Russell Hoban - Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

‘Well, if Death is out to get you there’s no escaping, is there. It’ll find you in Earl’s Court or Piccadilly Circus or Belgravia or wherever. Maybe when it’s time you put out signals without knowing it and Death homes in on them.’

‘Say more. Look at Melancolia. Look at her face, the polyhedron, the dog. What about that winged infant perched just behind her? A boy, do you think? Is he asleep? Sulking? Is he the child of Melencolia?’ She held both my hands tightly. ‘Maybe — no, I don’t want to put thoughts in your head. Is she sexy, Melencolia? She’s well-built, not? Her eyes, how they burn, eh?’

We were quiet for a while. Upstairs Berlioz, like a musical Delacroix, moved on to the next part of his crowded canvas, the tenebrous waltz of the second movement — a cast of thousands, all of them shadows. I was thinking of Mr Rinyo-Clacton and my death that I had seen in his eyes. I remembered the sound of his weeping and tried to move my mind away from it. In the print on the wall the eyes of the winged woman burned with … what? What was she thinking of?

‘Eros and Thanatos,’ said Katerina.

‘What about them?’

‘I don’t know; my mind is a big confusion and words come out of my mouth. So rarely is anything separate from anything else. Nothing is simple. Sometimes we move towards what we think we move away from.’

The white walls seemed to vibrate. Her hands felt full of the voices of the dead. I closed my eyes and tried to see Serafina but I couldn’t. Katerina pulled her hands away and as I opened my eyes she was covering her face. ‘What is it?’ I said.

She removed her hands; her eyes were very big. For a moment I saw her as a young woman, a woman to fall in love with. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, but I don’t think I can do any more today. I don’t know whether I’ve helped you at all.’

‘You have, in some way that I don’t quite understand.’ She looked awfully tired. God knew knew what she had to deal with at twenty-five pounds a time. As I paid her I felt a surge of pity for her, that this woman who had worn, perhaps danced in, those snakeskin shoes, should have to do this for a living. ‘Can I come and see you again?’ I said.

‘Yes, but I don’t want any more money from you — just come and talk to me when you feel like it, yes?’

‘Yes, thank you.’ I kissed her hand.

‘Such gallantry!’ she said with a bewitching smile. ‘I see you out.’

As we left the room I noticed a box of sheet music on the floor with something by Debussy on top. On the worn carpet were several places that looked less worn. ‘You play the piano?’ I said.

She flushed. ‘I sold it. I like to play late at night and people bang on the door and shout.’ At the front door she took my hand in hers for a moment. ‘Be careful,’ she said. ‘Come safe to your house.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘See you.’ As I left, Berlioz was into the fourth movement, and the muffled thunder of drums announced March to the Scaffold.

As I came down Katerina’s front steps I saw Desmond in evening clothes but no Daimler. ‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring the car around.’

‘How’d you know where to find me?’

‘It’s my job.’

When the car pulled up and Desmond opened the door, I got into it. Right, I said to myself, it’s only a matter of life and death — just go with the flow. As we moved smoothly eastwards I leant back against the leopardskin and closed my eyes and remembered the oasis dream.

October was, in one way or another, always a big month for Serafina and me: we met in October and she left me in our fourth October. The dream was a year ago, in our third October. For me the name of the month has in it a leaning forward, a striding, the sound of a stick rattling along iron railings, a hastening towards year’s end and the dreeing of one’s weird.

We were in Paris for a long weekend. The days were mostly bright, the weather mild. We went up and down the Seine on a bateau mouche while a relentless taped commentary in four languages told us what we were seeing on the Left Bank and the Right. ‘You’ll get a stiff neck,’ said Serafina as we passed under the Pont des Invalides and I admired the natural endowments of the pneumatic bronze river-nymphs on the bridge.

We went to Sacré-Coeur and rode a little fun-fair sort of train from Montmartre to Pigalle under a grey sky. In the Place Pigalle between a Ciné video and a boulangerie there was the vacant shell of what must have been a tavern or some kind of drinking-place. Its bulging face was shaped like a barrel, with indications of hoops and staves. Two deeply recessed barrel-shaped windows were its eyes; its clownish nose was the bottom of a barrel with the name Au Tonneau weathering into blankness on it; its mouth was a Gothic arch with its peak just below the nose. The eyes were shuttered and blind, the mouth sealed; the colour was the brownish-grey of forgottenness. From the pavement to just below the eyes Au Tonneau was palimpsested with tattered and fading posters heralding events long gone: Harry Belafonte! That empty barrel whose wine was long since spilt, its face kept looking at me.

We went to Nôtre Dame, climbed the spiral stone stairs of the North Tower and photographed each other with gargoyles; we went to the Musée Rodin and agreed that we liked Camille Claudel better. We dared to use the Métro and never once got lost. We did many tourist things, walked many miles with bottles of mineral water in our rucksacks, and chewed and swallowed many baguettes. But the dream –

On our last full day in Paris, the day of the Musée Rodin, we walked back by way of the Jardin du Luxembourg and the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Our hotel was in the Rue de la Bastille. We were footsore and weary but not in the mood for going indoors, so we headed for the Place des Vosges.

Having thoughtfully provided ourselves with two glasses, we bought a bottle of unchilled sauvignon on the way, tried to buy some ice at a café but were given it free of charge, went to the Place des Vosges, and found an empty bench. With the corkscrew on my Swiss Army knife I opened the bottle. I poured; we clinked glasses and drank the cold brightness of the wine that seemed to contain the whole mystery of our mingled selves. We drank the roundness of the day, the gold and the blue of it, the pang of October and Time’s iron railings.

In the arcade over the road a little band of buskers were playing speeded-up jazz and standards but we heard them slowly: ‘Petite Fleur’; ‘Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey?’; Thelonious Monk’s ‘Well, You Needn’t’; ‘Caravan’; ‘The Sheik of Araby’; and others. Ours was a back-to-back double bench; several shifts of couples came and went in various languages and friendly smiles.

The sun declined with Hesperidean tints; I went back and bought a second bottle and we put it away silkily and with heightened appreciation of the music and everything else. The day had become archival and permanent and we recognised the specialness of it. We looked at each other not only with love but with new liking for the kind of person each of us was. When we left we crossed the road to where the buskers were packing up and I gave them money. Harmoniously we wove our way back to the hotel, made love, and fell asleep.

That was when I had the dream: Serafina and I crossing a lion-coloured desert until the oasis mysteriously appeared, the feathery palm trees real in a way that only palm trees in dreams are; there were wild asses drinking at a shining dark pool in which the palms were reflected.

I woke up around eight o’clock in the evening and when I sat up Serafina woke too. ‘Such a strange dream I had,’ she said: ‘there were donkeys drinking at a pool…’