Alexander regarded the minuscule human figures that stood in the dusk of the monument, under the simulated stars, and for a second, though the scene was absurd, he experienced a taste of wonderment, a taste that was the same as he had experienced as a boy when looking at the Martian cities in his comics, where cars sped through tubes that were as clear and straight as thermometers and the atmosphere was cold and smelled of ink.
‘Look at this,’ said Roderick, tapping Alexander’s elbow. He was watching the bearded man, who was carrying one of his books up to the counter. The bearded man advanced very slowly, with the book open on his hands, as if bearing a platter. He proffered it to the librarian who had emerged from the office behind the counter and spoke to her, meekly, indicating something on one of the pages. The librarian – a woman in her early thirties, taut and slim as a long-distance runner, with dark hair that was parted severely down the right and cut perfectly straight at the level of her jaw – glanced at the bearded man, and at the book, and at the man again. Her eyebrows lifted so subtly that no other part of her face seemed involved in the expression, and then her wide thin lips parted to utter a word. The bearded man swivelled the book to examine the sentence underneath his finger. With a discomfited smile, he turned the page towards the librarian once more, and seemed to repeat his question. The librarian bent forward to inspect the book again, and seemed to give the same reply. She straightened, in a movement that was hydraulically gradual and steady. The bearded man watched her open a box of index cards, and returned to his table. ‘Poor woman,’ said Roderick. ‘Every week she has to go through this performance. Always pestering her, that one. He pretends he needs help to read the footnotes.’
‘Got short shrift from her,’ commented Alexander.
‘He always does, but it makes no difference. He will not be deterred. He is in love.’
‘I see.’ Grimly the bearded man put the book back on his table. The librarian was writing on a card, winding and unwinding a lock of hair while she wrote. Her demeanour suggested that she might be writing a report on the irksome incident that had just occurred. ‘You’re sure?’ asked Alexander.
‘Quite sure,’ replied Roderick. ‘So am I. In love, that is. With her.’
‘You what?’
‘Why ever not? Do you mean to imply that you detect some flaw in my dear Lady Disdain?’ demanded Roderick.
‘Good name.’
‘Thank you. She’s German. Her name’s Cornelia. Cornelia Biehl,’ said Roderick, admiringly. ‘I saw it on an envelope.’
‘You’ve spoken to her?’
Roderick closed the book, held it at arm’s length as though bidding it goodbye, and restored it to its shelf. ‘I have. She helped me with an enquiry.’
‘And?’
‘And nothing. I tried to flirt with her, but she didn’t notice. Which was not a little humiliating, as you can imagine. But exciting as well. A woman with no time for flirting. Superb.’
‘But you haven’t spoken to her again?’
‘I can’t,’ complained Roderick, huddling against the shelves as if for shelter. ‘I’d make a mess of it. I’d be like him with his small print. An obvious pretext. Ridiculous.’ He peered around the stack at the bearded man; Cornelia rose from her seat and went into the office. ‘We’d better get going,’ he said, and he hurried across the room before Cornelia could return.
Not until Nosferatu was over did they talk about Cornelia again. Still in his seat, Roderick clutched at his chest in emulation of the vampire’s convulsion of longing and misery, and gasped, as if with his final breath: ‘I confess.’ Clawing at Alexander’s arm, he smiled ecstatically at the blank screen.
‘You confess?’
‘I have a plan, Mr MacIndoe,’ croaked Roderick. ‘Will you help me? Please.’ He sucked his cheeks to make them sink, and rolled his eyes pathetically. ‘I am a worthless creature, Mr MacIndoe. I am a shrinking, creeping, worthless, pitiful thing,’ he mourned. ‘But you, Mr MacIndoe. You—’ he wheedled, and he extended a crooked forefinger towards Alexander’s chest, like Nosferatu transfixed by a spot of blood on the skin of his guest.
‘Explain yourself, Roderick,’ said Alexander, putting on his coat.
