The Rendezvous and Other Stories

by Patrick O'Brian

  It must be the right kind of man, of course. It is not every man who can live by himself: two of the other painters here are mad. With old Dupont it is probably a question of senility, no more; but Laforge is mad directly. He goes by with a quick shuffle, just not breaking into a run, and there is such a look of concentrated unhappiness on his face that if it were not so annoying you would be desperately sorry for him – providing you thought there was still a ‘him’ alive behind that closed-in, wretched face. The people in the street turn after him and stare. They make the usual gesture, and although they have seen him for a long time now they watch him avidly to find him worse. Presently they will shut him up, no doubt.

  In madness, I understand, there is nearly always this misery: not quite always, but certainly very often in the kind of solitary madness that I am thinking of. There is always – and this is the vital distinction – a loss of objectivity.

  They also lose (a consequence, I think) whatever sense of humour they ever had. And that I do possess, as strong as it was when I was a child, to whom so very many things are funny, even the sound of words. The last time I had dinner with the Lemaîtres, Marie said that someone or other had a sponge factory, and the words themselves were so absurd – not the meaning, the words intrinsically – that they made me laugh and laugh and laugh, although I did not want to. I did not want to hurt Marie (I do not know her well, nor yet Lemaître) and it was not an explicable joke, fabrique d’éponges. It depended on the i, long and high, and the round ponges, and the particular air of solemnity. But I could not stop, though I turned my eyes away from their ludicrous wondering faces, faintly displeased behind their polite smiles: I swallowed a mouthful of scalding soup, dropped my napkin: but it was no good, the tears came into my eyes, and when the fou rire gained the others and they began to giggle too, I burst out and gasped and gasped until I was nearly sick and could not breathe. We said fabrique d’éponges and howled: sometimes we could say no more than fab … It wrecked the dinner: but my God I laughed.

  However, that is only a minor point: the essential is the insight, objectivity. I have watched a clock for hours, the wonderful peace of the pendulum’s swing, and I have seen it swing left and right, left and pause, back across the nadir, rise and pause. And stop. Stop poised up on the right until I have let it go, to swing and tick, swing and tock. But all the time I have known just what it was, that my mind was spinning free and time was not. No loss of insight there.

  And I have looked at my naked feet, bony and long on a chair before me, and I have seen the stigmata form, and from each crimson wound a rose.

  Yes, I know that road: I am quite clear there. That is not what can do you any harm, nor make you unhappy. On the contrary, I should say, all things summed up, that I was a very happy man. I was less so when I still roved after women, when that hunger and excitement drove me out; when a dark warm evening came and I was restless, could not settle until I had defined my need. But that was long ago. I have had all the common girls here, and some others too; Thérèse and Rose, Conchita and that Denise who made me ill. The fair one – Marie-Claire? Denise again? I never could recall her name. But since the fire went out, I have been happy, in my way.

  Yet so much hangs on what you mean by that. A calm euphoria, an isolation: that is what I mean. A burrowing in, deep, deep down until you reach a kind of peace glowing inside a haze.

  Sometimes it will not work; something goes astray. This morning it was like that. I was reading, and between the paragraphs the associations piled up, so that I was thinking on two or three separate levels: that is normal enough; every man does it who talks, and at the same time thinks of what he is going to say next, and at the same time bears in mind that he must not stay more than five minutes because he has an appointment, and at the same time sees a creature flying and says in some inner compartment, ‘That is a wasp: it might sting.’ It is normal, and with practice it can be developed.

  As I say, I was following out these associations, and that usually settles down to a line of wordless thought which goes on while I read and after I have stopped, reaching, in the end, my happiness far down.

  But this morning, the associations grew and multiplied; they were obstructive, unmanageable, and I became confused. Generally they act as planes, planes that dissolve, one behind the other, like my painting: though that is an inaccuracy, because like the sheets of colour in my work, they are not behind one another – that is not the relation at all. They are different planes; but I will not dwell on this.

  This time there were two other features, both quite familiar, but now they were out of place. The first was that the whole thing was a game, a pretence that I could stop at any minute. The whole thing, my sitting there, my being in that room, my existence indeed; that was a game. This feeling I have known for years and years, and sometimes I think it first arose from some dishonesty, from some insincerity and forcing of emotion. When I was a very young fellow I played at being in love, saying the words, making the gestures, while my heart pumped blood hard through my veins and real tears blurred my vision; but all the time I had a faint (not always so faint) glimpse of myself from a viewpoint generally in a corner of the room and I would say something more or less satirical – my corner-self would say it internally. Later, a good deal later, when I finally abandoned figurative painting, I worried about the honesty of my work, and I believe the worry, the question at all, was a proof that somewhere I was cheated, worked myself into an attitude where the self standing in the corner could rightly smirk and say, ‘Oh behold the new-born Braque.’

