Finally he connected the telephone tape recorder, set it to start recording when he picked up the telephone, and dialled the number she’d given him. He heard it ring three times, four times. ‘I wonder if I’m interrupting anything?’ he said. ‘Maybe she has a live-in girlfriend.’ He imagined the two of them in bed while the phone rang a fifth time.
‘Hello,’ she said. Her voice was not sensual, only clear and academic, the voice of someone correcting proofs for a scholarly journal. Or the voice of a reporter on the Six o’Clock News. The thought of her naked was maddening.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘This is Ruggiero.’
‘Ruggiero, you’re American!’
‘Everybody has to be from somewhere.’
‘You don’t sound seventy-two — you sound much younger.’
‘There’s a young man in me but he can’t get out.’
‘Hasn’t age given you anything to compensate for that?’
‘I enjoyed my mind until my inner voice went.’
‘You mentioned that before. When did it happen?’
‘About a month ago.’
‘What made it happen, do you know?’
He told her about the piece in the Times.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘maybe your thoughts were too much for your inner voice, so it quit on you.’
‘That could well be. Now you’re in my thoughts. I know you’re not the Angelica in the photographs. Can we meet?’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t want you to be only a voice and a mental image, I want you to be all of you.’
‘What’s your mental image of me?’
‘You know the Courbet painting, L’origine du Monde?’
‘Very flattering. That painting stops just north of the tits. First I’m a naked blonde chained to a rock, then my hair goes dark, I lose the chains, put on a little weight, and get headless.’
‘Not headless — I see you with a clever face and hornrimmed glasses.’
‘Horn-rims do it for you, do they?’
‘They enhance the imagined nakedness of you.’
‘And you want to meet me so you can have the whole actual me in your mind to look at. With my clothes off, I suppose.’
‘If possible.’ He watched the little red light on the recorder fluttering as he spoke.
‘What kind of rock are you chained to, Ruggi?’
‘Rock of Aged. Rock of impotent lust and madness.’
‘Definitely my kind of guy but give me a better reason why we should meet. Convince me.’
‘I feel as if it’s Destiny: mine and yours.’
‘Destiny’s a funny thing — it could well be that we’ll meet and you’ll wish we hadn’t.’
‘Whatever. Can we make it soon?’
‘Tomorrow night — is that soon enough?’
‘Where?’
‘Surrey Street off the Strand. Be at the Arthur Andersen entrance opposite the old Norfolk Hotel and Surrey Steps.’
‘When?’
‘Quarter past ten — 22.15 hours. Does that work for you?’
‘I’ll be there. How shall I know you?’
‘You won’t need to know me; I’ll know you. There won’t be that many old Ruggieros standing in that particular spot at that time on a Monday night. See you then.’ She hung up.
‘See you,’ said Klein to a dead phone. ‘Harold’s Monday night. Destiny? Something’s moving me; it’s like being swept along by a fast-flowing river. Am I going to drown, be broken on rocks — what?’
He poured himself a large Glenfiddich, knowing that it would make him sleepy, and put on Astor Piazzolla’s Tango Sensations. The music was sombre, dark, fateful. He saw Hannelore walking towards him, smiling with the sun behind her shining through her hair. ‘I haven’t seen much of you lately, Hannelore,’ he said. ‘Mostly what I get are memories from further back. Much further back. Well, whatever’s happening now, things will be what they want to be.’ And he fell asleep in his chair.
17 The Goodbye Look
Monday afternoon: Temple Underground Station. ‘“Waltz me around again, Willy,”’ Klein sang softly to himself as he climbed the stairs to WAY OUT, “‘around, around, around. The music is dreamy, it’s peaches-and-creamy — oh don’t let my feet touch the ground …”’ His meeting with the pornographer known as Angelica was almost seven hours away but he wanted to reconnoitre Surrey Street before dark.
The station was full of motion as people came and went, their various destinies intersecting and diverging. ‘“Look thy last on all things lovely,”’ said Klein, “‘every hour.’” Beyond the turnstiles he saw golden sunlight and the fruit and vegetable stall, brightly lit and festive, the gloss and colour of its offerings ticketed with white price cards. To the right of it was the flower stall, its blooms flaunting themselves under fluorescence and sunlight. To the left of it was the bright and cosy world of the newsstand, its wares ranked under the blazon of The Economist, the white title stentorian on a scarlet background.
Men and women waiting to meet someone stood by the station entrance. A Big Issue vendor, bearded and lonely, held up a magazine hopefully. Beyond him was the rush of cars on the Victoria Embankment; beyond the cars the river with its boats and sunpoints in a golden haze. ‘Sunpoints on the water,’ said Klein, ‘sunpoints dazzling on different waters, different times, other rivers watched by faces speaking and silent.’
Integral with the station entrance, the Temple Bar Restaurant was a haven for drinkers of coffee, perusers of newspapers, and those given to contemplation. ‘They mostly look like regulars,’ said Klein. ‘They can come into the Temple Bar Restaurant and say, “The usual.” Or maybe they just go in and sit down and it’s brought to them. Probably the regulars were here before the restaurant; they brought their coffee in thermos flasks and they read their newspapers leaning against a wall until the tables and chairs, the coffee urn and the steamed-up windows happened around them. This may be a demonstration of the anthropic principle.’
He mounted the steps to the street as men and women young and old, fast and slow, singly and in couples and groups, came down past him towards the station entrance. ‘Golden, golden,’ he said, ‘such a goldenness in the November afternoon sunlight!’ He crossed Temple Place with the low sun on the left side of his face, looked briefly up the long perspective of Arundel Street with its vanishing point somewhere beyond the Strand, and turned left with the sun in his eyes, his gaze following an adorable pair of legs moving briskly towards the Howard Hotel. ‘Don’t reify,’ he admonished himself, ‘but how can one not?’ The legs, diminishing rapidly, kept on straight ahead as he turned right into Surrey Street on the other side of which stood a King’s College building.
He moved slowly uphill, keeping to the right-hand pavement. About halfway up he came to broad steps on which sat some young men smoking and chatting, wide glass doors behind them at the top of the steps. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to the nearest one, ‘what building is this?’
‘Arthur Andersen.’ Being helpful to the little old tourist, he added, ‘Over there across the street are the Roman baths.’
‘Thank you,’ said Klein. Opposite was a long tall cocoa-coloured Victorian edifice making its way up the street in reiterated gables, balconies, balusters, pilasters, Tudor-arched windows, cornices, and various ornamented outcrops and escarpments. Klein saw a sign, SURREY STEPS, and a dark archway beyond.
He continued up Surrey Street, the long cocoa-coloured succession continuing with him. On a portico he saw, in raised letters, Norfolk Hotel. Signs in three of the ground-floor windows said that the sometime hotel was now devoted to War Studies in London. He crossed to that side and walked back down to Surrey Steps and the dark archway where a sign guided him to the Roman baths. He went down the steps and found himself in a little alley facing a wall that said WARNING! HAZCHEM.