The Mighty Walzer (37 page)

‘As with sherry, so with port. Plus ça change

‘I see it,’ I said.

‘So have you got any?’

‘No,’ I said.

He looked relieved. Now he could gracefully leave. He’d only just entered but being here was a torment to him. And to me. ‘Then come to my room,’ he said. ‘I’ve got bottles of the stuff.’

‘By the way,’ I said as we clattered down a flight, ‘I’m Walzer.’

‘I’ ‘know,’ he said. ‘It’s on your door. I’m Rivers.’

‘Not St John,’ I laughed, giving him my hand.

‘I am actually, yes. My brother’s Rochester.’

‘Rochester Rivers?’

‘No. Edward Rochester. He’s my half-brother.’

‘The next thing you’ll be telling me,’ I said, ‘is that your mother’s locked away in an attic’

He shot me an intense look from his whiteless eyes. A black bolt. ‘How did you know that?’ he said.

I tried for a joke. It was either that or die. ‘As with sherry, so with port,’ I said.

‘Sorry?’

‘As with sherry — look, it doesn’t matter.’

I didn’t have a chance. I saw it at that moment, once and for all. Not a hope. I’d never hold out against them. Once a turtle, always a turtle. And I’d come to a turtle farm.

We were now in his room. He told me he’d come up only yesterday, yet already the room bore the stamp of the man. Dark. Confined. Over-charged. Ominous. Fucking deranged. How had he done it in a day? I looked at his shelves. Austens, Jane. Burneys, Fanny. Brontës, All Of Them. But also Dostoevskys, Fyodor. And Gogols, Nikolai. And Pushkins, Alexander. Not in translation, either.

‘You read Russian?’ he asked me. ‘You look as though you read Russian.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Though I come from there, partly, sort of, a long time ago. You?’

‘Do I come from there?’

‘Do you
read
it?’

‘Read it, speak it, breathe it,’ he said.

Then he directed my attention to the mantelpiece on which were a number of heavily ornate icon-like frames all containing photographs of the same woman. Plump and peevish and over-painted.

‘Yasmin,’ he said.

‘She’s very beautiful,’ I lied. No more attic jokes.

‘My wife,’ he said.

‘You’re married?’

‘Not yet.’

‘But you’re about to be?’

‘Soon. The moment she agrees.’

‘She hasn’t agreed yet?’

‘She hasn’t met me yet.’

His hands shook when he poured me port. Mine shook when I lit his cigarette. We affected each other badly. We set each other jumping, like a pair of back to back magnets.

‘Not that I’ve got much time to play with,’ he went on. ‘I’m not expecting to live all that long.’

‘Sorry?’

‘It has to be soon because I’ve been told I’m not going to live long. Look,’ he said, showing me his palm.

There were no lights on in his room, and only the smallest turret window, giving out on to a shaded service yard. So it wasn’t easy to see much. But even in the dark I could make out that he had no life line to speak of.
To speak of
? Let’s not beat about the bush — he had none. As far as his palm was concerned he was already a dead man.

‘How do you mean you’ve been
told
you’re not going to live long?’ I said, which in the circumstances was as good as changing the subject.

‘Fifty years ago my grandfather met a Kazakh fortune-teller on
a train from Uzbekistan to Tientsin. The fortune-teller tried to leap from the carriage when he saw my grandfather’s palm, but my grandfather insisted on knowing the worst. “If it’s to be, it’s to be,” he said. “On your own head and the heads of your progeny be it,” the fortune-teller replied, and proceeded to tell him that neither he, nor his youngest son, nor his youngest son’s youngest son, would survive past the age of forty. My grandfather died in his thirty-ninth year. My father died when he was twenty-eight. I am the youngest son of the youngest son.’

What do you say to that on your first day in Cambridge?

I wished Sheeny were here. ‘Oy a broch!’

Without him the best I could manage was, ‘I’m not sure how much trust I would want to repose in a fortune-teller I met on a train in that part of the world.’

Cambridge prim. And I hadn’t even had my first tutorial with Yorath or Rubella yet.

‘Aren’t you?’ St John Rivers said. He’d turned shirty on me. Suddenly he wasn’t two people. Shirty, he was entirely himself. ‘Aren’t you? It would be interesting to hear what my father and grandfather would have to say to that.’

