The Club

by Takis Würger

  I enjoyed lectures, and I spent a lot of time studying in a side wing of the University Library devoted to Old Norse literature, somewhere I could be alone. It was the old part of the library that could only be accessed through a side door; there was no Wi-Fi, so most students didn’t like to work there. It smelled of dust and old glue. I often had a feeling that the books had little messages from Charlotte in them. I trained every day and usually went to the Pitt Club twice a week for lunch, but that didn’t make much sense during this period because the cook didn’t do steamed chicken breast. I hadn’t observed any crimes being committed at the Club. I told Alex all of this, and she listened.

  She went over to a French window, opened it, and stepped onto the balcony. The wind blew into the room. Alex stood in the rain; she was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and jeans. I waited a moment, then threw on my coat and went to join her. There were no lampposts in Chapel Court; the only light came from windows where students sat at their desks, illuminated by their reading lamps. Alex asked if the cold bothered me.

  I stood beside her, studying her thin face. In the last few months I’d kept hoping she would want to meet up, but my encounters with Alex were always brief; she remained distant, and it felt as if I were reporting to my boss.

  A few weeks before this meeting I’d found an interview with her online, a scan of an old newspaper article. She was talking about having taken a year off to climb a few mountains; it had been the year after my mother died. That winter Alex had run a 430-kilometer race along the frozen bed of the Yukon River in Alaska. It was called the Yukon Arctic Ultra and was considered to be the toughest ultramarathon, with temperatures below minus fifty degrees Celsius. In the interview she talked about how her long johns had been too big, meaning that the seam cut into the muscle of her thigh. She couldn’t take the underpants off because she’d have risked freezing to death. Alex ran all the way to the finish line, placing thirty-fourth out of hundreds of participants; all the runners who finished ahead of her were men. The doctors had cut off her long johns in a cabin. The flesh of her thigh had been abraded right down to the muscle.

  “Why did you keep running back then, in Alaska?” I asked.

  Alex wiped the rain from her nose. “Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “There are meant to be ghosts here in College. Haven’t you heard? In Second Court. Supposedly it’s the ghost of a former student, James Wood, who studied here a hundred and fifty years ago. He was so poor he couldn’t afford to buy wood for a fire. He fell asleep over his books and froze to death, and his ghost has haunted students ever since.”

  “Why is it so hard to talk to you, Alex?”

  “For a long time I didn’t believe in ghost stories,” she said.

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “In the Yukon Delta I was running away from a ghost.”

  Alex was shivering. Her shirt was wet, and through the material I could see the straps of her black bra against her skin. I stepped back into the room; the situation was making me uncomfortable, and I stared at the gaps between the floorboards. Alex went into the little bathroom and came back in a gray pullover and leggings. She said she was pleased with me, and to carry on just as I was. She talked to me as if I were one of her students who had written a good essay.

  “When are you going to tell me what this crime is I’m supposed to be solving? I’ve done everything you asked. I lie for you every day. The boys at the Club are my friends.”

  Alex stood at the window and didn’t reply.

  “I’m not going to play this game much longer,” I said.

  I got up to leave, but she grabbed my hand. I could feel her strength. She was so strong I didn’t dare move. I knew I would do everything Alex asked of me.

  “This isn’t a game, Hans. You think the boys at the Club are your friends? Why? Because they fill your glass with champagne and drive you around in their cars? If you go along with it all, then sure, you’ll end up with a highly paid job in the City. You’ll find a wife through the Club who’ll let you do whatever you like with her. You’ll think you’re entitled to all of it, because you’re better than all the rest. But are you, Hans? No, you aren’t. Now trust me—or would you rather trust a man like Josh Hartley?”

  Josh had three broken ribs; someone had beaten him up on the way home. It wasn’t clear whether he would fight in the Varsity match. His ribcage had turned dark blue in places. I wondered how much hatred you had to feel to just go for a person like that.

