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8
I was saying ‘You are not basically aggressive’ as I regained consciousness.
‘No,’ said the woman as though it was a grave shortcoming. ‘It is true.’ I couldn’t see either of them from where I was full length on my back. She switched the tape recorder on. There was the sudden intimate sound of a girl sobbing. ‘I want it recording,’ she said, but the sound of the girl became hysterical and she began to scream as though someone was torturing her. ‘Switch that damn thing off,’ Datt called. It was strange to see him disturbed, he was usually so calm. She turned the volume control the wrong way and the sound of the screams went right through my head and made the floor vibrate.
‘The other way,’ screamed Datt. The sound abated, but the tape was still revolving and the sound could just be heard; the girl was sobbing again. The desperate sound was made even more helpless by its diminished volume, like someone abandoned or locked out.
‘What is it?’ asked the maidservant. She shuddered but seemed reluctant to switch off; finally she did so and the reels clicked to a standstill.
‘What’s it sound like?’ said Datt. ‘It’s a girl sobbing and screaming.’
‘My God,’ said the maidservant.
‘Calm down,’ said Datt. ‘It’s for amateur theatricals. It’s just for amateur theatricals,’ he said to me.
‘I didn’t ask you,’ I said.
‘Well, I’m telling you.’ The servant woman turned the reel over and rethreaded it. I felt fully conscious now and I sat up so that I could see across the room. The girl Maria was standing by the door, she had her shoes in her hand and a man’s raincoat over her shoulders. She was staring blankly at the wall and looking miserable. There was a boy sitting near the gas fire. He was smoking a small cheroot, biting at the end which had become frayed like a rope end, so that each time he pulled it out of his mouth he twisted his face up to find the segments of leaf and discharge them on the tongue-tip. Datt and the old maidservant had dressed up in those old-fashioned-looking French medical gowns with high buttoned collars. Datt was very close to me and did a patent-medicine commercial while sorting through a trayful of instruments.
‘Has he had the LSD?’ asked Datt.
‘Yes,’ said the maid. ‘It should start working soon.’
‘You will answer any questions we ask,’ said Datt to me.
I knew he was right: a well-used barbiturate could nullify all my years of training and experience and make me as co-operatively garrulous as a tiny child. What the LSD would do was anyone’s guess.
What a way to be defeated and laid bare. I shuddered, Datt patted my arm.
The old woman was assisting him. ‘The Amytal,’ said Datt, ‘the ampoule, and the syringe.’
She broke the ampoule and filled the syringe. ‘We must work fast,’ said Datt. ‘It will be useless in thirty minutes; it has a short life. Bring him forward, Jules, so that she can block the vein. Dab of alcohol, Jules, no need to be inhuman.’
I felt hot breath on the back of my neck as Jules laughed dutifully at Datt’s little joke.
‘Block the vein now,’ said Datt. She used the arm muscle to compress the vein of the forearm and waited a moment while the veins rose. I watched the process with interest, the colours of the skin and the metal were shiny and unnaturally bright. Datt took the syringe and the old woman said, ‘The small vein on the back of the hand. If it clots we’ve still got plenty of patent ones left.’
‘A good thought,’ said Datt. He did a triple jab under the skin and searched for the vein, dragging at the plunger until the blood spurted back a rich gusher of red into the glass hypodermic. ‘Off,’ said Datt. ‘Off or he’ll bruise. It’s important to avoid that.’
She released the arm vein and Datt stared at his watch, putting the drug into the vein at a steady one cc per minute.
‘He’ll feel a great release in a moment, an orgastic response. Have the Megimide ready. I want him responding for at least fifteen minutes.’
M. Datt looked up at me. ‘Who are you?’ he asked in French. ‘Where are you, what day is it?’
I laughed. His damned needle was going into someone else’s arm, that was the only funny thing about it. I laughed again. I wanted to be absolutely sure about the arm. I watched the thing carefully. There was the needle in that patch of white skin but the arm didn’t fit on to my shoulder. Fancy him jabbing someone else. I was laughing more now so that Jules steadied me. I must have been jostling whoever was getting the injection because Datt had trouble holding the needle in.
‘Have the Megimide and the cylinder ready,’ said M. Datt, who had hairs – white hairs – in his nostrils. ‘Can’t be too careful. Maria, quickly, come closer, we’ll need you now, bring the boy closer; he’ll be the witness if we need one.’ M. Datt dropped something into the white enamel tray with a tremendous noise. I couldn’t see Maria now, but I smelled the perfume – I’d bet it was Ma Griffe, heavy and exotic, oh boy! It’s orange-coloured that smell. Orange-coloured with a sort of silky touch to it. ‘That’s good,’ said M. Datt, and I heard Maria say orange-coloured too. Everyone knows, I thought, everyone knows the colour of Ma Griffe perfume.
