I, Lady Rice, offer the scene to you because it’s a relief to me. These days any flights of my imagination tend to end up with visions of Edwin in bed with Anthea, and are intolerable. This one, triggered by Tully Toffener, Member of Parliament, another of Brian Moss’s clients, ended safely enough, with mere doubts about the nature of reality. Perhaps I am beginning to heal.
Tully called my employer Brian at the office and I listened in, with (for once) Brian’s permission. Mostly Jelly eavesdrops, records and take the tapes home secretly. She used to pilfer when she was a child: look through keyholes, listen in on extensions, collect little piles of stolen goodies: with trauma the habit has returned.
‘That poor old man,’ said Tully of Congo, his step-grandfather-in-law. Sara’s grandmother Wendy had remarried at an unseemly age, and hopes of Sara’s inheritance were dashed. Wendy and Congo seemed bent on getting rid of as much wealth and property as possible before they snuffed it. Tully’s voice was unctuous with hypocrisy. That is to say it sounded pretty much as usual. ‘That poor old man!’ said Tully Toffener. ‘He’s begun to see things. He needs to be shut away for his own good. He’s senile. Alzheimer’s, I expect.’
Last weekend, instead of weeping and watching Sky TV, I wrote up the scene as I imagined it. I used the word processing skills Jelly had recently developed in my fingers. It’s not a skill I ever wanted to acquire, but needs must when alimony drives. And The Claremont will produce a personal computer for a small extra charge.
Bedouins swung from trees to attack the poor old man. Communards, their sashes red, their rags grey, wormed up over the bare boards towards him to set fuses for their gelignite. A pirate, his jacket tattered velvet, his cap skull-and-crossboned, spurred cowboy boots on his feet, slept propped up against the tallboy.
Every now and then Peter Pan’s Tinkerbell would flit by in her froufrou, screaming abuse, striking out with what looked like an extended sparkler. A skinny man in skin-tight black leather paced like a kind of moving cut-out in the window alcove, silhouetted against the thin sheets which served as curtains. He carried a rope garotte in his strong hands, and occasionally would jerk it tight, looking at Congo with horrid meaning.
The visitors came at dusk: with the dawn they went away. Congo would leap and flail with his broom all night and be exhausted by morning, but at least Wendy could sleep. He kept her safe. When she woke, she would look at him with adoring eyes and say something simple and to the point, like ‘my hero’, and murmur that her glass needed filling, and he would make the dangerous journey to the bathroom and fridge to bring back vodka. The freezer compartment grew its muzzy ice blobs and sparkling tentacles further and further out into the world: the hatch door of the ice compartment no longer closed: soon the door of the fridge would no longer close – then what?
There was no point in worrying about the future. The hazards of the present were enough to be getting on with. Most things in the apartment were by now sold – once all were gone, that would be that. Every week or so Congo would show Wendy the empty housekeeping purse and she would point to something in the room –she seldom spoke: at ninety-two, words had finally begun to fail her – Persian rug, original Regency curtains, Tiffany lamp, escritoire – and Congo would call Arthur, or Bob, or Alice – they kept adding their names and numbers to the list on the pad – and someone would come round with cash and take whatever it was away. Sometimes other things would go as well – the six silver spoons in their soft dark blue wrap had gone from their drawer, and eight miniatures from the wall, and what else? But the dealers seemed cheerful; they’d smile and chat and were not disapproving or surprised by the smell and the mess.
And was not property theft? Had not Marx so described it? Neither of them, Wendy or Congo, had worked for its acquisition. Wealth had come to them: they had not earned it. You could not take objects beyond the grave, however valuable or beautiful: why should the dealers not have them, to make an honest or dishonest living as they chose? If the dealers didn’t get them, Sara and Tully Toffener would. Relatives were more dangerous and distressing by far than dealers ever were. Relatives traded love and hate, using possessions as both weapons and symbols: dealers merely traded.
What could the motive of the nightly visitors be, in so attacking him, so abusing him? That was the real problem. Did he deserve it? Was hell sending out its messengers? The visitors used language in a way Congo never had in all his life, thus persuading him the more of their reality.
‘Get that fridge thawed out, you fuck-head,’ the executioner would snarl, while Congo kicked and poked him away with the broom.
‘I got your false teeth in my pocket,’ jeered a Communard one day. ‘We’re stewing them up for food because we ain’t got nothing else. You fat bastards are starving us out.’ And he wormed, halfway between adder and human in his grey rags and red silk sash, over the oak floorboards, and caught and ripped the sash on a nail which had often bothered Congo, catching as it would on the dry skin of his old toes. It was the detail that so impressed. And Congo could swear he once heard Tinkerbell snipe, as she swung by, ‘I used a dildo on Wendy when you were asleep’, and as she swung back, ‘She loved it, darling, absolutely loved it. Filthy old thing!’
He tried to maintain a dignified silence, but sometimes it got to be too much.
‘Get out of here!’ he’d yell at them. ‘Who are you? What do you want? This is my home –’ but they didn’t seem to hear, as if he were the apparition, not they.
One night the executioner put the noose aside to sharpen a guillotine blade. Screech, screech. Congo’s ears hurt. An edge of the blade caught in the thin fabric and ripped it. The tear revealed a perfectly ordinary Chelsea street scene outside: the good Georgian houses of Lodestar Avenue, the decorated street lamps which the tourists loved; the headlights of occasional passing traffic. And Congo could hear the sheet ripping. There was no discernible difference between that reality and this. What was he to make of it? And when he looked out of the window he saw a row of Arabs squatting by the garden wall, staring up at him reproachfully. They seemed hungry. What was Congo meant to do about it? There was no food in the house, only ice and vodka. The whole world was needy: in old age especially, the rich as well as the poor.
Anyway, this was the scene I envisaged, on the strength of one phone call from Tully Toffener. I had no understanding at the time of how later it would relate to my own affairs. It is strange how these things happen. The scenes that stay in your mind for years, for no apparent reason, can later turn out to have great relevance to your life. A passing meeting with a stranger by the lake: lake and stranger engraved into your memory, though you can’t imagine why: the stranger turns out to be your future husband’s brother; the lake where your best friend inherits a house, so you come to know both well. The examples of portent are so often trivial and gossipy; it’s as if, in the Platonic sense, they were mere shadows of Portent itself. But I digress.
Congo had to sleep, that was the trouble. God alone knows what goes on while you sleep and in the end everyone has to sleep.
If I understand the culture of the aboriginals correctly, human beings are the mere result of dingoes dreaming in the dreamtime, before the power of those dreams made the world take actual form. Well, that figures. Dreamt up by a dingo. I can deal with that. And at least for a time I was out of my own predicament, and into Congo’s, and learning to despise and dislike Tully, as well as Anthea. Spread outrage more thinly, and it’s easier to swallow.