The Horned Man

by James Lasdun

Bruno!

  It was Bruno Jackson’s coat!

  He should have liv’d, Angelo says after reneging on his promise to spare Claudio’s life in return for a night with Isabella; He should have liv’d, save that his riotous youth, with dangerous sense, might in the times to come have ta’en revenge …

  Like the guests on Desert Island Discs, I have my Shakespeare and my Bible: Barbara Hellermann’s Shakespeare; Trumilcik’s Bible, which, as you would expect, is no conventional Bible. Between these books I have been trying to make sense of the events of these past weeks. And it seems to me that far from overestimating the scale and complexity of the campaign launched against me (as an obdurately skeptical part of me suspected I was, even to the end), I had been fatally underestimating these things.

  That I was confronting not one, but two antagonists, allied against me in the implementation of a kind of vast pincer movement – motivated, on Bruno’s part at least, by revenge (I have yet to understand Trumilcik’s motive) – was still far from clear to me as I stumbled down the stairs of Melody’s building, and out on to the street.

  Instead of curing me, Melody’s one-handed touch seemed to have made my head even worse. And added to the physical pain was that sight – an image to pierce the soul – of Bruno Jackson’s coat embracing Carol’s. It was about all I could do to examine the memory then of what I had had no doubt a deep vested interest in forgetting: that Bruno and Carol had met, had spent time together under the same roof as Fellows at the Getty Institute in California three years earlier. This fact had come to light last fall, when Bruno and I had first met, and were sounding each other out over coffee in the Faculty Dining Room, cautiously trading selections of our life histories. ‘The Getty Institute?’ I remembered saying, ‘my wife was there a couple of years ago. Carol Vindler.’

  ‘Carol Vindler’s your wife?’

  As I dragged myself through the streets of the West Village, I tried to burrow back in time to that moment. Had there been any particular glint in Bruno’s eye, any suggestion in his voice or demeanor of sensitive information in his possession; of a split-second’s decision to withhold it? I couldn’t be sure, and yet the possibility itself was enough to set my mind reeling. Bruno and my wife? No! I wanted to shout out the word; blast its veto indelibly on to the past, the present and the future. Certain turns of event are simply incompatible with the continuation of one’s life …

  I controlled myself as best I could, tried to come to a cooler, more rational appraisal of things. They had met; that was for sure. Perhaps she had found him attractive, as women seemed to. But even if she had, I doubted whether anything would have happened. The whole light-filled edifice of Carol’s personality, her emotions as precise, as diamond-bright as her intelligence, was built on honesty. Deception would have been as little tolerable in there as a spitball in a Swiss watch. But now – now that she was a free agent again … Might she not have resumed contact? Even the most contented spouses keep a few names and faces at the back of their minds for a rainy day – former lovers, someone they might have slept with if circumstances had been different, chance acquaintances their stray gaze held a second longer than a purely social contact required, leading them both somewhere they stepped back from but never forgot … And when the moment comes, the rainy day, the partner gone, how easy it is all of a sudden, how natural it feels, to pick up the phone … But on reflection even that I couldn’t quite see Carol doing. Even that had something base about it; an admission of latent duplicity during the time we were together, which her pride in her own integrity, if nothing else, would find offensive.

  No, the move must have come from Bruno. He must have heard about our separation – not hard in a villagey city like New York. And he would have found a way of insinuating himself into her new orbit. Perhaps he knew Melody; knew her through … through Trumilcik! (That, right there, was my first intimation of the possibility of their being in league together: Bruno and Trumilcik; Bruno’s cunning, his malcontent’s sly machination; Trumilcik’s crude and bestial brutality: Bruno pinning up that Portland poster, maybe even faking it, sticking the note in my mailbox, forging the letter to Elaine; Trumilcik crapping on my desk, attacking me in the synagogue …) And through Melody had got to Carol. Ah! My insides seemed to melt. I felt as I imagined a parent would feel at the thought of their child being abducted by a stranger: an immediate, foaming panic I had to beat down, once again, to pursue the question of why he would do it. Simple opportunism? The assiduous womaniser simply obeying the law of his own instincts? Possibly. But was there not also – in the outcome at least – something tauntingly pointed, aimed deliberately at me, calculated to send me lurching into whichever circle of hell it is that the victims of sexual jealousy suffer their torments in? Something, in other words, that might have had less to do with desire for Carol than with revenge against me? He should have liv’d – I read the words again – save that his riotous youth, with dangerous sense, might in the times to come have ta’en revenge … Too bad, I find myself thinking ruefully, that the powers of the Sexual Harassment Committee didn’t extend to the issuing of a death warrant!

