So I made another of the predestined steps in my life. Schwillen was inevitable and so was meeting them. It was my first morning in Schwillen that it happened and I'd drunk a little, not too much, and was feeling just about right. I climbed a little bluff over the lake where there was a monument to some Lithuanians. There was a park and a castle and green-painted chairs to sit on. So I sat. I remember contemplating with some pleasure the fun it would be to have an aristocracy all named after cheeses and contrariwise. Le gratin indeed! Then I became aware of a large figure standing between me and the sun.
"Wilfred Barclay, sir? Wilf?"
"Good God."
"If I might—"
He was huge—really huge. Or perhaps I had shrunk.
"I can't stop you sitting down, can I?"
"It's really great to see you!"
"How are my dependent clauses?"
"I ought to explain, Wilf—"
"Don't bother. Go away and teach."
"Sabbatical, Wilf. Every seven years."
"So long? It seems only yesterday."
"Seven years, Wilf, sir."
"You served seven years for Leah. Her eyes will be weak."
"No, sir. She's Mary Lou. I guess you don't know her. There."
I looked where his eyes showed me. A girl was just stepping on to the gravel patch where we were sitting. She was very young, twenty, I thought. She had a pale face and dark, cloudy hair. She was slim as a cigarette.
"Mary Lou, look who's here!"
"Mr Barclay?"
"Wilfred Barclay."
"Mary Lou Tucker."
Rick gazed down at her proudly and fondly.
"She's a real fan, Wilf."
"Oh, Mr Barclay—'
"Wilf, please. Rick, you lucky young devil!"
I shed forty years in a flash. Correction: I felt as if I had shed forty years. Rick was my friend. They were both my friends, this one in particular.
"Felicitations, Mary Lou!"
Somehow it was obvious they were just married, or if not "just", why, she looked like that, all grace and glow! I took her by the shoulders and kissed her. I don't know what she thought of the Swiss wine—D?le—that I'd been drinking as early in the morning as that. I thrust her away, examined her from low, pale brow to delicate throat. Her cheeks had mantled. That was the only word and before you could repeat it her cheeks had paled and mantled all over again. Everything inside was at the surface in a flash; but then, it hadn't far to go.
"Late felicitations, Mary Lou. Husband and wife is one flesh, and since I can't kiss Rick—"
Tucker gave a yelp of laughter.
"—you take it out on Mary Lou! Hold it right there!'
A minute camera flicked into his right hand from his sleeve with the dazzling speed of a stiletto. The pic must be about in some drawer or other, perhaps in the library at Astrakhan, Nebraska. There'll be Mary Lou, her beauty dulled by the instant record, there'll be my scraggy yellow-white beard, yellow-white thatch and broken-toothed grin. The camera cannot have caught her warmth and softness. It was what you might call a close encounter of the second kind, no image of a girl but the pliant, perfumed, actual—I was not used to it and put very far off my guard. A wave of feeling pulsed up my right arm from the thin covering over her waist. My ageing heart missed a beat and syncopated a few others. She was perfect as a hedge rose.
"Wilf, you and Mary Lou should have a beautiful relationship. After all she majored—"
Mary Lou broke in.
"Now, hon, we don't have to—"
But he was gazing down earnestly into my face.
"God, Wilf, Elizabeth is a dear person and I was truly sorry."
"Oh, Mr Barclay—"
"Wilf, please. Try saying 'Wilf'."
"I don't think I can!"
"Yes, do, do. Go on, just say it!"
"No, I, I can't—"
We were all laughing and talking at once. Rick threatened to beat her if she didn't, and I was saying I don't know what, and she was laughing beautifully and saying that, no, she couldn't, and—
"Oh, Mr Barclay, that quaint old house!"
Believe it or not, I never noticed. It was only later that I realized that my sometime quaint old house was where they had just come from. When we had done our silly laughter and paused, it was as if in expectation of some second act.
"Here. Why don't we sit down?"
There was a bench seat. I sat in the middle. Rick sat on my left, Mary Lou sat down somewhat gingerly on my right.
"Wilf," said Rick ponderously, "I have to ask a question."
"Not about books, for God's sake."
"No, no, but— Well, I suppose you're alone?"
