Fascination (28 page)

‘You could make a fortune,’ she says, ‘if you marketed this properly.’

Neil mentally lists the side effects of excessive steroid use in women bodybuilders: coarsening of the skin, acne, stretchmarks, roid-rage, deepening voice, hirsutism, clitoral enlargement, cholesterol increase, headaches, high blood pressure, kidney malfunction, water retention, stomach aches.

‘You risk kidney malfunction,’ he eventually says.

‘But,’ she says, ‘how do you gain serious muscle-mass, otherwise?’

‘Fair point.’

They are scrutinizing the menu in Zebulon, a new restaurant that has opened in the refurbished Grand Hotel. As far as Neil can tell, Zebulon generously offers food from at least seven different cuisines – Pacific Rim, straight Asian, Tex-Mex, English, US, Indian and Italian – and the odd idiosyncratic mix of several, best symbolized by the house sandwich: a bacon, egg and brie ciabatta. Tom Yum prawns with a lime and lemon grass salad sounds good, but he is worried about his creeping shellfish allergy. His eczema patch is the size of a side plate now. Goan chicken curry or the ‘Ultimate Nachos’ also tempt. Doreen is ready to order.

‘Does the chicken caesar salad have anchovies?’

‘Yes,’ says the waiter, who sounds Russian, ‘and you can have extra.’

‘Right. I’ll have a chicken caesar with extra anchovies but with no chicken, no croutons and no dressing.’

‘Ah, anchovies,’ Neil says. ‘More omega-3 fatty acids. Excellent.’

Neil orders steak and kidney pudding with a flamin’ salsa sauce on the side. He takes his list of names out of his pocket and slides it across the table towards her.

Neil walks Doreen across the carpark of Body’s East towards her car. She opens the door, turns and kisses him, full on the mouth. His arms go round her and his palms rest on her lats. It’s like hugging a wide-screen television. Even in her heels she’s seven inches shorter than he is. Their pose is awkward: she flattens her face on his chest, he rests his chin on the top of her head.

‘Can you hear it?’ he says. ‘My heartbeat’s irregular.’

She’s not listening. She raises her face to him. ‘Thank you, Neil,’ she says.

‘What for?’

‘Maggie Steelmaster.’

‘What do we see when we look at our fellow human beings? The bulk of their behaviour is as unpredictable as the weather. We intuit
that they have mental lives – minds – of one sort or another but beyond that we arrive at perplexity.’

Before she leaves for the States Doreen – as a form of thank-you present – takes Neil to Glyndebourne to see
Cosi fan Tutte
. It is his first opera. Doreen, to his vague surprise, tells him she loves opera and
Cosi
is her favourite. Moreover, she seems familiar with the place – this theatre in a country estate – and knows what to do, what the form is. Neil learns that she usually comes to Glyndebourne with her father – in fact he has given up his ticket for Neil.

In the interval they sit on the lawn with their picnic, Doreen removing the bread from her smoked salmon sandwiches, allowing herself a rare sip or two of Neil’s champagne. She has been recently on the sunbed and her even, dense pro-tan is immaculate. Neil tries to imagine her on stage in her micro-kini, ripped and pumped, depilated, dehydrated, oiled and slippery with collagen posing oil, and feels a rare sexual quickening. He reaches for her hand.

‘I’m going to miss you,’ he says.

She’s not listening, her mind’s on something else. ‘Neil,’ she says, ‘What’s your opinion about beef plasma?’

‘For some thinkers, the mind is more confidently and immediately known than anything that is material. If this view is followed it is natural to begin to become sceptical about the very existence of the material world.’

‘It seems incredible,’ Doreen writes two weeks later, ‘but the fact that I came third in Orlando means I now have a sponsor – Busta-Tech. I even have a car! I told the people at Busta-Tech about TESTOMAX – so expect a call! I couldn’t have done this without you, Neil (and TESTOMAX!). By the way can you send me some more? If I get a top ten in Ms Olympia I’ll be staying on here for a year or so. I’m frying my calves in the gym and it’s working, it’s really working. Lotsa luv, Maggie.’

