The Squire Quartet

The French couple smiled and shrugged and expressed their sympathies with Squire. ‘It happens all the while in France,’ Jacques said. ‘Maybe with stabbing in addition.’

Broadwell went to the window, drew back the curtain, and watched to see Jarvis drive off. Uncle Will and Mrs Davies stood by the fireplace, holding hands without speaking.

‘We’d better leave after all that,’ Willie said, glumly.

‘I never thought she would actually go with him,’ Squire said. He felt his lips pale and sat down. ‘I never thought to see that. She sided with him … I need a drink.’

Mrs Davies began to weep. ‘Take me away, please Willie … I never expected to hear a daughter of mine treated like that by her husband. We ought to go after them. Oh, oh, how awful everything is … Tom, you’re so cruel … Poor Teresa …’

‘I’ll get you a drink, Mrs Davies,’ Ron Broadwell said. ‘We all need one. Big ones, at that. And – Happy New Year, everyone, by the way!’

It was midnight. Distant bells began to peal.

13

Illegal Currency Charges

Ermalpa, September 1978

It was midnight; Thursday, 14 September, was passing into history.

The lights in the corridors had dimmed or had been switched off. Francesca da Rimini and Paolo, their nudity and guilty love shrouded in decent shadow, stood like sentinels over the dark foyer of the hotel, staring towards the Via Milano. Down that thoroughfare, last Fiats were fleeing, travelling all the faster in their comparative solitude, like the remnants of a school of fish escaping from a vast maw.

In the bar of the Grand Hotel Marittimo, lights still burned, the skilled waiters still waited, smiling and polite, pocketing their small tips. The tables were still encircled by conference delegates, most of them drinking and smoking, all of them talking.

Herman Fittich, buoyed by the success of his talk that evening, was laughing as he compared teaching experiences with members of the French delegation. Rugorsky was at another table, arguing with Morabito and some Italians, though turning every now and again to pat the arm of Maria Frenza, who sat next to him, smoking and smiling exclusively into the night air.

Dwight Dobell sat with Frenza at another table, discussing the vagaries of the American academic system. Squire was at the same table, half-listening; he had sat through many similar discussions in his time, yet the American academic system remained incomprehensible to him. Each conversation added a mite more incomprehensibility. He got up as if to go to the toilets, but turned instead to the lift, and travelled to the second floor. It might as well be bedtime.

The long melancholy corridors with their high arched ceilings were dim; every other light was off. A few trays lay uncollected outside doors. The silence was as thick as a blanket on a hot night. A vacuum cleaner, entangled in metres of its own cable, stood awaiting morning; its heavy fake streamlining suggested that it was a survivor from the regime of Mussolini; with its jutting black rubber prow, it even looked like Mussolini.

Before he reached the corner of the passage, Squire heard voices. A woman’s first, sharp, protesting. Then a man’s.

He turned the corner. The first door on the left was open. Light poured into the corridor from a bedside lamp.

A man bent over a woman. He was in trousers and shirt-sleeves. His jacket had been flung down on the bed. He was holding the woman fairly gently and speaking persuasively, not in English. She had reached the door, and was leaning backwards, to get as far away as possible. She saw Squire.

At the same moment, he recognized d’Exiteuil and Ajdini. D’Exiteuil turned, poking his little beard over his shoulder, looking extremely displeased by the interruption. Ajdini waved enthusiastically.

‘Ah, Tom Squire! I must simply have a word with you. There is rather an abstract question needing to be resolved.’

She moved fast, eluding d’Exiteuil, turning deftly to wish him good-night, smiling, linking her arm with Squire’s, adjusting her coiffure, thanking d’Exiteuil for his kindness.

D’Exiteuil stood at his door, his brows gathered darkly, pulling at his cheek as he folded his arms across his chest.

‘Good-night, Jacques,’ Squire said.

Squire walked briskly along to his room, unlocked it, ushered Ajdini in, followed her, and locked the door behind them. He was laughing more openly than she, as he stood beside her. She was a tall lady. Colour had mounted into the normal pallor of her cheeks.

