It Takes a Thief

by Niels Hammer

  “You must have a miraculous memory for details?”

  “Oh no, I only have a fair idea where about it is hidden, and I usually wait two or three months before taking the spoils to London, but I waited about a year with the wristlet and the other jewellery.”

  “So that was why it was still available?”

  “Yes.”

  Licking her lips she savoured his astonishment. He had underestimated her cautiousness.

  “But then you must dig through the whole place to find it?”

  “Oh, no, I use a metal detector. I will be out hunting Roman treasures. I have in fact bought some coins so that I can substantiate my interest if need be.”

  Corot’s lake landscape – musée de l’Ermitage – good light filtered through layers of chlorophyll.

  “I see, that explains your small library on Roman coins.”

  “It does, but it’s also interesting in its own right, and I have developed quite a passion for it.”

  Delighted by her ingenuity he pressed his hand down between her warm firm thighs.

  “That’s what you like?”

  “Yes, supple strength – sophisticated skill, but why do you keep it for three months?”

  “It’s self-evident. If I should have aroused any suspicion there will be nothing substantial to indicate my involvement, and after three months the interest in such cases dies down, due to the more urgent concerns of the present; and besides, theft is not considered to be a priority.”

  They had come out into the Broad and as the wind had vanished the still surface of the water shone with a rosy glow in the sinking Sun.

  “How do you keep à jour of forensic developments?”

  “Once a month or so I look through abstracts of journals such as ‘Forensic Science’ and ‘Journal of Forensic Science’ in the library. I would never touch such subjects on the Internet.”

  “So finding you I have been very lucky in at least two different ways.”

  Chiaroscuro among the tall Alders – a fair glimpse of a good forest – Shishkin’s glade with Grey Herons – variations over a theme.

  “It would be presumptuous of me to agree to grant you luck as far as your Fate is concerned; but your methodology, your power of observation and deduction certainly made it more likely that you would be able to find me than not.”

  “Your surname was a godsend.”

  “You would have managed anyway; you could for example have become a member of all the likely clubs in turn and if spending a week in each one of them you would certainly have found me in less than six months. I can at least hear three nightingales now.”

  “Yes, they are fairly common here, but the song varies from individual to individual. There are some whose songs are good and then there are virtuosi whose repertoire includes tunes, flutes, melodies, twitters, snarls and abrupt pauses. One bird can give the impression of an entire orchestra. Yes, I could have done as you say, but how could I have been able to wait?”

  So sitting side by side they listened to the intensifying music that enveloped them while watching the Lion-fragrant Sun set in the North East – a blood-red ball of incandescent vapour – a juicy blood-orange of pulsating fire.

  “Sometimes beauty can be so intense that it hurts like when you continue – ”

  “Shall I – ”

  “No, never. Do not change the ways you move or the ways you move me.”

  “Even if it should hurt a little?”

  “No, never. Do whatever you can to reach the apotheosis of sensibility. That and that only.”

  “Le pauvre chevalier qui ne se rend pas?”

  And her smile became the challenge of a teasing threat – perfectible as soon as they came back.

  XXV

  Like a nonentity – Malevic’s Black Square – ‘though he managed to liberate painting from the shackles of mimesis and representation’ – but how could that be a liberation? Why was mimesis or even representation assumed to be shackles? ‘He raised painting to a higher state’ – aha – but what was it exactly about that state that made it higher? Why should patterns of nature – inner or outer – reduced to straight lines – triangles or circles be seen as an improvement rather than as an impoverishment when the details that made it real – suggestive and full of associations – were lacking? No answer would come from that quarter for would an abstract painting not be as impossible as an image of something invisible? A poor intellectual léger de main? ‘And he gave painting a greater degree of spatial freedom’ – but what kind of freedom could that be? Was there really such a phenomenon as freedom? A Swift was bound by gravity and designed by air flow and air resistance – so was that kind of freedom not wishful thinking – a disassociation from felt reality? No one but God was free. Ἐλεύθερος γὰρ οὔτις ἐστὶ πλὴν Διός.‘He questioned the nature and the purpose of art.’ Excellent – however – what was art but a prakṛtiḥ kenning of puruṣaḥ – something visible suggesting that which was invisible – that which could not be depicted – represented – explained or understood? A suggestion of the inner serenity beyond understanding – what was art but a subtle nudge in the ribs to further transcendence?

  “I’ve done what I could without overdoing it, but what should we drink?”

  “Prawns, muscles, salad, aspharagos, sparrowgrass, en vinaigrette and smoked Salmon, why – ”

  “Simply because Barbara loves salmon.”

  “A Winkel Riesling would do, I think.”

