"Good-it's excellent again. Wait… before you go." Royal put down his fork. Casually, he asked, "Have you heard anything of him? Perhaps someone has seen him?"
Mrs Wilder shook her head, bored by this roundabout questioning. "Who…?"
"Your husband-Richard, I think he was called. Wilder."
Mrs Wilder stared down at Royal, shaking her head as if not recognizing him. Royal was certain that she had not only forgotten the identity of her husband, but of all men, including himself. To test this, he placed his hand on her thigh, feeling the strong muscle. Mrs Wilder stood passively with her tray, unaware of Royal fondling her, partly because she had been molested by so many men during the past months, but also because the sexual assault itself had ceased to have any meaning. When Royal slipped two of his fingers into her natal cleft she reacted, not by pushing his hand away, but by moving it to her waist and lightly holding it there as she would the straying hands of her children.
When she had gone, taking the portion of meat which Royal always left for her, he sat back at the long table. He was glad to see her go. Without asking him, Mrs Wilder had laundered his white jacket, washing out the bloodstains which Royal at one time had worn so proudly and which had given him, not merely his sense of authority, but his whole unstated role within the high-rise.
Had she done this deliberately, knowing that it would emasculate him? Royal could still remember the period of endless parties, when the apartment building had been lit up like a drunken liner. Royal had played the role of feudal chief to the hilt, presiding each evening over the council meetings held in his drawing-room. As they sat together in the candlelight, these neurosurgeons, senior academics and stockbrokers displayed all the talents for intrigue and survival exercised by years of service in industry, commerce and university life. For all the formal vocabulary of agendas and minutes, proposed and seconded motions, the verbal paraphernalia bequeathed by a hundred committee meetings, these were in effect tribal conferences. Here they discussed the latest ruses for obtaining food and women, for defending the upper floors against marauders, their plans for alliance and betrayal. Now the new order had emerged, in which all life within the high-rise revolved around three obsessions-security, food and sex.
Leaving the table, Royal picked up a silver candlestick and carried it to the window. All the lights in the high-rise were out. Two floors, the 40th and the 37th, were left with electric current, but they remained unlit. The darkness was more comforting, a place where real illusions might flourish.
Forty floors below, a car turned into the parking-lot and threaded its way through the maze of access lanes to its place two hundred yards from the building. The driver, wearing a flying-jacket and heavy boots, stepped out and hurried head-down towards the entrance. Royal guessed that this unknown man was probably the last resident to leave the building and set off for his office. Whoever he was, he had found a route to and from his apartment.
Somewhere on the roof, a dog whimpered. Far below, from the mouth of an apartment twenty storeys down the cliff face, there was a brief isolated scream-whether of pain, lust or rage no longer mattered. Royal waited, his heart starting to race. A moment later there was a second scream, a meaningless wail. These cries were the expressions of totally abstracted emotions, detached from the context of events around them.
Royal waited, expecting one of his retinue to enter and inform him of the probable reasons for these disturbances. Apart from the women in the next apartment, several of the younger male residents-a gallery owner from the 39th floor, and a successful hairdresser from the 38th-usually lounged about in the corridor among the garbage-sacks, leaning on their spears and keeping an eye on the staircase barricades.
Picking up his chromium cane, Royal left the dining-room, a single candle in its silver stick lighting his way. As he stumbled over the black plastic bags he wondered why they had never heaved them over the side. Presumably they held this rubbish to themselves less from fear of attracting the attention of the outside world than from a need to cling to their own, surround themselves with the mucilage of unfinished meals, bloody bandage scraps, broken bottles that once held the wine that made them drunk, all faintly visible through the semi-opaque plastic.
His apartment was empty, the high-ceilinged rooms deserted. Cautiously, Royal stepped into the corridor. The guard-post by the barricades was unmanned, and no lights gleamed through the doorway of the adjacent apartment where the women lived. Surprised by the absence of light from the usually busy kitchen, Royal walked through the darkened hallway. He kicked aside a child's toy and raised the candlestick above his head, trying to pick out any sleeping human figures in the surrounding rooms.
Open suitcases lay on the mattresses that covered the floor of the master-bedroom. Royal stood in the doorway, a medley of scents crowding around him in the darkness, brilliant wakes left behind them by these fleeing women. Hesitating for a moment, he reached into the room and switched on the light.
The instant electric glow, so unfamiliar after the wavering candlelight and twitching torch-beams, shone down on the six mattresses in the room. Half-packed suitcases lay on top of each other, as if the women had left at a moment's notice, or at some prearranged signal. Most of their clothes had been left behind, and he recognized the trouser-suit which Mrs Wilder had worn to serve his dinner. The racks of Anne's dresses and suits hung in the wardrobes like a store display.
The even light, as dead as a time exposure in a police photograph recording a crime, lay across these torn mattresses and discarded clothes, the wine-stains on the walls and the forgotten cosmetics on the floor at his feet.
As Royal stared down at them, he could hear a faint hooting noise from the darkened corridor, moving away from him as if emitted by these escaping women. This series of whoops and nasal grunts he had been listening to for days, trying without success to repress them from his mind. Switching off the light, he seized his cane firmly in both hands and left the apartment.
Standing outside the door, he listened to the distant sounds, almost an electronic parody of a child's crying. They moved through the apartments at the far end of the floor, metallic and remote, the sounds of the beasts of his private zoo.
15. The Evening's Entertainment
The evening deepened, and the apartment building withdrew into the darkness. As usual at this hour, the high-rise was silent, as if everyone in the huge building was passing through a border zone. On the roof the dogs whimpered to themselves. Royal blew out the candles in the dining-room and made his way up the steps to the penthouse. Reflecting the distant lights of the neighbouring high-rises, the chromium shafts of the callisthenics machine seemed to move up and down like columns of mercury, a complex device recording the shifting psychological levels of the residents below. As Royal stepped on to the roof the darkness was lit by the white forms of hundreds of birds. Their wings flared in the dark air as they struggled to find a perch on the crowded elevator heads and balustrades.
Royal waited until they surrounded him, steering their beaks away from his legs with his stick. He felt himself becoming calm again. If the women and the other members of his dwindling entourage had decided to leave him, so much the better. Here in the darkness among the birds, listening to them swoop and cry, the dogs whimpering in the children's sculpture-garden, he felt most at home. He was convinced more than ever that the birds were attracted here by his own presence.