Mantissa (17 page)

“And you out of one of them.”

“For which you’ve played us every kind of mean, vindictive trick ever since.”

“Something you innocent, lily-white, notoriously non-violent men would know nothing about.”

“Until you taught us.”

“Don’t stop. Feel free. The massed ranks of certified male paranoia are standing right behind you.”

He stretches a finger at the door. “I’ll tell you something else. If you were Cleopatra, your Cypriot aunt, and Helen of Troy all rolled into one, and standing there now, I wouldn’t touch you with a bargepole.”

“You needn’t worry. I’d rather be raped by a band of orangutans.”

“That doesn’t surprise me one bit.”

“I’ve met some contemptible –”

“And poor bloody orangutans.”

There is a silence.

“If you imagine for a moment that you’re going to get away with this…”

“And if you think I wouldn’t rather be analphabetic than ever stuck in the same room with you again…”

“If you crawled from here to eternity I’d never forgive you.”

“And if you crawled all the way back, nor would I.”

“I
hate
you.”

“Not half as much as I hate you.”

“Oh no you can’t. I can hate as a woman.”

“Who can’t hold the same idea in her head five minutes running.”

“Oh yes she can. With shits like you.”

Suddenly he smiles, puts his hands in the pockets of the bathrobe, and sits up again on the bed.

“I know your game, my dear woman.”

“Don’t you
dare
call me your dear woman!”

“I know perfectly well why you’ve really gone invisible.” There is a silence. He makes a mocking little beckoning sign. “Come on. You know you can’t resist an apple. Even though you’re only an archetype.” The silence continues, but at last the voice speaks curtly from the door.

“Why?”

“Because if you weren’t invisible, I’d have you around” – he raises it –
“my
little finger again in less than five minutes.”

There is a moment’s pregnant silence; and then there comes from the door a sound beyond the capacities of mere alphabet (Greek or English) to transcribe; an
urrgh
or
arrgh,
but at the same time both deeper and more high-pitched, of a throat being slowly cut, of a soul being scorched, of an endurance stretched beyond endurance, an agony beyond agony. It is close, and yet seems also to come from the furthest depths of the universe, from some ultimate and innermost core of animate being, and suffering, within it. To any third listener, especially to one familiar with the less happy theory of the nature of the cosmos – that is, that it must one day fall in on itself out of sheer horror at its own asininely repetitive futility – it must have seemed a deeply fitting, and indeed moving, noise. But the man on the bed in the grey-quilted room is clearly no more than rather cynically amused by this cross between a moan and a death-rattle that he has evoked.

What might then have followed… but what does come is a much more banal sound, though completely unexpected. There is suddenly a whirring, a clicking of ratchets and escapements from the hitherto supposedly silenced cuckoo clock on the wall in the corner. It is clearly premonitory, despite its distinctly absurd and busy length, of some major announcement. It comes at last, the little Swiss oracle from the wooden machine, and cries its miraculous message.

At the very first cuckoo, Dr. Delfie is visible again. She stands in her white tunic by the door, her hands only an inch or two from where they have evidently been clasping her head in a frenzy of despair. But now already she is glancing at the clock in the corner with an expression of amazed delight, as a child might on hearing the end-of-lesson bell; by the second cuckoo she has turned to look at Miles Green, who has risen from the bed, and is impulsively reaching his hands towards her; by the third, the pair are respectively running and striding across the old rose carpet; and by a fourth cuckoo, had there been one, they are impacted in each other’s arms.

“Oh darling.”

“My darling.”

“Darling.”

“Darling.”

“Darling.”

“Oh my darling.”

These somewhat cuckoolike words and phrases lack the pleasing rhythm and swiftness of the true and experienced voice in the clock; and take far longer to be said than to be read, since they come more like gasps for air than words, and from among a series of fevered, straining, seemingly insatiable kisses. At last she turns her head away, though the two bodies remain as tightly clinging, and speaks more coherently.

“I thought it had stopped.”

