by WALL, ALAN
‘Kate Halloran, meet Stefan Kreuz,’ I said, a little shyly. ‘This is Stefan’s flat, by the way.’
‘Hello, Stefan,’ Kate said, the words flowing slowly from her lips, still sticky with sleep, syrupy with solicitude. He took her hand and shook it very gently.
‘And hello to you, my dear.’
Kate went away that day, but only so that she could bring some of her things back in the evening. Our days together turned into a week. Stefan said nothing. I kept observing him closely to catch any signs of disapproval, but I could see none. During the following week, Kate started preparing meals for all three of us. She had never discussed this with me, but Stefan seemed more than happy to join in with the preparations. She was a very good cook. I came back one day to find them both in the kitchen, cooking and chatting amiably, as Stefan guided her through the preparation of an authentic goulash. I edged back out quietly, leaving them to it, humming a Bessie Smith tune quietly to myself as I went.
She told me she had been born in Portsmouth. At the age of eighteen she had entered the photographic files of the Southsea Model Directory and soon found herself walking down some of the less attended catwalks of the Home Counties, simulating smiles, cavorting to the syncopations of desire. Soon she had come to London, hoping to be photographed for the tabloids. Two days later she was surprised to find herself in a draughty studio in Wandsworth, alone with a photographer who was unshaven and hung-over, his pale flesh ghostly in the morning light. He had spent three hours shooting her topless. A few of these pictures were subsequently published, not however on Page Three of her chosen red top, but instead in magazines with predictable names that always end up on the top shelf at the newsagents. Which was why, she explained, needing money as badly as she did by then, she had found herself working four nights a week at a nightclub off St James’s Square, which advertised itself as ‘an exotic oasis in the city for gentlemen’. The waitresses all served topless. No physical contact was permitted in the main bar, but there was a separate room below, dark and spiky with music and smoke, where plenty of touching took place to make sure all the bits and pieces were in the right places. And if a gentleman in pursuit of his urban exotica was prepared to pay £100 to the management, either by credit card or cash, he could start out into the night with the waitress of his choice, with whom he must then make his own ad hoc financial arrangements regarding hourly rates and services to be provided.
All this information was provided in sleepy conversations over the pillow, between our frenzied engagements. The teeth-clenched intensity of her thrown-back head was new to me. Dominique had never done more than moan quietly to herself, as though chasing whispers down the corridors of her repressions. Or could they have been mine?
Kate’s flesh seemed powdered somehow, like her face, chalky-white with moondust. And she was usually fogged as though she had just emerged from sleep, or was about to make the long descent back into it. Somehow she seemed to spend half the day either dressing or undressing, though she could be snagged for hours at a time in a limbo of dishevelment somewhere between the two. The white flesh of her legs and sometimes, when she only wore one of my shirts and sat drinking coffee in the kitchen, that of her breasts, was easily visible as she loped about, curled, stretched, or leaned forward with an easy motion to reciprocate whatever gesture had just been offered.
I couldn’t keep my hands off her and it took a few weeks before I started to register the discrepancy: Kate would go into her frenzied mode before I’d barely touched her. Her cries and contortions always arrived with the same regularity, continued at the same pace, died away with the same attenuated fall. I started to wonder if Kate’s body could be telling me lies. I felt some strange and unwelcome memory stirring, of touching the flesh but knowing the spirit was elsewhere. Then one day, when she had gone for a walk down Oxford Street, I rifled through the bags in the corner where she kept most of her things, and found her portfolio from the Southsea Model Directory. When I saw the teeth-clenched intensity of her thrown-back head, with nothing more sensual than strobe lights caressing her breasts and thighs, I felt curiously hollow; felt as though I’d at last found the body of evidence under the body; caught out my own desire as somehow fraudulent, entrapped and entangled in a scheme that had preceded it.
