The Doubleman

by Christopher Koch

  ‘You must stop dwelling in your mind on this association,’ the husky voice whispered through the grille. It was accompanied by a smell of cough-lollies; the priest had a cold. ‘You are lucky that temptation is out of the way, since you say the person concerned is in another city. But you must be careful of building a false desire, a false image of this woman. Such desire can never be satisfied — not just because in your case it would be sinful to do so, but because we don’t find ease of it through lust, or even through what you think of as love. The desire you feel, although you don’t recognise it, is really the desire for God. Being united with Him alone can satisfy those longings which are never satisfied, and which pursue us all our lives. Remember that; ask forgiveness; ask God to take you to Himself.’ Soon afterwards, he gave me absolution, his voice trailing away in muttered Latin, the smell of cough-lollies persisting.

  I had begun to go out with girls — most of them fellow-students — but this meant little to me. Brief moments of promise, brief interludes of physical excitement, were always followed by the decision that my partners were drab and trivial. No one could compare with Deirdre. Besides, the prettiest and most sought-after girls were not interested in me, and for this I saw my limp as being to blame. It was only slight, now; I scarcely ever used the stick; but it prevented me from dancing, and the most vital and popular girls liked to dance; they liked unimpaired men. But it didn’t matter, really; nothing mattered but Deirdre Dillon, who should have been Deirdre Brennan.

  She had never made her promised visit to Hobart; instead, I had her letters. These came regularly in answer to mine, always in the same expensive blue envelopes, addressed in her round, regular hand, in violet ink. The letters had two aspects, as Deirdre had done. There was a light, gossiping tone and a tone of high romance. I was allowed glimpses of Deirdre in isolation — washing her hair, sitting in her garden above Sydney Harbour, reading her books — a young, dreaming girl in an isolated house; a figure in a Bronte novel. And once she had sent me a photograph, which I treasured. On the back of it, in her violet ink, she had written: The twenties!! The picture had been taken at a fancy-dress party to which Deirdre had gone as a twenties flapper; headband, beads, an absurdly long cigarette-holder in her mouth. Mooning over it with double nostalgia, it seemed to me that she had actually lived then; and the picture became a sacred relic, an artefact that not only proved Deirdre had existed, but framed her in our lost decade.

  At times, in answer to my declarations, she grew almost erotic — and then drew back. They were almost love letters, but not quite; she didn’t say, ‘I love you’, but merely, ‘love, Deirdre’. And once she said: ‘I can’t say that; I mustn’t. And you mustn’t write to me as you did last time. It makes me long for you too much. I think so often of our lovely beach.’

  Her husband wouldn’t open my letters, she said; I could feel safe on that score. But she asked me not to grow so serious for my own sake. This, of course, did nothing to dissuade me. I lived for the mail. And yet, despite the way in which these letters brought the tones of her voice into my head, she grew less and less real; she became another figure; and this figure took on a new and complex dimension, which Darcy Burr would soon help me to understand.

  3

  ‘And how are you liking it here? Any regrets?’

  Broderick leans back in his swivel chair, half-turned towards me from his rolltop desk.

  ‘It’s a means to an end. I appreciate your taking me on.’ This is the first time I’ve been inside his office since I began work at Varley’s.

  ‘It must be a bit of a come-down, after the undergraduate life. And I’m told you went well in your exams.’ His tone is neutral, his voice cold as ever, and his blank eyes remain attentive on my face. Their pupils are very small, the yellowish lids drooping in a more accentuated way than I remember. I pause, wondering whether I should sit down; I’ve only come in here for some catalogues. But now he swivels right around and extends his legs in front of him, his back to his desk, blowing a thin stream of smoke from his cigarette. He seems to intend that I should stay and talk.

  ‘You did metaphysics, Darcy tells me. Did you get much out of it?’

  ‘I liked it, but I didn’t see much point in it. In the end, classical metaphysics only told me something I already knew.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘That the whole visible world’s an illusion.’