“I know.”

“Oh Miles, it seemed forever.”

“I know… I honestly didn’t mean a single –”

“Darling, I know. It was all my fault.”

“I was just as bad.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“Darling.”

“Oh darling.”

“I love you.”

“So do I.”

“For God’s sake make the door vanish.”

“Yes, yes.”

She turns her head and looks back at it. The door vanishes; and once again they are kissing; then collapsing to the carpet.

“Oh you poor angel, look how big – no stop, let me, you’ll tear the buttons.”

There is a silence.

“Oh you darling, you darling…”

Another silence.

“You’re such a monster, I love it when you…”

Another silence. And now something else strange begins to happen, although the pair on the old rose carpet are too self-occupied to notice it. A stealthy opacity begins to suffuse the grey and quilted walls. It soon becomes apparent that they are rapidly and quite unaccountably losing texture and substance, all solidity. Instead of cloth and padding they become, as it were, a fog at dusk; and in, or through, this mist there now appear surreal shapes, movements, like shadows seen through heavily frosted glass; or like the murky oceanic depths, through the porthole of a bathysphere.

“Oh that’s so nice. Do it again.”

Another silence.

“Oh Miles, I think I’m going to die.”

Another, and very brief, silence.

“No don’t stop, don’t stop…”

If their eyes had only been open, they would have seen that the treacherous walls, in what seems a crescendo timed to their actions, have changed even further, into a now quite transparent plate glass, which bars nothing but sound. And horror of horrors, on all sides of this room become glass box, or oblong greenhouse, there now appear, in a night denied only by the dim light from within the room, broken phalanxes of the sick and their tenders: patients in dressing-gowns, nurses male and female, cleaners, porters, doctors, specialists, staff of all kinds: who on all but one side edge closer, until their first ranks press, ghostly faces outside an aquarium, against the transparent wall. And there they watch, with a sad and silent concupiscence, as the dispossessed contemplate the possessed; or the starving, at a restaurant window, the fed and feeding. The only thing private, still left sacrosanct, is the word. Not that words are now being sounded inside that room, but only broken fragments of alphabet.

Outside, a yard from where the door has been, stands the implacable and formidable figure of the bespectacled staff sister, on whose face appears neither hunger nor concupiscence, but merely some psychological corollary of the starch in her uniform. On every side the serried faces; but around her, an emptiness, as a drop of antiseptic in a culture dish will distance an otherwise spreading bacillus. No eyes seem more magnetized by what is being enacted. They watch with an intensity that glistens. Only once do they shift their gaze, to deliver malign and lightning glances at the walls of mute faces to left and right and opposite. So might an avaricious theatre manager size his house, or a brothel madam her night’s clientele. She sees, as she threatened; but inside a mind that can only see, and never feel.

It is done; and now the oblivious pair lie slumped, in an unconscious reprise of their position after the first and clinical coupling; the patient on his back, his doctor lying half across him, her head couched on his shoulder; but on this occasion with their hands affectionately clasped, the fingers interlaced. The silent audience watch a few moments more, but then suddenly, as if bored by this immobility, this cessation of action, turn shufflingly away and recede into the limboic shadows. Only the sister stands firm. She folds her plump arms and remains staring, as if weaker souls may fade away, but she, she shall never fail in her duty to snoop, to judge, to hate and reprehend the flesh.

Too much, even for walls. With a hundred times the speed with which they have become clear, a reverse metamorphosis takes place. The sister is caught by surprise, stumbles forward, is glimpsed for a moment with her outraged, thwarted face and hands pressed against the clouding glass, as if she will break through rather than be thus balked of her prey. In vain: in barely ten seconds the grey quilting, the warm walls of protective, if somewhat monotonously uniform, schoolgirl breasts have returned, after their temporary aberration, to their original state. All external is once again excluded.

