The Janeites

by Nicolas Freeling

  “The truth is,” said William, “I want your advice”.

  “Quite right, I give good advice. Nobody takes it, a grave mistake. Think it can’t be disinterested. Think it harsh. But sweet words butter no parsnips.” Proud of his English, which he speaks well. “Sounds wrong that, somehow; I beg your pardon – you were saying?”

  “They tell me I’ve got a cancer.”

  “They do? Where?”

  “Something internal. They act vague, I suspect deliberately.”

  “Mm yes. Liver, sweetbread, so good to eat when it’s veal; when it’s ourselves we prefer not to dwell. Frightened you, mm?”

  “Yes.” In William’s trade they know all about fear, live with it and learn to handle it. This is something else. “At my age.”

  “Exactly. I know somebody good. Wasn’t a great deal he could do for me but he has remarkable talent – name escapes me for the moment. Leave this with me, William. My own small pains, not a great deal to be done bar the pilgrimage to Lourdes, mm, wouldn’t the journalists love that. Well, I’ve had a busy life. But you, my son… not going to have this, are we? You may rely upon me.” And William knows that to be the truth. “Apropos, have you mentioned this to your wife?”

  “Would it interest her?”

  “I think my advice would be don’t, not just for the present; having to be sorry won’t be much use to either of you. It’s in your hands but we’re going to pull you through this, you know… Leave me now, before I get captious and petulant. Look in on Charlotte, that’ll make her day. Stay to lunch, come to that. Pooh, what I eat is off a tray.” He was already on the phone. “Patricia – I have a little detective work for you.” Waving an adieu.

  His kindness is genuine. People discount it, saying it’s a trap, a ploy, a red herring. They say he’s utterly dishonest, through and through. Total bastard. Even if genuine it’ll be turned to his advantage. Even if you found the thread you’d never get it untangled. But William, a simple man, knows this complex man better than that.

  “Hal-lo,” said Charlotte. “Dear boy, as Father says. Drop of white wine? Sit ye down then. Catch Edith? Making the voice ever so small and sweet she were this morning, a little fella got such a bollocking his teeth were loose in’s jaw.” True, Edith governs. ‘Not though in My Kitchen’.

  “I bet Father was happy,” she went on. “But he’s not well, at all – you saw? How long do we have, I wonder. What will we do, William, what will we do?”

  “Do like him, pay no attention. What happens, happens.” It was, he thought, the advice he had just received.

  Dr Valdez at ‘the office’, Institute ponderously named for a dead-and-gone begetter, Doctor Gustave-Adolph Rietschmieder, asks for tea. Silvia, the secretary shared with two more (she isn’t fat-gross, she’s fat-comfortable) makes good tea. There is also a web-site and much computerized machinery; one can talk to people, across the world but Ray likes to see and speak with faces, bodies, fingers in the room with him.

  All over the world the Crab shows up on screens: a great many people observe it, puzzle over it, try to measure it. Major event right now, noticed by all: there’s a lot more of it. It is about to tickle half the western world, say the statistics, which is double the figure of a couple of years back. Ray dislikes all these abstractions. It makes points of light on screens, zigs and zags on graph models, forms odd and stangely pretty patterns. To Ray it has a voice to which he listens; a dialogue might result, inconsistent and unexpected and dare one say amusing?

  The public, as well as a lot of doctors, would dearly love there to be plain guidelines – preferably pleasant: Eat wholemeal bread. Drink red wine. The Crab laughs at this and so does Ray; they snigger at biochemists and astrologers (friendly though with either). How would he describe himself? A sort of parapsychologist? – after a few glasses of red wine. He’s a Dotty; there are many dotties: they have inexplicable successes – he talks to the Crab and sometimes persuades it to go away: credit should go to the Patient. It can pop off and pop back; misbegotten sense of humour, much like God’s. There are letters which run together in acronyms, and can signify complex chemical compounds: one (Jesuit slogan) is AMDG. The Crab understands Latin, needs no telling that Cancer is also to-the-greater-glory-of-God.

