First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (21 page)

On one other occasion after that night, I tried to get him to talk about himself. It wasn’t long before his death.

“Believe me, Andrew,” he said. “The only interesting thing that ever happened in my life was meeting your mother.”

I understood then that she was the love of his life: his ideal. He must have been quite wrong about her, for she was a woman of flesh and blood. But clearly she had never disappointed him, even by dying. Or perhaps her death had ensured he’d never be disappointed in her.

One significant thing happened during my first summer in Camberloo, though I didn’t realize it at the time. I used to walk to the Xanadu in the morning: about two miles. It was such a pleasure, everything was still so new to me: the blue jays and the cardinals that flew among the old trees of
the suburban houses; the squirrels whose sharp little eyes reminded me of Doctor Giffen’s.

I used to take a short cut along a brief avenue to the main road. One morning as I was walking that way, I was admiring one of the more impressive houses: it was white with four pillars in front. I noticed the curtains moving at one of the upstairs windows, as though someone had been watching me and had shut them quickly when I looked up.

For the rest of the summer I walked that way, and several other times the same thing happened as I passed the house. Once or twice, I caught a glimpse of a hand pulling the curtain together. Once, I even thought I saw a face. Perhaps if Doctor Giffen and I had talked more, I might have mentioned what I’d seen. If I had, I might have been spared a great deal of suffering later on.

“I
HEARD YOU SHOUTING
out during the night,” Doctor Giffen said.

This was at breakfast one morning after a heavy snowfall. I’d had a bad nightmare and forced myself awake, at about three in the morning. I knew I’d made some noise, and hoped he hadn’t heard.

His little eyes were on me, unblinking. He put his hand up and straightened the knot of his tie: he wore his tie and his jacket even at breakfast. The smell of his cologne still hadn’t faded much.

“It’s not the first time,” he said. “You’ve been living here
for more than a year, and I’ve heard you quite often. I’m a light sleeper.”

I fussed with my cornflakes. But he wouldn’t let up.

“I suppose it’s nightmares?” he asked. “Have you been having nightmares? They must be very frightening.”

I prepared myself for the interrogation. Perhaps I would have explained to him that I’d had them under control for years, but that occasionally they were too strong for me. That in my nightmares I was still a boy: not a grown man who might have been able to withstand the terror.

But no interrogation came.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t ask you to tell me about them. Some of my patients insist on telling their dreams and their nightmares. Quite boring really. I don’t place much stock in that sort of thing. Perhaps their fellow dreamers enjoy hearing about them.”

He sipped his coffee, and became confessional.

“Do you know, Andrew? I’ve never had a single dream in all my life. I used to think it was bound to happen, but it never did. I can imagine what it must be like. But I’ve never actually had a dream myself.”

I was surprised at this revelation. “I thought everyone had dreams,” I said. “What happens when you fall asleep?”

“Nothing much,” he said. “It’s quite like an anaesthetic. One minute I’m awake, then the alarm goes off and it’s time to be up and doing something. It’s refreshing, really, that period of nothingness, whatever it is. I like it.”

“But I thought not to dream was unnatural,” I said.

He smiled a tight little smile at that word. I tried to apologize.

“No, no.” He shook his head. “You’re quite right, of course.” He sipped again at his coffee and looked past me out the window where snow lay thick on the lawn and the
branches of the evergreens. “Your mother once said she felt sorry for me—not to have had dreams. She said it explained a lot about me.” He looked back at me. “She said she wouldn’t hold it against me.”

I thought: How right she was. And perhaps that was why he was so hard to talk to.

“Yes, she felt sorry for me,” he said. “But I don’t envy people their dreams. I can’t conceive what it must be like to live in that kind of anarchy all night long, then wake up and have to deal with the realities of life with any conviction during the day.” He finished his coffee and put his cup carefully back in the saucer. “If someone offered to show me how to do it—to dream, I mean—I shouldn’t have any hesitation at all in saying: ‘No thank you.’ ”

We lived together four years. He had a professional life that involved meetings with other doctors; and he made occasional trips to medical conferences. He had no social life I knew of, and no women friends. Often I’d catch him standing in front of that photograph over the fireplace, looking as contented as any man in love.

He died quite suddenly after a severe stroke. He’d left instructions for one of his colleagues—a surgeon by the name of Stevenson—to be called to the house within hours of his being pronounced dead. Doctor Stevenson arrived in due course. He was a little round man, nattily dressed like Doctor Giffen. From the way he talked, they must have got along well together.

The body was laid out in Doctor Giffen’s bedroom. Stevenson looked it over briefly, then spoke to me.

“Did he tell you why he wanted me to come here?” he said.

I said I’d no idea.

“He wanted his throat to be slit,” he said. “Just to make
sure he was really dead. He made me promise to perform the procedure.”

He had a medical bag with him which he laid on the bed. He took out a green apron and gloves. I could see the scalpels underneath.

“There shouldn’t be any mess. The heart’s been stopped for hours and the blood will have congealed. I’ll just sever the two carotids.” He started to prepare. “Would you like to stay and watch me do it?” he said to me. “It’ll only take a few seconds.”

“No, thank you,” I said. And I left quickly. I must admit I was astonished at Doctor Giffen’s bizarre last request. I realized just how superficially I’d known him. Or how little he himself wanted to be known.

The funeral was brief and formal: his body was incinerated, as he requested. He left me everything: the house, a substantial amount of money. And a little box of cyanide pills he’d shown me a year before his death.