Roderick helped him with a sleeve, and continued in his own voice. ‘I would like you to help me with Cornelia,’ he said to Alexander’s back, as they shuffled along the row. ‘I think I could succeed, eventually, but it’s the bridgehead that’s the difficulty. Once I get in close,’ he said, crouching and curving his arms like a boxer in a grapple, ‘I think I can acquit myself well. But it’s that first step. The lineaments of desire. You have them, but I do not. This is the problem we must circumvent.’ He stooped to pick a half-full bucket of popcorn from the floor and held it between his fingertips. ‘Live like pigs, some people,’ he grumbled, glaring at the bucket rather than meet Alexander’s gaze.
‘And your plan?’ asked Alexander, opening the door to the foyer.
Roderick crushed the piece of litter into a bin and wiped his fingers with a handkerchief, one by one, considering Alexander’s question. ‘It took one phrase for me to fall for Cornelia. “Let me go and look for you,” she said, and that was it. From those seven words, from the way she said them, I felt I knew her. I felt I could tell how she takes life. You think that’s absurd, don’t you?’ he asked, flinching at the sunlight.
‘Not at all.’
‘But of course I’ve done some research as well, to be sure. I’ve watched her. I’ve taken note of what she reads. Last week,’ he confided, ‘she was reading Macaulay. Can you believe it? Macaulay. Nobody reads Macaulay any more,’ he said, dazed by his good fortune.
‘How long has she been under observation?’
‘Months. Many months,’ he admitted, with a smile of compassion for his quarry. ‘We have another shared interest, Cornelia and I,’ he went on. ‘Cinema,’ he said, smacking his lips. ‘She reads the reviews in all the papers. Every one of them. We have the same tastes, I know it. With your assistance, who knows what may happen? But without your assistance, Alexander, I fear she may never come to appreciate my vibrant personality,’ said Roderick, and he pressed his palms to his cheeks like a politician laying hands on a baby’s face.
‘What’s the part you have in mind for me?’
‘Well,’ Roderick replied, with a framing gesture of his hands, as if his plan were a physical object that he was setting straight, ‘we have a common ground, as I say. We have to meet in a cinema, in circumstances conducive to conversation. Now, Les Enfants du Paradis is coming up soon, and I’d wager it’s Cornelia’s kind of film. So, what I propose is that you and I go to see it, and we give Cornelia a ticket to make sure she goes too. I mean you give her the ticket. If you offer it, she’ll take it, I’m convinced. Say you bought it for a friend who now has some other engagement.’
‘Two tickets,’ said Alexander. ‘You have to give her two tickets. One ticket is as bad as the footnote subterfuge.’
‘You’re right,’ replied Roderick delightedly. ‘One ticket would be obvious.’
‘But if you give her two it looks as if you’re assuming she has a boyfriend to bring. Which is a possibility you should be prepared for.’
‘Of course.’
‘Are you prepared?’ asked Alexander, placing a hand solicitously on Roderick’s shoulder.
‘I am,’ asserted Roderick nobly. ‘So you’ll be my Trojan horse?’
‘Make sure you buy two pairs, far apart. Not a block of four.’
‘Right you are,’ replied Roderick, and they set off for Wilton Row, to meet that evening’s group in the pub where a subaltern was once flogged to death for cheating at cards, and where the sword on the wall had been seen to move and inexplicable footfalls had been heard upstairs, most often in September.
In preparation for his conversation with Cornelia, Alexander returned to the library on the following Saturday and spent half an hour with a randomly chosen volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, at a desk that Cornelia cou
ld see whenever she looked up from her catalogues. Two weeks later he returned and sat at the same desk, where he simulated concentration on an electoral register and silently rehearsed what he might say to her. On the third visit, having waited for a moment when he could speak to Cornelia without being overheard, he walked purposefully past the counter, stopped at the door as if arrested by an inspiration, and approached her. ‘Excuse me,’ he began, reaching into his jacket for the envelope, ‘I couldn’t help noticing –’ and his voice sounded thick and insincere. ‘I don’t know if you’d be interested –’ he said, standing where the bearded man had stood, and being regarded by the face that had regarded the bearded man.
‘I’m sorry?’ said Cornelia.
‘If they are of no use to you, perhaps you might know somebody –?’ said Alexander, leaving the rest of the sentence unsaid. He took the tickets from the envelope and pushed them towards Cornelia’s hand. ‘I don’t need them now,’ he explained. ‘I’d only throw them away. I can’t get a refund, you see. So someone should make use of them.’
