Russell Hoban - Angelica's Grotto

‘What are you on, Harold?’ said Leslie.

‘Mortality,’ said Klein. He tasted, like fruit gums, the intensely red, green, and amber of traffic lights. Cars on both sides, ahead and behind, were silent worlds of otherness with bright reflections sliding rearward on their tops. Again there appeared the Embankment and the river garlanded with lamps, jewelled with boats, shining with lost years.

‘What’s happening?’ Klein murmured to Oannes. Marlene Dietrich appeared in his mind as Lola Lola with naked thighs, black stockings, suspender belt, top hat. Emil Jannings, at the end of his tether, crowed like a rooster. ‘Are we getting into a Blue Angel -situation here?’

‘There are worse ways to ruin yourself,’ said Melissa.

‘Like Russian roulette?’

‘Think about it: the professor’s canary was dead at the very begining of the film but when he moved in with Lola Lola, up jumped a new canary singing like a steam whistle. How’s your canary, Harold?’

‘The last time I looked it was on its back with its feet in the air. Are you wearing black stockings?’

‘Of course, with a suspender belt. I like to be correctly attired for mental undressing. Sorry about no top hat.’

‘No wanking while we’re on the road,’ said Leslie to Harold as the Tate Gallery and the Vauxhall Bridge came and went. ‘How do we get to your place?’

‘Carry on down the Embankment past the Battersea Bridge and around into the New King’s Road where you turn left.’ To himself, ‘Before that there’s the Albert Bridge and Daphne.’

‘Who’s Daphne?’ said Leslie.

‘A bronze nude. When I lived in Beaufort Street I used to go jogging on the Embankment and I always slapped her bottom when I passed. I think she was vandalised and now she’s fibreglass.’

‘That’s life,’ said Melissa.

‘Who vandalised you?’ said Klein.

‘Would you believe me if I told you I stabbed my father twelve times?’

‘I’d believe you saw Beyond the Clouds.’

‘You’re so five minutes ago in a sort of twenty-five-years-ago way, Harold. You’re a hippy replacement.’

‘“By brooks too broad for leaping the lightfoot lads are laid,”’ said Klein, ‘but a lot of us old retreads are still around.’

The Albert Bridge wedding-caked and diamonded its way over the river. ‘Albert Bridge, my delight,’ sang Klein, ‘let your lights all shine tonight.’

‘You just make that up?’ said Leslie.

‘Something from a long time ago,’ said Klein. It was a rhyme he’d composed for Hannelore back in the good time. For the rest of the trip he whispered into his hand except when he had to give directions. Arrived at his house, he looked out across the common towards the District Line. ‘The place hasn’t changed since I left it earlier this evening.’

‘Did you think it would?’ said Melissa.

‘These days time goes in and out like an accordion,’ said Klein.

‘Listen,’ said Leslie, ‘I’d love to stay and talk about relativity with you, but the boss wants me gone.’ To Melissa, ‘Watch your ass, sweetheart.’

‘I’ll do that,’ said Klein, as he left the van with the object of his desire.

For a moment they stood by the steps of Klein’s house. On the far side of the common a Wimbledon train dopplered its way to Parson’s Green. The night was warm for December; there was a nightingale singing; there was an almost-full moon.

‘Waxing or waning?’ said Klein. ‘I’m never sure.’

‘Three-quarters full or three-quarters empty,’ said Melissa. ‘Maybe there’s not all that much difference.’

‘Are you so world-weary?’

Unbelievably, she moved closer to him and laid her head on his shoulder; he was just tall enough for that to be comfortable. He put his arm around her, feeling through her jacket the heat of her body. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I’m not sure what I am; sometimes I’m not sure if I am.’

‘You? The formidable Lola Lola?’

‘Nobody is the same all the way through like a stick of seaside rock. Or from moment to moment, for that matter — you must know that, living as long as you have. Put your other arm around me. You’re older than my father.’

‘The one you stabbed twelve times?’

‘Whatever.’

‘Is this happening?’ said Klein, recalling her legs as she stepped out of the van in her very short skirt. ‘I’m an old man, close to the end of my life, and I feel like a sixteen year old on a first date. This isn’t real, of course, but can we say that reality is whatever is the case?’

‘You think too much, Harold.’

‘Like a Jewish horse.’

‘Are we going inside or are we putting on a show for the neighbours?’

‘Sorry, you felt so good that I didn’t want to move.’ He went up the steps ahead of her, unlocked the door, and held it open for her. Once inside, before he turned on the hall light, he leant towards her, said to himself, ‘What are you doing, Harold?’ and drew back.

‘What were you doing, Harold?’ The moon shining through the fanlight glazed the oval of her face, made her like porcelain, fragile and collectable.

‘It’s that sixteen-year-old feeling — I was going to kiss you.’

She moved into his arms. ‘Do it, Harold, this is your fantasy and my scientific enquiry.’

Madness is good, said Oannes.

Klein kissed her, feeling faint as she opened her mouth to him. They stood that way for a while before anyone spoke. ‘That was quite acceptable, Harold,’ she said. ‘I was wondering if you’d smell and taste old but you don’t; your tongue certainly carries its years well.’

‘You weren’t disgusted?’

‘In my line of work I can’t afford to be. Any response below the belt?’ Her hand asked the question as well.

‘Vestigial there but ten out of ten in my head.’

‘That’s where it counts. Are we going to move out of the hall?’

He hung up their jackets and they went into what used to be a living-room but had long since been taken over by his work. There were bookshelves on all the walls except the one where the bay window fronted the street and the chimney breast where Pegase Noir hung alone. There were boxes and stacks of videotapes, piles of newspapers and unanswered correspondence. The desk was occupied by a PC, modem, and printer of recent manufacture, a very old Apple II computer for running unconverted floppy discs, a mini-hi-fi, and a variety of owls in glass, brass, china, bronze, spelter, stone, and plastic. On the printer a little naked china female presented her rear view as she reclined on one elbow and made eye contact with a tiny mermaid who leant against the groin of a large violently green-and-gold ceramic frog of almost abstract design. Two other little china females in the bookshelves danced in different periods while a third charmed a snake. Various sargassos of old and current yellow A4 pages drifted in the stillness of the desk.

Red file cabinets stood where possible, and in the odd shelfless corner there were posters: the 1933 King Kong atop the Empire State Building with a crushed aeroplane in one hand and Fay Wray in the other; Vermeer’s Portrait of a Young Girl; Caspar David Friedrich’s The Stages of Life; and a brightly coloured toucan advertising der bunte Vogel BIERKAFFEE RESTAURANT in Munster. Bric-à-brac, beach pebbles, seashells, a model of a Portuguese fishing boat and the Meissen girl kept station on the mantelpiece of the bookshelf-blocked fireplace. In deserts of desuetude on floor and tables tottering babels of defunct workroom cultures and buried civilisations awaited the archaeological spade.