‘I see that look in your eye,’ she said, pushing him with extended arm, ‘I hope I just didn’t step from the frying pan into the fire.’

‘What a gorgeous voice you have, Selina, and how lovely you look when a little ruffled. Was Jacques going to rape you?’

‘Of course not. Jacques? He is harmless. I simply changed my mind, that’s all. I simply changed my mind. Now I’m going to bed and I hope that you will be an English gentleman and not present me with any difficulty.’

‘Don’t insult me with the English gentleman bit. Regard me as Serbian, just for tonight. I’ve got you here and I won’t let you go till morning.’

‘I’m not insulting you, I’m praising you, for heaven’s sake. You’re not another little Enrico Pelli, I know that. Now, I’ll have a drink with you while you calm down a bit, for friendship, then I will go to my room.’

‘Your room’s not lonely. I am. You promised me that you would sleep with me tonight. You must keep your promises. You’ve whetted my appetite, Selina.’

The fine bone features became finer, turning almost to porcelain. She commenced to prowl about the room looking about her, as if bored by the conversation. He stood and watched her slender buttocks moving under her dress.

‘My belief in the miraculous doesn’t extend to quite that extent.’ She sighed. ‘Let me go, Tom. I don’t like to be your captive. This is boring. How’d you like to be a woman and go through this same scene so often? I was going through it only just now with Jacques, except that as yet you have not laid a finger on me. But that will come, eh?’ She looked at him with contempt, yet with a half-smile; there was a coquetry she seemingly could not suppress.

‘You must continually plant yourself in the same scene, mustn’t you, Selina? The role must give you a little titillation and pleasure, isn’t that so?’ He heard anger and banter and lust, spiced with a mite of sympathy, in his own voice.

She stopped pacing and faced him. ‘Give me a cigarette.’

‘Don’t smoke.’

‘It’s so late.’

‘You look fresh.’

‘I will not have any of your phoney psychiatry such as you gave me this morning. That was an insult, I consider. That Freudian stuff … That’s why I avoided you and would not eat dinner with you this evening, in case you wondered.’

‘I didn’t wonder. I guessed. But my remarks weren’t meant to irritate. I simply had a moment of perception regarding some of your troubles, or thought I did. I don’t want to pry, why should I? But if I can help I’d be glad to.’

‘Because you think you can get me into bed that way.’

He laughed. ‘Does it hold such fears for you that you dread it? It’s pleasant. Precious, if done for its own sweet sake, not as some sort of – bargain. Often exciting, sometimes consoling, occasionally – miraculous.’

She flushed. ‘Okay. That’s enough. I’m not a kid, you know. I can’t be talked into what I don’t wish to do. I’m not just a bloody body, you know.’

‘True.’ He pulled the door key out of his trouser pocket by its plastic label, walked over to the door, and opened it.

‘You’re free to go if you wish.’

She gathered herself up, breasts, stomach, handbag, between her arms, then suddenly changed posture, raising a finger.

‘Wait! Maybe I have a cigarette left after all, let me just look.’

She opened her handbag and produced a packet, which she flipped open and proffered, letting Squire see the label. ‘Drina’.

‘You can buy them in Germany now. So many poor Yugoslav Gastarbeiter are in the Bundesrepublik, working away to keep democracy going.’

‘And maybe to prop the tottering communist economy back home?’

As he accepted a cigarette, they both laughed. After they had lit up, she closed the door gently with her back and smiled at him.

‘Wicked Jacques may still be lingering in the corridor with intent. I am afraid to go from your room.’

‘If not sex, I’ve only got vodka to offer.’

‘Fine.’

She consented to sit down on the bed. After a drink, she allowed him to kiss her. Then she drew away her lips and smoked in silence. He watched her, admiring the line of her neck, its feather of dark hairs, her lobeless ear.

‘How could there be any possible connection between the death of my father, so long ago in Kragujevac, in a country I no longer visit, and my political sympathies?’

