by William Boyd
* * *
I came to this book hoping for some sort of guidance, but it can only bumble on about the ‘insufficient articulation of our language’, which is absolutely no help at all, however accurate it may be. For example, the door of this café I’m sitting in is on my left-hand side. I clearly see in my left field of vision a tall woman in black come through it and advance towards the bar. I take a pen from my pocket and intend to write down what I saw in the margin of my book. I say to myself: ‘Write down what you saw coming through the door.’ I cannot do it, of course. As far as the right-hand side of my body is concerned the lady in black does not exist. So which hemisphere of my brain do I trust, then? Which version of the truth do I accept; lady or no lady?
They are both true as far as I am concerned, and whatever I decide one half of my body will back my judgement to the death.
Of course there is a simple way out: I can turn round, bring her into my right field of vision, firmly establish her existence. But that’s entirely up to me. Oh yes. Unlike the rest of you, verification is a gift I can bestow or withdraw at will.
I turn. I see her. She is tall, with curly reddish auburn hair. Our eyes meet, part, meet again. Recognition flares. It is Erica.
It was I who discovered Joan’s body on the floor of the guest bedroom. (One shot: my father’s old Smith & Wesson pressed against her soft palate. I use the revolver – fully licensed of course – to blast at the rooks which sometimes wheel and caw round the house. Indeed, Joan and I spent a tipsy afternoon engaged in this sport. I couldn’t have known . . .)
Kramer was still in London. I had gone out to a dinner party leaving Joan curled up with a whisky bottle – she had muttered something about a migraine. Naturally, I phoned the police at once.
Kramer arrived on the first train from London the next morning, numbed and shattered by the news.
At the inquest – a formality – it came out that Joan had attempted suicide a few months earlier and Kramer admitted to the rockiness of their marriage. He stayed with me until it was all over. They were stressful edgy days. Kramer was taciturn and preoccupied which, under the circumstances, wasn’t surprising. He did tell me, though, that he hadn’t been continually in London but in fact had spent some days in Paris with Erica where some sort of emotional crisis had ensued. He had only been back thirty-six hours when the police phoned his London hotel with the news of Joan’s death.
And now Erica herself sits opposite me. Her face has very little make-up on and she looks tense and worried. After the initial pleasantries we both blurt out, ‘What are you doing here?’ and both realize simultaneously that we are here for the same reason. Looking for Kramer.
When Kramer left after the inquest he told me he was going to Paris to rejoin Erica and make a film on De Chirico for French TV. Apparently unperturbed he had continued to sleep in the guest bedroom but it was several days before I could bring myself to go in and clean it out. In the waste-paper basket I found several magazines, a map of Paris, a crumpled napkin from the Bar Cercle with the message ‘Monday, Rue Christine’ scrawled on it and, to my alarm and intense consternation, a semi-transparent credit card receipt slip from a filling station on the M4 at a place no more than an hour’s drive from the house. This unsettled me. As far as I knew Kramer had no car. And, what was more disturbing, the date on the receipt slip was the same as the night Joan died.
* * *
Erica is distinctly on edge. She says she has arranged to meet Kramer here tonight as she has something to tell him. She picks at her lower lip distractedly.
‘But anyway,’ she says with vague annoyance, ‘what do you want him for?’
I shrug my shoulders. ‘I have to see him as well,’ I say. ‘There’s something I have to clear up.’
‘What is it?’
I almost tell her. I almost say, I want the truth. I want to know if he killed his wife. If he hired a car, drove to the house, found her alone and insensibly drunk, typed the note, put the pistol in her lolling mouth and blew the top of her head off.
But I don’t. I say it’s just a personal matter.
There is a pause in our conversation. I say to Erica, who nervously lights a cigarette, ‘Look, I think I should talk to him first.’
‘No!’ she replies instantly. ‘I must speak to him.’ Speak to him about what? I wonder. It irritates me. Is Kramer to be hounded perpetually by these neurotic harpies? What has the man done to deserve this?
We see Kramer the same time as he sees us. He strides over to our table. He stares angrily at me.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he demands in tones of real astonishment.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, nervousness making my voice tremble. ‘But I have to speak to you.’ It’s like being back at school.
