The Club

by Takis Würger

  “Please may I get some ice from the kitchen? I don’t want to ruin your tablecloth.”

  “Of course—wait, I’ll go down with you. I know what it’s like; some chap from Oxford smashed my nose once. I bled like a geyser.”

  He got up and went with me to the kitchen.

  The rest of the evening the conversation was all about boxing. Charlotte leaned back in her chair, smiling quietly at me. When her father stood up during the mousse au chocolat to demonstrate a combination that had won him one of his fights, Charlotte raised her glass and nodded at me.

  After the meal she said she was tired and wished us goodnight. She hugged her father and kissed me on the cheek, putting her hand on the back of my neck as she did so.

  Angus Farewell said he wanted to show me something. He handed me two heavy tumblers and went down a staircase to the cellar. Part of the cellar was filled to the ceiling with wine bottles; there was also a shelf of whisky.

  “Do you know anything about whisky?” asked Farewell.

  “Absolutely nothing.” Wine had made me brave.

  “Nor did I at your age.”

  He took a bottle from the shelf and we walked through the cellar. He pressed a series of switches. Neon lights illuminated a boxing ring; beside it, two sandbags hung from the ceiling.

  “My home,” said Farewell. He unscrewed the bottle and filled the tumblers.

  The whisky tasted of peat and caramel. Farewell said he hoped I would box against Oxford in the spring. Thirty-nine years ago he had won his weight category. It would be an honor to see me fight for Cambridge in the same weight class as him.

  “What do you want to do with your life, Hans?” he asked.

  We leaned back against the ropes and stared into the depths of the room, as if an answer were hidden there. For a moment I considered whether I ought to say something that sounded ambitious.

  “No idea, to be honest.”

  He raised his glass and clinked it gently against mine.

  “To freedom,” he said, and drank.

  I felt that I needed to say something else.

  “I mean, I don’t know what field I want to go into, but I would like to have a family one day. And do something that’ll allow me to be myself.”

  “Who else could you be?”

  I said nothing. Farewell put his hand on my shoulder and left it there.

  “That sounds very sensible. See what happens at Cambridge; it’ll all fall into place.”

  “What do you do, actually?” I asked. I couldn’t bring myself to call him Angus.

  “I’m an investment manager with an independent private equity company.”

  “Ah, right.”

  He laughed. “I work for a holding company that focuses on expansion and growth financing in the public health sector. So we buy up companies with other people’s money, trim them for profitability, then sell them on a few years later to the next buyer.”

  “Aha.”

  “Which means I work for locusts,” said Farewell, “and make sure a lot of money is turned into even more money, and between you and me it’s an absolutely ridiculous profession. If ever you consider going into it yourself, I will forbid Charlotte to have anything to do with you.”

  I thought about how I had introduced myself with a false name, how Charlotte had only brought me to this house to get her father to nominate me at the Pitt Club. And I still didn’t know what crimes were being committed there that were important enough for me to have to move from Germany to Cambridge, and Charlotte to have to deceive her own father.

  After a while Farewell said he would have the car brought round; next time I should stay the night and we should spar a few rounds in the ring.

  “Look after Charlotte,” he said.

  I nodded. I hardly felt nervous any more. “She seems so wounded,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t take it the wrong way. Farewell nodded.

  “It’s the place. Cambridge. I think for some it can be damaging.”

  “It’s the people,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The place is just a place. It’s people who do damage.”

  He nodded again. “Look after Charlie,” he said; then, very quietly: “Please.”

  Angus Farewell took a deep breath; when he spoke again his voice was firm. He bounced his torso once against the ropes.

  “Because—you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said, although I didn’t understand a thing.

