Exchange Place (15 page)

Because It Was He

The accordion music of the
Maigret
theme faded. I could feel the Black Rose wearing off and decided to roll another. I keep my stash in a vintage Peek Frean biscuit tin with a bas-relief of a coral reef stamped into its lid, exotic multicoloured fish, sea anemones and urchins, the tin secreted in one of the drawers of the miniature burr walnut chest where I also keep my notebooks; and on top of the chest is a Bose Wave Radio/c
D
player which I bought some years ago, inveigled by the language of its advertising, reproduced in the accompanying manual, from which I quote: ‘Extensive research in the fields of speaker design and psychoacoustics – the human perception of sound – led to the groundbreaking 901®Direct/Reflecting® speaker system in 1968. Acoustimass® speaker technology reshaped conventional thinking about the relationship between speaker size and sound, enabling palm-sized speakers to produce audio quality previously thought impossible from speakers so small.’ And I thought of music resonating from the big wire grille of John Harland’s
EKO
radio or from the suitcase-sized Dansette record player. I couldn’t remember when I had last listened to the Bose. I switched it on, and recognized the sound immediately. It was Glenn Gould playing
Contrapunctus XIV
. I couldn’t remember when I had last been playing it, but the display showed it had been some five minutes into the twelve minutes eighteen seconds of the track when I cut it abruptly short, well before the track itself comes to the staccato stop of its predestined, unfinished ending, followed by a silence like a gunshot. And I recalled how Bach’s autograph of the music bore a note in his son Carl Philippe Emmanuel’s hand saying, ‘At the point where the composer introduces the name
BACH
(the notes, that is; in English notation, B flat-A-C-B sharp) in the countersubject to this fugue, the composer died’ – a claim disputed by modern scholars, some of whom suggest that Bach finished the piece on another sheet of paper, referred to in the literature as ‘fragment X’. But if fragment X ever existed, it has been lost.

When I had rolled the joint I lit it, turned the Bose back to the beginning of the track, and sat down to listen. How often had I listened to this playing of
Contrapunctus XIV
, ever since I first heard it in John Harland’s studio all these years ago? I have no way of knowing. Many times in the studio itself, no doubt, and again I pictured Harland painting to that music, and tried to remember what might have then gone through my mind, or what had subsequently transpired that day, or on another. I had listened to
Contrapunctus XIV
many times on the car radio, sometimes immersed in it while I drove on automatic pilot to a destination I had been to many times, sometimes not fully listening as I drove an unfamiliar route; or I would find myself in a reverie prompted by the music, perhaps a fragment of a memory of being elsewhere on a previous listening, a landscape I had forgotten driving through until once more I heard the music I had been listening to then, a dark, nameless avenue without end. By now, after so many listenings, albeit mostly forgotten by my conscious mind, I have a fair enough outline of the piece, and can anticipate to some extent what comes next, and vocalize along with it, somewhat as Gould did himself; and as I do, I think how feeble my memory of the piece must be, compared to that of Glenn Gould, who could sight-read anything – whole orchestral pieces – and memorize on sight. He could read music before he read words, and had only to hear a piece or glance at the page of a score to retain it indefinitely, and I wondered if he could do the same with books.

Certainly, I could not; and, glancing around the shelves of the book-lined room in which I write, I wonder how many of these hundreds of volumes I could trace in my memory to their point of sale. Lately I have bought many books on the internet, but my library has come mostly from physical shops, many or perhaps most of them now vanished. And as I glance again, a ray of sunlight falls upon a stack of shelves, illuminating the many-hued spines of dictionaries, art books, novels, books of science and philosophy, books about books. My memory draws a blank with most of them. But here I see a row of vintage Baedekers in shades of faded red, and I remember, in an alleyway off Charing Cross Road in London, a second-hand bookshop specializing in travel books. On the shelf above is a
Robinson Crusoe
in an eighteenth century binding which I found in the Excelsior Bookshop in Smithfield, and I remember standing in the smouldering ruins of Smithfield after it had been firebombed how many years ago I cannot tell, remarking how difficult it was to burn books, for between the charred covers they still retained their inner core of text. And sandwiched between Jean Cocteau’s
Diary of an Unknown
and Paul Valéry’s
Idée Fixe
is the three-volume Everyman edition of
Montaigne’s Essays
, translated by John Florio, given to me by John Harland for my fiftieth birthday, or the day after it rather, for he had mistaken the date. From one John to another – Harland to Kilfeather, he had written on the flyleaf.

