Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

11. Yes or No

‘We’re in act two now,’ whispered Mr Rinyo-Clacton with his mouth close to my ear. ‘Mélisande’s not happy at the castle, she wants to go away, she thinks she might not live much longer. She’s nothing but trouble, that girl.’

‘Why do you keep coming to this opera then?’

‘I love it — there’s so much death and mystery and darkness, so much uncertainty in the music. You never know for sure what’s what in that story. It’s like the sea: you never know what’s coming up from that deep, deep chill beneath you.’

I was surprised at how accurately he was describing my state of mind and my feelings about my own story. The music and the voices rose and fell like the sea as I tried to call up the oasis dream but my mind gave me the dead blind face of Au Tonneau, then the brooding Melencolia with her hammer and tongs and her greyhound. Other pictures also it offered but I looked away.

Act Two became Act Three, and again Mélisande let down her hair and Pelléas sent his kisses up it while I pitied the doomed lovers and tried to think about what I was going to do; I wanted to talk to Serafina to find out if there was any chance of getting back together before I went further down the road with Mr Rinyo-Clacton. And I wanted to ponder the many Samarras where Death appeared at the appointed time. A million pounds! There was applause, the curtain fell on Act Three, the house lights came up, and Desmond entered the box with champagne and caviare and toast. He poured and withdrew, his hands disappearing last, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat.

Mr Rinyo-Clacton extended his glass. ‘Salud, pesetas, y amor, y tiempo para gustarlos,’ he said with a wink and a grin. I watched my glass go out to meet his and we clinked.

‘Speaking of salud and tiempo,’ I said, ‘I find myself wondering about last night.’

‘Mmmm!’ He kissed his fingertips with a smacking sound. ‘For me it was special; you were absolutely wonderful with your virginal, somewhat reluctant, submission to my desire and your own — as I think about it I’m getting excited all over again.’ He gripped my thigh with his very strong ugly hands, showed his very good teeth, and breathed his bad breath on me. ‘How was it for you?’

‘Worrying. I’m going to ask you a straight question and I want a straight answer.’

‘Oh, dear, it’s come to that, has it?’

‘Just tell me, are you HIV positive?’

‘Jonathan, please! Do I ask you questions like that? Our pleasure was the more exciting because it was edged with uncertainty and dread. Be a man, Jonny! Don’t wimp out on me after such a promising start.’

‘The short answer, then, is that you’re not going to tell me?’

‘The short answer is, I have no idea. If I were the worrying sort I’d take precautions to begin with. As I’m not and I don’t, you surely don’t expect me to observe a three-month period of chastity and then go for an HIV test, do you?’

‘Arsehole roulette,’ I said.

‘If you like, and I think you do. In any case, such trifling worries are scarcely appropriate for a man who’s considering the sort of offer I’ve made to you.’ He refilled our glasses and clinked his against mine again. ‘Tonight’s the night, my boy.’

‘For what?’

‘For you to say yes or no. We can’t go on meeting like this indefinitely — no such thing as a free lunch and all that. What’s it going to be?’ His mouth was wet, possibly from the champagne.

‘You’re offering a million pounds,’ I said.

‘And a year to enjoy it.’

‘Why would you want to do this — buy my death? If you want somebody’s death, why can’t you simply go out and kill somebody like an ordinary murderer?’

‘It’s sexier this way: if you agree to these terms it’s the ultimate submission: mmmmmm, yes! Dark pleasure! Secret joy!’

‘I think you must be crazy.’

‘Crazy? The word is meaningless, read the papers and tell me that we live in a sane world. In any case, don’t attempt to understand me — you’d find yourself well beyond your depth. Just tell me whether you accept my offer or not.’

I tried to picture a million pounds. As far as I knew, the biggest banknote was a fifty. A million pounds would be twenty thousand of those. I thought of films in which people opened attaché cases full of money neatly stacked. Sometimes they got shot, stabbed, or blown up. I thought of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the empty cloth bags and the gold dust blowing in the wind down the mountain. Quite a few films with banknotes blowing about too. I thought of Serafina humming to herself contentedly in a custom-built kitchen. No yachts, no flash cars for me, only the power to do as I liked, to carve the potential me out of the rock of nothingmuch. Serafina and I could live a whole lifetime on a million pounds — if I had a whole lifetime. She’d talked sometimes of how it might be to own her own restaurant. I could see it vividly: The Omnivore. With potato pancakes on the menu along with choice cuts and a dessert trolley with not too many healthy things on it.

