Pilgrim (48 page)

“You are not a schoolboy, Mister Pilgrim.”

“Are you not my master?”

Silence.

“I hate this room. This cell. Must I stay here forever?”

“No.”

“Is it you who carries the key?”

“One of them, yes.”

“And the others?”

“Kessler. Wolf. The doctor in charge of this ward. His name is Raddi.”

“Ernst Raddi. Yes. I’ve met him. Or should I say, he has met me? In his presence I was always chained. Another prick.”

“There were no chains, Mister Pilgrim. Never.”

“Whatever they were, they felt like chains.”

“I’m sure.”

“How kind of you.”

“I’d like to know why you think of me as a prick.”

“The description bothers you?”

“To know could be beneficial. If I am to help you, I must know who you think I am.”

“Why do you think I need help?”

Jung almost laughed, but contained himself.

“The key is in my pocket, Mister Pilgrim. Only I can set you free.”

“You said there were other keys in other pockets.”

“Yes—but only mine can set you free. Besides which, it is all too clear you are troubled. You yourself know this. And so…your answer?”

“Why do I think of you as a prick? Because you are too pleased with who you are and the few minor achievements you have made in your field…”

Jung closed his eyes, but said nothing.

“And because you are an arrogant, opinionated wielder of unlimited powers. And because you have no notion of your own ignorance and the damage this ignorance inflicts. And because you are unrepentant. And because you abuse the intellects of others in order to protect the reputation of your own. And because you are Swiss!”

Jung stood up—turned away—removed his glasses and dabbed at his eyes with his handkerchief.

“That’s quite a list,” he said.

“It’s just a beginning,” said Pilgrim.

Jung shifted his weight and thought of turning again, but did not.

“Would you like another doctor to take you on?” he asked.

“Take me on? Am I a wrestler? A rugby team? An army of insurgents?”

“M
ISTER
P
ILGRIM
!” Jung now did turn and, blazing with visible fury, confronted his patient. “Enough is enough!”

“What a pity. I was enjoying myself.”

“No doubt. But you are in trouble, sir. Not with me—but with yourself. I have a job to do here, and I intend to do it. I am not alone in my arrogance and I am not alone in my ignorance and I am not alone in my opinionated wielding of power…”

“
Unlimited
power!”

“You, sir, are a past master in all these fields, and if I may say so, you are something of a prick yourself!”

Pilgrim blinked. He was genuinely surprised. He turned towards the wall and said: “I want a window.”

“You cannot have a window! There will be no windows until I have my answers.”

Pilgrim sat down.

“Is that understood?” said Jung.

“Yes.”

“Now…” Jung himself sat down. “We have cleared the air. Let us proceed.”

Pilgrim gazed at his knees. The white of his pyjamas seemed to mesmerize him. “Where are we going?” he said, all but whispering.

“We are going to discover who we are,” said Jung. “Both you and I. We have no maps, but we must find our way. And we will.”

3

Not quite a week later, on Thursday the 13th of June, a man in a bowler hat and a tailored grey coat was seen on the terraces of the Lindenhof, which rise above the
Limmat on its west bank. At the top of this wooded park, there was a magnificent esplanade with benches, tables, a café, a fountain and a view of Zürich that was unmatched in its splendour.

To the right, the Grossmünster—to the left, the Prediger-Kirche—and beyond it the University of Zürich, dominated by the Burghölzli Clinic riding on its hillside and rising up from its skirt of protective trees.

Trees. They were everywhere. The linden trees that gave the park its name and the oak, the chestnut, the ash and the aspen crowded amongst the shops and houses across the river, making a froth of green lace on which the roofs and steeples seemed to float.

The man in the bowler hat wore a pair of binoculars which hung from a leather strap around his neck. In his hand, he carried a small leather-bound notebook. From another leather strap, this one hanging from his shoulder, there was a Kodak camera in a cloth case which he pressed against his side with his elbow. The perfect—or seemingly perfect—tourist.

He moved along the balconade entirely engrossed in the view before him. Occasionally he would stop, raise the binoculars, stare at something and afterwards make an annotation in his book. He had been doing this now for more than an hour, while unbeknownst to him, he was himself being observed by a woman seated beneath the trees on one of the benches behind him.

