Madness is Better than Defeat

by Ned Beauman

  ‘Er, no, I won’t come in,’ said Burlingame, taking an involuntary step back. Her fear of appearing ill-mannered had marched her towards a lot of unpleasant places in her life. The doorstep of Notcote Hall was the latest. If she could possibly help it, a Pozkito orgy would not be the next.

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘I have a message, that’s all.’

  ‘From the university?’ Since leaving Cambridge he had let his graying hair curl down to his shoulders.

  ‘No.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Mr Elias Coehorn Jr. of New York wishes you to accompany him on an expedition to the jungles of Spanish Honduras, around the Río Patuca, about fifty miles inland from the Caribbean Sea. He needs a liaison to the natives.’

  Lady Alice stroked Bridewall’s arm. ‘Oh, Sidney, isn’t that wonderful?’

  All that excess blood had abruptly drained from Bridewall’s face. ‘Around the Río Patuca, fifty miles inland from the Caribbean Sea?’

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘But there’s nothing to see there. Absolutely nothing. No reason to go. Much better not to go.’

  ‘Except for the locals!’ said Lady Alice. ‘You’re always saying you’d be so thrilled to go back to the jungle if you could only find the funds.’

  ‘Yes, well, that’s exactly the rub. He probably thinks he can do it for the price of a trip to the Riviera. I get requests like this ceaselessly.’

  Burlingame was in a better position than anyone to know that in fact he did not. ‘He says he has limitless resources. He has the backing of the Eastern Aggregate Company.’

  ‘Oh, I think Daddy had some of their stocks,’ said Lady Alice. ‘Sidney, you must go! They’ll be so pleased to see you! All the old faces from last time. Like a school reunion.’

  ‘But I don’t know anything about this man’s credentials.’

  ‘If he’s paying for you to go back to the jungle it doesn’t matter if he’s a circus pony with a tie on.’

  ‘You don’t really expect me to leave you and your sister here on your own?’

  ‘What’s come over you, Sidney? Of course you can leave us here on our own.’

  Burlingame was asking herself similar questions. Why would Bridewall be so reluctant? Then he turned back to her. ‘You will go,’ he said.

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Nothing is more incumbent upon the old than to know when they should get out of the way and relinquish to younger successors the honors they can no longer earn and the duties they can no longer perform. I know Central America is your chosen field. When I was not much older than you I went to Burma and I made my name there. You were always a fine student and you deserve the opportunity to do the same.’

  ‘But you’re not old,’ said Lady Alice. ‘You’re not even fifty.’

  Bridewall ignored her. ‘You can tell Mr Coehorn that you have my full confidence. He may have wanted me but what he is getting is one better.’

  ‘Sidney, I hardly think she’ll flourish among the natives. Look how terrified she is of a few inches of flesh.’

  ‘My decision is made. You are my official delegate to the Pozkitos. You will either have to tell Mr Coehorn that you are going or you will have to tell him that no one is going.’

  ‘But I haven’t even finished my tripos,’ said Burlingame. Of course, this was just one of a dozen reasons why Bridewall’s proposal was ludicrous. Another was that she could never make her own name as Bridewall had once made his – not only because she was a woman, but also because, as he said, she had chosen the classical civilizations of Central America as her specialism, a choice she now half-regretted. The Yanks were working with such piranha speed down there that by the time she was qualified enough to try to attach herself to one of the rare British expeditions to the region everything would already be mapped and sketched and translated and there would be nothing left but gristle. Whenever Burlingame had twinges of personal ambition she ignored them, but even if she’d been genuinely determined to make a contribution as momentous as Folklore of the Tucanoan-Speaking Peoples, she would never have the opportunity. The best she could hope for was a career of pedantically crosshatching other people’s discoveries in long books no one would read, a prospect which gave her a pleasant feeling of rightness and security, like the smell of her attic bedroom at home.

