The Unconsoled (18 page)

'Ah. I'm very pleased you see it that way. It would have been a source of great frustration to me, Mr Ryder, not simply during the rest of your stay, but throughout the years to come, to think that you once stayed at my hotel and were forced to endure such an unsuitable room. I really can't think what could have been going on in my mind four years ago. A complete miscalculation!'

We had been speeding through the darkness for some time without encountering other headlights. Off in the distance I could see what may have been a few farmhouses, but otherwise there was little to break the empty blackness to either side. We travelled on in silence for a little while. Then Hoffman said:

"This is a cruel stroke of luck, Mr Ryder. That dog, well, it wasn't young, but it might easily have lasted another two or three years. And the preparations had been going so well.' He shook his head. 'It's such bad timing.' Then, turning to me with a smile, he went on: 'But I'm confident. Yes, I'm confident. He won't be deflected now, not even by something like this.'

'Perhaps Mr Brodsky should be offered another dog as a sort of present. Perhaps a young puppy.'

I had said this without much thought, but Hoffman made a show of considering it respectfully.

'I'm not sure, Mr Ryder. You must realise, he was extremely attached to Bruno. He kept little other company. He'll be in a state of mourning. But you may be right, we must alleviate his loneliness now that Bruno has gone. Perhaps some other animal. Something soothing. A bird in a cage, say. Then in time, when he is ready, another dog could be introduced. I'm not sure.'

He fell silent for the next several minutes and I thought his mind had gone on to something else. But then suddenly, as he stared at the dark road unwinding before us, he muttered intensely under his breath:

'An ox! Yes, an ox, an ox, an ox!'

But by this stage I was tired of the whole business of Brodsky's dog and I leaned back in my seat without speaking, determined to relax for the remainder of the journey. At one point, in an attempt to find out something about the event to which we were travelling, I said to him: 'I hope we shan't be very late.'

'No, no. Just right,' Hoffman replied, but his mind seemed to be elsewhere. Then a few minutes later, I heard him mutter sharply once more: 'An ox! An ox!'

After a while we turned off the open road and found ourselves in a salubrious residential district. I could see in the darkness large houses in their own grounds, often surrounded by high walls or hedges. Hoffman drove carefully around the leafy avenues, and I could hear him once more rehearsing his lines under his breath.

We passed through some tall iron gates into the courtyard of a substantial residence. There were already many vehicles parked around the grounds and it took the hotel manager a little while to find a space. He then got out and hurriedly went off towards the front entrance.

I remained in my seat a moment longer, studying the large house for clues concerning the occasion we were about to attend. The front comprised a long row of huge windows coming almost to the ground. Most of these were lit behind their curtains, but I could see nothing of what was going on within.

Hoffman rang the doorbell and gestured for me to join him. When I got out of the car, the rain had eased to a drizzle. I pulled my dressing gown close around me and walked towards the house, taking care to avoid the puddles.

The door was opened by a maid who showed us into an expansive hallway decorated with grand portraits. The maid appeared to know Hoffman and there was a quick exchange as she took his raincoat. Hoffman paused a moment to straighten his tie in the mirror, before leading the way deeper into the building.

We arrived at a vast room flooded with lights in which a reception was in full swing. There were at least a hundred people present, standing about in smart evening dress, holding glasses and exchanging conversation. As we stood at the threshold, Hoffman raised an arm in front of me as though to protect me and searched the room with his gaze.

'He's not here yet,' he muttered eventually. Then, turning to me with a smile, he said: 'Mr Brodsky isn't here yet. But I'm confident,
confident
he'll be here before long.'

Hoffman turned back to the room and for a second seemed at a loss. Then he said: 'If you'd just wait here a moment, Mr Ryder, I'll go and fetch the Countess. Oh, and if you wouldn't mind standing a little way back over here - ha ha! - just out of sight. As you'll remember, you're supposed to be our big surprise. Please, I won't be long.'

