The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge (8 page)

‘What is it?’ asked the Judge, as the village reared up out of the vineyards in the distance.

Schweigen risked all.

‘Stop the car.’

She pulled up on a small track by the edge of the vineyards. A little row of olives and two dark pillars of cypress trees, brushing one another, marked the rim. They could be seen, clearly, from all directions. The Judge switched off the engine and turned her dark gaze upon him. He reached up to her dark glasses and took them off. Her nose twitched and she blinked. Schweigen realised that she could no longer see him clearly and that she was swallowing a huge gust of laughter.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘You are.’

She leaned towards him; he could smell her hair and the perfume on her dress. Her lunge across the gear stick was so sudden and unexpected that Schweigen cringed back against the passenger’s door. One hand shot out and caught his head, her fingers sticking into his short damp hair, and with the other she hauled his shoulders round to face her so that her savage kiss, hard against his lips, almost dislocated his collarbone. Schweigen shook with fright like an assaulted virgin. She covered his face and neck with light, dry kisses. Then just as suddenly as she had come she drew away, like a serpent recoiling, choosing the next bare patch of skin to bite.

‘There,’ she said, ‘wasn’t that what you wanted?’

Schweigen recovered himself completely. His confidence galloped back through every vein, like a horse flying riderless across open fields, charged with pure joy.

‘Yes,’ he said, looking her straight in the eye, and allowing all his sexual intent to glimmer and shine with expectation and demand. ‘That was exactly what I wanted.’

‘You taste of salt,’ smiled the Judge and flicked her tongue swiftly across her lower lip.

3

THE BOOK OF THE FAITH

Now, five years on from that day at the funeral, Schweigen’s emotions rolled back and forth as he rummaged through the chalet where Madame Laval had spent her last days. He stomped about the bedrooms overseeing his forensic research party; he felt tricked and betrayed by this stately woman, who had followed her brother to the grave, staging an exact replica of the earlier events. But through the manner of her death Madame Laval had brought the Judge back to him. There was the woman he loved, sitting downstairs, bending over the evidence, in charge of his investigation. The trail glowed warm again. He had an incontestable excuse to speak to her every day. He found himself smiling into the linen cupboard.

André Schweigen could never quite remember the Judge with sufficient clarity between their rare encounters ever to be reassured that she was not, in fact, a mirage created by desire, which he had ingeniously conjured up. He wrote her name upon his telephone pad, over and over again, simply for the pleasure of watching the letters take shape, just as the younger son of Sir Rowland de Boys had plastered
ROSALIND
all over the woods, defacing stiles and gateposts, oaks and silver birch trees. If he tried to remember her smooth, cool shape he could see nothing but her eyes and hands. He couldn’t remember her clothes. Did she always wear black as she had done five years before at Anton Laval’s grotesque requiem Mass? She is half my size. I can hold both her hands in one of mine. All her movements are sly and deft. She makes me feel huge, ungainly, clumsy and stupid. Her hair. Now I can see her, I can see every flick and shimmer of her black hair as she bends forward with her head upside down and brushes her hair downward, then up she comes, acrobatic and precise as a circus act, and it settles round her shoulders and across her face like an affectionate animal. Then she raises her left arm, comb braced and ready, rakes it all upwards, then sculpts the mass into a coil, no stray threads, and fixes the creature at the nape of her neck, with that tortoiseshell clamp that her mother brought back from the Maldives. And the last thing she does as she smoothes her shirt into her trousers is reach for her glasses.

I have watched her do this every time I have made love to her. She moves like a dancer. Now I can see her eyes and hands. But I cannot imagine her face. A cold swell of panic rushed through him and lifted the hair on his forearms. I cannot see her face. And so the Judge vanished.

Schweigen found himself perpetually on the brink of announcing to his oblivious wife that he was in love with a Judge. This rendered his family life precarious and intolerable. Had he been able to confess that the Judge was merely another woman, the matter would have been simpler, less strenuous, more easily explicable. He would then have fallen into that banal category of men, who, after an erotic debut with a woman they have known for some time, settle down into about eight years of emotional and economic debris; in which they purchase the villa, plant the trees, make do with one car when the wife works part-time, eat dinner with friends who are doing the same thing, have one child, decide they cannot afford another, and thank God it’s a boy, buy surfboards for Brittany, skis for les vacances d’hiver, mountain bikes and walking boots, eat sensibly, despite the chips, decorate the house for Christmas and decide that they are happy. On the edges of this seeping bliss the husband – or the wife – will have the odd adventure. A few doors will be slammed when all is revealed, discovered or confessed. But the steadiness that has been established by routine and that daily engagement which is required of long-married people, who, after all, rub along like comrades in the trenches, will restore the balance; and a provisional equilibrium, that long swell in the Atlantic, which means you have reached the middle passage, steadies the ship. The possibility of catastrophe had already been avoided by intimate friends, once, twice, and Sabine Schweigen prepared herself, not only to take these side steps in her stride, but to ignore them steadily, as wise wives often do.

She therefore did not notice, or refused to do so, when Schweigen lay beside her, prostrate, unsleeping, like someone electrocuted, nor did she comment when he sat sagging and crumpled at the table in the mornings, black rings beneath his eyes, like an elderly rag doll. The first investigation proved traumatic. Small wonder. Who would not be shaken by the sight of dozens of poisoned people, some no more than children, murdered while they slept, and by their parents’ own hands? Madame Schweigen was a nurse who specialised in intensive care. She frequently worked night shifts, so that her mother was recalled to babysitting duties when her husband’s journeys dragged him away from home. She remained unperturbed when his life heaved into disturbance and uproar; with an inquiry of this nature anything else would have been extraordinary. Besides, he still ate a substantial breakfast.