  There was more to it than that; much more, but these partial causes are very remote now. The important thing is that at times the feeling is very strong (it hardly ever leaves me entirely) and then my surroundings seem so impalpable, such a hollow pretence, that it makes me if not unhappy, at least confused. Ordinarily it is not unpleasant, rather the reverse: one can pretend to be going for a walk, to be talking in a friendly, sociable manner, to be living very cheerfully – it simplifies daily life very much. No: what I have said might have been the cause was not the cause at all. The two pretences are quite distinct, different in nature. The first was dishonesty; the second is not – it is a feeling that the illusion is slipping away.

  The second thing that spoiled my reading and its consequences was a sense of having been there before. The words had a vexing half-familiarity, though it was a new book: now and then a whole phrase would be entirely known and (what was more troubling) my own reflection on the known phrase would come out pat like a sentence learned by heart. I knew what I was going to read, what I was going to say on discovering that I knew it, and my own rejoinder to that second discovery: and so on, seven deep.

  My own comfortable, favourable mist or haze was now a fog. I no longer felt that at the worst I had only to stop pretending, stop playing this private game, to stop existing. I was getting lost, losing control: and to reassert the discipline of my mind I deliberately read a page of the book. That did very little. I got up and washed my hands and face.

  I was sorry now that my cat had gone: I had had an affection for that distant creature although I knew it was a descent into emotion; and now I was sorry that the cat was not in the studio. I would have opened it a tin of fish if it had been there, and doing that would have been valuable.

  I looked at the painting that I had up on the easel and I began to work on it mechanically. Soon I had spoiled the canvas, and I let my hand draw criss-cross lines.

  The base and cause of the wretched state of my mind, I found, was a sort of dream that I had had in the night. It was about my neighbours.

  They were good neighbours, below, in front and on each side. They were often very kind to me – took in parcels, told me the news of the quarter when we met, and when my cat was still here they were kind to her, too; gave her milk. I do not think they approved of my girls, but that was long ago, and I had always been very quiet, even then. They were working people, kind, sensible, tolerant. Good people, my n
eighbours: all except the man and woman who kept the restaurant on the ground floor. They were a bad couple; the man a flashy, smarmy-haired little pompous rat; the woman a short-legged, hard-faced shrew of about forty. I went there at first because I thought it would save trouble, and they gave me an omelette with a cockroach in it. They drank heavily, quarrelled and screamed until dawn sometimes. Their place was frequented by their friends and by foreigners on the spree, and they bawled and sang and shrieked above the blaring radio until four or five in the morning. The man was odiously ingratiating: the woman too: she had a high screaming laugh, more truly metallic than I have ever heard from a human throat. She could let it rip at will, and she did whenever anybody else laughed. It was quite false: she had never really laughed in her life except at a puppy drowning.

  They had a waitress whom they did not pay: she made her living from tips and by whoring with the customers. All the sporting men of the place went there after her and you could hear them out-manning one another in deep voices and whooping cachinnation. She was a big wench, fairly pretty, crammed with high spirits. I would have had nothing against her at all, if she had not sung: but she did sing, every morning until lunchtime, while she cleaned the restaurant. She sang very loudly, very affectedly – she was being the quaint pretty girl scrubbing floors and not minding it, I believe – and on one note only. It was a false note, and the damned songs she sang penetrated windows, shutters, floors, everything.

  There they were, a pretty crew; and the man had one trick that irritated me more than all the rest. He had an ugly little signboard hanging on the wall, pointing to his restaurant, and every time he passed it he would set it straight. The gesture, indicating ownership, importance, the right to touch, was so automatic that he would do it without even looking to see whether the sign were straight or not. Sometimes he would go out, touch it without looking, and come back. I could have borne anything but that.

  To return to this kind of dream of which I have spoken. They were making more noise last night than usual. I wondered whether my neighbours in front would get angry enough to throw a bottle: they did sometimes when the din had been intolerable for many hours past midnight. I felt angry for them: they and all the people around were working families who got up early. Many and many a time have I seen them come out, cross and bleary, robbed of their sleep and robbed of their full day’s power by the screaming hooligans below. As time went on I grew angrier on my own account.

  Then I was thinking in my chair for a long while. In separated waves the noise pierced through, but when I got up to find my bomb I was no longer angry. I was far within myself, but I recalled my anger, for myself and for those other people, and I examined it: it was very red, emotional and raw: roughly triangular.

  My bomb was one of the small kind that we used to call a citron. I do not know its technical description, but it was a hand grenade, shaped like a lemon. I had kept one, because I liked its form. I found it in my box of different shapes, kicked off my slippers and went quietly downstairs. As I went down the shrieks and laughter increased. In the lobby inside the front door (it is always open except in the winter) there are the fuse-boxes for the whole house. I drew the white porcelain bridge that controlled the restaurant’s electricity, and as their lights went out I heard the huge, anticipated shriek and the waitress’s unbridled scream as one of the men grabbed her in the dark.

  The electricity is always breaking down in this street, and everyone has candles ready. I waited a moment until I saw the dim glow reflected, and then I went into the street. In the darkness outside the open restaurant door I stood and looked in: the girl was out of the room; the rest were gabbling about a second candle. They were all drunk. The woman let out a burst of her cackle and I drew the pin. It was, I remembered, a seven-second fuse, so I counted five before lobbing it in. It was remarkable that the people looked at the bomb as it landed, and not towards the place it came from, as I had expected.