He went into the room and for a few moments I watched his figure moving about the guests, his worried demeanour in marked contrast to the merriment all around him. I saw a number of people try to speak to him, but each time Hoffman hurried on with a distracted smile. Eventually I lost sight of him and possibly drifted forward a little in my effort to locate him again. I must in any case have made myself conspicuous for I heard a voice next to me say: 'Ah, Mr Ryder, you've arrived. How delightful you're with us at last.'

A large woman of around sixty had placed her hand on my arm. I smiled and muttered some pleasantry, to which she said:

'Everyone here is so eager to meet you.' With that she began to lead me firmly into the heart of the gathering.

As I followed her, squeezing my way past the guests, the large woman began to ask me questions. At first these were the usual enquiries about my health and my journey. But then, as we continued to make our way around the room, she proceeded to quiz me with great thoroughness about the hotel. Indeed she went into such detail - did I approve of the soap? what did I make of the carpet in the lobby? - that I began to suspect she was some professional rival of Hoffman much peeved that I was staying at his establishment. However, her general attitude and the manner in which she regularly nodded and smiled at people as we passed left little doubt that she was the hostess of these proceedings, and I concluded that this was indeed the Countess herself.

I had assumed she was leading me either to a particular spot in the room or to a particular person, but after a while I got the distinct impression we were walking around in slow circles. In fact several times I felt certain we had already been in a part of the room at least twice before. The other thing I noticed with curiosity was that although heads would turn and greet my hostess she made no effort to introduce me to anyone. Moreover, although some people smiled politely at me from time to time, no one seemed especially interested in me. Certainly no one broke off a conversation on account of my passing by. I was somewhat puzzled by this, having steeled myself for the usual smotherings of questions and compliments.

Then after a while I noticed there was an odd quality to the whole atmosphere in the room - something forced, even theatrical about its conviviality - though I was unable immediately to put my finger on it. But then we finally came to a halt - the Countess falling into conversation with two women covered in jewellery - and I at last had the chance to look about me and gather some impressions. Only then did I realise that the occasion was not a cocktail party at all, but that in fact all these people were waiting to be called into dinner; that dinner should have been served at least two hours earlier, but that the Countess and her colleagues had been obliged to hold off its commencement due to the absences of both Brodsky - the official guest of honour - and myself - the evening's great surprise. Then, as I continued to cast my gaze about me, I began steadily to realise just what had taken place before our arrival.

The present occasion was the largest to date of the dinners given in Brodsky's honour. Being also the last before the crucial event on Thursday evening, it was never likely to have been a relaxed affair, and Brodsky's lateness had turned the tension up further. At first, though, the guests - all of them highly conscious of being the city's elite - had remained calm, everyone scrupulously avoiding any comment likely to be construed as casting doubt on Brodsky's dependability. Most, in fact, had managed not to mention Brodsky at all, relieving their anxiety simply by endless speculation over when dinner would be served.

Then had come the news concerning Brodsky's dog. How such news had come to be given out in so haphazard a manner was not clear. Possibly a phone call had come to the house and one of the civic leaders, in a misguided attempt to settle the atmosphere, had blurted it out to some guests. In any case, the consequences of allowing such a thing to spread mouth to mouth through a gathering already tense with worry and hunger were entirely predictable. Very soon, every sort of wild rumour had begun to circulate around the room. Brodsky had been discovered, utterly drunk, cradling his dog's corpse. Brodsky had been found lying in a puddle in the street outside, talking gibberish. Brodsky, overcome with grief, had tried to kill himself by drinking paraffin. This last story had had its origins in an incident several years earlier when indeed, during a drunken binge, Brodsky had been rushed to hospital by a neighbouring farmer after imbibing a quantity of paraffin - though whether he had done so in a bid to kill himself or simply out of drunken confusion had never been established. Before long, in the wake of these rumours, despairing talk had started up everywhere.

'That dog meant everything to him. The man will never get up from this. We have to face it, we're right back at square one.'

'We have to call off Thursday night. Call it off straight away. It can't be anything but a disaster now. If we let it go ahead, the people of this city will never give us a second chance.'

'That fellow was always too risky. We should never have let it get this far. But what do we do now? We're lost, hopelessly lost.'

Then, even as the Countess and her colleagues had sought to regain control of the evening, a burst of shouting had erupted from near the centre of the room.