  He raises his eyebrows as though I’ve said something that impresses him. Then the crooked smile travels up the side of his face; it gives him a look of cold kindness. ‘I’d certainly agree with you there. And what next?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Where does that take you to?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I’m agnostic about everything at the moment.’

  He says nothing to this at first. Formal as a banker in his dark blue three-piece suit, he gets up and crosses to a little table where a bottle of whisky and some glasses stand. He pours two, telling me he keeps it here for the publishers’ reps. On a Friday night he always allows himself one; will I join him?

  I take the drink with a sense of being favoured, and discreetly look about me, in this narrow, windowless office which is situated at the foot of the basement stairs. There’s a worn Persian carpet on the floor, making it intimate and comfortable. A guitar stands in one corner, and the walls consist entirely of books. Many of them look old, and deal with music and art; others deal with philosophy and occult topics, most of their titles conveying nothing to me. It resembles the room of a university lecturer; yet in some way I can’t analyse and is probably my own imagination, it seems more suggestive of esoteric knowledge than any lecturer’s study. Perhaps it’s simply the fact that it’s located underground.

  Broderick sits at his desk again and sips his whisky. I take a chair by the bookshelves, but his empty gaze makes me as cautious as it did when I was standing. Now he says musingly: ‘Let’s sum up the position. People like Locke and Berkeley and Kant have told you that perception’s a deceiver; that your senses trick you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So as far as ontology’s concerned, we don’t really know what’s outside us, do we?’ His voice remains hollow, faintly regretful, but friendly now. ‘It’s just a skin, everything that we see. The question is, what’s really out there? Or who? How do we pierce the skin? Did they teach you that, at university?’

  I smile, waiting to see what all this will lead to. No doubt some hackneyed theory or outdated system, presented as fresh discovery. But Broderick remains impressive, and I wonder if he remembers our meeting in the lane. His next remark, made casually, is bizarre.

  ‘I’d suggest to you that we’re watched all the time from out there. By enemies and allies.’ He seems to be gazing just past my shoulder — perhaps to no particular purpose, but despite my incredulity at what he’s said, I have the sudden sense of a dark shape standing behind me. I cast a stealthy glance aside, feeling foolish; it’s Broderick’s overcoat, hanging behind the door. Upstairs, the shop will be closed and empty by now, the dustcovers over the counters. Turning back, I find him watching me with melancholy amusement, and his sad handsomeness touches me as it did in the lane; I’m irrationally flattered by his wish to talk to me.

  ‘You once believed in angels,’ he says. ‘Or I presume you did, since your Church does. Why shouldn’t you believe in other entities?’

  ‘You mean demons?’

  ‘That’s a Christian term, with silly associations. I can’t take Christianity very seriously, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Christ was a clown.’ His tone is off-hand. ‘He died a clown’s death. You remember his last words on the cross?’

  ‘They were natural. He took on human flesh.’ In spite of my new-found agnosticism, I find I’m still uncomfortable at hearing Christ mocked.

  ‘No true redeemer would take on human flesh, surely? Divine beings are supposed to be pure spirit, aren’t they? And the birth of a divine child wasn’t new. You’ve he
ard of the Eleusinian Mysteries?’

  I admit I haven’t.

  ‘The divinity then was Dionysus, and his virgin mother was the goddess of the sea.’

  He lights a fresh cigarette; he’s a chain-smoker, and his thin fingers are orange with nicotine. As he smokes, he allows the ash to grow longer and longer, inhaling very seldom. Then he asks: ‘Haven’t you ever suspected that the universe is double?’

  At this I experience a small shock, and I ask him what he means. But instead of answering, he glances at his watch, stands up with an expression of forbearance, and favours me with his brief, crooked smile again.

  ‘It’s after closing time.’ He takes down the dark blue coat from the door; I’ve been dismissed.

  I had very few conversations with him after that; perhaps half a dozen in all, and they were usually brief. He was always pleasant, in a tolerant way, but he would never let me stay for long; he would hint that he was busy. And since I was usually in his office playing truant from my job serving customers upstairs, I had no justification for lingering.

