Russell Hoban - Angelica's Grotto

Professor Slope took off his spectacles, wiped them with his handkerchief, and imagined the scene in Safeway. ‘Couldn’t have been very pleasant for you,’ he said.

‘She had curlers in her hair,’ said Klein, shaking his head.

‘Apart from that, how’ve you been feeling lately? Any big ups or downs?’

‘No big ones. I had a medium up a while back when I made potato pancakes and they didn’t fall apart.’

‘Downs?’

‘Well, I always feel a little low when I haven’t got a book going and right now I’m between books.’

‘Any plans for the next one?’

‘I’ve been thinking about Klimt, just the nudes. Do you know his work?’

‘No.’ Professor Slope contemplated the Escher. ‘Can you remember, perhaps when you were young, any sort of incapacity — not an injury but a loss of function?’

‘Loss of function! Catriona Moriarty, when I was fourteen — O God! she was like an Irish Aphrodite, and I …’

‘Not that kind of function — that’s autonomic nervous system. I’m looking for something ordinarily under your control.’

‘That’s a laugh. How much in life is under our control?’

‘Let’s not stray from the matter at hand. Try to remember some loss of function other than sexual.’

‘When I was nine I had to take piano lessons. My teacher, Mr Schulz, always smelled of bananas. I never practised but his pupils were giving a recital and I was to play Für Elise, which I’d never once got through successfully. On the afternoon of the recital all the strength went out of my wrists — they just went all floppy and my mother had to take me to the doctor.’

‘And what did the doctor say?’

‘He said it was nervousness and he gave me a tranquilliser.’

‘What then?’

‘I became tranquil.’

‘And your wrists?’

‘Stayed floppy till evening; when the recital was over they were all right again.’

‘That sounds to me like what we call a dissociative disorder.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s when there’s nothing physically wrong but the body isn’t taking orders from the brain.’

‘What’s that got to do with the loss of my inner voice? That is the brain talking, isn’t it?’

‘The boundaries in this sort of thing aren’t as clear-cut as one might like. Before we can help you with your problem we need to have a better idea of what it is. I’m going to arrange for you to have some tests, then we’ll proceed from there.’

‘What kind of tests?’

‘Psychological ones.’

‘Just what I need,’ Klein whispered into his hand — ‘something I can fail at.’ To Professor Slope he said, ‘Who’s going to do the tests?’

‘One of our psychologists — I don’t yet know which one.’

‘And after that I come back to you?’

‘No, my job is to make the first assessment, then I pass you along to whomever is the best person to get you sorted.’

‘ W h o ever.’

‘Whatever,’ said Professor Slope. ‘I’ll put the wheels in motion and you’ll be hearing from us shortly.’

‘From whomever?’

‘I’m sure your grammar is impeccable, Mr Klein, but more importantly we need to address deeper issues. Good luck.’ He picked up a microcorder and began to murmur into it, meanwhile extending his hand which Klein shook.

‘Why do ungrammatical people love to say “more importantly”?’ said Klein. ‘Thank you.’

When Klein got home he poured himself a Glenfiddich, sat down at his desk, and looked across it to the mantelpiece and the Meissen figure of a girl about to bowl a golden ball. Leaning forward with her knees bent and her right arm extended she stood thirteen and a half inches high on a round gilt-bordered base one and three-quarter inches high. Her feet were bare and she wore a classical pale-green gown that was tied with a pink ribbon below the breasts and left her right breast and shoulder bare. She was made in 1890 and the sculptor, Schott, had signed the base.

Every part of her was beautiful and shapely: her body and her limbs, her hands and feet, each individual finger and toe. Her long blonde hair framed the exquisite oval of her face. Full of sweetness, her face was, her rose-petal mouth all virginal, her eyes entranced and dreamy.

Her face was the face of the beloved who takes no notice, the beloved who passes by, chatting with her friends, with never a glance, never a thought for the one whose heart lies at her feet. Had Schott intended that face or was it that the very clay under his hands had refused him the response he craved?

Klein had bought that figure in Hannelore’s home town, Celle in Lower Saxony. ‘She looks like you,’ he said to her.

‘No, she doesn’t,’ said Hannelore. ‘I was never that young, never that pretty.’

‘Yes, you were, and the youth and prettiness are still there.’

‘You wish.’

‘I wish,’ said Klein twenty years later as the girl, intent on her bowling, passed him by with never a glance.

The objects in his workroom, apart from their relationship with him, had relationships with one another: some harmless, some not. From a long-ago trip to Paxos with Hannelore, Klein, an inveterate collector of beach pebbles, had brought home one that he thought big enough to be called a stone. It appeared to be some kind of conglomerate, a pale warm grey, smoothly rounded, ovoid, weighed eighteen ounces, and felt good in the hand. On it Klein had written in black ink, in Greek letters, KINESIS/ANAPAUSIS: MOTION/REST.

Holding this stone in his hand, he saw the beach and the large mystical rocks shaped by the sea, heard the lapping of the tide and saw, magnified by the clear water, a polychaete worm, black and many-legged, like a warning to the curious. He saw the road to the villa and the olive trees on either side that flashed silver in the warm wind. There was a particular olive tree, ancient and wrinkled and still bearing fruit: in its hollow trunk was an opening that looked as if a naked goddess, Persephone perhaps, had emerged from it into the green-lit grove. Klein tried to remember the moment of balance when he had written those words on the stone, caught only the scent of Hannelore’s sun-warm hair.

Sated with ANAPAUSIS, the Paxos stone longed for KINESIS. Klein had once placed it on the mantelpiece near the Meissen girl, then quickly removed it before it could jump up and smash her to bits. From then on he kept it on his desk, handling it as he would a dangerous pet.

It was ten days before Klein received a letter giving him an appointment with a clinical psychologist, Mrs Lichtheim. In the interval he began to make notes for a study of the nudes of Gustav Klimt and he attended diabetic, eye, cardiology, vascular, and foot-health clinics at Chelsea & Westminster Hospital.

On these visits he passed and repassed the fish in the lobby. They lived in a long, narrow, green and bubbling world and had been listed, Klein assumed, in the builders’ manifest:

So many thousand bags cement

So many thousand cement blocks

1 No. 12 assortment XL Matissoid Mobile Atrium Shapes

1 world (long, narrow, green, bubbling)

16 lobbyfish (assorted)

While appearing to take no notice of Klein and the rest of humanity the fish explained to their children, ‘What you see on the other side of the glass is an ichthyocentric world: it is as it is only because we are here to observe it.’ Klein sensed this and avoided eye contact.

There were not very many young people queuing up for the clinics Klein visited; mostly they were others of his age group in wheelchairs and on sticks, many of them limping and halting in sandals, slippers, trainers, and divers bandages and offbeat bespoke surgical-appliance footgear. He spent half-days waiting to see registrars and consultants while nurses of many ages, weights, and shapes marched, ambled, and frisked past him. He mentally undressed the good-looking ones down to their lissome and beautifully articulated skeletons as, like a greyhound in a walking-frame, he followed with his eyes the nimble rabbits of his desire.