  CHAPTER 14

  I spent that night in my office at Arthur Clay. It seemed to me I could reasonably count on a night of grace before anyone thought of looking for me there. Since my encounter with Trumilcik, I had formed the assumption that he favored the synagogue basement over this office for his nocturnal quarters, and I didn’t think there was much likelihood of his appearing here tonight. But if he did, I was ready for him. At any rate, I thought I was.

  I tried to go to sleep in my desk chair, but between the glare of the campus lamps outside, and the unceasing ache in my head, I soon realised that this position offered little prospect of oblivion. The heat must have been lowered too, as the room was distinctly chilly. I wanted to lie down, I wanted darkness, and I wanted something to wrap myself in.

  With a distinct reluctance, though realising there was nowhere else to go (the closet was too short to lie down in), I opened Trumilcik’s hiding place and crept in, closing the desks behind me. Wrapping myself in his stinking sheet, I shut my eyes and fell into a fitful sleep, full of uneasy dreams.

  I was unaware of any nocturnal visitation, human or otherwise, but when I emerged at dawn, bleary and unclean, I realised even before I caught sight of myself in one of Trumilcik’s strategically placed mirrors, that something truly catastrophic had come to pass.

  Forcing myself to stand still and confront my reflected head, I had the sensation of fainting rapidly through successive layers of consciousness, but without the luxury of passing out.

  A thick, white, horn-like protrusion had grown out of my forehead.

  I knew, of course, that this could not be so: that I was either still asleep and dreaming it, or that the mounting pressure of these past few days had made me suggestible to the point of hallucination. But this knowledge didn’t remotely lessen the terror I felt as I stared at my image in the mirror. Gingerly, I raised my hand to the protrusion, praying that the sense of touch – less given to hysteria, perhaps, than that of sight – would prove the monstrosity an apparition and make it vanish. Unfortunately it had the opposite effect: the thing felt appallingly real: hard, rock-smooth, and icy cold.

  Though I was no longer in pain, I felt as though I had become extremely ill. Something had shifted in my relationship to my surroundings. Physically, materially, they were unchanged, but in some essential way they seemed to be receding from me, or I from them. It was as though I had switched sides in a train, and what once rushed to meet me had started slipping away. I looked at the furnishings with an odd feeling that I recognised after a moment as yearning. I wasn’t so much seeing these ordinary things – the black-stained chairs, the sunflower clock, the pottery mugs, the five-to-seven-cup Hot Pot Coffee Maker – as yearning for them. I was filled with nostalgia for them as if my world and theirs had already parted company.

  All the while I was telling myself that the pale horn sticking from my
forehead would be gone when I next looked in the mirror. But this did not turn out to be the case. There it still was; white and pointed, interacting with the light and shade as complicatedly as any non-apparitional body part. I assured myself that however real it seemed to me, it couldn’t possibly be visible to anybody else, and that I should just act as if it were not there. Through a gap in the hemlocks outside the window, I saw a janitor wheel his mobile cleaning station into the science building across the campus, and I realised I had little time to spare if I wanted my sojourn here to pass unnoticed. But I found myself unable to leave the room. I felt that I would simply drop dead of shame the moment someone set eyes on me.

  I might well have stayed there until I was discovered, had I not remembered Barbara Hellermann’s maroon beret, which I had put back in the closet along with the rest of her clothes, after my return from Corinth. I took it out and put it on. The horn bulged oddly underneath the baggy fabric, giving it the shape of a child’s bicycle helmet – a surreally soft one – but at least it was concealed.

