Gabriel's Moon, page 3
Sefton laughed violently and his gruff bark of amusement turned into a cough.
‘Stick to travel writing, Gabriel,’ he said, thumping his chest. He turned and shouted at his children. ‘Careful where you kick that ball, chaps!’
Victoria appeared and quietly offered fresh coffee. Sefton declined but Gabriel followed her back indoors. It was a chilly day for early September – with a cold wind-rasp and a sky full of lumbering clouds – he was glad to get back into the warmth.
‘Thanks again for the beautiful present,’ Victoria said.
Gabriel had given her a small carved figurine he’d bought in a market in Léopoldville. Ebony, eight inches high, it was some kind of human/animal hybrid, with horns and breasts and a tail, holding a hoe in one hand and a gourd in the other. It was a good-luck charm, he explained, meant to bring prosperity, health and happiness to the owner.
‘I’ll settle for that,’ Victoria said, pouring his coffee. She seemed genuinely delighted by the gift and had already placed it on the mantel. ‘It can be our tutelary deity. I love it. So beautifully carved. How thoughtful of you, Gabriel. And you remembered my birthday.’
In fact, he had bought it for Lorraine but he was pleased he’d given it to Victoria instead, seeing her evident pleasure in the little statuette. Lorraine would probably have looked at it askance, he realized. A useless trinket from Africa. He offered a cigarette to Victoria – who declined, trying to give up, she said – and lit one for himself. He glanced at her. Not a trace of make-up – not even a dab of lipstick on her birthday – her thick brown hair stretched tight into a complicated bun.
He liked Victoria because he knew she liked him and because she ignored Sefton’s mocking deprecations. One day, when visiting the house, he had overheard her talking about him on the phone to a friend. He caught his name mentioned and eavesdropped, slightly apprehensive.
‘Gabriel, yes,’ she had said to this friend. ‘You met him at Sefton’s party. You know – the tall gaunt handsome one who looks like a starving poet. Yes, that’s him, Gabriel . . . Sefton’s younger brother. Can you believe they’re related? And he’s a very good writer.’
Gabriel had moved on, blushing to have overheard the encomium, but pleased. He looked at her now, sitting across from him on the sofa, cupping her mug of coffee in both hands, and he wondered why and how on earth she had ended up as Sefton’s wife. Most marriages are incomprehensible, he told himself.
‘You know what, Gabriel,’ Victoria said, smiling. ‘I think I will try one of your French cigarettes, after all.’
When Gabriel made his goodbyes later, Sefton said he’d walk him to the Tube station, needed the exercise.
As they strolled together down Archway Road, Gabriel again noted the incongruity between the two of them, as he always did when he found himself alone with his brother. Sefton, solid and overweight, hair already greying, in his maroon cardigan and his weekend tweeds, some banded club tie at his throat. How could they be brothers? Yet they manifestly were, both orphaned, both of them having to confront the same tragedies at a young age.
‘You off on your travels again?’ Sefton asked.
‘No, staying put for a while.’
‘You wouldn’t fancy a little trip to Copenhagen? Hand-deliver a letter for me.’
‘Foreign Office business?’
‘Exactly.’
‘No, thanks.’
Gabriel always felt slightly uneasy when Sefton tried to draw him temporarily into his world. He had done ‘favours’ for Sefton in the past when he was abroad. Delivered letters and small packages to nondescript addresses, shops and apartment blocks. Once he had left a newspaper (Le Monde ) on a park bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Another time in a café in Lisbon all he had had to do was to say ‘No’ to a man who came and sat down opposite him, who then immediately stood up and walked out.
He had accused Sefton of being in the Secret Intelligence Service and Sefton jovially denied it, finding the notion very amusing, he said. SIS? Me? Don’t be ridiculous. He was a Foreign Office man, pure and simple, he said, but we do get up to all manner of tricks – oh, yes, you couldn’t imagine. And yet he had suddenly been posted to the embassy in Geneva for two years in the mid-1950s, uprooting the family, and when Gabriel had asked Victoria what precise job Sefton had done at the embassy she said she had no real idea. ‘Some kind of administration to do with passports,’ was the best explanation she could manage. And here he was, now, offering a mysterious trip to Copenhagen.