The huge glass orange fractured into a million prisms, each one a brilliant, like the Sainte Chapelle at high noon, and I slid through the coruscating light as a punt slides along a sleepy bywater, the white cloud low and the colours gleaming and rippling musically under me.
I looked at M. Datt’s face and I was frightened. His nose had grown enormous, not just large but enormous, larger than any nose could possibly be. I was frightened by what I saw because I knew that M. Datt’s face was the same as it had always been, and that it was my awareness that had distorted. Yet even knowing that the terrible disfigurement had happened inside my mind, not on M. Datt’s face, did not change the image; M. Datt’s nose had grown to a gigantic size.
‘What day is it?’ Maria was asking. I told her. ‘It’s just a gabble,’ she said. ‘Too fast to really understand.’ I listened but I could hear no one gabbling. Her eyes were soft and unblinking. She asked me my age, my date of birth and a lot of personal questions. I told her as much, and more, than she asked. The scar on my knee and the day my uncle planted the pennies in the tall tree. I wanted her to know everything about me. ‘When we die,’ my grandmother told me, ‘we shall all go to Heaven,’ she surveyed her world, ‘for surely this is Hell?’ ‘Old Mr Gardner had athlete’s foot, whose was the other foot?’ Recitation: ‘Let me like a soldier fall …’
‘A desire,’ said M. Datt’s voice, ‘to externalize, to confide.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
‘I’ll bring him up with the Megimide if he goes too far,’ said M. Datt. ‘He’s fine like that. Fine response. Fine response.’
Maria repeated everything I said, as though Datt could not hear it himself. She said each thing not once but twice. I said it, then she said it, then she said it again differently; sometimes very differently so that I corrected her, but she was indifferent to my corrections and spoke in that fine voice she had; a round reed-clear voice full of song and sorrow like an oboe at night.
Now and again there was the voice of Datt deep and distant, perhaps from the next room. They seemed to think and speak so slowly. I answered Maria leisurely but it was ages before the next question came. I tired of the long pauses eventually. I filled the gaps telling them anecdotes and interesting stuff I’d read. I felt I’d known Maria for years and I remember saying ‘transference’, and Maria said it too, and Datt seemed very pleased. I found it was quite easy to compose my answers in poetry – not all of it rhymed, mind you – but I phrased it carefully. I could squeeze those damned words like putty and hand them to Maria, but sometimes she dropped them on to the marble floor. They fell noiselessly, but the shadows of them reverberated around the distant walls and furniture. I laughed again, and wondered whose bare arm I was staring at. Mind you, that wrist was mine, I recognized the watch. Who’d torn that shirt? Maria kept saying something over and over, a question perhaps. Damned shirt cost me £3.10s and now they’d torn it. The torn fabric was exquisite, detailed and jewel-like. Datt’s voice said, ‘He’s going now: it’s very short duration, that’s the trouble with it.’
Maria said, ‘Something about a shirt, I can’t understand, it’s so fast.’
‘No matter,’ said Datt. ‘You’ve done a good job. Thank God you were here.’
I wondered why they were speaking in a foreign language. I had told them everything. I had betrayed my employers, my country, my department. They had opened me like a cheap watch, prodded the main spring and laughed at its simple construction. I had failed and failure closed over me like a darkroom blind coming down.
Dark. Maria’s voice said, ‘He’s gone,’ and I went, a white seagull gliding through black sky, while beneath me the even darker sea was welcoming and still. And deep, and deep and deep.
9
Maria looked down at the Englishman. He was contorted and twitching, a pathetic sight. She felt inclined to cuddle him close. So it was as easy as that to discover a man’s most secret thoughts – a chemical reaction – extraordinary. He’d laid his soul bare to her under the influence of the Amytal and LSD, and now, in some odd way, she felt responsible – guilty almost – about his well-being. He shivered and she pulled the coat over him and tucked it around his neck. Looking around the damp walls of the dungeon she was in, she shivered too. She produced a compact and made basic changes to her make-up: the dramatic eye-shadow that suited last night would look terrible in the cold light of dawn. Like a cat, licking and washing in moments of anguish or distress. She removed all the make-up with a ball of cotton-wool, erasing the green eyes and deep red lips. She looked at herself and pulled that pursed face that she did only when she looked in a mirror. She looked awful without make-up, like a Dutch peasant; her jaw was beginning to go. She followed the jawbone with her finger, seeking out that tiny niche halfway along the line of it. That’s where the face goes, that niche becomes a gap and suddenly the chin and the jawbone separate and you have the face of an old woman.