The woman appeared to be in her late twenties—perhaps her early thirties. She was trim and neat and
dressed in navy blue, wearing a light spring coat with tortoiseshell buttons and a blue straw hat with a wide mauve ribbon. Its shape was not unlike the bowler worn by the man, although it lacked a turned-up brim.

Her focus was entirely on this curious man with the curious binoculars and curious notebook. He was as trim and neat and small as herself and he seemed almost as lonely, in spite of his attentions to whatever it was he was spying on. Whatever—whomever.

She wondered.

He could be a confidential agent
, she speculated.
Or a private investigator. Or perhaps a jealous husband, whose wife is in a dalliance with some romantic, dashing young man. An officer in the Hussars. A naval personage. An artist or a doomed poet. What exciting lives some people lived.

Some people, yes. Others, no.

All at once, the man turned and looked directly at her.

She closed her eyes and smiled. The thought occurred to her:
I have been chosen.

When she opened her eyes, she saw that the man was older than expected. Given his almost military bearing, his squared shoulders, his trim waist, his erect posture, she had thought he might be in his mid-to-late twenties, but clearly, he was over forty.

Over forty! A worldly man. A practised man. A challenge.

His eyes, at a distance, appeared to be smoky grey. His nose was handsome, rising straight as an ivory bone to a pair of winglike eyebrows whose arching
shapes mimicked flight. His mouth was a wide, thin line, his lower lip moist and full, his upper lip masked by a full and elegant moustache whose corners he had twisted into the shape of dimples.

O, mercy, mercy! What is going to happen?

His approach was so deliberate, there could be no mistaking his destination.

Even though the young woman was seated in the shade of the linden trees, she raised her hand to protect her eyes from the light through which he walked towards her.

“Madam,” he said when he had stopped within four feet of her, “may one ask if you are alone?”

“One may,” she replied, barely audible. She had fully intended to be heard, but something in her throat prevented her voice from rising much beyond a whisper. “Though I may appear to be alone, I am waiting for a friend,” she lied. There was no friend. There never had been since childhood. The very word was foreign to her. Nevertheless, it was a useful word when a gentleman called. “She may well attend me at any moment.” The word
she
, the woman thought, was a masterstroke. It did not prevent her from being a continued object of desire, but placed her in a protective embrace.

The gentleman had removed his hat. “So much the better,” he said. “There is no need to ask but a moment of your time, if you would be so kind.”

She was bitterly disappointed by this. A mere moment of her time was hardly likely to lead to a romance.

“May one inquire if madam is of Scots descent? I detect an accent quite familiar to my ears.”

“Why, yes. I have come here from Aberdeen. Perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me your name. I am not accustomed to having conversations with people to whom I have not been introduced.”

“With pleasure. My name is Henry Forster and I come from London Town.” He said the latter almost as one might have sung it—rather gaily, with a lilt.

“London Town?”

“Yes. From Chelsea on the River Thames. Cheyne Walk, to be exact. If madam has never had the pleasure, I would suggest she acquaint herself with this most delightful purview. A landscape of complete enchantment.”

Was this an invitation?

The young woman blushed.

“I am called,” she said, “Miss Leslie Meikle.”

“Most unusual. And pleasing. Meikle—a Celtic name.”

“Leslie is my mother’s family name. My parents had hoped to have a son, but I arrived instead and they gave the honour to me.”

“How do you do.”

“How do you do, and how might I be of assistance?”

“I shall be brief, Miss Meikle,” said Forster. “I am on a mission and I require some photographs. Two. Perhaps three. If you would be so kind.”

He pulled the Kodak from his shoulder and removed it from its cloth case.

“You depress the lever just so,” he told her, opening the accordion folds and demonstrating. “I should like one of each profile and one of me facing the lens.”

Leslie Meikle rose and, accepting the camera, stepped into the light.

She would be
, Forster thought,
a perfect beauty if one had found her in a pastoral setting.
The blue eyes, the apple cheeks, the cherry lips. But her visage was somehow disconcerting in an urban landscape. The appearance of so much good health was upsetting to someone whose life of late had been spent in the depths of a hotel room and beneath the shade of a bowler hat while he grew a moustache to disguise his true appearance.