Neil’s tutor, Francis Parkman, hands him back his essay and compliments him on it. Then asks him if he’d like a drink. They stroll across the near-empty campus of Sussex University towards the students’ union. As part of his Open University degree Neil is spending a few days at a regional centre meeting tutors and attending seminars. Parkman suggests that he applies to do a degree at the university itself. Neil is flattered but seems unsure. Think about it, Parkman suggests, he’s confident something could be sorted out.

In the union bar Parkman brings their drinks over.

‘So,’ Parkman says, raising his pint in a toast, ‘minds can exist independently of matter.’

‘Yes,’ Neil says. ‘And matter can exist independently of minds. I see it every day, believe me.’

‘So you’re a Dualist.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Well, you arrived at a conclusion and it was a well-argued essay,’ Parkman says. ‘What made you come up with the concept of the placebo?’

Neil tries not to think of Maggie Steelmaster. Of Doreen Babcock turned Maggie Steelmaster. ‘My parents run a gym,’ he says. ‘It was just something that occurred to me.’

The job, as the men promised, only takes a day. Neil pays for it himself so his parents have no complaint – but they still can’t see what the fuss is about. Neil looks up at the new sign: the same colours – but finally correct. That sign has bugged him for years: he has minded about that sign. Now the gas-flame-blue neon of ‘Bodies East’ is shimmeringly reflected in the rain-pocked, glossy black puddles of the carpark. One problem solved, at last.

‘You ask me: what is life? That is like asking: what is a carrot?
A carrot is a carrot and that’s all there is to it.’

Anton Chekhov

He wakes up at 6.17 a.m. because of the pressure on his bladder and reaches under the bed for the pot. He sits on the edge of the bed and raises the hem of his nightshirt and pisses without standing up – like an old, sick man, he thinks. This summer they would install a proper lavatory, one that flushed, and they would build the guest house for the men to sleep in: the women could stay in the main house. How civilized.

He dresses, pulling on the clothes he discarded on the floor the previous night. Sometimes an old shirt is more comfortable than a fresh, new one, he thinks. We’re like animals, we prefer our own familiar smells. He stands in front of the looking glass and runs a comb through his hair and his beard. His hair seems to be thinning and he wonders for a moment if that could be a new symptom of his illness. The thought of becoming bald fills him with horror. He is only thirty-four, in God’s name, yet at times he looks and feels twice that age. How handsome he was at twenty! How did that young, burly peasant lad turn into a querulous, pernickety invalid? His own father has ten times more energy.

Just before he leaves the room he sees Lika’s letter on the bedside table and now he remembers why he went to bed so angry and why he slept so badly. He picks it up and folds it away in his jacket pocket. She was trying to tell him something, in her cryptic way, but he needs some coffee before he can attempt to decode her flirtatious chatter.

In the breakfast room no plates have been laid out and the lamps are not lit. In the kitchen he can hear Mariushka shouting at someone. Roman? No, Efim – he’s not fed the chickens…

Olga, the kitchen maid, comes in and gives a little cry of shocked surprise seeing him sitting there at the table.

What’s wrong, Olga? he says, keeping the irritation out of his voice. She moves around the room lighting the oil lamps.

Oh, I just didn’t expect to see you, sir.

Did you know I was in the house?

Of course, sir, you came a week ago.

And when I’m here do I not come in for breakfast every morning?

Yes, sir, you do.

So, in the morning it’s not unreasonable to say that you might expect to see me sitting here waiting for my breakfast.

I don’t understand, sir.

Be a good girl and fetch me some coffee.

He takes out Lika’s letter and spreads it on the table in front of him.

‘Dear naughty uncle, dear gentle daddy, I beg you on my knees to come to Paris where your adoring and adorable Lika needs to see you –’

A scratching on the floor, like a few seeds in an empty gourd, and he looks up to see Quinine, his dachshund, waddle into the room from the kitchen.

Hello, fatso, he says and clicks his fingers. Quinine wanders over and sniffs at his fingers and looks at him resentfully because there is no food on offer.

Have we ham, Mariushka? he calls into the kitchen.

