The Janeites (3 page)

You get very close; there’s an intimacy. In a crowd we are several. In a car even, two. But when he’s resting – cup of coffee, going over his speech, wash and brush up – you stay with him even for a little walk in the garden, breath of fresh air after dinner – he learns to accept that. You might get a violent reaction of strain or fatigue; lets his hair down, personal, insulting – ‘fellow’s a bloody fascist’; you never heard it, it was never uttered. He has to have his moments totally unguarded.

“You’re always watching for the dotties, they get in anywhere, mostly they’ve a piece of paper, a petition, an appeal, sometimes they’ve a fist, or a knife – or a gun.”

“You’ve a gun.”

“Carrying, yes of course we are. Rule is, never to use it, even show it unless bloody well forced. Everything based on non-violence. Fellow comes in arms and legs flying, block him, smother him, hold him but never hit him. You’re trained, endlessly, in that. Box with one another, judo, defence to any and every sort.”

“But you might get shot, knifed, killed even.”

“Yes. That’s the hard thing. He mustn’t be hurt – held for due process of law. But you – you’re expendable. Knowing that, you must never hesitate. Look, let me eat this steak in peace.”

“Readiness – all times ready.”

“You’re not going to stop me eating frites. Nor Béarnaise, neither.”

“I’m not about to try,” said Ray comfortably.

“Nine tenths of it is preparation – prevention – planning. You’ve gone over every inch in advance, get the unexpected down to the
irreducible. That done… with a Chief of State you’ve always a doctor and an ambulance on standby; reanimation unit. Any history say of a heart you’ve a cardio man. Nice to know; anyone to ressuscitate it’s probably yourself, and you’ll get the best there is.”

“Cheese? Fruit?”

“Sure – I like a lot of both.” Ray put his knife and fork together, wiped his mouth, took quite a powerful swig of water.

“Here endeth the first consultation. You’ve given me the key to what I wanted. A complete non-violence. There are a number of highly aggressive answers to a cancer. Surgery, radio, chemo, any amount of clever little molecules chemists put together and hide inside the pretty pink pill. I don’t like any of these much. We’ve some active things too for me to think about; has to be in tune with you. Active and alert without any violence – did you have lessons in relaxation?”

“Sure: physiotherapist, unwinding. Techniques to do it alone.”

“You start that up afresh. I know a girl, good masseuse.”

“Does she have a cunt?”

Ray began to giggle but it turned into an outright laugh so that he had to put down his coffee-cup to stop it spilling.

“I haven’t looked. You can always try.”

“While I’ve still got a dick and you haven’t cut it off.”

“William, you better believe me, that’ll be the very last thing I’ll come to. Don’t think of me as castrated – I like girls too.”

Ray drove home singing a little song.

Dr Valdez lives in a slice of the old town stuck between two main roads, traversed by a couple of alleyways and disregarded by brisk municipal developers; not old enough to be picturesque with cobblestones, expensive little shops, tourists taking photographs; darkened by high smelly walls whose decrepit plaster is falling off the stonework. These buildings are pinched too close together and
the upper stories compete for air and light; sanitation and electricity date from the century previous to the last and are dodgy. But the rents are low. At the street level blank sinister doorways long innocent of paint open on dark tunnels full of dustbins and rusty bicycles, plywood mailboxes with yellowed cards stuck to them. His just says ‘Valdez’. You aren’t going to say ‘Doctor’.

The other advantage is in being perfectly anonymous. Nobody is curious round here. Unsuccessful artists, down-at-heel waiters, old women in bedroom slippers, none of them bothered about Arab neighbours with odd tastes in cookery and music; nobody is racist either – couldn’t afford it. On the ground floor junk is stored by dealers in old wood and scrap iron; up the stairs there are queerer, possibly more sinister commodities. Since it is bang in the centre of the city people work round-the-corner, and always underpaid. The police are not unknown, nor debt-collectors. Valdez fits in nicely.

