The Book of Revelation (30 page)

Early the next morning, after a surprisingly deep sleep, I was informed that, as a result of a consultation with the Public Prosecutor, I was to be interviewed by an investigating judge. Once again, I was taken to the interrogation room; I knew the route so well by now that I could have walked it with my eyes shut. The judge was a well-built man with a head of creamy white hair, and he swept into the room with the sudden energy of a wave breaking over rocks. He asked me the same questions that Snel and Pieters had asked me, only his manner was both more formal and more distracted, and as I was led back to my cell fifteen minutes later I couldn’t help but feel that the interview had gone badly. Even so, I had no way of predicting what the eventual outcome might be. Events were speeding up in a way that seemed both orchestrated and vertiginous. People appeared and disappeared in front of me with dizzying rapidity, and I was supposed to impress each one of them. I found that I could hardly catch my breath—and this, oddly, despite long periods in my cell, alone. I was being asked to assume full responsibility for my past actions, and yet, at the same time, I seemed to have forfeited all control over the present.

•

The post that Juliette had brought from my apartment was delivered to me in the evening. The envelopes had been torn open, as I had expected, but, so far as I could tell, the contents had not been tampered with. Most of the letters were routine, mundane, fit only for the waste-paper basket—a statement from my credit-card company, an offer of a bank loan—but, among them, there was a postcard from Stefan. He had written to me from New York, where he was working on a photographic assignment. His assumption that my life was going on as always—
How’s the bar? Hope you haven’t slept with Gusta yet!
—made me realise how drastically everything had altered, and it was several minutes before I was able to turn to the last of the envelopes, which was rectangular and white, and which had the address of a firm of lawyers printed in the top left-hand corner. The letter was from a Mr Werkhoven. He wrote that, as executor of Isabel van Zaanen’s will, it was his responsibility to inform me of her wish that I should inherit her apartment in Bloemendaal. For a moment I could make no sense of this. I had to read the sentence again. Even then, its meaning seemed partial, incomplete; it left a smudge in my brain, like a poor-quality Xerox or a piece of rain-blurred ink. I put the letter down and lay back on my bed, and my mind seemed to empty all of a sudden, the space that thoughts usually inhabit taken up by just two words:
Isabel’s dead
. Just those words repeating silently, endlessly, until they lost their meaning altogether. . . .

I had last seen Isabel halfway through January. I had taken the train to Bloemendaal with Juliette, and we had spent an hour with Isabel—though I had talked to Paul Bouhtala for most of that time. There had been a certain tension in the air that afternoon, I remembered, which I had put down to the fact that two women who were both close to me were meeting for the first time. I also remembered that, on our way back to Amsterdam, Juliette had turned to me and said, “Isabel must have been beautiful when she was young,” a remark which made me smile. I told Juliette about the photograph Isabel had showed me once when, uncharacteristically, she had drunk two brandies after dinner. In the photograph—taken at the Waldorf Astoria, in 1953—Isabel was wearing a white evening gown, with diamond earrings and a diamond choker. Her skin was flawless, and her black hair slanted, gleaming, across her forehead, covering her right eyebrow. . . . “She’s still beautiful, of course,” Juliette added quickly, sensing she might have sounded tactless. “I only meant it’s a pity when you meet someone and they’re already old. You realise you’ve missed something, and that can sadden you.”

I thought back to my own first meeting with Isabel. She was in her late fifties then, and at the height of her fame. I had walked up to her backstage at Sadler’s Wells and told her how much I admired her work. I was studying at the Royal Ballet, I said, but there was a dance company in Amsterdam that I hoped to join. We spoke for less than five minutes, and I remembered nothing about her afterwards except for her perfect English and the seemingly disparaging way in which she had looked me up and down. Towards the end of that year, a scout from the Dutch company visited the Royal Ballet, and I was one of the dancers he chose to audition. You cannot imagine my excitement when he took me to one side afterwards and asked if I would be interested in becoming a member of the company. . . . One afternoon the following autumn, when I had been in Amsterdam for about six months, a message came over the studio PA, saying there was somebody to see me in reception. It was Isabel. I was sweaty and dishevelled, in a ripped T-shirt and Lycra cycling shorts, and she was wearing a Chanel suit and sunglasses. She kissed me three times, and then stood back and looked at me. “So,” she said with just the faintest trace of a smile, “you’re dancing in the Netherlands, just as you planned.” At the time, of course, I had no idea how she had found me, and it had seemed like the most extraordinary coincidence. It was only years later that I discovered that it was Isabel who had sent the scout to audition me, Isabel who had orchestrated the whole thing. . . .

