Mr. Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

by Russell Hoban

  ‘Not a good way to go.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t. Now women visit his tomb and they kiss him and rub his crotch and his boots.’

  ‘As any right-thinking woman would, but why the boots?’

  ‘I don’t know, but he seems to have become a symbol of the virility and fertility of the republican ideal. He was originally buried at Neuilly but in 1891 he was moved to Père Lachaise and the tomb with the statue was paid for by National Subscription.’

  ‘National Subscription! Was he that big politically?’

  ‘Evidently he started getting bigger as soon as he was dead, and Zoë says he’s got a considerable following now. His bronze hat is lying upside-down beside him, and women hoping for a lover or a husband put flowers in it and kiss the statue on the lips. Those who want to get pregnant also give him a little rub. Some of them go a bit further …’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘All the way, actually, with a partner or just with Victor.’

  ‘Zoë told you all this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Has she been to the tomb?’

  ‘That’s where she met Mtsoku.’

  ‘Was she there to do the business with Victor?’

  ‘She’d been visiting Oscar Wilde nearby and was just browsing.’

  ‘And Mtsoku?’

  ‘He’d been looking in on Marcel Proust but he’d heard about Noir’s female following so he cruised over for a recce.’

  ‘But you still haven’t said why you’re thinking of Victor Noir.’

  ‘Who knows? Maybe if I leave some flowers in the hat and give Victor a rub I can find a faithful lover. I’ve rubbed your crotch often enough but that didn’t seem to do it.’ She paused. ‘Or maybe if I ask very nicely he’ll keep the HIV virus away from us.’ She began to cry, and made no protest when I gathered her up in my arms and kissed the top of her head. She said us, I was thinking, and the air seemed full of angel trumpets.

  ‘Then you’ll come to Paris with me?’ I said.

  She stopped crying, moved out of my arms, blew her nose, rearranged herself on the couch, drank some wine, and said, ‘Probably. But I need to talk a little more before I decide, and if I ask you to explain things I’m not attacking you – I just need to understand, OK?’

  ‘OK, Fina.’ That one word, us, made me feel cosy and safe despite the fact that Death might well have me on its shortlist inside my body as well as outside my door. Takemitsu wasn’t doing Bruce Lee any more, just sounding lonely. Au Tonneau showed itself to me: the empty barrel, wine all gone. Then the number on Katerina’s wrist. Why do I do the things I do? I wondered.

  Serafina drank her wine and pondered silently for a while, then she said, ‘What I’m wondering about is the difference between you and me – how you wanted other women besides me and I didn’t want any other man. Maybe you didn’t just want them, maybe you needed them. What kind of want was that, Jonno, what kind of need?’

  ‘Fina, I’ve told you this before: I think most men – at least all the men I’ve ever known – just want as much as they can get.’

  ‘As much sex.’

  ‘Right. Men are programmed to spread their seed as widely as possible – scientists acknowledge that.’

  ‘But this wasn’t just raw sex, was it? It wasn’t so urgent that you did it standing up wherever the need took you – they wrote love-letters and so did you. You courted them, you had “something special” with this one and that one.’

  ‘Jesus, Fina!’ Her feet were on the floor; my lap felt empty.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not everything can be explained.’

  ‘Try.’

  ‘Do you know the poem by Baudelaire “To a Woman Passing by”?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He sees her in the street, in the deafening street that howls around him – a tall, slender woman in deep mourning, her hand lifting and swinging the hem of her skirt as she walks. She’s agile and noble, with a statuesque leg. They look at each other, he says he drinks from her eyes. He knows he’ll never see her again, and he ends the poem with, “O you whom I could have loved, o you who knew it!”’

  ‘Right – so he was deeply moved by a statuesque leg and I know that you are too. But he doesn’t say he wooed this woman until he got her into the sack.’

  ‘Maybe she was too agile for him.’

  ‘Stick to the point – you brought up that poem because we were talking about romantic love as opposed to straight shagging. Apart from anything else, romance is time-consuming. How many can you handle at the same time?’