"No constant companion. No just good friend. No seen constantly in the company of. D'you know, Mary Lou? I'm sixty!"
I paused, rather expecting Many Lou to be surprised. After all, I was rather surprised myself. But she nodded solemnly.
"I know."
Rick leaned towards me.
"And you're writing, Wilf?"
A touch of the old irritation came back. I grunted. Rick nodded.
"That kind of trauma."
"Good God, man, it's years and years—unless you're talking about my … my Italian connection."
"All the same—"
"Complete change of life style. Fancy-free. Can make a pass at any girl in sight with no one to say me nay but the girl."
Mary Lou moved slightly along the bench. I had, after all, breathed in her face. I expect her mother had told her you can never be sure with men. Well. You can't.
Rick was laughing with a touch of the locker room.
"I'll bet they don't!"
"Wanna bet?"
"Not on my salary, Wilf. An assistant professor—"
"Assistant? But weren't you full?"
"Honestly, Wilf—"
"It may well be on your letter, somewhere in that quaint old house, nailed in a tea chest: '—of the Department of English and Allied Studies, University of Astrakhan, Nebraska'. I remember it so clearly because it led straight on to that night."
"Wilf. I'd sooner not."
His voice faded, as it had faded in Seville. Mary Lou was sitting very tall and looking straight ahead. She swallowed—a lovely movement of the throat, Eve's Apple. She spoke without turning her head.
"Remember, hon. Cross your heart."
"But, hon—"
"You best tell Mr Barclay, hon. You'll never rest quiet else."
"What is this, you two? Something I don't know about?"
"Mr Barclay. He wasn't a professor as of that date. He was a postgraduate student and he borrowed the fare off'n his mom to come to you in vacation."
"I was desperate, Wilf. You were my, my—"
"Assignment?"
"Special subject. It's official, Wilf."
"Only remember, Mr Barclay, she was a really wicked person. Rick's told me about her."
"About who?"
"Ella. I'm glad you've told him you weren't a professor then, hon."
"I'm glad too, hon. So now I've told you, Wilf—"
"Mary Lou told me. Husband and wife—"
But Rick was staring across at Mary Lou with an expression of less than perfect devotion.
"—and I have tenure and I am an assistant professor and I have a kind of sabbatical."
"And I know you'll feel better now, hon. Now you can go on like you begun, hon. It's best. Always."
The sun was bright behind the trees, the leaves showering their shadows across the gravel. Every tiny wave sparkled on the lake. It all made me laugh.
"I'd quite forgotten what it's like to talk in—well, our mid-Atlantic lingo!"
I slid my arm along the back of the seat.
"So much for Rick's confession, Mary Lou. How about you? Anything to declare?"
"Well, no, I guess not."
She moved slightly away from me again.
"But you mustn't go!"
"It's not that, Wilf. She doesn't want to impose. She knows how generous you are. I've told her."
"That's right," I said out of my fatuity. "What's it to be, Mary Lou? The crown jewels or a moon rock?"
Mary Lou slid right off the end of the bench. It was deftly done for she rose to her feet, dusting off her calf-length skirt as she did so.
"I'll get back, hon. You two have so much to talk about."
She went very quickly and a cold wind poured down the slope behind the bluff and dulled the lake to pewter. Somehow it brought the dustbin back to mind.
"Rick. You are a con man. Nothing but. My congratulations. It's far more interesting than scholarship."
"I was meaning to tell you, Wilf. I was going to be a professor. I knew that."
"Con men know they're going to be rich."
"But I knew!"
"Hell, what's a professor anyway? When I was young I thought a professor amounted to something. They're no better than writers. I eat 'em for breakfast. Taste different, that's all."
"Critics, Wilf! They make or break!"
"But what about John Crowe Ransom? From your letter I got the impression he was a real buddy. Did you tell him you were a professor?"
Rick's face went from scarlet to puce. Since I was looking sideways at him, I now saw from a new angle a curious bit of his individual body language. I'd seen it years before when he came to the house, bashfully determined to beard me in a lair rumoured to be dangerous. Later I'd seen it at that conference. I'd thought then it was some sort of illusion, I don't know why, that drawing back of the chin into the neck, that look up under lowered brows. But no. When embarrassed Rick really did draw back the bottom half of his face, project a forehead supposed to be, hoped to be, brazen and look up under his eyebrows like a crab from under a rock. He did it now and not even to me. It had become mechanical and he did it to the lake as if determined to be undaunted by that pewter sheet.
