The Last Weynfeldt (2 page)

It was still half empty, but that would change in the next fifteen minutes as the cinemas emptied. Weynfeldt sat in his usual place at the bar: the first bar stool from the wall. From there he could observe what was going on, and never had to deal with more than one neighbor. The barman knew him and brought him a martini. Weynfeldt would probably just eat the olive; he was a very moderate drinker.

Nor did he indulge in any other excesses. When he dropped by a bar on the way home, he wasn't hunting for sex, warmth, a little company, like most single men. He did not suffer from loneliness. Quite the opposite: he liked solitude. When he did sometimes go in search of company, it was in a conscious effort to moderate his loner tendencies.

As for sexual needs, ever since a particular episode—or blow—earlier in his life, they had played an ever more insignificant role in Adrian Weynfeldt's life.

And so the course of events that evening was highly untypical.

No sooner had the barman served him his martini than a woman entered the bar, put her coat and handbag on the bar stool beside Weynfeldt, sat on the next one over and ordered a gin fizz. She was wearing a green silk Chinese blouse, white arms extending from its short, close sleeves, a tight black skirt and high heels a similar shade of green to the blouse. Her long red hair was tied up, secured with an imitation tortoiseshell clasp to free her neck, which the blouse's high collar circled loosely.

She had not yet looked at him, but when the barman placed her drink in front of her, she took the glass and raised it to Weynfeldt briefly. She didn't wait for him to raise his glass and return the gesture. But once she had taken a drink, half the cocktail in one gulp, she turned to him and smiled.

It was a smile Weynfeldt knew.

He was so startled he put the glass to his lips and poured the contents down his throat. The woman who had smiled at him resembled Daphne so closely it seemed impossible that instead of speaking English—Daphne's melodic Welsh-inflected English—she now greeted him with the highly Swiss
Pröschtli
, no trace of an English accent. Now she had spoken, the spell was broken, and he was no longer afraid he was seeing Daphne's ghost. Above all because the gin fizz was clearly not her first alcoholic drink of the evening and she spoke with a slight drawl. Daphne hadn't drunk at all.

“Your olive,” she said. “If you don't want it, I'll take it off your hands.”

Weynfeldt passed his empty glass to her. She fished the cocktail pick out and put the olive in her mouth. While she ate, she appraised him blatantly, spitting the stone into her palm and dropping it in Weynfeldt's empty glass. Then she finished her drink. “Lorena,” she said.

“Adrian Weynfeldt,” he replied. He was not someone who started with first names at a first meeting.

Lorena reached into her handbag, a well-worn, unbranded black leather number, and retrieved a battered wallet. She placed it on the bar, counted her money, half out loud, put the money back in her wallet, and her wallet back in her handbag. “What does a gin fizz cost?” she asked the barman.

“Eighteen francs,” he replied.

“Then I've got enough for three.”

“If you have no objection,” Weynfeldt said, “then I can take care of the drinks.”

“No objection, but I still don't want to drink more than I could pay for myself. An old single girls' rule.”

“Very sensible.”

“If it's sensible I'll have to think twice. ‘Sensible' makes you look older. Will you order me another?”

Weynfeldt ordered a gin fizz.

“And a martini for the gentleman.”

The barman looked to Weynfeldt. He shrugged his shoulders and nodded.

“You don't have to drink it,” Lorena said. “It's okay for men to be sensible.”

“It doesn't make us look older?”

“You're already old.”

Weynfeldt kept Lorena company for four gin fizzes, his martini remaining untouched at his elbow. When she asked for a fifth, he insisted on accompanying her home, and ordered a taxi.

“Where are we going?” the driver asked Weynfeldt.

“Where are we going?” Weynfeldt asked Lorena.

“How should I know?” she replied.

“You don't know where you live?”

“I don't know where you live,” she said, her eyelids drooping.

