Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (14 page)

So he went to Switzerland, having first taken the precaution of ordering three large refrigerators to place in the house. They might possibly come in useful. He had already, on one awful occasion, had to consume an ode, full of classical references, written by a dead friend of his which he had quoted before a select company as his own work; it had been an immense and unpleasant meal and he did not want a repetition of it. The refrigerators would, perhaps, serve as storing places for future phenomena; a line, a word, even a comma, could be taken a day as he felt inclined.

Packing off his fifth manuscript to the publisher, Quintin set off with Jocelyn, joyfully looking forward to a new sort of life. He had, for too long, led a monastic life – and all because he was afraid of a few meals of ice. It was ridiculous. There should be a change to all this. Were he to die in the attempt, he would, at any rate, leave an amazing book behind him.

He did die in the attempt and he did not leave an amazing book behind him. It was all very sad and totally unexpected. On his first night in Switzerland, he came down from his mountain home, intending to spend the evening at the inn where, he was told, a number of English tourists had arrived. He felt in need of company, particularly the company of English people. In this mood, ready for adventure, he entered the inn and joined the rowdy throng of young people, many with skis and snow-boots, back from a day’s sport.

To his delight a party of young men and women, seated round a large table drinking beer, was discussing literature. For some moments he hovered near them, listening. They were talking of style, and one of them brought up the name of George Moore. ‘Surely,’ said the earnest speaker, ‘the greatest stylist in the English language?’

Quintin said, slowly and quietly, ‘Can one think of Moore as anything but a laboured pedant? Pedestrian art, surely?’

The remark, of course, made an impression. It was unusual in those days to criticize Moore and the stranger bore the mark of authority in his quiet pleasant voice. One of the young men, his name was Powell, invited him to sit with the company. Quintin willingly did so, calling for drinks for all with a graceful lack of ostentation. It was not long before he was discoursing at some length upon writers and writing. He talked with a sombre distinction, quoting smoothly from writers as far apart as Spenser and Rudyard Kipling. He made no attempt to guard his speech. It would have been obvious to any listener that, in him, a rare Parliamentarian had been lost to England. There was nothing in what he said which could have been interpreted as malicious, pompous or untrue. Certainly nothing indecorous. Quintin, since those unhealthy experiments of his youth, had always been pure of speech. He never even swore. His talking was remarkable for its almost unperceivable ironies.

After the discussion had been going on for about an hour, there was a slight pause. Quintin sipped his beer happily, wondering why he had denied himself such pleasures as this for so long. Then Powell – wishing, as youth always does, to wind up the argument to some definite conclusion – said to him, ‘Who would you say, Sir, is the greatest living master of English prose?’

Everybody waited on his answer. They did not, of course, know the identity of the charming stranger, and Quintin enjoyed their company all the more because of this. He was really a very modest man. As he revolved the answer to Powell’s question in his mind, a score of famous names passed under consideration. It was, therefore, with a truly terrible shock that, a moment afterwards, he heard himself saying, calmly and authoritatively –

‘Quintin Claribel.’

From a few there was a murmur of doubtful agreement; others uncertainly shook their heads; one said, quite flatly, ‘Never heard of him’. Miserably, Quintin sought for some means to withdraw his statement. He knew at once that he had fallen very low. There were several writers, he knew, who wrote better than he could; wrote more firmly, more squarely, less fussily. An honest critic, he actually placed himself by no means at the top of the list. And yet he had declared that Quintin Claribel was the greatest living master. What did it mean? Could it mean that in the depths of his mind he believed it to be true?

He began to stammer a few words. ‘No – no – I – I didn’t mean that. Quintin Claribel is not – I mean – ’

Suddenly he turned and left them abruptly, to their surprise and disappointment. An old gloom returned. He felt afraid, very friendless.

Slowly he returned to his villa. So far nothing had happened. Perhaps, after all, his immediate penitence had saved him; or perhaps (he brightened exceedingly) Quintin Claribel
was
the greatest living master of English prose? In the still cold night he almost ran up the steep path, so anxious was he to refer to his four published works and deliver judgement upon himself.

Jocelyn was waiting up for him and looked at him, as he came in, with a smile that meant ‘Do you want me for anything?’ Almost roughly Quintin pushed him aside, went straight to the bookshelves, and found his own austerely bound works. Piling cones on the fire he fell down on some cushions and started to read. It was very quiet, so quiet that he strained his ears expecting some sound which never came. He went on reading, page after page, essay after essay. Finishing one book he started sleepily to read the second as the clock struck two. The fire had almost died and he realized how intensely cold he was. He could read no more; and he did not want to. The work was mediocre; he knew, he had known from almost the first page, that it was mediocre. Wearily he reached for the most recent collection; opened a page at random and read. It was still mediocre; it was merely a more finished mediocrity. What he had said, he had certainly always said well; but the purity of the style could not hide the paucity of the matter. If these works had been by any other writer, he would have thrown them on the fire. Thrown them on the fire? Well, why not? It was the only honest gesture to make.

