The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (9 page)

I recognized this face instantly, although it was fixed in the tormented snarl of orgasm. I remained staring at it for some time. It was the beautiful face of Dr Hoffman’s ambassador. The old man interrupted my reverie. His voice was as raucous as a rooster’s.

‘Is there enough money in my saucer to buy me a bottle?’ he demanded.

‘I’ll buy you a drink with pleasure,’ I said.

‘Thank ’ee; thank ’ee kindly,’ he replied and painfully heaved himself to his feet. He fumbled around in his corner until he finally produced a peaked cap of the style worn by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. When he had set this jauntily on his head, he began another search but I soon uncovered his white stick for him.

Now the pier was peopled. A ragged youth with caked snot in the grooves under his nose stood behind the rifle range idly probing the inside of his ear with a piece of twig and a blowsy woman in a rayon slip, with hair dyed the colour of apricots, yawned and scratched her buttocks at the entrance to the fortune teller’s booth. Three little boys clung to the rails by their feet holding fishing rods over the sea with one hand, and, in the other hand clutched jam jars of water by the string handles tied round the rims. The beach, too, presented an everyday holiday panorama of frisking dogs, children building sandcastles and a great deal of skin exposed to the sun. But all these Johnny-come-latelies had the yawning, vacant air of those just awakened from a deep sleep and walked uncertainly, sometimes, for no reason, breaking into a stumbling run and then halting just as suddenly to stare around them with startled, empty eyes or, turning to speak to a companion, they would stop, mouth ajar, as if they no longer recognized him. And, for so great a number of people, they made very little noise, as if they knew they had no existential right to be here.

The peep-show proprietor was blind and lame but he certainly knew his way about the town and led me unerringly to a small bar so deep inside the fishermen’s quarter the streets no longer bothered to keep up appearances and relapsed thankfully into slumminess. We sat down at a marble topped table and, without waiting for our order, a black brought us two glasses of the crude spirit that passes for brandy among the poor. He left the bottle on the table. The peep-show proprietor emptied his glass at a draught.

‘The purpose of my display,’ he remarked, ‘is to demonstrate the difference between saying and showing. Signs speak. Pictures show.’

I filled up his glass again for him and he thanked me by leaning across the table and comprehensively stroking my face with his gnarled finger-tips, as if learning my dimensions before sculpting me.

‘Who sent you?’ he asked abruptly.

‘I’ve come to investigate the disappearance of the Mayor,’ I replied guardedly.

‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘She sits like Mariana in the moated grange, poor girl! Mary Anne, the beautiful somnambulist.’

He drank again, more slowly, and then remarked: ‘My life is nothing but a wind-blown rag.’

With that, he fell silent. I was to learn he spoke only in a series of disconnected, often gnomic statements usually tinged with melancholy, bitterness, self-pity or all three together. I sipped my
eau-de-vie
quietly and waited for him to speak again. After the third glass, he did.

‘I was not Mendoza. I never had that honour.’

‘Who were you, then?’

He became bashful and secretive.

‘Once, I was a very important man indeed. Even, you might say, a great man. Once they used to take off their hats to me as I walked down the road and murmur to me ingratiatingly and barmen were glad of my custom, yes! proud and glad! Instead of merely sullenly tolerating me.’

The barman, who must have heard all this many times before, flashed his teeth and smiled at me as if to create complicity. I poured more brandy into the old man’s glass.

‘They used to say, “We’re honoured to have you honour us with your presence, Professor”…’ And then he stopped, as though he knew he had already said too much, which was perfectly true – he had given me the principal letters of a clue and now I had only to fill in the blanks. I made an initial guess.

‘The greatest success a teacher can boast is the pupil who surpasses him.’

‘Then why has he humiliated me so?’ wailed the old man and I knew instantly he had taught elementary physics to Dr Hoffman at the university all those years ago. When he finished the fifth glass, the last vestiges of his discretion vanished.