  ‘I think that’s a rhetorical question.’

  ‘Answer it anyhow, please.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re asking how many I can handle – what you want to know is why I did what I did.’

  ‘OK, tell me that.’

  ‘It’s very hard to spell it out.’

  ‘Not everything can be easy, Jonno.’

  ‘I keep feeling as if I’m going to lose you for ever.’

  ‘Don’t be so cowardly – whatever you tell me won’t lose me more than you’ve done already.’

  ‘Then maybe I’ve already lost you for ever.’

  ‘Whatever happens, it’s better to be honest with me and yourself, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ll try. The thing is, to me the sexual act was secondary – it was the idea that excited me: the idea of pulling a woman out of the unknown, someone you’ve never seen before but you sense a possibility and you want to get to that point where she lets you into her innermost privacy.’

  ‘And then what? Then you move on to the next one?’

  I shrugged. ‘I never moved on from you, Fina.’

  ‘No, I was the home base – I can see that. But when you were having these affairs, didn’t you think there might be consequences if I found out?’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d find out.’

  ‘But the deception itself has consequences – what you were doing had to make you different from the Jonathan I thought was with me. You must have compared me with the others: how I was in bed, how I looked, smelled, tasted, felt; the sounds I made, the things I said while I thought I was alone with the Jonathan I knew. So it was like a cloak of invisibility for you – you knew something that I didn’t – we weren’t both coming from the same place.’

  I found nothing to say.

  ‘And there’s the matter of the contract between us: it wasn’t written down, it wasn’t even spoken. But we did have an unspoken contract: you knew that you could trust me not to have anyone else on the side, and in accepting my fidelity and letting me believe in yours you made a contract with me. But you didn’t honour it. Do you believe in such a thing as honour?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And does honour matter to you?’

  ‘Of course it does, Fina.’

  ‘Can you explain how you can reconcile that belief with what you did?’

  Takemitsu had stopped. There was only silence and the noises from outside. I heard the voices of other women in strange beds. Look at me, said Au Tonneau: empty. ‘You know I can’t explain that,’ I said. ‘You say you’re not attacking me but you’ve demolished me completely. My behaviour was dishonourable and I can’t find any way of justifying it. All I can do is say I’m sorry and hope you’ll give me a second chance.’

  ‘The thing is, Jonno, I wonder if you’ll ever change. I think maybe you’re afraid of women and that’s why you have to keep knocking them over like tenpins. If you’ve needed to do that up to now, how are you going to stop?’

  ‘I’ll stop because I want you back and I don’t want to lose you again.’

  ‘You say that now but can I ever trust you again? If I were to come back, could I ever believe anything you told me? In bed together, could I believe that it was just the two of us alone and private, with no one else getting between us?’

  ‘We could try making love, see how it feels,’ I said stupidly.

  ‘“Making love”. There’s a whole lot of making going on but th
ere’s not that much love about. Let’s move on to the Rinyo-Clacton thing. What kills me is that I’d never have gone to bed with him if you hadn’t been unfaithful. Your infidelities made me leave you and my leaving led to both of us ending up with Mr R-C and maybe HIV.’

  ‘You could have said no to him.’

  ‘Yes, and so could you. And here we are. I feel so tired – I can’t talk any more tonight.’

  ‘Don’t go back to Zoë’s,’ I said. ‘Sleep here.’

  ‘But I want to sleep alone. Can I use the couch?’

  ‘Take the bed. At least I’ll have the smell of you when you’ve gone.’

  So once more we slept our separate sleeps. In the flat where we’d had so many sleeps together.

  26

  Insect Life

  When I woke up on Saturday morning I felt more myself than I’d done for a long time; then I realised it was because I’d gone to sleep knowing that Serafina was sleeping in our bed, in the bed where she belonged. It was quarter past eight and there were comfortable sounds and the smell of coffee coming from the kitchen. My next thought was, O God, next year at this time – probably sooner – I’ll be dead if I don’t do something about Mr Rinyo-Clacton. And why do I always think of him as Mr?

