Angelica's Grotto (19 page)

‘I’m sorry, Melissa – my mind always jumps from
one thing to another, sorting images and looking for connections. Don’t leave yet, please – I like having you around.’

‘OK, I’ll stay a bit longer. Have another drink and tell me about Christie’s. If the painting fetches five hundred thou, how much do you walk away with?’

He took a card out of his pocket. ‘Commission is on a sliding scale – the more money you bring in, the less commission they charge. If the hammer price is from £300,000 to £599,999 the commission would be six per cent.’

Melissa got her pocket calculator out. ‘Six per cent is £30,000. Leaves us with …’

‘Leaves
me
with …’

‘Four hundred and seventy thousand, which is not too bad.’

‘Don’t forget seventeen and a half per cent VAT on their commission …’

‘Five thousand, two hundred and fifty,’ said Melissa, ‘from £470,000 leaves £464,750 which is still a nice little bundle to walk away with. Or are there more deductions?’

‘The insurance premium is one per cent of the hammer price.’

‘Five thousand! That leaves £459,750. Anything else?’

‘That’s it; Mr Duclos said they’re waiving the catalogue illustration fee, and according to my accountant the Inland Revenue doesn’t get any of this because the Indexation Allowance comes to more than one hundred per cent of the market value in 1982.’

‘That’s a mercy. So we’re talking about a final figure of £465,625.00. How much of that can you use to fund me?’

‘Funny
– fund
is a four-letter word.’

‘I love it when you talk dirty, Prof. Keep talking.’

‘Where were we?’

‘Funding me.’

‘I think I need to refresh my memory as to what I’m funding.’

‘How can I help you?’ she said, leaning back in the chair.

He knelt in front of her and slid his hands under her bare bottom. ‘I’ll think of something,’ he said with his face between her thighs.

Still the same evening. ‘Now, then,’ said Melissa. ‘We were going to talk numbers.’

‘“Ye shall not eat of any thing that dieth of itself,”’ said Klein.

‘What the hell’s that about?’

‘That’s from
Deuteronomy,
it comes after
Numbers.
It just popped into my head, I’ve no idea why.’

‘What you’ve been eating is still very much alive, Prof. What is it with you, post-cunnilingual depression?’

‘It’s not exactly depression – it’s just that every now and then I wonder how I came to be where I am.’

‘You mean where you are with me?’

‘With you, with everything.’

‘I notice that it happens after your treat rather than before.’

Watching her mouth and her steady blue eyes as she spoke, Klein thought that mercy was not a big part of her makeup. ‘Don’t you ever wonder about that?’ he said. ‘Don’t you ever wonder how you came to be where you are and doing what you’re doing?’

‘I
know
how I came to be where I am and doing what I’m doing. But for now I’m wondering if you intend to
put your money where your mouth is – which might not be the best choice of words. Is you is or is you ain’t my sponsor? is what I’m trying to say.’

‘Hannelore and I had in mind to travel on some of the money from the sale of that painting.’

‘Who’s Hannelore?’

‘My wife. She’s been dead for a long time.’

‘Great. I’m deeply moved. I’m so moved that I think it’s time for me to go. Let me know when you’re ready to talk seriously about money. Otherwise stop rattling my cage.’

‘Are
you in a cage, Melissa?’

‘I’m out of here, Prof.’ There was a rush of air as she picked up her shoulder bag and made her exit, slamming the door behind her. Klein listened to the sound of her heels receding into the night.

He looked again at the
Sphinx
drawing, the picture and the figure both divided diagonally into light and dark. From the obscurity of her face her hidden eyes looked back at him.

‘Dying sea skills cost islanders their lives,’ said the headline over an Associated Press report in
The Times:

Suva, Fiji: Possibly hundreds of Pacific islanders die slow agonising deaths from sunstroke, thirst and starvation every year because they have lost the seamanship skills of their ancestors, it was claimed yesterday.

‘Today, about ninety-five per cent of Pacific islanders who fish at sea do so in small dinghies powered by poorly maintained outboard motors … They chase fish over the horizon, lose sight of their island and can’t find their way back,’ said Michael Blanc, who teaches basic sea safety skills in the South Pacific Commission’s fisheries programme.