She applied the moisture cream, the lightest of powder and the most natural of lipstick colours. The Englishman stirred and shivered; this time the shiver moved his whole body. He would become conscious soon. She hurried with her make-up, he mustn’t see her like this. She felt a strange physical thing about the Englishman. Had she spent over thirty years not understanding what physical attraction was? She had always thought that beauty and physical attraction were the same thing, but now she was unsure. This man was heavy and not young – late thirties, she’d guess – and his body was thick and uncared for. Jean-Paul was the epitome of masculine beauty: young, slim, careful about his weight and his hips, artfully tanned – all over, she remembered – particular about his hairdresser, ostentatious with his gold wristwatch and fine rings, his linen, precise and starched and white, like his smile.
Look at the Englishman: ill-fitting clothes rumpled and torn, plump face, hair moth-eaten, skin pale; look at that leather wristwatch strap and his terrible old-fashioned shoes – so English. Lace-up shoes. She remembered the lace-up shoes she had as a child. She hated them, it was the first manifestation of her claustrophobia, her hatred of those shoes. Although she hadn’t recognized it as such. Her mother tied the laces in knots, tight and restrictive. Maria had been extra careful with her son, he never wore laced shoes. Oh God, the Englishman was shaking like an epileptic now. She held his arms and smelled the ether and the sweat as she came close to him.
He would come awake quickly and completely. Men always did, they could snap awake and be speaking on the phone as though they had been up for hours. Man the hunter, she supposed, alert for danger; but they made no allowances. So many terrible rows with men began because she came awake slowly. The weight of his body excited her, she let it fall against her so that she took the weight of it. He’s a big ugly man, she thought. She said ‘ugly’ again and that word attracted her, so did ‘big’ and so did ‘man’. She said ‘big ugly man’ aloud.
I awoke but the nightmare continued. I was in the sort of dungeon that Walt Disney dreams up, and the woman was there saying ‘Big ugly man’ over and over. Thanks a lot, I thought, flattery will get you nowhere. I was shivering, and I came awake carefully; the woman was hugging me close, I must have been cold because I could feel the warmth of her. I’ll settle for this, I thought, but if the girl starts to fade I’ll close my eyes again, I need a dream.
It was a dungeon, that was the crazy thing. ‘It really is a dungeon,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Maria, ‘it is.’
‘What are you doing here then?’ I said. I could accept the idea of me being in a dungeon.
‘I’m taking you back,’ she said. ‘I tried to lift you out to the car but you were too heavy. How heavy are you?’
‘Never mind how heavy I am,’ I said. ‘What’s been going on?’
‘Datt was questioning you,’ she said. ‘We can leave now.’
‘I’ll show you who’s leaving,’ I said, deciding to seek out Datt and finish off the ashtray exercise. I jumped off the hard bench to push open the heavy door of the dungeon. It was as though I was descending a non-existent staircase and by the time I reached the door I was on the wet ground, my legs twitching uselessly and unable to bear my weight.
‘I didn’t think you’d get even this far,’ said Maria, coming across to me. I took her arm gratefully and helped myself upright by clawing at the door fixtures. Step by difficult step we inched through the cellar, past the rack, pincers and thumbscrews and the cold fireplace with the branding irons scattered around it. ‘Who lives here?’ I asked. ‘Frankenstein?’
‘Hush,’ said Maria. ‘Keep your strength for walking.’
‘I had a terrible dream,’ I said. It had been a dream of terrible betrayal and impending doom.
‘I know,’ said Maria. ‘Don’t think about it.’
The dawn sky was pale as though the leeches of my night had grown fat upon its blood. ‘Dawns should be red,’ I said to Maria.
‘You don’t look so good yourself,’ she said, and helped me into the car.
She drove a couple of blocks from the house and parked under the trees amid the dead motor cars that litter the city. She switched the heater on and the warm air suffused my limbs.
‘Do you live alone?’ she asked.
‘What’s that, a proposal?’
‘You aren’t fit enough to be left alone.’
‘Agreed,’ I said. I couldn’t shake off the coma of fear and Maria’s voice came to me as I had heard it in the nightmare.
‘I’ll take you to my place, it’s not far away,’ she said.
‘That’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m sure its worth a detour.’
‘It’s worth a journey. Three-star food and drink,’ she said. ‘How about a croque monsieur and a baby?’
‘The croque monsieur would be welcome,’ I agreed.
