by Will Self
‘It is’ – she made reckoning on her stubby fingers – ‘two hundred and ten francs for the weeks, and I can be giving you le petit déjeuner – an evening meal also, if you’re wanting?’
Treu und Glauben. ‘That’s fine, Frau Stauben,’ Joyce said. ‘I’ll take it. ‘
Frau Stauben’s grey hair lay in a mass of spirals on her rounded shoulders, the links of her spectacles chain were buried in the fuzz of her cardigan; the spectacles themselves rose and fell on her massive breast. She was still holding Joyce’s arm. ‘Please, you will call me Vreni – and …’
Joyce touched her own breast. ‘Joyce.’
‘Joyce. Exactly. Are you very sick-feeling, Joyce?’ Frau Stauben’s eyes were too blue – doll’s eyes with bags under them.
‘No, not very sick at all …’ She hesitated, wondering whether to speak of her odd feelings since the abortive visit to Gertrudstrasse, but decided against it. ‘I came to Zürich early, to – well, presumably Herr Weiss explained? My cancer is not very advanced, I don’t think I’ll be any kind of problem to you –’
‘No, no, you are not understanding, Joyce!’ Vreni Stauben became animated. ‘I am not having any problems with this – I have seen the very sicks, the very sicks. I only wonder …’ She twiddled an invisible dial, tuning in to her wonderment. ‘But really, I am too rude!’
Vreni Stauben hurried about, breathing with the rumbling squeak of the obese. She fetched towels and sheets for Joyce, then made up the bed. She showed Joyce the kitchen cupboards with their plastic boxes of muesli, and the fridge with its quarter-litre tubs of yoghurt.
‘If you are up first of time,’ Vreni said, grinning conspiratorially, ‘I will be frying the Röschti and the eggs.’ Then she gave Joyce a set of keys and demonstrated the tricky manoeuvre required to turn the mortise lock. All the while, the smoky-blue cat with the shaved belly padded along behind them. ‘She is the stupid animal,’ Vreni contended indulgently – and Joyce, who didn’t like cats, silently concurred.
When Joyce was alone in her new room, she sat down on the side of one of the beds, unzipped her ankle boots and eased them off. You’ve been on us a lot today, her sore feet complained. We’re not used to it.
Well. Joyce bent forward to grasp first one ball, then the second. I know that, but you may have to. She lay back on the pillows, intending to rest for a moment, but unconsciousness mugged her with its soft cosh.
She dreamt of Isobel, a Tommy-girl in a khaki wool uniform, puttees wound round her milk-bottle calves, a salad bowl tin helmet on her crunchy dyed hair. Joyce’s daughter was hunched up in a shell crater; illuminated by the bursting of whizz-bangs, one of her cheeks was shinily artificial. Gutta-percha. Ueli Weiss – in a full-length leather coat, Iron Cross at his high collar – stood smoking on the far side of a black pool, from the middle of which poked a skeleton’s hand holding a pistol. Despite the shellfire it was eerily silent, except for Chopin’s B Flat Sonata, played very softly by a virtuoso who was out of sight in no man’s land. The melody insinuated itself within the after-tone of each note.
The Angel of Mons slithered down out of the hot orange sky. It was wearing Marianne Kreutzer’s tight face mask, and its billowing white silk robe looked deliciously cool. Even though the Angel was fifteen feet high, once it had grasped Isobel under her arms, it was unable to lift her.
‘I’ll miss the flight, Mum,’ Isobel said. ‘Don’t leave me here.’ She pawed at her mother’s blouse, her stupid manicured nails catching in the fabric.
Joyce cried, ‘Get off me!’ And woke to the terrifying banality of Vreni Stauben’s cat, which was trampling her upper body. It was dark. After she had switched the light on and been to the toilet, she checked her watch: 3.44 a.m. She undressed, put the cat out the door and returned to the twin bed. She fell asleep immediately, and in the morning was hungry enough for both the Röschti and two fried eggs.
Offertorium
Every day, after breakfast, Joyce left the Universitätstrasse apartment and walked the Zürich streets. Vreni Stauben tried to persuade her to take cabs – or at least the tram or bus. But Joyce told her she preferred to walk.