Forster placed himself in the sunlight and Leslie Meikle stood five paces away and aimed the camera at his left profile. The hat was now on his head.

“May a person ask if these photographs are for a loved one, Mister Forster?”

Snap!

“They are for a colleague who has been incarcerated.”

Leslie Meikle let the camera fall to her waist.

“
Incarcerated?
Do you mean imprisoned?”

“Not precisely, no. Nonetheless, he is prevented from freedom. He is restrained.”

Leslie Meikle repositioned herself.

Right profile.

How romantic
, she thought.
To have a colleague prevented from freedom. Surely this is intrigue worthy of an Elinor Glyn novel, or one perhaps by Mrs Henry Wood.

Snap!

Full face next and last.

“I am intrigued, Mister Forster. May I ask what you intend to do—if anything—about your colleague’s unfortunate circumstances?”

“You may, but I shall not answer. I only want him to have these photographs to remind him that someone attends to his needs on the outside.”

Snap!

On the outside. How utterly dramatic!

In her mind’s eye, Leslie Meikle conjured the image of the Incarcerated Colleague clinging to his bars, his gaze on the distant mountains.

“Here is your camera, sir,” she said, handing the Kodak over to Forster.

“Perhaps,” Forster said with as much diffidence as he could muster, “Miss Meikle would allow me to take a photograph for the sake of having a memento of our encounter.” Why pass up a pretty face when it was there for the asking?

“I would be delighted.”

Leslie Meikle
, Forster would write in his notebook—not quite certain of the spelling but certain enough of the spell. In time, as he gazed at her smiling image on the Lindenhof Terrace, he would regret that his duty to Pilgrim had prevented him from pressing for more of her acquaintance.

As for Leslie Meikle herself, she would never forget Henry Forster, with his bowler hat, his smoky eyes, his ivory bone of a nose and his winglike eyebrows. Nor his shoulders neatly squared, nor his waist as trim as
her own. Nor his unkissed lips and their promise of moist embraces.

That shall be Tomorrow
Not tonight:
I must bury sorrow
Out of sight.

Why does one inevitably remember such lines?
Leslie Meikle wondered.

She would go home. She would not marry. She would care for her elders and perish. It would take forty years. Not that she would spend those forty years entirely in the shadow of what she would always claim were Forster’s advances, but he would be there forever in the company of each year’s ungarnered others—her collection of shadows, as she came to think of them—her regiment of
gentlemen-who-might-have-pressed-for-more-but-had-not.

Divide the human race by two,
Pilgrim would write of another unfulfilled encounter,
and there you have them: the millions who never connect.

As for the photograph of Leslie Meikle, Forster would tuck it into his notebook and remove it from time to time to gaze at the poignant edge of longing in her eyes and the thwarted smile that had all but failed to reach her lips.
What if?
she seemed to be saying.
What if we had met some other time and place? And what if…?
But nothing comes of that and in her eyes she knew it.

4

Lady Quartermaine had been kind enough to secure Forster’s accommodation until the end of July. While she herself had been certain of her impending death, she in no way communicated this to Forster. Her excuse for prepaying his expenses was expressed only as a desire to acknowledge his independence of her. She assured him—as he well knew himself—that Mister Pilgrim would repay her on his return to London, once his treatments had proved successful. That Doctor Jung could help him, she said, was undoubted. It was merely a matter of time.

Until the day of the avalanche, which now seemed remote as something from another age, Lady Quartermaine had maintained her liaison with Pilgrim through her meetings with and letters to and from Doctor Jung. Early on, in the wake of their arrival in Zürich, she had also been allowed to visit him twice—perhaps three times. Forster had seen his employer only on the occasion of Lady Quartermaine’s remains being removed to England. They had not spoken that day and Pilgrim had been so distracted that it was entirely possible he had not even recognized his valet. There had also been that
other person
—the blond and swaggering Swiss who had taken on Forster’s duties, and who looked so entirely unsuitable for the position. The man had not even known how to clothe himself appropriately.