There was a clip-clopping on the staircase and a stirring in the air, winter-sharp and woodlandish.
‘Hello,’ said Melanie Falsepercy as she sat down beside me. ‘Here I am. Did you think I’d come?’
Thank you, I said to the lamp. ‘I wasn’t expecting you at All Hallows,’ I said to her.
‘I followed you here from the Cheshire Cheese,’ she said.
‘I didn’t see you when I was there.’
‘I was outside standing under the bridge, skulking in the shadows.’
‘But why didn’t you come in?’
‘It wasn’t coming-in time, it was skulking-in-the-shadows time.’
‘And then you followed me here.’
‘Because I’d been waiting for you.’
A prayerful-looking man entered the oratory. We left, went out of the church, and stood hand in hand before the big road of blackness and white headlamps.
‘You’d been waiting for me,’ I shouted against the rushing of the blackness and the lights.
She brought her mouth close to my ear. ‘Yes,’ she said.
We crossed the road, the rushing faded behind us. Great-arched, great-shadowed, high in the lonesome evening the railway bridge loomed before us, the golden windows of the Cheshire Cheese invited. We entered the ascending red, the descending black and found ourselves a table under the canopy of quiet voices.
‘What’re you having?’ I said.
‘Whatever you’re having.’
I got us both treble gins with just a little water.
‘Gin looks so clear,’ she said, ‘and it’s so full of obscurity. Here’s to All Hallows.’
‘All Hallows. It was very strange yesterday evening; all of a sudden there you were.’
‘I’d never been here before. Had you?’
‘Never. What brought you?’
‘I’d been translating Rilke’s ‘Orpheus, Eurydike, Hermes’ and then I looked up Orpheus in the telephone directory.
When I saw the Orpheus and Tower Bridge Club listing I had to come to Savage Gardens for a look round. Thirsty work.’
Luise had translated that poem for me, I’d recorded her reading it in German and in English and I still remembered lines here and there:
Wie eine Frucht von Süβigkeit und Dunkel,
so war sie voll von ihrem groβen Tode …
Like a fruit of sweetness and darkness,
So was she full of her large death …
‘Do you do a lot of translation?’ I said.
‘No, it just happened that I wanted to get the ideas in the poem as clear in my mind as I could.’
‘Do you do any writing?’
‘Bits and pieces, nothing I’d show anyone yet.’
‘And you and Fallok?’
‘Not any more but we have a drink together now and then. What brought you to Savage Gardens?’
‘A conversation with the head of Orpheus.’
‘How did you and it meet?’
‘I hallucinated it in the mud at low tide near Putney Bridge.’
‘You and Tycho Fremdorf.’
‘Who’s Tycho Fremdorf?’
‘Haven’t you seen Codename Orpheus?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Better now?’ said the gom yawncher man as he cleared the table.
‘Much better, thanks,’ I said.
‘I keep seeing that man in different places,’ I said to Melanie when he’d gone.
‘That happens to Tycho Fremdorf too,’ she said.
‘What is all this about Tycho Fremdorf?’
‘Tycho Fremdorf is the protagonist of Codename Orpheus. He’s a sort of alienated anti-hero film-maker. He’s been wandering around all night with his Arriflex and in the dawn we see him standing in the low-tide mud near the Albert Bridge. Everything still and grey and the boats rocking at their moorings and then he sees the head of Orpheus coming up the river against the tide. It’s quite remarkable, there was a long piece about the film in Sight and Sound. Are you all right?’
‘What do you mean? Why shouldn’t I be all right?’
‘You look very pale.’
‘I always look pale. What did they say about Codename Orpheus, in Sight and Sound?’
‘Sylvestre Lyzée wrote the piece; he said that it worked on the deconstructionist level but he had a little trouble with the reality-frame.’
‘Wasn’t it directed by what was his name, Gustav Krähe?’
‘Gösta Kraken.’
‘He’s the one where it’s always very dark and you often see people lying in puddles, isn’t he? Didn’t he do a film called Squelchy Places?’
‘Bogs. In this one he goes in for rivers and low-tide mud a lot. The look of it is really terrific, that shot of the head coming up the Thames against the tide stays in the mind like some of Eisenstein’s images. It isn’t like the head of a swimming man, it’s all rotting and bloated and eyeless and it has this awful stillness about it as it moves upriver.’
I’d brought with me the pages I’d typed so far and at some point I’d put the folder on the table. There it lay in the shadow of Codename Orpheus. I put it back in my shoulder bag.
‘You brought a typescript with you and now you’ve put it away,’ she said. ‘Why’d you do that?’
‘This night is different from other nights,’ I said. As I said it I had the sensation of rocking in the sea and feeling something rising dark and huge from the black chill, becoming pale and glimmering, becoming Luise rising in her vast and ivory nakedness in the dark, in the night sea. So deep, the sea! So vast and comfortless! I shaded my eyes with my hand and looked down into the transparency of the gin in my glass, smooth brightness in the shining dawn and Luise seen across the water rising naked, huge, gleaming in the shining dawn.
‘Are you looking into the past?’ said Melanie.
‘It’s looking into me,’ I said, with Luise again at Mr Chow eleven years ago. You’re everything I’ve ever wanted in a woman.
‘Istvan’s told me about you and Luise. What is it with you and him and women? Does he break them in for you or what?’
‘This is only the second time it’s happened.’
‘It hasn’t happened yet.’
‘Maybe I’ll get lucky.’
‘Here’s to luck,’ she said.
11 The Big Rain
Blue-black shiningness, bluish-white shining on the puddles on the football pitch in the rainy night all starred with lamps and windows. Always in November there comes such a night, blue-black and shining and wild with rain and wind and brown leaves blowing. In the morning suddenly the plane trees on the far side of the common are bare winter trees.
Windowed shapes of light on the ceiling, Melanie Falsepercy asleep beside me, Luise rising in the shining dawn in the wild and rainy night.
In the dimness and the shadows of the room I breathed the novembery fragrance of Melanie Falsepercy. Uncovering her I ran my hand down the long smoothness of her back to the roundness of her buttocks. High, high over us there thundered aeroplanes into Heathrow, safe arrivals for the moment; rumbling through the rain the District Line trains took their golden windows homeward in the night, unseen faces mortal and alone.
I went down to the kitchen and opened the fridge. There were three cans of beer, most of a salami, a mouldering of old cheeses, half a tub of margarine, half a jar of marmalade, half a pint of milk and the head of Orpheus.
‘Loss!’ it said. ‘That’s what she was to me, you know: she was the loss of her even when she was apparently the finding of her, the having of her. And I was the same to her, I was to her the loss of me. We were the two parts of a complementarity of loss, and that being so the loss was already an actuality in our finding of each other. From the moment that I first tasted the honey of Eurydice I tasted also the honey of the loss of her. What am I if not the quintessential, the brute artist? Is not all art a celebration of loss? From the very first moment that beauty appears to us it is passing, passing, not to be held.’