  Bridewall changed tack. ‘Look here, Joan, why don’t you come in and we’ll talk it over properly?’ He smiled and licked his lips. ‘Once you’ve got a taste of what life is like at Notcote Hall you might be very keen to experience its tropical precedent for yourself.’

  That was when Lady Gwyneth appeared in the doorway between her sister and Bridewall. ‘Who’s this?’ she said in a rather childlike voice. She was completely nude, heavy-lidded, shining from head to toe like one of those Titian portraits with forty layers of glaze, and yet it was the strand of auburn hair pasted with sweat to her freckled cheekbone that stole all of Burlingame’s attention, because it seemed to sum up the general impossibility in a world such as this of forbidding from clinging what ought not to cling, of forbidding from moistening what ought not to moisten. She wondered how often Notcote Hall’s pipes must get blocked by some new and unfamiliar secretion that one of the inhabitants had discovered deep inside his or her corrupted body. Burlingame took one last look at Lady Gwyneth before she nodded goodbye to Dr Bridewall, turned around, and walked as fast as she could away from Notcote Hall.

  Because of the expression she knew he would fix her with, she couldn’t ask the Newnham porter to help her place a reverse-charge call to New York, so when she got back to Cambridge she went straight to the Glengarry Hotel, which had a public telephone inside a booth. The operator took nearly half an hour to connect her with Audobon 281 and she didn’t have Folklore of the Tucanoan-Speaking Peoples to pass the time because she’d deliberately left it behind on the train.

  ‘You woke me,’ said Coehorn. ‘I was up until five making calls, like a bookie. What time is it there? Michaelmas? Widdershins? Some other English time?’

  ‘I’m sorry I woke you.’ This was sincere. Burlingame hated to wake up sleeping people even when they’d specifically asked her to. Like spiders or babies there was something almost hostile about their fragility.

  ‘Did you see Bridewall?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is he going to come to Honduras with me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘This isn’t a telegram, Miss Joan Burlingame, you’re not being charged by the word. Tell me what happened.’

  ‘He said he’d rather that I went in his place. But that’s impossible, of course.’ She forced a dead little giggle just to emphasise how much like a joke she found the suggestion. ‘I wish I could give you better news.’

  ‘He didn’t want to go? You have to go back and tell him about the temple. That will hook him.’

  She couldn’t go back. ‘What temple?’

  ‘This is top secret, but they’ve found a spectacular ruin out there in the north-eastern jungle, somewhere between San Esteban and the coast. That’s where we’re going.’

  ‘I’m afraid you must have been misinformed, Mr Coehorn,’ said Burlingame. ‘There are no such settlements east of Copán. Dr Bridewall assured me that there is nothing at all to see in that part of the rainforest.’ In fact, one of the objectives of his fateful trip to Spanish Honduras had been to develop a theory to explain why the Mayans hadn’t pressed their empire any further.

  ‘Yes, so everybody thought. But this new joint has been found. And it looks different from all the other temples.’

  Burlingame felt suddenly short of breath. ‘How much scientific work has been done on it so far?’

  ‘Practically none,’ said Coehorn. ‘We’ll be the first major expedition to go and so far we don’t even have an archaeologist. Listen, what do you mean that Bridewall would rather you went in his place? Are you a Mayanist too? You say the fellow trusts you – well, I’m very pressed for time so that’s good enough for me. What do you say, Mi
ss Joan Burlingame? If you want the job, you’re hired.’ For a moment there was nothing on the line but a bluster of static. ‘Hello? Are you still there? Hello?’

  *

  Beverly Pomutz, my old editor at the New York Evening Mirror, hadn’t taken a single day off except for Sundays and Christmas Day in the twenty-nine years that elapsed between his honeymoon and his recent heart attack. After he came back to work following the second of those crises, he declared that he’d learned what it felt like to die – not when his coronary artery squinched shut and he fell to the floor of the wire room, but rather when he had to spend an entire week in a hospital bed quarantined by doctor’s orders from telephones, telegrams, radios, and newspapers, including his own. As is the case for many men of his age, it took a big scare to make him realise that he might have only a few years left on this earth and it was time to stop neglecting the parts of his life that really mattered to him. So he resolved to start going into the office on Sundays and Christmas Day, too.