I picked up the lawyer’s letter again. In writing to me, Mr Werkhoven had assumed that, as one of Isabel’s close friends, I would already have heard about her death, and this gave his letter a matter-of-factness, an abruptness, that had only added to my shock, my confusion. After all, it was little more than two weeks since I had seen her last. Her decline must have been sudden, rapid—almost brutal.

I turned on to my side and stared at the wall, which was disfigured by obscene messages, drawings of male genitalia, cigarette-burns. My vision blurred. I felt that I was sinking, sinking into dark, dank sediment. . . . There was only one consolation in all this: at least she had been spared the news of my latest humiliation.

•

That night, half awake, half dreaming, I opened the door to Isabel’s apartment. I moved slowly across the entrance hall, dimly aware of the paintings on the wall, and the crisp, fragrant heads of dried roses in the silver bowl under the mirror. I felt my way down the passage that led to the living-room. All the rooms lay in darkness, their furniture invested with the mystery and ambivalence of neglect. Outside, there was no moon, but a kind of dusty greyness spilled through the french windows, allowing me to see the swept fireplace and the cushions stacked neatly on the divan. I sat in the chair Isabel had always sat in when she was well, a chair with a high back, upholstered in fabric that was subtle, lavish—a blend of yellow, green and gold. On the table beside the chair lay a pile of loose pages, her record of the ballet we had been developing together. Though I was familiar with the type of notation she had used, it always looked intriguing to me, even a little sinister, like inscriptions found on rune-stones or plans for an experimental prison. We had made progress, I realised, but there was still work to be done and only I could do it. As I was reading what she had written, a faint aura of Egyptian cigarettes encircled me. It must be left over from the early autumn, I thought, before the cancer surfaced. A few sheets of paper crowded with pencil marks, a trace of cigarette smoke in the air—and that was all that remained of her. How quickly, how utterly, we are gone. . . . Sitting in her chair, I began to speak to her. I was saying things I had never had the chance to say when she was alive. I was also saying things she would never have allowed me to say if she had been in the room with me. But that’s the whole point of a vigil, perhaps. It’s a monologue, not a conversation. The person I was talking to no longer existed. She could not interrupt or disagree; she could not even answer me. The solitary nature of the act, the fact that it is so one-sided, makes you realise exactly what it is that you have lost.

The floorboards stretched away, black in the half-light, and, through the windows, I could just make out the dim shape of the forest, one shade darker than the sky. There was a wind blowing out of the north-east, but no other sound from anywhere. Though it was the middle of the night, I thought Bouhtala would be awake upstairs, in his leather armchair, with a glass of cognac at his elbow. He would be studying the atlas I had given him, perhaps, or leafing through his photographs of tattooed men, and the only movement in the room would be the smoke from his cigarillo spiralling upwards through a pyramid of lamplight, or his white shirt-cuff lifting as he reached out to turn a page, or smooth down his moustache. . . .

The next time I looked up, it was morning. I yawned, then stretched. Opening the french windows, I stepped on to the terrace. I leaned on the wooden rail, looking out across the garden, into the trees, and let the cool, damp air pass over me.

Later, after breakfast, I went for a walk along the beach, my hands in my coat pockets, my collar turned up. The wind pushed against my back, pushed so hard at times that, despite myself, I broke into a run. Loose sand whipped past my feet in lines that were long and sinuous, like snakes. There was no one else about. It was winter, after all. To my right, the sea unrolled against the shore. The low thunder of waves exploding, grey smashed into creamy white—

The scratch of a key in a lock, the creak of my cell door opening. . . .

