I wonder if riding the Central Line east and west across London is more easeful than going north and south? Travelling from Chancery Lane to Notting Hill Gate I felt, I don’t know – at home? Yes, that’s the right way of putting it. I felt at home beneath the surface of things, out of the light of day, between here and there. Yes, the betweenness of it was good, nothing was final; everything was in suspension, not yet precipitated by the forces I felt in me and around me. I believe everything I read about ley lines and force-fields and the power of earth and stones. London clay must have some power as well. ‘What are we but clay, and infirm vessels all,’ Mr Rinyo-Clacton had said.
The rush hour hadn’t begun yet, the faces and the spaces were of the afternoon calm. A man with an accordion came into the train at Tottenham Court Road, one of those terribly extrovert buskers with a weatherbeaten face and a gravelly voice. The woman bottling for him had a similar face and eyes like an owl. ‘Ladies and gentleman!’ said the accordion man in a peat-bog accent, ‘a little music for your entertainment between the hither and the farther shores of your journey!’
I always give money to buskers in the corridors of the underground but I hate it when these gravelly-voiced extroverts come into my carriage through the London clay beneath the surface of things. Naturally the first number he played was ‘Caravan’ and with it came the Place des Vosges and the feathery palms and the dark and shining pool. O God! I thought, why didn’t you make me a better man?
‘God bless ya, love,’ said the woman with the owl-eyes as I dropped some coins into her cup and wiped away my tears. ‘It really gets to ya, doesn’t it.’
‘Please,’ I said, ‘tell him not to play “The Sheik of Araby” next.’
But he did. The two of them got out at Bond Street while the music kept going on in my head.
‘Are you all right?’ asked a sixtyish woman with a National Gallery carrier bag and a copy of The Family of Pascual Duarte.
‘He shot his dog,’ I said.
‘Who?’
‘Pascual Duarte. He had a setter bitch and she looked at him as if she was going to accuse him of something and he shot her.’
‘I haven’t got to that part yet,’ she said. ‘Are you having a bad time?’
‘Nothing special.’ I wanted to rest my head on her bosom but I thought I’d better not. ‘Thanks,’ I added with a grateful smile while the accordion and the Place des Vosges and the palm trees and the dark and shining pool continued.
At Notting Hill Gate the reality was very solid – everything three-dimensional and fully functioning. I went up the escalator and down the stairs to the District Line. Little clumps of dark figures moving about or standing, sitting and squatting against the wall under dim yellow lamps. The board said the Wimbledon train was next. I always go to the far end of the westbound platform where you can look up at the sky and a high brick wall on the other side of the cut. It’s an interesting space, that: the curved glass-and-steel canopy of the station comes to an end; then this red brick wall rears up with street-level houses at the top of it under the open sky; at the end of that short open space the tunnel again shows its round black maw.
This red brick wall is faced with tall narrow arches, something like the arches one sees under aqueducts except that these are filled with brick instead of air. This wall always makes me think – I don’t know why – of Florence in the time of the Borgias. It was evening now; beyond the feeble yellow lamps the sky was dark; the wall looked sinister, standing tall in bricks of shadow. Did Lucrezia Borgia actually poison people? I couldn’t remember what the latest word was on that.
At Earl’s Court I phoned Katerina. ‘Can I come round?’ I said. Listen to me, I thought – always needing something from a woman.
‘Twenty minutes,’ she said. ‘I’ve got someone with me now.’
I went to the Waterstone’s at her corner. From the giant photo in the window Dr Ernst von Luker fixed me with his piercing gaze. ‘Wimp,’ he said. He pronounced it ‘Vimp’. The massed copies of Mind – the Gap sang their titles at me like a Eurovision entry.
‘What gap?’ I said. ‘Between the real and the ideal? Between then and now?’
‘Between you and Jesus,’ said a bearded passer-by who passed by before I could think of anything clever to say.
