Angelica's Grotto (24 page)

What can happen that’s bad?

You never know.

That night Klein dreamt that Hannelore was walking towards him in the Fulham Road, the sunlight behind her shining through her hair. They both stopped and she looked at him sadly. ‘You left me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t leave you.’

Early the next evening he was watching at the front window when the van appeared with Leslie driving. Klein went out to meet them. ‘Here we are,’ said Melissa. ‘Hi,’ said Leslie.

‘Hi,’ said Klein.

There was no parking space in front of the house so Leslie and Melissa unloaded the van in the street and put everything on the pavement. Melissa kissed Klein. ‘Well, Harold,’ she said, ‘this is it.’

‘Yes, it is. I’m not strong enough to carry you over the threshold and of course it’s not really that kind of thing.’

‘Just as well, since there are two of us and Leslie’s a lot heavier than I am.’

While Leslie drove off to find a space Melissa and Klein
carried things up the steps and into the house. ‘Don’t take anything heavy, Harold,’ she said.

‘I won’t. The computers go in the room all the way at the back.’

This one too,
said Oannes when Leslie reappeared.

That’s how it is, said Klein. The work was soon done. He looked away when Leslie took his things into the front bedroom. ‘Shall we order a pizza?’ he said. ‘I thought we’d do the shopping tomorrow.’

‘Sounds good,’ said Melissa. ‘Cheese and tomato pepperoni, mushrooms, green peppers, onions, and anchovies?’

‘Whatever does it for you.’

‘Got any beer?’ said Leslie.

‘There’s an Oddbins just up the road,’ said Klein. ‘Why don’t you get a couple of six-packs while I order the pizza?’ He gave him a twenty-pound note.

Leslie’s eyes met his for rather a long time as he took the money. ‘Any particular kind?’

‘I mostly drink wine, so get whatever you like.’

‘What beer do you drink when you
do
drink beer, Prof?’

‘Beck’s, and I’d rather you didn’t call me Prof, Leslie.’

‘Sorry! Should I call you Mr Klein?’

‘Harold will do nicely, OK?’

‘OK, nicely is how I want to do it, Harold.’ He moved away pantherishly, the primal waves of his maleness continuing their transmission after he was out of sight. Receiving the message, Klein shrank into non-existence, reached into it, hauled himself out by the scruff of the neck, and shook his head.

He could be trouble,
said Oannes.

Tell me about it, said Klein.

‘Leslie’s a lot of fun when you get to know him,’ said Melissa.

‘I’ll bet he is. I can see already that he’s got a great sense of humour.’

Melissa was standing by the wall where
Pegase Noir
used to hang. She touched the blank space it had left behind. ‘That winged horse flew away with some of the past, Harold. Now there’s more space for the present, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I suppose so.’ He wished she would move away from the mantelpiece and the Meissen girl. She was running her finger over the nipple of the figure’s exposed right breast, exactly as she had done the first time she was in this room. Maybe this is a dream, he thought. Maybe I’ll wake up and she won’t be here and I’ve never met her.

‘We’ve got the makings of a very pleasant arrangement here, Harold.’ She smiled suggestively. ‘Don’t spoil it for yourself.’

‘God forbid.’ He put Egberto Gismonti’s
Sol Do Meio Dia
on the CD player and the guitar filled the room with Amazonian jungle shadows. ‘That’s a nice sound,’ said Melissa. She shook her hips and rolled her shoulders to the music while he stood there danceless.

The pizza arrived, Leslie and the beer shortly after. They ate at the kitchen table. Klein opened a bottle of red which he and Melissa shared. Leslie drank Special Brew from the can. ‘They were out of Beck’s,’ he said.

‘Could I have the change?’ said Klein.

Leslie gave it to him. There was a beaded lamp over the kitchen table; Klein had always found its light cosy but now it seemed to fix the strangeness of this gathering like a surveillance photograph. He imagined the police examining it and asking questions. Really, he said to himself, what have I to feel guilty about?

Don’t ask me
, said Oannes.

While they ate and drank, Gismonti continued in the living-room and the bedroom waited upstairs for what would come later. Klein tried to stop the pictures in his mind but couldn’t. ‘What’s the domestic routine going to be?’ he said to Melissa. ‘Will you be cooking?’