  “I don’t want to lie anymore,” I said. I wrenched myself free and walked to the door. She didn’t make a sound, but when I turned she was standing right there, her face just inches away from mine. Her eyelid was flickering.

  “You can’t run away,” she said.

  I fled down the stairs, stumbling and grabbing hold of the banister. The little steps bounced beneath my shoes. I thought of all the young men and women who had run up and down these steps before me. It was a thought that had always given me pleasure. Now it frightened me. Out in the courtyard the rain lashed my face. I was glad Alex couldn’t touch me anymore. Sitting in the church tower at boarding school I’d dreamed of adventure, but I was no adventurer.

  Before heading out of the gate I turned and peered up through the rain. Alex was standing at her window, watching me.

  Peter

  Alarm: 7 a.m.

  Sport: 50 press-ups, 2 planks 30 seconds each

  Masturbation: in the shower

  Breakfast: instant noodles with jiaozi

  Motto of the day: The greatest vulnerability is ignorance.

  Aim of the day: Find the Pitt Club bow tie; be the best.

  There was a book in the window of Ryder & Amies on King’s Parade, under a light blue blazer on a dressmaker’s dummy. The book was the size and width of an atlas and thirty centimeters thick. Ryder & Amies was founded in 1864 as a clothing shop and has sold gowns and scarves to university students ever since. The book in the shop window was a compendium of ties. Twelve swatches were glued to each page with the name of the respective club alongside.

  I’d been interested in clothes ever since I saw the Sherlock Holmes films. Behind the counter stood a man who I estimated must be at least seventy, but I wasn’t very good at guessing white people’s ages. The man behind the counter was tall; he had hairs on his nose and a single strand combed over his bald head. His suit was old, and sat well; the elbows had been reinforced with patches.

  “Good morning. Could you tell me what that book in the window is?” I asked.

  “At last, a sensible question,” said the salesman. He reached into the shop window and placed the book on the glass counter.

  There were not so many tourists in town at this time of year. The afternoon sun shone through the shop window; the shop itself was almost empty. I saw dust motes spin in the light when the old man opened the book. He leafed through it, stroking the silk. We bent over the pages. He talked about drinking clubs and students who were particularly wild, particularly clever, or particularly good strokes in the rowing eight.

  The book had no system. Some of the pages were a mess, loose and yellowed. My heart was pounding; I was waiting for a particular swatch. A few days ago I’d climbed a spruce tree opposite the Pitt Club and had watched to see who went through the door. The members had all been wearing the same dark bow tie, but I hadn’t been able to clearly see the pattern. I recognized it here at once, though. Silver, blue and black stripes; beside it was written “P-Club.” I stroked my thumb across the silk and looked at the other clubs on the page. In the bottom left-hand corner a strip of silk was missing. Beside it was written “Butterflies.”

  “Where’s the swatch for that one?” I asked.

  The old man narrowed his eyes and bent over the page. Without looking up he said that he didn’t know, that some clubs were even older than he was.

  I had to go to a lecture, on game theory and market models; very important if you want to be an inves
tment banker. I shook the man’s hand, inclined my head slightly, thanked him, and left the shop.

  Ryder

  I work every day of the week, including Sundays, when I do the bookkeeping. In my opinion, a man who isn’t working isn’t alive. People shouldn’t forget what they are. I think the reason England is no longer what it once was is that people have forgotten their place.

  I looked through the tie pattern book a while longer. It had to have been about forty years ago, but I remembered it as if it were yesterday: the day a young man with long blond hair had come into the shop and asked to see the book. He’d been friendly and elegant, with very upright bearing. He’d taken the swatch off the page without asking and slipped it into his inside jacket pocket. I remember the yellow butterfly embroidered on the silk, and I remember the man’s smile, because he had smiled as he placed an envelope with a large number of twenty-pound notes on the table, saying that the club wanted to avoid publicity in future. I knew then that I was dealing with Old England, and at the same time I knew that I didn’t want to know what sort of club this was, or what the swatch was doing in the man’s jacket pocket. There were things that were meant for people like me, and this club was not one of them, so my task, the task of a proud English clothier, would be to forget the club and the envelope with the money, and if I didn’t succeed in doing that I would remain silent.

