There was another reason: a surfeit of heroism. Too many exemplary demises, milk-fed and arum-scented, too many equable departures for glory. Nine out of ten people died peacefully. Did no one die kicking and screaming any more, cursing God and the sawbones? They all seemed to struggle with such good grace against cruel misfortune. One miserable death acknowledged, one long season of pointless suffering faced with bitterness and resentment, would have been a breath of fresh air.
*
In later years, the death notices became so consumed by corrigenda that I was able to venture back into that territory from time to time. The rot reached such unnatural proportions that it began to subvert the purpose of the service itself, and the whole enterprise acquired the tone of a macabre joke. One could imagine the unhappy surprise of those left behind when they came to clip their remembrances.
Maggots, death notices: Till we meat again … Our heart felt thanks … Safe in God’s cave … The father figure of refrigerator services … Pissed away after a long illness …
*
Spilkin and I began to meet at the Café nearly every day, circumstances permitting. Before making his acquaintance, I had fallen into the habit of arriving in the mid-afternoon, to pre-empt the stream of after-work regulars and improve my chances of securing my favourite table (I had not been pushy enough to ask Mrs Mavrokordatos to reserve it for me); now I found, by empirical experiment, that no matter how early I arrived, Spilkin had beaten me to it, and no matter how late I left, Spilkin would outstay me. On the single occasion that I stayed till midnight and the closing, he contrived to dawdle so that he would be the last through the door. All his waking hours were passed at the Europa. He took lunch and supper there — outlandish platters of moussaka and shish kebabs, spaghetti Bolognese and Vienna schnitzel, Strammer Maxes and Croque Monsieurs. In those days, my own eating habits were more conservative than they are today, and in any event, dining out constantly was beyond my means. I deduced that Spilkin was rather better off than myself — no doubt there is money to be made in spectacles and prudent investment. Why he should have such an antipathy to being in his own home, I do not know. He had a room in the Flamingo, a residential hotel in Edith Cavell Street, but I never set foot in it. The laws of propriety, which propriety prevented us from ever discussing, had declared our private lives, the lives we led once we left the Café, strictly out of bounds.
As I’ve said, I was on comfortably proper terms with Mrs Mavrokordatos, although our relationship was not without its personal touches. She had begun to take in the Star, for instance, and kept it behind the counter in its own binder so that I should have first crack at it. But with Spilkin she behaved differently, almost as if she were his housekeeper or, their ages notwithstanding, his mother. She was always plying him with complimentary titbits — Italian kisses (as I believe they’re called), almond-flavoured amaretti sprinkled with angelica, oily dolmades, little tumblers of resinous retsina.
Once I said to her: ‘You should charge him rent for that chair.’
And he piped up: ‘She should pay me for sitting here. Thanks to me, she can say in all honesty that this place is never empty.’ There were always people coming and going, men mainly, clustering around tables where card games were in progress, drifting off into corners for quieter conversations, talking over their shoulders to ‘contacts’ at the next table, hailing newcomers by sending up smoke signals from their cigars. The recent arrivals from abroad spoke more loudly than the others, and offered cigarettes from garishly coloured packets, which were inhaled like the fair weather of home. Those who were leaving looked distant and bored, and wore too much gold jewellery. They came and they went. But Spilkin was a fixture.
‘There are limits — or there should be,’ I said. ‘No offence, Mrs Mavrokordatos, you know how fond I am of this establishment, but I’m beginning to think that Spilkin here is an extremist, beneath his moderate exterior.’
I resisted the urge to follow his example, to seek out company earlier in the day, to pop in at all hours. I have never been the sort of person who pops in anywhere. I could no more pop in than I could knock about or toddle along. It’s not my way. I disciplined myself to leave my flat no earlier than three in the afternoon and to return at a decent hour. Routine is the foundation of happiness. A proofreader needs a clear head and a sharp eye. All my life it had been lights out at ten on the dot, and I saw no reason to make rash changes now. My routine gave me more than enough time for doing the crossword, reading the newspaper, writing the odd letter to the editor, conversing with my friend, and of course working on my System of Records, the meaty main course for which all these other activities were mere appetizers. In this way, several satisfying months went by.
Spilkin was a ladies’ man. Did I mind, he enquired one day, if Mevrouw Bonsma joined us, just this once?
‘Mevrouw’ because it did not seem right to call her ‘Bonsma’, in accordance with our usual practice — the house style, as I thought of it — and because Spilkin had got it into his head that she was Dutch. He said he could not look at her without being reminded of poffertjes (which turned out to be sugar-coated fritters, much eaten in the Low Countries). For my part, I found that she put me in mind of windswept dykes and wheels of cheese. But I went along with his suggestion. I am not easily swayed, but I was perhaps a little too much under his influence at the time.
‘Tell us about Rotterdam,’ said Spilkin, ‘and your triumphs as a soloist with the Philharmonic.’
Mevrouw Bonsma disengaged her long teeth with a click and patted his arm with a hand as red and square as a stevedore’s (it is with pianists as it is with surgeons and cardsharps). ‘You know very well, Spilkijn,’ — he had introduced himself thus and she seemed to think it was a diminutive — ‘that I was born and bred in Rustenburg.’ Despite all her efforts to modulate it and make it lilt, her voice hissed and crackled like an old gramophone record.
‘A lady of your accomplishments? Impossible.’
‘I am just a farm girl at heart. Sincerely, I have never even been in an aeroplane.’
‘Mevrouw!’ Pursing his lips, giving the exotic diphthong the shape of a grape, then swallowing it whole like a tickled schoolboy. If he made ‘Mevrouw Bonsma’ sound as sweet and juicy as a fruit, she made ‘Spilkin’ into an acute little instrument for winkling the stubborn flesh from its shell. Bodkin, kilderkin, cannikin, sooterkin. Was it my imagination or was there a trace of a Dutch accent like a dusting of cinnamon on her flat vowels? Perhaps she was putting it on, under suggestion.
The banter continued while she powdered her face. Pancake, she explained, for the lights. Light, actually: a sixty-watt globe in a bluebell shade, dipping its head over the keyboard. ‘Once an artiste, always an artiste. But I have no illusions, life has stripped me of them, one by one. People used to sit up and take notice when I played. Now I am ‘‘background music’’, that’s all.’ The skin of her neck had the texture of crêpe. She enamelled her lips and went bravely back to work.
‘So, what do you think?’
I had had the opportunity to examine Mevrouw Bonsma closely over the months, but I had not drawn many conclusions from the exercise. She was highly strung, but that was fitting. And she thought too much about what other people thought of her. Taking pride in one’s appearance is nothing less than good manners, but she was overly concerned with trifles. An occupational hazard, perhaps. While one of her raw-boned hands bickered away at the keys, the other was always wandering to the nape of her neck, fumbling for a label, checking whether her jersey was on the right way round. I saw that she did not have the feet of a pianist either. Her big plates of meat, tilted on the wineglass heels of slippers made of silver chain-mail, pumped the pedals, while her hands rolled over the keys, setting up a pale vibrato in the flesh of her upper arms. She looked like a navvy driving some shiny piece of earth-moving equipment. Five-letter word: spade. Or: piano. Incongruously, the music itself was a soft, insistent outpouring, like drizzle on the roof, or the tinkling of a wind-chime, to which one grows so accustomed, one only hears it when it falls silent. ‘A charming woman.’