I slowly swung my legs on to the floor. I sat on the edge of the narrow bed, quite still, so as not to dislodge the memory of inhabiting the rooms where Isabel had lived; if I moved too much, it would all disintegrate, like a piece of five thousand-year-old wood that is suddenly exposed to light and air. I felt a calmness flow into every part of me, as if my body had been plunged in cool water. Perhaps it was simply the knowledge that I could sink no further, that I had reached a place, at last, some kind of solid ground or bedrock, on which it might be possible to build.

•

That morning I was summoned to the interrogation room where the two policemen, Snel and Pieters, and my lawyer were waiting for me. Snel selected a cigarette from the packet lying in front of him and tapped it thoughtfully on his gold lighter. My lawyer watched Snel with an eager, patient expression which only confirmed my lack of faith in him.

“You look pale,” Snel said.

“I’m all right,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

I sat down at the table.

Snel lit his cigarette and inhaled with relish. “Bad news, I’m afraid.”

I felt a bitter smile surface. “It never rains but it pours.”

“I’m sorry?” Snel said.

“Nothing,” I said. “Please go on.”

Snel said that the judge who had interviewed me the day before had found me uncooperative. Subsequent to the interview, he had recommended that I should be remanded in custody until my court appearance, which would take place in about two months’ time. In his report he claimed that I represented a danger to the community. It was possible, he said, that I would commit the same offence again.

I began to laugh. And once I started laughing I couldn’t stop, even though I saw that it shocked the three men who were sitting at the table. It must have been at least a minute before I brought myself under control. Still gasping, I apologised. Snel passed me a tissue. I thanked him.

When I had fully recovered I sat back in my chair and turned to Snel again.

“Do you think I could make a phone-call?”

The policeman considered my request for a moment, then he signalled to Pieters, who hauled himself noisily to his feet. While Pieters was out of the room, my lawyer leaned forwards, his ruddy face exuding its usual incongruous good-humour.

“I should remind you,” he said, “that you have the right to remain silent.”

Of course, he couldn’t have known what was in my head, but, all the same, the announcement seemed so ill-timed, so utterly inappropriate, that I began to laugh again. I couldn’t help it. My lawyer sat back in his chair, bemused.

The door opened. It was Pieters, returning with a phone. He plugged the jack into a socket low down in the wall and placed the phone in front of me.

“I need a number,” I said.

Pieters frowned. “What number?”

“I need the number of Police Headquarters,” I said, “in Marnixstraat.”

Pieters turned to Snel, who slid a hand into his inside jacket pocket and took out a small black notebook. He turned a few pages, then looked up and, studying me across two streams of exhaled smoke, read the seven-digit number out loud.

The three men watched me carefully as I dialled. I listened to the ringing tone. At last a woman answered. I took a deep breath, composed myself.

“Good morning,” I said. “Could I speak to Mr Olsen, please?”

There was a brief rustling sound, not unlike paper being crushed, then the line cleared and I heard him, very close, almost as if he had been there the whole time.

“Olsen here.”

“Mr Olsen. Hello.” I gave him my name. “We met at Paul Bouhtala’s birthday party. It was quite a while ago—nearly five years. . . .”

“Ah yes,” he said. “The dancer.” A few seconds passed. “You never brought me that drink . . .”

The sharpness of his memory unsettled me. At the same time, though, I felt it might work in my favour.

“That was rude of me. I’m sorry.” I paused, and then I said, “I owe you one.”

Olsen laughed. “So,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

“It’s a long story, I’m afraid. . . .”

“That’s all right. I’m not in a hurry.”

I began to describe the events of Monday night, the events leading up to my arrest, but I had been talking for less than thirty seconds, I had just reached the point where the girl’s red hair landed on the bar, when Olsen interrupted me.

“You’ve started in the middle,” he said gently. “Go back to the beginning.”

Rupert Thompson

THE BOOK OF REVELATION

Rupert Thompson is the author of five previous novels—of which
Soft!
,
The Insult
,
Air & Fire
, and
The Five Gates of Hell
are available in Vintage paperback. He lives in London.