Funderland

by Nigel Jarrett

  Greta often comes to his room to spend an hour or so with him. They share the same taste in books and the merger of their vague ideas on some subjects results in a clarification of view. In a way, they enjoy an intimacy that has no need of consummation, though they often touch each other affectionately, like a couple who have already enjoyed carnal pleasure and found it wanting. He leaves Mr Kesselman to his fantasies and approaches the dressing-table, where Greta is waiting for him to brush her hair. They chat, watching their conversation reported back to them.

  ‘Who’s on with you today?’ she asks.

  ‘Lorenz,’ he says. ‘Do you know what his name means?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Laurel. A bit tame, don’t you think – to be named after a bush, and a poisonous one at that?’

  ‘You British are so dim. Do you not see him wreathed in leaves, like a victorious warrior?’

  He tugs at her hair so that she winces. She is forever making statements that bear unintentionally on his immediate past, when he flew sorties over Germany and looked down fixedly on a rectangle of moonlit landscape hurtling like a newsreel out of control. Mostly when some indiscretion flies from her lips she straightaway raises her hand in apology. He just stares at her, waiting for the pictures she has summoned to vanish.

  ‘I saw you together at the café,’ he says. ‘You seemed to be hitting it off.’

  ‘There you go,’ she says. ‘Together. You couldn’t possibly mean sitting at the same table having an intelligent conversation. You mean bonded, two of a kind, all of a piece.’

  ‘How do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Are you jealous, Bobby?’

  ‘What – of you?’

  She looks up at him in the mirror, wondering if she should suggest that Lorenz, not she, is the object of his affection. She knows that so soon after a time when every move made by Bobby and his colleagues led to destruction, no decision about anything major is taken lightly. So often, when not working, they meditate alone beside the brooding lake. You could see them – Bobby, Greta, Lorenz, Mr Kesselmann – treading the shoreline’s naked shingles.

  The waiters take it in turns to preside at tea-time in pairs, standing opposite each other at the circular room’s two entrances. It is not their function to interrupt the buffet-style ceremony, in which sandwiches and pieces of cake are taken from salvers, and tea and coffee are poured from urns, but they replenish the table and relieve guests of their empty cups and plates. The clientele, mainly older Americans and Northern Europeans with money, are not voracious feeders, preferring to take what they need at one go rather than have a healthy appetite interpreted as bad manners. Lorenz, approaching him as they were sweeping up crumbs, once likened the thin widows among them to sparrows. The duty waiters are not so far removed from each other that they cannot smile across the room at an observation confirmed. Lorenz’s smile is broad and generous and accompanied by a chuckle as his chest beneath the starched shirt imperceptibly shakes.

  Lorenz is about Bobby’s age and comes from a village a few miles from Versoix. It amuses Bobby to compare him to the idealised Germans he once shot out of the skies: blond, suntanned, unmarked, and with a lofty superiority related more to bearing than height. For the same reasons, Mr Kesselman, the oldest waiter among them but in other respects their equal, seems to find the comparison unsettling: at any rate, Lorenz is the one with whom Mr Kesselman has the least contact, not avoiding him exactly but also not going out of his way to be friendly. Greta says Mr Kesselman needs to take care, or else the turmoil fomented inside him by Lorenz’s presence could lead to trouble. The psychologist in her says character is often ascribed to a person’s origins rather than to a capacity for sullenness.

  ‘I like Lorenz,’ Greta says. ‘He’s a mystery.’

  ‘What do you mean, a mystery?’

  ‘He’s inscrutable. You just don’t know where you are with him. I find that interesting.’

  ‘You would – you’re a psychologist.’

  She shudders again. They have all declared themselves to each other, but only Bobby tosses their avowals back at them when it suits him. Bobby is not prepared to jostle freely, to leave himself exposed in the open.

  ‘Then let me practise on you.’

  She stands up, snatching the brush, and wrestles him towards the bed. He collapses on to it, laughing. While he lies there waiting for her interrogation to begin, she draws up a chair, grabs a book and pencil and pretends to take notes. He hears the insect-like abrasion of her stockings as she crosses her legs.

  ‘Now, Mr Samson. What did you do in the war?’

  ‘I was a bomb-aimer.’

