I have since learnt that Loussiere, unless forced by circumstances to eat a morsel, dislikes consuming food in front of other people.
All those years ago my father had woken me by shaking a few flecks of the snow from his hat onto my face. I was only eight years old, the year was 1919. He had just returned from a trip to the Continent. Back then my glorious father had a bright smile and brighter eyes.
He was a tall man, healthy, remarkably so given his experiences during the war. He had not been able to resist waking me even before removing his heavy, black astrakhan topcoat. It was nine o’clock in the evening on a school day. I had missed him a great deal having not seen him for two whole weeks, which when you are only eight years old and you love your father fit to burst is a very long time indeed.
First he told me of his experiences in Paris, and then in Zurich where the main thrust of his business had taken him.
“Sometimes, in France, you can pretend that the war had never happened and at other times, when you see the men who came back,” he drifted a little and to bring himself back. He went to light his pipe but remembered where he was and pocketed it before my mother caught the odour and came to interrupt us, “but that’s beside the point. The point is that I met Msr Loussiere once again.”
Msr Loussiere had been to our house in Hampshire once, when I was seven years old and ill with the measles. I was on death’s door according to my mother, although my aunts explained that I was a far too robust for that . Msr Loussiere was a short, thin man, with a heavy accent that I had a great deal of trouble understanding in the five terrifying minutes that I was in his company.
Short he may have been but when he looked down on me as I lay in my bed, he seemed to fill the entire room, blacking out all possible light except that which came from his own eyes. The other thing that struck me about him in my feverish state was that he seemed to have no smell at all. Everybody I knew had their own signature pungency. Nanny Maykins smelt of milk, my father smelt of his pipe, my mother of her perfumes, but Msr Loussiere smelled of nothing whatsoever. I felt that he must somehow be withholding his own essence from those around him.
He was another businessman, like my father, and like my father, the nature of his business was varied and too complicated to explain. Unlike my father Loussiere didn’t smile even when he made what to anybody else must have been a small joke about changing my spots. He merely said the words and lifted his head slightly away, moving his gaze from my chest.
“Mr Sanborn, your son reminds me very much of my own when he was a young boy,” he told my father. Msr Loussiere leant over me once again breathing his odourless and very cold breath on me, “take care of your little Anthony, take care, he is very precious indeed.
“As you know Mr Sanborn, my petit Henri did not return from the war, which can never be forgiven,” he leant lower and placed his icy lips on my forehead with a brief kiss that lasted for all of my life. Then I could smell him and I retched. It was as if he had decided to release himself just to me. It was the smell of everything that had ever been in the world, everything that was now dead. It was dark, weeping and without hope and it froze me, my temperature dropped sharply almost freezing the perspiration all over my body.
As he lifted his head away from mine I was able, not that I wanted to, to look closely at his face. Unlike my father, or my uncle, there were no lines on his face, no signs that his skin had any memory of the years he had lived in it. To compound this strangeness, while the hair on his head was dark, his moustaches, eyebrows and lashes were almost invisible. His lips were thin. His nose was sharp. When he talked, that mouth appeared not to open but merely to undulate along a left-right line. This meant that I only caught a brief glimpse of his white teeth. Worst of all, worse than the doll-like quality of his unmarked skin, worse than the fairy-like blondness of his hair, and worse than that slit of a mouth were his eyes.
In the various documents I have read on my seemingly eternal travels (maybe to discover some truth, maybe to forget one) that the eyes of a monster are always the feature that tells its truth, that reveal it for what it is; and I find this to be correct, in fact as in fiction. I find it difficult even now, many years after my first meeting with Msr Loussiere, hidden as I am in my appalling apartment in the vilest part of Tunis to describe the eyes of that… man.
The irises of both eyes were shattered into small shards that floated in their own space. They were light blue, green and brown at any one time, staggeringly so. Their lids were as thin as the membrane inside an eggshell or so it seems to me now, today. The contrast between pupil and iris was, however, the memory that most impressed itself upon me. The ever-changing nature of those irises was countered by the stagnant stillness of the black, fogged pupils. They were, in fact, fog-glazed in the way of the men and women I have seen a second after they’re final breath. Since my early childhood, I have learnt that the pupil should react to different conditions of the light, but Loussiere’s pupils then and on all our subsequent meetings never, ever changed.
I am digressing to my present state, which I pray is adjacent to my peaceful final end. I must take you back again to my father and to the true termination of my natural life.
My father explained that Loussiere had met him from the Dover-to-Calais ferry boat when it docked as the dawn marked out the skyline of that French port.
