Russell Hoban - Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

‘I think she’ll be staying at Mtsoku’s place tonight.’ She wasn’t looking at me as she said it. We took off our coats as if we had nothing on under them. She lit the gas fire and it purred softly as it glowed into life. ‘Would you like something to drink?’ she said. ‘There’s a bottle of red or I can make some tea.’

‘Tea, please.’

‘What kind?’

‘Rose-hip, please.’

She looked at me sadly and went through the beaded curtain into the kitchen.

For a moment I stayed where I was, watching the lava lamp as the damned souls unfroze and sank into the primordial red. Zoë, though absent, was a presence in the room. She’s twenty-seven, a statuesque six feet tall, does her blonde hair in many little plaits interwoven with coloured yarn and (when she’s not waiting tables) headphones, wears kohl, patchouli, a silver nostril stud, and black garments with a lot of leg. The last time I asked her about the music in the headphones it was Mind the Rap, the latest album from In Your Face. Her current carrying book was a biography of Frida Kahlo. She has a degree in Politics and Modern History from Manchester University, is a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, and frequently gets time off from the Vegemania to take part in protests and demonstrations. Her boyfriend, Mtsoku, is a black saxophonist from Kenya who performs with In Your Face. Zoë’s absent presence seemed to be watching me with a certain amount of cynicism.

I went into the kitchen and leant against the cabinets watching Serafina while she filled the kettle. ‘Why don’t you put on some music?’ she said.

Looking through the CD collection I was surprised to find the same Purcell disc we had at home. I put it on at Track 4, ‘Musick for a while’:

Musick, musick for a while,

Shall all your cares beguile;

Shall all, all, all,

Shall all, all, all,

Shall all your cares beguile; …

‘Is this Zoë’s,’ I said, ‘or did you buy it?’

‘I bought it,’ she said from the kitchen.

With Serafina there I could listen to that song that I hadn’t been able to bear alone: the haunted and haunting melancholy of Purcell’s music and Chance’s counter-tenor, a male voice not coming from the usual male place but from a soul-place beyond that, where in a flickering shadow-world of flame and darkness the guilty were whipped by a fury whose head was wreathed in snakes:

Till Alecto free the dead

From their eternal bands,

Till the snakes drop … from her head

And the whip from out her hands.

The beaded curtain rattled as Serafina came into my arms and I kissed her and hugged her and we cried a little. The kettle whistled; she went back to prepare the tea, then she brought in the jug and two mugs on a tray and put it on the low table by the couch where I was sitting. She sat down not on the couch but in a wicker chair opposite and there we were then. Jim rubbed against Serafina’s legs, then jumped into her lap and purred loudly.

There sat my Serafina in her old faded jeans and baggy grey jumper, my destiny-woman who wasn’t mine any more. I looked at her and looked and looked, wondering if I had ever really seen her and trying very hard to see her now — her face that was at the same time sharp and softly rounded, her ripe mouth a little open as if for another kiss, her blue-green eyes as she leant forward, her long fingers caressing the self-satisfied cat. You can’t step into the same river twice, I was thinking. Sometimes you can’t even find the river.

‘Fina,’ I said, ‘why are you sitting so far away?’

‘Jonathan, a hug and a kiss can’t take us back to where we were before.’

‘I’m not trying to get back to where we were, I’m trying to move forward to a new place.’ As I said the words I heard them coming out in soap-operaspeak.

‘That’s easy to say, but if you put in salt instead of sugar when you’re making a cake and then you put in sugar to cancel out the salt, it doesn’t — all you have is a ruined cake.’

Purcell and Chance were now into ‘O Solitude’ and the lava lamp was doing swaying red cobras and phallic shapes whose heads came off and rose to the top of the cylinder. ‘I’m not trying to cancel out the salt,’ I said, ‘but is there no such thing as forgiveness?’

‘Forgiveness …’ She lapsed into silence, then began to laugh.

‘What?’

‘I just had a vision of Humpty-Dumpty lying on the ground all in pieces, and he says to whatever made him fall, “I forgive you.” But he’s still lying there all in pieces.’

‘But you’re not a broken egg.’

‘You don’t know what I am, Jonathan. And I don’t know what the act of forgiveness is. If I say, “I forgive you,” what does that do? What happened doesn’t go away. Maybe some of me goes away.’

‘Maybe what goes away can come back.’

‘Do you really think so? Zoë used to live with a man who cheated on her and she forgave him, whatever that is; but she said her anger didn’t go away, it got worse as time went on and she changed in little ways, like she found that she couldn’t stand the sight of the pubic hairs he left in the bath, and in bed if he touched her when she was asleep she’d give him the elbow without waking. She decided to end it before she started spitting in his tagliatelle.’

‘What can I say? For Zoë it’s the politics of sex that matter.’

‘OK, let’s come back to us. When we were together I was really with you — all of me. But you were living a whole other life separate from me. How were you able to do that? I don’t think I really know who you are.’

‘Fina, I think most men want as much sex as they can get; some restrain the urge better than others and some are greedier than others. I never stopped loving you.’

‘Oh well, that makes everything all right then. Great. So what happened after I behaved so unreasonably and walked out? Then it seems you got greedy for men and you backed into our friend Rinyo-Clacton who got greedy for me and now maybe we’ll both end up dying of AIDS. Is that the new place you want to move forward to? Is that the new bond between us?’

That stopped me for a while. The gas fire purred softly, the cat loudly; in the lava lamp red misshapen worlds rose and fell. Purcell and Chance carried on with:

Lord, what is man, lost man,

That thou shouldst be so mindful of him?

‘And yet,’ I said, ‘you were in my arms and you kissed me only a few minutes ago. I don’t think love can disappear just like that, I think you still love me.’

‘Maybe love doesn’t disappear, maybe it just turns to stone, heavy inside you for the rest of your life. Kissing doesn’t mean anything — it’s a reflex that you can still trigger if I forget for a moment how things are. You look the same but you’re so strange to me now! It’s as if I’d been reading a book in English but the next time I opened it the whole thing was written in Transylvanian. So maybe I was out of my mind when I thought I could read it because now the pages are full of strange words that have no meaning for me.’ Her long fingers still caressing the cat as she spoke.

‘That day when we got drunk in the Place des Vosges,’ she said, ‘all of me was with you and it felt so good. I’d never had that before, and you looked at me as if you were seeing the whole Serafina of me and I thought, yes! this is really, really it. Then back at the hotel when we made love it felt as if all of you was with me, no part of you was anywhere else. Then the dream: my God, Jonathan, how many people ever have anything like that — the oasis that showed itself to both of us while we slept, the place of good water where the palm trees grow, and the desert all around. Lots of people wander in the desert all their lives, lots of people die in the desert but we’d crossed that desert and found the oasis in each other.’ She paused.