Ideas Above Our Station Read online

  ‘No, darling. This is quite a literary bar. Then the barman says to him, “Excuse me, sir. A lady asked me to give you this.” It’s a note. Richard – that’s the librarian: Richard York – Richard asks him when, and the barman says just now. “She was just here now, sir.” Which is a mystery because Richard didn’t notice anyone. No one had been within his purview.’ Georgie paused for me to enjoy her word. ‘So he opens the note. The lady says she’s seen him in the Library of Periander this morning; and yesterday afternoon during the thunder storm. The paper she’s written the note on, it’s thick in his hands: like parchment – why are you laughing?’

  ‘I’m not!’ I protested. Louise kicked me under the table.

  ‘Richard agrees to meet her and they go for dinner. He meets her in a grove beside the bar. She’s blonde. She’s a sort of ageless beauty. Like Catherine Deneuve.’

  ‘Mark likes Catherine Deneuve,’ Louise said maternally. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Richard’s wife’s recently left him because of his career. She’s left him for a banker. He’s very wary of jeopardizing another woman’s happiness.’

  In his shirt of burnt-orange, the waiter lowered his head to ask if it had been fine for us. Georgie went on. The woman’s name was Leda. She exerted a hypnotic effect on Richard: after the brandies, he found he was walking in the rain with her. Then he found he was in the foyer of her hotel, where he said goodbye, remembering he had an appointment with a curator at 8:45 the following morning. The next evening, he rang her at her hotel (as promised) to invite her for dinner. They arranged to meet in the bar at his hotel. He went down to sip a beer – being thirsty from an afternoon among dust and archives – and wait for her. He was startled to find that Leda was there already, her hotel being the other side of town. That night they made love. Richard felt that Leda made love like a mountain climber.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ Louise asked me.

  ‘Just someone over there.’ At the back of the restaurant, where the burnt-orange wall was painted with a tiger in a cage on tiny green wheels, back straight, head high, he sat in uneasy dominance by two friends.

  ‘Is it the one who was on the train?’

  ‘Yes.’ How did she know? When did he come in? ‘D’you remember him then?’

  ‘Yes!’ Louise said brightly.

  ‘He was on the tube as well.’

  ‘I know he was.’

  ‘And he passed us – when we went to the shop.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I was amazed, by her, by the two of us. We’d never discussed him. Not once. I said no more about it. I wondered if he spoke English, to sit over his friends with such glum superiority. We paid the bill and left. Outside it was raining.

  ‘I’ve got it here, Marcus.’ Georgie was taking a book from her weekend bag. ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I’m going to have a drink. Would you like one?’ I had a brandy, Georgie a glass of port, then we skimmed through Corinth for specimens while Louise made Georgie’s bed.

  ‘Look at this: He watched her like a man who has been woken too quickly. Ha ha ha!’

  ‘It is so rubbishly written!’ Georgie laughed.

  ‘Ha! This: She searched his face as if it were an unknown garden.’ We roared cleverly.

  ‘It’s quite an ingenious idea though, the plot idea,’ Georgie reminded me.

  ‘Oh yes. So what happens?’

  ‘Well after Leda’s slept with him, she starts telling him about her life. Bit by bit. He has to keep sleeping with her to find out the whole thing.’

  ‘Why does he want to?’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘Find out the whole thing?’

  Georgie licked her upper lip slightly. The tip of her tongue was swarthy with port. I heard Louise whack a pillow. ‘Because she’s extraordinary. She’s actually a middle spirit.’

  ‘Hey?’

  ‘Now you’re interested.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I can tell. You like things like that.’ She held her little glass by the bottom of the stem to drink. ‘The Renaissance philosophers were interested in them.’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘Middle spirits. They’re in between God and the angels, and humans.’

  ‘Where do they live?’ I asked humorously.

  ‘In the upper air. And the clouds. They can move really fast. And they live about two thousand years. Zeus was one. And Apollo. And Helen of Troy. Now don’t interrupt. They can do all sorts of things. Fly round the earth for example. But when they die, that’s the end.’