“He took me by the arm, hardly waiting for me to bid farewell to the acquaintances I had shared the channel crossing with, nor to collect my luggage and the documents that were to provide the central pillar of the entire engagement in Switzerland”
“We have no time to dawdle here Msr Sanborn, I have arranged for you to breakfast at a local hotel before we must board the train for Paris. You must explain to me what the London office has told you of our business together. I must know everything before we meet our contact in Zurich. Do you have the papers that I asked to be translated? Do you have them safe?” The diminutive man was animated in a manner that startled my father who was still trying to accustom himself to the solid feel of dry land.
They repaired to a small hotel near the docks, to a small, private anteroom, hidden by a curtain from the trades people and others preparing for the crossing to Dover. He ate a small breakfast of bread and good cheeses.
“Monsieur Loussiere did not join me, he merely sipped some warm water flavoured with an infusion of herbs that I took to be of a medicinal nature”, my father told me.
I have since learnt that Loussiere, unless forced by circumstances to eat a morsel, dislikes consuming food in front of other people.
My father continued, “Msr Loussiere took the portfolio of documents that my company had translated for him. He pawed over them, nodding his head rapidly, scratching his forehead until I was scared he might draw blood. Occasionally, to my embarrassment, he uttered blunt profanities against our lord in all his three forms and the virgin in her purity. I thought to intercede, to stem the flow of these intonations but decided that with a fortnight in each other’s close company, I was best keeping my peace. His immortal soul was his own business after all, Anthony”.
How right my father was, how innocent and how foolish of him. Damn him, damn my father, damn him and Lord save him because I am beyond salvation now.
My beloved father continued, “To my knowledge, the documents had been translated from some ancient language known only to a few academics and religious scholars. One of whom, a professor Carvell, lived a quiet subsistence on the Cathedral Close here in our own city. It was my task to approach the professor in an attempt to reveal the contents of the papers that had been delivered to our offices. Msr Loussiere himself had suggested that our London head office refer to this gentleman,” at this point in the story my dear mother entered the room and admonished father for keeping me late awake when there was school in the morning. As usual, papa looked sheepish and begged for a few more minutes which, as usual, my mother allowed us.
“Your mother is quite correct as usual Anthony, you must sleep if you are to be strong and learn. We must leave our story for tonight. But go to sleep as fast as you can so tomorrow will come quickly”, he paused and smiled. I smiled back and drifted into a beautiful rest.
The next morning I woke early, I was almost expecting to see my father still sitting at the end of my bed, the sun rising behind him, ready to continue with his tale. I was preparing to put on my slippers when I was gripped with a memory from the dream I must have had. I was an older man, older than my father even, and I was sitting on a tall stool, music was playing but it was not like any music that I had ever heard, in my right hand I held a drink of some kind, in my left I held my own beating heart.
As I dressed, I looked at myself in the mirror, I used to do that, and there I was, a bright, blond, healthy and intelligent eight year old boy called Anthony Sanborn, ready for whatever the world could present me with that, or any other day. I weep now when I think of that day, that vision of what I might have become had my father never brought that man into the house. That dreadful event that fills me now with unmentionable terror and unmanageable rage.
On arrival at the breakfast table, I found my father and mother rapt in conversation, close to each other, my father’s newspaper open on the table unnoticed and slightly coloured with marmalade. As I took my seat and bid them both good morning, they turned, unlocked their gaze from each other and turned their love to me.
“Good morning Anthony, you are looking pale, my boy,” my father looked at me seriously over his spectacles. He turned to my mother, “What do you think Natasha? Does young Anthony look a little pale to you this morning?” I waited for my mother’ inevitable nay-saying, this was a school day and I had much to attend to at my studies. Much to my surprise, instead my mother smiled and nodded at my father.
“Well then, the only thing for it is to rest and recuperate in front of the fire. Fortunately, I am not required in the office until Mr Morgan returns from Venice on Tuesday morning next. So it seems as if you will have some company for the entire day”. He proceeded to tuck into his breakfast, beckoning me to do the same, and so our family meal passed gently into memory.
I was left alone with my father and the continuation of the previous night’s story. We sat together in his study, a very rare treat indeed and one that made me feel quite grown up. I was propped up against some atlases, while he had pulled his chair over to the open window so that he could smoke his pipe without offending my lungs. The room was at once hot from the fire and cold from the winter wind that gusted in every few minutes.
“Well, Anthony, we boarded the Paris train at eight thirty and, having observed that our luggage was safe, we found our compartment and settled in for the journey. I made a half-hearted attempt to read the newspaper as we steamed through the beautiful French countryside which is similar to our own county”. I could see that he was going to begin a lecture on one of his favourite topics and shifted slightly in my seat. My dear father caught my drift, we understood. I miss him.
