‘About time we saw you down here,’ said Mr Kidd. He offered his hand. ‘Bob Kidd. I’m in the room next to yours.’
‘Hello,’ said Christopher, looking up. And then, on seeing the hand and feeling flustered and polite, ‘I’m Christopher.’ He took the hand. The shake was firm, so firm he felt himself rising, just a little, from his chair. Mr Kidd lifted the air behind his trousers as if he were wearing a morning suit and settled into the seat beside Christopher’s. He seemed trim and energetic, youthfully old, with a beard-bordered redness to his face suggestive of whiskey and Sunday walks.
‘Not a bad old place, this,’ said Mr Kidd. ‘Been a regular for twenty years. This your first time?’
Christopher looked at his article as if the answer might be found there.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘What are you reading up on, then?’
‘It’s research,’ said Christopher. ‘For my thesis.’
‘A thesis, eh? What’s the subject?’
‘History of science.’
‘History!’ declared Mr Kidd. ‘What’s it about, then? In a nutshell.’
‘Oh,’ said Christopher, ‘I don’t want to bore you. It’s very boring. Not to me, of course, but to anyone who isn’t me. Sometimes to me.’ The thought that other people might want to talk with him about his thesis always filled him, against his will, with a grateful excitement.
‘What else am I here for? Go on, bore me.’
‘All right, then. Actually it’s about eighteenth-century medical models. The anatomical models they’d make — of pregnant women, for example, obstetrical models — to teach students and train surgeons. In the eighteenth century.’
‘Oh ho,’ said Mr Kidd, a look of delight on his face. ‘Oh ho,’ he said. ‘I don’t know much about obstetrics, though I’ve seen two children into the world, but I know a little something about models.’ He fixed Christopher with an intimate eye. ‘If you’ve got a minute I could show you quite a model.’
Was this what Christopher had feared, hurrying through the lobby of the St George Hotel, his chin tucked into his nervous collar? An invitation from a man like Mr Kidd, both blatant and disguised, more sad than it was awful? His experiences of seduction had been avid and unvarying; in contrast to this, they took on a new cast of yellow-lit tenderness, as if they had happened long before and were unrepeatable.
‘I’m very busy,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. So much to read. But thank you.’
Mr Kidd maintained a smile around which the eagerness of his face shrank. He was obviously offended. His invitation had been friendly and too quickly refused. There was a genuine model of some kind — a train, or plane, or a luxury car, a coveted Bugatti convertible that could only ever be owned in miniature.
‘Not to worry. Give me a knock if you ever fancy a chat. Door’s always open.’
Mr Kidd stood abruptly, confused at this failure; there was a collapsing of something, a crowding in of age or exhaustion. His disappointment revealed his years: over eighty. He smoothed down the tails of his invisible suit and persisted with his smile. A keen crowd of old men watched the termination of the exchange from all corners. Christopher worried that he might have humiliated this man in front of his lounge cronies and would now be responsible for a disastrous slip in the social ranks. There was that volatile feeling common to gatherings of this kind on public holidays, suggestive of a public execution.
‘Thank you,’ Christopher bleated to Mr Kidd’s departing figure, which waved a hand about and moved toward the lobby.
Christopher spent a minute or two confused himself, and unable to concentrate, before calming down enough to remind himself that he owed nothing to Mr Kidd, whom he now connected with the cough in the next-door room, and that his aim in this city was to lead a simple life of research, seven days a week, until he could return home with new material and nothing else to report. Settled by these thoughts, he returned to reading.
But the article on Christopher’s lap spoke with intelligent fury of the violence toward women represented by the obstetrical models that were, as he described them, his ‘intellectual bread and butter’; he grew ashamed and embarrassed in the lounge of the St George. From a distance — the distance of a few chairs away, by the tea and coffee table, where men continued to sweeten their cups with irregularly shaped lumps of sugar — he was sure the images accompanying his article must look obscene. He had become a man reading pornography in a hotel lounge. How long did it take to clean a room? Should he finish his tea, cold by now, before leaving the lounge, and where would he put his cup? Should he take it with him? His anxiety was something like the rolling pressure required to remove the shell of a hard-boiled egg. He sat in his chair with his cold tea and his dirty article, more and more of his composure flaking away; eventually he reached the same point of false bravado that had first led him to the lounge. He stood with purpose, gathered his things, and carried his cup with him into the lobby, nervously sipping the air. The doors of the lift stood open and he stepped through them with a sideways motion, pressing the ‘Close Doors’ button before selecting his floor. Fifth floor. He rose toward his room with a sensation of heavenly ascent. Stepping from the lift he could see his door still open, half the vacuum tube sticking out into the windowless hallway. He imagined a maid in crisis, called from her duty by a family emergency, and in his agitation permitted himself to pour his cold tea into a plant pot; at the same time he heard a voice calling, ‘Knock! Knock! Knock!’ The voice came from behind Mr Kidd’s door. ‘Knock! Knock! Knock!’
Christopher knocked.
Mr Kidd opened the door and took Christopher’s empty cup from him with one fluid movement. It was as if he’d been privy to Christopher’s concerns; as if he’d known that Christopher was worried, was ascending, was standing outside the door with a cup in his hands. Mr Kidd threw the cup into the air, where it described a graceful arc over the bed before landing in his wastepaper basket. A pair of shoes already occupied this receptacle.
‘Christopher,’ said Mr Kidd, with outstretched arms, and he ushered his guest into the room. It was the reverse of Christopher’s not only in the arrangement of the furniture but also in its clutter, the disorder of which suggested long tenancy: piles of boxes, magazines thick-edged on these boxes, sloped stacks of books, a dish rack above the basin, a hat stand on which shirts and jackets perched on wire hangers, with the wardrobe itself taped shut, and a birdcage in the corner by the air-conditioning unit. The bird in the cage cried, ‘Knock!’ It shook its blue and black and white feathers against the bars and swung, one-legged, on its swing.
‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ said Mr Kidd.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ said Christopher. ‘I wanted to know — has the maid been to you yet?’
‘You mean Lori? She has, she has. Sit down.’ And he straightened out a stack of magazines on a low chair, so that Christopher understood he was to sit on them. He placed his papers on top of the pile and sat. The chair rocked a little against the floor, the bird’s beak darted among its seeds, Mr Kidd sat genially on the end of his bed. At Christopher’s feet, folded handkerchiefs filled a shoebox.