  Ad majorem – well, upon occasion – Dei gloriam is likewise this still youngish man; fair-haired (mud colour), thin, sallow; a slovenly look, poorly finished, with mad pale eyes; a portrait by Otto Dix, foreseeably a favourite painter of his – ‘lovely man, durch Mitleid wissend’. Here in Strasbourg as elsewhere Jesuits can be found doing anything. They had a big house here before the Revolution (next to the Cathedral, handsome façade now rather dirty, the Lycée Fustel de Coulanges; another local notable). The Observatory was also theirs, and is still here in a peaceful garden with a dome for the telescopes. You wouldn’t see much now in the way of stars, the Rhine valley being sorely polluted; they measure earthquakes and the like, while people like Ray have electronic microscopes, and compose dirty limericks for the edification of colleagues in Berkeley or Ann Arbor. The office has links with the University, antique and respectable seat of learning; mostly with the Faculty of Medicine. It’s a European city; long humanist tradition. Dürer worked here, and Baldung Grien – two of Otto Dix’s major prophets: heaps more saints. As a young scholastic Raymond has been in England, in Poland, Italy… now he’s here: who knows what the Jesuits get up to?

  He likes his research job, is liked there too; the dottiness is appreciated. He doesn’t much like lab work. Too much filtered air and the chimaeras bombinating in a vacuum; too much that is shut away from his realities. He has a taste for raw meat, and so has the Crab. Oncology is boring unless ontological. ‘No I don’t want everybody to live for ever, but I’d like them to make more of what they have. Happiness is more than a sound prostate. No, I don’t suppose the results are much better than roulette.’ For the Crab keeps a casino where few win, but Ray has his successes.

  His phone rang and Silvia’s voice said, “I think you’ll want this one.”

  “Doctor Valdez, could you hold just a second? Monsieur le Marquis would like a word if that’s convenient.” Fascinating old man. Extremely attractive. A failure he hadn’t been willing to admit. They had liked each other. A long life of falsehood, of dishonesty? It was too easy, to put the failure down to that.

  “Raymond dear boy, I have something to interest you. A good man, whom I much value as it happens, is in some trouble with these doctors; lives down your way. Of course I’ve no right to ask personal favours. I think don’t you know you’d find him worth the pains.” It would never occur to him that I’d tell him no; and if I did he’d find a way of twisting my arm without seeming to.

  “I can look into it. Who’s been treating him, do you know?”

  “Bend you to my will, can I? A man Rupprecht I do believe.” Ray suppressed a giggle in his nose, ‘the man’ being an eminent professor and the old devil certainly aware of it.

  “So you’ll let Patricia know, will you? I rely upon you. Thank you, I’m as well as you would expect, perhaps a little more. I’ll be interested to hear further about this.”

  And there’ll be something behind it. With that old man there always is.

  “Silvia can you get me Professor Rupprecht’s secretary?… Thank you… Annie, good morning. Tell me, have you a man Barton on your book? Yes, as in Bordeaux, and probably within the last few months. The Professor’s in the theatre is he? With his permission I’d like you to pull that dossier for me.”

  And now they are in the pub together. A consultation.

  “Is this,” asked William, “the line in the old Bogart movie, the start of a beautiful friendship?”

  “There’s another I like even better; Bogart lying on the boat roof and Robinson sneaking out of the cabin. ‘I’m coming out now, soldier, I ain’t got no gun.”’ Pleased with William’s guffaw.

  “Ray, that’s a nice watch. Crocodile and all. Patek Philippe?”

  “Present
from a grateful patient. I take bribes too.”

  “Wear it like that, some boy’ll rip it right off you.”

  “I was getting attached to it, too. Worse – I was getting proud of it. You’re quite right.”

  “No, I’m a cop.”

  “Tell me about this, it interests me. Let’s just decide first what we’re eating and drinking.”

  The police are mostly pretty dim. Brutal thugs, a good few. Or corrupt, racist – you name it. Poorly trained too. But if the odd one shows signs of being intelligent and alert as well as having a good physique, a reasonable background, a good school record – and there are some – then you might get fingered for special training and this is intensive, because being a guard to someone like a Minister is a very delicate job. High failure rate. As I know because I was a starred number. I’ve shadowed the President, and the Premier, and I ended up Chief, for the Marquis, and there I stayed, a number of years, where most get rotated fairly often.

