Medusa Frequency (2 page)

My desk is a clutter of stones written upon and not; seashells, acorns and oak leaves, china mermaids from long-gone aquaria, postcards of medieval carven lions, clockwork frogs and photographs of distant moments. It’s a good desk, there’s a lot of action even when I’m not there. Propped up amongst the stones and clutter are two books open at colour plates of Vermeer’s
Head of a Young Girl;
there are also a postcard of it stuck on the edge of the monitor screen and a large print over the fireplace. Night and day in all weathers she looks out at me from her hereness and her goneness. Even the ageing of the painting seems organic to it; one can see in the reproductions how the reticulation of fine cracks in the paint follows lovingly from light into shadow the curve of her cheek, the softness of her mouth, the glisten of her eyes, the fineness of brow and nose, the delicacy of her chin.

Impossible to know what her look might have been a response to; presumably Vermeer sat down at the easel and said something like, ‘Turn your body to the side but turn your face to me. No, back a little – like that. Hold it like that.’ And she’d held it like that, her face full of questioning and uncertainty. Was there also fear? Fear of what? What had she to fear from him? Was the giant squid in her thoughts or in her dreams? What was her name? Maybe it will come to me, the story of what happened between them. Here it comes, no research -straight story:

Vermeer when he painted this picture was forty-five. He’d been married for a quarter of a century and had seven children when there sat down in front of him this girl of seventeen. Her name was Ursula; they called her Ursel, Oor-zl. When you say her name it isn’t like saying Miranda for example; it’s a simpler utterance.

Ursel, he used to say in his mind as she went her ways about the house. She was a servant; he paid her money and she lived in his house, slept under his roof. He imagined her lying in the darkness at the top of the house; he imagined the smell of her warmth and the sound of her breathing in the darkness.

When he said, ‘Will you sit for me, Ursel?’ she said, ‘Yes, Mynheer.’ There was no question of getting her to take her clothes off, he wanted her nakedness so much that he couldn’t ask for it, he had to put more clothes on her. ‘Try this,’ he said, handing her the blue and gold scarf. He stood watching as she wound it round her head. ‘Yes,’ he said, hearing the sound of her breathing in the darkness, ‘that’s good. Now turn and look at me the way you did before. Like that. Hold it like that.’

She sat that day and the next and the next while he painted. Looked at her and painted. The look on her face is her answer to his look. That was all that happened.

After writing the above I looked at the back of the postcard of the painting and noted that Vermeer only lived to be forty-three.

I went down to the kitchen and made myself a sardine sandwich. While I ate it I leafed through
Personal Computer World
looking at the various ads for hardware and software. There were so many software packages for spreadsheets and databases and computer adventure games, why couldn’t there be one called
Third Novel?

On my way back to my desk I noticed something lying on the floor by the front door where I always find cards and notices from radio cars and estate agents, carpet cleaners, palmists, and Chinese takeaways. This one was typed on yellow paper, the same kind I use:

ART TROUBLE?
COMPOSERS, WRITERS, FILM-MAKERS –
STUCK? NOTHING HAPPENING? NO IDEAS?
WHY NOT
HEAD FOR IT
?

Write orph one

HERMES

Write orph one? There were a Soho address and telephone number. I sat down at my desk, put a stone from Paxos on the HERMES flyer, and looked at the Vermeer girl in the postcard, the two books, and the print over the fireplace. The look on her face always made me think of Luise von Himmelbett who lived with me for two years and left me nine years ago. There’s a photograph of an olive tree among the stones on my desk; when Luise left she wrote on the back of it:

I trusted you with the idea of me
and you lost it.

Later that Monday when I’d had some sleep and the day was open for business I looked out of the window and saw that it was grey and glistening and rainy. Good, I thought; more things happen when it’s grey and glistening and rainy.

When I rang the HERMES number a breathy female voice, shadowy and warm, said, ‘Hermes Soundways’. In the background there was music, veiled and flickering but familiar.

‘Hermes
Soundways,’
I said as I remembered. Hermes Soundways was Istvan Fallok, he’d been Luise von Himmelbett’s lover before me. Back then Luise was working at the Netherworld Bookshop in Kensington Church Street around the corner from Slithe & Tovey; I went in there for a classical dictionary and that was the first time I saw her.

