She responded stiffly, pushing me away.
‘I warn you, Jay. I’m not very happy with the way you’ve been acting.’
‘You look lavish.’
‘Don’t. I’ve put on half a stone.’
‘You are a dark unyielding largesse. You are Aberystwyth beach at sunset.’
‘And you’re full of crap.’
‘Okay. You look a bit chubby.’
‘That’s better.’
‘Your cheeks are a bit puffy, like a hamster.’
‘But don’t overdo it.’
I went to hug her again, and this time she was softer, less rigid.
‘Thanks for calling,’ she said, a minor concession.
‘Hey. I was always going to call. How was the flight? You must be exhausted.’
‘Actually, I am.’
‘You probably want a shower.’
‘Actually, I do.’
Richard Burton was an expert on women. He was the lover of Sybil Williams and Susan Hunt and Elizabeth Taylor and Sally Hay, and a thousand others he didn’t even bother to marry. He enjoyed the elegance of women, their humour, their brave promises, their suicide attempts, their decent gestures, their utter deceit, their lap-dogs, their unshakeable loyalty, and their million-dollar necklaces.
We were mostly silent driving back to the city in the van.
Helena was mostly silent. I told her about the weather, suddenly more dramatic than usual, metallic clouds dragging storms from the mountains, cut only by the sunshine of angels. I pointed out the world-famous water-jet, which today was on, each free-falling drop in the morning sunshine making a rainbow, all the way down. I pointed out Mont Blanc in the distance, and the Protestant Cathedral. ‘Geneva’s a wonderful city,’ I said. ‘You’re going to like it.’
‘It’s not a holiday.’
In which case, I impressed on Helena my good fortune to have been sent to a one-time city of God, home to the United Nations and the International Red Cross, and headquarters to 420 other equally worthy non-governmental organisations. As one of Europe’s leading centres of social progress, it was a city of humanity and enlightenment where supplicants still arrived in search of divine intervention. Geneva was the world’s capital of good intentions, and a unique island of goodness.
‘So why are so many of the shops closed?’
‘Ah, that,’ I said. ‘You’re right. It’s not the best week ever for shopping.’
Even though it was only Monday, many of the shops had already shut. There was a large-scale popular protest planned for the weekend and, following lurid tales of imminent violence broadcast on television, Geneva was slowly closing down. To reassure the city’s resident army of diplomats and bankers, the local political leaders had promised zero tolerance, with riot squads drafted in from other cantons, and emergency paramilitaries on standby over the border, in France. The Palace of Nations, in fact the entire United Nations complex, would be enclosed behind a sectioned fence made of steel barriers more than two metres high.
It was hard to imagine. Until now, the only two policemen I’d seen in the city, not counting VIP escorts and helicopters, were in a stopped patrol car, questioning an attractive woman student on suspicion of bicycling without a licence.
But I wasn’t much concerned with the state of the world. With poetry, yes. And yes, with the exquisite predicament of love.
‘If Geneva really is the capital of good intentions,’ Helena mused, ‘then the large-scale popular protest might be expected to succeed.’
While Helena was in the shower, I tidied away some clothes, then threw open the windows. The women in white coats were still hard at it in the windows of the packing-plant opposite. Several buildings to the right, on my side of the street but one balcony further up, there was a canary in a cage who liked to sing. One of its favourite songs was an imitation of a car alarm.
In the living-room, I killed time by browsing the low-rise cityscapes made on the bookcase by left-behind Bibles and thick biographies. Like the Chaplain, and probably the Chaplain before that, I’d already skipped through the indexes of the biographies looking for the secret which explained the greatness of Franz Liszt, or Lenin, or George Eliot. It turned out, discouragingly, never to have been their stay in this particular city. It was always their family background, and their upbringing, and the combination of a lucky circumstance with some indefinable, inimitable gift.
I pulled out the I-Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes. We’d consulted it once at theology college, and back then it had warned Helena to be careful of ambitious plans, which were likely to be misunderstood.
