Part 24 (2/2)
”Of course I do.”
”Last time too?”
.”Yes!”
”Do you stay alone?” I asked.
He laughed loudly. ”Me? Not for one minute. Not me. There's dancing girls waiting for me in my room when I arrive. They're changed every day.”
”But music night after night after night, the way you like it?”
”Who says what I like?”
”Fourteen nights of it. Twelve, I suppose, if you count the travel.”
”Could be twelve. Could be fourteen. Could be thirteen. What does it matter?”
He was still concussed. He was talking from a long way off.
”Which is what you go for. To Salzburg. And what you pay for. Yes? Yes, Cyril? Give me a signal, please, Cyril. I keep thinking I'm losing you. And it was what you went for this Christmas too?”
He nodded.
”Concerts, night after night? Opera? Carols?”
”Yes.”
”Only the trouble is, you see, HQ says you only stayed the one night. You arrived on the first day as booked, they say, and you were off again next morning. You paid the full whack for your room, all two weeks, but the hotel never saw hide nor hair of you from your second day till you came back at the end of your holiday. So quite reasonably, really, HO are asking where the b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l you went.”
I took my boldest leap so far. ”And who with. They're asking whether you've got someone on the side. Like Boris and Olga, but real.”
I turned a couple more pages of my notebook, and in the deep silence the rustle was like falling bricks. His terror was infecting me. It was like a shared evil. The truth lay a membrane from us, yet the dread of it seemed to be as terrible to the man who was trying to keep it outside the door as to myself, who was trying to let it in.
”All we need to do is get it down on paper, Cyril,” I said. ”Then we can forget it. Nothing like writing something down for getting it out of the way, I say. It's no crime to have a friend. Even a foreign one isn't a crime, as long as he's written down. He is foreign, I take it? Only, I notice a certain hesitation in you here. He must be quite some friend, I will say, if you gave up all that music for him.”
”He's nowhere. He doesn't exist. He's gone. I was in his way.”
”Well, he hadn't gone at Christmas time, had he? Not if you were together with him. Was he Austrian, Cyril?” Frewin was lifeless. He was dead with his eyes open. I had hit him once too often.
”All right, then, he's French,” I suggested more loudly, trying to jerk him from his introspection. ”Was he a Frenchie, Cyril, your chum? . . . They wouldn't mind about a Frenchie, even if they don't like them. Come on, Cyril, how about a Yank then? They can't object to a Yank!”
No answer. ”Not Irish, was he? I hope not, for your sake!”
I did the laughing for him, but nothing stirred him from his melancholy. Still at the window, he had crooked his thumb and was boring the knuckle joint into his forehead, as if trying to make a bullet hole. Had he whispered something? ”I didn't catch you, Cyril!”
”He's above all that.”
”Above nationality?”
”He's above it.”
”You mean he's a diplomat?”
”He didn't come to Salzburg, can't you b.l.o.o.d.y listen?”
He swung round at me and began screaming. ”You're b.l.o.o.d.y spastic, you know that? Never mind the answers, you can't even ask right! No wonder the country's in a mess! Where's your savvy gone? Where's your human understanding, for a change?”
I stood up again. Slowly. Keep him watching me. Give my back another rub. I wandered down the room. I shook my head as if to say this simply would not do.
”I'm trying to help you, Cyril. If you went to Salzburg and stayed there, that's one scenario. If you went on somewhere else - well, that's quite another. If your chum is Italian, say. And if you pretended to go to Salzburg but went - oh, I don't know - to Rome, say, or Milan, even Venice - well, that's another. I can't do it all for you. It's not fair and they wouldn't thank me if I did.”
He was wide-eyed. He was transferring his madness to me, appointing himself the sane one. I refilled my pipe, giving it my entire attention while I went on talking.
”You're a hard man to please, Cyril” - tamping the tobacco with my forefinger-”you're a tease, if you want to know. 'Don't touch me here, take your hand away from there, you can do this but only once.' I mean, what am I allowed to talk about?”
I struck a match and held it to the bowl, and as I did so I saw that he had transferred his knuckles to his eyes in order not to be in the room. But I pretended not to notice. ”All right, we'll forget Salzburg. If Salzburg is hurtful, put Salzburg aside and let's go back to your Iron Curtains. Yes? Agreed?”
His hands slipped slowly from his face. No answer, but no outright rejection either. I went on talking. He wanted me to. I could sense his reliance on my words as a bridge between the real world and the inner h.e.l.l where he was living. He wanted me to do the talking for both of us. I felt I had to make his confession for him, which was why I decided to play my most perilous card.
”So suppose, for argument's sake, Cyril, we were to add the name of Sergei Modrian to this list and call it a day,” I suggested carelessly, almost covering over my words in my efforts to sound unthreatening. ”Just to be on the safe side,” I added cheerfully. ”What do you say?”
His head was still hanging downward, his face cut off from me. Chatting cheerfully, I expanded on my latest helpful proposal for HQ.
”'All right,' we say to them, 'so take your wretched Mr. Modrian. Don't play around with us any more, we'll come clean. Have him and go home. Ned and Cyril have got work to do.”
He was dangling, smiling like a hanged man. In the profound silence that had settled over the neighbourhood, I had the sensation of hearing my words resounding from the rooftops. But Frewin seemed barely to have heard them.
”Modrian's the one they want you to own up to, Cyril,” I continued reasonably. ”They told me. If you say yes to Modrian and if I write him down, which I'm doing, and you allow me to, and I notice you're not stopping me, are you? n.o.body can accuse either one of us of being less than frank with them. 'Yes, I am a chum of Sergei Modrian and screw the lot of you' - how's that? 'And I went with him to wherever we went, and we did this, we did that, we agreed to do certain other things, and we had a lovely time, or we didn't. And anyway, what's all the glasnost for, if I'm still being forbidden to a.s.sociate with an extremely civilised Russian?' . . . How's that? Never mind the gaps for the moment, we can fill all those in later. Then, the way I see it, they can pack up the file for another year and we can all get on with our weekend.”
”Why?”
I affected not to understand.
”Why can they pack up the file then?” he demanded, as suspicions crowded in on him. ”When they've been who they are? They're not going to turn round and say 'What's the point?'
n.o.body does. Not when they've been one thing. They stay who they are. They don't become other people. They can't.”
”Come off it, Cyril!”
He had sunk into his own thoughts and was becoming hard to reach. ”Cyril!”
”What then? What's up? Don't shout.”
”So what's wrong with being Russian these days? HQ would be far more worried if Sergei was a Frenchie! I only suggested Frenchie as a trap. I regret that now, I apologise. But a Russian these days - for heaven's sake, we're not just talking friendly nations, we're talking partners! You know HQ. They're always behind the times. So's Gorst. Our job's to set the trend. Are you hearing me, Cyril?”
And that was where, for a moment, I thought I had lost the whole game - lost his complicity, lost his dependence, lost the willing suspension of his disbelief. He wandered past me like a sleepwalker. He stood himself at his bay window again, where he remained contemplating his half-dug pool and all the other half-built dreams of his life, which he must have known by now would never be completed.
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