Angelica's Grotto (12 page)

‘As any proper academic would,’ said Klein.

‘OK, old cock, we’ll have our little assignation at your place, not mine. Where do you live?’

‘Fulham.’

‘Fulham, Leslie. You can drop me off at Harold’s place and I’ll find my own way home.’

‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ said Leslie.

‘We’ll find out, won’t we. He’s weird but I don’t think he’s dangerous. Let’s cross the water and get on with it.’

‘That’s the way to do it,’ said Klein. ‘It’s a good day to die.’

‘Why did you say that?’ said Melissa.

‘It’s a quote – something some guy used to say before going into battle.’

‘Did he die in battle?’

‘No, he was stabbed in the back after the battles were over.’

‘What was his name?’

‘I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.’

Melissa’s face, into the light and out of it, was attentive, interested, calculating? The traffic sounds were like those in a dream and the geography of London inflected itself in unfamiliar ways, looming here, passing unnoticed there, strange music to the eye. ‘Like a sixteenth-century map,’ said Klein, ‘full of odd shapes and terrors: the winds have faces and there are anthropophagi in unknown corners.’

‘What are you on, Harold?’ said Leslie.

‘Mortality,’ said Klein. He tasted, like fruit gums, the intensely red, green, and amber of traffic lights. Cars on both sides, ahead and behind, were silent worlds of otherness with bright reflections sliding rearward on their tops. Again there appeared the Embankment and the river garlanded with lamps, jewelled with boats, shining with lost years.

‘What’s happening?’ Klein murmured to Oannes. Marlene Dietrich appeared in his mind as Lola Lola with naked thighs, black stockings, suspender belt, top hat. Emil Jannings, at the end of his tether, crowed like a rooster. ‘Are we getting into a
Blue Angel
-situation here?’

‘There are worse ways to ruin yourself,’ said Melissa.

‘Like Russian roulette?’

‘Think about it: the professor’s canary was dead at the very begining of the film but when he moved in with Lola Lola, up jumped a new canary singing like a steam whistle. How’s your canary, Harold?’

‘The last time I looked it was on its back with its feet in the air. Are you wearing black stockings?’

‘Of course, with a suspender belt. I like to be correctly attired for mental undressing. Sorry about no top hat.’

‘No wanking while we’re on the road,’ said Leslie to Harold as the Tate Gallery and the Vauxhall Bridge came and went. ‘How do we get to your place?’

‘Carry on down the Embankment past the Battersea Bridge and around into the New King’s Road where you turn left.’ To himself, ‘Before that there’s the Albert Bridge and Daphne.’

‘Who’s Daphne?’ said Leslie.

‘A bronze nude. When I lived in Beaufort Street I used to go jogging on the Embankment and I always slapped her bottom when I passed. I think she was vandalised and now she’s fibreglass.’

‘That’s life,’ said Melissa.

‘Who vandalised you?’ said Klein.

‘Would you believe me if I told you I stabbed my father twelve times?’

‘I’d believe you saw
Beyond the Clouds.’

‘You’re so five minutes ago in a sort of twenty-five-years-ago way, Harold. You’re a hippy replacement.’

‘“By brooks too broad for leaping the lightfoot lads are laid,”’ said Klein, ‘but a lot of us old retreads are still around.’

The Albert Bridge wedding-caked and diamonded its way over the river. ‘Albert Bridge, my delight,’ sang Klein, ‘let your lights all shine tonight.’

‘You just make that up?’ said Leslie.

‘Something from a long time ago,’ said Klein. It was a rhyme he’d composed for Hannelore back in the good time. For the rest of the trip he whispered into his hand except when he had to give directions. Arrived at his house, he looked out across the common towards the District Line. ‘The place hasn’t changed since I left it earlier this evening.’

‘Did you think it would?’ said Melissa.

‘These days time goes in and out like an accordion,’ said Klein.

‘Listen,’ said Leslie, ‘I’d love to stay and talk about relativity with you, but the boss wants me gone.’ To Melissa, ‘Watch your ass, sweetheart.’

‘I’ll do that,’ said Klein, as he left the van with the object of his desire.

For a moment they stood by the steps of Klein’s house. On the far side of the common a Wimbledon train dopplered its way to Parson’s Green. The night was warm for December; there was a nightingale singing; there was an almost-full moon.

‘Waxing or waning?’ said Klein. ‘I’m never sure.’