Wearily, yet with a fine sense of the rightness of his action, he threw all four books on to the dying fire, struggled to his feet and mounted the stairs to his bedroom. Cynically he reviewed his life; what had it been but a mere waste of words? He realized now that words had enslaved him from the beginning. Even at the font, he must have sensed the loveliness of his own Christian name. He remembered how his parents had told him of his extraordinarily intelligent and attentive behaviour at his Baptism, as though he understood the mystery that was being enacted in him. But, the truth was, even then, a babe in long clothes, he had been entranced merely by the glorious music of his own name.

‘Quintin Claribel,’ he murmured, on his way up the stairs, ‘Quintin Claribel.’ Better, far better, than magic casements; indeed, these two words, he now saw, had always been for him the magic casements which opened to the perilous sea of words. He had called himself a man of letters. Of
letters.
Yes. Even the appearance of each letter thrilled him and always had. He remembered that ‘O’ on the ice when he had skated twenty years ago; he remembered his first creation on the bough of the walnut tree; the beauty of all his frozen creatures through the years. And, with all this in mind, he pushed open the bedroom door.

It would not quite open; something stood in the way. Irritably – pleased now with his train of recollection and resenting any disturbance of it – he forced the door forward. It burst open with a strange tinkling crash; he found himself sprawling against the lintel to save himself from falling. He was standing, though he did not at once realize it, before his
magnum opus.

He switched on the light.

‘Good God!’ he said.

He ought to have known it; he ought to have expected it. Larger than any letters he had ever seen, each one three feet in height, stretching right the way across the room from window to window like a great hurdle, he faced his own name in solid ice.

‘QUINTIN CLARIBEL’

One letter, the ‘N,’ which had been near the door, had been broken by his carelessness and lay in shattered pieces at the end of the word. So what he read was ‘Quinti Claribel’. Quinti – Quinti! He rocked and roared with wild, ironic laughter. How absurd it immediately became! Why had nobody, in his childhood, given him that nickname, saving him perhaps, from the enslavement of words? Had he been called ‘Quintie’ (and even in his present mood he could see the added ridiculousness an ‘e’ on the end would give to it), he might have been a different person.

Carefully he climbed through the space left by the ‘N’ and surveyed the whole work from the other side. He liked it just as well backwards. From all angles it was a perfect creation – even though disfigured. It would, he saw, take a very long time to eat.

For an hour he sat there, looking at his creation. He knew that this was the final crisis; if he could bring himself to devour all this ice, he might be different, perhaps a better person. But could he do it? Could he swallow, piece by piece, the pigmy-high letters of his own dulcet name?

Towards dawn, knowing that he must make the attempt, he wrote some notes in his journal. Then he stretched his half-frozen limbs, put some gloves on his stiffened hands and reaching out for a chunk of the ‘N’ which still lay in several pieces on the floor; brought it to his mouth and bit a little piece. He swallowed; he bit more; he swallowed again. He began to feel within himself a curiously shrinking sensation; not altogether unpleasant but certainly very watery. He took another piece of the ‘N’ with uncertain fingers and swallowed that too with a great gulp. For a moment he paused. Then a wild passion seized him, like the first incoherent passion of a young boy in love. With both hands he furiously attacked the ice, breaking it down and pouncing with eager, open mouth upon any piece nearest to him. All the precision which had marked every action of his life, left him. Almost immediately the thaw began. A delicious sensation flooded his vitals. Not only was the ice thawing; he himself was thawing.

The dawn broke over the mountains and a ray of steely sunlight glanced through the half-drawn curtains. Jocelyn, sleeping in a room below Quintin’s, noticed a patch of dampness on the ceiling and wondered vaguely what it was. He turned over and went to sleep. Half an hour later he was awakened by a dripping of water upon his upturned face. He rose, puzzled; dressed, and went to the kitchen to make his master some tea. Going upstairs, he knocked on the door and went in.

He was so shocked by what he saw that the cup of tea crashed from the tray to the floor. The bed was empty and had never been slept in. His master’s clothes, soaking wet, were lying in a heap in the middle of the room. Floods of water had soaked through the carpet to the boards, through the boards to his own room below. It was bitterly cold.