But! Would the million pounds really make any difference to Serafina? It wouldn’t cancel my infidelities. Or would it? I knew what life was like without a million pounds but I had no idea what it might be like with. Surely, I thought, it must make a difference in everything, in ways I couldn’t even imagine. The very way in which you opened your eyes in the morning must be different; the way you walked and talked; the way you saw yourself in the morning mirror and the way others saw you — yes! If I saw myself differently, as I must, then Serafina would see me differently, yes? I wasn’t sure of that.

A year! If Mr Rinyo-Clacton kept his word. Would he? Hard to say — his idea of honour and truth might be idiosyncratic. Desmond appeared and filled my glass which I seemed to have emptied. How could I protect myself against the possibility of Mr Rinyo-Clacton breaking his word? A document of some kind to be left with my solicitor and Mr Rinyo-Clacton to be informed of it:

Be it known that I, Jonathan Fitch, have entered into an agreement with the man known as T. Rinyo-Clacton who resides at such and such an address. For the sum of one million pounds Mr Rinyo-Clacton is entitled to take my life at any time after one year from this date. If I should meet with death before this date, the police are to be notified of this arrangement.

I didn’t actually have a solicitor and it seemed ridiculous to engage one expressly for the Rinyo-Clacton business; even if I did, telling Mr Rinyo-Clacton that such a document existed seemed unlikely to guarantee me the promised year. More and more I felt that he was a man who did whatever he liked whenever he liked and never got caught.

‘I can hear the wheels in your head grinding,’ he said, ‘and I can assure you that anything you can think of has already occurred to me. I expect you’ll want to protect yourself with some sort of document left with your solicitor and of course I’ll do the same. Although my intention is to buy your death I am well aware that the conditions of the agreement will give you a powerful incentive for terminating me. Makes the whole thing more of a sporting proposition, I think — adds a little spice to both our lives.’

I was certain then that he’d done this before. I found myself thinking of an old black-and-white film, The Hounds of Zaroff, in which Count Zaroff on his remote island lures yachts to their destruction with false beacons. Survivors who reach the shore are wined and dined, then given a day’s start before he hunts them down and kills them for his sport. ‘You’re not a very nice man, are you?’ I said.

‘Nice is boring; I like excitement. So do you, or you wouldn’t be here. Now are you going to give me your answer or are you going to keep dithering while you drink my champagne?’

I opened my mouth and watched the worods, the woordos, the words walk out into the peaceful murmur of the Royal Opera House interval. ‘My answer is yes,’ said the worods and the woordos and the words. ‘You can buy my death for one million pounds and a year to enjoy the million.’

Mr Rinyo-Clacton gripped my thigh. ‘I’ll drink to that,’ he said, and chortled in his joy.

‘How do we …?’

‘Consummate our bargain? Back at my flat after the opera.’

‘You’ve got a million pounds in cash back at your flat?’

‘I always like to have a little cash on hand. But first we have Acts Four and Five before us, and Pelléas and Mélisande are finally going to pull their fingers out and declare their love. In real life they’d have been having it off days ago out in the woods or down at the boathouse but this is opera and they’ve got to sing their way around it for a while before he even gets to stick his tongue in her mouth. And his stupid brother, Golaud, maybe he’s meant to symbolise something because dramatically he’s unbelievable: Mélisande’s had wet knickers for Pelléas all this time and Golaud’s not taken any notice till now. Well, women are built for deception, aren’t they?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Think about it — when a man doesn’t want to do it he’s going to have difficulty rising to the occasion, but all a woman’s got to do is spread her legs and and fake an orgasm. Actually, Mélisande’s pretty much of a pain in the arse altogether. In real life one or the other of the brothers would have straightened her out smartish. Maeterlinck could have done better with the text.’

‘How many times have you seen it this year?’

‘This is only the fourth. With all its dramatic flaws it’s still my favourite opera. People die right and left in other operas but this one is all about death from beginning to end; it’s like a gorgeous poison flower. You simply have to move your mind out of the everyday reality frame to enjoy it.’

Debussy’s music, like the sea, delaying not, hurrying not, took us through the long-awaited kiss, the killing of Pelléas, and the later death of Mélisande. ‘C’était un pauvre petit ê tre mysterieux comme tout le monde,’ sang Arkel, the grandfather of Golaud and Pelléas. ‘She was a poor little mysterious being like all of us,’ said the surtitle. I was reminded that être, the infinitive to be, was also the noun, being. Everyone who was, was a being, a poor little mysterious being. Serafina and I, that’s what we were. And Mr Rinyo-Clacton, was he also a poor little mysterious being? I looked at his dark profile and saw him naked in his bedroom, felt him penetrate me. Stop that, I said to myself: think about Mélisande, how it was her destiny not to belong to the one she loved, how sad that was. But my mind persisted in going its own way, sorting through its pictures and wondering what was coming after the opera.