by Peter Høeg
“I couldn’t,” he said.
Two men in brown coats came out onto the steps.
“We’ll take it with us,” said the woman. “Will you give us a hand?”
The man looked at her vacantly. The animal was as tall as a man and broader. And it was a long, long time since he had done any manual labor.
He had been under the impression that the woman was already standing up. But now, without any visible change in her stance, she grew an inch taller.
“It’s dying,” she said. “Would you be so kind as to help lift it.”
The man bent down and grabbed hold.
* * *
From his window, a little later, he watched the ape being driven away in a black car that reminded him of a funeral cortege. He came to the conclusion that it probably would die and with that he dismissed the thought. But for a long while afterward he was bothered by pain in the small of his back from having lifted too heavy a weight and the unreal sensation of having lived through a dream.
* * *
The car was no hearse but an animal ambulance belonging to the Holland Park Veterinary Clinic, and the man who made the first cursory examination of the ape, as it lay on the ambulance cot, was Dr. Alexander Bowen, proprietor of that institution.
“Will it live?” asked the woman.
“We have to get it into the clinic.”
An indiscernible nod from the woman sanctioned the implicit costs entailed by the ape’s admission.
“I would rather it wasn’t registered,” she said.
The ambulance stopped, the woman climbed out. Halfway through the door she turned.
“If it lives,” she said, “I’ll see that you’re well rewarded.”
This promise prompted the doctor to give a little schoolboy bow.
“But if it dies you might as well fill one of your own syringes right there and then and put yourself to sleep.”
four
In South Hill Park, alongside Hampstead Heath, outside the door of one of the vast rooms of a mansion that lay, hidden away, inside a garden as big as a park, Madelene Burden took a last swig from the water carafe in her hand, straightened the topknot into which her hair was drawn, pushed open the door and walked into the light.
“How do I look?” she asked.
Adam, her husband, drew himself up and took in the sight.
“Enchanting,” he said.
Had he been closer he would have been able to catch a whiff of something else in addition to this enchanting vision—namely, the reek of ethyl alcohol emanating from his wife’s pores and from the water carafe. But right now he was standing in the middle of the room and at that distance the illusion held.
With the exception of one large surgical lamp all of the furniture in the room had been pushed back against the walls and Madelene embarked upon an erratic progress along sofas, occasional tables and wing chairs.
“Is there going to be dancing?” she asked.
Adam Burden was fond of encapsulating any significant and complex phenomenon in a single, telling expression. For Madelene, on meeting her in Denmark, he had come up with the word “dewy.” That had been just over a year and a half ago. At the time it had seemed to him to sum her up perfectly. Since then he had occasionally, as now, felt a twinge of doubt.
There was a knock at the door; their housekeeper opened it and stepped aside.
Out of the darkness and silence there came first footsteps and then a flash of white. Two men wheeled a hospital trolley into the room. They were followed by Alexander Bowen. Finally Andrea Burden, Adam’s sister, stepped inside and closed the door.
The porters pushed the trolley into the center of the room. It was covered with a thin blue sheet, under which Madelene could discern the outline of a body. Only the deceased’s head lay uncovered and, as yet, in shadow.
Andrea Burden trundled the surgical lamp over to the body, lowered the head and switched it on. The two porters removed the blue sheet.
The lamp blanked out the rest of the room. For a moment, within its golden sphere, the only thing that existed was the ape.
Like moths, Adam and Madelene were drawn toward the creature. Just for an instant Madelene forgot her tight skirt and high heels. She teetered dangerously, as though on stilts, regained her balance and positioned herself alongside the trolley.
She could hear the animal’s breathing, thick with mucus, drugged. Behind her, in the darkness, she was aware of her husband circling around the light. Silence reigned in the room. But somewhere in that silence a secret dialogue had been struck up.
“Let’s hear it,” said Adam Burden.
“We pick it up the day before yesterday. In a garden in Dulwich. The owner looked in the Yellow Pages under Animal Protection Societies and worked his way down the list. At some point he gets through to Miss Burden, who calls me. There’s been considerable blood loss, dehydration; it’s suffering from delayed shock. General condition is critical. I operate as soon as it’s admitted to the clinic.”
With his forefinger the doctor traced a white bandage running around the animal’s shoulder and upper arm.
“After administering a transfusion I remove forty pieces of number five shot from the area around the right scapula. The shot was fired from forty yards away, wounding superficially but causing pain and loss of blood. I sew up two gashes, in the medial and lateral gastrocnemius. Bite marks, possibly a dog.”
He pointed to two dressings below the ape’s knee.
“We took a fair amount of rust out of four vertical tears in the abdominal area. Where they back onto the railway embankment most of the houses have had barbed wire put up. Reinforced here and there by electric fencing.”
He turned the palms of the ape’s hands toward the light; the burn salve glistened like chalk.
“It came across the viaduct, saw the gardens and tried to climb down. The sides are sheer, concrete and granite, so it fell. Partially torn ligaments in both ankles.”
He placed a hand on the ape’s chest.