I went into Waterstone’s and in the Reference section I opened a copy of Who’s Who but there was no Rinyo-Clacton listed. Browsing aimlessly to kill time I found a table stacked with The Carnivore Cookbook by Celestine Latour – the famous soprano’s favourite meat dishes. From the jacket smiled the delicate carnivorous Mélisande who looked so much like Serafina. I turned a few pages idly and was looking at a photogragh of ossobucco when I felt a hand on my bottom.
I jabbed backward with my elbow into the iron-hard stomach of Mr Rinyo-Clacton. ‘You see?’ he said, indicating the cookbook. ‘They’re all carnivores, every one.’ He was wearing a black shell suit and black Reeboks and smelled as if he’d run all the way from Belgravia.
‘You bastard,’ I said.
‘Listen to this.’ He was holding a copy of Mind – the Gap. He opened it and read from the flap copy:
‘ “For too long, says Dr von Luker, author of Illustrations of Reality, the brain has huddled by the little fire of limited reality while the mind prowls like a hungry animal in the darkness beyond. In this new work he challenges the reader to make the vital hook-up between brain and mind.”
‘That’s where the real things happen, Jonny – in the darkness beyond the fires. This book is from me to you.’
‘Never mind that – I saw you at the Vegemania. You’re out to ruin even the little bit of time I’ve got left, aren’t you.’
‘You’ll probably see me at the Vegemania often. Serafina’s potato pancakes are absolutely magical. She’s a beautiful girl, Jonny, and sexy like anything. I can see why you went all to pieces when you lost her.’
I turned to go but he said, ‘Just let me pay for this and inscribe it and I’m off.’
I was about to tell him what to do with the book when it occurred to me that Katerina might find his handwriting interesting. At the till he produced a gold card and a gold fountain pen from a black belly-pouch, paid, quickly wrote something on the flyleaf, gave me the open book, and made his exit with a thumbs-up sign.
I looked at his inscription:
FOR JONNY –
‘The Bird of Time has but a little way
to flutter – and the Bird is on the Wing.’
Thinking of you always,
T.
Black ink, and the writing was large and spiky, with many slants and angles and a lot of up-and-down to it. The Fitzgerald version of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was a favourite book of mine when I was sixteen and I still knew most of the quatrains by heart. When thinking of Serafina I often recalled:
The Moving Finger writes, and having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
The ink was still wet. With a finger between the cover and the flyleaf I left Waterstone’s and went down the road to Katerina’s place.
She kissed me hello. ‘Jonathan!’ she said. ‘He was in Waterstone’s just a moment ago.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I’ve seen him in my mind, felt who it was. Only from the back did I see him, a big man, tall and broad, a dark shape of malice standing in front of you, blotting you out.’
‘He hasn’t blotted me out quite yet, Katerina.’
‘An unfortunate choice of words. Sorry. I am so much disturbed by him.’
We went into the front room and sat down at the table where the little bronze woman waited under the blue-shaded lamp with her quill and her scroll while Melencolia brooded on the bare wall with her ironmongery, her dog, the surly winged-infant, and the magic square that totalled thirty-four in all directions. She noticed that I was watching her as she toyed with her dividers. What divides the men from the boys, she said, is that the men do something while the boys just talk.
Katerina took my hand. ‘Thank you for your note and the money,’ she said, ‘but I haven’t ordered a piano. I know that spending some of the million is your way of locking yourself into your contract with Mr Rinyo-Clacton and I don’t feel good about it. Tell me what is happening with him.’
I handed her the book. ‘He gave me this just now in Waterstone’s.’
‘Aha!’ she said, holding it close to her chest with both hands. ‘Oh!’ Again that change in her face – the ancient sibylline look with the lips drawn back from the teeth.
‘That’s the look I saw on your face when you held the money,’ I said.
As before, she shook her head, dismissed it with a gesture, then, clutching the book, said, ‘Here there is death, death, death, death! I’m talking about the death in him’
‘What about it?’
‘It’s all tangled up, not clearly focused; partly it points out and partly it points in.’
‘What, murderous and suicidal both?’
‘And fear, yes? This have I already said before, not?’
‘Yes, when you handled the money he’d given me. What’s he afraid of?’