‘It’s just an intuition, and my intuitions aren’t reliable. But I also lost my father at an early age, and am aware of the stresses such bereavements bring with them. Otherwise, I had only your extraordinary reading of Aldous Huxley to go by. In his most enduring book, Brave New World – which I suppose Herman would classify as science fiction – Huxley dramatizes the battle between the state and the individual or, to define it more narrowly, between a bureaucracy and sexuality. Do you hate Huxley because he was on the side of sexuality? Doesn’t sexuality and all that goes with it challenge the Perfect State – or any state that claims perfection and therefore classifies all who criticize it as criminals? Remember the words of the Savage in Brave New World. He claims the right to be unhappy, to grow old and ugly and impotent, to catch syphilis, to be tortured, because then he can get a glimpse of freedom and poetry. I’d say on the basis of our very slight acquaintance, that you might be alarmed by the Savage in all of us, including the Savage in yourself. By opting for a repressive system, you repress the Savage.’

‘More phoney psychiatry! You insult me. You treat me as if I were a child.’ She puffed smoke at him.

He put an arm lightly round her waist.

‘You just see it that way. I only offered you an intuition. Marxism sounds bad in your pretty mouth, but I’ve no business speaking to you like this.’

‘That’s true!’ she said with spirit. ‘It’s immoral – interfering. Someone described you as a self-appointed critic, that I know. They were right!’

‘Would you rather critics were appointed by the state? The self-appointed ones are best, kindest, most disinterested … Were you happy as a child – I mean, before the massacre at Kragujevac? Can you remember so far back?’

She turned the fine bone china of her face towards him and regarded him searchingly with a pure glance which came close to making him quail.

‘No – yes. One always remembers.’ She looked at him, playfully, slid her spectacles down on her nose to regard him better. ‘Let me tell you this – since it’s late – my secret. My father was a desperate man, desperately poor, desperately everything, like a character from Gorki. There were trees behind our house where he would go to rage… He often beat me when he was drunk, with his hand or with poles. Yet after he was shot, I knew I loved him dearly, needed him, and I longed in despair to see him once more and even be beaten by him. I would be utterly degraded, as long as he came back. There, that’s the truth.’

She exhaled blue smoke and waved it away.

‘Your mother? You don’t mention her.’

‘She died giving birth to me. Another woman looked after us then.’

They sat without speaking, smoking together companionably, occasionally sipping vodka. She said, ‘Of course there’s more to it than that. There always is. The world changed, that day he and my brother were shot by the Germans. It wasn’t only them I lost, but a less tangible thing … A.E. Housman’s land of lost content. You can never get back there.’

She quoted,

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

‘You will think I’m very self-pitying, when you get to know me.’

‘We all need pity.’ He stroked her dark hair, and she rested her head against his shoulder. He remembered her anecdote about Dorothy, the woman with the brain injury.

‘One day, I’ll tell you about the death of my father.’

A simple exchange of stories … The promise appeared to please her. She rested a hand with its bright nails on his shoulder, whilst continuing to gaze into the shadowy recesses of the room.

‘It’s the night, Tom. When we’re changed, somehow …’

‘I don’t really know you at all. It’s a cheek to pretend to … Why don’t you go back to Serbia?’

‘Oh … The pain, or something. Let’s not talk about it. Kiss me again, if you’ll kindly go no further than that. In a way you’re right – I hate sexuality.’

‘Your beautiful lips, Selina …’ He poured kisses on them, removed her spectacles, held her tightly, relished the taste of her mouth, the warmth of her breath, began pressing his body with its erection against her thighs. She pushed away, gasping.

‘Look, Tom, be kind, promise, promise – I know how you feel, but promise you will just do no more than kiss me. Will you? Just kiss …’

‘No more? Come on, no one knows we’re here together.’

‘Tom …’ She wrapped an arm around his neck, whispering, ‘Then I’ll feel safe … Promise …’

He began to kiss her, pressing closer, forgetting himself, becoming just a warmth, sensing her delight. Her arms tightened as she sank back on the bed, their lips still together. Then her body began to heave under him, her leg hooked round his. Her tongue darted into his mouth, low gasps escaped her. He lay on top of her, eyes closed, ‘Drina’ burning his fingers. She ceased to move.

Rather than disturb her, he pinched out the cigarette stub with his fingers.