  You get very close; there’s an intimacy. In a crowd we are several. In a car even, two. But when he’s resting – cup of coffee, going over his speech, wash and brush up – you stay with him even for a little walk in the garden, breath of fresh air after dinner – he learns to accept that. You might get a violent reaction of strain or fatigue; lets his hair down, personal, insulting – ‘fellow’s a bloody fascist’; you never heard it, it was never uttered. He has to have his moments totally unguarded.

  “You’re always watching for the dotties, they get in anywhere, mostly they’ve a piece of paper, a petition, an appeal, sometimes they’ve a fist, or a knife – or a gun.”

  “You’ve a gun.”

  “Carrying, yes of course we are. Rule is, never to use it, even show it unless bloody well forced. Everything based on non-violence. Fellow comes in arms and legs flying, block him, smother him, hold him but never hit him. You’re trained, endlessly, in that. Box with one another, judo, defence to any and every sort.”

  “But you might get shot, knifed, killed even.”

  “Yes. That’s the hard thing. He mustn’t be hurt – held for due process of law. But you – you’re expendable. Knowing that, you must never hesitate. Look, let me eat this steak in peace.”

  “Readiness – all times ready.”

  “You’re not going to stop me eating frites. Nor Béarnaise, neither.”

  “I’m not about to try,” said Ray comfortably.

  “Nine tenths of it is preparation – prevention – planning. You’ve gone over every inch in advance, get the unexpected down to the irreducible. That done… with a Chief of State you’ve always a doctor and an ambulance on standby; reanimation unit. Any history say of a heart you’ve a cardio man. Nice to know; anyone to ressuscitate it’s probably yourself, and you’ll get the best there is.”

  “Cheese? Fruit?”

  “Sure – I like a lot of both.” Ray put his knife and fork together, wiped his mouth, took quite a powerful swig of water.

  “Here endeth the first consultation. You’ve given me the key to what I wanted. A complete non-violence. There are a number of highly aggressive answers to a cancer. Surgery, radio, chemo, any amount of clever little molecules chemists put together and hide inside the pretty pink pill. I don’t like any of these much. We’ve some active things too for me to think about; has to be in tune with you. Active and alert without any violence – did you have lessons in relaxation?”

  “Sure: physiotherapist, unwinding. Techniques to do it alone.”

  “You start that up afresh. I know a girl, good masseuse.”

  “Does she have a cunt?”

  Ray began to giggle but it turned into an outright laugh so that he had to put down his coffee-cup to stop it spilling.

  “I haven’t looked. You can always try.”

  “While I’ve still got a dick and you haven’t cut it off.”

  “William, you better believe me, that’ll be the very last thing I’ll come to. Don’t think of me as castrated – I like girls too.”

  Ray drove home singing a little song.

  I don’t want to roam,

  I’d rather stay at home –

  Living on the earnings of a whore.

  Dr Valdez lives in a slice of the old town stuck between two main roads, traversed by a couple of alleyways and disregarded by brisk municipal developers; not old enough to be picturesque with cobblestones, expensive little shops, tourists taking photographs; darkened by high smelly walls whose decrepit plaster is falling off the stonework. These buildings are pinched too close together and the upper stories compete for air and light; sanitation and electricity date from the century previous to the last and are dodgy. But the rents are low. At the street level blank sinister doorways long innocent of paint open on dark tunnels full of dustbins and rusty bicycles, plywood mailboxes with yellowed cards stuck to them. His just says ‘Valdez’. You aren’t going to say ‘Doctor’.

  The other advantage is in being perfectly anonymous. Nobody is curious round here. Unsuccessful artists, down-at-heel waiters, old women in bedroom slippers, none of them bothered about Arab neighbours with odd tastes in cookery and music; nobody is racist either – couldn’t afford it. On the ground floor junk is stored by dealers in old wood and scrap iron; up the stairs there are queerer, possibly more sinister commodities. Since it is bang in the centre of the city people work round-the-corner, and always underpaid. The police are not unknown, nor debt-collectors. Valdez fits in nicely.