From that day to this Quintin Claribel has never been seen. It was assumed that he must have gone up to the mountains early that morning in search of a Snow-breasted Eagle, a rare bird that he had mentioned in conversation at the Inn the night before. But we, who have access to his diaries, know better.

VII

In the Steam Room

In the steam room the physical body is wrung out of you, and yet you become most painfully aware of it. As you open the door to the dank lobby which leads to the inner door and pause there a moment before approaching this forbidden threshold, you are aware of a sense of the ridiculous, standing there naked, already drenched in your own sweat, your skin flabby and salmon pink, yet asking for more. You wonder what made you pay your money for the ambiguous luxury of a Turkish Bath. You almost turn back from that second door. It is not exactly inviting; and the earlier part of the ceremonial debilitation of your winter-weakened body has been more of an undermining of your whole nervous system than anything else, only serving to emphasise the naked fact that this body which you so cherish is doomed to extinction, whatever manner of ending is to embrace it. No: it is not altogether a pleasant experience, wandering with a neutral linen cloth round your middle (or discarding it if you so wish) from room to room where other unclothed men, mostly middle-aged, sprawl inertly in steel deck chairs, lie out on benches, pad about like neurotic leopards on the hot stone floor, or go to the showers to wash away the grey sweat which has been sucked out of their pores. Not altogether pleasant, but oddly fascinating; and it is this fascination, this unholy masochism which finally drives you towards the second door, and the steam room.

Such thoughts passed in my mind as I faced that door. I was really rather weary of this body of mine by now. Outside, a superb morning of early spring was blooming; one ought to be walking high in the hills or lying in the sun, not stuck in a clammy town and going through this almost obscene performance of trying to restore a body which was well past its prime. About ready for the knacker’s yard, that’s what I am, I told myself. And then I pushed open the heavy door and entered the steam room. I was, so to speak, in the condemned cell.

Ferocious whirling clouds of saturating steam made it impossible at first to see anything at all. For a few moments it seemed unbearable and I nearly gave it up. The steam coiled and eddied, lapping at the substance of the solid square room and at once snaking at me as though to macerate me deep in its own essence. The door closed behind me, and I was alone – or thought that I was alone. Because at first I did not see the one other inmate; and even when I did begin to see him lying belly down on the slatted bench along by one wall, I was still alone. In the steam room, even when there are others present, you are always strangely alone. It is quite impossible to imagine holding a conversation with anyone in there. Even Socrates would have dried up. The silence is unbreakable and any desire to break it is soon quelled by the very weight of the heat which presses down on you and by the sinuous vapours which churn your body and seem to choke out your entire personality.

At first I stood near the door, wondering how I was able to breathe at all. Every breath became more of an effort. I bent forward, resting my hands on my knees, and opening my mouth felt the moisture dripping down my body. Then I touched the end of the bench nearest to me, and drew my fingers sharply away. Surely, not even a glutton for punishment could sit on this? The heat seemed intolerable, and yet, in fact, it was tolerable; and after a moment or two I did sit, leaning forward and staring into the vapourised mobility of the room.

It was then I saw, on the far side, a tattooed arm hanging down from the bench, and gradually there came into misty view the rest of the other man’s body, a large clumsy body with streaks of wet grey hair on its back. I looked at the other benches, but all were empty; there was only this one occupant, and myself. I was glad to feel his presence; I might have been uneasier without him. I tried to lie on my back, but the heat was too much and I felt if I so much as touched the stone wall I would sizzle and shrink to a wet cinder. I half expected to see the electric chair rise up from a trap door in the centre of the room. I saw a block of what looked like iron scooped out to make a neck rest, and similar blocks on the other benches. But I did not dare to touch it, feeling it would be red hot. I began to expect the skin to peel off my body layer by layer, until a raw piece of sinewy meat would be all that was left of me. And then I wondered how much of this it was wise to take; whether a point would be reached when it would be impossible for me to make the supreme effort to reach the door and get out.

Sense of time began to waver; had I been in here one minute, two, or even ten? And what was the longest span of time one could endure with safety? An odd pride began to govern the me who seemed to have become a distillation of the body I had brought in, and was now floating around in this gyration of steam – a pride which told me I must not weaken till the other man had gone. But he had not moved so far as I could judge; he was still in the same position. By now I could see the pink soles of his feet, the fat and flattened thighs, the wrinkled buttocks, the hairy back, and the neck crouched in upon the block. How could he bear it? For how long had he been roasting? Probably he was well accustomed to the tyrannies of the Turkish Bath and knew just how much of the steam room he could take, unlike myself who had only used it once before in my life, and then not here. An ardent balneologist, perhaps, given to boasting of his experience. No. I was not going to be beaten by this man; what he could suffer I could suffer. And so, gingerly, with a great deal of trepidation, I offered my back to the wood slats, stretched out my legs, and closed my eyes.

