The Ballet of Dr Caligari

by Reggie Oliver

  I spent less time looking at Jane, though my mind was still full of her as I watched Giselle’s lover Hilarion being danced to death by the white spirits of suicides. Adam’s music did not seem so banal; or rather, the formal predictability of its gestures enhanced its menace, gave it a threat that was perhaps not intended. I wondered if I could make this idea work with the music that I was trying to write for Sir Daniel’s Caligari.

  After the performance I offered to escort Jane home. It was rather a formal, old fashioned thing to do, but she declined.

  ‘Whereabouts do you live?’ I asked.

  ‘Kensington Church Street.’

  ‘With Sir Daniel?’ She nodded. I said nothing, but my surprise—it amounted almost to dismay—was obvious.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘thank you for a lovely evening.’ She touched my arm lightly, a friendly gesture, I thought, then moved away rapidly. She was soon lost in the gilded crowds as they spilled out of Covent Garden. I thought I saw Julian briefly and felt a great desire to talk to him, but he also became lost in the throng. Suddenly I felt very alone.

  When I got home, I found that I was very hungry. I managed to scratch together an unpleasant but sustaining meal from the contents of my fridge. I gave myself a whisky—not a common occurrence—and felt restless. I was sure I was not going to sleep, but I must have done because when I woke suddenly several hours later I found I was lying fully dressed on my bed. No lights were on in my room but the yellow glare of street lamps pervaded the white muslin curtains which protected my bedroom from the outside world. In less than a minute I was fully awake with a strong sense that there was someone else in the room.

  There was. The dark shape of a woman was standing close to the door. I could not see her clearly but she was facing the wall. My mind was too shocked to register anything as visceral as fear.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. The word sounded as absurd as it felt.

  She turned round. It was Jane. Wordlessly she began to remove her clothes. I could say nothing. And when she climbed into bed with me I felt her skin soft and cold like the silken pall on a coffin. Our encounter had a kind of passionless eroticism that I had never experienced before. We did not speak because it was all too strange.

  When it was over I lay by her side caressing her hair and stroking her smooth skin. Apart from breathing more deeply she showed no response, but when I stopped my caresses for a moment she took my hand in hers and laid it on her breast as if she wanted me to continue.

  ‘Why are you living with Sir Daniel?’ I asked. ‘Can’t you afford to live on your own?’ She turned her head away but gripped my hand more tightly. I asked her how she had got into my flat and she did not reply. I had made love to a shadow. Soon I fell asleep and when I woke again she had gone.

  She came to me several times in the following weeks but never announced and never, to be honest, exactly when I wanted her to come. In the meanwhile, I began to put together a score for the Caligari ballet, visiting Sir Daniel every week to play him the results. I soon realised that the only way to make progress was to do exactly what he wanted. He did at least have a clear concept of what the score should be, and though it was to some degree stultifying it also stimulated some of my most accomplished music to date. I took a distant pride in my achievement, as if it were not really my own work. Sir Daniel never expressed enthusiasm, but if I had written something which met with his approval he would nod and say that it was what ‘we are looking for’.

  As I was leaving, I would always be shown out by Jane, but she never spoke to me. She barely said anything even during our encounters at my flat. All my enquiries about her life, her relationship with Sir Daniel were turned aside. As I recall it now she only complied with one request of mine, which was that when she came she should ring the doorbell and not simply materialise in my flat. (I discovered that she had contrived to have my keys copied, though how and when I never knew.) I became obsessed by her and the way she gave me everything and nothing. I knew it could not go on like this, but each time I hoped for one more meeting: her body had the cool perfection of a Greek statue.

  Then one day, after I had played through a sequence in which Francis pursues the somnambulist Cesarine through the crooked streets, dances briefly with her and then once more loses her, Sir Daniel said: ‘Well now, I think we should play this for Marda.’

  The shock I felt must have been plainly visible. In the first place, I had not quite accustomed myself to thinking of Jane as Jane and not Marda, but I knew whom Sir Daniel meant because he had looked up at the portrait over the fireplace when he spoke. Then, with a typical gesture, he put up his hand to forestall any further questioning.

