl-eyes as I dropped some coins into her cup and wiped away my tears. ‘It really gets to ya, doesn’t it.’

  ‘Please,’ I said, ‘tell him not to play “The Sheik of Araby” next.’

  But he did. The two of them got out at Bond Street while the music kept going on in my head.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked a sixtyish woman with a National Gallery carrier bag and a copy of The Family of Pascual Duarte.

  ‘He shot his dog,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Pascual Duarte. He had a setter bitch and she looked at him as if she was going to accuse him of something and he shot her.’

  ‘I haven’t got to that part yet,’ she said. ‘Are you having a bad time?’

  ‘Nothing special.’ I wanted to rest my head on her bosom but I thought I’d better not. ‘Thanks,’ I added with a grateful smile while the accordion and the Place des Vosges and the palm trees and the dark and shining pool continued.

  At Notting Hill Gate the reality was very solid – everything three-dimensional and fully functioning. I went up the escalator and down the stairs to the District Line. Little clumps of dark figures moving about or standing, sitting and squatting against the wall under dim yellow lamps. The board said the Wimbledon train was next. I always go to the far end of the westbound platform where you can look up at the sky and a high brick wall on the other side of the cut. It’s an interesting space, that: the curved glass-and-steel canopy of the station comes to an end; then this red brick wall rears up with street-level houses at the top of it under the open sky; at the end of that short open space the tunnel again shows its round black maw.

  This red brick wall is faced with tall narrow arches, something like the arches one sees under aqueducts except that these are filled with brick instead of air. This wall always makes me think – I don’t know why – of Florence in the time of the Borgias. It was evening now; beyond the feeble yellow lamps the sky was dark; the wall looked sinister, standing tall in bricks of shadow. Did Lucrezia Borgia actually poison people? I couldn’t remember what the latest word was on that.

  At Earl’s Court I phoned Katerina. ‘Can I come round?’ I said. Listen to me, I thought – always needing something from a woman.

  ‘Twenty minutes,’ she said. ‘I’ve got someone with me now.’

  I went to the Waterstone’s at her corner. From the giant photo in the window Dr Ernst von Luker fixed me with his piercing gaze. ‘Wimp,’ he said. He pronounced it ‘Vimp’. The massed copies of Mind – the Gap sang their titles at me like a Eurovision entry.

  ‘What gap?’ I said. ‘Between the real and the ideal? Between then and now?’

  ‘Between you and Jesus,’ said a bearded passer-by who passed by before I could think of anything clever to say.

  I went into Waterstone’s and in the Reference section I opened a copy of Who’s Who but there was no Rinyo-Clacton listed. Browsing aimlessly to kill time I found a table stacked with The Carnivore Cookbook by Celestine Latour – the famous soprano’s favourite meat dishes. From the jacket smiled the delicate carnivorous Mélisande who looked so much like Serafina. I turned a few pages idly and was looking at a photogragh of ossobucco when I felt a hand on my bottom.

  I jabbed backward with my elbow into the iron-hard stomach of Mr Rinyo-Clacton. ‘You see?’ he said, indicating the cookbook. ‘They’re all carnivores, every one.’ He was wearing a black shell suit and black Reeboks and smelled as if he’d run all the way from Belgravia.

  ‘You bastard,’ I said.

  ‘Listen to this.’ He was holding a copy of Mind – the Gap. He opened it and read from the flap copy:

  ‘ “For too long, says Dr von Luker, author of Illustrations of Reality, the brain has huddled by the little fire of limited reality while the mind prowls like a hungry animal in the darkness beyond. In this new work he challenges the reader to make the vital hook-up between brain and mind.”

  ‘That’s where the real things happen, Jonny – in the darkness beyond the fires. This book is from me to you.’

  ‘Never mind that – I saw you at the Vegemania. You’re out to ruin even the little bit of time I’ve got left, aren’t you.’

  ‘You’ll probably see me at the Vegemania often. Serafina’s potato pancakes are absolutely magical. She’s a beautiful girl, Jonny, and sexy like anything. I can see why you went all to pieces when you lost her.’