Erica crushes out her cigarette and jumps to her feet. I can see she is blinking back tears.
‘I have news for you,’ she says, fighting to keep her voice strong. ‘Important news.’
Kramer grips her by the elbows. ‘Come back,’ he says softly, pleadingly.
I am impatient with whatever lovelorn drama it is that they are enacting, and also obscurely angered by this demeaning display of reliance. Raising my voice I flourish the credit card receipt. ‘Kramer,’ I say, ‘I want to know about this.’
He ignores me. He does not take his eyes from Erica. ‘Erica, please,’ he entreats.
She lowers her head and looks down at her shaking hands.
‘No,’ she says desperately. ‘I can’t. I’m marrying Jean-Louis. I said I would tell you tonight. Please let me go.’ She shakes herself free of his arms and brushes past him out into the night. I am glad to see her go.
I have never seen a man look so abject. Kramer stands with his head bowed in defeat, his jaw muscles bulging, his eyes fixed – as if he’s just witnessed some dreadful atrocity. I despise him like this, so impoverished and vulnerable, nothing like the Kramer I knew.
I lean forward. ‘Kramer,’ I say softly, confidingly. ‘You can tell me now. You did it, didn’t you? You came back that night while I was away.’ I spread the slip of transparent paper on the table. ‘You see I have the facts here.’ I keep my voice low. ‘But don’t worry, it’s between you and me. I just need to know the truth.’
Kramer sits down unsteadily. He examines the receipt. Then he looks up at me as if I’m quite mad.
‘Of course I came back,’ he whispers bitterly. ‘I drove back that night to tell Joan I was leaving her, that I wanted Erica.’ He shakes his head in grim irony. ‘Instead I saw everything. From the garden. I saw you sitting in your study. You had a kind of bandage round your head. It covered one eye.’ He points to my right eye. ‘You were typing with one hand. Your left hand. You only used one hand. All the time. I saw you take the gun from the drawer with your left hand.’ He paused. ‘I knew what you were going to do. I didn’t want to stop you.’ He stands up. ‘You are a sick man,’ he says, ‘with your sick worries. You can delude yourself perhaps, but nobody else.’ He looks at me as if he can taste vomit in his mouth. ‘I stood there and listened for the shot. I went along with the game. I share the guilt. But it was you who did it.’ He turns and walks out of the café.
KRAMER IS LYING. It is a lie. The sort of mad impossible fantastic lie a desperate man would dream up. I know he is lying because I know the truth. It’s locked in my brain. It is inviolate. I have my body’s authority for it.
Still, there is a problem now with this lie he’s set loose. Mendacity is a tenacious beast. If it’s not nipped in the bud it’s soon indistinguishable from the truth. I told him he didn’t need to worry. But now . . .
He is bound to return to this melancholy bar before long. I know the banal nostalgia of such disappointed men – haunting the sites of their defeats – and the powerful impulses of unrequited love. I will have to see Kramer again; sort things out once and for all.
I signal the waiter for my bill. As I close my book a sentence at the bottom of the page catches my eye:
A curse on them all I say.
Hardly Ever
‘Think of it,’ Holland said. ‘The sex.’
‘Sex.’ Panton repeated. ‘God . . . Sex.’
Niles shook his head. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked. ‘I mean, can you guarantee it? The sex, that is. I don’t want to waste time farting around singing.’
‘Waste bloody time? Are you mad?’ Holland said. ‘It only happens every two years. You can’t afford to miss the opportunity. Unless you’re suffering from second thoughts.’
‘What, me?’ Niles tried to laugh. He looked at Holland’s blue eyes. They always seemed to know. ‘You must be bloody kidding, mate. Jesus, if you think . . . God!’ he snorted.
‘All right, all right,’ Holland said. ‘We agreed, remember? It’s got to be all of us.’
Niles had never asked for this last fact to be explained. Why – if, as Holland attested – the sex was freely available, on a plate so to speak, why did they all have to participate at the feast? Holland made out it was part of his naturally generous personality. It was more fun if you all had a go.
‘Let’s get on with it,’ Panton said.
