Chapter Seven
Garnet rented a large nineteenth century merchant’s house close to the Botanischer Garten tram stop, from the top windows of which it was possible to glimpse the sparkling waters of the Zurichsee, and the many spires and towers of that city’s historic centre. During the daytime he would request his carer to wheel his chair up the steep cobbled slope to Lindenhof, where he would while away hours watching the old men arguing over the giant chess boards, and admiring the skill of the boules players, casting their gleaming silver balls on the dry ground in the shadow of the fragrant lime trees.
Although still a recognisable figure around the city - his wheelchair rendering total anonymity all but impossible - Garnet, nevertheless, lived the life of a virtual recluse; he rarely appeared at public events, gave no interviews to the media, and discontinued communication with almost all of his New York acquaintances. As Saffron Davies recalled: “We were shunned, without ever knowing what offence we had committed.”. One of the few people from his old life with whom Garnet did maintain a correspondence with the architect Marcel Chin, although the exchange of civilities was somewhat one-sided, and strangely enough, for all his curmudgeonly reputation, it was Garnet who was the more avid letter writer. By now, Chin had established his own high-profile architectural practice, and although still without a physical, bricks-and-mortar building to call his own creation, was held in the highest esteem in his profession: people most commonly referring to him as a great visionary, rendering it unnecessary to sully him with doubts as to whether or not he was a great builder. As a consequence of his newly found fame and success, it was Chin who found himself with little spare time on his hands, and Garnet who discovered that time was genuinely relative, and that sometimes it could drag interminably. For a while this excess of hours even deterred him from his favourite pursuit of attaining the summit of tall buildings, ever since he had read that time passes more slowly the further away from the Earth’s surface an object is located: additional time was something he was quite happy to do without. There was also the logistical problem, that the finest view of Zurich was to be had from the top of the two towers of the Grossmunster, and restricted by his disability, and unable to find such subservient carers as he had been previously able to in New York, Garnet was incapable of ascending higher than the front steps of the austere Romanesque cathedral. If he wanted to look for further evidence of being knocked while he was down, it was staring him in the face.
Nevertheless, Garnet regarded his time spent in the Swiss city, as among the most peaceful of periods he had known in his life. He was beginning to learn that quiet obscurity was one of the most valuable commodities that money could buy. Where before he had found his wealth oppressive and, as a consequence, his life meaningless unless he used his fortune to further trumpet his family name, or to build a great and lasting monument as a testament to himself and his bank balance, here, in the relative tranquillity of a foreign city, he realised that the greatest thing that money could buy was the luxury to do nothing. And, moreover, to do nothing, in extremely lavish surroundings.
The subject of Garnet’s love-life had been a matter of public debate and media scrutiny for the better part of three decades. Common opinion was that the man was asexual, but this most generally translated into the fact that their subject was too discrete to have been ‘found out’ one way, or the other. Few men of wealth are ever asexual; it is the pauper who most often lays in a lonely bed. True, Garnet was no Howard Hughes, but should he have ever been called to bring forth witnesses to testify to his sexuality, there would have been no shortage of women willing to endorse a statement of his prowess. Something else that money could buy: silence.
It was during his Zurich sojourn, though, that Garnet had, what he later described, as the one true love affair of his life. Madame Marie-France Dreslin owned an antiquarian bookshop in a small, cobbled alleyway leading off Munstergasse, halfway between the fashionable boutiques and classy hotels of Bellevue and the open air restaurants and sleazy hostels lining Niederdorf, where backpackers mingled freely with prostitutes, and explicit photographs on the walls advertised the nature of the films shown in the cinemas, and where a succession of dark-expressioned North African men in slick suits, attempting to divert the passing human traffic from their straight and moral path into the myriad neon attractions, converted the street into a slalom course of negative responses and downturned glances.
Mme. Dreslin had been widowed three years previously - so Garnet was to discover. The shop had been established by her husband, a small, energetic man who had travelled far and wide in his pursuit of increasingly rare books, and whose pent up zeal and boundless energy, confined within the limitations of too tiny a frame, had resulted in a massive heart attack at the age of fifty-six, whilst carrying a box of new additions to his stock, into the shop from his car. Mme. Dreslin, an expression not entirely contorted with either grief or sadness on her face, would point at the swirly-patterned carpet beneath ‘Old Maps and Cartography’ as the location of her husband’s final fall.