  But this was not an easy arrangement to negotiate with his wife, who’d wanted him to step down from the job entirely, and that was how he ended up coming to work every day with a small tan Pomeranian on a leash. Although Pomutz’s doctor had found that ten minutes spent stroking a small dog would reduce a patient’s blood pressure, the primary purpose of this ball of fluff was that it had been trained to bark a warning whenever it heard raised voices, and also, like a tamper-proof alarm, to bark whenever Pomutz was out of its sight. The bark took its pitch from the emergency brake of a subway train and was unendurable for more than a few seconds at a time. It was supposed to remind Pomutz to stay calm when his wife couldn’t be present to pat his shoulder. He named the dog Scofield after the publisher of the Mirror.

  By early afternoon on his first day back, Pomutz had dealt with enough urgent business among his senior staff that he now felt like finding out from his junior reporters what else he’d missed during his convalescence. Standing at the door of his office, he called out, ‘Miss Vansaska, Mr Zonulet, Mr Trimble – get in here,’ perhaps at random or perhaps because the three of us didn’t look as if we were working hard enough.

  ‘First order of business,’ said Pomutz when we were seated. ‘Mr Trimble, can you tell me what the fuck is wrong with Mr Busby?’

  ‘I don’t know what to say, boss.’ Gul Busby, the Mirror’s gossip columnist, almost never bothered to come into the office, but Leland Trimble, his assistant, was expected to garrison himself here in case he was needed at short notice. Since the day he was hired, Trimble had been transparent in his desire to steal Busby’s job, but so far his plans had come to nothing, partly because Busby was known as one of the best in the business and partly because Trimble had a way of alienating his own sources. Recently, however, Busby had become more and more erratic. At first, there was just something off about his columns that you couldn’t quite articulate, a feeling in the prose like a pinched nerve. But over the last week or so, it had got far worse: although he still wrote about New York celebrities, he now seemed to be ignoring their romances and rivalries in favor of describing, for instance, the appearance of the veins of Gertrude Niesen’s arm as she raised a glass of Pernod to her mouth, or the asymmetrical lacing of Joe DiMaggio’s sneakers when he was seen getting into a cab near Yankee Stadium, all written in flat, declarative sentences bleached clean of the colorful Broadway slang for which he was known. Because Busby had a longstanding agreement with the paper that only Pomutz himself was allowed to edit his work, during Pomutz’s absence these columns had been printed intact, and there had already been a number of vexed letters from readers.

  ‘Has the man had a fucking nervous breakdown?’ said Pomutz. At his feet, Scofield issued a verbal warning. The animal did have three black dots to serve for a face but in a competition to give a convincing visual impression of sentience it would have fallen well below a Halloween pumpkin and perhaps about level with the headlights and grille of an idling taxi. ‘Have we got a fucking abulic on our hands?’ the editor added in a lower voice. ‘Did you talk to him?’

  ‘He says he’s got “misgivings” about the column as he’s been writing it up until now,’ said Trimble.

  Vansaska noticed that Trimble was wearing a new silver tie clip. She knew he only bought jewelry for himself when he had a big gambling windfall. There was no one at the Mirror whom she disliked more than this human tophus. On her first day here she had made the mistake of going for a slice of apple pie with him after work because he seemed friendly and he promised to tell her how the office really worked. What he meant by that, it turned out, was an objective account of whom she ought to screw. If she screwed the City Editor everybody would hear about it, if she screwed the Deputy City Editor everybody would hear about it, she couldn’t screw Pomutz because he never cheated on his wife, there was no point screwing a guy like me because I didn’t have any influence, and so forth, but if she screwed Trimble himself, she could not only count on his mentorship, which was her best chance of quick advancement, but also on his absolute discretion. ‘There’s nobody like a blab man for keeping a secret,’ he said to her. ‘That’s what they call a paradox.’ She waited to feel a sticky hand on her knee, but instead he just sat back, apparently waiting for her to act on the irrepressible gratitude she would no doubt feel for his kind offer.