  ‘Marda and I will pick you up at your flat at nine tomorrow morning. Take your music with you. There will be a piano there. And now if you will excuse me. Marda will see you out.’ He rose and left the room.

  In the corridor, I said to Jane: ‘What’s going on? Do you know about this?’

  In answer she simply put her finger to her lips. I was hoping that she might come to the flat that night but she didn’t.

  The following morning I was ready when I saw Sir Daniel’s Rolls Royce stop outside my Willesden Green flat. Jane emerged from the driver’s seat, rang the bell, looked up to see me peering from the window and stepped back into the car.

  Sir Daniel was seated in the middle of the back seat, with documents of various kinds spread out ostentatiously on either side of him. When I approached the car, he began busying himself with them. Jane opened the door of the front passenger seat. I got in and we drove off in silence.

  The situation annoyed me. ‘May I ask precisely where it is we are going?’ I asked, allowing a touch of frosty irony to colour my voice. I hoped this would annoy Sir Daniel and I think it did.

  ‘A place called Frodsham Grange,’ he replied. ‘And now, if you will excuse me, I have some papers to attend to.’

  ‘Where is that?’ I asked Jane softly. Jane pointed to the Sat-Nav on the dashboard. It indicated that it was over fifty miles away. I asked no further questions, though I burned with a strong inner sense that I was being shabbily treated.

  Whatever one’s feelings, a ride in a Rolls Royce, especially if one is as unused to it as I was, is a soothing experience. My apprehension and annoyance returned only when we passed through a pair of electronically opened wrought iron gates and were going up a long straight drive, wide enough only for one vehicle, between an avenue of lime trees. We were entering an estate, somewhere in the semi-rural environs of the Essex and Suffolk border. The grounds were well tended with large expanses of clean-shaven lawn. Clumps of rhododendron and rather self-conscious stands of trees punctuated the decorous monotony of grass. A weak sun shone; somewhere in the distance beyond I heard the hum of a mower.

  We came in sight of a large red-brick building which had the look of an Edwardian country house built by an arriviste millionaire. An extensive white veranda ran along one side.

  ‘Frodsham Grange?’ Jane nodded. In front of the main entrance, over which there was an extensive porch, there was a circular gravel drive. It surrounded a green lawn in the middle of which was the lichened statue of a classical deity. It was the figure standing below it that drew my attention. He was an old man and he wore a white dressing gown over white pyjamas. He was staring up at the classical god—Pan, I think it was—with a rapt expression, as if it were a sublime work of art rather than a tawdry garden ornament. The strangest thing about him was that he wore a white cardboard crown on his head. Presently two male attendants in blue uniforms came out and bore him away indoors.

  It was clear that Sir Daniel was expected. What I took to be the manager of Frodsham Grange, a stout man in a blue suit hurried out onto the drive and, with an almost fawning deference, greeted Sir Daniel as he stepped from the Rolls. I heard him mutter something to Sir Daniel about ‘everything’ being ‘ready’ for him.

  ‘What is this place?’ I asked Jane.

  ‘I think it’s some sort of san
atorium.’

  ‘Haven’t you been here before?’

  Jane did not reply. I was becoming more and indignant about being conveyed here against my will with only the vaguest notion as to why I was there. The fat man in the blue suit was presented to Jane and me and we shook hands. He was more like a peculiarly obsequious hotelier than the manager of a sanatorium.

  ‘If you will come this way.’

  The interior was polished, wooden and gloomy, but by no means unluxurious. A great staircase led up to the first floor with a stained glass window dominating the first landing. It depicted, in a cubist, Expressionist style, a town with a church and people scurrying about in it. All the buildings were set at peculiar angles and the people seemed dwarfed and intimidated by these arrangements. If it were not for the violently bright colours, it might have been a representation of the Expressionist town in the film of Dr Caligari. It was a striking if unsettling piece of work.

