Russell Hoban - Angelica's Grotto

Klein disconnected from the Internet and switched off the modem and the monitor. It was quarter past nine on a rainy evening in September. Across the common a District Line train rumbled towards town. His mind gave him the red telephone box outside the block of flats in Beaufort Street where he and Hannelore had lived from 1970 to 1972. ‘The red telephone box in the rain under the drooping white blossoms of a chestnut tree,’ he said, ‘the red telephone box all fresh and juicy in the rain with the white petals scattered on it.’ He’d never made a call from that telephone box but he’d always passed it going to and from the flat and it stood in his memory like an illuminated gatehouse to his love. ‘ Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott’ he sang: her favourite hymn. ‘All gone,’ he said. He went down to the kitchen, poured himself a large Glenfiddich.

‘When the world was young,’ he heard himself saying, and his voice woke him up. ‘What?’ he asked himself, trying to hold the fugitive thought. ‘When the world was young the movies were black-and-white, the people in them spoke in short snappy sentences. At restaurants and getting out of taxis they paid with banknotes and never received any change. The big gangsters used electric shavers in their cars as they were driven downtown. At home they were massaged by ex-prizefighters who called them Boss. When they got shot there was no blood. The chorus girls had beautiful rounded legs, not thin. The money in those films was only stage money; no wonder they didn’t bother with the change. There was an organist at the cinema of my childhood, spotlit and sparkling; we followed the bouncing ball and sang but later, much later, last night I was thinking of the red telephone box in Beaufort Street, I can see it now. In 1970 Forbidden Fruit was the shop at the corner of the King’s Road. ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’ was a song we listened to. Hannelore gave me a copy of Jung’s Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious and I still haven’t read it. New flowered sheets on the bed for our first night. Minutes and hours that will still be there when I’m long gone.

‘I want to speak in black-and-white,’ he said. ‘I want not to bleed when I’m shot. I want to part the slats of a Venetian blind and look down at the street and say, “I’m tired of running.” From what? Everything. “Keys that jingle in your pocket, words that jangle in your head. Why did summer go so quickly? Was it something that you said?”’

Although Klein’s self-discipline had slackened of late he was hoping to get back to a solid work routine with Naked Mysteries: The Nudes of Gustav Klimt: opening one of his Klimt books he turned to the plate of Danae being entered by the shower of gold that was Jupiter. He studied the picture intently, marvelling at the magnificence of Danae’s haunches lifted to the downrush of the god, the pearly paleness of her breast, the surrender in her flushed enraptured face, eyes closed, red mouth open. From the opulence of Danae he went to a book of drawings, ghostly sketches of naked and half-naked women sitting, standing, lying in each other’s arms or playing with themselves, Klimt’s faint and snaky lines stroking every curve and savage flaunt of hip and thigh, buttock and breast, lustful lines enclosing volumes of indolent and eager female flesh. ‘He was as woman-hungry as I am,’ said Klein. ‘I wonder if he ever got as much as he wanted.’

‘Others have appreciated women,’ he wrote, ‘but Klimt is unique in the astonishment with which he perceives the essential mystery of the female.’ He stopped typing.

‘What he does,’ he said, ‘is fuck them with his eyes.’ He saved the page, switched on the modem, went to the Internet and put Angelica’s Grotto on the screen.

He skipped from picture to picture in the various galleries, shaking his head and following the anatomical permutations eagerly. Returning to the homepage, he looked long and earnestly at Angelica’s face. ‘Haunted,’ he said. ‘She looks haunted; there’s no other word for that look. What is the rock she’s chained to? Is it the money she gets for posing? Is she a prostitute? Does she want to be rescued? Is she waiting for Ruggiero?’ He saw himself mounted on the hippogriff, felt the wind on his face and the beating of the great wings, heard the shriek of the animal as it battled through the murk towards the incandescent nakedness of Angelica.

When he reached the end of Gallery 7 the screen suddenly went black, shuddered a little, then came up with the home-page picture of Angelica in her grotto. Below her a dialogue box asked: WOULD YOU LIKE TO TAKE A WALK ON THE NIGHT SIDE? YES/NO

‘Yes!’ he said, and clicked on it. On the left side of the screen appeared a block of text under the title, MONICA’S MONDAY NIGHT. The right side was a photograph of the Strand near the Aldwych on a rainy night, the wet road and pavement reflecting the darkness and the lights. Walking towards the viewer was a very pretty young woman with long red hair, very chic in a black suit with a short skirt, black stockings, and shiny black high heels. She was carrying a leopard-spotted umbrella.

‘Clip-clop,’ said Klein, imagining the sound of her heels. He read the text aloud:

‘It’s quarter past ten on a rainy Monday night. Monica, an English lecturer at King’s College, is on her way home from a meeting. The Strand is still lively but when she turns into Surrey Street heading for Temple tube station there is very little traffic and her heels make a lonely sound on the wet pavement.

‘Monica feels good in her little figure-hugging black suit. As she walks she feels her silky red bush rubbing against her silk knickers, feels her skirt tight against her thighs and buttocks. She feels the nakedness of her body under her clothes and her nipples stiffen.

‘She’s thinking about the weekend just past, remembering the feel of Gerald’s body against hers. He’s a terribly nice man who makes love as if he’s done an A level in it. Unsatisfied but not wanting to seem ungracious, she’s always faked orgasms and he’s convinced that he’s wonderful in bed.’ NEXT

‘I know the type,’ says Klein. ‘He probably considers himself an expert on wine, too.’ The next picture showed Monica from behind in all her shapeliness and tightness and clip-clopping shiny black heels. ‘Yes!’ he said. ‘So sweet!’

‘It’s so quiet, thinks Monica. The tube station seems far away. She looks back over her shoulder and sees no one. Were there footsteps behind her? She stops to listen, hears only the distant traffic on the Strand and the rain pattering on her umbrella. She finds herself recalling newspaper stories of women dragged into cars and taken away to be raped. She sees her thighs being forced apart; she makes an O with her lips, imagines the taste of semen on her tongue and the sweat of brutal men on filthy mattresses in evil-smelling rooms.’ NEXT

‘O God,’ said Klein, ‘it’s going to happen.’ He clicked again and got a close-up of Monica’s face under the street lamps, her mouth open, her eyes closed:

‘Monica finds strange pictures in her mind, strange stirrings in her body, feels a wetness between her legs. I want to get home, she thinks as a van draws up beside her. As she turns, a powerful hand is clamped over her mouth and she’s pulled inside.’ NEXT

‘I knew that was going to happen,’ said Klein as he clicked. The new photograph was a close-up of Monica face-down on a mattress in the van, her skirt pulled up to expose her little black silk knickers and suspender belt, the whiteness of her thighs above her black stockings. Klein read:

‘Her captor’s hand on the back of her neck forces Monica’s face down against the musty mattress. “Don’t scream,” he says as the van pulls away. “If you scream I’ll hurt you.”