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘They don’t go to heaven. It’s finito.’

  ‘What are you two on about?’ Louise had come in.

  ‘Middle spirits.’

  ‘But if they marry a mortal man, they get an immortal soul. That’s why Leda is after Richard.’ Georgie looked down her nose.

  ‘So what happens?’

  ‘Why don’t you read it, Marcus?’

  ‘Yes,’ Louise said in sorority.

  ‘I don’t fancy it.’

  ‘But you want to know more about it!’

  ‘No I don’t. Not that much.’ I really was indifferent. Georgie raised her glass at me.

  ***

  When did people stop believing in these things? From other sources than Corinth (which was now believed by seventeen or eighteen million people in six different languages), I amassed some information about middle spirits. Ariel was a middle spirit. Mephistopheles too, apparently. And the fairies and nymphs. They could come through keyholes. Paracelsus believed in them, Shakespeare did, Pope too. The belief then faded. Unlike God, they didn’t stay too long. They certainly had decorum, your middle spirits; which was why they were now welcome back. If only they hadn’t all died. It was sad to think this. It was desolatingly sad; that they’d had their two thousand years and gone.

  Unless there were one or two remaining who’d started about 10AD. They’d still have a chance. But they’d be worried; they’d be in their very last years; they’d be looking for – damn it! I was starting to believe all this myself; like seventeen or eighteen million readers of the book I scoffed at. Except that I had my own sources.

  As the summer went on, I became interested in trying to spot them. The traits I was looking out for were speed of travel, and eagerness for sex (with a potential husband, or wife). I didn’t notice any of the former; though of course, they wouldn’t want to advertise it in case they alarmed mortals; no doubt they kept away from the aircraft routes. How quickly did you get here? was a question constantly on my mind as I observed the people around me. The other trait posed its own problems of detection. Assuming everyone was eager, though not conspicuously – at least not in my area – how did you sift a spirit’s desire from the mortals’? I became quiet and watchful. I would sniff a spirit out. There was one hard by us: I knew it.

  Underground at Victoria, on the curving platform of the westbound District Line, I was watching the thick sparks of an eastbound train when the blond traveller slotted in. He was listening to a stocky Kiwi with cropped ginger hair who was expostulating about Britain and looking up for approval; which was granted perhaps once with a nod. I found myself on an empty platform, oblivious of my train.

  ‘It will come,’ I said to myself, ‘it must come.’ At the window, I was looking up the road in the twilight. Behind me Louise hovered, wanting to show me the new things she’d bought.

  ‘You keep not saying anything these days,’ she complained. ‘Is anything wrong, darling?’

  ‘I’m concentrating.’

  ‘What d’you think of this one?’ It was a pale gold camisole trimmed with lace. There he was, leaving the hotel beyond the Arden to look for a wife. ‘Well?’ Louise came down the room and stood with her hands on her hips between me and the window.

  ‘Ha!’ I cried. ‘That’ll do! That will do. Very sexy. And very votive!’ She left the room happy, returning to say that Georgie would be coming to stay at the weekend. Bet
ter still!

  As we try to remember dreams, I tried to induce what lay ahead of us by switching off all thought of it but leaving the door open. Let it come. Keep it dark. Mind you don’t startle it! I began to feel hilarious, vague, incontinent.

  Saturday afternoon, I was directed to absent myself. I must concentrate on something mundane. In Kensington High Street, I examined trousers. Why does the philosopher say, ‘Truth is a trouser word’? I went along to Waterstone’s to find out, passing the twin pilasters of Corinth and its mulberry successor, Brother Erebus, on my way downstairs to the philosophy section. The answer discovered, I ascended to the street and stared at the cricket through the window of Dixons till the sun began to slant from Hammersmith.

  It was falling on our road from the west when I returned. From the balcony of Hotel Urquhart rose a din. They were starting early up there. Among the oscillating torsos I saw a blond head and a blonde head and a dark head. Eyes lowered, I carried on home in excitement of shame. They were all up there now, the traveller, Georgie and my wife. It was happening. He would take them. We were mixing with the spirits. We? Yes. Somehow it would be passed on to me.

