Now Sileen, madly by lamplight, checked the oversize photocopied sheets of Conrad’s bibliographer, Smith; cackling as he ticked off his recent purchases. He had made an authentic capture I could not understand or evaluate. But I knew that I was incontinently eager to escape from it.
IV
With no view from his window — no vision to accuse him — Sileen survived. Tenbrücke was made miserable by the presence of the river. He could do nothing with it. Yet he could never bring himself to pull the drapes and blank the world out. It would still be there. And he would see it. He covered his eyes with his hands. He felt his brain drowning in occult semen; pearly slime dripping slowly on to sawdust; cold honey leaking from the sharp lip of a teaspoon.
His residence was a controlled environment. Each object smirked in self-justification. It knew its value. It had the advantage. It ‘appreciated’ as fast as its curator, Tenbrücke, was dying, decaying, sweating himself away. Even the wooden blocks of the floor shone in aggressively shifting patterns: arrowheads pointing the path to extinction.
Tenbrücke willed himself quite deliberately to let the knuckle of dead cigar ash drop on to the white Afghan rug — but he could not do it. Terror beaded the stubble of his skull. Angry boils erupted on his neck. Tubercles insinuated in his oxters. His stomach spasmed convulsively. But the Waterford-crystal glasses on the silver tray remained unsmeared, brittle. The seals on the bottles were unbroken. The lemons were unblemished anchorites: worthy of Zurbaran. Tenbrücke, like Sileen, was a man who spent much of his time alone in his chosen space. He had married late — and too wisely — a much younger woman; an innocent who hoped, one day, to inherit most of Caithness. For now, she was safely occupied in the city. She satisfied his lack of desire. They ate out.
Tenbrücke fiddled with the knobs of the shower unit. He left the perfectly adjusted stream of water running, but he did not undress. He sat on the edge of the bed, feeding the black coverlet through his fingers. He was melting. He could smell animal-death on his body: a beast hunted to climax. He tasted ash mixed with rain. Something was wrong. One of the floor tiles was — of its own volition — lifting, coming away. A light was hidden beneath, and a light was lifting it. There must be a hole in the ceiling of the flat below. Tenbrücke would have to ring the agents with a formal complaint: or, better, instruct his lawyers to hit them for a completely new floor. He was tired of tiles. He wanted weathered marble, inset with birds, branches, flames; lapis-lazuli, veins of silver. The light was so strong: what were they doing? There must be an unlicensed photographic session in progress. The riverside apartments were very popular with New Wave pornographers.
He found that, without moving, he was able to look directly into the hole and — although this defied the laws of physics — he could see everything they were doing. It was just as if he was in the room with them. He was in the room with them. He joined them in their circle of salt: a circle of names he knew had been stolen from the Kabbalah, the Book of Spirits. Now he breathed as they breathed, faster and faster; choking, a claw at his throat. His eyes watered from the smoke of burning incense. He heard the repeated whispering of the name: Belial. Be-li-al. Be-li-al. Be-li-al. Be-li-al. It was his own voice. A polished dish was in his hands. And he saw in it a distorted face, a face of fire: bearded Falstaff; laughing, high-eared, red. He bared his teeth. And bit through the flesh of his cheeks, until the blood ran out from his mouth.
The pain brought him back. It was over. He slid open a drawer. Customized handcuffs, thongs, and a leather mask lay on top of two neat stacks of folded and ironed pyjamas. He tore off his shirt, losing buttons; mopped his malarial torso with a pyjama jacket, which he then put on.
He wanted to write something down, to leave a note for his wife. He needed to imagine her, still in her scarf and Barbour, searching for him, calling his name: the square of blue paper, unread, in her hand. But it was impossible. He was trembling too much to hold a pen. He pulled on a camelhair coat, stuffed the handcuffs into his pocket, and ran out of the flat for the last time.
V
A shifty unshaven polymath nebbish, with a cocky drone, and a patter so tedious it could have been marketed as a blood-coagulant, was lecturing a dangerously healthy-looking Californian couple. They were shrink-wrapped, sterile, irradiated like a pair of Death Valley grapes. They socked vitamin-enhanced aerobic vitality at you, so hard you could wish on them nothing but a catalogue of all the most repellent diseases of skin and bone and tissue; all the worst back numbers from the cursing books of Ur, Uruk, and Kish. You were obliged to superimpose on their boastful skeletons the historic treasures of old London: growths, malignancies, rickets, nose-warts, furry haemorrhoids, palsies, fevers, sweats, bubos, wens, mouth-fungus, trembles, and pox scabs. They were so heavily insured against disaster that they were almost obliged to justify the premiums by dropping dead before they overdrew another breath.
The woman kept dabbing her lipstick with a Kleenex, and flinching visibly from the sneering intimacies of the tour-guide; who last had his teeth investigated in celebration of the election of Clement Attlee and the coming Socialist Dawn. Harold Wilson’s white-hot technology of dentures, he ignored. The husband wondered how the same soft drink he used in Soquel could taste so strange in London, England. What did they do to it, for chrissakes? Maybe the dyes for the logo had some kind of freaky half-life? This frigging town was awash with terrorists brandishing poisoned umbrellas, crazy Irish bombers, Arabs spitting in your food, and fall-out from Russia stripping the trees. If you could find a train that was moving, it was sure to explode. They couldn’t even keep the beer cold. They sure as hell imported the formula, but were too dumb, or too greedy, to follow it. Ugly bunch of chicken-shit dick-heads! Skin like bath-scum. Fughh!
The guide was in spate, and lying outrageously. He appeared to be rehearsing for an occasional column in The Times Literary Supplement, that would get up everybody’s nose with its preening erudition. They swallowed what they wanted of it, and wondered if they could survive yet another evening in the National Theatre before cutting their losses and skipping to the Hemingway Conference in Venice.
‘Can you believe what those English critics wrote about Serious Money?’ the woman whined. ‘We just found it was totally without soul. It was so shallow. It didn’t confront the real issues. And the theatre! My God! No air-conditioning: you’re practically sitting in some guy’s lap. No wonder the English are all sex criminals. I felt so dirty. Believe me, it wasn’t easy to get those tickets. I’m sorry to say this, but we were conned. We won’t be back in a hurry, will we, Bob?’
‘You are standing,’ said the guide, a little wobbly himself; his arm thrown affectionately around the gibbet, ‘on the very site of the infamous “hanging dock” that saw the execution of so many pirates; including, of course, Captain Kidd. You probably recall the name from the cinematographic version — 1945 — with Mr Charles Laughton, Randolph Scott, John Carradine, Gilbert Roland…’
‘Errol Flynn,’ said the Californian bookman. ‘Errol Flynn did all the pirates.’