“London has etched a map of itself on this one,” he said.
“How did it get to Southwark?” Adam asked.
“The Met and the River Police had cordoned off St. Katharine’s Dock that day.”
“But that’s on the other side of the river.”
The doctor motioned with his hand; the two porters rolled the ape onto its side. The bite mark was long, narrow, deep, every tooth having left a gouge that had either been stitched up or sealed by pus. The hair around the wound had been shaved off, exposing a third of the back. The skin was black and blue from bruising. Madelene turned around and began the journey back to the water carafe.
“A van left the area just before it was cordoned off. It has not been found. But they did find the Doberman which would appear to have been in the van. The ape must have had its back half turned to it when it climbed in.”
Once more there was silence. Madelene located the table; under cover of the darkness she took a drink from the carafe.
“So,” said Adam Burden, “everyone is now looking for a large ape covered with bite marks?”
“Everyone is looking for the skipper of a boat,” said the doctor. “Some yacht rammed into the dock. There’s been no mention of any animal.”
Madelene felt how Adam became still, how—out of a range of unspoken options—he had reached a decision she did not understand.
“It can stay here,” he said. “Wheel it down to the garden room.”
The two porters drew the trolley out of the light.
Madelene’s field of vision and her mental radius were now narrower and shorter than the room itself, and dwindling by the minute. She sensed rather than saw the meeting breaking up.
“But Mrs. Clapham baked some pastries,” she said. “Cream horns. Oh well, I can always eat them with the baboon. When it wakes up.”
A door closed. Madelene had no idea whether she was alone. She tried to drink, and failed. Then she rested her head on the tabletop. To Adam B
urden, who had remained standing next to the surgical lamp, her heavy snores sounded exactly like the ape’s.
part two
one
Each morning Madelene was resurrected. This resurrection occurred in front of her mirror and took between thirty and forty-five minutes. While it was under way she was totally absorbed; during that space of time, with uncompromising thoroughness, she did the one thing she knew herself to be truly good at: she re-created the myth which said that Madelene looks gorgeous.
The face that met her eyes when she seated herself at the dressing table was, in her own opinion, a dull face. Not a faded face or yet a face in decay—Madelene was only thirty years old. But it was—to her mind—a pale, nondescript face that looked as if it might at any minute disappear, not in some blazing inferno but simply because, being so drably mediocre, it might easily merge with its surroundings.
Onto this surface she now applied a mask that was at one and the same time sensual and reticent. Having first cleansed her face with skin lotion to create an oil-free base of tightly closed pores, she then used a silk-matte foundation to erase the past ten years of her life. The face in the mirror before her might now, in all its smooth neutrality, have been twenty or perhaps even fifteen or twelve years old.
With a concealing stick she eradicated the microscopic lines around the eyes together with the gradually acquired skepticism of a lifetime. She used a fine brush to raise her eyebrows into the permanent wonder of youth.
It is in the dark areas of our faces that age and weariness reside. Her eyes she enlarged with a pale eye shadow that followed the line of her eyebrows before carefully outlining them with liquid eyeliner. They were now wide, clear and uncritically receptive. She then touched up her cheeks with a delicate golden terra-cotta blush, accentuated the curve of her mouth with a lip brush and enhanced the fullness of the lips with a natural gloss. Last of all, with a sickly yet widening red dot at the mouth of each tear duct she erased her iron constitution. Her face now seemed childish, radiant and ever so slightly delicate; so skillfully, so subtly reconstructed that only an expert would be able to tell that cosmetics had been used.
Madelene had learned the art of makeup from her mother. Not by asking questions or being given any direct answers—it was too sensitive a subject for that—but by watching her.
Madelene’s mother’s life had been one long succession of panic-stricken but more often than not successful attempts at beautification. First and foremost, the beautification of the family’s stylish and hectic day-to-day life in Vedbæk, north of Copenhagen, where it was not only the dinner service that was made of porcelain, where the very atmosphere was crystalline and under constant threat of shattering and no voice was ever raised above a whisper for fear of starting an avalanche of glass. But also, and in more exacting fashion, at the receptions held by the family trust, at which the unresolved tragedies of certain families were thrown together with the calamities of other families and individuals to form an elegantly turned-out, graciously served-up version of a modern-day hell on earth here, at the end of the twentieth century. On such occasions Madelene’s mother managed to organize a repast that served as a form of social first aid; she could bid “A warm welcome to one and all!” in a voice that shut out emptiness as effectively as polyfiller. Not only that but, despite the force of both internal and external circumstances, she always looked wonderful. She could emerge from seeing to things in the kitchen enveloped in a cloud of steam and, when the air cleared, there she would be, looking décolleté, attractive, hospitable, attentive and girlish, to the point where even Madelene’s father’s features would momentarily soften into an expression of unmitigated pride of possession.