  As the car drove towards Cambridge I stared out of the window at the night, exhausted and yet wide awake. The alcohol and the excitement were at odds with each other and were churning me up inside. The car was big and black; the chauffeur was silent. I didn’t belong to these people, but there had been moments that evening when I’d felt that I could. I wanted to note down the name of the whisky, but I couldn’t remember it. Perhaps the whisky itself was to blame, or perhaps it was because these past few days had all been a bit too much, but I wanted Angus Farewell to be my friend. His laughter lines reminded me of my father; it was just a trick of nature, but this detail made me feel warm towards him. I’d enjoyed talking to him about the team, and I’d felt close to him when we’d stood in the cellar leaning against the ropes. The boxing cellar was amazing. I’d never seen anything like it. The ropes around the ring were black, the sandbags were leather, and on the wall, neatly lined up one after another, were glass cases with exotic butterflies in the most brilliant colors.

  Josh

  Searching for tomatoes in November was an absolutely retarded idea. I walked across the market square, stopped, looked at the beef tomatoes and sniffed them. I plucked a cherry tomato from its vine and ate it. No good; too late in the year.

  I was going to cook that evening for the new German from the boxing club. As in: I was going to cook and he was going to eat. To be honest, this was my way of trying to please him. I liked him. Not in a gay way—as a friend.

  I bought lamb’s lettuce, oyster mushrooms and shallots, and chervil for the vinaigrette. I went to The Art of Meat and bought a thick piece of organic Hertfordshire beef fillet. I always bought organic meat. Intensive animal husbandry is immoral and disgusting, and people who support the industry are bastards. Oil’s another one. Almost every single face cream is petroleum based. Petroleum!

  The way the butcher introduced the knife into the flesh and cut along the bone … mate! I liked that knife.

  At eight o’clock the doorbell rang. Stichler was holding a bottle of white wine; I could tell immediately that it was from the supermarket. He sat down on a stool beside the cooker. He was wearing a great shirt; it was pale blue and shimmery, expensive cotton, Giza perhaps, or Sea Island. A lot of people think it’s all about the label; they run off to Armani and get themselves expensive shirts. When I was a child my father’s tailor explained to me that it’s actually all about the quality of the material and the handiwork. He didn’t sew labels in his suits.

  My kitchen was equipped with a gas cooker and a marble worktop. It was the best kitchen I’d managed to find in Cambridge. I’d had the walls painted this insane gray—Farrow & Ball Bone.

  I plucked, washed, then spun the lamb’s lettuce, chopped the shallots, sliced the mushrooms. I fried them in butter, which was a little tricky because I had to keep the temperature below the smoke point, but I mean: how sexy is butter?

  The fillet of beef was sitting in a tin in the oven at 140 degrees Celsius. Meat tastes much more like meat without the roasted flavour, in my opinion. By cooking it in this way I could reduce the amount of fat needed to an absolute minimum. When the core temperature reached 58 degrees Celsius, I took the meat out of the oven.

  “You can really cook,” said Stichler.

  How many times had I heard this sentence? Hardly anyone at Cambridge could cook. The students were spoiled because they’d grown up in boarding schools. I had this French nanny once, the one with the peach. She’s the one who taught me; but that’s a different story.

  I mixed
a vinaigrette for the salad, stirred in the mushrooms and shallots, coated the meat with butter and sprinkled it with coarse sea salt and crushed peppercorns, cut the fillet into thick slices and dressed it. À la minute, motherfucker.

  Then I told him. “I was at the Pitt Club yesterday, brother. Your name was in the book.”

  It was sick, saying this and watching the change in his expression. Stichler had this classical face and buff hair.

  He gaped at me like a fish. He didn’t say anything, so I just kept talking.

  “Angus Farewell nominated you. I’ve seconded.”

  The meat was tender and flavorful; the salad tasted great, as well.

  I liked this Hans Stichler more and more. A quiet customer, but a beast in the ring. Some days we shared a sandbag; neither of us would say much, but I could feel that we were building a connection. At least, I hoped so. Saying nothing is incredibly stylish, too. I’ve always thought that.

  “Some more beef, Stichler?”

  “It’s delicious.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you have a bit of bread to go with it, perhaps?” he asked.