In the mornings, when she set out on her expeditions, there were still misty rags hanging from the trees on the wooded slopes surrounding the city; then, as the morning wore on, the rags were torn away. There was a succession of high, bright, chilly days. With each venture she made, Joyce unwound the thread of orientation, down between the dully neoclassical museum and library buildings, then across the Limmat Bridge, before trailing it round the edge of the old town.
Vreni told Joyce about Weinberg’s, and the cheaper department store, Globus, both of which were on Bahnhofstrasse. She took her time shopping, far more than she would have done at the Bull Ring in Birmingham. The shop assistants were no more presentable than those at home, but, to be frank – and since she was addressing herself alone, why shouldn’t she be – they were far more attentive, and polite, and spoke markedly better English as well.
Joyce realized she was building a wardrobe, and it was from this alone she deduced that her sojourn in Zürich would be for quite a while: the hours sheathed in good-quality cotton underwear, the days helped into a comfortable, yet stylish, navy two-piece – this in a lightweight wool, since Vreni had told her to expect warmer weather in April.
At Apartment 7, Universitätstrasse 29, Joyce adapted herself to the rhythms of her landlady’s life. It was much as she had always feared: the petty sumptuary rules, the cat-and-weather conversations, the talk of milk supply – and ailments. A pooling of sensibility with no sex barrier to prevent it: is that my support hose, or hers?
Joyce had always understood, rationally, that Derry would predecease her – the X chromosome, the single malts, the many cigarettes, the sedentary job – but worse than the fear of his absence was the idea of any other presence. In the darkest days of mourning him, when she didn’t even dress herself, Joyce recoiled from the phone calls of even her closest and oldest friends, their very feminine concern. Her anxieties were half formed, and all the worse for it: the purgatorial doom of a shared scone in the café of a National Trust property, for ever and ever and ever. Lord Jesus Christ King of glory, deliver the souls of all the faithful departed from the pains of hell …
One morning, after Joyce had been a week or so at Frau Stauben’s apartment, the two women lingered together over breakfast. Vreni was showing her photographs of the previous year’s Easter play at St Anton’s; this was, Joyce knew, her other way of memorializing Gertrud. Tossing aside the final photo – a particularly choleric cherub, tightly held by a long-suffering angel – Vreni said, ‘Ueli – Herr Weiss – he called in the night before to ask me if you are being all good.’
Joyce didn’t think this an inquiry after her moral welfare; she dug doughtily at the remains of her muesli. ‘Oh, really,’ she said, ‘I’m perfectly all right – don’t I seem all right?’
‘It is – I – it is …’ As Vreni was not someone to whom tact came naturally, she mangled on: ‘I am not knowing what is the stage of your treatments, Joyce. I am so sorry, you forgive me for not inviting this talk, but I am confused, I do not know what to say to Ueli – ’
‘You don’t have to say anything to Herr Weiss!’ Joyce snapped, and was going to add that her health was none of his business, had not Frau Stauben tipped her glasses off the end of her long, veined nose and put the doll’s eyes on Joyce. The morning sunlight was intense in the small kitchen, and a sort of nimbus edged her soft form. ‘But I am thinking,’ (Butt ai amm zinkin …) she mispronounced with great care, ‘that you are not so ill at all. You have not the look’ – she skidded into Schweizerdeutsch – ‘Sie gsehnd nöd uus wie öpper wo Chräbs hätt’ – then back out – ‘the look of a cancer person. I know this things, you see.’
The daughters of other women looked up at them from the table. Teenagers dressed as immaterial beings, their smiling faces blank and startled in the flash, waiting for experience to shade them in.
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br /> Without being aware of having taken her leave, or taken up her new coat, handbag and gloves, Joyce found herself outside in the street, the fairly high heels of her new shoes vigorously tapping on the paving. She followed the thread back towards the river; on the museum’s portico a muscular goddess did dancercise with the globe. Joyce walked over the bridge, then climbed the stairs beside the gothic grotto to the Lindenhof, the small park she had ventured out to from the Widder Hotel on the first night of her resurrection.
Could it be true, what the fat lady said? Could Joyce be recovering from the cancer? Phillimore had said the origin of her cancer was ‘occult’; might the dissolution of these tumours be equally mysterious?