I could no longer connect, not with any conviction, and asked myself whether she’d ever truly connected at all. Soon I couldn’t bear to hear her moans. I had a feeling that she’d once recorded them, then simply memorised the performance. I didn’t feel as though they had anything to do with me and I longed once again for Dominique’s soft and self-beguiling murmurs, as she sank further down and I sank further in.
* * *
‘It’s been wonderful, Kate, really, but I just feel I need to be alone again for a while, that’s all. I’m essentially the solitary type. But Dan probably told you that.’ She looked at me and then shrugged. Exactly how we’d met.
‘I’m going up north for a fortnight,’ I said, ‘and I’ve had a word with Stefan about you staying on by yourself here while I’m gone, so you can find somewhere else. He said that would be fine. I’ve settled the rent. I’ll be back on the fifteenth. So, if you could find somewhere by then…’
‘As long as you enjoyed it,’ she said.
‘Oh, I enjoyed it, believe me.’
And that weekend I took the train from King’s Cross to Yorkshire.
11
On the way up I tried to register all the different counties, but half of them seemed to have melded one into another by the time the train finally pulled into the station. I caught sight of one of the old public buildings and was back twenty years before. I had gone to the local art gallery one weekend and stood next to a Henry Moore sculpture of a woman, the great gaping mountain of a woman, with outcrops for breasts and a vast void of a womb. I had placed my hand carefully on its rough-cast surface, just above the blind declivities of her eyes. A uniformed figure had beaked swiftly out of a corner.
‘Hands off, if you don’t mind.’
Fresh from my reading of a Thames & Hudson book, I turned and replied, keeping my hand in place, ‘Henry Moore says that if people don’t touch his sculptures, they’ll die.’
‘That’s as maybe, son,’ said the man in the uniform, ‘but if you don’t take your hand off that particular one, I’m going to cut it off.’
My grandmother had not been well. She was even shakier than usual on her legs. Her eyes had sunk a little deeper into her face, whose flesh was now ivory white, with dark hairline cracks across it. I asked her what the matter was, but she only gestured to the lower part of her torso.
‘It’s a funny thing about being uneducated,’ she said later in a meditative tone as she sipped a glass of whisky, ‘but you only ever find out the names of all the things inside you after they start packing in.’
‘Stay young, lad,’ my grandfather said, looking through the window at his roses. ‘Stay young as long as you can, that’s your best bet.’
By this time my grandfather had been retired for a while and spent most of his days, when it wasn’t raining, playing bowls in the local park. I arranged to take them down to the Metropole that Saturday night, ferried there by the local taxi service, to sample the buffet meal at the carvery.
My grandmother couldn’t grasp the concept of the carvery, no matter how often I explained.
‘You can go back as many times as you like,’ I said. ‘There’s no need to pile it up like that.’
But she kept piling, and when she’d eaten everything that was on the plate she edged across to me and asked in a whisper if I might sneak back and get her some more of the roast beef and potatoes.
‘We don’t have to sneak back,’ I said. ‘We’ve paid for the meal. You can have as much as you like.’ She looked dubious.
‘But won’t you have to pay them again?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘just the once. You can clear the table, if you’re that hungry.’ I thought as long as she had her appetite there pro
bably wasn’t too much to worry about.
‘You get it for me anyway,’ she said, just in case, offering me her plate. I went dutifully and piled once more. After I had placed it before her and sat down, she leaned across conspiratorially.
‘You didn’t have to pay them again, did you?’ My grandfather stood up.
‘I’ll go get her another lager,’ he said. ‘She was always more logical with a bit of drink inside her.’
By day I walked the streets where I’d grown up, called into pubs where I’d drunk, even saw the occasional face I recognised. On a piece of wasteland near a wrecker’s yard there were still the ravaged shells of motors long defunct. I remembered how I had once sat in them, heaving the steering wheel this way and that as I gunned along some imaginary highway. That was as close as I’d ever come to driving and, odd though it may seem, as close as I’d ever wanted to. I stood on St Enoch’s Road and looked down the hill to where I’d once watched a Lister have sex with some local girl, while twenty feet above him one of his brothers threw stones at them both. There’d been white twitches of flesh under the chaos of her clothes. I remembered the excitement I’d felt, laced with dread.