It had been a copy of Les Soeurs Vatard that had first drawn Garnet’s attention to the small booksellers. His passion for Huysmans was surprisingly unabated with maturity, and Les Soeurs was one of that writer’s few novels that he had yet to read. The edition displayed behind the yellow-filtered window, was the 1909 Ferroud version, illustrated by Jean-Francois Raffaelli, bound in green morocco and marbled boards. A faded, typewritten note standing up beside the book, described the contents as ‘A tale of nineteenth century life in a bookbindery in Paris’. There was evidently no attempt at the ‘hard sell’ here. There was also no record of the price that was being asked for the volume, although this would have been of little consequence to Garnet in any case: financial considerations were never an obstacle; possession, for him, was only a question of desire. It was perhaps the fact that the same principle did not work on Mme. Dreslin herself, that added greatly to her appeal for Garnet.
Mme. Dreslin was a straight-backed, slim woman, with the poise which seems to come so naturally to the French. Of what is commonly described as a figure, it would have to be said that she had very little, appearing almost boyish by her lack of curves, but for all that, Garnet thought that he had rarely encountered a more feminine creature. For a woman of forty-five her face was conspicuously free from lines, and reflective consideration of how she must once have looked, in the first flower of youth, the inevitable telltale signs of the intervening years iteratively stripped away from her complexion so that the innocent woman was revealed once again, would have lent most people to describe her as beautiful. To discover that Mme. Dreslin was only actually thirty-five years old puts a subtly different spin on the critical assessment: the physical composition of her visage was in no way altered by the knowledge, but at the same time, somehow, it was.
Garnet was fascinated by her air of cool aloofness. It was something that he rarely encountered in his life. His minor celebrity status - and if not that, his considerable wealth - guaranteed a fawning reception by people who recognised him; his wheelchair bound physicality prompted polite and condescending helpfulness by people who did not. Mme. Dreslin was something of an anomaly: her abrupt manner could not have been conducive to improved sales in the shop, and her frosty contempt of her clientele was completely at odds with the concept of efficient customer service which was central to the American psyche. Garnet could scarce imagine someone less likely to advise him to ‘have a nice day’. Nevertheless, her peculiar philosophy towards sales patter was sufficiently individual to ensure her of one regular new customer. Garnet was later quoted as likening his relationship with Mme. Dreslin as something akin to how the sadomasochist must feel every time he visits his personal dominatrix: you knew that you were going to be abused, but that was ninety percent of the pleasure.
On the occasion of Garnet’s first visit to Dreslin Antiquariat und Buchhandlung, his request to be shown the volume in the window was gree
ted with a dismissive wave of the hand, as if to say ‘you know where it is, you get it’ and after recovering from his initial surprise sufficiently that he was able to instruct his carer to recover the desired book, his query as to the price was met with the flat rejoinder of “Five hundred francs”. It was a considerable sum of money, even for a book as exquisite as the Ferroud edition, and its sale would have surely compensated for a week of few customers, but Mme. Dreslin’s tone of voice belied none of these facts: it was pure ‘take it or leave it’. Garnet took it, and returned to the shop again two days later, the ill-mannered woman having been the uppermost thought on his mind during the intervening period. This time he asked if they stocked any other works of Huysmans, an enquiry which was met with a bored look, a slight pout of the full lips, and an expressive shrug of the shoulders, the proprietress’ arms extended wide not in an attitude of embrace but indicative of the explanation, ‘who can tell, some questions are destined to forever remain as mysteries’. For someone who had never said more than two words to Garnet, he had managed to construct an elaborate imaginary discourse between the two of them. With an effort, Garnet managed to resist the temptation to remind her that he was the same person who had spent five hundred francs in her establishment only the day before yesterday, and that surely this fact entitled him to something more than a display of indifference, but instead, he retreated, for the second time hastily vacating the Dreslin premises, giving his carer instructions to wheel him to the top of Lindenhof, where, with the city spread out below him, he could plan his continuing campaign of engagement.
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