And I wondered again about the circumstances in which John Harland had vanished so mysteriously how many years ago I cannot tell, circumstances of which I was able to piece together some fragments over those years without ever coming to a conclusion. One thing was sure: he left knowing he was to leave, and never told me a thing about it. I only found out some months later when I bumped into an old school acquaintance – I cannot say friend – who had risen to some eminence in the legal profession, let’s call him Holmes. We exchanged the usual pleasantries of two people who have not met for some time and would not care too much if they ever met again. I cannot remember how Harland’s name came up, I must have mentioned it for whatever reason, and Holmes said, Harland? Yes, we all miss him terribly, said Holmes, took us all by surprise. And as the conversation developed it transpired that Holmes had received a note from Harland the day before he vanished, a note which said, Urgent business, will be away for some time, and that was all, said Holmes. Of course he was rather eccentric, said Holmes, and I nodded, and that was that. I walked for some time not knowing where I was and when I came to I saw that I had come to the door of 14 Exchange Place, which door I had tried many times in the past without success, until I abandoned all hope of seeing John Harland again. I had lost the key.

I lift the three volumes of Montaigne from the shelf, books that had been touched by Harland’s hand. In my memory I undo a parcel of blue cartridge paper, not knowing what it might contain. Harland is looking at me and when he sees me smile he smiles too and it lights up the room. It is a very nice edition, 1928, the green cloth binding yellowed, more so now than then, with the passing of those years. I open a volume at random, and in The
Firste Booke
Chap. XXVII, ‘Of Friendship’, I happen on this reply given by Montaigne whenever he was asked why he so loved Steven de la Boitie: Because it was he, because it was myselfe.

Je est un autre

You have been here before, but only when you were someone else, said Gordon. As he spoke, the green wall lamps began to pulsate and the ambient music changed to a monotonous beeping. But hark! said Gordon, theatrically, lifting an index finger, the children of the night! And then, in a more soothing voice, Relax, my dear boy, merely our early warning system for one of those tiresome police raids, we get to know they’re coming a good half hour in advance. We have our people everywhere, in all walks of life. They wear the appropriate uniform or garb, they take on the gestures and the speech of those whom they represent. Judges, bankers, art dealers, bookmakers, et cetera. The police of course. We have our friends in Quai des Orfèvres. If the world is a stage, they are consummate actors, becoming that which they are perceived to be. Only at night do they become that which they perceive themselves to be. We could talk about this all night, said Gordon, but for now, we can talk for as long as it takes us to finish our drinks. Gordon raised his glass. Kilpatrick reciprocated. As for what Gordon said thereafter, Kilpatrick, when he came to summarize it the next morning in his notebook, would have put it something like this:

Gordon said that in our walk through life we change, footstep by footstep, as irrevocably we are drawn towards our destiny and are altered by the glance of others. We glimpse a face in a crowd we think we have seen before, déjà vu or not, and we are changed by that apparition. We make our way through the crammed tunnels of the Métro brushing against or avoiding each other, and our bodies are altered by those negotiations whether we know it or not. A pickpocket sidles through the carriage and unbeknownst to you relieves you of something that was yours, and when you look for it you believe it to be lost by some inexplicable negligence on your part, or else you see in retrospect the man standing opposite you swaying sympathetically, his face buried in the pages of
Le Monde
, you remember how the motion of the train brought you for a split second into the most delicate of contacts, and the man pardoned himself as did you, you would never have revisited that moment had you not fumbled in a pocket and then gone through all your pockets for that which no longer was there, patting hip and breast as if conducting a body search on a person who was you. Gordon said that all our turnings cannot be otherwise than what they were, when we look at them or at what we remember of them in retrospect. With hindsight. And hindsight blinds us to all the other possibilities, which are myriad, said Gordon. And we are not one but many, we are the sum of all we are to others whether dead or living, for the dead have preceded us in our journey, and they have mapped out its territory in advance.

