When I got home I slid the disc into the player and heard first the low hum of the darkness where the soul of the thing lived, then the bassoon slowly dragging itself all unwilling into the light. Oh, what a sad bassoon!
‘Kindred spirit?’ said Serafina, back from the shops.
‘He certainly knew what trouble was.’
‘Don’t we all.’
‘Yes, but not many of us are advised by a so-called “court of honour” to kill ourselves and then go ahead and do it.’
‘Look who’s talking.’
‘I wasn’t pressured into this thing I’m in.’
‘This thing we’re in,’ she said over her shoulder as she put things in the fridge. ‘Poor old Pyotr Ilyich lived in the wrong time and place for being queer. If he were alive in London now he’d be knighted and completely at home in the world of the arts and he wouldn’t need to compose a pathetic symphony.’
‘The word that Tchaikovsky used, according to my Oxford Dictionary of Music, was patetichesky, which means “emotional” or “passionate” rather than “pathetic”.’
‘Whatever. He was still a pathetic man.’
‘Fina, why do you sound so hostile?’
‘Because sometimes I think that when you met your new friend you connected with the real you. Maybe there are still bugs in this place, so I’ll say it loud and clear, CAN YOU HEAR ME, MR RINYO-CLACTON? SOMETIMES I THINK YOU AND JONATHAN ARE THE REAL ITEM AROUND HERE.’ Speaking to me again, she said, ‘If we both come out of this alive I might eventually get over your womanising but this other thing could really finish us.’
The music seemed to be begging forgiveness and looking for a way ahead. I put my arms around Serafina but she made herself rigid and turned her face away from me. ‘Maybe, Jonathan,’ she said, ‘you’ve got decisions to make.’
‘No, I don’t — the only future I want is one with you. What happened with me and him wasn’t primarily a sexual act for me.’
‘What was it then?’
‘You were gone and I didn’t think you’d ever come back and I felt so low and lonely …’
‘Go on.’
‘I wanted to be relieved of the burden of myself, of my manhood — I wanted someone else to take charge of me.’
‘And what now? Are you expecting me to take charge of you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, what have you got in mind? What are your plans for the future?’
Something made me hold back from talking about the future until after my meeting with Mr Rinyo-Clacton. ‘I haven’t done that much planning.’
‘Now might be a good time to begin. I’m off to the Vegemania.’ As always when she went out, she left an absence behind her.
Tchaikovsky had apparently pulled himself together and was marching along purposefully with a snappy allegro molto vivace as if he was going in to win. I knew how it ended so I stopped the music, made myself a cup of tea, sat down at my desk, and began to write this.
33. Wimbledon Train
Early dark, November dark, November lamps and faces and shop windows and footsteps sharp and cold. People bursting from the silent-roaring ocean of the day and swimming upstream like salmon into the November evening. The finale of the Pathétique, the adagio lamentoso that I hadn’t listened to at home, was playing in my head and it seemed to me the proper soundtrack for Pizza Huts and Taco Bells and big red 74 buses novembering down the Earl’s Court Road. Fifty-three years old he was when he died, Pyotr Ilyich, nine days after conducting the première of the Pathétique in October 1893. Where was that court of honour now, that told him death would be a good career move?
I’m always early for every appointment, I can’t help it; it was only twenty past five when I reached the tube station and stood there smelling roasted chestnuts and waiting for Mr Rinyo-Clacton. ‘This could be the last time,’ he kept saying in my mind. How? Was it possible that he was dying, that he had tried to shelter from his own death in mine and now was relenting? I saw myself visiting him in hospital, being his comrade in his last moments. But the awful things he had done — his calculated seduction of Serafina and his various intrusions into our lives! How could I be the comrade of such a man? Whatever was about to happen, I felt now that he was the weak one and I was the strong one, and I liked that feeling.
Suddenly here came Katerina looking like a storm-driven ship about to smash itself on rocks. ‘Katerina!’ I said. She seemed not to hear me, but hurried into the station and down the stairs. I followed as she went through the turnstile with her travel permit; when I saw her go down to the westbound platform I bought a ticket to West Brompton and went down the stairs after her as a Wimbledon train pulled in.
Katerina made her way through the crowd, moving quickly past the refreshment kiosk, past the board that showed the incoming trains, past the Piccadilly Line stairs. She stopped by the next stairs as I caught up with her. The doors of the Wimbledon train stood open; passengers getting on pushed past those getting off as Mr Rinyo-Clacton stepped on to the platform and found himself face to face with Katerina.
‘Kandis?’ she said. She passed a hand over her eyes and shook her head in evident disbelief. ‘No, not possible — Theodor, is it you?’
Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s eyes opened very wide, his mouth was a silent O. He stepped back, the doors of the carriage closed on his coat, and the train moved out, dragging him along the platform and into the tunnel as people shouted and pointed. ‘No!’ I said. ‘Wait!’ But he was gone, and never said a word.
34. Magic No
So here I am — Jonathan Fitch on Chapter 34 of my story. I’m very superstitious and superstition creates its own rules: I knew it would be wrong to contrive to end this with a chapter total the same as that of Melencolia’s magic square but I thought it would be a good omen if it fell out that way. That’s not going to happen now: melancholy yes; magic no.
When I saw Mr Rinyo-Clacton step back and get caught in the carriage doors I said, ‘No! Wait!’ A useless thing to say, I know, but I was overwhelmed by a sense of this thing being cut off short, being stopped unresolved. I was shocked by the taking-away of his death from me by this weird deus ex machina. Dea, rather, this old woman who suddenly finished off a man who’d become some kind of a cornerstone of my existence. There were so many things to be worked out before I could be the hero of my story, and now the process would never be complete and I’d never be that hero.
Platform 4 was taped off and the station closed. People streamed out into Earl’s Court Road, marvelling at the drama that had heightened their reality. I told a London Transport policeman that I was a close friend and he directed Katerina and me to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.
‘Kandis?’ I said to Katerina, ‘Theodor Kandis, was that his name?’
‘That was his name.’
‘Who was he?’
She stifled a sob and shook her head. We took a taxi, and all the way to the hospital she sat with her hands over her face, speechlessly rocking back and forth.
35. Smaller
Accident and emergency at Chelsea and Westminster Hospitaclass="underline" cloistered and quiet, full of quickness and slow time, close to but distant from the crawling traffic in the Fulham Road and the rain now making the streets shiny. Sister Melanie Quinn, large and well-built, reminded me of Melencolia, whose face, as I recalled it now, was quite a nice one, friendly even. She drew aside the curtain of the cubicle and there he was, completely submissive to Death.