"Come on, Rick—out with it!"
"It began with a mistake by my—our—secretary in the office. Ella. I used to get letters addressed to Professor Tucker. It was the same for everybody, a sales pitch, flattery."
"So you took a leaf out of the commercial handbook. Bravo!"
"You'll never know what your work's meant to me."
"If anyone lets on what a con man you are, you'll be drummed out of the academic regiment."
"It was that goddammed girl. Me too, I have to say. I let it ride."
"You took a risk. Congratulations."
"Worth it, though. Her mistake earned me this, hopefully, intimacy, sitting here like this, side by side."
"How the hell else could we sit?"
"That girl, Wilf—" chin drawn back again, leaden waters fronted—"she liked me. She thought she was doing me a favour."
"And John Crowe Ransom?"
"I really forget, Wilf. I really do. We did meet."
Suddenly I saw that the waters were lifeless.
"What does it matter? I'm leaving tomorrow. Then Mary Lou'll be able to sit on this bench without falling off it."
There was a pause. Rick broke it.
"But you'll have dinner with us tonight?"
"All three of us?"
"Surely."
"Right. But you'll be my guests. Old man's privilege. The only one."
"Mary Lou's shy, Wilf. She always was. But she does know what a really warm person you are under that British exterior."
"And I thought I was international."
Rick stood up. He came out with one of his prepared statements.
"We've always thought of you, sir, as a really fine example of and credit to your Great Country."
He took himself off down the bluff after his wife. He left me there nodding solemnly like a porcelain mandarin and murmuring, Be wary of Mary, don't be a prick with Rick.
Then I added the loathsome words aloud.
"Hopefully in this encounter situation."
Quite quickly sanity returned to me. They had been to the "quaint old house". So this meeting was not accidental. They had wheedled my postes restantes out of Elizabeth, if not my agent. I was Rick's special subject. I was his raw material, the ore in his mine, his farm, his lobster pots.
But where was he getting the money to come in pursuit? Such things are expensive, as I knew from an early attempt to get some letters back.
I thought of this girl, Mary Lou, with the transparent face of that beauty which must surely be holy and wise. Not like the poor old padre!
"Born again perhaps."
The girl you meet every seven—no, every fourteen years, the one you meet, in fact, when it is all too late. I saw my sudden exhilaration for what it was, the symptom of my near-senility. I guessed how my breath must already stink of the morning's D?le. There might be much in this for Rick. There might be something in it for Mary Lou, opportunity to admire with distaste someone whose books she had read. But there could be nothing in it for me but fixation, frustration, folly and grief. I determined to sear this tiny bud of the future before it was in leaf. Let them chase someone else. There were authors enough to go round after all, authors by the thousand; and all with foreheads of such brass or lives of such impenetrable rectitude they could afford the deadliest of all poisons about themselves, the simple truth. Whereas I—
Seated on the green-painted bench I endured a shower of pics out of my past. I leapt up and hurried back to the hotel. I murmured to the manager that I was in need of solitude. Smoothly he recommended the Weisswald, an apron of skiing country held up to the sun and now deserted in the off-season. I should stay at the hotel Felsenblick. The others were clean, of course, but that was all. I nodded and nodded and paid my bill, packed, filled in my forwarding address as the Hotel Bung Ho, Hongkong, and stole away.
There was a vast garage at the foot of the Weisswald and then a rock railway slanting up the hideously vertical side of the mountain. I kept my eyes shut all the way up. My fear of heights is pathological, which is perhaps why I am fascinated by them. More than that, I wanted to save the view of the high places until I got on level ground and could admire them without feeling the compulsion to jump. A porter led me, my eyes watching my feet, to the hotel. The manager had a suite, no less, at a reduced price and its balcony overhung the cliff. He threw open the door and ushered me through.
"See!"
One side of the sitting-room was french windows, with the balcony outside them. Beyond that was five miles of empty air. The manager threw open the french windows and invited me to come outside. I stood close to the glass. The balcony felt firm enough.
