Russell Hoban - Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

‘Got any red?’

‘Coming.’ I opened a bottle and watched the glasses filling as I poured. As soon as Serafina came into the flat everything looked more like itself; things reassumed their proper colour, texture and character; the lamplight had more warmth in it, the wine gurgled with surcease of sorrow. She went to the shelves where the CDs were and I wondered what music she’d put on. ‘Takemitsu!’ I said, as it made its entrance like Bruce Lee coming over a wall and sneaking up on the bad guys.

‘Right,’ she said: ‘November Steps, for orchestra with shakuhachi and biwa. It sounds the way I feel.’ By then Bruce Lee had abandoned the sneak-up and was banging on dustbin lids with a stick.

‘As if you’re in a dark and narrow place where something might jump out at you?’

‘Something like that.’ We clinked glasses and sat down on the couch. She gave me one of her slanty smiles, somewhat careworn, took off the anti-rape shoes, and put her feet in my lap. ‘I think better this way,’ she said.

‘What are you thinking about, Fina?’

‘Just at this moment I’m thinking about Victor Noir.’

‘Who’s Victor Noir?’

‘He was a French journalist, only twenty-one when he was shot dead by Pierre Bonaparte in 1870.’

‘How come?’

‘He and a colleague had been sent to challenge Bonaparte to a duel with a republican journalist named Grousset. Bonaparte claimed that Noir slapped his face and that was why he shot him.’

‘Why did Grousset want to fight Bonaparte?’

‘Politics. The republicans were pissed off with Bonaparte because they thought he’d abandoned them when he became reconciled with Napoleon the Third.’

‘But why’re you thinking about Noir?’

‘I’m getting to it. On his tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery there’s a life-size bronze statue of him as he looked just after he was shot. He’s flat on his back with his coat lying open and his shirt unbuttoned so you can see the bullet-hole in his chest. His trousers are partly undone to help him breathe as he died. He was shot on the 10th of January, only two days before he was due to be married.’

‘Not a good way to go.’

‘No, it wasn’t. Now women visit his tomb and they kiss him and rub his crotch and his boots.’

‘As any right-thinking woman would, but why the boots?’

‘I don’t know, but he seems to have become a symbol of the virility and fertility of the republican ideal. He was originally buried at Neuilly but in 1891 he was moved to Père Lachaise and the tomb with the statue was paid for by National Subscription.’

‘National Subscription! Was he that big politically?’

‘Evidently he started getting bigger as soon as he was dead, and Zoë says he’s got a considerable following now. His bronze hat is lying upside-down beside him, and women hoping for a lover or a husband put flowers in it and kiss the statue on the lips. Those who want to get pregnant also give him a little rub. Some of them go a bit further …’

‘How far?’

‘All the way, actually, with a partner or just with Victor.’

‘Zoë told you all this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Has she been to the tomb?’

‘That’s where she met Mtsoku.’

‘Was she there to do the business with Victor?’

‘She’d been visiting Oscar Wilde nearby and was just browsing.’

‘And Mtsoku?’

‘He’d been looking in on Marcel Proust but he’d heard about Noir’s female following so he cruised over for a recce.’

‘But you still haven’t said why you’re thinking of Victor Noir.’

‘Who knows? Maybe if I leave some flowers in the hat and give Victor a rub I can find a faithful lover. I’ve rubbed your crotch often enough but that didn’t seem to do it.’ She paused. ‘Or maybe if I ask very nicely he’ll keep the HIV virus away from us.’ She began to cry, and made no protest when I gathered her up in my arms and kissed the top of her head. She said us, I was thinking, and the air seemed full of angel trumpets.

‘Then you’ll come to Paris with me?’ I said.

She stopped crying, moved out of my arms, blew her nose, rearranged herself on the couch, drank some wine, and said, ‘Probably. But I need to talk a little more before I decide, and if I ask you to explain things I’m not attacking you — I just need to understand, OK?’

‘OK, Fina.’ That one word, us, made me feel cosy and safe despite the fact that Death might well have me on its shortlist inside my body as well as outside my door. Takemitsu wasn’t doing Bruce Lee any more, just sounding lonely. Au Tonneau showed itself to me: the empty barrel, wine all gone. Then the number on Katerina’s wrist. Why do I do the things I do? I wondered.

Serafina drank her wine and pondered silently for a while, then she said, ‘What I’m wondering about is the difference between you and me — how you wanted other women besides me and I didn’t want any other man. Maybe you didn’t just want them, maybe you needed them. What kind of want was that, Jonno, what kind of need?’

‘Fina, I’ve told you this before: I think most men — at least all the men I’ve ever known — just want as much as they can get.’

‘As much sex.’

‘Right. Men are programmed to spread their seed as widely as possible — scientists acknowledge that.’

‘But this wasn’t just raw sex, was it? It wasn’t so urgent that you did it standing up wherever the need took you — they wrote love-letters and so did you. You courted them, you had “something special” with this one and that one.’

‘Jesus, Fina!’ Her feet were on the floor; my lap felt empty.

‘What?’

‘Not everything can be explained.’

‘Try.’

‘Do you know the poem by Baudelaire “To a Woman Passing by”?’

‘No.’

‘He sees her in the street, in the deafening street that howls around him — a tall, slender woman in deep mourning, her hand lifting and swinging the hem of her skirt as she walks. She’s agile and noble, with a statuesque leg. They look at each other, he says he drinks from her eyes. He knows he’ll never see her again, and he ends the poem with, “O you whom I could have loved, o you who knew it!”’

‘Right — so he was deeply moved by a statuesque leg and I know that you are too. But he doesn’t say he wooed this woman until he got her into the sack.’

‘Maybe she was too agile for him.’

‘Stick to the point — you brought up that poem because we were talking about romantic love as opposed to straight shagging. Apart from anything else, romance is time-consuming. How many can you handle at the same time?’

‘I think that’s a rhetorical question.’

‘Answer it anyhow, please.’

‘I don’t think you’re asking how many I can handle — what you want to know is why I did what I did.’

‘OK, tell me that.’

‘It’s very hard to spell it out.’

‘Not everything can be easy, Jonno.’

‘I keep feeling as if I’m going to lose you for ever.’

‘Don’t be so cowardly — whatever you tell me won’t lose me more than you’ve done already.’

‘Then maybe I’ve already lost you for ever.’

‘Whatever happens, it’s better to be honest with me and yourself, isn’t it?’

‘I’ll try. The thing is, to me the sexual act was secondary — it was the idea that excited me: the idea of pulling a woman out of the unknown, someone you’ve never seen before but you sense a possibility and you want to get to that point where she lets you into her innermost privacy.’

‘And then what? Then you move on to the next one?’

I shrugged. ‘I never moved on from you, Fina.’

‘No, I was the home base — I can see that. But when you were having these affairs, didn’t you think there might be consequences if I found out?’