  ‘What did this involve?’

  ‘Being regularly frightened out of my wits.’

  ‘Why do you want to be a waiter in Switzerland?’

  ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’

  ‘What are your intentions towards me?’

  ‘Platonic.’ He grins.

  ‘Thanks very much. Did you lose friends in the war?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was your greatest fear?’

  ‘Having to ditch in the sea.’

  ‘Can you swim?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you like me to teach you?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Can I put the light on now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Before flicking the switch, she goes to the window as if in response to Bobby’s reservations about Mr Kesselman. But Mr Kesselman is nowhere to be seen. The guests are on the lawn, enjoying cigarettes before tea. They have their backs to her. Some of them are staring out towards the lake, as if having witnessed some strange watery happening now subdued and disappeared from sight. Their personal plumes of smoke give the impression that they are on fire and don’t yet know it. She feels privy to impending disaster, like a clairvoyant.

  ‘What are your intentions towards Lorenz?’ she asks suddenly, without turning around to face him. He reaches up and puts on the light himself. Her face is immediately reflected back at him in the window, as though a stranger looking into the room from outside has joined them and is also seeking an answer to her question.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The mystery of Lorenz is that he tries to reach other people through a third party, namely me.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I think he’d like to get to know you.’ She suddenly feels that, for a moment, meditation is over and decision-making has begun. Bobby’s response surprises her.

  ‘Is he shy or something?’

  ‘Possibly. He tells me he has no ambition, not in the hotel trade anyway. Where do you think such a man’s interest lies?’

  The question sounds to him like a psychologist’s professional wariness in the presence of a subject who might be unpredictable, even violent. He moves towards his greatcoat, which is hanging from a hook on the back of the door, and reaches for the pipe and tobacco in one of its deep pockets. But he believes his action might be a signal for behaviour she will recognise, so he disappoints her by picking up the hairbrush instead and bidding her to resume her seat in front of the mirror.

  ‘I haven’t finished,’ he says, starting to draw the brush through the hair on the right side of her head. ‘I don’t know whether I want to know more of our Lorenz than I do at the moment. We’re all just knuckling down here, finding our way.’

  ‘Oh, come on! It’s a new world. Anything goes.’

  Bobby feels there is a sense in which almost everything Greta says applies only to herself and whoever else she thinks is like-minded. He wonders when he will be released from the memory of war to join her in a future she has already embraced. It will take a while. But he is not ready to tell her that he has watched Lorenz diving expertly into the hotel swimming pool without a splash and wondered why such accomplishment has to be subordinated to menial service. Perhaps she knows, or suspects. Perhaps Lorenz, not she, will be the one to give him swimming lessons.

  ‘There,’ he says.
‘All done.’

  She runs her hands through her hair and looks up at him. He seems vulnerable. She rises from the chair and touches his cheek, waiting for something to ensue. All that happens is that they gaze at each other. Then he kisses her on the forehead, as a father might kiss a daughter who has made him proud. But she pulls him towards her. Their lips clash then move apart before touching again, gently. Her mouth is open, as though she is about to express some feeling hovering between tenderness and indelicacy. They part, and she leaves the room feeling like a conspirator and having accomplished something.

  He turns off the light and goes to the window. Having not seen the smoking guests, he watches Mr Kesselman reoccupy the empty space he left earlier, now succumbed to nightfall, and ponders the image of a man who has emerged from some indeterminate place to assume his allotted position. This evening, Mr Kesselman will join them in the main dining-room, where his vanity will shield him from the knowing glances behind his back.

  Out on the lake, a boat begins nosing through a spread of glitter. The future, Greta always says, will be bright, and on the water it is signalled in all its faraway brilliance.

  The Lister Building

  Dear Charley,

  By the time you read this I shall have made quite a mess of the Prime Minister. Not strictly true, as you well know, but I have observed Doctor Ferbusch long and often enough to have felt that it is I who am making those sleek wounds rather than he, the sad, pompous toosh. I am not supposed to let on that it is the PM who is to be wheeled before us tomorrow. We have been sworn to special secrecy, such as it is in in Room 24, where Doctor Ferbusch seeks the means of startling medical science with the pre-arranged complicity of the dead. Doctor Ferbusch once said to me, without looking up and therefore as though he were addressing the corpse itself in the manner of an apologist: ‘A cadaver, Morley, is the supreme example of repose, and we should do as little as possible to disturb it.’ To his credit, he achieves this – by straight, silent carving, the deft leafing of tissue, the reverential transfer of organs in vitro and, I have to say, a fearsome responsibility where his vocation is concerned.