Gradually she stirred. She sighed. Judging his moment, he sat up, breathing so deeply he almost trembled. He took a small sip of the vodka. It was warm.

‘I must go, Tom, dear. I won’t stay.’ It was a faun’s glance she gave, there and away.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

She stood up. Her mood had changed; she was gentle and not exactly downcast, although her eyes perpetually sought the floor.

‘Yes … Oh dear … It is tomorrow … That’s serious.’

He kissed her on the cheek, with care in case she did not wish it. She appeared not to notice. As she moved to the door, she said, ‘Perhaps we’ll have more time together.’

When she slipped into the dark corridor, she said, ‘Tom, the miraculous does sometimes happen.’

Squire stood listlessly at the door until she had disappeared, before moving back into the room. An envelope lay at his feet. As he stooped to pick it up, he thought that Selina must have dropped it, and instantly his mind conjured up a scene where he went to her bedroom to return it and found her undressing. But the note had his name on, written in a foreign hand; it had been slipped under the door. He immediately lost interest, and flipped it onto the table.

Locking the door, he went and lay on the bed, hands behind his head, his meditations possessed by Selina Ajdini.

In a moment of vision, succoured by the silence of the hour, he saw no mystery in personality. He perceived her with clarity, and the circumstances which surrounded her. The clarity neither magnified nor belittled her; it was cleansed even of compassion, for one condition of the vision was that his own personality, with all its limitations and potentials for growth, was also clear to him – a distortion in one would have implied a distortion in the other.

Within those linked visions burned his understanding of human nature, of its ramshackle structure, its transience, its quality of light.

There was nothing inscrutable about personality or relationships between people. These matters could be perceived, divined; in a sense he knew Selina fully. There was no puzzle. The puzzle came when such things had to be translated into words. Words belonged only to the cerebrum, the part of the brain that made man specifically human; but the mysterious world inhabited by whole understanding occupied all of the brain, and the nervous system beyond it, and the blood cells and body beyond that. It could not be reduced into words. Any system of understanding built purely on words – such as an ideology – was an impoverishment of the human being. Selina tried to live in her words, her ideology, because, for specific reasons, she was afraid of the whole world of her personality. Pain lurked there.

With patience and love, it would be possible to make that proscribed area accessible to her again. But not by words alone. Words alone could not defeat pain.

He climbed off the bed, assumed tadasana, and performed some steady hora breathing in order to clear his mind still further. Moments of meditation and vision could be encouraged, developed. They enlarged life. They created stillness.

The stillness was in some miraculous way eternal within the frames of a human life. Squire had experienced the first such perception at the age of four. He still recalled it: it had remained with him. The nursery with a coal fire burning, firelight reflecting on all the shining brown surfaces of the room. The child at the window, face half-turned to the outdoors, realizing the lure – the wilderness – of the world, as dusk filtered in. Realizing the unknown was limitless. It had been the first of his escapes beyond time, and in a way the most vivid. He had felt his own containedness and greatness. He had reached to an oceanic content within his own being.

There had been other similar moments before his father died; they continued after the watershed of that event.

The death had killed his tentative reaching towards the orthodoxies of the Christian religion, though not towards an unspoken mysticism. He saw only now that the unspokenness had preserved its freshness. He hated the very word ‘mysticism’; but of its flesh he was not in doubt, for he felt it inside him.

Even these reflections visited his mind without a cloud of words, as he slowed his breathing and set aside the hotel room.

With placid amusement, he detached himself from his body, rising above it to see a man, recently embraced by a woman, standing in still posture, mind clear of logical thought. That stillness, that balance, was a triumph, achieved within – the image always charged him with excitement – within the violent explosion that was the universe. He visualized the curdling galaxies, the stellar bodies, whirling away from each other, still fleeing from that primal explosion, that ejaculation of matter which began everything. The cosmos was still inexpressibly new.

All human experience was a brief dawn affair; more comprehensive experiences would be possible later in the cosmic day. Meanwhile, it was possible to develop towards greater understanding.