She was twenty-seven then, taller than I, with the sort of old-fashioned beauty one sees in antique dolls; she had a long shining plait of blonde hair, a lovely voice, a very short skirt, and wonderful legs. She sold me
The Oxford Classical Dictionary
as well as eight other books of which the last was
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition;
I still haven’t read it and I don’t ever expect to but I’d have bought whatever she showed me. When I told her I was going to be writing copy for Orpheus and Hermes she said that she knew a composer who was obsessed with those particular themes and that’s how I came to meet Istvan Fallok.

It wasn’t at all surprising that I should fall in love with Luise; I’d been divorced not long before that, I was alone, and I’d never met a woman like her: she was quite calm just being herself, she had none of the desperation that produces art, she commanded attention without producing a product. I asked her to lunch and she said yes. I took her to Mr Chow in Knightsbridge. I haven’t been there for years now but that was back when I bathed and shaved every morning and sometimes did that sort of thing at lunchtime. I asked if Fallok was a special friend of hers and she told me they’d been together for
two years but it was over now. ‘I kept my bedsit in Kilburn the whole time,’ she said, ‘I never moved in with him.’

‘You knew it wasn’t going to last?’

‘One woman’s not enough for Istvan,’ she said.

‘I can’t imagine being with you and wanting anyone else,’ I said.

‘Why is that?’

‘Because you’re everything I’ve ever wanted in a woman.’

‘Are you sure? I’m not clever, you know - I don’t write or paint or anything like that, I’m not an intellectual type.’

‘An intellectual type isn’t what I’m after.’

‘What are you after then?’

‘You,’ I said. ‘You’re what I’m after.’ The world at that moment was so various, so beautiful, so new, the very air was electric with good luck and happy promise, I could feel her responding to the excitement in me. I was thirty-eight then; I was in a heightened state of mating behaviour, able to catch the waiter’s eye, to find taxis or parking spaces without frustration, to get interval drinks at the theatre without groaning, to buy tickets for concerts and recitals - nothing was burdensome to me, nothing was too much trouble, and she was the woman who would make everything all right. I imagined waking up and finding her there every morning, I imagined page after page coming out of the typewriter. I wrote poems, gave presents, wooed early and late, and within two months she’d left her Kilburn bedsit and was living with me.

‘Are you there?’ said the shadowy female voice on the telephone.

‘I’m ringing about a flyer I got through my letterbox,’ I said.

‘Hang on,’ she said.

‘Hello,’ said a man’s voice.

‘Is that Istvan Fallok?’

‘Yes. Who’s this?’

‘Herman Orff.’

‘Ah, art trouble. Stuck, are we?’

‘It happens. I seem to remember that it’s even happened to you on occasion.’

‘Lots of occasions. Funny, I’ve got that Hermes theme on the Revox now, you can probably hear it. Seen Luise lately?’

‘No, it’s been more than nine years. Have you?’

‘No. Our lost Eurydice.’

‘Are you still composing electronic music?’

‘Sure. I did the track for
Codename Orpheus.
Have you seen it?’

‘No. Is it a spy film?’

‘More of an existential exploration of the nature of reality.’

‘Listen, what’s this
HEAD FOR IT
thing?’

‘It’s an EEG technique with a few refinements.’

‘Will it get me to places in my head that I haven’t been able to get to?’

‘Maybe you’ve already been to all the places there are in your head.’

‘I’ll take that chance. Has it got you anywhere you hadn’t got to before?’

‘Yes, it has. But it mightn’t be a place you want to get to.’

‘How much are you charging for it?’

‘Fifty quid for the first hour, twenty-five for every hour after that.’

‘How soon can we do it?’

‘Can you come between three and four this afternoon?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right. See you then.’

‘See you.’

Strange, talking to Fallok after all those years. I wondered if he still had any hard feelings about me and Luise. He’d said at the time that he’d known she was going to leave him sooner or later. She was a loyal woman but very proud.

The Vermeer girl was looking at me from the two books, the postcard, and the print over the fireplace. I had no idea where Luise was now.