‘This I still don’t know.’
‘Look at what he wrote on the flyleaf.’ She looked. ‘This is a quotation, yes?’
‘From the Rubaiyat’
‘I know it only in a German translation – these lines about the Bird of Time I don’t recognise.’
‘The full quatrain is:
“Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter – and the Bird is on the Wing.’ “
‘So,’ said Katerina, ‘whose time is he talking about, do you think?’
‘Mine, there’s no doubt about that.’
‘His handwriting is almost like that of a child, a child big and strong but confused. He’s right-handed, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Look – slanting away from the writer it goes and slanting back towards him with its pointyness like spears and arrows, death pointing out and pointing in. Up it goes and down like the waves of the sea. What is sticking in him that could be the death of him? Oh God.’
‘We both know what it is, don’t we, Katerina: that son of a bitch has got AIDS and now I’ve probably got it and given it to you.’
Katerina’s eyes were blue, quite a vivid blue, not the sort of eyes you expect an old woman to have. As she looked at me steadily I remembered the number tattooed on her arm. She took my hand. ‘That we don’t know yet, Jonathan. Maybe he’s got HIV but not yet AIDS and maybe you’ve caught nothing from him. I don’t feel any sickness in you.’
I thought back to the first time, in Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s bedroom: I’d had a lot of champagne and I was in a strange state of mind and I … what? I wanted to get the burden of myself off my back. He said later he could feel the death in me responding to him. What a poetic image. And the second time he simply did it his way because he was strong enough to. When I went to meet him at the opera was I hoping to get AIDS? Was I that crazy? I saw myself sitting on the floor in Piccadilly Circus tube station. What a poor excuse for a man!
‘Jonathan,’ said Katerina, ‘mostly I get the big things right, like the death in him – but whether this is your death by violence and his own from illness or only the death that lives always in the mind I can’t be sure. And even if illness, it could be anything, not only HIV or AIDS. With details I am not at all reliable. And as I’ve already told you once, maybe you have nothing from him. Now you must wait three months and then you get yourself HIV-tested and we know what’s what.’
‘Three months of not knowing!’
‘Ah, Jonathan! There’s a saying in German: no matter which way you turn, your arse stays always behind.’
‘Thank you for your input, Katerina. God knows how long it might have taken me to work that out for myself.’
‘Now you’re angry.’
‘I’m sorry – it’s not you I’m angry at. Now I’m thinking something that I don’t want to say out loud. Can you read my thought?’
‘Yes, but there’s something else I want to talk about: have I only thought it or have you said to me that Serafina is your destiny-woman?’
‘I don’t remember, but that’s what she is – or was. I’m not sure that she thinks of herself that way any more.’
‘Tell me, please, what is a destiny-woman.’
‘For me a destiny-woman is the one that your whole life has brought you to – whatever you’ve done or not done, whatever roads you’ve kept to and whatever turns you’ve taken and when you find her your two life-lines are joined from then on.’
‘What do you mean when you say “life-line”?’
‘I’m not sure it’s definable. Sometimes I think I can feel how things are moving and where they’re going.’
‘Is it a predestined line, do you think?’
‘Not exactly but I think there are probabilities: if you see a pig and a chicken in a farmyard you might predict bacon and eggs in their life-lines.’
‘What do you predict in yours?’
‘Well, you know the contract I’ve signed with Mr Rinyo-Clacton.’
‘I’m not sure that’s an accurate prediction. Life-lines are strange things – what you’ve done and haven’t done, the roads you’ve kept to and the turns you’ve taken. My own life is incomprehensible to me; I can feel it following some unknown line like a dog on a scent but I don’t know what it is. Your life too is following a line unknown to you. That thought you were thinking – I advise you not to act on it just yet. Wait and see how things go. Do you understand me?’
‘Yes.’
‘This is a heavy time for you, Jonathan. If you want to stay here tonight you know you are welcome.’
‘Thank you, but tonight I think I have to be alone with whatever’s going to be looking out of the mirror at me.’
She kissed me. ‘Come safe to your house.’
‘I’ll try.’