The sparks flew forever up the chimney. Turmoil was all that could be expected. There was evil in man, in men and women; only a fool would doubt it when he had the privilege of living in the twentieth century – as a being confined to a lunatic asylum would be the maddest of all inmates if he refused to believe in lunacy – but that evil was a flaw wrought by the holocaust of the physical world. That was where religion falsified the situation. Flames had no morality. If evil was a human creation, so was the concept of perfection. Wasn’t perfection always visualized as somehow static? And stasis was an impossibility in the exploding universe. It was a good idea to recognize the instability of all things, and to breathe deep and slow.

He threw off his clothes, brushed his teeth, and climbed between the sheets.

His mind would not let him sleep. He lay there for some while before realizing that sleep was not going to visit him yet. Some factor just beyond his grasp was worrying him.

He sat up with sudden impatience, saying into the wall of dark before his face, ‘But anyone who could speak so ill of Huxley cannot be a good person.’

Impatiently, he let his head thump back on the pillow.

Again, he tried to make himself sleep, concentrating on slow breathing. But the moment of rapture had curdled into a mood of self-distrust, sucking him back into the past with its regrets.

Images of disquiet flooded him. His father’s savage death. His mother’s dead countenance, patched with hitherto unknown browns and greys. The long estrangement from Teresa. Even the savagery with which the English critics, unlike those abroad, had attacked ‘Frankenstein Among the Arts’.

From serenity, he fell into despair.

Near at hand lay his doubts about the conference in Ermalpa, and his quarrel with d’Exiteuil. One of his beliefs was that, as the nineteenth century cultivated optimism, often of a rootless kind, so that century’s impoverished heirs and assigns of the twentieth cultivated a pessimism possibly as rootless. The art of enjoyment was lacking. He had always hoped to contribute to the general enjoyment; not as an entertainer – he had no gift for that – but as an appreciater, one who could enhance other people’s lives, as his father had enhanced his. That had been the driving force behind his great television series and the book related to it.

(‘Tottering between playing the common man and the intellectual, hopelessly fumbling both roles, Thomas Squire – even now no doubt expecting a knighthood for his services to a TV-zapped nation – tries to camouflage a lack of content beneath a middlebrow concern with the surface of trivia; his compulsive dashes about the globe, which reduce all space and time to a corner of the studio, are physical analogues of his efforts to cover dozens of subjects in order to conceal the fact that he has no subject. As he points in astonishment at things with which we are all too familiar, it is impossible not to feel that the new Renaissance on which he lavishes his laboured epigrams is our Untergang in thirteen episodes.’ Leslie Lippard-Milne, ‘Frankensquire Among the Parts’, New Statesman)

There were no Lippard-Milnes in Ermalpa. The conference paid him homage – although one accepted that homage never meant what it professed. But the delegates were also busy destroying the things he held dear, the things they held dear. Could poor Krawstadt ever enjoy a game of pinball now he had written so villainously on the subject? Well, perhaps one hoped not.

These unembarrassed arts, why should they wilt so easily beneath scrutiny? Another law was emerging. Pick a flower and it dies.

What was he going to do next? How was the rest of his life to be lived? He thought of the sailing ship moored at the harbour, ready to slip away to sea. There was no escape, only the appearance of escape. That depended who else was in the boat with him. The opportunity to begin again often presented itself, no doubt of that. But the blowfly in the human heart ensured that one went on making the old mistakes.

He had no complaints. Things were as they were. If the conference was a failure, he was not responsible; he would never be one to admit it failed. If ideology killed it, there again he had no complaint. In his time – it was curious to look back on it now – he had killed for the sake of ideology. He could remember the savage triumph he felt when, in a farmhouse in Istra, he looked down at the broken body of Slatko, the Russian colonel. That had been no timeless moment of vision; whenever the episode rose to mind, he pushed it from him, not wishing to recognize any more that part of himself.

Now Slatko’s brutal face pursued him. Squire sat up and put the light on, feeling ill.

He padded over to the bathroom to get himself a sip of water – he had been warned that Ermalpa water was contaminated, but he had heard similar tales wherever he went. He caught sight of the unopened envelope lying on the table. After drinking, he took the envelope back to bed and ripped it open.

Inside was one sheet of paper with the hotel’s crest. The letter read,