  On the first floor the fat man ushered the three of us into a long room whose windows looked down onto the front drive and the grounds beyond. A few figures in the distance dressed in white, but accompanied by blue coated attendants were wandering the park land.

  The room itself was sparely furnished with a few antique but uncomfortable chairs set against the walls. Opposite the windows was a marble fireplace and at one end of the room was a dais on which stood a gleaming black Bechstein grand piano. The fat man left the room, almost bowing as he withdrew. Sir Daniel waved his hand towards the dais.

  ‘There you are, my boy. Make yourself comfortable.’ There was even a note of geniality in his voice, but I knew him well enough to be aware also of a suppressed tension, even excitement. He began to pace about the room pretending to inspect the large, dull, Victorian landscapes with which it was decorated.

  ‘You want me to play my music? Here? Why exactly?’ I felt by now that I was entitled to an answer.

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough, dear boy,’ said Sir Daniel shooing me towards the piano with an elegant balletic hand gesture. I might have been more indignant had he not seemed so light- hearted for once. At that moment it would have been churlish of me to spoil his fun.

  As I was establishing myself at the piano and taking out the music I saw the double doors at the opposite end of the room open. There was a pause, then through it came three blue-coated attendants wheeling a hospital bed hung about with a battery of drips and monitors. Festoons of wires, pipes and cables all converged on a figure lying in the bed. Sir Daniel directed the attendants to place the bed within a few feet of the dais so that the person in the bed, whose eyes were closed, was facing me. I could now clearly see the face and the long, emaciated white arms which rested on the sheets. It was a woman.

  Then there was some discussion between Sir Daniel and the attendants. It was clear that he wanted them to leave the room while they were insisting that they had to stay. Eventually Sir Daniel’s will prevailed and they departed. I saw him smile. For a man like Sir Daniel even these small assertions of power had their satisfaction. He turned to me, pointing to the woman in the bed.

  ‘This is Marda de Valli,’ said Sir Daniel.

  I had guessed as much. The thin face, the prominent cheekbones, the stillness made her look ageless. Her hair was white; her wrinkles imperceptible. She looked like a mummified corpse; only the slight rise and fall of her chest and the assortment of bleeps and pulses that came from the array of equipment that surrounded her indicated life, of a sort. Her eyes were lightly closed and very occasionally I thought I could detect a faint twitch of the eyeball beneath them.

  ‘Play the score,’ said Sir Daniel to me. When I hesitated he nodded fiercely, so I began.

  At first, I was so intent on my score and getting it right that all other impressions were blocked out. Slowly, however, I began to relax into my music and started to observe the strange circumstances in which I was giving my recital. Sir Daniel stood at first, then he indicated to Jane that he would like a chair to be brought so he could sit beside Marda’s bed. Once he had sat down he turned his attention entirely towards Marda. Jane glanced up at me fearfully.

  I was now playing automatically, almost without thinking. All the other elements in the room took on an intense personality which made my playing seem a mere accompaniment. Jane stood by the door, like a shadow, her desire to be anywhere but in this place almost palpable. Sir Daniel sat on the antique armless chair in his perfect suit some distance from the bed, his eyes fixed on Marda’s still form. The index finger on his left hand began to beat convulsively in time with the music. His glance was intense, almost fiery, if fire can also freeze.

  When I stopped playing for a moment, Sir Daniel turned to me in cold fury and gestured for me to continue playing, so I did. The music had taken over. It became louder and I was improvising something with barely any of my consciousness engaged.

  I thought the music was drowning out everything in the room, but it wasn’t. There was a metallic creak which flashed across the wall of sound I was putting up like a pistol shot. It must have come from the bed. I began to flag again, but Sir Daniel, without this time keeping his eyes off Marda in the bed, signalled wildly for me to go on playing. I played, keeping a close watch on the bed myself. There had been a movement. I thought I might have been deceived, but the next moment I was convinced. Marda’s eyes opened, but they were as black and opaque as if they had been shut.