No ham.

Have we veal?

Veal, yes, sir.

Bring me some bread and cold veal with my coffee.

Quinine stands there, his front feet bowed and his paws splayed, and then yawns.

You shall have food, he tells his dog, just be patient.

‘Dear naughty uncle, dear gentle daddy…’ He has asked her many, many times not to call him uncle. But now ‘daddy’ – even though she’s only twenty-four, this is intolerable. He begins to compose his reply in his head: ‘My dearest toddler, my darling little munchkin…’ but he could already hear Lika’s low and hearty laugh. How she would find this amusing – strapping Lika, with her broad shoulders and small, soft breasts, her flaxen hair, her lazy, hooded eyes that looked as if she were perpetually about to fall asleep. ‘Flaxen’, that’s the word for her hair: its blonde exuberance, its preposterous, curling mass…

He hears his father kick off his boots at the kitchen door and pad across the floor.

Oh, it’s you, his father says as he enters, have you calmed down yet?

What
is
the man talking about? he thinks as he watches his father cross the room searching his pockets for something.

Olga comes in with the coffee.

There you are, sir, hot as lava.

Thank you, Olga: now what about some milk, some bread, some cold veal? She’s running back to the kitchen. And a damn cup!

He stares at the pot of coffee. There’s a small bunch of cherries painted on the side. Or are they tomatoes? What is it Potapenko calls me? King of the Medes.

Still in a bad mood, eh? says his father, filling his pipe. If you go to sleep angry it can ruin your digestion for a week. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

In the yard Roman is stacking new pairs of cart shafts. He looks round.

Morning, sir, wonderful morning. They talk about the weather, how last week’s rain ruined the clover.

He asks Roman: who ordered these cart shafts?

I did, sir.

Are the old ones finished? Broken?

Oh, no, they’re fine, sir.

So why do we need new ones?

We always order new cart shafts before the summer haymaking.

He looks round and notices Quinine, fortified with veal, snarling at the yard dog.

Have you seen my sister? he asks Roman.

In the vegetable garden, sir.

He walks through the yard and around the side of the house past the veranda towards the vegetable garden. He can see Masha earthing up the young potato shoots, but urgently, furiously, as if a flood were coming or a tempest and this was her last chance to complete the task. Everybody in a sour mood today, he realizes.

Morning, he says. I’d offer to help but I’d drop down dead.

Which might be best for all of us, Masha says.

I refuse to respond to this, he thinks.

We have to get rid of that yard dog, he replies instead. He’ll eat Quinine for lunch one of these days.

Masha says nothing.

What have I done, Masha? Tell me and I’ll make amends.

It’s what you’re
not
doing that outrages me, she says, finally turning to face him.

He sighs. But I like Potapenko, he’s my friend.

Your ‘friend’ is having an affair with your mistress. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you but you should know.

Of course I know, I’m not that stupid. Anyway, Lika’s told me. She wrote to me about it.

Masha balances her fork on its tines, lets go and watches it fall to the ground.

That is possibly the most disgusting thing I’ve heard.

Look, we’re all grown-ups. We’re not children –

It’s a grotesque betrayal of you, she says, of your friendship with him, and of our hospitality to him. How can you see him, how can you go travelling with him?

He’s excellent company. He looks after my affairs brilliantly.

Masha stamps past him out of the garden. Call yourself a man, she shouts over her shoulder.

I just want Lika to be happy, he yells after her. Life’s too short.

He goes to his study. As he clears a space on his desk he notices that someone has placed a sheet of paper on top of the manuscript of his latest story on which is written the title ‘The Man with the Big Arse’. He crumples it up with a smile. Potapenko. But then thinks: what was he doing in my study?

He tries to draft out a reply to Lika but finds it difficult going so he reads her letter again and senses his anger returning. ‘All the women in this hotel look at me askance as if they know some secret about me. Come and rescue me, daddy dear, and we will travel together – Switzerland, Sweden, Morocco. You would be well in Morocco with its palm trees and endless sunshine. Perhaps I’d let you have a dancing girl or two…’