And so for the first time in more years than he could remember, Adrian Weynfeldt returned home after midnight in female company. The security people would be amused when they came to watch the videos.

He opened the heavy door to the building, led Lorena in, and closed it behind him, keeping an eye on his guest, who seemed in danger of losing her balance at any moment. He took his magnetic ID card out of his wallet, pushed it into the slot next to the inner security door, led Lorena to the elevator, controlled by the same card, and rode to the third floor.

Weynfeldt's apartment was in a nineteenth-century building in the center of Zurich's financial district. He had inherited the building from his parents. While they were still alive a bank had taken out a lease on the ground floor, using three of the remaining four floors for their offices. The bank's security measures were sometimes tiresome, but were ultimately in Weynfeldt's interest as his apartment held a valuable collection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Swiss art.

He ignored the bank's repeated advances, luring him with suggestions of apartments in quieter districts so they could take over his floor too. Apart from his time at boarding school and his year in London, he had lived his entire life in this space. As a child he had slept in a room close to his parents; as he grew older he had moved farther toward the periphery of the apartment, which extended over five thousand square feet. While he was at university the servants' quarters were converted into a separate apartment for him, and the housekeeper moved into one of the three guest rooms. Another guest room was soon occupied by the nurses looking after Weynfeldt's father, who was homebound by the age of seventy-five.

His mother survived his father by nearly twenty years, which she also spent in the apartment, receiving round-the-clock care herself for the last four. Soon after her death Weynfeldt commissioned an architect from his circle of younger friends to refurbish the rooms from scratch. The old-fashioned bathrooms were transformed into superbly designed facilities, with sandblasted glass, darkened chrome and gray granite; the creaking walnut parquet was replaced with light oak; the walls and plasterwork were painted white or gray and the whole apartment was freed of the mustiness accumulated over the last hundred years.

Aside from a few special pieces, Weynfeldt put the furniture in storage and filled the rooms with his growing collection of 1920s-50s Swiss designer furniture.

This was the apartment into which he ushered the somewhat tipsy Lorena, who dropped her coat and handbag on the polished floor of the vestibule and said, “Wow!”

She said it a few more times during their tour of the rooms. “Wow! Like a museum.” And later, “Wow! You have all this to yourself?”

The inspection seemed to sober her up a little. In Weynfeldt's study, a large room with a floor-to-ceiling window opening onto the rear courtyard, also added during the refurbishment, she asked, “and here?”

“Here is where I work.”

“What do you do?”

“I work for Murphy's. I'm an expert in Swiss art.”

“What does that involve then?”

“Writing expert's reports, supervising auctions, producing catalogues, that sort of thing.”

“Sounds boring.”

“No, it's not.”

“That's why you have all this art?”

“The other way round. The job is because of all the art.”

“Is there anything to drink in this palace?”

“Only nonalcoholic.”

“I don't believe you.”

“What would you like then?”

“Whatever you're having.”

“Lemon verbena tea, it is.”

When he came back with the tray she had left the study. And wasn't in any of the sitting rooms. He finally found her in his bedroom. She was lying in her panties and bra on his bed, apparently asleep.

Weynfeldt went into the bathroom, took a shower and put on clean pajamas. As he did every night. He owned fourteen pairs of pajamas, all tailored by his shirtmaker, all with monograms: six light-blue ones for the even days, six blue-and-white striped for the odd days and two for Sundays—one of the small quirks he allowed himself, providing his life with a little luxury and a little regularity. He believed that regularity prolonged life.

There was also the opposing theory: regularity makes each day indistinguishable, and the more events and habits are repeated, the more the days resemble each other and the years too. Till your whole life feels like one single year.

Weynfeldt didn't believe this. If you do the same things more often, go to the same places and meet the same people, the differences become subtler each time. And if the differences are subtler then time passes unnoticed. Someone you see every month instead of every year never appears to age. And you never appear to age to them.