In the dead of recent nights Joyce had awoken often, and looked across the empty twin bed to where the feline darkness rubbed against the jet windowpane. Was it outside, her cancer? Had it been put out there, to stare back in at her with eyes as round and black as an umlaut? Was it watching her body, huddled up in the duvet, for signs of defeat: the unruly cells, cowed, mending their own membranes, retreating into the milky opalescence of their cytoplasm? … fac eas, Domine, de morte Iransire ad vitam … Allow them, O Lord, to cross from death into the life …
Below her sun rays skipped, wavelet to wavelet. Pretty. Ordinary. Pretty. Beside her the Stadthäuser loomed. Sandy. Dull. Sandy. Joyce was beginning to read Zürich, a little; the individual buildings, the streets, the hills beyond – all were outlined. Some of these were filled in – with colour, texture and form – while others were simply labelled, e.g., ‘Rathaus’, and given a brief description. She went on, threading through side streets empty in the mid-morning. She had it in mind to pick up the bras she had ordered the day before yesterday – although she also knew that it was far too early.
In Bahnhofstrasse Joyce was arrested by a chocolatier’s window. Here was the inverse of the edible leather goods in the old town; the slick brown stuff, melted and poured into the moulds of quotidian things – books and biros, coins and watches. It was tempting, this parallel world of sweet substance, and Joyce tried casting herself as a little old English governess, stuffing a Gladstone bag full of it, before boarding the train that would take her home across Europe.
The train home, maybe I could take that? The plane was out of the question: if I feared death when I was on my way to commit suicide, then what would it be like now? Every jolt or jostle threatening to pop this bubble of shiny, reflective awareness? Joyce walked across the road towards the station, eyes fixed, unseeing, on the stony breasts of the gods and goddesses guarding its clock. What does Weiss want?
A group of street drinkers were clustered convivially beside a plinth, upon which a bearded patriarch was ever-striding towards an industrious Zion. Joyce thought that, this being Switzerland, they were going about the business of intoxication in a sober fashion, the only thing to distinguish them from still soberer citizens a certain lack of registration that recalled the transfers Isobel used to rub on to cardboard panoramas with a pencil. They stood – two men, two women, one brown, three white – in kinship with the drift of last autumn’s leaves. It was only when Joyce was within a few feet of them, and one of the women took a swig from her can of lager, then looked round, that she recognized her own daughter.
‘Mum – Mummy!’ Too loud, the closest living relative cried: an egregious acquaintance forcing intimacy in a crowd. The man with her was Asian – a Tamil? His face smooth – firm, yet fleshy – his lips symmetrical, his thick blue-black hair pressed down on his brow by a cream-wool hat.
Isobel set her can on the ground and rushed to embrace her unyielding mother. ‘Oh, Mummy, I was so scared. Oh, Mummy, I thought you were –’
Dead. Joyce completed the sentence, internally, but it was Isobel she meant. She realized that Frau Stauben’s Gertrud and her own Isobel had become mushed up in her mind, both household goddesses, the objects of useless and chintzy cults.
‘Where’ve you been? I’ve been back to the hotel every day, I’ve waited there loads, they – they called the police in the end –’
‘I’m not surprised, Isobel,’ Joyce said firmly, disengaging herself from the beery embrace.
‘Are you all right? Are you going somewhere – d’you want me to come with?’ This, all in a rush. Please take me with you, Mummy, please? The teary little face imploring among the tricycles, nurseries in those days, well, they were a bit like prisons.
‘I hardly think we want to discuss this in front of your …’ Joyce eyed the Tamil man and the two others, who were not so respectable after all: the man had his front teeth missing, the woman an open sore by her ear. ‘… friends.’
Mother and daughter walked together into the front hall of the Hauptbahnhof: an enormous, barrel-vaulted space, with dingy light filtered down through many semicircular windows. The atmosphere was stale with diesel fumes and the odours of the departed masses. A bulgy, gilded dummy of a pierrot was dangling from the beams overhead; Joyce supposed this was meant to be public art. She stopped and said to Isobel: ‘I’m not going anywhere, I told you that already. I’m staying here, in Zürich –’
‘But, Mum –’
‘I also told you, Isobel, that I’m fed up to the back-bloody-teeth with carrying you, girl.’ From ancestral workshops came the bash and whine of her long-gone Black Country accent. ‘If you’re going to hang about on street-bloody-corners with this – this riff-raff, you can keep out of my road.’