Around the turn of the century, by dint of a suicidal collective effort, Madelene’s father’s family had pulled themselves out of medieval poverty and accumulated the money that enabled Madelene’s great-grandfather to study engineering. His two sons also went on to become engineers and—in the 1920s—uncommonly well-off. In a very low-key, Danish fashion and with a clear, inherited memory of the starvation and cholera epidemics of the previous century, the two brothers had used this sudden wealth to consolidate their position. They invested and reinvested, bought land, bred and made provision for their offspring, so that by now they were not so much a family as a clan—large, unremarkable, unobtrusive and exercising a direct influence on Danish foreign policy.
The family fortune had been founded on the building of cowsheds, a side of the empire that Madelene’s father had kept up. These structures, though, were not half-timbered cottages down some leafy country lane, as featured in Danish Tourist Board brochures, but four-story, totally mechanized industrial plants for the manufacture of domestic animals. Madelene’s father hated any kind of publicity and he had succeeded in remaining unknown to all but a select few. These few could, however, detect his personal thumbprint on Denmark’s annual production figures—as quoted in the country’s Statistical Yearbook—of 20,650,000 pigs and 813,000 beef and veal cattle.
As is so often the case with people who attempt in their terror to put some distance between themselves and their poverty-stricken past, Madelene’s father respected only people who had made their fortunes or who happened to be pioneering men of science and, until she ran away with Adam, Madelene had had to put up with her father referring to her—even, or perhaps especially, in her presence—as “Madelene, who is nothing really.” While she had been given a token education, she and everyone else had always known the only thing that really mattered was that one day she would take her place by the right man’s side, and in order to take that place it was not enough to be the heiress to a fortune; one also had to look good and looking good meant work, even now, this morning.
Madelene had never found the courage to stand up to her parents. With some defiance but unable to see any alternative, she had traveled down the smoothed and well-trodden paths marked out for her. But she had dreamt agonizingly, aimlessly, passionately of the chance of another kind of life. Into this dream stepped Adam Burden—a man, an amiable, attentive and not altogether harmless man, on the way up, and Madelene climbed aboard, both like the princess swept up behind the prince on his white horse and a castaway, all at sea and three-quarters drowned, clutching at the life belt that suddenly heaves into sight.
Madelene had had five hundred and twenty-nine days of marriage and each one had begun like this, in front of the mirror, just as what came next also followed a set pattern.
She would now get up and go down to the kitchen for a chat with Clapham’s wife about the housekeeping. From there she would proceed to the terrace to exchange a few words with Clapham himself. After that she would go up to town to do some shopping, or play tennis, or go riding on Hampstead Heath. She would then take a stroll with a woman friend and be back home by five p.m. in order to welcome Adam home at seven.
Anyone whose days are all the same and free from want inhabits eternity of a sort and that was how Madelene looked upon her life. As though she had wished for, sought and found eternity.
She slipped into a short, pleated skirt and approved her reflection in the mirror. She looked like the oldest daughter of the family on her way to an early tennis lesson. Then she left the room.
* * *
In the doorway, as always, she paused for a moment.
Madelene had two rooms, a bedroom and a dressing room, which she left as an animal leaves its territory, tentatively and warily. The routine that lay ahead of her was familiar down to the last detail. Even so, it was not without its terrors.
She had personally taken care of the decoration of the two rooms she was now leaving behind. She never knew where she found the courage to insist on their pale wooden floors, clean-lined furniture and white walls. To her they represented the only piece of Denmark left to her. Over that threshold the Commonwealth began.
Adam Burden’s parents had died while he was in his twenties but Madelene had heard his father’s voice. One evening Adam had played her a r
ecording from the BBC series Tales from the Dark Continent on which an assured and nonchalant voice described, warmly and wittily and with never a hem or a haw, the grand old days in India and British East Africa, and to Madelene it had seemed as though the house in which she lived were speaking.
This house had been built by Adam’s parents on their return to England in the mid-fifties. They had built it as a memorial to their life by the Indian Ocean and named it Mombasa Manor. It was an L-shaped building with a tiled roof and vast parklike gardens planted with tropical trees and shrubs.
In its rooms lion skins were spread on wall-to-wall carpets and spears and shields hung next to the fireplaces, and Madelene knew that other people thought she led a very grand life, titillatingly exotic and much to be envied. She also knew that she was, ostensibly, the mistress of this house.
Nevertheless, every morning, including this one, she was brought momentarily to a halt in her doorway, checked by an instinctive sense of dread embodied in the thought that, since the British Commonwealth had subjugated everything else of an alien nature, might it not also devour her?
The pause was brief, this morning as on every other. Madelene shook her head, it was a crazy idea, she drove herself onward. And, as on all the other mornings, as she walked along the corridors, down the stairways and through the rooms, she left her fear behind her, a little of it in each room.
* * *
Clapham had a standard greeting for her. Whenever Madelene stepped out onto the terrace he would stand up, doff his cap, present her with a flower and offer her a cup of coffee.
He always made this offer in a whisper. The coffee was a token of their fraternization, the alliance—in a world that had never known anything coarser than Darjeeling first flush—between her, the foreigner, and him, the worker.
Up to a point Madelene trusted him. Like her, he was a part of the surroundings—and, like her, he was not one with them.
