CHAPTER EIGHTY-SIX

Rorschach, 5

IN ITS HEYDAY Rorschach’s bathroom was a thing of luxury. Along the whole of the rear wall, connecting all the sanitary fixtures to each other, was a complex arrangement of lead and copper piping graced with lavishly convoluted bifurcations, as well as a probably superfluous plethora of manometers, temperature gauges, flowmeters, hygrometers, clappers, cocks, taps, control levers, handles, valves, and stoppers, providing a machine-room backdrop which made a striking contrast to the refinement of the remainder of the decor: a veined marble bath; a medieval font for a washbasin, a fin-de-siècle towel rail; bronze taps carved in the shapes of radiant suns, lions’ heads, swans’ necks; and a few curios and objets d’art: a crystal ball, of the kind you used to see in dance halls, was hung from the ceiling, refracting the light in its myriad cat’s-eye mirrors; and there was also a Japanese ceremonial sabre, a screen made of two panes of glass trapping a host of dried hydrangea flowers, and a painted wooden Louis XV low table, holding three crudely moulded tall jars for bath salts, perfume, and bath oil which represented three maybe ancient statuettes: a very youthful Atlas carrying a scale world globe on his left shoulder, an ithyphallic Pan, and a frightened Syrinx already half-transformed into a reed.

There are four works of art which draw the eye especially. The first is a painting on wood, dating certainly from the first half of the nineteenth century. It is entitled Robinson Making Himself as Comfortable as He Can on His Desert Island. Above this title, written in two lines of white-on-black capital letters, can be seen a fairly naïve depiction of Robinson Crusoe in a pointed bonnet and a goatskin waistcoat, sitting on a stone; on the tree used to mark the passing of time he is making a notch for Sunday.

The second and third items are prints dealing differently with similar subjects: one, mysteriously called The Purloined Letter, portrays an elegant drawing room – herringbone woodblock floor, Jouy cretonne wallpaper – in which a young woman, seated by a window looking out onto a great park, is edging a piece of fine linen with bourdon lace; not far from her, an ageing, exaggeratedly English-looking man is playing the virginals. The second engraving, of surrealist inspiration, depicts a girl of maybe fourteen or fifteen wearing a short lace slip. The open-work clocks on her stockings end in arrowheads, and the little cross she wears on her neck has branches made of fingers, with slightly bleeding nails. She is sitting at a sewing machine, near an open window through which can be seen the mountainous boulders of a Rhineland landscape, and on the lingerie she is sewing can be seen this motto, embroidered in black-letter Gothic script.

The fourth work of art is a cast standing on the rim of the bath. It is a full-length model of a woman walking, about one third life-size. She is a Roman virgin of twenty or so. Her body is long and supple, her hair is gently waved and almost entirely veiled. Her head is tipped slightly to one side, and in her left hand she holds a gather of the extraordinarily pleated robe which falls straight from her neck to her ankles, thus revealing her sandalled feet. She has her left foot forward, and her right foot, about to step on, touches the ground only by the tip of its toes, with its heel and sole almost vertical. This movement, expressing both the easy agility of a young woman and her self-confident calm, gives the statue its particular charm, a firm stride held steady, as it were, in midair.

A canny woman, Olivia Rorschach has rented out her flat for the months she will be away. The rental – which includes Jane Sutton’s daily services – was arranged through a bureau specialising in temporary accommodation for very rich foreigners. This time the tenant is someone called Giovanni Pizzicagnoli, an international administrator normally resident in Geneva but spending six weeks in Paris to chair one of the budgetary commissions of the Unesco special assembly on the energy problem. This diplomat made his choice in a few minutes on the specifications provided by the bureau’s Swiss agent. He won’t arrive in France until the day after next, but his wife and young son are here already because, believing all Frenchmen to be thieves, he has given his wife – a sturdy Bernese of about forty – the job of checking, on the premises, that everything is as promised in the specification.

Olivia Rorschach thought her presence at this visitation pointless, and she withdrew at the start with a charming smile, using her imminent departure as an excuse; she did no more than to urge Madame Pizzicagnoli to watch that her little boy didn’t break the decorated plates in the dining-room or the blown-glass grapes in the entrance hall.

The girl from the bureau took her client over the rest of the flat, listing the fittings and fixtures and ticking them off on her list as they proceeded. But it quickly turned out that the visit, originally envisaged as a routine formality, was running into a serious difficulty: the Swissess, clearly obsessed to the highest degree by domestic safety problems, has demanded to have the workings of every household appliance explained to her, and to be shown the location of every circuit-breaker, fuse, and disjunctor. The inspection of the kitchen was manageable, but in the bathroom things quickly went critical: overwhelmed by events, the girl from the bureau called her boss to the rescue, and, given the size of the deal – the rental charge for the six weeks is twenty thousand francs – he could not but come over, but since he had obviously not had time to look up the file properly, he in turn had to call for help from various people: from Madame Rorschach, in the first place, but she declined, claiming it was her husband who had dealt with the installation; then from Olivier Gratiolet, the former landlord, who replied that it had ceased to be any business of his nearly fifteen years ago; from Romanet, the manager, who suggested asking the interior designer, who did no more than give the name of the plumber, who, given the time of day, could be materialised only in the form of a recorded message on his telephone answering service.

The final reckoning brings six people together in Madame Rorschach’s bathroom:

Madame Pizzicagnoli, holding a pocket dictionary and exclaiming in a voice made tremulous and ear-shattering by anger, “Io non vi capisco! Una stanza ammobligliata! Ich versteh Sie nich! I am in a hurry! Moi, ne comprendre! Ho fretta! Je présée! My tailor is rich”;

the girl from the agency, a young woman in a white alpaca twopiece, fanning herself with her ferret gloves;

the bureau’s boss, frantically hunting for an ashtray in which to deposit his three-quarters chewed-up cigar;

the building manager, leafing through the co-ownership rule book, trying to remember whether there was anything in it anywhere about safety standards for bathroom water-heaters;

a plumber from a breakdown service called to an emergency, no one knows why or by whom, winding up his wristwatch whilst waiting to be told to go away;

and Madame Pizzicagnoli’s little boy, a tot of four and a half in a sailor suit, quite unperturbed by the hubbub around him, kneeling on the marble flagstones, playing tirelessly with a clockwork rabbit which bangs a drum and blows a trumpet to the tune of “Colonel Bogey”.