  “You eat bread?”

  Stichler looked at me, wide-eyed. “Don’t you?”

  “Have you ever considered how dangerous gluten is for your digestive system? All I’m saying is: wheat belly. Spelt’s just about OK, but since everyone’s started baking with genetically modified wheat I really would steer clear of it.”

  Mate—the look on his face! Stichler didn’t respond, but we understood each other all the same.

  Late that evening, after he’d left, I poured the rest of the cheap white wine down the drain, threw the shallot skins in the bin, put the dirty plates in the dishwasher, and wiped down the marble worktop. I drank another half bottle of champagne to clear my head. I came across the chervil in the brown paper bag from the market. I’d forgotten it. I stared into the bag and could feel the energy inside me getting too much; it had to come out. It had been a nice evening, and now I had to throw the chervil away because it would be withered by morning. I hated wasting things.

  Marble is a hard surface. Any child knows that.

  I picked up the stool Stichler had sat on by the legs and slammed it down on the marble worktop, again and again, until the wood splintered into pieces.

  Hans

  As I walked down Castle Street I felt the cotton against my skin and saw the spot on the left cuff where the tailor had removed the initials.

  I passed my college and turned into Jesus Lane. The Pitt Club stood white and glowing in the night. Six Ionian columns supported the roof outside the entrance to the clubhouse. I placed my hand on one of the cold pillars. The building looked like a temple, and more than ever I felt a desire to belong. For a moment I tried to convince myself that the desire had been awakened by Alex’s mission, but I knew that it had in fact been growing in me for a very long time.

  I had to go home and write an essay about Karl Marx; I was supposed to have finished it by the next morning. I liked the wording of the question: “‘In direct contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend to earth from heaven’ (Marx). Discuss.”

  Angus

  Chelsea: light-bathed windows, tall hedges, white gravel drives. It almost doesn’t feel like London. I think that’s why I’ve always liked it there.

  Until I went to boarding school I lived in a manor house in Somerset. Silence at night, the smell of blossom in the morning, waiting for the day of the first cider pressing. That was my childhood.

  There were times when the concrete and blinking lights of London depressed me. Underground trains are the great sin of civilization. You stand there penned in like a pig en route to the slaughterhouse, breathing in strangers’ exhalations, it’s too hot, and someone is always sneezing. The most vulgar form of transport imaginable. When I think of the faces of people emerging from the tunnels of the Underground it immediately puts me in a foul mood.

  They say that Londoners are always nasty to strangers. I actually think Londoners are the friendliest of people until they get on the Underground every morning and lose their minds.

  I hereby solemnly swear that if I should ever become poor and have only ten pounds in my pocket, I will spend those ten pounds on a taxi, just to avoid the Underground.

  The house of the investment banker who had invited us that evening stood at the end of a long drive. White gravel, naturally. Lining the path to the house were large stone sculptures of butterflies. Jesus Christ. Two butlers were waiting on the threshold; they wore top hats and cream gloves. How can anyone make their butler wear a top hat in the twenty-first century? I couldn’t suppress my laughter.

  There were about forty men at the house. I knew them all. Close-shaved cheeks, thinning hair, the scent of forty aftershaves, all with a faint whiff of cedar.

  A few of the younger ones were playing billiards in the basement; in the garden two men were sitting on a swing seat drinking Negronis, which a butler was carrying round the house on a silver tray. The host was the financial director of a private bank who for the past couple of years had been working one day a week in an honorary capacity as an advisor at Amnesty International’s London headquarters. I was willing to bet he took the Underground when he went to Amnesty. He wore fat ties, smoked thin white cigarettes, drank white wine diluted with soda, and laughed too loudly. Nouveau riche in every fiber of his being. I thought it was a shame I’d never boxed against the man.

  The host greeted me with a hug and said if I needed anything I should ask George.

  “Which one is George?”

  “I call them all George,” said the host, “otherwise I get confused.”