There was more in this vein which Kilpatrick could not remember. They drank the last of the green spirit and left by a secret staircase as the police were entering by another. They emerged on an empty street in Paris. It was dawn and a pale moon hung in the sky. The black limousine was parked some fifty paces ahead of them, engine ticking over. As he walked towards it Kilpatrick thought his footsteps made no sound as they glided over the pavement, or else Gordon’s footsteps were so perfectly synchronized with his that both sounded as one. Odilon the chauffeur stood to attention holding open the cabin door of the vehicle. Kilpatrick boarded and Gordon followed him into the interior. Hôtel Chopin, said Gordon, Monsieur Kilpatrick will be tired after his long day. Had Kilpatrick told Gordon that he was staying at Hôtel Chopin? He could not remember. He sank into the long leather bench. Gordon? he said. Yes? said Gordon. You were about to tell me about John Bourne, said Kilpatrick. You are tired after your long day, said Gordon, we’ll do something better than that. I’ll bring you to see him tomorrow night. Would that suit your purpose? said Gordon. I regret I have another appointment tomorrow, said Kilpatrick. Ah yes, said Gordon, one of those unexpected invitations one sometimes receives when abroad. Surprise is one of the pleasures of travelling, is it not? But the night after tomorrow will be fine. Odilon will come to your hotel at seven o’clock and we’ll proceed from there. Would that suit? Kilpatrick nodded. Suddenly he felt very tired and he fell asleep to the swish of the limousine tyres along an empty boulevard.

As he remembered it, he dreamed he was sitting in the front row of a picture house, waiting for the picture to begin. The auditorium was empty but for him. He was wearing a dress suit, opera cape and top hat. As the art deco wall lamps along the red plush walls began to dim he realized that not only could he see with the eyes under the brim of his top hat, but with another, disembodied eye that had no definite location; rather, it seemed the interior of the auditorium was all eye, or all camera, and he could view himself as he would a character in a motion picture. The proscenium curtains were still drawn when the picture began, superimposed on the red velvet pleats for a few seconds before they rippled open with a swish that was audible over the soundtrack, the same eerie music he had heard in Les Caves des Changes. He was watching a documentary entitled
Les Structures Sonores
. The commentary was in French and he could follow most of it with the help of the subtitles, his eye flickering in rapid movements as it registered the text.
Les Structures Sonores
was the collective name of the two composers, the brothers … Kilpatrick could not remember their names when he woke but he knew from somewhere that Jean Cocteau had used
Les Structures Sonores
in his film
Le Testament d’Orphée
, or was it
Orphée
? In 1952 they reveal a new acoustic principle. They manage to amplify the internal vibration of metal and crystal. They make acoustic for a plurality of public. It is an ensemble of varying geometry. The sounds do not have the very precise frequency. For this reason, their combination is not organized according to their height but rather according to juxtaposition of tones. The rods, plates and strings are built on the amplification cones and rubbed, percussed or slided according to the non-verbal parameters. The elision and recurrence is another deliberation of technique. The structures are in many harmonies as you see in origami of metal. Kilpatrick saw on the screen a multitude of convoluted, multicoloured tubes and overlapping metal plates, shifting and swaying kaleidoscopically, somehow taking on the appearance of a tropical landscape in which the sound of rainfall on leaves and of waterfalls plunging into chasms mingled with the music, and he realized, when he came to write it down, that there were colours and shapes and sounds for which there is no language. He found himself in another terrain. He was struggling up a steep mountain path, carrying a heavy briefcase. He was out of breath and he wondered if he had forgotten to take his medication that morning. He stopped to rest. He took out his watch and looked at it. He rested for one minute as timed on his watch. He opened the briefcase and took out a passport and a pair of spectacles. He put the spectacles on and looked at the passport, and realized he was the man in the picture. A gunshot rang out.