We hadn’t believed a word of it. In the bedroom, I checked Burton was well hidden, and took out one of my cardigans, the blue or the black. Helena was still in the bathroom, but I waited patiently, sitting outside the door, and she eventually came out in a billow of steam and the humid smell of soaps. It was very similar to the aromatic feelgood smell of relics, rubbed in the appropriate way. It was lavender and strawberry, and flora allegoria.
She was wearing a towel, tucked up under her reddish arms. Her dark hair was flat on her head, and her cheeks were glowing. I did look briefly at her dimpled knees, and the shining bones of her shins. And I did glance in passing at the softer muscle of her calf, and the fading ink-pricks where she’d recently shaved.
But primarily, I was waiting there to offer her the cardigan.
Helena smiled. ‘You know. Sometimes I actually believe you’re nice.’
‘Just being professional.’
‘In that case, stop looking at my throat.’
‘Your neck, actually.’
‘Just don’t.’
She took the cardigan, and leant back against the doorframe as she found the front and undid the buttons. One of her buttocks flattened against the edge of the door, and I wanted very much to make love to her, because that was the meaning of life.
‘Close your eyes,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘I’m going to take off the towel and put on the cardigan.’
‘So why do I have to close my eyes?’
‘Privacy.’
‘I’ve seen you naked hundreds of times.’
‘Just do it.’
I closed my eyes. She was moving very close in front of me. I heard the towel fall, and she must have known that, and she could easily have changed in the bathroom.
‘You can look again now.’
I opened my eyes and she was standing naked, arms out wide. ‘Yaah!’
She laughed, and shrugged into the cardigan, turning and quickly buttoning it while I was still spluttering, looking everywhere. By which time it was too late, and she was all buttoned up, the lambswool reaching just below her buttocks.
‘We need to talk,’ she said, and padded barefoot through to the living-room. The sleeves of the cardigan reached the palms of her hands, and her curled fingers stretched the sleeves a little further, her arms straight, cocking her wrists so that her knuckles pointed upwards. She went over to the window, and tried out the view.
‘I haven’t much appreciated your behaviour.’
‘I’ve not been well.’
‘I’ve heard that. When you didn’t come back with the Chaplain, I was worried. You ought to have made an effort.’
‘Let’s get married.’
‘For God’s sake, Jay.’ Helena turned round and let go of the sleeves. She crossed her arms. ‘It’s about time you started taking this seriously.’
She was pretending to be angry and unavailable, but I wasn’t so easily deterred. I knew that women changed their minds, because at Helena’s age Elizabeth Taylor was married for the fourth and positively final time and irreversibly in love with Eddie Fisher, who sat in vigil by her hospital bed as she survived a vicious mystery illness, during which clinically she died, on four separate occasions.
Eddie Fisher was the husband one before Burton.
‘Do you fancy going out? See the sights?’
‘I want to sleep. I
’m tired, Jay, very often. I’m having a baby. We are. You’re having a baby. Things have to change.’
‘Why? We can muddle through, like we always used to. If you didn’t keep saying that things had to change, I might never have panicked. Why does anything have to change?’
‘Well,’ Helena said. She curled into the armchair and drew her legs up beneath her, pulling the cardigan tight over her knees. ‘Money, for a start. How are we going to survive?’
‘Let’s not talk about money.’
‘Yes, let’s. Let’s talk about money.’
Starting off poor, in the rags stage of the story to richness, Burton’s immediate prospects in Pontrhydyfen involved twelve hours a day up to his thighs in a two-foot seam of coal. Every terrace in the village was a casebook of crippled and tuberculose lungs, malnutrition, despair and unnecessary death. Poverty was waiting, always waiting, and the only remedy was money.