Whereupon he walked out. Walked out of his own room and left me there in the gloom, to finish my port, gaze on Yasmin and sport his oak for him. When I next saw him he was at the Master’s sherry party, showing his palm around. He affected not to know me.

I would soon learn that by Cambridge and especially by Golem College standards there was nothing especially untoward in any of this — people were always walking out without a word. Tutors did it as a matter of course. One second you were rehearsing your weekly essay before the sternest of judges, the next you were reading to an empty room. Often you didn’t even see them go. Lecturers practised it too, turning on their heel mid-sentence, their gowns billowing, leaving three hundred of us with our pens in the air. All perfectly commonplace. Not rudeness, shyness.
They weren’t up to saying, ‘Excuse me.’ As for affecting not to know you, that was a Golem College speciality. Iaoin Yorath would wonder who you were in the middle of a conversation. I have a dim memory of him dismissing me from his presence on at least two occasions on the grounds that I was an interloper and that he only supervised members of the college.

‘Dr Yorath, I am here in your room at your invitation,’ I can just about remember telling him.

‘The more fool me!’ was his reply.

I mention this by way of protecting St John Rivers’s good name. Yes, he was fucking deranged, but they all were. Taken all round he was probably less deranged than the rest of them. At least he wasn’t a fantasist. In the matter of his prognostications about his marriage to Yasmin, for example, he was proved dead right. He’d seen her photograph in a Leningrad paper originally and had tracked her down from that. He was writing to her every few days at the time I encountered him and she was replying with a weekly photo. Finally he went to collect her. Married her in the Christmas vacation with the blessing of her family, posed for a rigor mortis wedding photograph on a bridge on Nevsky Prospekt — the Venice of the East, my arse, St John! — then brought her back to Cambridge. This was in his third year as an undergraduate. Two months later she ran off with the captain of the Golem College croquet team. Not a word. Just wasn’t there any more. The ethos had got to her, too, you see. Didn’t even leave him a photograph.

Shortly before his finals, St John Rivers threw himself out of his little turret window.

So he was right about his life prospects as well.

But I didn’t yet know what was in store for either of us. For Day One, Person One, he was fucking deranged enough.

By the time I got to the Master’s sherry party, which I reckoned had to be number one priority whatever I did next, I was on
shpilkes. If my suitcases were wrong then my Kardomah suit was bound to be wrong. St John Rivers had not understood most of what I’d said to him, thinking I was speaking in Manchester tongues — what if the Master asked me to pronounce Boggart Hole Clough? What if he wasn’t looking where he was going and walked into me? What if I walked into
him?
What if I made an allusion to a mad wife in the attic and he
had
a mad wife in the attic?

I’ve said it’s catching, embarrassment. And I’d caught it. I was in a fever of it.

We stood in a line and the Master inspected us, like troops. I remember thinking he was going to check behind our ears. We were all freshmen. Welcome to Golem College, that was his message to us. Welcome, men.

Men?
I’d become a man all of a sudden. If I was a man why didn’t I
feel
like a man? And why didn’t the others
look
like men?

Why didn’t the Master look like a man, come to that?

He didn’t have a young face exactly. In fact, when you got close, you could see that it was coming apart, the jaw precarious, the cheeks dropping, the eyes loose enough to be shaken out of their sockets. But he bore no signs of wear and tear. It wasn’t dilapidation that was at work on him, it was disparity. No two features agreed. His face had simply fallen out with itself.

He walked along the line, asking names and shaking hands. When he came to me something extraordinary happened. He said, ‘Don’t tell me.’ Then he lowered his head, showing me his baldness. Was I meant to kiss it? Was that what you did when you met a Lord? ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me,’ he said again, tapping his temples. Then he came back up smiling. Not one tooth alike unto any other, except in the matter of looseness. ‘Walzer!’ he said. And he played an imaginary ping-pong shot, a scooping backhand drive that would have missed the table by a mile.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘That’s me.’

‘Well?’ he waited. ‘What’s your response?’ And when he saw that I was nonplussed he played the shot again, this time from a less cramped position and with more topspin. ‘Well, Mr Walzer?’

Was I really expected to pretend to hit it back? Were we really going to play a game of shadow ping-pong with everybody watching? And was I required to let him win?

I chopped. Deep and low. My classy forehand chop from before the days of sponge and sandwich.

‘Good man,’ he laughed, moving on. ‘You’ll do.’

