Pilgrim (8 page)

“Well, I say
mad
and I say
crazy
when
mad
and
crazy
pertain. And right now, I think
you
are
mad.”
Furtwängler stood up. “Good God,” he said. “We have him here only two days and he tries to kill himself again.”

“It’s in the nature of his nature,” said Jung. “Apparently.”

“There you go again!
Apparently!
’ What does apparently mean in Pilgrim’s case. You’ve barely met him.”

“I take what I’m given,” said Jung. “I take what they have to offer. He offered slit wrists. So?”

“So leave him alone and leave him to me.”

“Then why did you ask me here? And Archie Menken. Why did you ask us here?”

Furtwängler wanted to kick himself and say:
because I’m stupid
—but instead, he said: “I don’t know. I suppose for the old-fashioned reason that another physician’s opinion might be useful. I should have known better. Especially given my experience over time with you.”

“I wish you didn’t feel that way.”

“I have to, don’t I. You’ve given me no choice, Carl Gustav.”

“And so?”

“And so I shall have to ask you not to have contact with Mister Pilgrim until further notice.”

Having said this, Furtwängler turned away and went to the door between the two rooms, where he lingered briefly and then said over his shoulder: “good morning to you,” after which he left.

“Good morning,” Jung replied—but only in a whisper. When he heard the outer doors shut, he turned back towards the windows. Then he sat down and looked at his hands.
I have the hands of a peasant,
he thought.
A peasant’s hands—and a peasant’s blundering ways.

Less than a minute later, Kessler returned and told
him that Mister Pilgrim would be kept in the infirmary for the rest of the day.

“Any serious damage done?” Jung asked.

“Not of any permanent nature, though it seems he cut fairly deep for a man with nothing but a spoon. It’s mostly they want to keep an eye on him. I met Doctor Furtwängler in the hall just now and he said he was going to check on him.”

“Yes.”

“If you’ll excuse me, then,” said Kessler, “I’ll do a bit of cleaning up in the bathroom.”

“Of course.”

Jung remained in Pilgrim’s bedroom, wandering with apparent aimlessness from bed to bureau to desk—inspecting the surfaces with a careless finger, as if checking for the presence or absence of dust. At the bureau, he paused long enough to open and close the drawers one by one, leafing through the handkerchiefs, the shirts, the underclothes, the neatly folded cravats and foulards.

Clearly, Pilgrim was a man of wealth. He also had discerning standards—quality making up for quantity. As with most who are born to a world where grace and wealth go hand in hand, the concept of having more than one needed was vulgar—if not indecent. Laid out beneath Jung’s inquiring fingers were shirts that would last for ten or fifteen years, so long as the owner’s girth did not increase. Their collars would be a different story, and handkerchiefs, of course, could not be expected to last so long, nor stockings. Simple and serviceable underclothes such as he found could
last perhaps three or four years. Ties are for forever.

Forever.
Why had this word occurred and recurred in his mind this day?
Forever. Forever.
Not last week. Not yesterday. But only today:
forever.

Well…

He gazed again at the woman’s face in the silver frame. She had the look of another age and style—of twenty, even thirty years ago, before the century turned. And who was she in mourning for—a dead child—her husband? Perhaps herself?

In the bathroom, Kessler was collecting Pilgrim’s discarded clothing and preparing it for the laundry.

“Funny,” he said to Jung as he came out to the bed and began to sort through the pile, “how the clothes thrown off by a suicide seem somehow to be soiled. I dressed him this morning and I know that every bit of this was freshly laundered when he put it on. While my fingers know it is clean, some instinct tells me it is not.”

“That’s what you call
an atavistic reaction,
Kessler,” Jung said. “Same as any child—even a baby—would know a viper is dangerous. But Mister Pilgrim has not committed suicide. He is still alive.”

“Yes, well…” said Kessler. “Them as tries and fails will try again. That’s my experience of it, anyway. Yours, too, Doctor—I should think.”

“Yes. I admit it. Mister Pilgrim will more than likely try again.”

Kessler held Pilgrim’s discarded shirt in front of him, stretching its cream-coloured arms to the limit. Wings.

“Not a small man, is he.”

