A Burnt Out Case (15 page)

‘You’d need to be a kind of a saint, wouldn’t you, to bury yourself here.’

‘No. Not a saint.’

‘Then what are you? What are your motives? I know a lot about you already. I’ve briefed myself,’ Parkinson said. He sat his great weight down on the bed and said confidingly, ‘You aren’t exactly a man who loves his fellows, are you? Leaving out women, of course.’ There is a strong allurement in corruption and there was no doubt of Parkinson’s; he carried it on the surface of his skin like phosphorus, impossible to mistake. Virtue had died long ago within that mountain of flesh for lack of air. A priest might not be shocked by human failings, but he could be hurt or disappointed; Parkinson would welcome any kind of failing. Nothing would hurt Parkinson or disappoint him but the size of a cheque.

‘You heard what the doctor called me just now – one of the burnt-out cases. They are the lepers who lose everything that can be eaten away before they are cured.’

‘You are a whole man as far as one can see,’ said Parkinson, looking at the fingers resting on the drawing-board.

‘I’ve come to an end. This place, you might say, is the end. Neither the road nor the river go any further. You have been washed up here too, haven’t you?’

‘Oh, no, I came with a purpose.’

‘I was afraid of you on the boat, but I’m afraid of you no longer.’

‘I can’t understand what you had to fear. I’m a man like other men.’

‘No,’ Querry said, ‘you are a man like me. Men with vocations are different from the others. They have more to lose. Behind all of us in various ways lies a spoilt priest. You once had a vocation, admit it, if it was only a vocation to write.’

‘That’s not important. Most journalists begin that way.’ The bed bent below Parkinson’s weight as he shifted his buttocks like sacks.

‘And end your way?’

‘What are you driving at? Are you trying to insult me? I’m beyond insult, Mr Querry.’

‘Why should I insult you? We are two of a kind. I began as an architect and I am ending as a builder. There’s little pleasure in that kind of progress. Is there pleasure in
your
final stage, Parkinson?’ He looked at the typewritten sheet that he had picked up in Father Thomas’s room and carried in with him.

‘It’s a job.’

‘Of course.’

‘It keeps me alive,’ Parkinson said.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s no use saying I’m like you. At least I enjoy life.’

‘Oh yes. The pleasures of the senses. Food, Parkinson?’

‘I have to be careful.’ He took the dangling corner of the mosquito-net to mop his forehead with. ‘I weigh eighteen stone.’

‘Women, Parkinson?’

‘I don’t know why you are asking me these questions. I came to interview
you
. Of course I screw a bit now and then, but there comes a time in every man’s life . . .’

‘You’re younger than I am.’

‘My heart’s not all that strong.’

‘You really have come to an end like me, haven’t you, Parkinson, so here we find ourselves together. Two burnt-out cases. There must be many more of us in the world. We should have a masonic sign to recognize each other.’

‘I’m not burnt-out. I have my work. The biggest syndication . . .’ He seemed determined to prove that he was dissimilar to Querry. Like a man presenting his skin to a doctor he wanted to prove that there was no thickening, no trace of a nodule, nothing that might class him with the other lepers.

‘There was a time,’ Querry said, ‘when you would not have written that sentence about Stanley.’

‘It’s a small mistake in geography, that’s all. One has to dramatize. It’s the first thing they teach a reporter on the
Post
– he has to make every story stand up. Anyway no one will notice.’

‘Would you write the real truth about me?’

‘There are laws of libel.’

‘I would never bring an action. I promise you that.’ He read the advance announcement aloud. ‘The Past of a Saint. What a saint!’

‘How do you know that Rycker’s not right about you? We none of us really know ourselves.’

‘We have to if we are to be cured. When we reach the farthest point, there’s no mistaking it. When the fingers are gone and the toes too and the smear-reactions are all negative, we can do no more harm. Would you write the truth, Parkinson, even if I told it to you? I know you wouldn’t. You aren’t burnt-out after all. You are still infectious.’

Parkinson looked at Querry with bruised eyes. He was like a man who has reached the limit of the third degree, when there is nothing else to do but admit everything. ‘They would sack me if I tried,’ he said. ‘It’s easy enough to take risks when you are young. To think I am farther off from heaven, etc., etc. Quote. Edgar Allan Poe.’