Not keeping it simple, that was always my trouble. Just like my father with his Yo-Yo. ‘Point to you actually, Master,’ I said. ‘I’ve netted my return.’

He was polite enough to nod. But I could see that already I bored him. Prolix. Pity.

For my
part I
was chuffed that he knew my name almost alone of all the line of freshmen, but I had mixed feelings about being here on the strength of my ping-pong. I thought I’d put all that behind me with the swag and tsatskes. To be resurrected, as a fall-back position, only if I flunked Collins Classics. That’s assuming I
could
resurrect it.

‘What was all that about?’ St John Fivers asked. He seemed to know who I was again.

But he walked away while I was telling him.

An improbably tall person, neither man nor boy, surveyed me through what, from that distance, looked like an airman’s helmet, but was in fact nothing other than a pair of very square spectacles on a very square face. ‘You’re not a bloody hearty, are you?’ he demanded.

I wasn’t confident I could get words to carry to his height. So I lobbed him up a Bug and Dniester shrug. Meaning, if you look at it this way, but then again if you look at it that way …

‘Well are you or aren’t you?’

It was actually a reprimand. If I stayed talking to him any longer he’d be telling me to make my bloody mind up. And he was no
less of a freshman than I was. I’d seen him in the line, inclining extravagantly to the Master who himself was no short-arse. So I put into practice the one lesson in Cambridge etiquette I’d already learnt and left him to his ire. But it embarrassed me to do it. It wasn’t how I’d been brought up to behave. It contravened the convention of tcheppehing.

‘Can’t say I blame you,’ someone whispered in my ear.

I turned around in surprise. And found myself looking into an open face, clear blue eyes, a broad smile, a slightly dizzy quiff of blond hair, relaxed stance, easy demeanour — someone like myself, at last!

‘Oliver Walzer,’ I said, holding out my hand.

‘Robin Clarke,’ he said pleasantly, holding out his.

‘Bit of a brute for someone who offers not to approve of hearties, isn’t he?’ I said.

‘Yes, isn’t he. Name’s Marcus Whiting, I’m told. Classics scholar. They say very brilliant.’

I pooh-poohed that. ‘We’re all very brilliant,’ I said.

‘Oh, I’m not. I’m not brilliant at all.’

‘You wouldn’t be here, else,’ I said. Already I liked him. Maybe he wasn’t very brilliant but I liked him. The goyishe friend — could this one be
the goyishe friend?
Whose sister I would marry in a little country church in Gloucestershire? Where we would raise horses and soft-voiced goyishe children called Christopher and Amelia? And only ever have cheese
after
dinner?

He laughed. ‘Trust me I’m not,’ he said. ‘I’m not even clever. But I can see you are.’

‘Brilliant or clever?’

‘Brilliant.’

I smiled and shook my head.

‘Yes, you are,’ he said. ‘All Jews are brilliant.’

I swallowed hard. I could have walked away but I foresaw an element of farce in that. Ricocheting from one to the other like a steel ball on a bagatelle board.

‘Not
all
Jews,’ I said. ‘Just as not all gentiles.’

He was still shining his countenance upon me. ‘I’m glad you said gentiles and not Christians,’ he said. ‘It’s a common mistake. As a Christian myself I feel that there is a great deal of the Jew in me. Where would we Christians be without the Jews after all?’

‘Where indeed,’ I said.

‘Which is why it’s so important to Christians like myself to try to win Jews back to their original faith …’

I held up a hand. ‘No,’ I said.

‘You don’t even know what you’re saying no to yet.’

‘I do,’ I said. ‘I’m saying no to everything.’

‘Couldn’t we meet over a beer, to talk about it.’

‘Jews don’t drink beer,’ I said. ‘It interferes with their brain cells.’

He fell quiet for a moment or two. Then he said, ‘I see that I’ve hurt your feelings. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to do that. I love all Jews.’

‘Well that’s more than I do,’ I said.

Now that he’d said he’d hurt my feelings I needed to escape him. As long as he’d only hurt my feelings I was no more than annoyed by him. But once he’d said he’d hurt my feelings, he’d hurt my feelings.

So stuff his sister.

‘I have another party to go to,’ I said.

‘Quaffers? I’m off to that. I’m a bit of a hearty myself, I have to confess. Hockey. You’re ping-pong, I gather. I’ll walk over with you.’

‘No need,’ I said. ‘I’m going to Yorath and Rubella’s.’