Many people were rushing towards the incident, a few retreating in panic. What had occurred was that one of the younger councillors had pinned to the floor a tubby, bald-headed figure who after a moment everyone had recognised to be Keller the vet. The young councillor had been pulled off but had held on to Keller's lapel so tenaciously the vet had been pulled up with him.

'I did my best!' Keller was shouting, red in the face.
I
did my best! What more could I have done? Two days ago the animal was fine!'

'Fraud!' the young councillor had bellowed and attempted another assault. Again he had been pulled off, but by now a number of others, recognising a good scapegoat, had begun also to shout at Keller. For a moment accusations had rained down on the vet from all sides, charging him with negligence, and with jeopardising the future of the whole community. At this point a voice had shouted: 'What about the Breuers' kittens? You spend all your time playing bridge, you let those kittens die one by one…'

'I only play bridge once a week and even then…' the vet had started to protest hoarsely, but immediately more voices had shouted over him. Suddenly everyone in the room had seemed to have a long-borne grievance against the vet concerning some beloved animal or other. Then someone had shouted that Keller owed him money, another that Keller had never returned a gardening fork borrowed six years earlier. Soon the feelings against the vet had risen to such a pitch it had seemed quite natural that those restraining the young councillor should slacken their grip. And when the latter had made yet another lunge, he had seemed this time to do so on behalf of the great majority of those present. The situation had looked on the verge of turning quite unpleasant, when a voice booming across the room had at last brought everyone to their senses.

That the room had fallen silent as quickly as it had perhaps owed more to the astonishment caused by the speaker's identity than to any natural authority he commanded. For the figure everyone had turned to see glaring down at them from the platform had been that of Jakob Kanitz, a man noted in the town principally for his timidity. Now in his late forties, Jakob Kanitz had for as long as anyone could remember held the same dull clerical post at the town hall. He was rarely known to venture an opinion, still less contradict or argue. He had no close friends and several years earlier had moved out of the small house he had shared with his wife and three children to rent a tiny attic room further down the same street. Whenever anyone had broached the matter, he had intimated he would very soon rejoin his family, but the years had gone by and his arrangements had not changed. Meanwhile, largely on account of his willingness to volunteer for the many mundane tasks around the organising of a cultural event, he had become an accepted, if somewhat patronised member of the town's artistic circles.

The room had had little time to get over its surprise before Jakob Kanitz - perhaps aware that his nerve would hold out for only so long - had begun to speak.

'Other cities! And I don't just mean Paris! Or Stuttgart! I mean smaller cities, no more than us, other cities. Gather together their best citizens, put a crisis like this before them, how would they be? They'd be calm, assured. Such people would know what to do, how to behave. What I'm saying to you, all of us here, we're the best of this town. It isn't beyond us. Together we can come through this crisis. Would they be fighting in Stuttgart?! There's no need for panic yet. No need to give up, to start quarrelling among ourselves. All right, the dog, it's a problem, but it's not the end, it doesn't mean anything yet. Whatever condition Mr Brodsky may be in at this moment, we can put him back on course again. We can do it, provided we all play our part tonight. I'm sure we can, we have to. Have to put him back on course. Because if we don't, if we don't pull together and get this right tonight, I tell you this, there's nothing left for us except misery! Yes, deep, lonely misery! There's no one else for us to turn to, it has to be Mr Brodsky, there's no one else now. He's probably on his way at this moment. We've got to stay calm. What are we doing, fighting? Would they fight in Stuttgart? We've got to think clearly. In his shoes, how would we feel? We must show we're all grieving with him, that the whole town shares his sorrow. Then again, friends, think about it, we must cheer him up. Oh yes! We can't spend the whole evening in gloom, send him away believing there's nothing left, he might as well go back to… No, no! The right balance! We've got to be cheerful too, make him see there's so much more to life, that we're all looking to him, depending on him. Yes, we have to get it right, these next few hours. He's probably on his way now, God knows in what condition. These next few hours, they're crucial, crucial. We've got to do it right. Otherwise there's only misery. We must… we must…'