M
ILES
Green opens his eyes and stares up at the domed and cerebral ceiling, thinking not, if the truth be known and some shred of plausible male psychology preserved, of the eternally beautiful, passionate, granting and granted young Greek goddess he holds in his arms, but whether, if one was doing the unthinkable and trying to describe the ceiling of pendent grey breastlets in words, accuracy could justify the use of the distinctly rare word
mocarabesque;
which leads him to think of the Alhambra, and thence of Islam. He kisses the hair of the houri beside him.

“Darling, well done. That was interesting.”

She kisses his shoulder. “For me too, darling.”

“Perhaps not quite the most interesting yet, but…”

She kisses his shoulder again. “Definite possibilities.”

“You were really super today in some of the rallies.”

“So were you, darling.”

“Seriously?”

“Your new backhand smash about paying me a fee.”

“Pure reflex.”

“It was sweet.” She kisses his shoulder. “I adored it. I could have killed you on the spot.”

He smiles, staring at the ceiling, and draws her a shade closer.

“Clever Dr. Delfie.”

“Clever Miles Green.”

“It was your idea.”

“I could never have brought it off alone, darling. I’ve been waiting all my life for someone like you.”

He kisses her hair. “I still remember that evening so vividly. When you first came.”

“Do you, darling?”

“There I was, tapping away on that ridiculous typewriter.”

“Crossing out nine words in every ten.”

“Stuck with that wretched heroine.”

“Darling, she just wasn’t me. I was only being cruel to be kind.”

He pats her back. “Then there
you
were, in the flesh, sitting on the edge of my desk.”

“While you almost fell off your chair in surprise.”

“Who wouldn’t. When a dazzling creature like you drops out of thin air. And then says she’s come to make a proposition.”

She leans up on an elbow, grinning down at him.

“To which you said, Who the devil do you think you are?”

“I was a bit taken aback.”

“And when I told you, you said, Don’t be absurd, I’ve never seen you before in my life.” She stoops and brushes the tip of his nose with her mouth. “You were so funny.”

“I honestly couldn’t believe it. Until you said you were sick to death of hiding behind imaginary women. Then I did begin to realize we were on the same wave-length.”

“Because you were equally sick of imagining them.”

He smiles up at her. “You still do that bit beautifully. Great conviction.”

“It comes from the heart.”

He kisses the inside of her wrist. “It was so marvelous to find someone who understood at last.”

She looks demurely down. “Darling, who else, if not me?”

“How sick one gets of writing – and even sicker of being forced to publish it.”

She smiles tenderly at him, and prompts. “And so…?”

“If we could only find some absolutely impossible…”

“Unwritable…”

“Unfinishable…”

“Unimaginable…”

“Endlessly revisable…”

“Text without words…”

“We could both be our real selves at last.”

She bends and kisses him. “And finally?”

He stares at the ceiling, as if the splendid moment of ultimate discovery is present again.

“The curse of fiction.”

“Which is?”

“All those boring stretches between the sexy bits.” He looks into her eyes. “That was the clincher for me. I knew we were made for each other then.”

She sinks against his shoulder again. “I’ve forgotten what I did next.”

“You said, My God, then why are we waiting?”

“Oh Miles, I wasn’t as shameless as that.”

“You jolly well were.”

“Darling, I hadn’t been had as my real self for almost seventeen centuries. Ever since those beastly Christians. All those other writers I dragged in just now – they never got within a mile of the real me. You are truly the first since… I can’t even remember his name. I just couldn’t wait a minute more.” She sighs. “Have you had that poor little ottoman mended?”

“I’ve kept it broken-legged as a memento.”

“Darling, how sweet of you.”

“The least I could do.”

She kisses his shoulder. For a moment or two they lie in the closest silence, on the old rose carpet. Then he touches down the smooth-skinned back, warm ivory, to her waist and pulls her a little closer.

“I bet they did really.”

She shakes her head. “I was always hiding behind someone else.”

“Like the Dark Lady.” He kisses her hair. “You never mentioned that before.”

“It wasn’t a very happy relationship, actually.”