It was no accident that in his sober years Burton was resolute in his escape from 2 Dan-y-Bont to 73 Caradoc Street, and then away from Pontrhydyfen altogether, to 6 Connaught Street, Port Talbot, and to Exeter College, Oxford, and 24 Lyndhurst Road, Hampstead, to the house he called Pays de Galles in Céligny, Switzerland, before the ultimate film-star safety of Casa Kimberley, at Puerto Vallerta in Mexico.
Money offered salvation. It also sourced his extravagance and downfall, the folly of the Krupp diamond and a purple Rolls and 150 Welshmen on a jolly to the London Dorchester. Burton wanted the miner boyos to see the distance he’d travelled, and to show them his own paid-for heaven. But at the beginning it was simpler than that. He was getting married to Sybil Williams from higher up the valley, who may or may not have been pregnant, and money was an absolute essential. Otherwise, like Burton’s mother, who was very special and not like other boys’ mothers, Sybil might die from puerperal fever at the age of forty-nine, and that was seriously no way to live. Really, it wasn’t.
I sorted out the bed, and left Helena to sleep. Then I phoned Rifka on her mobile. I wasn’t in a church kind of mood, so I arranged to meet her at the Colombo.
At the Colombo, nothing was as popular as cricket, and for one-day internationals Mr Dharmasena removed the window so that Sri Lankans could watch from the pavement. But whatever the sport, the television was always on, and today the British Lions were starting their New Zealand tour with a soft midweeker against a backward North Island province.
Apart from a table of hungover Australians, I was the only customer, and Mr Dharmasena himself offered me free drinks, as a thank-you for yesterday’s service in the church. I fancied a Guinness, and said so, but by the time he’d brought it over I’d changed my mind. I had to be serious. I had to avoid the pitfalls which led to a second child in a Devereux care-home, so blasted by her father’s chronic absenteeism that the only words she ever spoke were ‘Rich! Rich!’, as if always calling Burton back from his own self-destruction.
Rifka arrived just as the game kicked off, and sober and silent we watched the first few minutes. The Lions, with only three Welshmen, were soon ten points down to a Waikato side that Mervyn Davies (on his own, man) could have mesmerised with his eyes closed and just back home from the mine. It was a disgrace, and well before the second try I was picking out the Welsh boys in the pack and thinking: ‘that could have been me’. In front of 30,000 people in the Waikato Stadium, that could have been me.
I turned away from the screen and asked the waitress for a Rivella, and then another one for Rifka. It was a drink I’d discovered in Switzerland, made from extracts of milk. It was extremely unalcoholic.
‘Now,’ Rifka said. ‘What is it that couldn’t wait?’
I shifted my chair closer towards her, and hoped for some intercession from Burton’s leg. She moved her chair closer to mine, which was, by lucky coincidence, exactly as I’d hoped. I wasn’t beyond flirting with Rifka. Even if Helena was my Cleopatra, Rifka could still be one of my other willing co-stars, Claire Bloom or Sophia Loren.
‘There’s something bothering you, isn’t there? Do you want to talk about it?’
‘No,’ I said, but Burton was always a talker. He claimed to have talked out all the novels he wanted to write, before he actually wrote them. He couldn’t help himself. I pushed the untouched Guinness a little further away, and wrapped my hands round my brown bottle of Rivella. ‘I need money.’
‘Not a problem. Dig up James Joyce.’
I reached under the table, pulled up my trouser-leg, and put out my shin where Rifka could see it. Then I let the trouser drop, and went back to my bottle. Rifka looked at me curiously, as if I’d done something very strange, and I wasn’t having that.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. I just didn’t know that James Joyce had an interest in the rugby.’
‘It’s not Joyce. It’s someone else. I want to know how much Moholy will pay.’
‘Depends who it is.’
‘That,’ I said, ‘is Mr Richard Burton.’
Her face fell. Burton wasn’t good enough. In 1948, more than half a lifetime ago at the age of fifteen, Richard Burton had been selected to trial for Welsh Schools. It was the finest moment of his childhood. They put him in the Possibles, not the Probables, and he didn’t make it. His whole life, that was the pattern, and there was always the problem of getting so close, being so nearly there, and then failing, and falling short. I reached under the table, and with a wince I wrenched free the sellotape. I put Burton’s leg-bone on the table.