Klein spent about an hour searching through his video collection until he found a documentary called
The Last Navigator
that he’d once taped from Channel 4. It had been filmed in Micronesia, which at the time had massage parlours and Burger Kings but no Disneyland. On the island of Satawal in the Carolines the navigator, Mau Piailug, was first seen with a circle of stones on a mat and a group of
less-than-keen children whom he was attempting to teach the star-compass memorised by his ancestors. ‘I’ll continue to voyage,’ he said, ‘and if I’m not disabled, or too old or dead I will pass my knowledge to the next generation.’

As a demonstration of the traditional skills, Piailug had organised the building of a sailing canoe for a 500-mile voyage with an adult crew from Satawal to Saipan in the Marianas. Piailug was perhaps in his forties; his compact brown body was sea-tempered and ready, his face intense with the island-finding spirit. ‘We men should think only of our strength,’ he told his crew, ‘we are not children. When we’re on the canoe it is my role to tell you the talk of the sea. Remember the canoe is our mother and the navigator is our father.’

The vessel herself seemed as eager as Piailug; she was a creature of quickness and memory, a magic of wind and wood, winged with a landfall-hungry sail, rigged with ropes of nothing-forgotten, keeled with the shape of answer-the-sea. At the start of the voyage Piailug, at the helm of the outrigger canoe, sang to his crew:

I sing of this canoe, our canoe,
of the life of the spirits, the life of people.
Be with me, spirit,
on the small beach, on the wide beach,
on the beach of my island -
I sing of this canoe, our canoe.

Out of sight of land Piailug’s eyes were attentive day after day to the colours and shapes of clouds, to the winds that shifted or were steady, and to the swells. At night he steered by the stars that successively rose over the horizon on the chosen course, each night bringing the mother canoe and
her children closer to the loom in the sky, the reflected light of the island landfall, and the tiny speck of land in the wide, wide sea. He had no instruments, only himself, his thousandfold memory and the dead who sailed with him, chanting the names of winds and swells and stars.

The outrigger canoe seemed less a man-made thing than a natural part of sea life, the sail as inconspicuous against the sky as the wing of a tern. Watching that swift and urgent vessel hissing through the blue water Klein was riveted. Saipan safely reached, he shook his head, then sat for a while whispering into his hand. He didn’t want to hear what he was saying.

‘I’m lost,’ said Klein.

‘In what sense?’ said Dr DeVere.

‘In the sense of I don’t know where I am.’

‘Can you elaborate?’

‘I am of a people who have always been fearless navigators of the mind. The dead sail with us as we make our way from idea to idea, steering by the stars and sea-marks named by those before us. Such a wide, wide ocean! But you always know where you are by the waves, by the swells, by the loomings and the stars. Then one dark night the waves change, and the swells; the winds blow from not the usual quarters. Black squalls come, and heavy seas, the stars are blotted out, the wind moans in the rigging. You suddenly realise that you might never make your landfall, you might drown. A great wave hits the boat and takes you with it, you feel yourself going down, down, down and then you don’t know any more which way is up and you can’t hold your breath a moment longer and the wild wide ocean fills your lungs and then you’re gone: down among the dead men.’

Dr DeVere kept respectfully silent for a few moments. ‘It’s good that you could get that out,’ he said.

‘Is it? I almost don’t know who I am. I try to think of how I came to this and it’s hard to believe how it all began. I read this lousy piece in
The Times
and Boom! my world fell apart.’

‘Ronnie Laing said some good things in his time: one of them was, “The breakdown can be the
breakthrough.”’

‘Depends on what you break through
to,
I should think.’

‘What do you think you’ve broken through to?’

‘Way back in our first session – it seems a hundred years ago – you brought up Georg Groddeck and his theory of the It. When I wasn’t too impressed by that idea you asked me to visualise a speaker in my head other than myself and I named Oannes. It looks to me now as if he’s the It that’s been living me and I’m not too happy with it.’

‘Why not?’