  The stairs are stone to the second floor, wood thereafter and children fall down them now and again: there is of course no lift. Walls of dilapidated dark-green paint. The slum-landlord is some insurance company, quite strict about fire hazards. These old buildings don’t bring in much but the ground will be valuable some day. Raymond goes up lightly. His view is mostly of gutters, chimney-pots and roofscape but he has quite a lot of space, keeps it more-or-less clean, and is comfortable. His furniture seems mostly to have come from the junkstore downstairs, but people buy the new and the fashionable, throw things away that are perfectly good; the cooker and the hi-fi had cost little.

  Ray has taught himself to be a pretty good cook. Also a fervent listener to music. Devotion. Good instincts. Knows, really, damn-all about either subject. Is this jesuitical of him, he wonders? You, and all that you have and do, are His. Jesuits have often been the most deplorable people; appalling reactionaries leagued with the worst sorts of government. One’s faith in God’s infinite wisdom gets badly shaken here. Mm: your conceit, Valdez, your infernal self-importance – it hasn’t been for want of Telling.

  You are to think about William. You were a bright little boy but, it was the Society that put you where you are. William is badly blocked, and inside that magnificent physique who knows what fearful knots accumulate – just the thing to attract the Crab.

  Autistic children for instance – so little understood, so notoriously difficult to treat – their blockages are such that they roll themselves into a ball in the corner, unable to speak, showing their misery through a sudden frenzy of the most intense violence but they can, with great patience, be brought back into the world – running a thermograph on William might show up places where some of these blockages can be Got At.

  This is a tool Dr Valdez thinks quite well of – a sensitive instrument which reads temperatures over fifty strategic points of the bodily surface and gives you a printout on the computer. How very crude – but doctors with fingertip-feel, says Ray sadly, are few and far between. Our pathetic little bits and scraps of Science. Artists have it. Pettish, to still his own blockages. Some music – something jarring which is then most satisfyingly resolved – piano concerto, Ravel, pianist is the Argentine woman. Has she ever got Fingertip-feel. Stay very still and you will feel her hands, on your stomach, searching out and resolving all that is blocked in yourself.

  It is not to be. The phone started ringing. One is never invulnerable. The phone shouldn’t be ringing; it’s an unlisted number. Which in turn means – oh dear. Whe
n it rings and one Knows who that is, it’s madly welcome, it’s extremely unwelcome, but either way, goodbye Monsieur Ravel. Hereafter, in a better world than this, I’ll be hoping for more love and knowledge of you.

  “Yes.” He wants more love and knowledge of Janine, but oh dear. Tears. Snuffles. A pathetic little voice.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “I’ve been working. I am working. I have again to be working.”

  “I have to see you.”

  “I came in to change my shoes.”

  “But darling, I –” This must be stopped. He wants to say, Darling, tell me your troubles. Better – Come here at once. Now.

  “This evening. Come this evening. We’ll have a picnic.”

  “But then I’m at work.” Limp with despair.

  “Come after work.” Knowing he shouldn’t say that.

  “Is that the best you can do?” Reproach-filled.

  “It will be the best. I promise. I must run. Kiss.” No kiss. Clonk went the thing, burning with resentment. He wished – he wishes – but there’s not much to be had out of that.

  Trapped in his own lies – now he has to change his shoes. And make a shopping list. He hadn’t been in any hurry to go to work, and now he had to: Janine is quite capable of coming over here to see whether it was true, to catch him.

  It’s quite a snug cabin. Shelves of books and one or two nice pictures; he hasn’t space for more, nor light; there are far too many books. From these surroundings you could fairly conclude that he has money to spend. There is a cupboard with clothes which are well cut and have cost a lot, because Dr Valdez has to go out into the World quite often. The shopping list nags at him so he goes to look in the kitchen, dragging rather. In the fridge is a piece of beef, getting rather sticky too. Well, for tomorrow a paprika stew. He could wish for veal (osso bucco is a lip-smacking idea) but nobody in their senses buys veal now. This will have to do – buy tomatoes. Wants lemon-peel. Wants – no, that we’ve got; olives we’ve got, anchovies we’ve got – or not with lemonpeel? There will be a delicious smell. Janine will provide another delicious smell. Write champagne, write flowers, write something nice-to-put-on-bread: picnic, ja. Rather a long list. Oh well, all in a good cause.