‘He doesn’t even allow me to work in the laboratories. He gave me a set of samples and let me loose, left me to wander, up and down, here and there, hither and thither, pushing my wheelbarrow in front of me… tripping over stones and rotting my guts with filthy liquor…’

‘His set of samples?’

‘Plenty more in my sack,’ he said. ‘Lots and lots of samples. Dozens and scores and hundreds and thousands of samples. You’d think they breed in there and I just put them in the machines, don’t I, and stick a sign along with them and sometimes people pay and sometimes they don’t and sometimes they scream and sometimes they giggle and sometimes the police turn me out of town and off I go down the road again, pushing my barrow. And times grow worse, since he began to put it into practice. No more money to spare for an old man’s disgusting if didactic demonstrations; you can get as good at home. Soon I’ll have to charge a pin to see it – or a jam jar, or a cigarette card. And who will exchange such rubbish for liquor, then? When that day dawns, poor robin must tuck his head under his wing, poor thing, and pretend to be warm, yes!’

‘But,’ he added, pouring out the seventh glass for himself, ‘the singular privilege of becoming Mendoza was never granted me. I was allowed to make my own transformations and if you look at me you can see how well I have succeeded.’

A tear trickled out from under his glasses so that I knew he had eyes even if they were sightless and I seemed to remember a cutting in the files that said Dr Hoffman’s old professor had suffered some injuries in an accident in a laboratory many many years before. I judged the old man was now sufficiently drunk and handed the bottle back to the barman.

‘I should like to kill him,’ said the peep-show proprietor. ‘If I were ten years younger, I would go to the castle and murder him.’

‘Do you know the way to the castle?’

‘I should follow my nose,’ he said.

But then a cock crowed and the sound affected the old man curiously. He sat up and listened attentively; it crowed a second time and then a third.

‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ shrieked the old man.

With that, he struck me full in the face with his cane so that blood streamed into my eyes from a cut above my forehead and, when I could see again, he was gone. I hurried immediately back to the pier but, though he could only hobble, I caught no sign of him along the way and when I reached the place where his booth had been, it was, of course, also completely gone. So I made my way to the Town Hall, to do my official business.

The plaster scrolls and garlands on the pompous exterior of the Town Hall were crumbling like dry sponge cake and all the windows were screened with green blinds but the heavy mahogany doors swung open readily enough and, though puffs of dust rose up when I trod on the maroon plush carpeting and most of the offices were empty but for cobwebs spun from inkwell to pen-rack across blurred surfaces of desks, at last a yawning clerk came out of the ante-room of the Mayor’s office to greet me. Metal bracelets hoisted up his shirt-sleeves to bare his wrists for work; he had been left in charge.

The Mayor’s office itself was a mausoleum. It had been tidied since he left so there were no papers or files to be seen and they had drawn his carved, pompous chair so tightly up to the scrupulously denuded desk that it looked as though it were denying admittance there to any future body. The Mayor’s pink blotter was thickly furred with mildew and his dried-out water flask, topped with an inverted tumbler, had grown hunched shoulders of settled dust. The indefatigable spiders had woven a canopy across a photograph of the late President on the wall. The clerk opened a cupboard to reveal half a decanterful of mayoral sherry, now grown viscous as treacle, groped on a lower shelf and produced the fur-collared overcoat the Mayor had left behind him on the snowy morning he vanished. The pockets contained only a single balled glove and a dirty handkerchief, nothing of significance.

But after only the briefest search through the other offices, I found evidence that a certain peep-show proprietor had filed an official request to open a booth on the pier in the preceding month of April; this form, signed with a tentative cross, still waited for the official stamp so my ramshackle friend had clearly gone ahead on his own and set up shop regardless. It was, at least, a connection. I tucked away this form to take back to the Minister, took the clerk’s name and briefly checked his reality rating with my information. It appeared satisfactory. Then I asked him to ring the Mayor’s home, where his daughter still lived with a housekeeper. The clerk got through after only seven or eight minutes and I noted the services were still functioning satisfactorily though the clerk told me the telephone switchboard could neither take nor receive calls outside the immediate neighbourhood while even these local calls were constantly interrupted by voices in unknown languages. After a good deal of country town chat with the Mayor’s house, he ensured me some nights’ lodging there, at the probable source of my bureaucratic mystery.