My grandmother couldn’t face any long trips out, so I made my own way by bus over the moors. I travelled to the glen and stood in the exact spot where Dominique had found her yellow-hearted flower. There were none now. I walked up through the mist to the top of the hill where the sheep emerged from the inkwash grey, still wrapped in their genesis wool. They stopped dead and stared, and I felt for a moment as if I were dissolving in their gaze, then somewhere below us a churchbell exploded. In bed at night I found myself thinking of Kate. Might I have been a little hasty there? A certain asynchrony between desire and its expression surely wasn’t the gravest misdemeanour in the world. I wondered if I was really ready for the monk’s life yet. I could still feel her tongue enticing me, the way they say amputated limbs carry on sending their messages to the brain long after they’ve entered the incinerator. I thought of Dominique, too, and even of Sally Pagett, but I didn’t really want to think about her. I had to think really hard not to think about her. The trouble was that I couldn’t think about her without also thinking of Dan. Dear dead Dan.
Then one afternoon at five o’clock I was back on the train again, heading for London. And on the way down I decided to retrieve Kate from wherever she’d landed and bring her back to Stefan’s flat. He liked her, that much was obvious; they were at ease in one another’s company. Maybe we could live as a family. An unorthodox one certainly, but then that was the only sort I’d ever known. And the next time Stefan had one of his women in, we could all be introduced; go off at the end of the evening to our separate bedrooms, with smiles of wine-bright anticipation on our faces. I felt a surge of warmth towards both of them.
It was after nine when I let myself into the flat and as I made my way through the living room I heard a sound I knew only too well. Kate was already past the initiatory moans and had moved on to the tiny yelps. I sat down slowly on the sofa and listened as the third movement, the basso profondo of labyrinthine passions at long last located and now gaspingly explored, began its progress. ‘Stefan, Stefan,’ she cried, calling out his name exactly as she’d once called out mine, though with what seemed to me, from the auditory gallery, a more unambiguous enthusiasm. Then she moved to the attenuation, the dying fall, and Stefan uttered some lyrical sounds in Hungarian, which I could have sworn were lines from his translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
Five minutes later he emerged, wearing nothing but an open bathrobe that flapped about his torso. He stopped in the middle of the floor.
‘Sean, I didn’t realise you were back.’ I nodded, in acknowledgement of the fact that I was and that he evidently hadn’t realised.
‘Have a cognac.’ I nodded weakly. I certainly needed something. He came back with the drinks and sat down next to me on the sofa.
‘Kate,’ he began, then faltered. The only time I had ever known his English give way.
‘Has moved into your bed, Stefan,’ I offered helpfully. ‘Yes, I heard.’ Stefan smiled at me, his ancient seducer’s smile. His brown eyes were always warm, always amused and tolerant. I could see, I suppose, what they saw in him. He reached into the pocket of his robe and took out a Gauloise. Blue smoke soon enshrouded us both.
‘I wonder if you’d mind very much,’ he said and faltered again, then he stood up and walked across to his mantelpiece, where he stared down at the acorns and trilobites he’d collected over the years, ‘mind going to stay in Dalrymple House instead of here. It’s just, it could seem a bit crowded otherwise. That’s the way it felt before…’
‘You want me to move out?’
‘If you wouldn’t mind.’
‘Would tomorrow be all right?’
‘Tonight would be better. I mean, you could come back and get your things tomorrow. Just pick up what you need for the moment. I already notified Maggie. Your room is ready: she aired the sheets.’
So that night I stayed at Dalrymple House.
‘I gather you’re moving from there to here,’ Maggie said, a little cautiously, as she gauged my mood.
‘So it seems.’
‘Stefan must be keen.’