  Serafina was already dressed, bright-eyed and wide awake, ready for the day. ‘Good morning,’ she said as I came into the kitchen.

  ‘Good morning. How was your night?’

  ‘Wonderful. I still haven’t got used to that futon at Zoë’s place.’

  ‘You can sleep here every night, you know.’ I moved my mouth towards hers for a good-morning kiss. She turned so that I caught her on the cheek. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Will you be around when I come out of the shower?’

  ‘Yes, I don’t have to leave for a while yet. Bacon and eggs?’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  After breakfast I phoned Eurostar and booked us on the 08:23 from Waterloo on Monday. The telephone is a wall model that I never got round to fixing to the wall. The cord that connects the handset to the base is a thing of tightly coiled ringlets that often get entangled in each other and cause me to drop one or both parts of the telephone, which is what I did after booking the seats on Eurostar. The base fell to the floor and out of a recess in it rolled a small wad of tissue and a little hightech bug – I’d seen enough thrillers to recognise such things. There’d been nothing to secure the device, no glue or tape or Blu-Tack, just that little wad of tissue that would allow it to fall out at the slightest jolt. I took the thing into the bathroom, lifted the lid of the cistern, and dropped it into the water so he could have a good listen whenever the toilet was flushed. Then I phoned Eurostar and changed the booking to Tuesday, after which I phoned Paris and booked the hotel.

  ‘He’s bugged the phone,’ I said to Serafina, ‘and he wanted me to find it.’ I told her what I’d done about it.

  ‘Oh God, you mean to say he’s been here in this flat?’

  ‘With Desmond, probably. I’m pretty sure his skills go well beyond chauffeuring.’

  ‘But bugging’s illegal, isn’t it? And if he got in here without a key, that’s breaking and entering, right? You haven’t given him a key, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you going to the police?’

  ‘Oh sure, and the first thing they’ll ask me is, “Why would anybody want to break in and bug your flat?” and then I’ll tell them I sold my death to some nut for a million pounds and they’ll sort the whole thing out, yes?’

  ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘What I just did – drop the bug in the cistern.’

  ‘But if he wanted you to find that one, maybe there are others you won’t find. If he’s trying to freak us out, he’s certainly succeeding with me.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to turn the place upside-down looking for the others.’ I raised my voice and spoke to the plants, the lamps, the bookshelves, the coffee table. ‘Can you hear me, Mr Rinyo-Clacton? If this is how you get your jollies, be our guest.’

  ‘This isn’t funny,’ said Serafina. ‘Maybe it doesn’t bother you but I wonder if I’ll ever feel safe here again. Are you going to change the locks?’

  ‘What’s the point? If these locks didn’t stop him, new ones won’t either.’

  ‘What about those fancy systems you see in New York flats in films, where these long steel bars slide into place?’

  ‘He’ll always find a way to get in, Fina. I refuse to panic about this.’

  ‘He could have been in the flat last night, watching us while we slept. What would you have done if you’d woken to find him standing over you?’

  ‘If we caught him in the flat he probably could be had up for it. Unless he’s had a key made, in which case he’d say I’d given it to him.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘You see what he’s doing? He’s making us spend more and more time thinking about him, trying to guess his next move. Please, let’s not do this.’

  ‘I’ll try not to.’

  But we didn’t stop thinking about him.

  27

  Lumps of Time

  Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s presence, once I’d discovered that bug, filled the flat like a smog. We saw his invisible shadow huge upon the wall, smelled him in the air, tasted him in our food, heard him in the silence, felt his ugly hands all over us.

  Serafina was now back at Zoë’s and I was going to have to make it through the nights remaining between us and Paris alone. Time lay about in lumps and blobs, refusing to move. I went to the National Gallery to check out Hendryk again in Room 18. He was his normal self but gave me nothing. Why, I wondered for the first time, was there a woman in a bed glimpsed through a doorway. Perfectly respectable – just her head in a nightcap showing above the counterpane. Was she ill? Was she dying?