“No. He certainly towers over me. Let me see that, would you.”

Jung put his hand out and Kessler passed him the shirt. “It is what they call Egyptian cotton,” he said. “Soft as a baby’s kiss.”

Jung held it up to his nose.

Kessler said: “if I might say so, sir, that seems a funny sort of thing to do. To smell another man’s shirt.”

“Lemons,” said Jung. “It smells of lemons. Lemons and something else…”

He threw the shirt back to Kessler, who tested its scent and said: “lemons. Yes. He wears a sort of toilet water. Pats it on his cheeks when I’ve shaved him. You’ll find it in the bathroom.”

Jung went through the door and found the bottle above the sink on a marble shelf. It had a round glass stopper. Its label was grey and written in English.

Penhaligon’s of London,
he read.
By Appointment to His Majesty, King Edward VII, Perfumers.

And underneath, in scroll-like print, he deciphered:
Blenheim Bouquet.

Jung removed the stopper and sniffed.
Lemons. Oranges. Limes and moss. And perhaps a touch of rosemary…

“There was a woman here this morning,” he said. “In the reception room with Doctor Furtwängler…” He tipped the bottle and wet his finger end with the contents. “Would you happen to know who she was?”

“That would be Lady Quartermaine,” said Kessler.
“I recognized her motor car. She brought Mister Pilgrim from London yesterday.”

Jung reappeared in the doorway.

Kessler was standing beside the armoire, hanging up the tweed jacket. There was a clothes brush in his hand.

“Quartermaine, you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then she must wear it, too—this scent. I could smell it on Doctor Furtwängler when he came into the hall.”

Kessler turned from the armoire with a shocked expression on his face. “I don’t know what you’re saying, sir. The notion is inconceivable.” He gave the jacket a final swipe with the brush and closed the door.

“No, no, no,” said Jung, and laughed. “I’m not suggesting they embraced. Nothing of the kind. It is just that I have the nose of a bloodhound. Lady Quarter-maine must have shaken Furtwängler’s hand. I could smell it on his fingers.”

“Well. That certainly is a talent, sir. I’m amazed.”

“Do you know where Lady Quartermaine might be staying?”

“At the Hôtel Baur au Lac, sir. I heard it being said.”

“Thank you.”

Jung was making for the corridor.

“Doctor?”

Jung turned.

“Before you go, I think I should draw your attention…” Kessler seemed embarrassed. “There’s
another little irregularity regarding Mister Pilgrim, sir. I mean—besides his not speaking and his trying to kill himself…”

“What is that?”

“There’s a mark on him, sir. On his backside…”

“His buttocks, you mean?”

“No, sir. Right between the shoulder blades.”

“What sort of mark?”

“Not unlike a tattoo. You’ve seen a tattoo, I suppose. I mention it, because the sight of it made me wonder, had Mister Pilgrim been to sea. You know how sailors are—drawings all over, some of them.”

“What does it show, this tattoo?”

“A butterfly, sir. And one other thing.”

“Yes?”

“It is all one colour, Doctor. Red, you see. Most unusual. It has the look of pin pricks—just like someone had pricked it out on Mister Pilgrim’s back with a needle or a pin.
Dot—dot. Dot—dot. Dot—dot—dot.
You see? Very odd. Not your normal everyday naval tattoo. I just thought you should know. He tried to hide it. Tried to hurry into his shirt before I got to him. But I saw it, nevertheless, in the mirror plain as day. It made me wonder…”

“Yes?”

“Well, it made me wonder if maybe it was some kind of—I don’t know—insignia. Like he belonged to some kind of club or secret society. That sort of thing. A sign or a signal for others of his kind.”

“Thank you, Kessler. All very interesting.”

“Yes, sir. Same as a person might say that Mister
Pilgrim himself is all very interesting. Not your average lunatic, so to speak. If you know what I mean.”

“Yes. Indeed I do. Good morning.”

“Good morning, Doctor.”

When Jung had gone and shut the door behind him, Kessler went back to the bed and lifted up Pilgrim’s shirt—stretching its arms as he had before and holding it out to the sunlight streaming through the windows.