  Broderick was only seen in the shop when he passed through the low door behind the sales counter that led to the basement stairs; he never served customers, and bald, portly old Varley, who I suspected did little work any more, seemed to depend on him to run the essential machinery of the place. So the sales staff were in awe of the accountant, growing quiet when he went by; he was like the shop’s true owner, coldly calculating its fundamentals, down below.

  He was nearly always to be seen through the open door of his office at the foot of the basement stairs. Sometimes, after hours, he would be heard softly practising his guitar. In working hours, bent over his ledgers and catalogues, his cigarette with its long, suspended ash always between his lips, he seldom turned around. But when I came clattering down the narrow wooden stairs to fetch some stock, he would sometimes smile at me over his shoulder. It was a strange smile, melancholy yet remote. He seemed to be waiting poignantly for me to understand something; yet I never met a man less approachable.

  I would sometimes lurk about his door at closing time on a Friday night, hoping to be asked in for a whisky again. There were occasions when he did so; more often he didn’t, and sometimes he wasn’t there at all; he went to the mainland on buying trips. But when he did talk to me, it was with self-contained brevity, and usually in a sort of riddling style. These conversations, with the exception of casual exchanges about new stock or the business of the shop, were nearly always an expansion of our first one: a sort of dialogue in serial form. But he always proceeded through hints; nothing I could say would make him expand on his ideas for very long. When he wanted to go, he would look at me as though he wondered what I was doing here, and I would flush, and stand up. I was still not twenty, and found it difficult to judge when I’d worn out my welcome. Sometimes Darcy Burr was here too, for one of his afternoons of work; then we would talk to Broderick together. Looks of complicity would pass between these two; I felt that he had explained much more about his notions to Burr than he had to me.

  Once, and only once, when I was talking to him alone, he showed a sort of scorn. I had been trying to question one of his remarks, no doubt using the pedantic tone we’d all done in Philosophy tutorials, when he put down his cigarette and looked up at me suddenly, his face severe. ‘Look young fellow,’ he said. ‘You really know nothing.’

  His use of ‘young fellow’, rather than the statement itself, was like a slap; I stood flushing, my dignity affronted.

  He went on in a softer tone. ‘University gave you plenty of information, I’m sure. But that’s just shit.’ In his mouth, the word was unusually obscene; he rarely swore. ‘Real knowledge is to know,’ he said. ‘A fellow like Darcy understands that. He understands it in the same way he understands music.’ He paused, and watched me. ‘In pop music, the tunes are the whole thing. But in complex music, the melodies aren’t there at the beginning just for what they are. They’re there for what they’ll become.’ I expected him to go on, but he sat back and fell silent, drawing on his cigarette, staring in front of him and taking no more notice of me. It was time for me to go.

  I didn’t question him much after that, or visit him uninvited. But a certain pattern had emerged from his talk, and I would sometimes prod Darcy to elucidate it, since it became fairly plain that Burr regarded himself as the guitar teacher’s disciple. The picture was shadowy, and disconcerting. The material world, it seemed, was in the grip of powers over which God had no control, and this made the idea of fleshly sin ridiculous. There was no sin. Only the spirit mattered; but the spirit was imprisoned in the body. There was hope, but where it lay was never made clear. Deeply curious, I questioned Burr closely about this, and he hinted at intermediaries; supernatural entities of great power who could be invoked as helpers. Then he closed up; but not before hinting that such helpers might actually be available to Broderick. Darcy at that age was often ingenuous and naive, and I didn’t take this very seriously. Broderick was another matter; I couldn’t dismiss him so easily, and his remarks continued to startle me. Once he remarked that the Holy Spirit was not male but female — a statement I found shocking.

  I remained reluctantly fascinated by him, and sometimes, in the night of the basement, I would feel an actual sense of threat. These were heresies he was proposing, after all; trained early to resist them, I found them threatening even now; and what was most disturbing, if they were actually to be taken seriously, was the denial of God’s sovereign power. If what Broderick hinted at was true, then there was no assurance of the defeat of evil. There was no happy ending.