In the afternoon I left for Soho. Fulham Broadway is one of those underground stations that look like aeroplane hangars, airy and light and full of lift and more so on a rainy day. People made their entrances and took their places on the platform, each of them more or less in character for the day’s performance. I was playing Herman Orff in
The Quest.

There was a leggy young woman in a short black skirt, black leather jacket, black tights, and little black boots, clip-clop, clip-clop. She turned as she passed, her eyes seemed wide with
surprise. Her hair was brown and thick - she was altogether urban but she looked as if she might vanish behind a tree. Her eyes were remarkable: dark eyes darkly outlined, open wide so that when she looked at me there was white all round the pupil. Her eyes were not like the eyes of women on Greek vases but there came the thought of a shady grove. The grove became more shadowy, became wild woodland. Her face had a sudden woodland look, as if she might just that moment have heard the baying of hounds.

Don’t be ridiculous, I said to myself as I drifted along to where she was. She was leaning against a pillar reading a book; it was a proof copy. With some casual twisting and bending I was able to make out the title:
The Mountains of Orgasma
by Juan de Fulmé, published by Avernus. Juan de Fulmé had won last year’s Booker Prize with
The Valley of Pudenda.
O God! I thought: to explore the valley of her pudenda! To climb with her the mountains of Orgasma! Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself again but it was no use whatever.

I reminded myself that I was forty-nine and wondered how old this woman of the wood might be: about twenty-seven, I thought. Beauty that passes! Transience! Was I going to be foolish? It looked as if I was. I didn’t want to be old and wise, wisdom seemed unsporting; I wanted to be more foolish than when I was young, I’d never been foolish enough. What is it but foolishness that brings the giant squid and Eurydice together? Non-giants also are subject to it.

From far off in the blackness came a moving light, the wincing of the rails ran towards us ahead of the rumble and clatter of the train. Doors opened before us, closed behind us, we swayed and shook as one in
Transports of Darkness
by Herman Orff;
Caverns of Iron
by Herman Orff;
Upward the Light,
a trilogy? NOTTING HILL GATE, said the sign outside the window. Doors opened, we got out. Ahead of me with forms of walking world between us she clip-clopped through that buskerless corridor to the Central Line escalators. No pipes, no timbrels; only the pattering clock of footsteps measuring multitudes of separate mortalities.

Her quiet reading face replayed itself in my mind as her legs beckoned before me, descending to the platform where we stood and looked into the tunnel for a light. ORPHEUS TRAVEL,
said a poster in pseudo-Greek lettering. I will, I answered in pseudo-Greek.

Again we shook together, swayed together, were entranced together in our space of light that rumbled through the darkness. We both got off at Oxford Circus. On Argyll Street I saw her before me, umbrellaless and vivid in the greyness and the rain. What a pleasure it must be for her to walk around in her body, I thought as I watched the glisten of the street flashing at her swift dark heels. She crossed Great Marlborough Street, went into Carnaby and over to Marshall which was the way I was legitimately going: Hermes Soundways was off Broadwick Street round the corner from Cranks Wholefood Restaurant. The rain intensified the colours of the present and called up the past that always waits, the colours of it unremembered, the light of it strange on my eyes. Luise and I used to drink rose-hip tea at Cranks.

This new woman of the rainy afternoon continued ahead of me to the alley where Hermes Soundways was. Very Soho, the little alley of Istvan Fallok. Full of little businesses looked in upon by dusty windows. Little hidden businesses in the rain, in the greyness, ledgers and invoices unknown, services unrecognized. There were many gaunt and angular scaffoldings suggestive of Piranesi’s prison fantasies, dark against the grey sky. Dark pipes and planking in the rainlight of Soho, in the greylight of Istvan Fallok’s little corner of the world where she was obviously going.

A flight of steps led down to his place, through the windows I could see a shadowy interior glowing with illuminated dials and little eyes of red and green and yellow light; she clip-clopped down the steps ahead of me without looking round. When he opened the door I heard, veiled and flickering, the same music I’d heard on the telephone; this place lived in the half-light of its music and in the music of its half-light, it swam in sound like a long-drowned city in a sea of dreams.