‘Fully funded, Gabriel. You won’t be out of pocket.’
‘I’m very busy. Writing.’
‘Well, think about it. No rush. It can wait until you’re ready.’
Sefton changed the subject.
‘Have you seen anything of Uncle Aldous, recently?’
‘Funnily enough he’s asked me to pop round for a drink.’
‘Send the old bastard my best regards, will you?’
They walked on to the Tube station reminiscing about Aldous Dax, wondering how he was coping with his recent retirement and who was the new woman in his life. There were many stories to tell.
Lorraine slid out of bed and crossed the room to ‘go to the toilet’, she said. As she opened the door her lithe, naked figure was illuminated by the corridor light and Gabriel felt the loin-tug of sexual energy renewed. Amazing, as they had only just made vigorous love ten minutes before. He lay back in bed thinking of the extraordinary effect Lorraine had on his libido. Then creeping guilt overwhelmed his lust, quickly, and he felt ashamed.
He knew why he so desired Lorraine: it was because she was nothing like him and knew nothing of his world; that she had left school at sixteen; that she talked with a twanging London accent with many a glottal stop; that she had an insecure grasp of English grammar and worked as a waitress in a Wimpy Bar – this was what aroused him so. She was exotic, strange, totally unlike the other lovers he had known in his life. Briony, Maud, Janet and Annabel were all from his social and intellectual class, more or less. Lorraine was terra incognita, wild, fascinating.
Curiously, he was growing convinced that she felt the same about him. Sometimes she introduced him to people as ‘my posh boyfriend’. She often asked him to repeat words and phrases, giggling at his accent, asking him to explain what they meant, as if she couldn’t believe she was coupling with a weird being like him. Yes, strangeness worked both ways – a two-way street – he reflected a little ruefully as she came back into his room and snuggled into bed beside him.
‘Who’s a randy devil?’ she said, feeling his cock. ‘You don’t never stop, do you, Gabe.’
On Monday morning, he took his finished interview with Patrice Lumumba to the newspaper offices and handed the pages to the foreign editor, Grant Muldoon.
‘Just under three thousand words,’ he told Grant. ‘You said I should write as much as I wanted. I’ve got masses more on the tapes.’
‘Fantastic,’ Grant said, riffling through the typescript, nodding, unusually visibly excited. ‘This’ll go out the Sunday after next – big splash. Great work, Gabriel. We got lucky. Let me buy you a drink or three.’
But his piece wasn’t in the paper on the Sunday after next, to his baffled disappointment. He’d been paid, gratifyingly quickly, a cheque in the post, but he’d never seen a proof, and there had been no editorial notes. Odd. He called Grant who was shiftily apologetic.
‘History’s overtaken you, old son,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s been a kind of coup in the Congo. Some soldier, a Colonel Mobutu, seems to have taken over, calling the shots now. Your man Lumumba has been sacked, stripped of office – pretty much under house arrest as far as we can tell. Hard to get a clear picture at the moment.’
‘But, hang on, what Lumumba has to say is still interesting.’
‘Was interesting,’ Grant said. ‘Sorry to be so blunt, Gabriel, but it’s suddenly yesterday’s news. We’d look stupid running it. The opinions of a recently sacked ex-Prime Minister. Maybe you could write something about this Mobutu guy.’
‘I don’t know anything about him. Anyway, perhaps I’ll place the piece somewhere else – the New Statesman, the Economist—’
‘Ah, no, you won’t, I’m afraid. Sorry again, Gabriel. We’ve paid you in full, remember. It’s ours, not yours.’ Grant suddenly sounded uneasy. ‘Look, maybe it’s just as well. Your piece was, well, let’s say – controversial. The editor was wavering, wanted to talk to the proprietor. Then this coup happened.’
‘Why was he “wavering”, for Christ’s sake?’
‘Because your piece was very pro-Lumumba,’ Muldoon said. ‘And not everyone thinks he’s, you know, the great, coming man that you portrayed. The Congo’s messy. Very. Lots of vested interests, lots of flashpoints.’
‘The stuff about the Soviets, you mean,’ Gabriel said, beginning to think he was out of his depth.
‘That didn’t help. Put the whole thing down to experience. Lumumba was a hot potato last week – then he suddenly became a cold potato. No one’s interested in cold potatoes. Let it drop.’