‘Three-quarters full or three-quarters empty,’ said Melissa. ‘Maybe there’s not all that much difference.’

‘Are you so world-weary?’

Unbelievably, she moved closer to him and laid her head on his shoulder; he was just tall enough for that to be comfortable. He put his arm around her, feeling through her jacket the heat of her body. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I’m not sure what I am; sometimes I’m not sure
if I
am.’

‘You? The formidable Lola Lola?’

‘Nobody is the same all the way through like a stick of seaside rock. Or from moment to moment, for that matter – you must know that, living as long as you have. Put your other arm around me. You’re older than my father.’

‘The one you stabbed twelve times?’

‘Whatever.’

‘Is this happening?’ said Klein, recalling her legs as she
stepped out of the van in her very short skirt. ‘I’m an old man, close to the end of my life, and I feel like a sixteen year old on a first date. This isn’t real, of course, but can we say that reality is whatever is the case?’

‘You think too much, Harold.’

‘Like a Jewish horse.’

‘Are we going inside or are we putting on a show for the neighbours?’

‘Sorry, you felt so good that I didn’t want to move.’ He went up the steps ahead of her, unlocked the door, and held it open for her. Once inside, before he turned on the hall light, he leant towards her, said to himself, ‘What are you doing, Harold?’ and drew back.

‘What
were
you doing, Harold?’ The moon shining through the fanlight glazed the oval of her face, made her like porcelain, fragile and collectable.

‘It’s that sixteen-year-old feeling – I was going to kiss you.’

She moved into his arms. ‘Do it, Harold, this is your fantasy and my scientific enquiry.’

Madness is good,
said Oannes.

Klein kissed her, feeling faint as she opened her mouth to him. They stood that way for a while before anyone spoke. ‘That was quite acceptable, Harold,’ she said. ‘I was wondering if you’d smell and taste old but you don’t; your tongue certainly carries its years well.’

‘You weren’t disgusted?’

‘In my line of work I can’t afford to be. Any response below the belt?’ Her hand asked the question as well.

‘Vestigial there but ten out of ten in my head.’

‘That’s where it counts. Are we going to move out of the hall?’

He hung up their jackets and they went into what used
to be a living-room but had long since been taken over by his work. There were bookshelves on all the walls except the one where the bay window fronted the street and the chimney breast where
Pegase Noir
hung alone. There were boxes and stacks of videotapes, piles of newspapers and unanswered correspondence. The desk was occupied by a PC, modem, and printer of recent manufacture, a very old Apple II computer for running unconverted floppy discs, a mini-hi-fi, and a variety of owls in glass, brass, china, bronze, spelter, stone, and plastic. On the printer a little naked china female presented her rear view as she reclined on one elbow and made eye contact with a tiny mermaid who leant against the groin of a large violently green-and-gold ceramic frog of almost abstract design. Two other little china females in the bookshelves danced in different periods while a third charmed a snake. Various sargassos of old and current yellow A4 pages drifted in the stillness of the desk.

Red file cabinets stood where possible, and in the odd shelfless corner there were posters: the 1933 King Kong atop the Empire State Building with a crushed aeroplane in one hand and Fay Wray in the other; Vermeer’s
Portrait of a Young Girl;
Caspar David Friedrich’s
The Stages of Life;
and a brightly coloured toucan advertising
der bunte Vogel BIERKAFFEE RESTAURANT
in Munster. Bric-à-brac, beach pebbles, seashells, a model of a Portuguese fishing boat and the Meissen girl kept station on the mantelpiece of the bookshelf-blocked fireplace. In deserts of desuetude on floor and tables tottering babels of defunct workroom cultures and buried civilisations awaited the archaeological spade.

On a well-worn Kelim stood a TV with two video-recorders; facing those a soft chair, a footstool, and a little
Indian table inlaid with ivory on which was a bowl of banana skins and tangerine rinds, beside which stood an unwashed glass that smelt of Glenfiddich. Under the rear window squatted a downtrodden couch in a geometric pattern of browns and reds, its seating space occupied by archive boxes and
National Geographies.
A variety of lamps, mostly articulated, arranged light and shadow to Klein’s liking. ‘This room is my exobrain,’ he said.

‘It looks about ready for a moult, but well-organised in an overwhelmed sort of way.’

‘I don’t know where everything is but I know where a lot of things are. Can I get you something to drink?’