  As I left the room I gave a last glance round, and happened to notice the book I had taken down earlier that semester – the one whose moving bookmark had formed my first, unwitting brush with Trumilcik. Impulsively, I put it in my coat pocket. Then I slipped out, hurrying down Mulberry Street to the train station.

  There were mercifully few people on the train at that hour. I sat by myself in one of the reversible plastic seats, crouched down and gazing out of the window at the poisoned creek oozing along past the crumbling habitations that lined the track. I wondered what it was that so fascinated me about this spent landscape. Ugly as it was, it had something compelling about it – a strange, fallen beauty that held one’s gaze in spite of one’s horror. Some days, the ledges of ice shelving across the stream were pinkish in hue, some days mint green; depending, I supposed, on which gland of which deceased chemical plant or paint factory happened to have just ruptured and spilt its bilious juices into the groundwater. Even the pockets of woodland still standing here and there had a bleakly enchanted look – the trees thin and scraggly, so close together they produced not branches but parasitical-looking masses of wire-thin suckers that covered each one with a sinister furze. Bleached plastic bags fluttered up in the twigs, all one could imagine them producing by way of foliage or blossom.

  It struck me that I should have brought Carol out here. With her interest in purity and pollution (when she left me she’d been writing an article on the interminable disputes over sewage and waste-disposal that apparently kept the Assizes of Nuisance in medieval Europe fully occupied), she’d have made sense of this landscape. How I would have liked to be sitting by her, listening to her clear voice – always a little amused by the things her intelligence alighted on – discoursing on these matters! I found myself remembering the little colored arrows she had showered down through my father’s manuscript. From there the drift of my thoughts went to my father himself – his tumor, and then the morbid question of whether I had perhaps just come into some grim physiological legacy, a notion I retreated from as fast as I could, backtracking to the sweeter image of his arrow-struck papers, whereupon I remembered a particular reference they had made; one that, in the absence of any other plan, took hold of me with the force of a directive.

  However it might appear to the contrary, I had no other motive for going to the Cloisters Museum that day.

  It was a cold, beautiful morning. The museum – a pantiled medieval fantasy – rose above the Hudson with a gleaming look as though it had been freshly chiseled out of the sunlight.

  I had never been there before, and I was struck by how austerely the collection was mounted. There was none of the usual clutter of information and security. Stone walls and plain wooden rafters created an atmosphere of monastic simplicity. The rooms were furnished sparely, giving the eye space to study each artefact in peace. Gaunt wooden saints, gilt-emblazoned altar screens, monumental chests of drawers, stood with an impassive, time-scoured look of repose. A continual chant of plainsong drifted through the rooms, and from time to time a bell tolled with an authentically cracked tone. There was even the distinct ecclesiastical odor of candlewax and oiled wood.

  It was John D. Rockefeller, I read in the pamphlet I picked up, who purchased the museum’s most celebrated treasure, the Unicorn Tapestries. He saw them when they were sent to New York from France for an exhibition in 1922. ‘I merely lingered five minutes to satisfy my eye with the beauty and richness of their color and design’, he wrote, ‘and bought them forthwith.’

  The seven tapestries, depicting seven stages in the hunt of the unicorn, hang in a room specially constructed to resemble some intimate inner chamber of a medieval castle. I wandered in, the only visitor, and walked slowly around.

  I was in there for probably no more than twenty minutes, but when I left the room I felt dazed, engulfed almost, as though I had just sat through some long, harrowing film full of scenes that stood in relations of dreamlike reciprocity or mysteriously revealing opposition to my own life. Out of the stilled images of the tapestries, my mind appeared to have created a fluid continuum of action, so that I had the impression of having witnessed the entire hunt in all its vivid beauty and violence.