Repetition slows down the passage of time. Weynfeldt was absolutely convinced of this. Change might make life more eventful, but it undoubtedly made it shorter too.

He returned to his bedroom. Lorena was lying in the same position, on top of the duvet. He looked at her. She was very slim, a delicate build, almost too thin. Above her groin to the right was a small tattoo, perhaps a Chinese character. Her belly button was pierced, and it sparkled—a cut stone, glittering as Weynfeldt walked to the wardrobe to fetch another duvet. He lay down next to Lorena and covered them both.

“What about fucking?” she asked, drowsy.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “If you still want to.”

“Okay.”

He turned the bedside lamp off.

She reached her hand out and let it fall on his chest, flat and lifeless. Her breathing soon became softer and regular.

Well done, Adrian
, Weynfeldt thought, as he fell asleep.

Keep them talking. That was how they did it in the films Weynfeldt had seen, when police officers tried to stop people committing suicide. Or when mediators talked to kidnappers. Distracting them from carrying out their plan was half the battle. But he couldn't think of anything to say. Like those dreams when you need to run but can't move from the spot, he stood there, facing a woman about to kill herself, and said nothing.

Like the time nearly thirty years ago when Daphne had said, “I'm leaving now.” He hadn't even been able to say
Please don't go
, or
No!
Not even the one syllable,
No
. And she'd wanted him to say something; he'd sensed that. She had stood there with her suitcase and given him the chance to stop her.

Daphne was an exchange student at his university. He'd met her at an art history seminar. Everyone had fallen for her; why she'd picked him he would never know. When she returned to England he went with her, defying his parents' objections—his father despairing, his mother enraged. They rented a small apartment in Chelsea and spent a year there, a year which grew happier in Weynfeldt's memory with every year that followed.

He had never really understood why it ended. An argument, a slight tear in the fabric, a case of unfounded jealousy; he couldn't reconstruct it, no matter how hard he tried. But he knew they'd still be together today if he'd managed to utter one single syllable.

He'd had to watch, speechless and immobile, as she left. Not resolute or angry, but despondent and hesitant. As if she were waiting till the last moment for him to stop her.

She had said she would have her things picked up in a few days. When they were still there a week later he started to get his hopes up. After ten days he called her parents. They told him that two days after she left him, she had been in a car crash. She had died on the spot.

Adrian saw the fists gripping the balustrade loosen their grip, the knuckles returning to the shade of the surrounding hands.
Don't do it
, he wanted to say,
Please, please don't do it
. Instead he just stood there, sensed the indifference his face conveyed, as unable to control this as his speechlessness. It was as if the paralysis which had gripped his tongue had spread to his entire face. As if the skin and muscles had gone limp and taken on an expression of horribly blasé indifference.

“You don't give a fuck if I jump or not, do you?” she said.

Weynfeldt succeeded in raising his eyes and looking her in the face. Even now, in the unambiguous gray light of a Sunday morning, the similarity to Daphne was startling. This face held traces of resignation and lost illusions he had never seen in Daphne's, not even on the day it all ended. And yet it was as if they had known each other for thirty years.

“You don't give a fuck,” she repeated.

Now he managed to shake his head.

“It'll be messy and bad for your reputation. And all the formalities with the police will be a drag of course. But other than that …” she released one hand from the balustrade and raised it in a gesture of apathy.

He stood there helpless. Like a stuffed dummy, his mother would have said. Then he shook his head once more.

She let her hand fall, but didn't return it to the balustrade; she stretched it out behind her, and turned her face that way, as well, looking to the street below, leaning back, holding on with just one hand, like a trapeze artist receiving her applause. “Give me one reason not to let go. Just one reason.”

He felt his eyes fill with tears, his numbed face creasing up. A noisy sob burst from his chest.

The woman turned back in surprise and looked at this man in his white pajamas, crying. Then she climbed back onto the balcony, led Adrian back to bed, put her arm around him, and burst into tears herself.