“Throughout the journey, despite a few polite attempts to begin a conversation, Msr Loussiere remained silent, immersed in the translated document. He looked up occasionally and I could see that he was, if not happy, then at least not discontented by his study. On one occasion he broke his interminable quiet to ask me if he had been making any involuntary statements or noises recognisable as words. He had not. Still it was disquieting to watch his face seemingly lit by the ancient glow from the words that had been lost to us for so many centuries.
“After half an hour or so, I could no longer even pretend to keep my eyes on the newspaper in front of me and I began to doze,” at this point in the story my father paused, took the pipe from his mouth, and I saw his hand was shaking. He roused himself and continued. I was later to learn from the journals I discovered when going over his effects, journals that he had hidden during the years that his illness ravaged and destroyed him, rotting him from his eyes into his brain, that during this doze my father had a glimpse of the world of the Msr Loussiere that I have come to know.
According to the journals, as my father had begun his doze, the train passed through a small village. As they passed he caught sight of a young man stumbling from one side of the single road to the other.
“It was not as if the youth was drunk,” wrote my father, “it was more like something I had seen before. The boy had his arms tucked in front of him so that his two fists were pressed to his chest, his head was bent and he was running from one side of the road to the other. The train driver sounded his whistle, and the poor young man flung himself to the ground. It was then that I realised that I had seen many hundreds of men running in this way during the war, running to avoid being cut down, running from death. I could only assume that this poor chap was shell-shocked in the most extreme manner possible. In my dream, and I must suppose I must have been dreaming, for any other explanation would surely be a sign of insanity, a voice spoke to me. I took pride in my ability with languages before my memory was washed away and replaced with dread. The words that came to me in my dream were not English but nor were they any other of the languages I knew or had ever heard, yet I still understood them! And I was transfixed in horror that outstrips and outweighs any that I felt in battle.
‘Your world is a mess. Trash. Slow, false, baseless, shallow, slimy with good intentions, glistening with good deeds, full of remorse, guilt, puerility, fear and contempt. Your world is dripping in blood, clad in gore that will inevitably consume you and the like of you. There is no innocence now, they have murdered innocence. There is damage and disconnection, whining, keening, harping; vile choirs of self-satisfaction singing choruses of charmless ageing hymns, the words of which are carved, meaningless into the corpses of the young dead. You have made your world my world. You are smiling, bewildered, hopelessly hopeful cretins. My world is brimming with tears, empty of spirit, closed to sympathy and arid of love.’
“The voice rose in pitch to an unbearable tone, like a million cracked bells chiming together, at once. Like a billion children screaming on a battlefield. Like the Heavenly Armies weeping in defeat”, wrote my poor father. As I read those pages I cried as I had on the day of his passing.
‘Our sons are dead. Our beautiful sons. Our little boys are dead. Our futures are dead. Without reason, without thought and without any chance of choice. You will atone for this. You too will sacrifice a life as we sacrificed lives. Only when this happens will my world leave your world. I will ensure this. I will complete this if necessary. I will never leave your side until it is done.’
“When I woke, Msr Loussiere was looking at me with a wry smile and a glass of red wine in his hand”.
“We are close to Paris, Msr Sanborn, let us toast the new day and our new business together. Then, a change of clothes at the hotel, followed by a meal for you at Le Gout restaurant and then…” he drifted off before regaining himself. “So, you see very soon you will be returned to the bosom of your family, and I must come and visit once again, I really must”.
My father took my hands in his and I could see in his eyes that he was terrified.
“It is only when I returned and saw you last night, Anthony, that I remembered that dream on the train. Msr Loussiere is visiting us today, in just a few hours. He is coming. He is coming here. And you cannot be here when he arrives. You cannot. You will not. Now, go to your mother and tell her to take you to town, give her this money. Tell her to buy you a picture book or whatever will make you happy my darling boy, go now and go quickly. Tell your mother that when she returns, that she will need to ask Jones to visit me in my study before she looks in”.
Then he picked me up and kissed my cheeks.
Mother and I visited the town. When we returned, she sent Jones, our butler, to tell my father when it was time for supper. It was Jones who discovered my father sitting in the high-backed chair in his study, his service revolver hanging from his hand by his side. He had shot that revolver into his heart. He looked, Jones told the inquest, at peace.
I keep a transcript of the inquest and read it often as I get older and older. It is this document above all others that I have read that has been the chart of my life. The anger, pain and sadness I derive from it constantly draws me to Loussiere.
I have my father’s suicide service revolver with me tonight. I have tracked Loussiere to Manchester. I will be seeing him tonight. He will deny all knowledge of my father. That doesn’t matter.