“In my profession,” he’d said to me, “I see too much unnecessary suffering.” He’d intended to take one of the pills if his death was a lingering one. But he died instantly, without the need of them.

I appreciated all he’d done for me, but I didn’t miss him very much. After his death, I realized that trying to think of something to say to him during breakfast and dinner had always been a strain. That and the fact that even before he died I was having more than the usual trouble with nightmares, and the sleeplessness that went along with them made solitude seem better to me.

With the money I inherited, I bought the Xanadu Travel Agency. I left the running of it to Lila Trapper, a middle-aged blonde who’d worked there for years. Her two eyes were of different colours—the right one green and the left
one blue—so it was always disconcerting to look into them. She was a good worker, and I kept out of her way, spending only an hour or two each day in the office.

The house in Woodsides was too big for me. I sold it. I took some of the furniture and other odds and ends, including the photograph of my parents, and moved into an apartment next to Camberloo Park.

I
F
I
WERE AN OBSERVER
, writing about Andrew Halfnight, what could I say about the next period of his life? That it appeared humdrum and boring? That at times he gave the impression his physical being was just a burden to be dragged from one unexciting day to the next?

Indeed, it’s not at all hard for me to think of those years as though I were somehow disconnected from them: a spectator watching my own life. My nightmares had become so frequent and so terrifying they took a heavy emotional toll: all I wanted in my waking life was dullness. The lack of sleep wore me down, so my relationships with women never amounted to anything. Who would want to spend any time with a man who always seemed apathetic—even though I liked to think I was just exhausted.

I kept going daily to the Xanadu. The office was in the basement of Camberloo Square, and I made myself go in for a couple of hours most weekday mornings, just to keep in touch. Though I didn’t really need to, Lila Trapper ran it so efficiently. I’d usually stay in the back office, out of the way. But sometimes, if Lila and her assistants were busy, I’d be obliged to deal with clients, though it was obvious they’d have preferred someone else.

So, it was a relief to Lila when I’d go travelling. And in the early years of my ownership I travelled a good deal, mainly in
Central America. I loved to visit the ancient ruins of Chichen Itza, for example, or Tulum: I’d escape from the guided tours and find a quiet place to sit and think about all the people who once lived there, gone and forgotten. And I loved to wander round the crowded cities where the language and the culture were incomprehensible to me. In a strange way, I felt at home: my sense of alienation was justified.

Then, one February five years after Doctor Giffen’s death, I spent a few days on the island of Santo Lobito, checking it out as a possible vacation resort for Xanadu clients: Lila trusted me to do that. The island had only a few hotels at that time and I stayed in one just outside the city: the Hotel Cortez. It was old and luxurious with a private beach and acres of gardens smelling of spices and exotic fruits.

But I didn’t spend much time in the hotel. The city attracted me. It was ancient for the New World, with its ornate sixteenth-century cathedral, its crumbling palaces and its teeming alleys. Tourists were discouraged from wandering alone for fear of pickpockets or even kidnappers. Beggars with empty eye-sockets, with limbs deformed, with pocky faces were everywhere.

One afternoon, I was prowling the city looking for something to read. That wasn’t easy, for the island hadn’t a single bookstore. Often, however, tourists would leave books behind in the hotels, and those books would soon appear on street-vendors’ stalls in the city. I came across one of these stalls in my walk, and began examining the books on it. I noticed that the corners of all of them looked as though something had been nibbling at them. Any time I opened the pages, little black specks fell out.

The vendor had been watching me, so I looked at him inquiringly and shook one of the books so that a shower of specks fell from it.

“
Ratas
,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

I didn’t need a translator.

Another of the street-vendors told me that the city’s indoor market—the Mercado—must surely have a large selection of books, so I went there. It was in the oldest part of the city: a hulking wart of a building at the centre of a maze of narrow streets. The entranceway was at the top of some broad steps strewn with beggars. Guards with machine-guns stood on either side of the doors.

The smell inside the Mercado was bad, but at least the place was relatively quiet after the chaos of the streets. Upstairs was the meat market: I could hear the hum of the air-conditioners at work up there. Down here, there was no air conditioning: only the heat and the smell.

I wandered from stall to stall, accosted on all sides by small, anxious men and women trying to interest me in their merchandise. But I didn’t want guitars, statues of the virgin, golden earrings, ponchos, flick-knives or any of the usual artifacts. I wanted books.

I struggled my way round the entire labyrinth, sweating. Every time I passed a stairwell leading upstairs, I could hear the air conditioning from the meat market. I envied those who shopped up there. But I had come to find books. I found none.

At last I was back at the main entranceway. The sound of the air conditioning from upstairs attracted my attention again. I thought perhaps some astute bookseller might have managed to set up his stall in the cool up there. So I went up the stairs.

The humming became louder and louder, and the smell was so thick it caught in my throat. I got to the top landing and looked around. I saw immediately that I’d completely misunderstood about the air-conditioning system. I could see the entire area, windowless and dimly lit—and
a hundred stalls all selling meat. There was no air conditioning. The source of the noise was the flies: countless millions of flies. They were everywhere, coating the walls, the ceiling. The meat was under constant attack from swirling hordes of them, buzzing angrily at the vendors who swiped at them with sombreros and rolled-up papers so that buyers could examine the meat.

I saw all of this for only a few seconds before I hurried back downstairs and out into the stifling air. But that awful smell was still inside of me as I barged my way along the streets, trying not to vomit. Eventually I got out of the old city and back to the Cortez. But the humming noise and the bad smell stayed with me all that night, and became part of my nightmares.