  Right before my eyes, it seemed, the young huntsmen had set off with their spears and hounds from the flower-sprinkled glade, riding through the forest till they came upon the unicorn at a stream, kneeling down and dipping his horn to purify the waters for the other creatures of the forest. Momentarily awestruck, the huntsmen watched in silence while he performed this sacred office. But as soon as he was finished the spell lifted, and they closed in with raised spears and faces full of hatred. Unable to flee, the harried unicorn defended himself, turning on his attackers with a wildness that seemed out of character in such a gentle-looking creature, kicking out both rear legs at a man attempting to spear him from behind, while at the same time ripping a savage gash in the flank of an unlucky greyhound with his horn. Meanwhile a woman with narrow, beautiful, sly eyes was beckoning to the huntsmen, as if to whisper to them the secret of luring unicorns into captivity. And sure enough, the poor creature was soon at her feet, kneeling there with a look of gentle resignation, while the woman’s pale hand rested on his head. A moment later he was brutally gored to death. His carcass was slung over a saddle and taken to the gates of the royal palace, where his horn was ceremoniously offered to the king and queen.

  That was all, as far as the hunt itself was concerned, but in an abrupt, wondrous coda, the unicorn appeared again, miraculously restored to life, sitting in a wooden palisade against a flower-spangled background of exceptional loveliness.

  Across the gallery that I came into as I left the room, was a glass door to a balcony overlooking the Hudson.

  I went out to get a breath of fresh air and collect my thoughts. The view over the stone balustrade was like a tinted panoramic engraving, the brightness delineating every branch, boat and ripple with meticulous clarity. A pleasure boat appeared, NIZAM tours stenciled in red letters on the gray hull. The white wake behind it looked solid and immobile, lying like quartz rubble on the hammered bronze water.

  I’d come out here intending to reflect on what I had just seen, but already something else was distracting me; something that appeared to be connected with what I was seeing below me at that very moment – the river, the boat, the crystalline aspect of it all.

  I realise now that I was experiencing a kind of forlorn echo of my first meeting with Carol, but at the time I felt it merely as a nameless anguish, preventing me from thinking about the tapestries.

  I went back inside, where I found myself in a room devoted to images of the Virgin Mary.

  I didn’t realise I was in a special exhibition, and certainly hadn’t noticed the poster to that effect – not then, and not on any earlier occasion either.

  Passing by virgins in lindenwood and worm-pocked walnut, sceptred and statuesque with baby Jesuses in their arms, or else with his rack-ribbed
corpse across their laps, I came to a halt at a small triptych, an annunciation, showing the Virgin in a geometric spill of red drapery, not yet aware of Gabriel approaching in his complementary arrangement of white robes.

  It was painted with a richly glowing sheen that, according to the caption, had been obtained by overlaying aqueous opaque pigments with translucent oil pigments.

  As I was reading this, I felt myself suddenly rising into the air. For a moment I had no idea what was happening to me, and wondered if I truly had passed into the realm of the fantastical, a notion that grew in strength when I caught sight of the figure moving toward me from the far end of the long chamber, beyond the altarpiece, and saw that it was Carol.

  An indescribable elation came into me as I beheld her; one that for a split-second seemed in itself to supply abundant cause for my present levitated condition. She was here! She was coming toward me! My beautiful, radiant wife!

  ‘Carol!’ I cried.

  ‘Get him out of here!’ I heard her yell, becoming simultaneously aware of the true explanation for my airborne state, namely the presence of two large guards with their hands under my elbows, attempting to remove me from the room.

  ‘Carol!’ I called again.

  ‘Stay away from me! I have a Personal Protection Order. You know damn well!’

  ‘Carol!’ I shouted, and it seemed to me I was calling across a great chasm of misunderstanding, not just separating me from her but threatening to separate all men from all women, as if we were experiencing some strange continental drift of the sexes.

  ‘Get him away! He’s not allowed within two miles of me! I already had to call the cops on him last night!’

  This absurd business of a PPO! She had obtained one after being attacked that night in the Plymouth Rock.

  ‘Listen Carol,’ I cried, ‘that wasn’t me at that club. That was –’

  But the guards were dragging me away and suddenly I couldn’t see her. I felt immediately a surge of power in my limbs, as though the knowledge that this might be the last chance I would ever have to explain myself released unsuspected reserves of strength. With an almighty wrenching motion, I twisted free of my captors, and began to run toward Carol. As I did so, one of the guards managed to grab on to my overstuffed briefcase, causing it to fall to the ground and burst open.