‘It wasn’t Poe.’

‘Nobody notices things like that.’

‘What is the past you have given me?’

‘Well, there was the case of Anne Morel, wasn’t there? It even reached the English papers. After all you had an English mother. And you had just completed that modern cathedral in Bruges.’

‘It wasn’t Bruges. What story did they tell about that?’

‘That she killed herself for love of you. At eighteen. For a man of forty.’

‘It was more than fifteen years ago. Do papers have so long a memory?’

‘No. But the
morgue
serves us instead. I shall describe in my best Sunday-paper style how you came here in expiation . . .’

‘Papers like yours invariably make small mistakes. The woman’s name was Marie and not Anne. She was twenty-five and not eighteen. Nor did she kill herself for love of me. She wanted to escape me. That was all. So you see I am expiating nothing.’

‘She wanted to escape the man she loved?’

‘Exactly that. It must be a terrible thing for a woman to make love nightly with an efficient instrument. I never failed her. She tried to leave me several times, and each time I got her to come back. You see it hurt my vanity to be left by a woman. I always wanted to do the leaving.’

‘How did you bring her back?’

‘Those of us who practise one art are usually adept at another. A painter writes. A poet makes a tune. I happened in those days to be a good actor for an amateur. Once I used tears. Another time an overdose of nembutal, but not, of course, a dangerous dose. Then I made love to a second woman to show her what she was going to miss if she left me. I even persuaded her that I couldn’t do my work without her. I made her think that I would leave the Church if I hadn’t her support to my faith – she was a good Catholic, even in bed. In my heart of course I had left the Church years before, but she never realized that. I believed a little of course, like so many do, at the major feasts, Christmas and Easter, when memories of childhood stir us to a kind of devotion. She always mistook it for the love of God.’

‘All the same there must be some reason that you came out here among the lepers . . .’

‘Not in expiation, Mr Parkinson. There were plenty of women after Marie Morel as there had been women before her. Perhaps for ten more years I managed to believe in my own emotion – “my dearest love”, “
toute à toi
”, and all the rest. One always tries not to repeat the same phrases, just as one tries to preserve some special position in the act of sex, but there are only thirty-two positions according to Aretine and there are less than that number of endearing words, and in the end most women reach their climax most easily in the commonest position of all and with the commonest phrase upon the tongue. It was only a question of time before I realized that I didn’t love at all. I’ve never really loved. I’d only accepted love. And then the worst boredom settled in. Because if I had deceived myself with women I had deceived myself with work too.’

‘No one has ever questioned your reputation.’

‘The future will. Somewhere in a back street of Brussels now there’s a boy at a drawing-board who will show me up. I wish I could see the cathedral he will build . . . No, I don’t. Or I wouldn’t be here. He’ll be no spoilt priest. He’ll pass the novice-master.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about, Querry. Sometimes you talk like Rycker.’

‘Do I? Perhaps he has the Masonic sign too . . .’

‘If you are so bored, why not be bored in comfort? A little apartment in Brussels or a villa in Capri. After all, you are a rich man, Querry.’

‘Boredom is worse in comfort. I thought perhaps out here there would be enough pain and enough fear to distract . . .’ He looked at Parkinson. ‘Surely
you
can understand me if anyone can.’

‘I can’t understand a word.’

‘Am I such a monster that even you . . . ?’

‘What about your work, Querry? Whatever you say, you can’t be bored with that. You’ve been a raging success.’

‘You mean money? Haven’t I told you that the work wasn’t good enough? What were any of my churches compared with the cathedral at Chartres? They were all signed with my name of course – nobody could mistake a Querry for a Corbusier, but which one of us knows the architect of Chartres? He didn’t care. He worked with love not vanity – and with belief too, I suppose. To build a church when you don’t believe in a god seems a little indecent, doesn’t it? When I discovered I was doing that, I accepted a commission for a city hall, but I didn’t believe in politics either. You never saw such an absurd box of concrete and glass as I landed on the poor city square. You see I discovered what seemed only to be a loose thread in my jacket – I pulled it and all the jacket began to unwind. Perhaps it’s true that you can’t believe in a god without loving a human being or love a human being without believing in a god. They use the phrase “make love”, don’t they? But which of us are creative enough to “make” love? We can only be loved – if we are lucky.’