‘Like a real date, eh, Harold?’

‘It’s my party and I’ll buy if I want to.’

‘Whisky for me, please.’

‘Water?’

‘No, just as it comes.’

He was able now to see her with more objectivity than before. She was actually pretty but her art-deco style of face and hair formalised the prettiness with a sophistication that hardened it somewhat. Her hair was hennaed, her eyes blue, her features very like those of some of his china ladies. She was wearing a short-sleeved, low-necked black jersey top, a red skirt, the shortness of which he had already noted, the
de rigueur
black stockings, and medium black heels. When she sat down in the TV chair and crossed her legs he took in her white thighs and the black suspenders. Scarcely able to believe this windfall of goodies, Klein remained, as always, critical: she was not beautiful like the lithe and supple Angelica and her legs were ‘definitely not in a class with Dietrich’s’, he heard himself say.

‘If you can do better, feel free, Professor.’

‘Sorry. It’s just as well that I can’t hear your thoughts
about me – I’m sure they’re a lot more critical than mine about you.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong – when I’m into something and going with it I suspend all disbelief.’ She was still looking around the room. ‘I don’t see a stuffed owl; the place seems somehow incomplete without one.’

‘I know. I’m waiting for the right one to turn up.’ He went down to the kitchen, came back with the Glenfiddich and two clean glasses, and poured. Melissa was standing in front of the Meissen Girl. She touched the nipple of the bare right breast.

‘That’s Meissen,’ said Klein nervously.

‘Christ, what a simper. This was obviously done by a man, probably an old man. Do you think she’s pretty?’

‘I think she’s beautiful.’

‘That’s what I mean – it’s the sort of gymslip prettiness dirty old men go for: virgin pussy in porcelain. Figures like this are somehow crying out to be smashed.’

‘O God, please don’t!’

Her eyes moved up to
Pegase Noir.
‘Is this an original?’

‘Yes. Odilon Redon.’

‘Harold! Are you a closet millionaire?’

‘No. There was a time when I made a few bob in art deals for collectors. Now I write books and make a whole lot less.’ He showed her
Darkness and Light: the inner eye of Odilon Redon.
‘This is my latest.’

She opened it to the copyright page. ‘Published four years ago. What’ve you done since?’

‘This and that: articles, TV. I’ve just started research and notes for the next book.’

‘Which is?’

‘Naked Mysteries: The Nudes of Gustav Klimt.’

‘Haven’t you had enough naked women on the Internet?’

‘Naked women by Klimt aren’t the same as naked women on pornographic websites.’

‘Why not?’

‘The women on the Internet have become product. That’s what the bad guys call drugs in the movies. “How much product can you move?” the suppliers say to the dealers. Pornography dehumanises women; Klimt explores their humanity.’

‘Very smooth, Harold. Maybe we’ll come back to that later. You’ve got some very deep thoughts in this Redon text.’ She read aloud, ‘“It is evident that Redon was not so much the master of his material as its servant; his images and ideas forced him to give them form and substance, compelled him to find the shapes and spaces they required. Always his forms are hypermorphic – the gesture configures the shape and the shape becomes itself to a greater degree than ordinary vision allows. In
Roger and Angelica,
the tiny distant Angelica is the pearly flaunt of her nudity; the hippogriff is the quivering thrust of its haunches; and these, like all of Redon’s figures, are celebrants of a mystery in which they themselves are the sacrifice. The colour, dream-haunted and strange, bursts from the seed-pods of his
noirs.
‘Black,’ he said, ‘is the most essential of all colours.’ In the black is where his creatures live, the black from which Oannes, half-fish and half-human, emerges, saying, ‘I, the first consciousness of chaos, arose from the abyss to harden matter, to regulate forms.’ And in this same black, Venus, all rosy and golden, becomes visible in the nacreous genitalia of her birthing.” Does anybody buy your books?’ she said.

‘Academic libraries, mostly.’

‘And this is all you do?’

‘That’s it.’

‘What do you live on?’

‘I invested the money from my picture deals. Do you require a financial statement?’

‘Sorry, I always want to know the facts of people’s lives. So you live shut up in this room, devoting your life to the work of others.’

‘Art raises the worldwide level of perception, it takes the mind to places beyond ordinary experience. Do you think the study of it is a waste of time? It beats running a porno site, wouldn’t you say?’