‘Hello, hello, are you there, Harold? This is 1998; unisex cooking has been going on for quite a while. What did you do until now?’

Over the years Klein had become a reasonably good cook, even essaying such advanced dishes as beef Stroganoff and goulash. He rebelled, however, at becoming the housewife of the group. ‘I mostly bought frozen dinners at Safeway or I ordered in various kinds of takeaway,’ he said. ‘What did
you
do until now?’

‘Sometimes we ate out; sometimes Leslie cooked.’

‘Leslie, you’re a real all-rounder,’ said Klein.

‘Some of us have to be. If I’m going to do the cooking here you and Melissa can do the shopping – I’ll write out a list for you tonight.’ To Melissa he said, ‘We still have to get everything hooked up.’

While Leslie and Melissa organised the website room Klein went to his desk and put the last unfinished Klimt page up on his computer screen. Then he made it go away and put up a blank new page. He sat with his arms folded across his chest, looking at the wordless screen. He remembered an old Jimmy Durante song and typed:

Sometimes I think I wanna go,
And then again I think I wanna stay.

He needed music but wasn’t sure what kind. He put on
Piazzolla Classics.
The first track was ‘Three Minutes with the Truth’ which always sounded to him like something
struggling to move forward while being pulled back. The second track was ‘The Little House of My Ancestors’ which made him see it on a hillside under a flat blue cloudless sky, children playing in the dusty road. He listened through the disc, going where the music took him while staring at the words of Jimmy Durante on the computer screen.

‘Beddy byes,’ said Melissa, and kissed him. To his questioning look she said, ‘Soon,’ and went upstairs, followed by Leslie who said, over his shoulder, ‘Sleep well, Harold.’

‘No doubt in
his
mind about where he sleeps,’ Klein muttered to himself. He went to the window, looked out at the street where the parked cars were frosting up under the unblinking stare of the pinky-yellow lamps. The winter night, sensing his attention, came up to the window, pressed its bleakness against the glass, mouthed
You and me
,
sweetheart.

You’re a pathetic fallacy, said Klein, and turned away. He went through his video collection, chose
The Passenger,
fast forwarded to the scene near the end when Jack Nicholson, having stolen another man’s name, his passport, and possibly his destiny, lies on a bed in the
Hotel de La Gloria
on the Spanish border. In the stillness of late afternoon the camera, like his departing spirit, moves slowly out through the window and the grille to look across a dusty space towards the Plaza de Toros where there is nothing happening today except a trumpeter sending a solitary
paso doble
into the ambient silence. Little distant figures by its wall speak in diminished voices. The faint passing wail of a far-off train is heard, then the labouring engine of the little Auto Escuela Andalucía car. Maria Schneider, the unnamed Girl, appears walking slowly towards the bullring. The car of the driving-school comes and goes; a small boy runs
across the window’s view, throws a stone, is shouted at by the little distant figures. A white Citrën drives up; two men in light suits get out. There are church bells, car doors slamming, the roar of a motorcycle starting up and fading into quietness. People come and go in the dusty space, some of them look up at the window, some don’t. A siren announces the arrival of a black-and-white police car; the policemen order the driving-school car to leave. Somewhere a dog barks. Other uniformed men arrive in a patrol car, perhaps they are border guards. With them is the wife of the man on the bed. He is dead now.

‘Did you recognise him?’ the wife is asked.

‘I never knew him,’ she says. The man on the bed is left behind as his story moves on without him.

The last shot in the film is outside the hotel at that time of
media luz,
all delicate pink and violet, when the sky is still luminous but the lamps are lit, first outside the hotel, then inside. The little Auto Escuela Andalucía car drives off under the music of a thoughtful guitar playing something uncredited that Klein had heard elsewhere: Julian Bream? He put on
La Guitarra Romantica,
searched patiently until he found it on Track 15,
‘Canco del lladre’,
‘The Thief’s Song’.

‘“The Thief’s Song”,’ said Klein. ‘He stole the identity of another man. This one that I have now, where did it come from? And the learner in the driving-school car, did he or she ever pass the driving test?’ Then he realised that he was speaking aloud. He sighed and went upstairs.