They walked over to the noticeboard. Holland pushed some juniors out of the way. Prothero, the music master, had written on the top of a sheet of paper: GILBERT AND SULLIVAN OPERA – HMS PINAFORE – CHORUS: BASSES AND TENORS WANTED, SIGN BELOW. Half a dozen names had been scrawled down.
‘Cretins,’ Holland said. ‘No competition.’ He wrote his name down. Panton followed suit.
Niles took a biro from his blazer pocket. He paused.
‘But how can you be so sure? That’s what I want to know. How can you tell that the girls just won’t be – well – music-lovers?’
‘Because I know,’ Holland said patiently. ‘Every Gilbert and Sullivan it’s the same. Borthwick told me. He was in the last one. He said the girls only come for one thing. I mean, it stands to reason. What sort of girl’s going to want to be in some pissing bloody operetta. Ask yourself. Shitty orchestra, home-made costumes, people who can’t sing to save their life. I tell you, Nilo, they’re doing it for the same reason as us. They’re fed up with the local yobs. They want a nice public-school boy. Christ, you must have heard. It’s a cert. Leave it to Pete.’
Niles screwed up his eyes. What the hell, he thought, it’s time I tried. He signed his name. Q. Niles.
‘Good old Quentin,’ Panton roared. ‘Wor! Think of it waiting.’ He forced his features into a semblance of noble suffering, wrapped his arms around himself as if riven with acute internal pain and lurched drunkenly about, groaning in simulated ecstasy.
Holland grabbed Niles by the arm. ‘The shafting, Nilo my man,’ he said intensely. ‘The royal bloody shafting we’re going to do.’
Niles felt his chest expand with sudden exhilaration. Holland’s fierce enthusiasm always affected him more than Panton’s most baroque histrionics.
‘Bloody right, Pete,’ he said. ‘Too bloody right. I’m getting desperate already.’
Niles sat in his small box-like study and stared out at the relentless rain falling on the gentle Scottish hills. From his study window he could see a corner of the dormitory wing of his own house, an expanse of gravel with the housemaster’s car parked on it and fifty yards of the drive leading down to the main school house a mile or so away. On the desk in front of him lay a half-completed team list for the inter-house rugby leagues and an open notepad. On the notepad he had written: The Rape of the Lock, and below that ‘The Rape of the Lock is a mock heroic poem. What do you understand by this term? Illustrate with examples.’ It was an essay which he was due to hand in tomorrow. He had no idea what to say. He gazed dully out at the rain, idly noting some boys coming out of the woods. They must be desperate, he thought, if they have to go out for a smoke in this weather. He returned to his more immediate problem. Who was going to play scrum-half now that Damianos had a sick-chit? He considered the pool of players he could draw on: asthmatics, fatsos, spastics every one. To hell with it. He wrote down Grover’s name. They had no chance of winning anyway. He opened his desk cupboard and removed a packet of Jaffa Cakes and a large bottle of Coca-Cola. He gulped thirstily from the bottle and ate a few biscuits. The Rape of the Lock. What could he say about it? He didn’t mind the poem. He thought of Belinda:
‘On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore,’. . . He found her far and away the most alluring of the fictional heroines he had yet encountered in his brief acquaintance with English Literature. He read the opening of the poem again. He saw her lying in a huge rumpled bed, a lace peignoir barely covering two breasts as firm and symmetrical as halved grapefruits. He had had a bonkon all the English lesson. It hadn’t happened to him since they’d read Great Expectations. What was her name? Estella. God, yes. She was almost as good as Belinda. He thought about his essay again. He liked English Literature. He wondered if he would be able to do it at university – if he could get to university at all. His father had not been at all pleased when he had announced that he wanted to do English A-level. ‘What’s the use of that?’ he had shouted. ‘How’s English Literature going to help you sell machine tools?’ Niles sighed. There was an opening for him in Gerald Niles (Engineering) Ltd. His father knew nothing of his plans for university.
