Russell Hoban: Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

‘It’s definitely not to be undertaken lightly. Consider it carefully, dream about it even. Pelléas again tomorrow night — I’ll be in my box. Desmond will drive you home.’

In the lift I looked away from the mirror in which Desmond and I were reflected. The fluorescent light was both dim and unsparing. When we came out of the building the air on my face was cold but not refreshing.

Even at midday Belgravia looks like a necropolis to me but at least one has a sense of life going on not too far away; at three o’clock on this October morning, however, Eaton Place with its long vistas of sepulchral white-pillared black-numbered porticos seemed a street of ghost dwellings on a dead planet; I wondered what might be listening to my footsteps. Maybe this is a dream, I thought — a desert dream instead of an oasis one.

Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s motor, said Desmond when I asked him, was a 1931 King’s Own Daimler. It was in more than mint condition, a grand and stately shining black machine upholstered in leopardskin and with a bit more under the bonnet than had been available in 1931. It had of course the usual amenities: bar and escritoire, TV, telephone, fax, tape and CD players and a sound system of upper-class fidelity. This car, a fit conveyance for emperors, kings, sultans, and heads of public utilities, smelled like a life I had no idea of and slipped through the late-night streets like a shining shadow in a silent dream. I thought of Mélisande’s golden crown glimmering beneath the water. ‘Have you been with Mr Rinyo-Clacton long?’ I asked the back of Desmond’s head.

‘Yes.’

‘Has he done this sort of thing before?’

‘What sort of thing do you mean?’

‘Offering to buy somebody’s death.’

Desmond’s eyes in the rear-view mirror were hooded and alert. ‘Gentlemen’s gentlemen don’t tell,’ he said.

I was back at my flat at about half-past three that morning. When I turned on the lights the place came out of the darkness like an animal caught in the headlamps of a car. All the plants whose names I’d forgotten reproached me silently; the Russian vine looked moribund. ‘Sorry,’ I said. I filled a jug and poured water into the vine’s pot but the water ran through the dry soil and dripped on to the floor. ‘I’ll get back to you,’ I said.

Poofter, whispered the cyclamen.

‘I know that’s how it looks,’ I said, ‘but that isn’t actually how it is.’ I went round and watered everyone and topped up the Russian vine, then I poured myself a large whisky. I found it difficult to look my flat in the eye; I felt ashamed, confused, guilty. ‘What can I say?’ I said. ‘Maybe a year from now I’ll be dead and you’ll forget me.’

I spent a long time in the shower. It’s one of those that comes off the bath taps and there’s never quite enough pressure. I wanted to be sheathed in clean hot water but I could never get myself completely covered by it.

It was quarter to five by the time I’d ministered to my soreness and got to bed and it took me a long time to fall asleep. I kept thinking about the unsheathed Mr Rinyo-Clacton and seeing newspaper and magazine photographs of rock, ballet and film stars as they looked before they died. I saw also men in hospices keeping vigil by their dying lovers. Listen, I told myself, maybe he hasn’t got anything and you didn’t get anything from him; he’s a millionaire and probably he’s very careful. Oh yes, I answered myself, he was very careful with you, wasn’t he. What if — O God! — what if he’s one of those people who get infected and then they want to pass it on? Stop that, I said, and my mind, like a child clutching a teddy bear, went to Serafina.

Serafina was cook and baker at the Vegemania Restaurant in Earl’s Court Road. Her body smelled of fear and desire; her voice was soft; her eyes implacable. Her brown loaves were like bread from a fairy tale; her potato pancakes sizzled with lust and tasted of fidelity. At home and when we dined out she went for red meat and she liked it rare. Serafina was unique; she was impressive. I’ve seen the Whitbread Brewery horses standing in the rain with steam coming up off their backs and people plying them with apples and lumps of sugar and speaking privately to them — they wanted to ingratiate themselves with something ancient and elemental in these great animals. That’s how people responded to Serafina. There was nobody like her and that she loved me was a continual astonishment to me. Now she was gone because I’d been an idiot.

I was an Excelsior salesman. My job was to sit in a little office over the Long Trail Travel Agency and ring people up to sell them the Excelsior Self-Realisation Programme. ‘Hello, Mr Dimbulb,’ I’d say. ‘I’m with the Excelsior Corporation. Our database shows that eighty-three per cent of the people of your age and socio-economic bracket realise only forty to sixty per cent of their personal potential. Of that eighty-three per cent, some twelve per cent have what it takes to do better and go farther and these are the people Excelsior wants to work with. Our computer tells us that you, Mr Dimbulb, are in that twelve per cent and you qualify for a free evaluation and consultation.’ And so on. If the prospect turned out to be a live one the next step was a visit from me with brochures, questionnaires, videotapes, books, and a contract. The Excelsior Self-Realisation Programme Starter Kit sold for £125 but the contract obliged the self-realiser to buy at least six more videos at £25 each from the monthly catalogues.

The Excelsior logo showed a muscular naked man with a chisel and mallet emerging from the rock out of which he was carving himself. ‘SHAPE YOUR OWN DESTINY’ was the slogan under the chiselling man. There was no chiselling woman on the logo but many of our customers were women and more than twelve per cent of them were interesting, attractive, and available. They didn’t just want casual sex, they wanted meaningful sex with word action: they wanted love. My consultation and evaluation sessions were full of temptation which I resisted only some of the time. I liked crossing that magic line from stranger to lover; I liked the rumpled sheets of strange beds in which new women moaned with pleasure and told me things they’d never told anyone else. They also wrote letters to me, some of which Serafina found in my pockets.

‘I gave you everything I had,’ she said, ‘and you shat on it.’

I said I was sorry. I said it many times and in many different ways but to no avail; pleas were useless. There was a whirlwind of things being flung into bags. ‘I’ll come back for the rest of it,’ she said, and was gone. The orphaned Russian vine hung by the window unwatered and the cyclamen cursed me in a tiny Serafina voice.

How could I have forgotten what she was to me? From the first moment when she spoke to me in the Vegemania four years ago I knew she was my destiny-woman, my everything-woman. She was strange and mysterious, and although after a while I could predict what she’d say and do in many situations, I never altogether understood her. We liked much of the same music, from Monteverdi to Portishead, but her reading taste ran to thrillers which bored me and she was also keen on such things as the Australian TV soaps, Neighbours and Home and Away, which I had no time for. She kept up with them on the TV in the kitchen at the Vegemania while preparing the evening menu; she liked Oprah Winfrey too, and various sitcoms with canned laughter, but I reminded myself that nobody was perfect.

Like every couple we had rows sometimes but we didn’t argue by the same rules and I often wasn’t clear about the outcome until later, when her actions would give me a clue: if, for example, she brought me a cup of rose-hip tea on a camomile night I knew it for a reminder that we were still each other’s destiny-people no matter what. I’d never thought of how it would be if Serafina left me, and when she did, the effect was such that Mr Rinyo-Clacton found me sitting on the floor in Piccadilly Circus tube station.