‘But having the baby together might well be the best part,’ she said.
She didn’t smile, she kicked the accelerator and the power surged through the car like the blood through my reviving limbs. She watched the road, flashing the lights at each intersection and flipping the needle around the clock at the clear stretches. She loved the car, caressing the wheel and agog with admiration for it; and like a clever lover she coaxed it into effortless perfomance. She came down the Champs for speed and along the north side of the Seine before cutting up through Les Halles. The last of the smart set had abandoned their onion soup and now the lorries were being unloaded. The fortes were working like looters, stacking the crates of vegetables and boxes of fish. The lorry-drivers had left their cabs to patronize the brothels that crowd the streets around the Square des Innocents. Tiny yellow doorways were full of painted whores and arguing men in bleu de travail. Maria drove carefully through the narrow streets.
‘You’ve seen this district before?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said, because I had a feeling that she wanted me to say that. I had a feeling that she got some strange titillation from bringing me this way to her home. ‘Ten new francs,’ she said, nodding towards two girls standing outside a dingy café. ‘Perhaps seven if you argued.’
‘The two?’
‘Maybe twelve if you wanted the two. More for an exhibition.’
She turned to me. ‘You are shocked.’
‘I’m only shocked that you want me to be shocked,’ I said.
She bit her lip and turned on to the Sebastopol and speeded out of the district. It was three minutes before she spoke again. ‘You are good for me,’ she said.
I wasn’t sure she was right but I didn’t argue.
That early in the morning the street in which Maria lived was little different from any other street in Paris; the shutters were slammed tight and not a glint of glass or ruffle of curtain was visible anywhere. The walls were colourless and expressionless as though every house in the street was mourning a family death. The ancient crumbling streets of Paris were distinguished socially only by the motor cars parked along the gutters. Here the R4s, corrugated deux chevaux and dented Dauphines were outnumbered by shiny new Jags, Buicks and Mercs.
Inside, the carpets were deep, the hangings lush, the fittings shiny and the chairs soft. And there was that symbol of status and influence: a phone. I bathed in hot perfumed water and sipped aromatic broth, I was tucked into crisp sheets, my memories faded and I slept a long dreamless sleep.
When I awoke the radio was playing Françoise Hardy in the next room and Maria was sitting on the bed. She looked at me as I stirred. She had changed into a pink cotton dress and was wearing little or no make-up. Her hair was loose and combed to a simple parting in that messy way that takes a couple of hours of hairdressing expertise. Her face was kind but had the sort of wrinkles that come when you have smiled cynically about ten million times. Her mouth was small and slightly open like a doll, or like a woman expecting a kiss.
‘What time is it?’ I asked.
‘It’s past midnight,’ she said. ‘You’ve slept the clock round.’
‘Get this bed on the road. What’s wrong, have we run out of feathers?’
‘We ran out of bedclothes; they are all around you.’
‘Fill her up with bedclothes mister and if we forget to check the electric blanket you get a bolster free.’
‘I’m busy making coffee. I’ve no time to play your games.’
She made coffee and brought it. She waited for me to ask questions and then she answered deftly, telling me as much as she wished without seeming evasive.
‘I had a nightmare and awoke in a medieval dungeon.’
‘You did,’ said Maria.
‘You’d better tell me all about it,’ I said.
‘Datt was terrified that you were spying on him. He said you have documents he wants. He said you had been making inquiries so he had to know.’
‘What did he do to me?’
‘He injected you with Amytal and LSD (it’s the LSD that takes time to wear off). I questioned you. Then you went into a deep sleep and awoke in the cellars of the house. I brought you here.’
‘What did I say?’
‘Don’t worry. None of those people speak English. I’m the only one that does. Your secrets are safe with me. Datt usually thinks of everything, but he was disconcerted when you babbled away in English. I translated.’
So that was why I’d heard her say everything twice. ‘What did I say?’
‘Relax. It didn’t interest me but I satisfied Datt.’
I said, ‘And don’t think I don’t appreciate it, but why should you do that for me?’
‘Datt is a hateful man. I would never help him, and anyway, I took you to that house, I felt responsible for you.’
‘And …?’
‘If I had told him what you really said he would have undoubtedly used amphetamine on you, to discover more and more. Amphetamine is dangerous stuff, horrible. I wouldn’t have enjoyed watching that.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. I reached towards her, took her hand, and she lay down on the bed at my side. She did it without suspicion or arch looks, it was a friendly, rather than a sexual gesture. She lit a cigarette and gave me the packet and matches. ‘Light it yourself,’ she said. ‘It will give you something to do with your hands.’