  The lifelessness of straight lines – squares – triangles – flat areas of a uniform colour – with no depth – no three-dimensionality – no flow – no nuances – no movement – but disharmony – disjunction – fragments – meaninglessness – two-dimensionality – a cardboard world – a cartoon superficiality – a lack of self-insight – a stale and jejune state of being in exile from oneself. Paintings of landscapes suggested emotional states – violence – peace – bliss – beauty – despair – dying. Paintings of flowers suggested beauty and grace – of animals grace – love – deceit – rage – fury – misery – grief – loving kindness – inner light – courage – sorrow – the nine or ten basic emotional states that together formed the reality all living –

  “There’s the bell. Come on!”

  It meant so much to her so he had to do his best – even in this frame of mind – to be a social animal. Taking him by the hand she ran out into the hall and her enthusiasm purged his smile of observational connotations. The door opened to frame a tall – burly and hazel-hued woman in a short ivory dress that clung to her skin as if it had been wet – and at the sight of their smiles of welcome – as they stood together on the lintel – holding hands – her midnight eyes brightened with moon-mists.

  “Barbara, may I introduce you to my future husband, Ralph, and Ralph, may I introduce you to my best friend, Barbara?”

  Her hand was warm and firm and her gaze direct and naked. No beating about the big black bush would be possible. Exchanging kisses Caitlin and Barbara looked up and down each other smiling with reciprocal animation.

  “Come in!”

  “Thanks and congratulations! I had a shock. It came like a bolt from the blue above, and you did not tell me anything at all until – ”

  The serious and joking accusation of a loss of confidence spurred Caitlin to embrace her again.

  “It has been so intense that I only just now have had time to tell my mother. You’ll understand when you hear how it happened.”

  “I’ll just fetch the wine, excuse me a minute.”

  Exploding in volleys of questions and answers they had forgotten him before he reached the door to the quiet underworld. She would imbue a plain and ordinary tale with the drama of a reality that would leave Barbara a little puzzled until she understood that the ordinary had become extraordinary due to the intensity and the novelty of the exp
erience. He brushed a cobweb off the neck of the bottle and went upstairs towards their excited voices and quick bursts of laughter. Barbara was as Caitlin had said laughter-prone and it was contagious like yawns or like all involuntary emotions. Basic mammalian physiology. Wolves yawned and laughed in unison.

  “How lovely it looks. A real feast.”

  “Ralph insists that wine is the fond of a pleasant meal, so I have no choice but to follow suit.”

  “But that’s not so hard, is it?”

  A human glint of humour – human weakness – human strength.

  “No, we’re pretty much alike actually.”

  Perspectives depended mainly on the prevailing mood. The odd pathological need always to explain and understand. Just when – just when would he be released –

  “That’s what you might expect with a love at first sight, isn’t it? But I did not know that you were so keen on ornithology.”

  “It’s only quite recently that I discovered the wealth of the biological diversity here in the Broads. There are more than four hundred and thirty species of birds, and butterflies I had never seen before and couldn’t imagine – ”

  “You must show me all this once you have had time to settle down.”

  “We are up at three in the morning and out on the boat well before sunrise, but the effort is negligible compared with the coming of dawn and the chorus of birds.”

  The rhetoric was saved from being rhetoric by the solemn timbre of her voice.

  “Oh, is it really? But what about your job and what about Iain?”

  “I have already submitted my resignation and I have not done anything for them since last week. Of course they were quite cross but had nevertheless the good grace to congratulate me; and as for Iain, you know he’s in Avignon. I have written him a very gentle letter, and I don’t think he will grudge me my new-found happiness, do you?”

  “No, not really maybe, but knowing him, I think that he nevertheless may feel that you have let him down. He has a melancholic streak that tempts him to brood and botanise.”

  “Yes, that was what worried me, so I tried to explain it as clearly as I could.”

  The inexplainable. Damnation – disaster – death – but maybe she was beginning to shed the hide of her present instar – or his explication de texte was all awry.

  “Your whole life will be changed now as a married woman and what about the club?”

  “I don’t really know yet.”

  “Don’t let me down there, or I’ll get really furious with you or with Ralph rather and he wouldn’t like that.”

  Or – her deep-throated laughter – a soft tropical night – coiling – around him from top to toe – elastic and purple swaddling bands.

  “I won’t, but I must arrange everything here first. We’re going to redecorate the rooms.”

  “Are we?”

  “So it’s also news to you?”

  Her smile implied that women were women and that that was as plain as it could be.

  “No, not really. We have been talking about it, but it’s not something we’ll do right away. I have to get accustomed to the house first.”

  “Of course, I’m constantly redecorating or changing the rooms. It drives Teddy mad.”

  Her sensual charm was – like her Ylang Ylang perfume – overpowering and prolonged exposure might be cloying – either lethal or leading to murder. Teddy would have to have a saintly –

  “Men don’t want to be bothered with anything, like the grumpy winter bears they are at heart.”

  “I’ll tell Teddy that, I will. It sums him up.”

  “But he’s always even-tempered, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, and he had better be. A fair degree of balance and mutual equilibrium has to prevail in a marriage; excesses of one kind or another – ”

  Her knowing glance was a lighthouse beam sweeping from Caitlin to him and back to Caitlin again. There could be a warning here he would have to heed.