"It is the best," said the manager, "really the best."
Had I been able to walk forward three paces, I could have spat down two thousand feet, had I been able to spit.
"It is for you. A good place for a writer."
"Who told you I am a writer?"
"My brother, the manager of the Schiff. The suite and the view is for you. Cheaply."
I was being shepherded from one family business to another. I cast a nervous glance at the 00-gauge railway that was laid out for children half a mile below, then concentrated on the nearer pot plants. On the balcony there was that white-painted iron table I had sat at in the Schiff, four white-painted chairs and a white-painted chaise-longue.
"My car will be safe? It was unlocked."
"The car, sir?"
"The garage."
"Both will be safe, locked or unlocked."
There was a pause. The view was changing minute by minute. A white line divided a black cliff below a mile-high iced cake.
"What is that?"
"Where, sir?"
"There."
"The Spurli. It is a waterfall. At the moment, with little snow left, it is a thread. It comes from that valley up there where our army conducted manoeuvres—"
"Up there? Impossible!"
"To tell you the truth, I was there. I do so each year. I am a major. Then—a word of necessary advice. I should not try to walk for a day or two."
"You mean I should acclimatize?"
"That is the English usage, is it not? Our American guests say 'Acclimate'."
"But I've been in the Zurich area."
The manager made a dismissive gesture, as if the difference between Zurich and the English Channel was too small to be noticed.
"Nevertheless, you are not in your first youth, Mr Barclay, and a day or two of rest is advisable."
"I shall remember."
"And with our view before you, we shall hope to be the source, not to say the inspiration, of some notable creation, sir. This is the bell. Our pleasure is to serve you."
The manager bowed himself out. I moved forward a little. I did not look down over the railing—a gesture for heroes. I pulled the chaise-longue as far from the railings as possible, wrapped myself in a vast duvet from the bedroom, stretched myself out and contemplated the view. It continued to change, to reveal further fantasies of rock or snow. It revealed slopes where there had apparently been caverns, turned the black cliff that had been a backdrop to the Spurli first to grey then brown. I lay, inviting nature to astonish me. It did so, moderately, as usual. For the manager was wrong, of course. I had been in too many places, had seen too many extravagances. In any case, marvellous views don't get writers or painters going. They just give them an excuse for doing nothing. If anything, a marvellous view gets in a writer's way. It engages him to it. So I watched, as peaks appeared beyond what I had thought was there and a nearer one proved to be a white cloud. But we have seen the set pieces, the Himalayas, the Andes, the Sahara, storms at sea, cloudless, moonless nights unpolluted by the glow from cities, we have seen underwater fantasies and rain forests—ha et cetera. What a writer needs is a brick wall, rendered if possible, so that he can't see through it into a landscape suggested by the surface. I saw this would be another wasted week.
Nevertheless, thinking these thoughts and drinking more D?le, I watched a bit of Switzerland for hours on end. Was I, I asked myself, a romantic after all? I did not think so. The thing led nowhere, the pleasure was an end in itself, brought forth no lofty or spiritual thoughts. It was the higher hedonism, a man becoming his own eyes. Late in the afternoon the D?le and the hyperoxygenated air did their work and I fell asleep.
I awoke with the sun lowering itself round the westward limit of the balcony. My head seemed clear of D?le despite the empty bottle. Was it the view? I played with the childish idea of adding a verse to Shelley's poem, this time celebrating the mountains as a cure for gueule-de-bois, like Chartres cathedral. With that thought my trancelike emptiness before Mother Nature filled with desire for a drink. I unwrapped from my duvet, visited the bathroom and went in search of the bar which was conveniently to hand. I wished to punish myself for the D?le and ordered a hideous concoction of my own which contains, among other things, Alka-Seltzer and Fernet Branca. In appearance it resembles diarrhoea. Even the manager, doubling now as barman, was appalled. Nor did he understand my remark that I was punishing a bottle of D?le but he accepted it and did as he was bid. I was flagellating my palate with my nasty drink, congratulating myself on my direct appreciation of natural beauty and celebrating my escape from the dangers of emotionalism into steady peace when a tall and massive figure stood at my shoulder.