  Hans

  The Viennese tailor came to the Farewell home, to the mansion in Chelsea. He was an Austrian with a blond side-parting and round glasses. Farewell let me make all the decisions, apart from the size of the pockets. A man needed big pockets, he said; you never knew what you might find.

  I sat in the library next to Charlotte’s room and spent a long time selecting the material. I hadn’t known how many different blacks there were. Farewell said that everything was actually gray. There was no such thing as black; it wasn’t a real color, it was just an illusion. I decided on a blue-black.

  “Like your hair,” said Charlotte.

  I hadn’t noticed that she’d entered the room and sat down on the table behind me. She had a leather suitcase with her.

  “We should go down to Somerset,” she said. “It’s magical at this time of year. You have to see the apple orchards covered in hoarfrost. We could take the Jag and be there in three hours.”

  Angus Farewell nodded.

  “Do you want to?” asked Charlotte.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Charlotte drove slowly and we listened to Belgian chansons. It was an old car, but the stereo was modern. I liked the music. As we came off the motorway and saw the hills of Somerset in the dusk, Charlotte began to sing in a quiet, throaty voice. It was so beautiful I couldn’t look at her. Light green fields rolled past the windows and I wished we could drive on forever.

  She seemed very familiar with the route. When she turned left down an avenue of bare trees I wondered where we were going. A sign said manor house; it was a phrase I didn’t know. The avenue led to a museum in a two-story nineteenth-century mansion with pale yellow walls, two rows of sash windows, and a slate roof. The house had several tall chimneys, and a portico, beside which stood a life-size statue of St Michael with one foot on Satan’s head, sword held aloft. I’d never had any interest in museums. I knew Charlotte was studying Art History and I secretly hoped we wouldn’t stay long. I wondered what her Swedish boyfriend would think when he found out she was looking at museums in Somerset with me. The thought made me nervous, but ever since we’d got in the car I’d had a buzzing in my chest that I hadn’t felt for a very long time.

  We walked through the rooms on the ground floor and looked at the paintings on the walls. She stood beside the portrait of a fat, red-haired woman.

  “Do you think I look like her?” she asked.

  I shook my head. The stairs to the upper floor were out of bounds; a chain with a no entry sign hung across them. Charlotte climbed over it and ran upstairs. I looked around and couldn’t see anyone, so I ran after her, coming to a halt at the top in front of a white-varnished, solid wood door. Charlotte took a key out of her bag.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered.

  She pushed the door open and took my hand as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  “Didn’t Daddy tell you he’d kept the house?”

  She curtsied, and started going through the rooms, pulling white sheets off the furniture. The rooms had thirty-foot ceilings; the furniture was of light-colored wood.

  “Applewood,” Charlotte said.

  There were no mattresses on the beds. Every room had a fireplace that looked as if it hadn’t seen a fire in a long time. On top of a bureau were photos in silver frames. One showed a married couple with a blonde girl who must have been Charlotte.

  That evening we walked the two miles to the village. In the pub, Charlotte had apple crumble with runny cream and drank cider made of apples grown on the trees behind the manor. I drank black tea and resolved that after this season I would stop boxing. The landlord remembered Charlotte; he talked about how she used to sit on the tractor cab during harvest with her Gameboy in her hand and drink scrumpy straight from the tap. Charlotte gave him an overly large tip.

  It was late when we walked back; fog lay over the fields. Charlotte said that if she were alone now she would be scared. She slid an arm around my hips beneath my coat and remarked that I was too thin. Like a greyhound, she said. We walked beside each other, both lost in thought.

  “Tell me a story about you, Hans,” she said.

  I liked it that she called me Hans. Most of the boxers and the men at the Pitt Club just called me Stichler.