Niles ran his hands through his thick wiry hair and rubbed his eyes. He picked up his pen. ‘Alexander Pope,’ he wrote, ‘was a major poet of the Augustan period. The Rape of the Lock was his most celebrated poem.’ He sensed it was a bad beginning – uninspired, boring – but sometimes if you started by writing down what you knew, you occasionally got a few ideas. He scanned Canto One. ‘Soft bosoms’, he saw. Then ‘Belinda still her downy pillow prest’. He felt himself quicken. Pope knew what he was doing, all right. The associations: bosom and pillow, prest and breast. Niles shut his eyes. He was weighing Belinda’s perfect breasts in his hands, massaging her awake as she lay in her tousled noonday bed. He imagined her hair spread over her face, full lips, heavy sleep-bruised eyes. He imagined a slim forearm raised to ward off Sol’s tim’rous ray, Belinda turning on to her back, stretching. Jesus. Would she have hairy armpits? he wondered, swallowing. Did they shave their armpits in the eighteenth century? Would it be like that French woman he’d seen on a campsite near Limoges last summer? In the camp super-market, wearing only a bikini, reaching up for a tin on a high shelf and exposing a great hank of armpit hair. Niles groaned. He leant forward and rested his head on his open book. ‘Belinda,’ he whispered, ‘Belinda.’
‘Everything okay, Quentin?’
He sat up abruptly, banging his knees sharply on the bottom of his desk. It was Bowler, his housemaster, his round bespectacled face peering at him concernedly, his body canted into the study, pipe clenched between his brown teeth. Why couldn’t the bastard knock? Niles swore.
‘Trying to write an essay, sir,’ he said.
‘Not that difficult, is it?’ Bowler laughed. ‘Got the team for the league?’
Niles handed it over. Bowler studied it, puffing on his pipe, frowning. Niles looked at the sour blue smoke gathering on the ceiling. Typical bloody Bowler.
‘This the best we can do? Are you sure about Grover at scrum-half? Crucial position, I would have thought.’
‘I think he needs to be pressured a bit, sir.’
‘Right-ho. You’re the boss. See you’re down for Pinafore.’
‘Sorry, sir?’
’Pinafore. HMS. The opera. Didn’t know you sang, Quentin? Shouldn’t have thought it was your line really.’
‘Thought I’d give it a go, sir.’
Bowler left and Niles thought about the opera. Holland had said it was a sure thing with the girls: they only came because they wanted to get off with boys. Niles wondered what they’d be like. Scottish girls from the local grammar school. He’d seen them in town often. Dark blue uniforms, felt hats, long hair, mini-skirts. They all looked older than h
im – more mature. He experienced a sudden moment of panic. What in God’s name would he do? Holland and Panton would be there, everyone would see him. He felt his heart beat with unreasonable speed. It was a kind of proof. There was no chance of lying or evading the issue. It would be all too public.
* * *
They gathered in the music room behind the new chapel for the first mixed rehearsal. There had been three weeks of tedious afternoon practices during which some semblance of singing ability had been forcibly extracted from them by the efforts of Prothero, the music master. Now Prothero watched the boys enter with a tired and cynical smile. This was his seventh Gilbert and Sullivan since coming to the school, his third HMS Pinafore. Two sets of forms faced each other at one end of the long room. The boys sat down on one set staring at the empty seats opposite as if they were already occupied.
‘Now, gentlemen,’ Prothero began. ‘The ladies will be here soon. I don’t propose to lecture you any more on the subject. I count on your innate good manners and sense of decorum.’
Niles, Holland and Panton sat together. Whispered conversations were going on all around. Niles felt his lungs press against his rib cage. The tension was acute, he felt faint with unfamiliar stress. What if not one of them spoke to him? This was dreadful, he thought, and the girls weren’t even here. He looked at the fellow members of the chorus. There were some authentic tenors and basses from the school choir but the rest of them were made up of self-appointed lads, frustrates and sexual braggarts. He could sense their crude desire thrumming through the group as if the forms they were sitting on were charged with a low electric current. He looked at the bright-eyed, snouty expectant faces, heard whispered obscenities and saw the international language of sexual gesticulation being covertly practised as if they were a gathering of randy deafmutes. He felt vaguely soiled to be counted among them. Beside him Holland leaned forward and tapped the shoulder of a boy in front.
‘Bloody Mobo,’ he said quietly and venomously. ‘Didn’t you get the message? No queers allowed. What are you bloody doing here? It’s girls we’re singing with. Not lushmen, Mobo, no little lushmen.’