  I went to the British Museum to look at two of my favourite things: the first was the little bronze head of a goddess, probably Aphrodite (Greek, second century BC), found near Mersin, Cilicia: not a solid head, just a shell of the face and the front of the hair, almost a mask. Hauntingly beautiful, her face: thoughtful and compelling. Her painted eyes, viewed from above, were seductive; from below, full of doubt. Now they seemed more full of doubt than usual. I’d visited her many times but only this time did it occur to me that Aphrodite knew all there was to know about love. On the other hand, maybe she was an ignorant goddess who made all kinds of love happen but knew nothing about any of them.

  This whole thing, I said to her, is about me and women, isn’t it?

  No answer.

  I went to the Assyrian Saloon and King Ashurbanipal’s lion-hunt reliefs from Kuyunjik to visit a particular lion, the one who grasps and bites the chariot wheel that pulls him up to his death on the spears of the king and his huntsmen. I looked into the shadowed eyes under the lion’s frown, fixed for ever in the tawny stone. There are two arrows in the lion and two spears; his stone rage and his stone dying have endured for more than twenty-five centuries.

  This lion-hunt, apart from being a remarkable work of art, is interesting in that the king, with his carefully curled hair and beard, is only a generalised formal figure as are all the other humans; but the lions are individual tragic portraits. The lion grasping and biting the chariot wheel is undoubtedly the king of the lions, the one whose frown and shadowed eyes are fixed for ever on that mystery that he so violently embraces.

  What do you think? I said to him.

  His answer was his action; it was between him and the wheel – what else is there to hold on to?

  It was an unusually warm day for October, and girls from everywhere were sitting on the museum steps. Life would go on, leaving me behind with the lion, the goddess, and the little dog Hendryk.

  I went to see Katerina, feeling a little uncomfortable about it. My night with her now seemed a strange dream and I knew it wasn’t going to happen again. When she’d held the banknotes, her face, with the lips drawn back from the teeth in that dreadful rictus, had seemed almost
a gorgon-face, full of a terrible power. Well, even Ashurbanipal had the help of a powerful grandmother.

  With a no-bullshit modern psychic and clairvoyant no explanations are necessary: this meeting was strictly business. ‘You feel it?’ she said when we sat down at the table with the little bronze woman and the blue bell-flower lamp.

  ‘Feel what?’ I said as Mr Perez favoured us with the overture to La Forza del Destino.

  ‘How it all comes to a point now. Very soon the waiting is over and we see connections that we did not see before.’

  ‘Katerina, what do you know that I don’t know?’

  ‘I know nothing, Jonathan, but I can feel the shape of what’s below the fin that cuts the water. He also, this Rinyo-Clacton – he wants it to be over soon.’

  I told her about our Paris plans. ‘Should we not go?’ I said. ‘Is there something else I should be doing?’

  ‘Don’t change whatever plans you have – go to Paris with Serafina and be open to whatever comes to you there. Enjoy yourself, even. You don’t have to jump whenever Mr Rinyo-Clacton rattles your cage.’

  Melencolia, on my way out, favoured me with a look of genial contempt.

  That evening I hired Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia at the video shop. That film pretty well covers everything; I’d already seen it four or five times, and as I sat down to watch Warren Oates as the doomed Bennie I was wondering if there was any point in the story where he could have stepped out of the train of events that was bringing him to his death. Even at the end, though, he needn’t have died: he gave El Jefe the rotting head, El Jefe gave him the million dollars, and Bennie could have walked out of there with the money. But by then his woman had died in the quest for the head and the death in Bennie could no longer be held back: he killed El Jefe and his bodyguards and was himself shot dead in his car as he drove away. His death had been in him from the very beginning, only waiting its chance to come out.

  I watched the film again and ended up feeling tough, fatalistic, and doomed. I could make it through three more nights alone; I could even water the plants.