Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

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.