Cornelia read the tickets, then turned her scrutiny to Alexander. ‘Thank you,’ she said, but she did not touch the tickets, and still had not touched them when Alexander looked back through the panes of the door.
As the lights went down in the cinema, Cornelia’s silhouette moved across the picture. She sat half a dozen rows in front of Roderick and Alexander, and she was on her own. Rod stared fixedly at the screen throughout the film, but when Jean-Louis Barrault cried ‘Garance!’ as his lover fled, Roderick gripped Alexander’s arm and allowed himself to look towards Cornelia. Her shoulders rose and fell, once. ‘You speak first,’ whispered Roderick, but Cornelia hurried away, leaving by the exit at the front. ‘Garance!’ Roderick echoed feebly.
‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Alexander.
‘Soderini moltissimo,’ Roderick swore. ‘What now?’
Roderick refused to visit the library until the issue was settled, one way or the other, and so Alexander went back on the following Saturday, though neither of them had any notion as to how an introduction might now be brought about. Cornelia smiled at him when he walked in, and thanked him for the tickets as he left, and that was all. Two weeks later he said hello as she passed his desk carrying a pile of magazines, and she smiled, no more warmly than she had smiled before, and Alexander smiled at the bearded man, who scowled at him, as if he took him for a rival. ‘The rush hour,’ he joked to Cornelia on the way out. She surveyed the room, counting the seven readers, and nodded, removing a card from her index file.
Then, on a Saturday afternoon in November, Alexander and Roderick came out of the National Film Theatre and saw Cornelia browsing at one of the bookstalls under Waterloo Bridge. ‘This is it. Now or never,’ Roderick asserted. ‘Go on, Alexander, friend of mine. Get over there. Say something to her. You have an excuse.’
‘And what are you going to do?’
‘I’ll loiter,’ said Roderick. ‘Be charming,’ he urged, giving Alexander a smack on the shoulder.
Cornelia stood at the end of a long trestle table, checking the index of a huge paperback. Nonchalantly scanning the upturned spines, as though he were a man who could spot an interesting title in the merest fraction of a second, Alexander moved along the other side of the table, keeping Cornelia at the border of his vision. She was still leafing through the book when he reached the point directly opposite her. He waited for her to notice that he was there, and at last Cornelia raised her eyes. She looked at him exactly as she would have looked at him had he been standing at her counter in the library.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘Hello,’ said Cornelia.
‘Hello,’ he said again. ‘This is a coincidence.’
‘It is,’ said Cornelia.
‘Did you see the film?’ asked Alexander.
‘Which film is it you mean?’ she asked.
‘Here,’ he said, and he waved at the doorway of the National Film Theatre, where Roderick was no longer standing.
‘No,’ said Cornelia. Tucking the book back into its row, she looked at Alexander with perfect neutrality. ‘Was it good?’
‘I enjoyed it.’
‘That’s good,’ said Cornelia. She looked at Alexander’s face and then at the book he was holding, which seemed to amuse her, as if it were a price tag left unwittingly on a sleeve. ‘Are you going to buy that?’ she asked.
Alexander glanced at the book he had lifted from the table. It was the second volume of the collected correspondence of two people whose names meant nothing to him. ‘I very much doubt it,’ he smiled.
‘I did not think so,’ said Cornelia, and she watched him put it down.
Over Cornelia’s shoulder, Alexander saw Roderick raise a magazine to his face then slide it aside. She was about to leave, and he said: ‘Cornelia, you remember those tickets, for the film –’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Those tickets that I gave you, for the film. In fact they were from a friend of mine who likes you, and I was wondering if you would –’
‘You know my name?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘My name. You know my name. How do you know it?’
‘It was on a letter.’
‘A letter? Where?’
‘By the phone. In the library.’
‘I see,’ she said.
‘I have a friend who –’
‘A friend,’ Cornelia repeated.
‘Yes.’
‘I see.’ She paused, and her gaze ran meanderingly over the rows of books. ‘Who is your friend?’ she asked, not looking at him.