  When they came in they were giggling. Damn. Why back so soon?

  ‘Mark’s here!’ Louise said gladly. ‘Guess what, darling? That blond traveller asked us to his party!’

  ‘Ah!’ I held both her hands in mine. I couldn’t speak. Her eyes – were they flashing more than usual?

  ‘You aren’t angry are you, honey? – It’s just that Georgie wanted a gin and tonic when she got here and we didn’t have any so we went to that stupid pub where all the Australians go. He was in there and he invited everyone – not just us. All the time we were there we felt so old we couldn’t get away quick enough. It was so embarrassing.’

  ‘Didn’t you enjoy it at all?’

  ‘Georgie thought she might get off with him. That’s really why we went.’

  ‘Ah!’ This was more like it. ‘Any luck?’

  Looking down her nose, Georgie said, ‘No! He had no character. So gormless. Wasn’t my type at all. You’re not angry we went are you, Marcus? It was my fault. Lou only came to please me.’

  ‘No,’ I said dolefully. ‘Not angry. It’s not that. What was the party for?’

  ‘He’s going back on Monday. He was just here for the summer.’

  ‘Ah you’ve got lovely new trousers!’ Louise stood back to admire the camel linen strides I’d bought, which now hung on my legs like sackcloth. ‘I know what’ll cheer you up! Just a minute.’

  So she brought me a beaker of cask-strength whisky and the three of us smoked some grass. And when I tell them both what I’ve been thinking, I’m damned if they don’t giggle like nymphs at my preposterous conception.

  On A Roll

  Tania Hershman

  We see no patterns in the tossing of a coin, the rolling of dice, the spin of a roulette wheel, so we call them random…‘random’… may be inherent, or it may simply reflect human ignorance.

  NewScientist 25 September 2004

  Holding them by the heels, I set the sandals down on the cloth. My naked toes twitch and wriggle. The croupier’s expression doesn’t flicker, as if women place their shoes in front of him during every roulette game.

  ‘Six hundred and forty-five dollars,’ I whisper. The croupier, the waitress with the pierced eyebrow, Jim from Texas – they can all see the label, they know what these golden babies are worth.

  ‘Brand new. I have the receipt. Six hundred and forty-five,’ I say again, feeling braver. This is the way it is meant to be. After all I’ve been through, right here is where everything is supposed to turn around.

  ‘Mind the heels on the baize, ma’am,’ says the croupier. He counts out my chips, pushes them over, and, even though I know what he is about to do, I hold my breath as he picks up my sandals and places them out of arm’s reach.

  I count my chips: four blood-red hundreds, four night-blue fifties, four bile-yellow tens and a pitch-black five. Four plus four is eight, eight plus eight is sixteen, sixteen plus sixteen is thirty-two, chants a voice in my head. My toes grip the legs of the high chair, my hands shake and I feel dizzy. What the hell have I just done?

  But there is also something reassuring about all of this. It is word perfect. Everyone is saying their lines exactly as it was in my dream. They are playing their part so I am playing mine.

  Las Vegas was a business trip. The company sent me to meet a client, some old bloke with a plastics factory churning out casino chips. I was there to walk him through the new laser slicer. But mainly I was there, said my boss, because this guy only liked to work with women. Normally the feminist in me would spike up and refuse, but I’d never been to Las Vegas – never been to America at all – so I just saluted and said,

  ‘Yes sir, where’s my plane ticket?’

  His secretary sorted out a stopover in New York, six hours. That was all I needed.

  It was a night flight. I sleep well on planes and I was exhausted, I hadn’t had an uninterrupted night since the accident, so I nodded off even before we’d left the ground. I don’t know how long I was out for. I woke up suddenly, confused, still inside the surreal dream I’d been having. I don’t generally remember dreams, but this one insisted on replaying itself over and over again in my brain, as sharp as a Technicolour film: I am sitting at a roulette table next to Jim from Austin. A croupier with enormous eyebrows spins the wheel, and the waitress, who is heavily made up and has a tongue stud, brings me a Cosmopolitan cocktail. I’m wearing my favourite green dress. On my feet are the new shoes I’m planning to buy in New York, shoes to which I’ve attached, like a shopping list, all my hopes for a new life. I sit there in my green dress and my gleaming sandals, and I slowly gamble away all my money.