I began then to think of death. At the age of fifty-six you do think of death rather more often than you wish, and it can become disquieting. How would the end come? Always assuming it was an end . . . Peacefully, with those I loved and who loved me, at my bedside. Absolution given, the Host on my tongue, the prayers for the dying distant in my ears? After a stroke, with limbs paralysed, speech distorted, vision impaired? Aided by merciful drugs to lose the pain of a cancer? Alone, struggling to find the way home in a snow drift? Dragged down by the crash of a wave, or hurled broken on a spine of rock? The operative figure in a bedraggled and shameful procession to the gallows? Crushed to a raw bleeding mess by a nose to nose meeting of car and lorry? Falling from the triforium of a cathedral and knowing, in the air, that the flagstones were bound to be splashed and spattered by blood and brains? On the operating table, intestines laid indecently bare, the surgeon cutting through to an enlarged appendix? Drifting to a fog of remorse after supper of barbiturate and whisky? The roof of the mouth blown to bits by my own gun? Licked by tongues of fire in a top storey hotel room? Dragging the unwanted old body to some rank dustbin with mildewed bread crushed down on top of a mush of tea-leaves soggy in newspaper? By axe, knife, or guile of poisoner? Fallen forward on the lavatory seat in one last defeated effort to evacuate bowels? By interior haemorrhage, the crash of a fist, or broken bottle splintered in the eyes? Slowly, unknowingly, face upwards in a hot bath? Or face downwards in. . . .

There were as many ways of dying as there were of living, and, for all I knew, one of those ways might now have come to me unless I could urge my palpitating body up from this blistering bench towards the door. There were ways of dying which perhaps had never yet been imagined, unimaginable as once had been the searing pains which ate into Hiroshima, and slower than the unfolding of the glory of spring. Slow, too slow; and again – quick, too quick – as when the hands of a murderer both lost and took control, and smothered you head downwards on a wooden bench in the steam room of a Turkish Bath; then, having attacked unseen, left you to rot away in the heat with the door locked, left your carcase to be found hours later and taken from hence to the cold slab of the mortuary, there to suffer the final humiliation of identification.

I forced my stupefied nine stone up from the bench, hideously fascinated by these images (of the ways of dying). It was dreadfully true that I could not with certainty declare that my way out would not be one of these ways. But one way I would not go; not in the steam room, the breath pumped out of me, the lungs bursting. It was possible to avoid that.

Yet, suppose the door would not open? Suppose it had been locked on the other side because of some fault in the mechanism of the heating – and why not? For no one had seen me enter so far as I knew. I remembered that there were few others in the Baths that morning. And now the silence, smothered by the confluence of steam, burst and gurgled in my ears, my throat was rough as sandpaper, my eyes streaked with sweat that seemed the colour of blood. I dragged myself up, sat, and looked down at my legs. They seemed to taper away to slimy strands of seaweed in a dank cave. With all that foetid heat I yet felt cold. I
was
cold; and I was trembling. And I crouched forward as though to begin a race – a race I must make to the door.

I don’t exaggerate these fancies; and I don’t exaggerate the horrible relish with which I indulged such images and then, with a pent-up sigh of relief, turned to look to the other bench, determined to make some remark, merely in order to have the consolation of a response from my companion. It was an absurd comfort to know he was there, probably dreaming of past pleasures, of lovers who had shared their younger bodies with his, of luxurious meals and rare wines; perhaps, even now, ageing as he was, contemplating richer pastures. If the door was locked, had been locked in error, with his company this could be lightly met. We would both shout, and bang, and bang again, till one of the attendants would come, full of apologies; and I would be able to tell the story of how I was nearly stifled to my end in the steam room and was only saved by a sense of humour which I and the other man found we both shared. Perhaps I would come to know him well, we might even become close friends, and in extreme old age take a delight in recalling the oddity of our first encounter with one another.

I think I tried humour. I think I said, ‘Why don’t you turn over and roast the other side’ (thinking of the Roman Martyr Lawrence, on the grid-iron). But whatever I said, no answer came. I looked across to the arm hanging down, with the finger tips nearly to the floor. And then I seemed to see something else: a thin red trickle coming slowly from the slats by his head. And there was a smell in the place, a smell of sickly corruption.

I moved a little closer, then suddenly stopped. I realised there were no feet displayed on the bench; no spreadeagled thighs, no buttocks, back, neck, or head. . . .