But Schweigen’s inner life had been laid waste by an emotional electric storm, which had fused the synapses in his brain. The Judge dominated the investigation and therefore his working life, but worse, far worse than this, she occupied his imagination, like a conquering army, whose troops and tanks, camped out at every street corner, now controlled all access to his soul. He gazed at his wife, desperate. For every action was now performed before the cool, appraising eyes of the all-seeing Judge, about whom he still knew next to nothing.

In the beginning, five years before, the Judge created all the circumstances that could reasonably lead to another meeting. Almost a month after Anton Laval’s funeral, when all attempts on Schweigen’s part to contact her had been greeted with a shattering clatter of the portcullis, he had begun to plan reckless measures. He could not accept that this affair was a matter easily settled in one afternoon. Then her voice, steady and precise, appeared in his ear, as if they had just finished speaking some moments before.

‘Monsieur le Commissaire? C’est Dominique Carpentier à l’appareil. I have arranged to meet the judge who dealt with the Swiss departure. Just to talk things over. Given that so many of the families are agitating about the lack of an enquiry. Have you seen
Le Nouvel Observateur
? Non? Marie-Cécile Laval has written an article about her brother that has provoked a good deal of correspondence. It reads more like a self-justifying obituary than an explanation. But you should read it. I’ve brought you a copy, just in case.’

‘Where are you?’ snapped Schweigen, incensed by her cool and aroused simply by the sound of her voice.

‘At Strasbourg airport. On my way to Bern. Would you be free, by any chance, and able to join me?’

The hotel in Bern overlooked the Parliament buildings and a famous café, which the government patronised, strolling across the square, bent on consuming mid-morning coffee and cakes during the breaks between sessions. The scale of the buildings, both the Parliament and the political coffee house, allowed them to settle comfortably alongside one another, domestic and charming. As they sat in the restaurant the evening sun illuminated the crisp yellow linen tablecloth and the Judge’s olive arms. Schweigen counted the ribbed stitches on the front of her white shirt, and noticed that the veins in the semi-precious stones in her ears were not symmetrical. He looked everywhere rather than into her face, the large glasses and the fabulous, magnified eyes. He heard the amusement in her voice, like a melody played on the oboe, every time she ceased to speak about the investigation and addressed him directly as a man to whom she had once made love.

‘I’ve booked a suite with two rooms. Just in case you wanted to endorse our respectable cover story.’ She grinned at him.

‘How could you be so sure I’d come with you?’ Schweigen had actually told the truth at home, or at least the geographical truth – that he was called away to Bern, activated his mother-in-law, and hurtled off to Switzerland, trailing in the Judge’s first-class wake on the midday train.

‘Ah well,’ said the Judge, ‘here you are.’ And he was granted a smile more beautiful, more generous and affectionate than he had ever dared to long for during all the manic hours he had spent gazing at her handwriting, whispering her name. André Schweigen felt quite unhinged. This awkwardness, which accompanied his passion like a drinking chorus in the middle of Mass, then proved his undoing.

Upon the table, beside their scraped dessert plates, was a Sträußchen, a little bouquet of wild flowers in a decorated pot. The hotel, now owned by a chain, had succumbed to the desolate economics of capitalism and replaced the fresh scented flowers, which had once enchanted visitors to the former family-run establishment, by an authentic plastic-textile cluster of edelweiss. Schweigen tipped the candle too close to the green-and-white bouquet, which caught fire at once and began to smoulder. For a moment he did not notice what he had done. A dramatic shift in the Judge’s attention triggered the alarm and a cloud of black smoke rose up from the table. The worst of it was that no one else, not even the waiters, or the two businessmen sitting next to them, who actually had a computer open on the table, took the slightest bit of notice. Schweigen tried to quell the flames with his bare hands, burning his thumb in the process. The Judge snatched up her yellow linen napkin, folded it rapidly in two and smothered the blaze in one swift gesture. The plastic flowers sizzled faintly beneath her ruthless grasp and then went out. She tipped her water glass over the napkin as a precaution, so that a small damp heap of charred remains defaced the table.

‘Have you burned your hand?’ The Judge was genuinely concerned. ‘There’s a sinister smell of roasting flesh.’ Then she laughed softly. ‘Come upstairs, André. I’ve got some antiseptic cream in my suitcase.’

And that was the second time she had called him by his first name. For ever afterwards he always remembered this combination of emotions, chagrin, embarrassment, pain and joy – the pure joy of acknowledgement and recognition. She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me. He no longer cared about anything else; the woman he loved without let or hindrance had gazed upon him with undisguised tenderness and addressed him by his name. She loves me.

_{*  *  *}

The heating in the chalet had not yet risen to the first floor. Schweigen prowled through the children’s rooms, full of video games, bright activity centres, plastic picture books and half-built constructions in Lego. The toys were beginning to get to him. He saw building kits, battleships and play-stations that he had bought for his own boy, the same baseball cap with the bright logo, similar boots. He bristled at these abandoned rooms and young lives sliced in two; his anger now rising in exact proportion to his approaching exhaustion. He wished them all back here, now, so that he could prosecute the lot. As he retreated from the main children’s room he turned out the light, and it was then that he became aware of the stars. André Schweigen looked up.

Above him, all across the ceiling, glowing with soft phosphorescence, glittered a pattern of lights, carefully designed to mirror the night sky at the winter solstice. The children had gazed at that sky night after night and then died, their faces raised to the same pattern of stars, churning across the void, following the earth where they lay, staring wide-eyed into eternity. Schweigen completely forgot his self-imposed formal manner towards the Judge, which he reserved for professional occasions, and yelled down the stairs, ‘Dominique! Viens ici. Viens vite!’