  “Are sooner or later doomed to end in shipwreck. As a child I saw a shipwreck on the Black Rocks, on the north-east coast of Saint Kitts during a hurricane, the finest three-masted schooner you ever saw, and I’ll never forget it. The ship was pounded to smithereens by the raging seas, and that’s what will happen if a proper balance of love is missing, but you two seem to suit each other passing well.”

  Sensing how the undercurrent of their intimacy spread to encompass the whole house and its environs she felt intrigued to reflect reality rather than to offer a personal opinion. Though being fundamentally subjective and personal she could keep the door closed and bend down to look through a scientific keyhole if need be – but quid pro quo.

  “So when did you leave Saint Kitts?”

  “Eighteen years ago, when I was eighteen, to study in Liverpool.”

  “But don’t you miss it?”

  “I certainly miss the beautiful weather and the close community life, but not the parochiality and the lack of opportunities.”

  “And you like your occupation here?”

  “I love it. Life’s renewed daily, in spite of the misery and the squalor, the ignorance and the stupidity. They are serious blemishes but they fade away as if superficial on the all-important background of life. Each birth is a wonder.”

  It gave her the necessary raison d’ être to continue from day to day but it reminded him of the infants with harelip and palatoschisis. Her perspective was preferable but he could not deviate from his melodramatic orientation – for it gave him the tragic dimension he needed to paint.

  “I’m sure it is.”

  Did she go back in time as far as she could? The visits to the dentist – the operations?

  “Birth is the single most important event in one’s life.”

  Barbara laughed good-humouredly. It was too self-evident. She looked at him with dancing flashes of light as unformed questions in her eyes – but she was also looking at him in the same way as she would look at a child – with all the loving kindness and indulgence that had been matured in her ample womanhood.

  “The most important event to remember, the primordial struggle for life.”

  “Do you?”

  Asbestic curiosity curtailed by professional scepsis.

  “Not all of it, but several sequences.”

  “That’s amazing, the brain’s not fully formed yet – ”

  “No, not before much later, but it’s nevertheless capable of receiving engrams, which, however, usually become difficult to access; but they form the pattern or the matrix underlying the way we feel, the way we think, how we live and who we are.”

  “Why would it be necessary to recollect the birth process?”

  She found a partial parallel or a simile even in the floral and fruity citrus flavour of the wine as it suggested the Taunus quartzite covered by loam-loess – the equilibrium between Sun and rain – the touch of altitude and the mild temperature. The same stern causality prevailed everywhere.

  “Unless you do that this pattern remains as a subconscious matrix that forms your life and as you have no knowledge of it you are left with no choice but to act it out automatically.”

  “You mean that it’s a deconditioning process to remember it. The remembrance will dissolve or lessen the impact of the matrix; you’ll feel more free?”

  Spontaneously aware of the issue she wanted Barbara to hear what he would say.

  “You will be a little more conscious of why and how, and a little less likely to think, feel and act preconditionally, to repeat yourself ad nauseam. Such experiences often appear in symbolic form, feeling like a butterfly coming out of its pupa or a flower opening its petals to the rays of the Sun.”

  Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles je ne me sentis plus guidé par les haleurs. A bottomless dream about that which it was best not to say anything. Clothes – however f
itting – demeaned the purity of her Nakedness. A truth limited by words would lose its life – a jellyfish taken out of the Sea.

  “That’s another reason why Caesareans must be discouraged. Can I have your references?”

  Because she had been so close to herself all her life the discrepancy between who she was and what she had become had not been pronounced enough to elicit such experiences. The gap had been too narrow to need a spark. There had always been a current running.

  “I’ll send you some references as attached files to-day or to-morrow.”

  “Thanks! But look! I’ve eaten all your smoked salmon. It was absolutely delicious.”

  “I’m glad you liked it. As you know I had enough salmon for a lifetime as a child.”

  “Also childhood experiences determine the way we live. Because of the easy-going nature of life in the Caribbean I will never be able to understand the Puritanical work-ethics of British society, the hypocrisy, the twisted sexuality. Though I’m accepted because of my education, my skill and experience I will always remain outside looking in.”

  Her lack of regret was a delight.

  “But Barbara, that’s your advantage really. You’re independent.”

  She could not tell her how much of a pariah she was herself – but Barbara had sensed it and it was one of the determining factors that had made them become fast friends.

  “Since it’s not just people in Saint Kitts who take life as it is, but in the whole Caribbean, from Nassau to Kingston, I assume that there might be a genetic factor involved?”

  “Of course there is. It’s Old Mother Africa laughing again.”

  She was grateful for her origin and keen to prove her superiority – having both emotional depth and intellectual acumen. The best of both worlds because of the balance. A Leitmotif both day and night – determining the way she fought – the way she moved – how she made love.