‘Must be.’ She was an attractive woman, older than me but younger than Stefan, and she gave me a smile then, a smile that bespoke either the possibility of intimacy or the established fact of complicity. Both were equally unwelcome.
* * *
Next day I walked down to collect my things and stopped outside the British Museum. I decided to go inside and look at the one thing I always ended up looking at. This was the obsidian mirror into which Dr John Dee had so often gazed with Kelley, a black pool making visible the vast invisible agencies that surrounded them. The kindly female curator, Annette, had one day taken it from its case when no one else was about and let me hold it in my hands. I wasn’t sure what exactly I was holding, or whether the images of any spirits had ever really moved across its surface. Dee said they had, though; he’d been in no doubt of it whatsoever. On alternate days came Modimi, in the shape of a pretty female child, and another feminine spirit named Galvah. Their speeches had needed to be decoded from Kelley’s unreliable reports.
It was by way of a magical speculum, which over the years had come to be called the devil’s looking-glass. Obsidian was sacred to the Aztec god Tezintlipoca, who would gaze into his own black scrying pool, there to observe the curious doings of humankind. Aztec priests preferred reflective surfaces for divination – smooth water, polished stone. The good doctor’s interests, it struck me once more, had been very dangerous indeed, as dangerous as casting the queen’s nativity, which he had in fact once done, landing himself in prison in the process. Aubrey records that he was reputed to have the power to raise tempests and he also claimed for himself the faculty of discovering hidden treasure. All he wanted was to be allowed to exercise his gift under the protection of the Royal Letters Patent, then he would set out into the world to discover mines of gold and silver ‘for her Grace’s only use’. But an ancient belief was still prevalent in those days: that treasure sunk under the earth was in the keeping of demons, and that their help must be solicited for its discovery. Stringent statutes were extant against such sorcery. You could die if you were caught at it.
Next to the obsidian mirror was the shewstone, a crystal ball, a polished glass zero pregnant with nothing, though seemingly patient with the possibility of everything. A translucent egg of mystical vacuity. Had Dee been the model for Prospero? How close was he to the School of Night? He certainly knew its most important members. How to fathom the past when we had so little notion what was going on in the present.
A few minutes later I let myself back into the flat. There seemed to be no one about. I assumed they were both probably recuperating from their nocturnal exertions in Stefan’s bedroom, the door of which was closed. It only took ten minutes to pack my things, which were mostly books and a few clothes. As I
came out into the living room, I walked across to the bookshelf and ran my hand across some of Stefan’s ancient volumes. I was saying goodbye, I suppose. I had a sad feeling that I’d not be back.
I smelt her before I saw her. Kate was behind me, wearing one of Stefan’s shirts, a candy stripe with a button-down collar.
‘Hope I’m not causing too much inconvenience round here amongst you boys.’ She kissed me easily on the cheek, then went and poured herself a drink.
‘Cognac?’ she called from the kitchen.
‘No thanks. A little early for me.’
She was sitting on the sofa, her legs crossed beneath her.
‘Just out of interest, Kate, why did you stop working at the Oasis?’
‘Daniel Pagett paid me to do some work for him instead.’ As she said this, she turned and looked towards the window. The clouds had briefly scattered and sunlight was shafting through. I bid her the fondest farewell I could muster and went quickly down the stairs.
Stefan called at the hotel a few nights later.
‘You are not angry with me, Sean?’
‘Not at all, Stefan. The soft doors opened and you went in. Isn’t that the way everything always gets started.’
* * *
A starred note from Hariot:
Women from that point on had no further place in our study. They were matter only for dreams and speculations.
I was glad to get back to work. I resolved myself against any murmurs of resentment; it’s not my way, after all, for that would be to commit the capital sin against time. Wishing things otherwise is merely another name for urging the years to go backwards, spitting in the face of what has been given, and I knew I’d never fathom my own particular riddle if I didn’t accept what was given. Anyway, I had the night to myself once more – apart from the news, that is, but I was well enough used to living with that. The great thing to remember about the news is that it always happens to other people.