  At the piano stood my saving grace in the form of Prince Amha Makonnen Workq. He was sporting a midnight-blue dinner jacket and eating a prawn canapé.

  “Amha, you old bastard,” I said.

  “Farewell, what a pleasure to see you. Fancy a prawn?”

  Forty years earlier the prince and I had both spent a season boxing for the university. He became a Butterfly the year after I did. He was the first colored man to be admitted to the Club. I remember the discussions at the time. The fact that he was a prince from the House of David worked in his favor. At university he wore a black velvet collar on all his suits to express his sorrow that his family had been driven out of his country by the coup. I also had a black velvet collar sewn on a tweed jacket, out of solidarity, and this cemented our friendship. To this day Amha and I still go to the same tailor, a man from Vienna who comes to London six times a year for fittings.

  That evening we talked about our daughters. Peeling the prawn with manicured fingers, the prince said his daughter was a disaster academically, but would go up to Cambridge in two years’ time. She also wanted to study art history, like Charlotte. Art was perfect for a princess, he said; that way she’d never get bored in the palace, it was full of pictures.

  I remembered the prince telling me about his university interview. While other prospective students were busy writing essays and taking exams, he arranged to go for a stroll around the rose garden with the Master of the college. At the end of their stroll, the Master apparently said he was looking forward to having a student in college who was personally acquainted with most of the people after whom the roses in the garden were named.

  “Tell me, have you heard these stories about the younger members?” I asked. The subject had been making me nervous ever since the Norwegian ambassador had told me over lunch a few weeks earlier that current members were spiking women’s drinks with liquid ecstasy.

  The prince popped another prawn into his mouth.

  “Yes, but come on, relax. On another subject: Have you heard about this Japanese whisky? Two hundred pounds a bottle; they say it’s as rounded as a billiard ball. I saw a bottle out front.”

  I wondered if I wanted to know what a billiard ball tasted like.

  “I thought you’d had a stroke?”

  “I’m a prince.
I’m allowed to drink even though I’ve had a stroke.”

  I liked him because he didn’t take himself as seriously as most of the other princes I knew. Prince Amha lived in a small house in North London with his wife, a doctor from Kent; he always had money problems, and knew for certain that he would never see the palace in his homeland again.

  One of the Georges sounded a pair of cymbals. We entered the dining room. The people standing round the table were mostly bankers, but there were also two ambassadors, the Leader of the House of Lords, a prince, five dukes, the head of an auction house, the deputy head of MI6, the editor-in-chief of the Spectator, and me. I thought that if someone were to throw a grenade into this room right now, people would wake up tomorrow in a different country.

  Beside me sat the prince, and a duke who was talking to the Spectator editor-in-chief about how the aristocracy never got the coverage to which it was entitled. It was inexpressibly boring. George carried in two roast pheasants, followed by another George with another two pheasants. The men ate the birds and talked about boxing and their mistresses. Laughter, South African red wine, flushed faces, brown sauce dripping onto starched shirts. I found myself thinking of Dante.

  I didn’t get drunk, although I did drink a lot. The party began to make me feel uneasy. Perhaps it had all been a mistake. Charlotte was of an age at which women got invitations from the Butterflies. Hopefully she was too smart to accept such an invitation.

  I said goodbye to the prince, walked up the gravel drive to the street and paused in front of one of the stone butterflies. I had a bottle of the Japanese whisky in my hand; one for the road. I glanced around and kicked at the statue’s wings. It was a powerful kick, and for a second I was proud of how strong I still was, with my sixty years; then my sole slipped on the mossy stone, I lost my balance and fell over on the damp, dewy grass. I lay there looking up at the sky, feeling like an idiot. I stayed there a while longer. It smelled almost like the Somerset apple orchards of my childhood. A few deep breaths, a hand on the grass, a moment of quiet. I drank a mouthful of the whisky lying down and poured the rest out onto the lawn.