‘His name is Roderick.’
‘Roderick,’ she said, making each syllable distinct. ‘Roderick,’ she pondered, as though assessing his veracity by the sound of the word.
‘That’s right.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she told him, smiling a stern apology.
‘You don’t think so?’
‘No.’
‘Forgive me, but I don’t understand.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Cornelia, watching the train that was crossing Hungerford Bridge. ‘Roderick. No, I don’t think so.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘There is not any friend named Roderick, I think.’
‘Believe me –’
‘Your friend named Roderick. It is you, yes?’
‘No,’ insisted Alexander, ‘I really do have a friend.’ Ten yards behind Cornelia, Roderick was counting coins into the palm of a stallholder. ‘Over there,’ Alexander nodded.
Reluctantly Cornelia turned around. With a straight arm she pointed at Roderick, as if pointing the way to someone who had asked for directions in the street. ‘Is that your friend?’
‘He is,’ said Alexander. ‘That’s Roderick,’ and as his name was pronounced Roderick grinned at Alexander and held aloft the magazine he had bought, like a trophy. Alexander acknowledged him with a look that told him not to join them yet.
‘I know him,’ said Cornelia. ‘He has been in the library.’
‘He has.’
‘He’s weird.’
‘He’s a little unusual,’ Alexander concurred.
‘A bookworm,’ said Cornelia, making it sound like the name given to a member of some disreputable organisation.
‘Among other things. A filmworm as well.’
‘What is the matter with him?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why does he make you speak to me? He can speak. He has spoken to me before.’
‘He’s bashful.’
‘That is stupid. He is not a boy. How old is he?’
‘I don’t know, exactly.’
‘He is your friend and you don’t know how old he is?’
‘About thirty-three, thirty-four.’
‘I am thirty-three. He is older,’ she decided, again looking straight at Roderick, who had now banished himself to the farthest stall. ‘And you are older than him,’ she said.
‘Yes, I am,’ said Alexander.
‘Why are you friends?’
‘I don’t know. But I can tell you how we came to be friends,’ he offered. Cornelia smiled like someone agreeing a price, and Alexander told her about Roderick’s appearance outside the church of St Clement Danes and their walk along the Strand. He had not quite reached Cleopatra’s Needle when Roderick, having removed his scarf and stuffed it into his carrier bag, strode up to Alexander.
‘May I interrupt?’ he enquired, with plausible casualness. ‘Roderick,’ he informed Cornelia, offering a businesslike handshake.
‘Cornelia,’ said Cornelia, accepting it.
‘Cornelia,’ replied Roderick graciously, pronouncing the word like a connoisseur of names.
‘Which I think you know,’ said Cornelia.
‘Indeed,’ admitted Roderick instantly, with a compromised smile. He pulled the handles of the bag apart and took out the old magazine he had bought. ‘Look at this,’ he said, opening the magazine at what appeared to be a cityscape of smog and shadows and sooty roofs. Like a waiter presenting an expensive menu, he put the magazine into Alexander’s hands, and Alexander recognised, in the background, the Dome of Discovery, gleaming like an oily hubcap.
‘You see?’ said Roderick to Cornelia. ‘It’s here.’ He touched the roof of the Festival Hall in the photograph, then gestured at the building behind them.
Alexander looked at the shrouded figures who stood as stiff as mummies on the colourless pavements, between the colourless buildings and the colourless river, and the picture seemed as bleak as an X-ray. ‘I remember it,’ he told Cornelia.
‘You remember it?’ she replied, and her eyes widened slightly.
‘And if Alexander says he remembers it, he remembers it,’ said Roderick.
‘It was like a funfair. But better.’
‘Someone told me the Skylon was made into ashtrays,’ said Roderick.
‘The what?’ asked Cornelia.
‘That thing,’ Roderick explained, putting a fingertip on the photograph, close to Cornelia’s thumb. ‘And look,’ he said, turning the page. ‘Look at these adverts. Aren’t they something?’ A man in a brown suit stood proudly facing a woman who clasped her hands in delight beside their new car, which shone with the same light as had shone on the door of the Bovis stove.
Ghost MacIndoe Page 45