‘It’s all got very run down since the Mayor left,’ he said dubiously. ‘Just the old woman and the, er, girl…’

Something in his voice indicated a strangeness in the girl. I pricked up the ears of my mind, briskly jotted down the directions he gave me and went to my car. It was now early evening and, since I stopped on my way to eat a supper of meat pies in a fly-blown café too squalid to be illusory, I did not reach the house until it was almost dark. It lay some way out of town at the end of an old-fashioned, rutted lane, where there were no other habitations than one abandoned barn. The sky was the tender, transparent blue of a late summer’s night and a slender intimation of the moon hung above a copse of fir although the tiger lilies of the setting sun still growled in the west. I parked my car in the road and, once the engine ceased to throb, there was no other sound but a faint shimmer of birdsong and the rattle of the quilled boughs of the pines.

Although I knew it was inhabited, at first I thought the house was quite forsaken for the extensive garden which surrounded it was sunk in the neglect of years. Whoever made the garden first must have loved roses but now the roses had quite overrun the garden and formed dense, forbidding hedges that sent out such an overpowering barrage of perfume that my head was soon swimming. Besides, roses sprayed out fanged, blossoming whips from cupolas which almost foundered under their weight; roses reared up in groves of sturdy standards now the size of young oaks; and roses sent vine-like tendrils along the sombre branches of yew trees, of ornamental rowans, of cherry trees and apple trees already half-suffocated with mistletoe so this summer, which had suited roses so well, seemed to have conspired with the gardener to produce an orgiastic jungle of all kinds of roses, and though I could not distinguish any of their separate shapes or colours, their individual scents all blended into a single, intolerably sweet essence which made every nerve in my body ache and tingle.

Roses had climbed up the already luxuriantly ivied walls and lodged in knots on the roofs where flowering weeds were rooted in the gaps between the mossy tiles while a great, unlopped elm with lice of rooks in its hair towered over the house as if about to drop its great limbs upon it, to smash it, while at the same time its roots clutched the foundations under the earth in a ferocious embrace. The garden had laid claim to the house and was destroying it at its arborescent leisure. Those within the house were already at the capricious mercy of nature.

Enormous clumps of mugwort had torn apart the gate and blocked the path entirely so I had to clamber over the tumbledown wall, dislodging a few more stones as I did so. Looking towards the shaggy outlines of the house, I saw a greenish glimmer of light on the ground floor filtering through the leaves which obscured the windows and took this for my clue out of the hostile, vegetable maze which, as I moved forward, lashed me, scored me, stung me and left me sick, bleeding and dizzy with its odorous excess. As I drew nearer to the house I heard, over the pounding of the blood in my ears, notes of music falling ‘plop’, like goldfish in a quiet pool. Breathless, I halted for a moment to find out if the sound was true. It went wistfully on. Somebody in that ruinous place was playing Debussy on the piano.

At last I reached the lighted window and parting the foliage which covered it, I peered through. I saw a drawing room with worn Persian rugs on the floor and walls hung with a once crimson brocaded paper that was now faded and figured with damp and mould, rucking and buckling over the dank walls beneath. There was an alabaster fireplace with a bouquet of shell flowers in a misted glass dome upon it and a fan of silver paper in the grate. Oil paintings so heavily varnished one could not make out their subjects hung here and there askew in pompous frames of tarnished gilt and an unlit cut-glass chandelier in the centre of the ceiling scintillated with reflections from the two candles in a branched stick which stood on the grand piano and threw a soft light over the girl who played it.

Her back was turned towards me but when I craned my neck I could see her white, thin, nervous fingers on the keyboard and caught a glimpse of the pale curve of her cheek. Her hair, the lifeless brown of a winter forest, hung down the back of her black dress. She played with extraordinary sensitivity. The room was full of a poignant, nostalgic anguish which seemed to emanate from that slender figure whose face I could not see.