thing to say to you is that we’ll ask no questions. You’re among friends here. We’ll ask nothing other than that you don’t play loud music in your room, that you smoke only tobacco, and that you eat only in your room and not in the dining hall, and only off your plate and not off your lap or bed sheets. Of course if you choose to become a member and pay your subscriptions you can eat with us in the dining hall.’
Rickard was taken to the other side of the building, and an elevator. The elevator was of a corporate 1980s design – Nefertiti’s breast cups blinkered bulbs in its corners. It took them to an attic floor where Rickard’s bedroom was. The bedroom was plain – bare dark floorboards; yellow walls on which was hung a framed picture of ‘the 18th at Valhalla Golf Club’ – and partly dirty. The bed, a double sleigh, at least looked comfortable. A bedside locker, a desk, a tall walnut wardrobe and some chipboard bookshelves completed the furnishings. The shelves were scattered with books on business: ‘how-to’s and biographies and annual reports. A porthole in the slanted ceiling was filled with distorting glass.
President Paulus leaned against the door jamb with crossed arms, looking as if he had not seen the room in a long time. Embarrassment, disdain and contrition expressed themselves in a cluster of dimples on his chin.
‘Home for however long you require. But with any luck you’ll be self-sufficient again soon. Until then you’ll receive our stipend. You’ll need to leave your bank details with Jon our treasurer. And while you’re under our roof, please enjoy our amenities. We have a library, a billiards and card room, and a racquet court which I’m afraid these days is used only for storage. We also have a small pro golf shop.’
Rickard settled for now on the drawing room. The room was hot as he entered, and he felt his face flush. A fire blazed in the grate. Set as it was into a gigantic tableau carved from green-grey soapstone, the fireplace resembled the centrepiece of a tall satanic grotto. At first glance the tableau seemed to be an oppressive mass of ribs, roots and boils, as if made of continually melting and solidifying wax. As Rickard’s eyes adjusted he picked out the details: foliage, weaponry, fauns, sheep-people, Korean farmhands, men from Europe. It was an attempt to represent the legend of Cha Bum Kun. Here were the gryphons and dragons of his childhood; there was the Moon Baby that brought him dairy produce from the West. It was a random and confused scene, and therefore a good representation of the story. Nobody was sure of the details of the story of Cha Bum Kun or in which order the details came. Nobody knew, either, what Cha Bum Kun’s message was, or even if he had had a message, or what lessons could be drawn from his life, or even if he had ever lived. In truth, Cha Bum Kun was not a figure that was taken very seriously. It meant that the Cha Bum Kun Club had no rituals – the tie business aside, and despite the vocabulary around its workings – and no ethos. It was, and always had been, just a club where men from all over the world could meet each other in its lodges, make useful connections, relax and play games. Usually these men were of such a disposition – meek, or odd – that they found it hard to get on in the world despite significant financial means. (And, usually, they were of significant financial means.)
There was just a single free chair in the room. It was so positioned that Rickard could not help but face two men. One of these men was bald on top, perfectly round-headed, and had an underbite. A pad of spittle had collected at a corner of his mouth. The other man had a full head of greasy white hair, long and pinned back behind the ears, and a face that tapered to the nose and lips like the blade of a Stone Age hatchet. They were snoozing, and easy to imagine dead.
Recently Rickard had been given to imagining that any elderly person he saw looked dead. Perhaps this was because the elderly were the easiest of all people to imagine dead: their corpses, in the main, would not look so different to the living versions of themselves. Something of the fear of death would disappear with this visualisation, although when he thought of his parents at home he saw them face down on the floor beside each other and hollowed out and grey like hot-counter chickens. But this bald old man would not be quickly corruptible. He would remain apple-cheeked and full in the mouth – no collapse in support behind the lips. Rickard imagined him too in a giant glass tube, in a bubbling rose-coloured liquid.
The other man – the flint-hatchet one, rigid in his chair, one hand loosely holding the other – would find the transition to corpsehood traumatic. His face was whittled, Rickard decided; had an eaten quality, been blasted, from having seen too much. He had uncanny foresight. Or, rather, uncanny experience: he knew, somehow, the advancing horrors. In the first moments of death the microbes would swiftly – and not for the first time – get to work; the tissue in the face would subside ply on ply and the hard edges above would harden further.
But even haunted by death there was something elevating about this man. He would be long and limber and heroic and become one with the relief carving in his likeness on the lid of his tomb. The tomb would be made of alabaster and in the dark it would glow. And in death the other man too – there would be something grand and glorious. This man as a crusader at rest, and that man at peace in his bubbling tube: and now the tableau behind glistened and quivered. Rickard saw in its details other creation stories; he thought of Romulus and Remus, Europa, and of the Milesians. He saw in it too evolution: the squirming tissue oozing more of itself, regulated by an electronic pulsar; but in the embers something seasoning – a glimpse of another world, arcane and outlasting, beyond bosses or bailiffs.
The heat of the fire had lulled him to sleep – a thump of the heart brought him back to life. He saw the bald man taking him in with querulous rousing eyes. The other man fully awake. The fire roaring again with fresh fuel.
‘New blood?’ said the bald man, with a discernibly Irish accent.
Rickard was afraid to open his mouth. It would give him away and then they would be off on that predictable old track talking about the same old bull.
The other man looked him gently up and down, and said, also with an Irish accent, but Americanised, and slightly lispy and high, ‘Sure leave him be, Denny. He’s only settling in. You’re very welcome anyhow. I’m Clive Sullis. Your friend here is Denny Kennedy-Logan.’
‘He’s not normally so forward and confident,’ said the first man, Denny, leaning now with ladsy familiarity towards Rickard. ‘The club makes him feel very secure. In the street he’s a lamb.’
Well, he would have to be out with it. He told the men his name – established that Denny was from Dublin, Clive from south Donegal (‘though I went off to Dublin as soon as I could escape’). Both had been in New York a long time.
‘And so they’ve given you that attic room, aye?’ said Denny. ‘They gave me that room when I first came here. But they boot you out once you find your way again. I wonder if they’ll ever give it back to me. What do you think you’ll do with yourself here in this city?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Rickard. ‘Perhaps I’ll stay with the newspapers.’
‘You look like a print-room boy, all right. Do you know about the hierarchy of aprons? You won’t get anywhere in that game unless you have the right length of apron.’
‘But,’ Rickard cut back in, ‘I’ve a bit of an old hankering to become a singer, that’s what I’ve set my sights on.’
‘Nothing in that game either. I knew a “rock and roller” in Dublin called Pádraigín O’Clock. You’ve never heard of him because he never amounted to anything.’
‘I don’t want to be a rock-and-roll singer, sir. I want to be a tenor.’
‘A tenor!’ Denny guffawed, clapping his hands together as a log exploded in the grate and hissed in its half-life. ‘Clive, would you listen to this! And how is your voice?’
‘Untested. Untrained,’ said Rickard. ‘But it’s all there, I think.’
‘You must try and coax it out so. Have you thought about getting lessons?’
‘Yes, this eventually would have been the plan.’
Denny sat back into his seat and turned to his companion. ‘Well, Clive, what do you think?’
Clive,