I was certain then that he’d done this before. I found myself thinking of an old black-and-white film, The Hounds of Zaroff, in which Count Zaroff on his remote island lures yachts to their destruction with false beacons. Survivors who reach the shore are wined and dined, then given a day’s start before he hunts them down and kills them for his sport. ‘You’re not a very nice man, are you?’ I said.
‘Nice is boring; I like excitement. So do you, or you wouldn’t be here. Now are you going to give me your answer or are you going to keep dithering while you drink my champagne?’
I opened my mouth and watched the worods, the woordos, the words walk out into the peaceful murmur of the Royal Opera House interval. ‘My answer is yes,’ said the worods and the woordos and the words. ‘You can buy my death for one million pounds and a year to enjoy the million.’
Mr Rinyo-Clacton gripped my thigh. ‘I’ll drink to that,’ he said, and chortled in his joy.
‘How do we …?’
‘Consummate our bargain? Back at my flat after the opera.’
‘You’ve got a million pounds in cash back at your flat?’
‘I always like to have a little cash on hand. But first we have Acts Four and Five before us, and Pelléas and Mélisande are finally going to pull their fingers out and declare their love. In real life they’d have been having it off days ago out in the woods or down at the boathouse but this is opera and they’ve got to sing their way around it for a while before he even gets to stick his tongue in her mouth. And his stupid brother, Golaud, maybe he’s meant to symbolise something because dramatically he’s unbelievable: Mélisande’s had wet knickers for Pelléas all this time and Golaud’s not taken any notice till now. Well, women are built for deception, aren’t they?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Think about it — when a man doesn’t want to do it he’s going to have difficulty rising to the occasion, but all a woman’s got to do is spread her legs and and fake an orgasm. Actually, Mélisande’s pretty much of a pain in the arse altogether. In real life one or the other of the brothers would have straightened her out smartish. Maeterlinck could have done better with the text.’
‘How many times have you seen it this year?’
‘This is only the fourth. With all its dramatic flaws it’s still my favourite opera. People die right and left in other operas but this one is all about death from beginning to end; it’s like a gorgeous poison flower. You simply have to move your mind out of the everyday reality frame to enjoy it.’
Debussy’s music, like the sea, delaying not, hurrying not, took us through the long-awaited kiss, the killing of Pelléas, and the later death of Mélisande. ‘C’était un pauvre petit ê tre mysterieux comme tout le monde,’ sang Arkel, the grandfather of Golaud and Pelléas. ‘She was a poor little mysterious being like all of us,’ said the surtitle. I was reminded that être, the infinitive to be, was also the noun, being. Everyone who was, was a being, a poor little mysterious being. Serafina and I, that’s what we were. And Mr Rinyo-Clacton, was he also a poor little mysterious being? I looked at his dark profile and saw him naked in his bedroom, felt him penetrate me. Stop that, I said to myself: think about Mélisande, how it was her destiny not to belong to the one she loved, how sad that was. But my mind persisted in going its own way, sorting through its pictures and wondering what was coming after the opera.
12. Now, Then
‘Now, then,’ said Mr Rinyo-Clacton in his study. The background music for this scene was the Debussy String Quartet in G Minor, coming out of a state-of-the-art Meridian sound system nestling among many shelves of CDs. To me that music always suggested beaded lampshades, oriental carpets, glass-fronted bookcases, and the word neurasthenia.
There was a very imposing desk of lustrous and highly-polished wood and many subtle curves, joinings, pigeonholes, drawers and compartments. I don’t know anything about furniture but this was the sort of thing one sees on the Antiques Roadshow and learns that it’s worth fifty thousand pounds. The desk was presided over by a double lamp of gleaming brass and green glass shades.
The other object that caught my eye was a large illuminated globe, the kind that sits in a wooden ring on handsomely turned legs. There were ranks of box-files and numerous guides to various countries but no other books.
The only picture on the walls was a framed reproduction of a Piero di Cosimo that’s in the National Gallery — a satyr bending over a dead or dying nymph with a wound in her throat. They are on the shore of a bay. A sad brown dog watches the two of them. Other dogs play on the beach; there are herons and a pelican. In the blue distance ships ride at anchor; beyond them are the buildings of a port. The scene is magical, dreamlike, desolate; the nymph, covered only by a bit of drapery over her hips, her girlish breasts pathetically exposed, is so luminously beautiful — her death seems a dream-death. She and the satyr seem to have strayed into a dream of the death of innocence.
‘Do you think they’ll wake up?’ I said.
Mr Rinyo-Clacton turned away from the desk to look, first at the picture, then at me. ‘They won’t and you won’t. This is it.’
The Debussy quartet had ended and the Ravel quartet that follows it on the CD (I have the same recording, with the Pro Arte Quartet) began. ‘Ravel after Debussy is quite nice, I think,’ said Mr Rinyo-Clacton. ‘There’s a good little edge to it. Do you like music? I never thought to ask.’
‘Yes, I like music’
‘This, as they say, is the beginning of the rest of your life. It will be a life of one year, so the music you hear and everything else will be heightened for you. “Look thy last on all things lovely, every hour,” eh?’
See Mr Rinyo-Clacton, his jacket off and his tie undone, bending over the desk, brilliantly caught in my vision like a scene in a film or a dream. A large half-full glass of brandy stood at the edge of the green blotter. There was another in my right hand. Mr Rinyo-Clacton opened a drawer and took out a crisp white document. ‘If you’ll read this,’ he said, and handed it to me. It was a proper piece of calligraphy, written in Chancery hand:
I, Jonathan Fitch, being of sound mind and with my faculties unimpaired, not under duress or the influence of any drug, hereby assign to T. Rinyo-Clacton, for the sum of one million pounds, to be paid on signature, the right to terminate my life at any time from midnight, the 24th October, 1995. This agreement is binding and I understand that it remains in effect even if I change my mind and return the money. The agreement cannot be cancelled except by T. Rinyo-Clacton’s exercise of the right assigned above.
‘What’s the T for?’ I said.
‘Thanatophile.’
‘Nobody’s called Thanatophile.’
‘You asked me what the T was for and I told you. Don’t sign this unless you’re serious about it because you may be quite sure that I am. You might think I’m crazy but don’t allow yourself to think we’re just fooling around here or it’s some kind of a joke. Once you sign that paper this thing is going to go all the way.’
‘I’m serious,’ I said, ‘and I know that you are.’