I was alone in the steam room. The door had not opened since I came in. I had been alone all the time.

Of course the door was not locked, and of course I got out, panting, weakened by the sweat which blinded me, and moving on legs which seemed to have shrivelled to sticks. Falling into one of the deck chairs in the adjoining chamber I tried to admit a sense of relief into me. But it would not come. My heart thumped and stuttered, and I began to want to return to the steam room to certify what I had not seen; what, it appeared, I must have imagined. But too vividly I remembered the coiling scarlet streak of colour on the floor of the colourless, engulfing room (like a painting by Francis Bacon); something which had been dribbling from the head of the man I had seen, or thought I had seen, lying face down on the bench. Very good, then: so there had been blood. I had imagined that too. Macabre inventions fester in the mind easily when the body is weakened; and I had come to the Baths in a weak condition, tired and burdened by worries. I had hoped to lose them here. But it had been a mistake – one that I warn others never to make.

But
had
there been another man there? And had I merely never heard him leave as I lay, muted and steamed, on the slats? Or had my desire for company embodied him in my imagination? Either was possible; and now I began to watch the outer door to the steam room, hoping that the other inmate would emerge, if there had been another – and I hoped so; it would be more comfortable if this were so.

Nobody came out. Perhaps three minutes passed. A thin lank man, almost altogether hairless, passed me and went towards the shampoo room; and a short paunchy man with a Jewish face fell into the chair next to mine with a grunt of satisfaction. Both were in their fifties. It was impossible to place them, except that by their lack of muscle it was clear they did not do heavy manual labour. One might have been a bishop, the other an accountant. It didn’t matter; they were only flesh and blood here, and male. I looked at the key of my cubicle, attached to my wrist by its strap, and thought with deliberate pleasure of the soothing rest I would soon have on the cubicle bed, after massage in the shampoo room, the final shower, the cold refreshing dip and the rough invigoration of the outsize bath towel I would take from the attendant’s office. But this pleasurable thought was beaten down by renewed apprehension. I could not relax until I had been again to the steam room to find out if there was another man there, or not. And I began to dread that second visit. What would I really find?

There was movement in front of me. I looked up. Somebody was going to the steam room. I did not see his face as he disappeared into the lobby; but he was a tall cumbersome man and I had seen his back. It was covered with hair. And his arms were tattooed.

Now it is a fact about the male of the species that he grows hair almost anywhere, but not so commonly on his back, between the shoulder blades. I was certain that this man was the one I had seen, or thought I had seen, in there a few moments ago. Was he so soon going in for a further steaming? I wanted to make some remark to the man next to me; but he was snoring, and it is not good etiquette to address a stranger in the Turkish Bath. The word ‘Silence’ is displayed everywhere, and it is generally respected. So I waited, tensed now, disliking every second. I longed to leave the place and get out into the March sun; the experience had become tainted. But there was something I had to see through. I waited.

In another half minute a second man passed me and also went towards the lobby. I would have recognized him without the scarlet slip he wore on his nakedness; he was one of the attendants, who had taken my ticket and shown me to cubicle number seven: a man of powerful build, with a waxy military moustache, hectic colouring on his cheekbones, a curiously theatrical figure. Ex-RSM, perhaps. And he had seemed to me in some way like a Turk – the genius of the Bath – its familiar. A pantomime being, with something of clockwork in his movements; and in his fixed unnatural smile too much show of very white teeth. One of those men who overdo the body business. His chest was tattooed. And his body was taut with muscle, his hands very large and white, yet with red protuberant knuckles.

He opened the door labelled ‘steam room’ and passed out of view. I closed my eyes, trying to become detached from action which, I told myself, had nothing to do with me. But all the time I was invaded by fears I could not rightly interpret. I tried to pull myself out of the chair to go to the steam room again. But it could not be done. I stayed, eyes closed, seeing again that scarlet rivulet on the stone floor.

Again I was aware of movement. The paunchy man next to me was reading a newspaper, his left hand picking at the softened skin on his left heel. I saw the attendant coming out from the steam room. He walked quickly and silently past me.

I got up suddenly. The whole thing had now become absurd; why should I feel this involvement? Why accept it? Stifling questions, blacking out images, I went back to the showers I had already used when I first came in. I washed myself down from head to foot with soap, feeling like Pontius Pilate after he had given Barabbas to the crowd. Then I went quickly towards the shampoo room. The quicker I got out of this place the better, I said. But I had to have my money’s worth; and I greatly looked forward to the massaging of my flaccid body. Perhaps it would erase the discomfiture which had fallen, unbidden, upon me.