‘My involvement with Melissa Bottomley became an obsession; I got to a point where I wanted whatever I could have with her at any cost. Her Leeuwenhoek money is almost gone and she needs funding to continue this study she’s doing. I told her I’d help her with that.’

‘Can you afford to?’

‘I own an original Redon that’s going to be auctioned at Christie’s for quite a bit of money.’

‘Maybe you could fund the NHS – they’re always coming up short.’

‘Very funny, Leon.’

‘Sorry. You were saying?’

‘Well, I got carried away and told her I might give her some money for her study. I didn’t say how much.’

‘So if you’re going to be coming into some money, what’s the problem?’

‘I’m not sure I want to give her anything now. That
painting was going to be converted to money for Hannelore and me to enjoy. Now Hannelore’s dead, and in exchange for sexual treats and a bit of conversation now and then I’ve promised money to this woman who has only contempt for me.’

‘When you spoke about your obsession with Melissa Bottomley you used the past tense. Are you no longer obsessed with her?’

‘No, I’m not. Long before this I could see her for the cold and calculating bitch she is but I was more or less under her spell. Now that spell is broken.’

‘So you’re not having anything to do with her from now on?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Why not?’

‘She gets to me in all kinds of ways: that first time she came to my house, we were standing outside on the pavement and she laid her head on my shoulder and said, “I’m not sure what I am; sometimes I’m not sure
if I
am.” When I expressed surprise she said, “Nobody is the same all the way through like a stick of seaside rock. Or from moment to moment.” Then she asked me to hug her and she said, “You’re older than my father.”’

Dr DeVere waited for more but Klein folded his arms and was silent, as if he had just presented an irrefutable argument. ‘She’s not the same all the way through,’ he whispered into his hand.

‘What did you just whisper?’ said Dr DeVere.

‘“She’s not the same all the way through.”’

‘I see. But you’re no longer obsessed with her.’

‘No.’

‘Could it be that you’re in love with her?’

‘That would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it.’

‘“Ridiculous” is not a word I throw around very much.
Are
you in love with her?’

‘“I’m only happy when it’s complicated.”’

‘Are
you happy?’

‘That’s a line from a song.’

‘Which you quoted because …?’

‘It
is
complicated and I’m confused. I know I’m nothing to her. At first I was just data for her study but I couldn’t leave it at that; I wasn’t satisfied with a voice on the phone or words on the screen, I wanted to meet her face-to-face, wanted to talk to her as real people do. Then when she set me up to be raped by Leslie I wanted to get back at her somehow so I hid in the van and kind of blackmailed her into coming to my house, but after that bit of intimacy …’

‘Are you talking about the intimacy on the pavement or the oral and anal intimacy in the house?’

‘All of it. I’m nothing to her and yet I
am
something; I think there must be some unfinished business with her father that she’s working out with me.’

‘And of course you’re working out various things with her, or just one big thing really.’

‘Which is,’

‘You tell me.’

‘How I feel about women?’

‘You said it.’

‘Are you familiar with the work of Bruno Schulz?’

‘Yes, and I’ve been wondering if gynocracy was going to come into this. Is that part of the action with her?’

‘Yes, but even when we get into that there’s something touching about her. She’s obviously got all kinds of personal hangups – maybe as many as I do – and she’s not very nice but with this study of hers she’s trying to find real answers
to questions that don’t always get asked; there’s not enough of that in the world.’

‘So you’re going to give her the money you promised?’

‘I don’t see how I can welsh on that promise. Of course I still have to work out how much.’

‘What about Oannes? Are you still getting one-liners? The last thing I have is “Madness is the natural state.”’

Klein consulted his Oannes list. ‘In the taxi on the way to Christie’s with the painting he said, “It goes,” meaning of course everything – everything goes until everything’s gone and that’s all she wrote. The next thing from him was in the Peacock Theatre where I went to see Tango por Dos. In the bar before the show started I was whispering to myself about an item I’d seen in the
Observer
– people reporting sightings of the Grim Reaper; I was recalling a drawing by Alfred Rethel, entitled ‘Death as a friend’, and thinking about Hannelore. I started to cry and a woman asked me if I was all right and I made a verbal pass at her and when I got back to Oannes he said, “Death as a friend.”’