With total poise, and only one brief glance at the Australians, Rifka fetched a newspaper from a rack, brought it back, and dropped it casually over the bone. She sat down again. ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with Richard Burton,’ she said.
‘No, you’re right.’ Under the newspaper he seemed so small, when once he’d been a big man, an open-side flanker from the Valleys. ‘He wasted his talents. He was a genius, but flawed.’
‘But there are bones in Moholy’s catalogue worth a significant amount more. More difficult people. More famous ones.’
‘I know that.’
‘I mean Burton’s interesting, but he’s not top of the range. He’s not James Joyce.’
It was the second half, and an Englishman was stretchered off. The Lions started a revival inspired by replacements and Celtic verve, that compulsive mix of foolery and hardiness. In fact, the fleet Welsh backs were breathing fire.
I asked Rifka if she’d ever consider working with me on someone more important than Burton. We could collaborate, help each other. We could co-operate. All I wanted was a leg-up, at the beginning of my body-snatching career. Everyone needed a hand, at the beginning, and Burton had stood on the shoulders of his mentor Philip Burton, and after that the playwright Emlyn Williams, and then John Gielgud. Without the help of others greater than himself, Burton would have stayed a no one.
‘Me and you. We’ll go halves. Who’s worth the most?’
‘I’ve stopped, Jay. I’ve given it up. And Moholy doesn’t want just anybody, not any more. I told you. He has someone specific in mind.’
‘I need help,’ I said, hanging my head.
‘Yes, probably. But not from me. Ask your girlfriend. See if you can corrupt her.’
‘As if. She’s worse than I am.’
It took several moments for my slow brain to stop, turn, and wonder how exactly Rifka knew about Helena. But by then Rifka was already on her feet, throwing some coins on the table.
‘James Joyce,’ she said. ‘After that, once you get yourself started, that’s the only income you’ll ever need.’
An Irishman missed a penalty in extra time, gifting the game to the lean New Zealanders. I was in a café and bar, licensed for beers and wines and spirits, and overcome by an increasingly familiar restlessness. I left before it developed into a thirst.
Out in the street, I tried to think exclusively about Helena, but it was noon in the daylight of Geneva, and lunch-time for women and girls. I had the bone rolled up in Rifka’s newspaper, and I carried
it through the streets like a baton. There were millions of them, and every woman on her lunch-break a potential lover for the Richard Burtons of this world, assuming there must be many, seeing as there was one.
Small breasts, I liked, and big hips. While not neglecting buttocks and bare backs. Legs, when visible, brought to mind the truly amazing amount of sex I’d never had, with thousands of women I’d never meet, and all of it discreet and brilliant. Come on, Rich, with that protester over there wearing a vest and cut-off jeans, intercede on my behalf.
I’d wasted so much time, and here in Geneva the ebb of life was measured by clocks on every corner, and on every building, and clocks in the parks constructed from flowers. On every street the time wasted in a city of talks and interminable waiting was displayed behind bullet-proof glass, and in every luxury shop the honest watches told exactly the same time. One second more than before, and one second more than before. Time was passing, and then I’d die. The watches and clocks were everywhere. Remember you will die.
The only place in Geneva to escape this precision engineering was the heart of the Parc des Bastions, on a bench facing the Reformer’s Wall. I double-checked in every direction that I wasn’t overlooked by a clock, and then sat down in the sunshine with the newspaper across my knees. The centre of the Reformer’s Wall, 100 metres long, was dominated by an immense statue of John Calvin, who disapproved strongly of the cult of personality. Bible in hand, Calvin was chief among a sculpted pantheon of Reformation heroes, ten metres high, many times as large as life, stylised and stony-faced, offering a generalised censure of anything I might care to contemplate.
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