‘I’m worried about you, Mum.’
‘Worry about yourself.’
‘What about the house? What’re you gonna do about that?’
Red and wet – was that how Isobel’s cheeks were always going to be? Unreasonably – because she knew this was only the lost girl’s compounded neurosis, no home to go to at chucking-out time – Joyce grew still angrier with her grasping, ungrateful, sot of a daughter.
‘The house, the house – that’s all you ever think about, Isobel. Worried you won’t be getting your money any time soon, are you? Honestly, if your father could see you now!’ If he could, he’d give her a hug, stroke her stupid dyed hair. Comfort her.
Isobel was now sobbing; Swiss travellers hurried past, eyes averted, heading for the ticket machines. Joyce got a pen and notebook out of her handbag, and, distraught as she was, Isobel still noticed this new acquisition. Joyce scrawled Vreni Stauben’s address and phone number on a page, tore it out and handed it to her daughter.
‘This is where I’m staying, if you feel you have to reach me. I don’t want to know where you are, Isobel, not until you straighten yourself out.’
‘But, Mum, I’ve got no … You see, my credit card –’
Joyce forestalled this bloody beggary, so at odds with the nation, its cavernous Alps stuffed with hard cash. She got out her wallet and slapped five rust-coloured notes into her daughter’s hand; then she tried to walk away, briskly, without a backward glance, deliver them from the lion’s mouth, but Isobel was still quicker.
The drunk woman grappled at Joyce’s arm, and it took fifty or a hundred yards to shake her off. She fell back to the group by the statue, and the last her mother saw of her, when she did look, was Isobel being comforted by the Tamil man, who had put down his beer and clasped her in an embrace that – since he was a full head shorter – appeared bloody ridiculous.
Sanctus
Joyce used her own key to the apartment, and walked straight down the corridor and into the main room. Ueli Weiss and Marianne Kreutzer were on one of the sofa-slabs; Vreni Stauben sat quivering on a chair. The dusty curtains had been opened and the blinds rolled up; there was a figure at the window, and, when it pivoted to confront Joyce, it took a while for her to establish its sex.
Then he said, ‘Mrs Beddoes – Joyce, if I may?’ in flawless English, while advancing to take her hand. ‘This is an intrusion – and an unexpected one for you – so, you must please forgive us?’
Is he wearing fancy dress? But no, it was a purple-trimmed soutane with wide, flaring skirts; a vivid pur
ple sash cut across his tubular upper body; and a black biretta with a purple tuft was set on top of his head – the capital of this human column.
‘I am Monsignor Reiter,’ the priest announced – not without a trace of pride – ‘but please, call me Jean.’
Joyce noticed the gold band on his wedding finger, and a white gold signet ring set with diamonds on his little one. He was young, this priest, and so white-skinned that he looked as if the pigment had been sucked out of him. He was also very tall, with a long El Greco face and black glossy hair so dense that even though he must have shaved that morning – evidenced by the fresh nick on his sharp Adam’s apple – his hollow cheeks were already blue-shadowed by new stubble.
‘How do you do,’ Joyce conceded.
Vreni began flapping, asking Joyce if she wanted tea … coffee. Even Marianne, who was in an eau-de-Nil silk top that must have cost a small fortune, seemed a little awed by the prelate.
‘Why,’ Joyce asked him, ‘are you here?’
‘I am a papal chaplain,’ Reiter explained, ‘charged by the Curia with the task of assessing certain kinds of … well, perhaps the least prejudicial way of putting it would be to call them “unusual events”.’ He raised his eyebrows; it was a radical move that made of his face something comical and expressive; temporarily, he appeared dumbfounded by his own words, overawed by his own magnificence.
They were still standing. Joyce paced herself. She slowly unbuttoned her coat, retreated to the vestibule to hang it up – together with the woollen tam she had bought at Day’s – then, returning to the living room, she sat down on the least comfortable of Vreni Stauben’s chairs: an aluminium frame with a leather sling for a seat. She didn’t feel particularly intimidated by the situation – priests, doctors, where was the difference? She had dealt with such professionals all her working life, and, as Derry had been a solicitor, she had also socialized with lawyers.