  I turned to go but he said, ‘Just let me pay for this and inscribe it and I’m off.’

  I was about to tell him what to do with the book when it occurred to me that Katerina might find his handwriting interesting. At the till he produced a gold card and a gold fountain pen from a black belly-pouch, paid, quickly wrote something on the flyleaf, gave me the open book, and made his exit with a thumbs-up sign.

  I looked at his inscription:

  FOR JONNY –

  ‘The Bird of Time has but a little way

  to flutter – and the Bird is on the Wing.’

  Thinking of you always,

  T.

  Black ink, and the writing was large and spiky, with many slants and angles and a lot of up-and-down to it. The Fitzgerald version of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was a favourite book of mine when I was sixteen and I still knew most of the quatrains by heart. When thinking of Serafina I often recalled:

  The Moving Finger writes, and having writ,

  Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

  Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

  Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

  The ink was still wet. With a finger between the cover and the flyleaf I left Waterstone’s and went down the road to Katerina’s place.

  She kissed me hello. ‘Jonathan!’ she said. ‘He was in Waterstone’s just a moment ago.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I’ve seen him in my mind, felt who it was. Only from the back did I see him, a big man, tall and broad, a dark shape of malice standing in front of you, blotting you out.’

  ‘He hasn’t blotted me out quite yet, Katerina.’

  ‘An unfortunate choice of words. Sorry. I am so much disturbed by him.’

  We went into the front room and sat down at the table where the little bronze woman waited under the blue-shaded lamp with her quill and her scroll while Melencolia brooded on the bare wall with her ironmongery, her dog, the surly winged-infant, and the magic square that totalled thirty-four in all directions. She noticed that I was watching her as she toyed with her dividers. What divides the men from the boys, she said, is that the men do something while the boys just talk.

  Katerina took my hand. ‘Thank you for your note and the money,’ she said, ‘but I haven’t ordered a piano. I know that spending some of the million is your way of locking yourself into your contract with Mr Rinyo-Clacton and I don’t feel good about it. Tell me what is happening with him.’

  I handed her the book. ‘He gave me this just now in Waterstone’s.’

  ‘Aha!’ she said, holding it close to her chest with both hands. ‘Oh!’ Again that change in her face – the ancient sibylline look with the lips drawn back from the teeth.

  ‘That’s the look I saw on your face when you held the money,’ I said.

  As before, she shook her head, dismissed it with a gesture, then, clutching the book, said, ‘Her
e there is death, death, death, death! I’m talking about the death in him’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It’s all tangled up, not clearly focused; partly it points out and partly it points in.’

  ‘What, murderous and suicidal both?’

  ‘And fear, yes? This have I already said before, not?’

  ‘Yes, when you handled the money he’d given me. What’s he afraid of?’

  ‘This I still don’t know.’

  ‘Look at what he wrote on the flyleaf.’ She looked. ‘This is a quotation, yes?’

  ‘From the Rubaiyat’

  ‘I know it only in a German translation – these lines about the Bird of Time I don’t recognise.’

  ‘The full quatrain is:

  “Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring

  Your Winter Garment of Repentance fling:

  The Bird of Time has but a little way

  To flutter – and the Bird is on the Wing.’ “

  ‘So,’ said Katerina, ‘whose time is he talking about, do you think?’

  ‘Mine, there’s no doubt about that.’

  ‘His handwriting is almost like that of a child, a child big and strong but confused. He’s right-handed, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Look – slanting away from the writer it goes and slanting back towards him with its pointyness like spears and arrows, death pointing out and pointing in. Up it goes and down like the waves of the sea. What is sticking in him that could be the death of him? Oh God.’

  ‘We both know what it is, don’t we, Katerina: that son of a bitch has got AIDS and now I’ve probably got it and given it to you.’

  Katerina’s eyes were blue, quite a vivid blue, not the sort of eyes you expect an old woman to have. As she looked at me steadily I remembered the number tattooed on her arm. She took my hand. ‘That we don’t know yet, Jonathan. Maybe he’s got HIV but not yet AIDS and maybe you’ve caught nothing from him. I don’t feel any sickness in you.’