The stairs are stone to the second floor, wood thereafter and children fall down them now and again: there is of course no lift. Walls of dilapidated dark-green paint. The slum-landlord is some insurance company, quite strict about fire hazards. These old buildings don’t bring in much but the ground will be valuable some day. Raymond goes up lightly. His view is mostly of gutters, chimney-pots and roofscape but he has quite a lot of space, keeps it more-or-less clean, and is comfortable. His furniture seems mostly to have come from the junkstore downstairs, but people buy the new and the fashionable, throw things away that are perfectly good; the cooker and the hi-fi had cost little.

Ray has taught himself to be a pretty good cook. Also a fervent listener to music. Devotion. Good instincts. Knows, really, damn-all about either subject. Is this jesuitical of him, he wonders? You, and all that you have and do, are His. Jesuits have often been the most deplorable people; appalling reactionaries leagued with the worst sorts of government. One’s faith in God’s infinite wisdom gets badly shaken here. Mm: your conceit, Valdez, your infernal self-importance – it hasn’t been for want of Telling.

You are to think about William. You were a bright little boy but, it was the Society that put you where you are. William is badly blocked,
and inside that magnificent physique who knows what fearful knots accumulate – just the thing to attract the Crab.

Autistic children for instance – so little understood, so notoriously difficult to treat – their blockages are such that they roll themselves into a ball in the corner, unable to speak, showing their misery through a sudden frenzy of the most intense violence but they can, with great patience, be brought back into the world – running a thermograph on William might show up places where some of these blockages can be Got At.

This is a tool Dr Valdez thinks quite well of – a sensitive instrument which reads temperatures over fifty strategic points of the bodily surface and gives you a printout on the computer. How very crude – but doctors with fingertip-feel, says Ray sadly, are few and far between. Our pathetic little bits and scraps of Science. Artists have it. Pettish, to still his own blockages. Some music – something jarring which is then most satisfyingly resolved – piano concerto, Ravel, pianist is the Argentine woman. Has she ever got Fingertip-feel. Stay very still and you will feel her hands, on your stomach, searching out and resolving all that is blocked in yourself.

It is not to be. The phone started ringing. One is never invulnerable. The phone shouldn’t be ringing; it’s an unlisted number. Which in turn means – oh dear. When it rings and one Knows who that is, it’s madly welcome, it’s extremely unwelcome, but either way, goodbye Monsieur Ravel. Hereafter, in a better world than this, I’ll be hoping for more love and knowledge of you.

“Yes.” He wants more love and knowledge of Janine, but oh dear. Tears. Snuffles. A pathetic little voice.

“I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“I’ve been working. I am working. I have again to be working.”

“I have to see you.”

“I came in to change my shoes.”

“But darling, I –” This must be stopped. He wants to say, Darling, tell me your troubles. Better – Come here at once. Now.

“This evening. Come this evening. We’ll have a picnic.”

“But then I’m at work.” Limp with despair.

“Come after work.” Knowing he shouldn’t say that.

“Is that the best you can do?” Reproach-filled.

“It will be the best. I promise. I must run. Kiss.” No kiss. Clonk went the thing, burning with resentment. He wished – he wishes – but there’s not much to be had out of that.

Trapped in his own lies – now he has to change his shoes. And make a shopping list. He hadn’t been in any hurry to go to work, and now he had to: Janine is quite capable of coming over here to see whether it was true, to catch him.

It’s quite a snug cabin. Shelves of books and one or two nice pictures; he hasn’t space for more, nor light; there are far too many books. From these surroundings you could fairly conclude that he has money to spend. There is a cupboard with clothes which are well cut and have cost a lot, because Dr Valdez has to go out into the World quite often. The shopping list nags at him so he goes to look in the kitchen, dragging rather. In the fridge is a piece of beef, getting rather sticky too. Well, for tomorrow a paprika stew. He could wish for veal (osso bucco is a lip-smacking idea) but nobody in their senses buys veal now. This will have to do – buy tomatoes. Wants lemon-peel. Wants – no, that we’ve got; olives we’ve got, anchovies we’ve got – or not with lemonpeel? There will be a delicious smell. Janine will provide another delicious smell. Write champagne, write flowers, write something nice-to-put-on-bread: picnic, ja. Rather a long list. Oh well, all in a good cause.