  Sir Daniel rose from his chair but made no move towards the bed. Instead he stretched out his arms and made little pulling movements with them as if he were enticing Marda to rise and walk.

  Astonishingly the body in the bed appeared to respond. The figure began to raise its head and shoulders from the pillow. The various electrodes and catheters which connected her to the life support machine began to snap and fall away. A beeping started up which should have alerted any nearby attendant or nurse, but it did not. Now she was sitting upright in the bed in only her white shift, her thin arms with the long skeletal hands hanging loosely by her side. She made a curious jerking, swivelling movement and her legs were now hanging over the side of the hospital bed, thin jointed sticks with a collapsed integument of skin-wrapped sinew. Again I faltered.

  Sir Daniel screeched: ‘Go on playing, you damned little shit! Play! Play!’

  The thin skeleton feet were on the floor. Marda began to inhale and exhale violently, making a hideous noise, half way between a rattle and a low moan. Sir Daniel’s face was ecstatic. He opened his arms and the look on his face was almost one of love, but there was too much triumph in it, too much of conquest.

  Her sad blank eyes were turned on him, and now she had turned her whole body in his direction. With one hand supporting herself on the bed rail she was standing on her feet. The short white shift she wore came to just above her knees which seemed strangely bulbous and knotted. Sir Daniel gestured to her to come to him. Her rattling breath came in great convulsive heaves, distorting her face and upper body violently.

  She took one step towards him, and another, then, taking her hand away from the bed rail, she took another step forward towards Sir Daniel. There was a crackling sound like the tearing of old cloth and I saw one of her legs begin to buckle, then the other. They did not so much break as disintegrate so that her whole body seemed to collapse into the ground like a dynamited building. The next moment she was on the floor, a puddle of desiccated flesh, no more. Jane screamed. The last thing I saw of Marda was her black eyes darting venomously about in her shattered head.

  I felt nothing but revulsion and panic. I leapt off the dais and ran for the door, grabbing Jane’s arm as I passed. The long corridor outside the music room was deserted. I saw one old man in white shuffling along with a Zimmer frame in the distance. I shouted for help. A blue coated attendant emerged from the doorway. I pointed towards the music room and babbled something about there having been an accident. I turned to the stairs and bolted down them, dragging Jane with me. We nearly fell over a wheelchair which stood tenantless in t
he hall. The emptiness of the Grange enhanced my terror. Jane went with me unresisting. I shouted at her to give me the keys to the Rolls. She said they were in the ignition. I ran to the Rolls and opened the driver’s door. Jane hesitated. I dragged her into the passenger seat and started up the car, barely knowing what I was doing. In my blind fear it seemed to take an age before I had started the car. We drove ridiculously fast down the lime avenue; I had never known such power behind a wheel.

  ‘Look out!’ screamed Jane.

  A lorry had turned in at the gate and was coming up the drive. There was no room to pass it. Too late I realised that this was the entrance and not the exit drive. I put on the breaks and turned the Rolls. There was a shriek of rubber and we collided with one of the lime trees, the full impact hitting Jane’s side of the car. I remember nothing after that and my mind is still in pieces.

  ***

  ‘How much of this story of his is true, doctor?’ asked the nurse.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ said the Doctor. ‘It is the truth as he sees it. That is all that matters. And it has given me an idea.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About how he might be possibly cured.’ They peered together through the little window of the cell door. Within, an elderly- looking man sat practising arpeggios on a dummy keyboard. He wore a white cardboard crown on his head. Occasionally he scrawled something with a pencil on a piece of music manuscript paper. When later examined the marks he made turned out to be meaningless scribbles.

  ‘And what happened to the woman?’ asked the nurse.

  ‘Jane Fisher? The accident paralysed her. She’s still in a coma, I believe. Well,’ said the Doctor, closing the sliding panel that obscured the cell door’s window, ‘that concludes our business with him for the moment. I wonder, nurse—may I call you Marda?—at about this time, I like to round off the day with a glass of champagne. Would you care to join me for one in my consulting room?’