  Despite his politeness, the bookshop’s accountant didn’t invite any sort of personal confidences or enquiries about himself. I questioned Darcy closely about him, but could discover only the barest facts. His full name was Clive Broderick; he had once been married, and was now divorced. Darcy believed that he must sometimes have affairs; his looks would surely attract women, Burr said, but he had never actually seen Broderick out with one. The accountant made long phone calls though, and Darcy imagined these were to women.

  He was a native of Hobart, but Burr knew of no relatives; Broderick had lived abroad for some years after the War, and had studied guitar in Madrid. Why he hadn’t pursued a musical career, and what had driven him back here to the obscurity of the island and Varley’s Bookshop neither Darcy nor Brian Brady could say. He lived in a flat in West Hobart, but they had never been there; he gave them their guitar lessons in Sandy’s shop, or sometimes, after hours, in his office. And Broderick somehow belonged in those places, I thought — both of which were cave-like, without windows; he was at home underground, and I was somewhat surprised when I saw him in the street. It was hard to imagine Broderick doing everyday things; I could barely picture him shopping, or cleaning his teeth, or even eating. I had never seen Broderick eat; he never brought sandwiches into his office, but disappeared to a solitary lunch in some unknown restaurant. No doubt it was expensive, since Broderick was plainly fastidious.

  He moved with extraordinary quietness. I had been startled many times to find him just behind me, in the shop or in the basement.

  ‘Brod’s got powers,’ Burr said. It was one of his casual workdays here; he and I were alone in the basement, packing books into cartons for the country at one of the long trestle tables. Broderick was absent from his office, away on a trip.

  The basement was a gloomy place, yet I rather liked it; I welcomed excuses to escape down here from serving the customers. Darcy and I lurked here like trolls, and furtively read the books. The building Varley’s occupied was old, and the basement was like a catacomb: dim perspectives of whitewashed brick pillars; smells of earth and mould; bare electric bulbs hanging from wooden rafters. Not all of these lights were kept on, and there were recesses that remained dark. The island’s summer was here now, but the basement was always cool.

  ‘What sort of powers?’ I asked.

  He hesitated, and I had the impression that he’d cons
idered some important disclosure and then decided against it. Then he said: ‘Brod can travel.’

  He and I had recently discussed the subject of astral travel: the possibility of getting the soul out of the body at will, and transporting oneself somewhere else. But I had treated this as folklore, not to be credited as fact.

  ‘It’s true. Brod’s been seen in one place, while his real self’s in another,’ Darcy insisted.

  I scoffed at this. ‘Pull the other one, Darcy.’

  His eyes glinted with amusement; he thrust out his neck like a goose. ‘Listen, mate, what if I were to tell you that yesterday I saw Brod in his office?’

  ‘You can’t have, he’s in Melbourne.’

  Darcy smiled knowingly, and said no more.

  Despite these lapses into superstitious games — games he may or may not have believed in — I found Darcy Burr an interesting companion at that time in our lives, mainly because he and I were being drawn together by our interest in faery lore.

  He was very well informed on this subject, being the only adult I’d met who didn’t dismiss it. He was particularly interested in the true nature of the Queen of Elfland, and we talked about this topic at length; I never tired of it, in that time when I lived for Deirdre’s letters. Queen Titania, he said, had evolved from the goddess Artemis. She was really the third aspect of the moon goddess: the enchantress, Hecate.

  We stood by the trestle table, Darcy in his dustcoat (uniform of the worker below ground), myself in the blue suit and tie I must wear for serving customers above. I wasn’t packing today; I lingered down here without cause, and at any moment the mincing voice of the senior salesman Mr Pringle would summon me up the stairs, his rimless glasses flashing from the top. (‘Richard? Are you serving? ’) Meanwhile, Darcy gossiped away about the nature of Artemis as Fairy Queen, displaying the learning he’d got from books Broderick lent him, and showing a sly, eager interest that was the closest thing to warmth he could demonstrate. It wasn’t the warmth of ordinary friendship, Darcy was too enclosed for that; but it did create a sort of conspiratorial closeness, down here. At times I wondered whether I was truly listening to Burr, or to Broderick; and it spurred me to do some reading of my own.