  So she informed him that she was engaged to be married, that she wouldn’t so much as graze his dick with a boat hook if he could make her the editor of the Herald-Tribune starting tomorrow, that there were about three and a half million men in New York she’d sooner fuck than him and dozens more arriving with every hour that the Dixie Bus Center was in operation. She said all that calmly, but when he just gave her a big complacent smile in response, she wanted to scream at him that by voicing her refusal she had not entered into an implicit ongoing negotiation. He was a five-star creep. All the same, she saw him as unthreatening in the final analysis. He would never have the strength of character to do anything really monstrous.

  ‘Misgivings?’ said Pomutz.

  ‘He says he’s “come to feel it’s intolerably disingenuous to present anthropic experience as if it can be reduced to these discrete, predictable narratives,”’ explained Trimble. ‘He says he’s not sure he “even believe[s] in distinct human personalities any more.” He says the world is “a slip-slop of complex, fractile interdependencies and the only thing of which you can be truly certain is the immediate reality of physical objects moving through space.” He says “mere sentiment is no longer of any interest to [him].” I’m just quoting direct here, boss. He was using a lot of ten-dollar words so I hope I’ve remembered everything right.’

  ‘Is he negotiating for more money?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘So you’re telling me we are lumbered with a fucking gossip columnist who isn’t interested in “mere sentiment”!’ said Pomutz, shouting the last two words, so that Scofield started barking self-righteously. Vansaska winced and covered her ears. Pomutz took a slow breath and looked down at him. ‘All right, point taken, you cunt-licker.’ Scofield quietened. ‘Has he got anything for tomorrow’s paper?’

  ‘He says he’s got a lot to write about the pattern of the water droplets in the basin after Jimmy Dorsey washed his hands in the bathroom of the Lollipop last night.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘Come on, boss. Let me take over. Busby lost his way months ago. It just wasn’t showing till now.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘Busby’s a good man,’ I said. That’s the syntax I’m going to use here – ‘I said’ – even though my personal recollection of that day has faded so much in the wash that I might as well be writing about some other guy entirely. After all, this was over twenty years ago. But the odd thing is that, because of what happened to me when I went inside the temple, I remember with almost perfect clarity what Vansaska was thinking. So, at best, I can report how I looked to her observant eye: most of the time I seemed to her ostentatiously la
nguid, slumped in my chair, except for the variable section of me that was just the opposite at any given time – tapping my foot, picking at a hangnail, clicking my tongue – as if a minor nervous disorder was touring my body. And she thought I wore my hat indoors too often. I was only twenty-two years old then.

  ‘Just give me a week’s probation,’ said Trimble.

  ‘No,’ said Pomutz. ‘You’ll spend a week introducing yourself as our gossip columnist. But the gossip columnist is an ambassador for the paper. And you make people feel uncomfortable.’

  ‘A day at a time, then. Let me write tomorrow’s column.’

  ‘The fact that you happen to be the only half-qualified blab man occupying my field of vision right at this moment shouldn’t be sufficient reason for me to agree but I’m obliged to admit that it is. You take it straight to me when you finish, though. And you’ll pull stories from everyone in the newsroom. I want quality.’

  ‘I got enough to fill it by myself.’

  ‘Hot cockles?’ said Pomutz. This was his word for scoops, a strange Anglicism that he’d picked up nobody knew where.

  ‘Sure. Number one, I ran into Frank Parker last week.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The singer. He had a nice piece of ass with him – pardon my francophonics, Miss Vansaska,’ added Trimble, as if anyone who’d worked for Pomutz for more than five seconds could possibly object to profanity. ‘He told me he was banned from the race track. Then a couple of zbyszkos pulled him out of the place. They must have been mob guys coming to collect. He was hollering but nobody did anything.’