Mischief (17 page)

‘Look,’ I said, ‘this holiday is supposed to be just the two of us, not Mrs Piper as well. Shall we talk about something else?’

Do not think that the Archduke’s chauffeur was merely careless, an inefficient chauffeur, when he took the wrong turning. He was, I imagine, in a state of shock, fright and confusion. There had been two previous attempts on the Archduke’s life since the cavalcade had entered town. The first was a bomb which got the car in front and killed its driver. The second was a shot, fired by none other than young Princip, which had missed. Princip had vanished into the crowd and gone to sit down in a corner café, where he ordered coffee to calm his nerves. I expect his hand trembled at the best of times – he did have TB. (Not the best choice of assassin, but no doubt those who arrange these things have to make do with what they can get.) The Archduke’s chauffeur panicked, took the wrong road, realized what he’d done, and stopped to await rescue and instructions just, as it happened, outside the café where Princip sat drinking his coffee.

‘What shall we talk about?’ asked Peter, in even less of a good mood.

‘The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire?’ I suggested. ‘How does an Empire collapse? Is there no money to pay the military or the police, so everyone goes home? Or what?’ He liked to be asked questions.

‘The Hungro-Austrian Empire,’ said Peter to me, ‘didn’t so much collapse as fail to exist any more. War destroys social organizations. The same thing happened after World War Two. There being no organizing bodies left between Moscow and London – and for London read Washington, then as now – it was left to these two to put in their own puppet governments. Yalta, 1944. It’s taken the best part of forty-five years for nations of Western and Eastern Europe to remember who they are.’

‘Austro-Hungarian,’ I said, ‘not Hungro-Austrian.’

‘I didn’t say Hungro-Austrian,’ he said.

‘You did,’ I said.

‘Didn’t,’ he said. ‘What the hell are they doing about our wild boar? Are they out in the hills shooting it?’

My sister Clare had been surprisingly understanding about Peter. When I worried about him being older, she pooh-poohed it; when I worried about him being married, she said, ‘Just go for it, sister. If you can unhinge a marriage, it’s ripe for unhinging; it would happen sooner or later; it might as well be you. See a catch, go ahead and catch! Go for it!’

Princip saw the Archduke’s car parked outside, and went for it. Second chances are rare in life: they must be responded to. Except perhaps his second chance was missing in the first place? He could have taken his cue from fate, and just sat and finished his coffee, and gone home to his mother. But what’s a man to do when he loves his country? Fate delivered the Archduke into his hands: how could he resist it? A parked car, a uniformed and medalled chest, the persecutor of his country – how could Princip, believing God to be on his side, not see this as His intervention, push his coffee aside and leap to his feet?

Two waiters stood idly by and watched us waiting for our wild boar. One was young and handsome in a mountainous Bosnian way – flashing eyes, hooked nose, luxuriant black hair, sensuous mouth. He was about my age. He smiled. His teeth were even and white. I smiled back and, instead of the pain in the heart I’d become accustomed to as an erotic sensation, now felt, quite violently, an associated yet different pang which got my lower stomach. The true, the real pain of Ind Aff!

‘Fancy him?’ asked Peter.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I just thought if I smiled the wild boar might come quicker.’

The other waiter was older and gentler: his eyes were soft and kind. I thought he looked at me reproachfully. I could see why. In a world which for once, after centuries of savagery, was finally full of young men, unslaughtered, what was I doing with this man with thinning hair?

‘What are you thinking of?’ Professor Piper asked me. He liked to be in my head.

‘How much I love you,’ I said automatically, and was finally aware how much I lied. ‘And about the Archduke’s assassination,’ I went on, to cover the kind of tremble in my head as I came to my senses, ‘and let’s not forget his wife, she died too – how can you say World War One would have happened anyway? If Princip hadn’t shot the Archduke something else, some undisclosed, unsuspected variable, might have come along and defused the whole political/military situation, and neither World War One nor Two would ever have happened. We’ll just never know, will we?’

I had my passport and my traveller’s cheques with me. (Peter felt it was less confusing if we each paid our own way.) I stood up, and took my raincoat from the peg.

‘Where are you going?’ he asked, startled.

