Russell Hoban - Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

I handed her the book. ‘He gave me this just now in Waterstone’s.’

‘Aha!’ she said, holding it close to her chest with both hands. ‘Oh!’ Again that change in her face — the ancient sibylline look with the lips drawn back from the teeth.

‘That’s the look I saw on your face when you held the money,’ I said.

As before, she shook her head, dismissed it with a gesture, then, clutching the book, said, ‘Here there is death, death, death, death! I’m talking about the death in him’

‘What about it?’

‘It’s all tangled up, not clearly focused; partly it points out and partly it points in.’

‘What, murderous and suicidal both?’

‘And fear, yes? This have I already said before, not?’

‘Yes, when you handled the money he’d given me. What’s he afraid of?’

‘This I still don’t know.’

‘Look at what he wrote on the flyleaf.’ She looked. ‘This is a quotation, yes?’

‘From the Rubaiyat’

‘I know it only in a German translation — these lines about the Bird of Time I don’t recognise.’

‘The full quatrain is:

“Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring

Your Winter Garment of Repentance fling:

The Bird of Time has but a little way

To flutter — and the Bird is on the Wing.’ “

‘So,’ said Katerina, ‘whose time is he talking about, do you think?’

‘Mine, there’s no doubt about that.’

‘His handwriting is almost like that of a child, a child big and strong but confused. He’s right-handed, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Look — slanting away from the writer it goes and slanting back towards him with its pointyness like spears and arrows, death pointing out and pointing in. Up it goes and down like the waves of the sea. What is sticking in him that could be the death of him? Oh God.’

‘We both know what it is, don’t we, Katerina: that son of a bitch has got AIDS and now I’ve probably got it and given it to you.’

Katerina’s eyes were blue, quite a vivid blue, not the sort of eyes you expect an old woman to have. As she looked at me steadily I remembered the number tattooed on her arm. She took my hand. ‘That we don’t know yet, Jonathan. Maybe he’s got HIV but not yet AIDS and maybe you’ve caught nothing from him. I don’t feel any sickness in you.’

I thought back to the first time, in Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s bedroom: I’d had a lot of champagne and I was in a strange state of mind and I … what? I wanted to get the burden of myself off my back. He said later he could feel the death in me responding to him. What a poetic image. And the second time he simply did it his way because he was strong enough to. When I went to meet him at the opera was I hoping to get AIDS? Was I that crazy? I saw myself sitting on the floor in Piccadilly Circus tube station. What a poor excuse for a man!

‘Jonathan,’ said Katerina, ‘mostly I get the big things right, like the death in him — but whether this is your death by violence and his own from illness or only the death that lives always in the mind I can’t be sure. And even if illness, it could be anything, not only HIV or AIDS. With details I am not at all reliable. And as I’ve already told you once, maybe you have nothing from him. Now you must wait three months and then you get yourself HIV-tested and we know what’s what.’

‘Three months of not knowing!’

‘Ah, Jonathan! There’s a saying in German: no matter which way you turn, your arse stays always behind.’

‘Thank you for your input, Katerina. God knows how long it might have taken me to work that out for myself.’

‘Now you’re angry.’

‘I’m sorry — it’s not you I’m angry at. Now I’m thinking something that I don’t want to say out loud. Can you read my thought?’

‘Yes, but there’s something else I want to talk about: have I only thought it or have you said to me that Serafina is your destiny-woman?’

‘I don’t remember, but that’s what she is — or was. I’m not sure that she thinks of herself that way any more.’

‘Tell me, please, what is a destiny-woman.’

‘For me a destiny-woman is the one that your whole life has brought you to — whatever you’ve done or not done, whatever roads you’ve kept to and whatever turns you’ve taken and when you find her your two life-lines are joined from then on.’

‘What do you mean when you say “life-line”?’

‘I’m not sure it’s definable. Sometimes I think I can feel how things are moving and where they’re going.’

‘Is it a predestined line, do you think?’

‘Not exactly but I think there are probabilities: if you see a pig and a chicken in a farmyard you might predict bacon and eggs in their life-lines.’

‘What do you predict in yours?’

‘Well, you know the contract I’ve signed with Mr Rinyo-Clacton.’

‘I’m not sure that’s an accurate prediction. Life-lines are strange things — what you’ve done and haven’t done, the roads you’ve kept to and the turns you’ve taken. My own life is incomprehensible to me; I can feel it following some unknown line like a dog on a scent but I don’t know what it is. Your life too is following a line unknown to you. That thought you were thinking — I advise you not to act on it just yet. Wait and see how things go. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes.’

‘This is a heavy time for you, Jonathan. If you want to stay here tonight you know you are welcome.’

‘Thank you, but tonight I think I have to be alone with whatever’s going to be looking out of the mirror at me.’

She kissed me. ‘Come safe to your house.’

‘I’ll try.’

I found myself thinking of Orlando Furioso. It was years since I’d read it and I’d forgotten most of it but not the part in Canto X where the beautiful Angelica, chained naked to a rock on the Isle of Tears, is about to be devoured by the sea-monster, Orca. Ruggiero, flying over the outer Hebrides on the hippogriff, sees her plight and speeds to her rescue. He wounds Orca, unchains Angelica, and off they go, Angelica on the pillion seat and Ruggiero lusting for his reward. He lands on the shore in expectation of heroic delights but while he’s struggling out of his armour Angelica puts a magic ring in her mouth, becomes invisible, exits with her virginity intact, and leaves Ruggiero to his own devices.

It struck me, as I walked to the Lord Jim, that the Angelica/Ruggiero/Orca pattern is a paradigm of the human condition: in every situation large and small there is an Angelica, a Ruggiero, and an Orca. Take a simple everyday thing like the shopping: the near-empty larder, Angelica, needs to be rescued from emptiness, Orca; the one who goes to the shops for food is Ruggiero. Or a big thing like a coronary bypass: the heart is Angelica; the thrombosis is Orca; the surgeon is Ruggiero. There is, of course, no frustration for either of these Ruggieros.

At the present time I seemed to be Angelica to Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Orca. What a position to be in! And within myself the Angelica of my essential identity was threatened by the Orca of my stupidity. Or my death-wish. Or something else? How well did I know myself? Where were my Ruggieros, internal and external?

I was certain that Mr Rinyo-Clacton was HIV-positive at the very least. Because that’s how things are — you open the door to a possibility and the next thing you know, an actuality has you by the throat. O God, I thought, if only I could turn back the clock to the other day when I hadn’t yet met Mr Rinyo-Clacton. Actually I don’t believe in a God that can be talked to, prayed to, haggled with, and so on. There might be something dreaming the universe or even consciously thinking it but I very much doubt that its eye is on the sparrow. Maybe it thinks in waves and particles and patterns, and one of the patterns is Mr Rinyo-Clacton.