So he did, reluctantly. He was a little embittered by the episode, thinking of the work he had put in, thinking that maybe Sefton was annoyingly right – perhaps he should stick to travel writing. He wondered if he should revisit that piece about Léopoldville and Brazzaville, after all – the two capitals separated by a mighty river . . .
And then the idea came to him with amazing clarity. That’s what he would write about next. Mighty rivers – the Congo, the Nile, the Danube, the Amazon, the Mississippi – but in a way that had never been done before. He called his agent, Jeff Lockhart, who asked for a two-page outline. Gabriel duly supplied it. A week later, Lockhart came back with a deal from Inigo Marcher and his new publishing house, Mulholland & Melhuish. His next book, Rivers, was born. Some Congo clouds do have silver linings, he told himself.
Gabriel dropped in to see his doctor, Muir Kinross, on his way to have a drink with his uncle as he needed that prescription for sleeping pills. Muir was in his sixties, a dry, amusing Scot from Edinburgh. He was a cultured, well-dressed man – always darkly and elegantly suited – whose consulting room resembled a stage set: Omega Workshops rugs on the floor, glass-fronted bookshelves, a highly polished desk, many tasteful pictures on the walls. Even the examination couch was behind an embroidered Secessionist screen of mythical beasts cavorting.
Muir unscrewed the top of his fountain pen and wrote out Gabriel’s prescription in his immaculate copperplate, all looping purple ink.
‘That should keep you going for a month or two.’
Gabriel slipped it into his jacket pocket.
‘I only take them now and then. When the need for a night’s sleep is, shall we say, acute.’
‘Same dreams? Same problem?’
‘Yes. Fires. It’s always fires,’ Gabriel said, wearily. ‘Small fires that won’t go out.’ He paused. ‘I get to sleep, then dream about fires and wake up. Then I can’t go back to sleep.’
‘What about your mother?’
‘She’s never there – but of course it’s all about her, really. That night.’ He paused. ‘I suppose. I can’t remember much, to be honest. Fragments. Always fire involved, though.’
Muir was familiar with the essential details of Gabriel’s autobiography – and he had been prescribing him sleeping pills for years.
‘Have you ever thought of psychoanalysis?’ Muir leant back in his seat. ‘Just a notion.’
‘I’ve thought about it,’ Gabriel said. ‘But there’s no mystery here – I know exactly why I can’t sleep, and why I have these dreams. There’s nothing for anyone to explain to me.’
Muir shrugged.
‘I only ask because one of my patients – also an insomniac – had extraordinary success with this particular psychoanalyst. She’s based in Hampstead. It might be worth making an appointment. You never know . . .’
He reached for his pen, searched a ledger for a phone number and an address and scribbled down the details on a filing card. He handed the card to Gabriel.
‘Dr Katerina Haas,’ Gabriel read out loud. ‘Sounds German. I like that. Authenticity. Maybe I’ll give her a ring.’
He thought further about this Katerina Haas as he travelled by bus to Kensington. He had no prejudice against psychoanalysis as long as no one claimed it was a science or scientific. Perhaps it might work as a placebo – the old adage of a problem shared being a problem solved coming to mind. He had to try everything, he thought, suddenly feeling a bit stressed: he couldn’t go through the rest of his life like this – the broken nights, the brain-fug in the day, the energy spikes and sudden overwhelming fatigue – the onerous half-life of an insomniac.
Aldous Dax lived in a large flat in a mansion block behind the Albert Hall. He greeted Gabriel effusively, kissing him on both cheeks.
‘Darling boy, so good to see you! Are you well? You look tired, sweetheart. Still not sleeping properly?’
Aldous’s plump pink face and longish, glossed-back grey hair tucked behind his ears made him look like a nineteenth-century aesthete. To add to the effect, he only wore light-coloured clothes and floppy bow ties. Today he was in a nacreous silk suit and a pale blue shirt with a lemony tie. He was wearing embroidered Oriental-style leather slippers, also, the pointed toes turned up. He led Gabriel along the hall, lined with watercolours from skirting board to ceiling, and into his capacious office-cum-drawing room. Here, as well as pictures on the walls, pictures were stacked on the floor against the wall, ten deep. Loose-covered sofas and armchairs were visible between piled columns of art books on every surface. Great bouquets of dried flowers and grasses in vases were perched on escritoires and coffee tables. It was a shambles, Gabriel always thought, but a unique and rather beguiling one.