  The PM is what we call ‘a Quality Bod’ or ‘QB’, and this is the closest we sail to levity. As you can appreciate, ‘QBs’ are pretty rare around here, perhaps because, in life, celebrity confers a certain loathing of proximity combined with a fear of decline. (Is it shallow to display irritation at Doctor Ferbusch’s habit of always calling me ‘Morley’?) Anyway, the last ‘QB’ we had in was a former Admiral of the Fleet with a liver the size of a jellyfish. I almost threw up (those were the early days) which was odd considering that the aura of eternal rest with which the dead confront us nearly always settles my stomach. I say ‘almost’, but there was an instant on that occasion when my own body hovered between revulsion and merriment: I formed a picture of a mariner who had been transformed by his element into something mythic, and I began to wonder whether or not Doctor Ferbusch would start hauling out halibut lungs, conger entrails and stiff, salt-plugged veins! But then I glimpsed a word – seafarer – passing along the great waters of thought and I assumed Doctor Ferbusch’s studied calm. Seafarer.

  Before I leave all this for a moment, dear Charley, I must mention Doctor Ferbusch’s little secret, no longer such. It all began a few weeks ago when I answered the phone to Mrs Ferbusch. Whether she was scatty or beside herself, even deaf, or whether it was my sore throat, or a combination of all these, she evidently mistook me for her husband, who was dealing with something down the corridor. Before I could explain that it was really me, Peter Morley the lab technician, she spluttered: ‘Enough is enough. I rang the clinic myself if you must know and they said you hadn’t been there. Good god – you’re a doctor yourself; you should realise what’s wrong with you, if anything!’ And with that she slammed down the receiver. Seconds later I heard the squelch of Doctor Ferbusch’s shoes on the polished floor. As he entered the room, my frozen features obviously puzzled him.

  ‘What’s up, Morley?’ he asked. ‘Seen a ghost?’ (Away from the dissecting table, Doctor Ferbusch is not without a sense of humour.)

  ‘It was Mrs Ferbusch,’ I explained. ‘On the phone. She seemed upset.’ He looked at me with the expression of a trusting parent who has probably been told a fib and feels both injured and resentful. He called his wife immediately while I shuffled some glinting tools of the trade in a neutral corner with my back to him. I heard my name mentioned. I was trying not to listen by making as much rattle as seemed discreet.

  We had just sewn up a sunken party from Faversham, a Mr Proudfoot (honest!!), and the undertaker had already collected, leaving behind certain essential organs which had come to rest in their jars and awaited further examination in a remoter place we minions call the Eureka Temple. We neither hear the cries of discovery from there nor receive credit for having to pickpocket our clients in the first place. Doctor Ferbusch is our only link with both zones. He sees the job through, filleting in 24 then slicing microscopically in Eureka. He was due there that afternoon but had been taking an inordinately long time to scrub up at the sink. He began to speak. His words seemed to strike the wall in front of him and sky across to me as I deliberately set imaginary dinner-places. ‘Did you get her drift, Morley?’ he asked. I paused as though I hadn’t heard or was weighing what he had said, and then I replied: ‘Not really, Doctor Ferbusch. Are you ill? Is there anything I can do?’ He was curt. ‘No there isn’t, Morley,’ he said. ‘Just stitch your lip, if you will.’ I was reminded of an aristocrat’s being forced to speak to the lower orders against his better judgement. Getting rid of me would have been no solution: it would simply have accelerated gossip.

  In any case, we have come to share much, Doctor Ferbusch and I. We occupy the bleached quarters of the afterlife; we are the unacknowledged mutilators; and now we are bonded anew by something unspoken, something growing inside Doctor Ferbusch himself, like an incipient surprise. For I have seen him falter of late as one does when, outside Sainsbury’s, comes the realisation that the contents of one’s bag do not match the memorised shopping-list with which one strode so confidently into the store, and a trivial lapse appears for a second to be momentous.