One shoe off and one shoe on Raymond sat paralysed with his mouth open; he has just thought of a good definition of Art. He looks for these a lot because nobody ever knows what Art is, and scientists are thirsty for a bit of it, getting their little particles littler, and perhaps when we find Higgs’ Boson it’ll turn out to be God. An eighteenth-century English painter-poet wanted a bow of burning gold, and that is unsurpassable? It’s a very stiff test; he doesn’t know many places where that is to be found. He could say where he first encountered it; on the floor of the Mauritshuis in The Hague, in front of the big Vermeer – do an about-turn and there is the Girl in the Turban. A few more chariots-of-fire he could point to, where you’d expect them, in the world-cities, where civilization has been building up for centuries – the Best we can Do, in gallery or concert-hall.

But how long do the arrows-of-desire take in flight? Five or ten minutes on a stage, and no more for a sunset; he has known pitifully little. The nature of the bow is that it will not resonate for more than the moment or two after Shakespeare ceased to inhabit the actor, Verdi the conductor.

Of these he has caught glimpses now and then. But in bed with a girl? Fellow says somewhere – Never never never never never. That is pretty strong but I am not totally convinced that either in science or in art is there a definitive never. There is so much that I do not understand. There is another man within me, who is angry with me. One of them is in love with Janine. Desire intense, passion overwhelming, let him only think of her he can think of nothing else. Pain. Doctor Valdez knows a lot about pain. Can claim to be an expert on the subject. Every fibre shudders, every nerve twangs horribly, gut and heart and lungs screaming, it’s in the throat and in the sinus and reaches down to the finger tip; he can be lying quietly and it will jerk him upright. He gets up and drinks a glass of water and walks about barefooted waiting for it to simmer back down to tolerable level. It’s love, this? If a man could go through childbirth it might be like this.

There are lucid intervals, pain of a different nature, is it a sort of withdrawal-symptom, no, that is a cheap and over-facile remark. It is less physiological. The eating and drinking her, the breathing her, absorbing her, that will come again, catching you up and flinging you down. This is less greedy but you love her perhaps the more. You aren’t quite as wolfish; are you less famished? Or is this the man within?

We were here and we didn’t want to go out. We got very hungry but the idea of phoning for a pizza nauseated both of us, the Chinaman, the hamburger-man, nonono. Cooking suddenly became funny, we went through the fridge for leftovers, through the shelf for tins, Raymond – that skilful fellow – made wonderful (really they were very good) fishcakes. Three for each. He watched Janine’s technique with these, fascinated. She put a great deal of ‘mexican’ ketchup on all three, scraped it all off to eat with the first, put as much again on the other two and polished that off with the second,
repeating this with the last. Ray was delighted. He didn’t feel insulted (taken pains to make the things nice). He didn’t think her vulgar or greedy. He wasn’t disgusted when she used her finger to catch any traces on the plate, licked it and said she wished there were more. If he had thought about it at all he would have said it showed trust; that she felt confidence, was comfortable with him, able to let her hair down. It was loveable in her.

He couldn’t, probably, have described her, even physically. That would not have thrown doubt upon his truthfulness, accuracy, nor detachment. He loved her. One would have to have asked William – quite a while later. His accuracy of observation struck everyone, including Ray. Trained cop, trained and experienced bodyguard: normal.

“Janine? I only met her once, no, twice. I had dinner with them in a restaurant. Ray brought her to show off. Her table-manners were perfect, altogether the lady. She was an actress, not very good; highly professional though. Very attractive, tremendous magnetism. Wonderful dancer, marvellous legs. Well – durably – put together. Marvellous tits too.

“Not beautiful but pretty, fine features. The only thing bad, small narrow eyes. Blue, a sharp electric blue, bit of green in it. Made up well. Lovely nose and ears, wide mouth well cut. Wide high cheekbones, not really Slav, fine forehead. Fair hair; she would have tanned well. Good deep voice, quite a lot of range. Handled herself well. Skilled. Anyhow some talent, I never saw her on a stage.

“She picked up bit parts pretty often, enough for a living. Ray told me she’d failed for the Conservatoire here, ‘in a year of lots of good girls’. Don’t know if that’s true, she was an accomplished liar. Tried out for television here, they didn’t want her. Had a go in Paris, got a few film parts. Knew her trade, could have made her way no doubt. But expensive flat, sharp little sporty car, spent a lot on clothes, so always broke.