So, angels smell of lemons, do they. Well, well, well. They smell of lemons—and where their wings are fixed, God marks it with a butterfly—right between the shoulder blades.

Spreading the arms, he watched the wavering sunlight through their folds. And closed—and opened them. And closed—and opened them again—and then again—in angel flight.

12

Kessler, his mother and his sister Elvire lived in a tall narrow house halfway down the slope between the Clinic and the River Limmat. He was the only son in a family that otherwise boasted six daughters, five of whom had been successfully married. The sixth, Elvire, had been chosen to see her parents through to death—to keep house for them, to run their errands and to act, in his early years, as Johannes Kessler’s nursemaid.

They were poor. Both parents had worked outside the home—Johannes, Senior, in the flour mill, Frau
Eda as cook for a lawyer who happened to be a bachelor—a certain Herr Munster. His unmarried status posed no threat, however. Frau Eda would not have tolerated the most understated of advances. She had ambitions for her children and not a hint of scandal would touch them. They would achieve a place in the middle class, which her parents had spent their lives achieving before them.

Her children’s greatest asset had been her own dowry—the house they lived in, a gift from her dying father. If not for the house, which sat at the centre of a middle-class district, they would have been forced to live at the furthest reaches of the city, where the poor were crowded in hovels and tenements packed in amongst the mills and factories. It was to this place that Johannes, Senior, had to make his way each day, and from which, each day, he returned.

Young Kessler’s earliest memories were of his father seated alone of an evening, staring exhausted above a bowl of soup, seeing nothing, saying nothing, only lifting a spoon to his mouth and letting it descend until the bowl was empty. At which point Elvire would remove the spoon from his hand and put a fork in its place. Sausage, cabbage and potatoes followed—eaten blankly between mouthfuls of pale beer and sops of bread.

Meanwhile, the child Johannes sat in his high-chair, moving his fingers over a plate of mash made up of whatever his father was given to eat each evening—whether sausage, cabbage and potato, or potato, sausage and cabbage. It was their only diet—though,
to her credit, Elvire tried to vary the modes of cooking—sometimes broiling, sometimes baking, sometimes braising the food.

What Johannes saw of his father was two black eyes, two dark nostrils and the gaping pit of a mouth in the oval of a flour-white face, beneath a fall of hair that was dark where his father’s cap had been and white where it had not. Shoulders drooping, elbows on the table, minimal, almost mechanical movements—a man-sized wind-up father-doll sitting amongst his brood—a doll whose springs were winding down even as its children watched—until, each evening, it stopped and simply sat there while the dishes, knives, forks and spoons were removed from around it. Then it rose and went away to its bed. No one spoke. Not ever. It was a house of endless fatigue and silence.

In those days, Frau Eda did not come home until Johannes himself had long been in his own bed. He only ever saw his mother in the mornings—once again from the vantage point of his high-chair—while she drank her last cup of coffee, rolled down her sleeves, pulled on her coat and went beyond his view into the world of someone else’s house, where she spent the day in someone else’s kitchen.

When Johannes was six, his father’s sleeve got caught in one of the mill-wheels and, there being no one by to save him, he was drawn in amongst the cogs and crushed to death. At the time, the boy was told none of this, only that his father had gone away and would not return.

Later, at school, he was told the truth by an older
boy whose father had also worked at the flour mill. For a very long while, young Kessler said nothing to his mother or to his sisters about what he knew. When he was eleven—or perhaps when he was twelve—he began to ask questions it had never occurred to him to ask before.
Where, when he left, did Father go?
And:
why did he go away alone when he could have taken us with him?
And:
why has he never written? Why has he never come back?

The answers to these questions were always the same.
He went away to join his mother and father…to stay with his brothers in Argentina…he had no money to take us with him…there is no post from South America…

One lie compounded the last and the one that followed. His mother had already grieved and put her grief behind her. A lie was easiest—and even telling it, she could partially believe it herself. She could daydream her husband’s life in Argentina. She could call the brothers back into her mind and in their company recreate the sunny days when she and her husband had been young and there was no foreboding. To call him dead at this late date was to take a step towards her own death she was not prepared to take, and even when young Johannes was as old as sixteen, she had still not declared herself a widow.