Lying wakeful in the back bedroom he listened for sounds on the other side of the wall. There was some murmuring and he opened his door to hear better. The door of the front bedroom, he noticed, was now slightly ajar. There was laughter, more murmuring, then he heard
Melissa say, ‘No, Leslie, no power games tonight!’ Leslie laughed, there were sounds of a scuffle, Melissa cried out twice, then there was only the creaking of the bed. Klein closed his door.
Welcome to the ménage à trois,
said Oannes.

What am I going to do? said Klein.

We’ll think of something.

Klein was accustomed to the looming of buildings and buses and he could handle it up to a point; he was troubled, however, by what seemed to him the unknown messages encoded in the 14 buses, the old Routemasters like the one that towered over him now as he headed for Safeway with a rucksack slung from one shoulder and a shopping list in his pocket. The 14s were definitely redder some days than others. ‘“The poor dead woman whom he loved,/ And murdered in her bed,”’ he muttered.

You didn’t murder Hannelore,
said Oannes.
She topped herself.

Blood and wine and buses are red, said Klein as the 14 puttered past him.
Love me,
whispered its diesel pheromones.

Everyone except one old lady on two sticks was walking faster than Klein. The morning was hot, the Fulham Road was full of traffic, the little green men on the crossing lights grudgingly allowed pedestrians a tenth of a second to get from one side to the other while the cars crouched, ready to spring. The sun was bearing down on the pollution to keep it within easy reach of anyone who happened to be breathing in; an examiner of early entrails would have
found little to say for today. Another 14 bus appeared, possibly a male responding to the one ahead.

OK,
said Oannes,
let’s get into this 14 bus thing, shall we?

I don’t like the way they loom, said Klein.

Naturally – that’s your guilt looming. Everybody’s guilt looms or climbs on their shoulders or crawls up their asses or whatever. The looming is normal so don’t let it bother you.

There’s more to it and I don’t know what it is.

We’ll get to that. First let’s look at what we’ve got here.

A big red in-your-face 14 bus.

A doubledecker, right?

Right.

What’s the essence of a doubledecker bus?

They have an upstairs and a downstairs.

Like your mind.

OK.

So if you don’t like it downstairs, go up on top.

Congratulations – you’ve just cut the Freudian knot.

Sometimes it needs cutting. These Routemasters – they’re open in the back, right? Why are they open?

So you can jump on and off.

Nice one, Harold. You jumped on – now what?

You think I should jump off?

You tell me.

I’m of two minds on that.

So when the time comes you’ll get rid of one of them.

One of the minds?

Whatever.

You said you were going to tell me about the more.

The thing about more is that it comes after what comes before it. When it’s ready it’ll make itself known.

You’re such a comfort to me, Oannes.

After all, we’re in this together for the time being.

What do you mean, ‘for the time being’?

Well, nothing’s for ever, is it.

Right, then while we’re still together let’s get on with the shopping.

I thought Melissa was going to help with that.

She had to be at King’s all day today. And Leslie’s out doing his thing.

Oh yes, Leslie’s thing.

It looms.

Nothing’s for ever, Prof.

When Klein reached the zebra crossingjust afters the little roundabout at the North End Road he looked neither to the right nor left but stepped off the kerb ignoring the squeal of brakes and walked without hurrying to the other side.

You got the action, you got the motion,
said Oannes.

There was a nondescript brown dog parked outside Safeway. I could do shopping, it said with its eyes.

‘Cleverness is not enough,’ said Klein as the doors opened automatically, ‘you need money.’ He read his list: 1 cabbage; 3 carrots; 1lb onions; mayo; yoghurt; bunch parsley; codfish cakes.

You’re not just a pretty face,
said Oannes.
You can shop too.

I’m a regular Renaissance man, said Klein. Despite the mental irritant of Leslie, he found that he was feeling good. Beautiful young women were sometimes to be seen in the shadowless fluorescent daylight, pacing indolently among the apples, pears, oranges, bananas, strawberries and pomegranates. These fruits had in the past lost their excitement when he got them home. The illuminated bottles of golden juice, heavy with sunlight from Jaffa and Florida and the gardens of the Hesperides, had become
simply the ghosts of citrus past in his fridge; potatoes had been mute lumps of carbohydrate. Now, even with the front-bedroom situation, there were good things to look forward to; the potatoes were solid with the promise of earthly delights and the pomegranates would still be musky with the scent of passing Persephones.