  It went off with a great orange flower of light that blossomed momentarily in the whole street. I pushed back the electric fuse and went silently upstairs, pursued by the familiar smell of dust.

  There was no possibility of detection. All the neighbours would be at their windows, not looking down the stairs.

  Now the thing that worries me about all this was the moral aspect. The withdrawal of the fuse was an act of lunatic cunning that would never have occurred to me as myself. I do not think that I even knew which was the right box. But the fact that I did withdraw it is terribly significant: at some time in my journey downstairs my play, my pretence of being a man – and hence my control – must have merged into a sense of reality and uncontrol.

  This train of thought must have started in the morning before I sat down with my book, it must have started unconsciously when I looked down into the street and saw a mess of plate glass still heaped in the gutter and the people staring: and it must have been that that wrecked my reading, a deep, well-founded distrust of that single element in the dream – dream or physical reality, it does not matter which.

  The essence of the matter is that the action of withdrawing the fuse was the action of a psychopath. And the consequences are bad. I do not mean the bodily consequences: detection is impossible. No; the consequences of an action that one recognizes as undoubtedly psychotic are that one must take measures against the possibility of a repetition: if once the lapse is established, to go on living would be criminal in an honest man.

  And it is so soon established: one question is enough. ‘Did you draw that porcelain bridge that holds the wire, and did you leave it so that you could push it back in the dark?’ If the answer is yes, you must then say ‘You did not know where the fuse box was: you know almost nothing about electricity. But your unconscious mind had noted the place and the function of the bridge; long ago, perhaps. It formed an intention, against the time when it could take over control. The intent was criminal. The thing that formed it must be cut off. The only moral issue now before you is the recognition of this fact.’

  The Last Pool

  ‘THIS IS the last pool,’ he said again, as he stood by the side of it with the water running over the toes of his waders. He had said the same thing at each of the five pools below it, and he had meant that if he did not catch a trout he would go home. Each pool in turn had yielded nothing, not even a rise to save the face of his resolution. Each time he meant it more, and now he meant it entirely: beyond this pool was a long flat stretch of river, difficult to fish and notoriously barren; to circumvent both it and the small private lake beyond meant a tedious hot walk in waders already too warm for comfort.

  The last pool was certainly the best pool for size and looks; it stood high above a series of chaotic rapids, and an almost unbroken rim of rock enclosed it. At the top end the river came clear over a wall of black basalt four or five feet high, curving over in green water before it broke into two main cascades that came down in foam to the pool. Even now, after weeks of drought, the top quarter of the pool was white, and the water had a menacing roar to it. The outlet was one single column of racing water, a broad mortal jet that came through a black gate of rock in the pool’s lower rim; it was from this that it had its name of Goileadair, or, as some said, the Kettle. The sides of Goileadair were sheer-to, and down the middle of it was a shingle bed, piled there by the two competing falls above. The highest part of the shingle was out of the water now, and quite dry.

  There was a sombre air about this last pool – little colour, for the valley just here narrowed to a gorge with a great deal of naked rock to its sides. The Scots pines that had taken footing in the crag to the left showed darkly above, and the flash of the falling water accentuated the black polish of the half-sunken rocks. In Conan’s time they drowned lepers here.

  The gorge was beautiful, this man, this James Aislabie, observed to himself; but it was a harsh, grim kind of beauty, God forbid. He sat down on one of the smooth rocks that marked the end of the pool, the edge of the cleft that let the water out; th
e river slid fast and silently between these rounded edges, its surface curved and tense. It ran over his dangling feet with an insistent pressure and a grateful coolness; and in ten minutes the all-pervading roar that filled the gorge no longer reached the threshold of his hearing.

  At the top end a yellow wagtail perched on a flat stone and stood bowing there and bobbing, and as James Aislabie watched the bird – a fine bird in the glory of his feathers – a fish leapt out of the foam a little to the one side of it. It was a small white fish, a sea-trout of perhaps half a pound or less, but it was a sight pleasant enough to a man who had fished long hours in the heat of the day without the sight of a fish at all.

  All day long the weary length of the river, with its difficult, reed-grown banks lower down, and the beat of the sun on his back: the disastrous lowness of the water, with its shining surface and his cast lying awkwardly curled upon it, and his hot boots and the grinding strap on his shoulder. The bad, short, laboured casts as his arms grew more and more tired, the glare on the water as his eye followed the place where his fly ought to be, and the swirling water. When he lay in bed thinking about fishing he did not recall these things, nor the flies cracked off, pulled off, dropped, lost high up in trees.

  He considered the best way to fish this pool, and he thought about changing his fly. He had no confidence in the fly he was using and none in the only other fly he had left, which was far too big. However, he cut off the one and tied on the other: it was more a gesture of piety than anything else. The name of the fly escaped him; somebody’s Fancy, or possibly Indispensable, he thought, as he pulled the knot tight round the black, shining eye. It seemed but decent to do the thing correctly, although his belief in his motions had almost wholly gone.