‘Home,’ I said. I kissed the top of his head, where it was balding. It smelt gently of chlorine, which may have come from thinking about his wife so much, but might merely have been because he’d taken a shower that morning. (‘The water all over Yugoslavia, though safe to drink, is unusually highly chlorinated’: guide book.) As I left to catch a taxi to the airport the younger of the two waiters emerged from the kitchen with two piled plates of roasted wild boar, potatoes duchesse, and stewed peppers. (‘Yugoslavian diet is unusually rich in proteins and fats’: guide book.) I could tell from the glisten of oil that the food was no longer hot, and I was not tempted to stay, hungry though I was. Thus fate – or was it Bosnian wilfulness? – confirmed the wisdom of my intent.

And that was how I fell out of love with my professor, in Sarajevo, a city to which I am grateful to this day, though I never got to see much of it, because of the rain.

It was a silly sad thing to do, in the first place, to confuse mere passing academic ambition with love: to try and outdo my sister Clare. (Professor Piper was spiteful, as it happened, and did his best to have my thesis refused, but I went to appeal, which he never thought I’d dare to do, and won. I had a first-class mind after all.) A silly sad episode, which I regret. As silly and sad as Princip, poor young man, with his feverish mind, his bright tubercular cheeks, and his inordinate affection for his country, pushing aside his cup of coffee, leaping to his feet, taking his gun in both hands, planting his feet, aiming and firing – one, two, three shots and starting World War I. The first one missed, the second got the wife (never forget the wife), and the third got the Archduke and a whole generation, and their children, and their children’s children, and on and on for ever. If he’d just hung on a bit, there in Sarajevo that August day, he might have come to his senses. People do, sometimes quite quickly.

1988

You know what it’s like, Miss Jacobs, when you’re having an affair? Forgetting appointments, neglecting children, running off to the hairdresser, having your eyelashes dyed; stopping and staring in mirrors instead of passing by with averted eyes – as if all of a sudden the fact that you’re alive and have a body
matters –
and you’re back with the sense of Mystical Connection. I’m an addict to extra-marital love: an addictive personality: one whiff of a cigarette and I’m off again: a drop of sherry in the Bombe Surprise and I’m out of my skull by dawn.

I can feel your eyebrows shooting up, Miss Jacobs, even though I can’t see them. I have to lie here on this couch, which is a little too hard and rather short. What do your men clients do? Dangle their legs? Or perhaps you only get to see dwarves? I haven’t been to see you for eight weeks. I’d quite forgotten how dreadful it is – talking into space like this.

What you always forget is that just because you’re connected, the object of your love is not necessarily, let alone permanently, so. As if you’d made a telephone call and the other person has spoken for a little and then wandered off, and not hung up, so that not only can’t you speak to them, but you can’t use the phone either, for anyone else –

I know I told you I was going to Alaska, on business. That my employers had sent me on a trip to learn about Alaskan business methods. It was a lie. You mean it sounded
true
?
So unlikely as to be true? Wonderful! Affairs are all lies: one gets really good at them.

I daresay even you have lovers, Miss Jacobs. There’s someone for everyone: somewhere out there are men who will admire the stony bleakness of your regard, the ferocious tugging back of your hair, the toughness of your blemished skin, your unsmiling mouth. I envy you. You couldn’t even begin to pretend: you are all truth and permanence as I am all frivolity and change. I know only the silly side of the coin: what it is to be loved for blonde curls and sulky looks, and that peculiar gift for idiotic discrimination I foster, which certain men find so entrancing. ‘Oh no, I can’t possibly go there, or eat this, or see that!’ With a flick of red fingernail, despising this, adoring that – men love the carry-on, for a while at least: then they get bored.

During the last eight weeks I have gone at least twice a week to the hairdresser. Nothing to prevent me blow-drying my own hair: it’s just at such times you feel the need to be ministered unto. As if it takes a bevy of supporting beauties just to get one woman to meet her lover! As if she carries with her the concentrated energy of women everywhere – their desires, their fulfilment, not just her own. Takes a dozen girls to adorn one bride.