A young woman sat at one end of the room at a partner’s desk. She was wearing heavy black spectacles and her hair was dyed a vibrant carrot orange.
‘This is Ariadne Vanderpoel,’ Aldous said, introducing them both. ‘My right and left hand. She’s helping me catalogue the stock from the gallery since it closed.’ He gestured at the stacked paintings on the floor. ‘Augean stables – I have no idea what I have, not a clue. Ariadne is bringing light to the darkness.’
Gabriel shook her hand. Her grip was very firm, no-nonsense. ‘What a pleasure,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard so much about you.’
Gabriel pointed at Aldous. ‘Don’t believe a word he says. Very unreliable narrator.’
Ariadne laughed loudly. Aldous joined in.
‘You can pop off now, sweetness,’ Aldous said. ‘See you tomorrow. I need an indiscreet word with my boy, here.’
When Ariadne left to find her coat, Aldous lowered his voice.
‘PhD in Fine Art from Cambridge. Incredible brain.’ He paused. ‘We’re not having sex, in case you were wondering.’
‘I wasn’t, actually.’
Aldous kissed him again.
‘How truly lovely to see you. I only have whisky, I’m afraid.’
They settled down with large glasses of malt whisky on one of the long sofas, shifting piles of books to make space. This flat, Gabriel thought, looking around, was effectively my family home. How could I not have ended up a writer? They both lit cigarettes and began to chat and gossip, Gabriel telling Aldous about his Sunday lunch with Sefton and family.
‘Is he still terribly boring?’ Aldous asked.
‘I now think his boringness is a clever disguise,’ Gabriel said. ‘It’s meant to make him seem uninteresting. I’m convinced he’s some sort of spy.’
‘God help the British secret service.’
Aldous had never really warmed to Sefton.
‘Talking about spies,’ he went on, ‘I had a very mysterious telephone call the other day – someone trying to buy a painting off me.’
‘That’s what you do, isn’t it? Sell paintings?’
‘I’m retired, so I told this person. But they were insistent. They wanted to buy a painting by one Javier Agustín Montano, known as “Blanco”. I looked him up there and then. He was still fucking alive!’
Aldous said he had explained to the caller that he was a dealer in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British watercolours. He had no interest in twentieth-century Spanish surrealists.
‘But this person wouldn’t let me go. Could I contact this “Blanco”? Would I negotiate a price with him? I told them to fuck off and hung up.’
‘How bizarre,’ Gabriel said. ‘Did this person give you his name?’
‘Thompson or Simpson, I can’t remember. I was in such a rage. A dull name, anyway.’ He took a large swig of his whisky. ‘There was something very fishy about it, though. Clandestine. I think I was being set up in some way, somehow. Perhaps some fraud, you know. It’s a very fraudulent world, the art world.’ He paused. ‘Am I paranoid? I sometimes wonder if all this fraudulence has affected my brain.’
‘Talking about brains,’ Gabriel said. ‘Listen – you’ll like this – I’m thinking about going to consult a psychoanalyst about my insomnia.’
‘Good Lord, you’ll have to tell me all about it, every lurid detail. How fascinating,’ Aldous said, reaching for the bottle. ‘Braver man than I am, that’s for sure.’
2.
Assassination
When Sefton called to invite Gabriel to Christmas dinner in Highgate, Gabriel lied and said he had flu. Instead, he spent the day with Aldous. They ate sandwiches and became merry and very drunk on single malt whisky. He welcomed in 1961 with Lorraine and Tyrone and some of their friends in a club off Oxford Street. Gabriel became very drunk once more.
In late January – on a cold, sunless, breezy day – he wandered up the King’s Road in need of carbohydrates and red wine. He saw the Stars and Stripes spread across a shop window and remembered that the new, young President had been inaugurated just the other day. JFK. Funny how a fresh face and new energy gave you irrational hope for the world, he thought, as he entered the warm, drowsy fug of the Café Matisse.