‘Why are you telling me this, Mr Querry – even if it’s true?’

‘Because at least you are someone who won’t mind the truth, though I doubt whether you’ll ever write it. Perhaps – who knows? – I might persuade you to drop altogether this absurd pious nonsense that Rycker talks about me. I am no Schweitzer. My God, he almost tempts me to seduce his wife. That at least might change his tune.’

‘Could you?’

‘It’s an awful thing when experience and not vanity makes one say yes.’

Parkinson made an oddly humble gesture. He said, ‘Let me have men about me that are fat. Quote. Shakespeare. I got that one right anyway. As for me I wouldn’t even know how to begin.’

‘Begin with readers of the
Post
. You are famous among your readers and fame is a potent aphrodisiac. Married women are the easiest, Parkinson. The young girl too often has her weather-eye open on security, but a married woman has already found it. The husband at the office, the children in the nursery, a condom in the bag. Say that she’s been married at twenty, she’s ready for a limited excursion before she’s reached thirty. If her husband is young too, don’t be afraid; she may have had enough of youth. With a man of my age and yours she needn’t expect jealous scenes.’

‘What you are talking about doesn’t have much to do with love, does it? You said you’d been loved. You complained of it if I remember right, but I probably don’t. As you realize well enough, I’m only a bloody journalist.’

‘Love comes quickly enough with gratitude, only too quickly. The loveliest of women feels gratitude, even to an ageing man like me, if she learns to feel pleasure again. Ten years in the same bed withers the little bud, but now it blooms once more. Her husband notices the way she looks. Her children cease to be a burden. She takes an interest again in housekeeping as she used to in the old days. She confides a little in her intimate friends, because to be the mistress of a famous man increases her self-respect. The adventure is over. Romance has begun.’

‘What a cold-blooded bastard you are,’ Parkinson said with deep respect, as though he were talking of the
Post
’s proprietor.

‘Why not write that instead of this pious nonsense you are planning?’

‘I couldn’t. My newspaper is for family reading. Although of course that word the Past has a certain meaning. But it means abandoned follies, doesn’t it? not abandoned virtues. We’ll touch on Mlle Morel – delicately. And there was somebody else, wasn’t there, called Grison?’

Querry didn’t answer.

‘It’s no use denying things now,’ Parkinson said. ‘Grison is mummified in the
morgue
too.’

‘Yes, I do remember him. I don’t care to because I don’t like farce. He was a senior employee in the Post Office. He challenged me to a duel after I had left his wife. One of those bogus modern duels where nobody fires straight. I was tempted to break the conventions and to wing him, but his wife would have mistaken it for passion. Poor man, he was quite content so long as we were together, but when I left her he had to suffer such scenes with her in public . . . She had much less mercy on him than I had.’

‘It’s odd that you admit all this to me,’ Parkinson said. ‘People are more cautious with me as a rule. Except that I remember once there was a murderer – he talked as much as you.’

‘Perhaps it’s the mark of a murderer, loquacity.’

‘They didn’t hang this chap and I pretended to be his brother and visited him twice a month. All the same I’m puzzled by your attitude. You didn’t strike me when I saw you first as exactly a talking man.’

‘I have been waiting for you, Parkinson, or someone like you. Not that I didn’t fear you too.’

‘Yes, but why?’

‘You are my looking-glass. I can talk to a looking-glass, but one can be a little afraid of one too. It returns such a straight image. If I talked to Father Thomas as I’ve talked to you, he’d twist my words.’

‘I’m grateful for your good opinion.’

‘A good opinion? I dislike you as much as I dislike myself. I was nearly happy when you arrived, Parkinson, and I’ve only talked to you now so that you’ll have no excuse to stay. The interview is over, and you’ve never had a better one. You don’t want my opinion, do you, on Gropius? Your public hasn’t heard of Gropius.’