* * *

My stylist Joanna had just come back from New York with tales of high life and a mind generally at the end of its tether. The kind of stories that make you think you’d better defect: that they do things better in Moscow. I can only say that kind of thing to you, Miss Jacobs; husband Roland, well, ex-(possibly) husband Roland, being so politically serious. He married me the better to despise my frivolity. He told me only this morning that in fact he now despises me so thoroughly he is obliged to divorce me: I’ll telephone home – home? – when I’ve finished this session with you and if there’s an answer he hasn’t left and he’s still my husband, and if there isn’t, he’s gone and he’s not. Never a dull moment. I’ve been putting off calling home or ex-home all day. It’s all right if you keep moving and keep talking – it’s only with stillness and silence that the panic sets in.

Now what Joanna said – her hair is so long she can sit on it, though I can’t think why she’d want to – was that in New York cannibalism is all the rage. Not whole people –
parts
of people; amputated limbs and so forth. At least I hope that’s what she said. I do have this incapacity sometimes to hear what is actually being spoken. In retrospect, I can hardly have been hearing with any accuracy what Anton – that’s my love, my lover: that is to say, my love, my ex-lover as from precisely seven days ago – was saying, or the end of the affair would not have been quite so unexpected; from bed to nothing in ten swift minutes. Anyway, according to Joanna, human flesh, either discarded bits of body, or – I suppose we have to face it – whole bodies, and tender young bodies at that, especially acquired for the occasion in some appalling and unthinkable fashion, are selling in New York for $2,000 a pound, and served stewed at all the best parties. And the other currently fashionable epicurean delicacy, Joanna says, is the brains of living monkeys, eaten with special long-handled silver teaspoons. Just tether your monkey and slice off the top of its skull and there you are.

I tried not to think about it. I thought about Anton instead, about wrapping my legs round his thin body and pleasuring him as he pleasured me. About a curl here and a streak there and whether a fringe is really what I need: if the hair is back from the face the character may indeed show, but was it character Anton wanted? I doubted it. And, when it came to it, what he wanted was a space in his head filled; some little wounded part made good, some little chilliness warmed. He had fun with the small words that indicated love, concern, possession, even permanence: he liked me to listen to them. He knew, I fear, that I was waiting and hoping for them –

And I? I wanted everything. I can’t help it. Men run away from me in droves, as others come running towards me. I am the far end of the swimming pool: the side you have to touch before turning and swimming back. As fast as you can towards: as fast as you can away.

Doesn’t it frighten you, Miss Jacobs, to think how soon we’re going to die? No, nothing frightens you, because your heart is pure, your soul is good.

Monkeys’ brains and long silver teaspoons. Shall I describe Anton to you? His beautiful haggard face, his lean body, his brilliant eyes, his quicksilver mind, his charm? Dear God, his worldly importance! Anton never walked if he could run. Yet I’m sure his wife saw him with more accuracy than I ever did: she would see him as I see Roland; as sheer living, walking, snoring, predictable, day-to-day folly. She would see in Anton a man re-running, decade after decade, without any alteration but with much surface embellishment, five glorious years of youth. A man for ever between twenty-eight and thirty-three, as life and event rolled by. Yes, of course, Miss Jacobs, he had a
wife.
Has a wife. Why are you surprised? Men like Anton have wives. In this brave new cannibalistic world of ours, all proper men are married, all proper women too. It’s our prudence, our reality, our safe familiarity while we nibble and guzzle the private parts of comparative strangers. Oh strange new wondrous delicacies!

I try to forget amputated limbs at $2,000 a pound; I try to forget the monkeys’ brains, as I try to forget, as my husband can’t, the missiles gathering, forget the whole frightening insanity of the world. I try to relish only this: the conjunction of man with woman, in the face of common sense and decency.

I tell you I loved him, Miss Jacobs: it is how I sanctified disgrace: how I justified the dangerous absurdity of our behaviour: this running through the machine of a different and forbidden tape. I set up this terrible, painful affair, the little short-lived merry haphazard affair, as an actual alternative, an actual radical alternative, Miss Jacobs, and not as the optional extra that Anton saw it to be. I took it seriously. It was my escape route from death.

* * *

And yet how many times have I not myself seen my accomplice in sex as an optional extra, the affair as a trivial in-and-out relationship, when the man has believed it to be world-shaking, shattering and permanent. Ah, the biter bit!