  The manor house at the end of the road rose up bright against the night sky. I thought about how different Charlotte and I were.

  “My parents are dead,” I said.

  I didn’t want to talk about it, and I didn’t know why I’d started. My fingers gripped the lining of my coat pockets. I was afraid Charlotte might ask a question I didn’t want to answer. But she just walked beside me, saying nothing. I felt her warm arm around my hips and was grateful to have her holding me.

  The house was unheated. Charlotte had brought two down-filled sleeping bags in the boot of the Jaguar, which were far too thin. She kissed me on the shoulder, said, “Good night, my little greyhound,” and pulled the door closed behind her. The water I washed my face in was so cold my fingertips ached. I laid the sleeping bag on a sofa, then went out onto the balcony. I felt a desire to smoke a cigarette, although I never smoked.

  I gazed down for a long time at the apple orchard in the nighttime fog. There were no stars in the sky.

  Memories surfaced from that morning, looking at swatches with Angus Farewell. There is such a thing as black, I thought. There is such a thing as the total absence of light.

  Late that night, as I lay naked in my sleeping bag, Charlotte came tiptoeing into my room. She wasn’t wearing a nightdress.

  “It’s so cold,” she said, and crawled into my sleeping bag. She was soft and warm, and settled down with her back to me. We lay like that for a while.

  “Hello, laddie,” she said.

  “Why do you call me ‘laddie’?”

  “Because you’re a lad compared to me,” she said.

  I watched my breath stirring the hairs on the back of her neck. We were very close together. I got an erection, and wondered what she was thinking.

  “We shouldn’t do this,” I said.

  No idea why I said that.

  “I think we should,” she said.

  She touched me with the back of her head and with her pelvis. I stared at a grandfather clock by the wall that had no hands. Charlotte smelled of cream. Slowly she moved against my skin. My forehead was pressed to the back of her neck; her hair fell in my face. She took my hand and placed it on her hip. I pulled her closer to me.

  “Don’t be so careful,” she said.

  She was like a waterfall.

  After I came I stayed inside her. I thought about how sh
e moved so confidently in a world that was completely foreign to me: when she’d kissed the antiques dealer on the cheek, when she’d tied my bow tie, when she’d hit me on the back of the head, when she’d come to me tonight on bare feet. But it wasn’t this strength that I was attracted to. I could sense her pain. I didn’t know where it came from, but it was there, and it attracted me.

  I think we found each other in our weakness.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. I was thinking that her hair curled at the nape of her neck like candyfloss.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said.

  “Your hair is like candyfloss.” She was sure to laugh at me now.

  “That sounds pretty,” she said.

  From then on I tried to breathe with her, in sync.

  Later, her breath coming in little clouds, she told me about her mother. The neurons that controlled her muscles had stopped working when Charlotte was fifteen. Her father had had doctors flown in from Germany and Boston, but the disease was incurable. Charlotte told me how her father had slapped one of the doctors when he’d said there was nothing he could do. Her mother died of heart failure caused by the disease. Her father went back to work the next day.

  I held Charlotte, one hand on her belly, and felt her tears falling on my other arm. For a moment I considered telling her about my family, but that night belonged to Charlotte’s mother.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I said.

  Charlotte fell asleep on my elbow. After my parents’ death I’d thought I could never love again, because the fear of losing someone was too great. I had grown cold inside. Now here was this woman, lying on my arm. I waited for it to get light. When she woke she said she didn’t want to go back to Cambridge. I thought about my mission, and the boxing match in four weeks’ time, and said nothing.

  Charlotte took a shower in the ice-cold water; she left the door open and peered through the glass from time to time to see if I was watching her. She had a small, thin scar on her left breast. I stroked it as she toweled herself dry, and she said that when she was young she’d picked up a rabbit from its cage; the creature had scrabbled with its legs and scratched her. It hadn’t been a deep wound, but the scar had remained.