  But this may have been over-excitement, because Major-General F----------, a stout JP from Guildford, looking up at us with indestructible reproach (we re-open their eyes), was a twin, and Doctor Ferbusch has been assured of access to the body of the survivor. Perhaps he was contemplating fame, an article in The Lancet with photographs of the twins laid out side by side like a pair of identical Bacchi. Somehow, though, I don’t think Doctor Ferbusch is one for wine and merriment. He sermonises (‘Learn something from this, Morley.’). He is stern. Just the chap to take the smile off the PM’s face with a blade. But more of that in a minute.

  Charley, I miss you. It still haunts me, that image of the two of us heading into the storm on Highgate Hill, with the Whittington shining ahead, a beacon on some transported Edwardian evening. Then the classes we went to, the Polaroid of little Ben writhing inside you – a starscape, one vast constellation reordering itself into an infant’s shape – and our knowledge that Ben was not mine, and the moment when our provisional moorings slipped and we began our tearful, separate drifting into the night. I sometimes look across at Doctor Ferbusch and wonder if he has anyone like you, anyone at a distance, shedding with time all the ugliness of the spirit. I don’t suppose you hear anything of Nick. Doctor Ferbusch was glad to see the back of him – figuratively speaking, of course! Doctor Ferbusch demands so much concentration on detail that he likened the tension between me and Nick to that generated by a pair of animals tugging at opposite ends of a metal bar. It was Nick, wasn’t it? After his first couple of days here, Doctor Ferbusch asked me, ‘Well, Morley – what do you think of the new pair of hands?’ I couldn’t say one way or the other, but Doctor Ferbusch, having sliced, probed and sewn, said simply, ‘A ladies’ man’.

  After Nick left, on a day when Doctor Ferbusch had been more th
an routinely jovial while bearing down on a breastbone, I began to receive the cool, restorative Ferbusch treatment. With a tuck here and a nip there, he began patching me up. ‘Who’s Charlotte?’ he had asked once, when we were three. Nick and I stared at each other, a mere stride separating us between head and toe of an Oxford don, a Dr Beatrice something-or-other, her silver hair still done up with ancient clips. ‘She rang,’ he said. ‘Apparently, either of you will do.’ Then later, I suppose after he thought was a decent interval, he began talking about disengagement. ‘Do you believe in the soul, Morley?’ he would ask. Maybe it was a celebration of Nick’s departure.

  Shortly afterwards he told me about his sarcoma. He was so objective, it sounded like a cat he’d taken in, a cat which, though unruly, had attached itself to him with a passion quite beyond his control. Did Nick ever tell you that it was he who had done the pregnancy test on the sample you gave me? He’d returned to the Path Lab by then. I was with him in that room with the twelve-foot preserved tapeworm in its Perspex tunnel, when he injected the midwife toads, calling me a few days later to view them as they kicked and bulged with eggs in dumb proclamation of your motherhood.

  Doctor Ferbusch was not amused to think that Nick and I were involved with the same woman. Nick’s leaving restored his moral certainty. Doctor Ferbusch has dwelt so long amidst the un-imagining flesh that he is as contemptuous of life as those who believe there is brighter and better to come. Immersed in his bluff landscapes of disfigurement, he will say something like, ‘All that intrigue, Morley, just for this’, as if dying were the whole point of living. He was right about Nick, but in a way that must always make the recipients of that kind of observation feel ever so slightly inferior: out of the race, as it were, or even a non-runner. I have increased in stature, Nick’s flippancy having made my surly cleverness seem like something Doctor Ferbusch might turn to advantage. He has always been filled with pleasure and a superior pride to see someone dabbling at the edge of the thicket of learning in which all that can be seen of him is his bent back. For a while now, he has been bringing in obscure journals, which lie around like copies of National Geographic in a dentist’s surgery. In one I discovered a piece called ‘Guillan-Barre Syndrome: Early Descriptions of Ascending Paralysis’ (I’m into syndromes, as you’ll see). There were grainy pictures of Guillan at Salpetriere, standing next to the dissector like Proust with a Metropol chef before the neat carving of livers.