  It was like no other dream I’d ever had. It didn’t cut randomly from one location to another, people didn’t appear out of thin air or have two heads, I didn’t sprout wings and fly. Even when I took off my sandals and laid them on the roulette table, it somehow felt real. I sat there on the plane replaying it in my head, something in me wanting to cry like a baby.

  I came out of JFK, my head buzzing, and found a taxi.

  ‘Bergdorf Goodman’s, please,’ I said to the driver, and stared out of the window at the city I’d only seen in films, but my mind was elsewhere.

  ‘Happy shopping, ma’am,’ said the taxi driver as I shoved a handful of green money at him, hoping it was the right amount. I nodded, dazed and rather unsure of where I was, but standing there on the pavement, I stared up at the department store logo and a switch inside me clicked. I had a mission. I headed straight in and up to the shoe department, trailing my wheelie case behind me.

  There they were.

  I asked for my size and whispered to the butterflies in my stomach. Slipping the straps over my ankle, the little Romanesque coins gently knocking into one another, I had to remind myself to breathe. My feet, always ignored in their ugly leather clodhoppers, were suddenly elegant, pale and long. They were someone else’s feet, not the feet of a thirty-two-year-old, jet-lagged widow in overlarge jeans and a baggy jumper. They were beautiful feet.

  I could have picked a glitzier style with rhinestones, or something plainer and more sophisticated, but when I saw this style online, I fell in love. It was the coins. The coins reminded me of a London museum we’d visited when I was little. I’d dashed past the remnants of perfume jars and animal skins, but stopped short at the case with ancient money. People hundreds and thousands of years ago had used these bent bits of metal to go shopping, like the ten-pence pieces I handed over for ice cream? No, couldn’t be. But looking back on it, I believe that what I found most strange was that all these lives had gone on before I was born. Until that moment, I thought the world began and ended with me.

  I gave the sandals to the assistant, handed over the cash, and went to catch my next flight.

  The hotel room in Las Vegas was bigger than my flat: two double beds, huge windows overlook
ing the strip from ten floors up, and a very well-stocked minibar. I had time to change my clothes and have a restoratative cup of tea before heading off to my meeting. It went well, he seemed to like me, touching my arm every few minutes as only an aged flirt can get away with, and promised he’d upgrade all their machines by the end of the year. I refused his entreaties to have dinner with him – far beyond the call of duty – and rushed back to the hotel, roulette wheels spinning in my mind.

  Sliding my card into the slot, I opened the door, and the ringing silence hit me like lead. I stood frozen in the doorway, wondering why no one was waiting for me, and a fit of hysteria rose inside me like acid. But something stronger forced it down and I took hold of myself. I had something more important to do.

  Taking the green silk dress off its hanger, I slid into it and it wrapped itself around me. When I opened the Bergdorf shoebox and saw my heavenly sandals, I felt the need to give thanks. I’m not a praying person. I hadn’t prayed in the hospital, there were no words I could think of. All I could do was bawl my eyes out, hoping that some god somewhere would know what I wanted. Maybe I should have tried harder.

  I closed my eyes for a minute, and then lifted out the right sandal, tiny coins jangling.

  My dream hadn’t specified which casino so I went to the nearest, a tacky imitation Greek temple, complete with white pillars and nude statues. I stood in the entrance, high on my heels and dizzy with it all.

  With two hundred dollars worth of chips, I looked around for the roulette tables. Crossing the room, the nearest table came into focus – and there they were. A croupier with bushy eyebrows was collecting chips from a balding man sitting with a glass of whisky. The world swam in front of my eyes, and something whispered in my chest, but I didn’t stop. Someone was pulling my strings and I let them lead me.

  I sat down to the croupier’s left, opposite the man who would soon be telling me the story of his three marriages.

  ‘Can I get you a drink, miss?’