Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess Page A

with her. I loathe myself, I could kill myself, the guilt I feel is shocking.’
    The day before I got this letter I received a telegram from Roper. It said: ‘ DESTROY LETTER WITHOUT READING PLEASE PLEASE WILL WRITE EXPLAINING .’ He never did write explaining. What he did instead was to expiate his fancied wrong to the woman shrieking for more in the moonlight. Girl rather than woman. Brigitte must have been very young at that time.
4
    It was a long time, time enough to forget Uncle Otto’s smoked salmon and coffined ham and his niece’s unpleasantness, before Roper and I met again. When we did meet again, he was, overfulfilling his wife’s prophecy, a
real
doctor, not just, like horrible dead Goebbels, a man with a first degree. He rang me up at home,very breathy and very close to the telephone, as though it were an erogenous zone of Brigitte’s. Urgent, he said. He needed advice, help. I could guess what it was going to be.
Wieder wieder wieder
.
Ach
, the lovely bloody
Mondschein
. I suggested a Soho restaurant the following evening. A German restaurant, since he liked German things so much. There Doctor Roper, white hope of research in cheap rocket fuel, got very drunk on sparkling hock and moaned and whined. His wife was playing away. And he loved her so much still, he said, and he’d given her everything any decent woman could – ‘What exactly has happened?’ There was a vinous touch of satisfaction in my voice; I could hear it and it was hard to suppress.
    â€˜He was in the house one night when I got back late, a great red German lout, and he had his coat off and his shirt open, a big fair hairy chest, and he was drinking beer out of a can and he had his feet on the settee, and when I walked in he wasn’t one bit abashed but just grinned at me. And she grinned too.’
    Abashed. ‘Why didn’t you bash him and kick him out?’
    â€˜He’s a professional wrestler.’
    â€˜Oh.’ I had a swift vision of Roper on the ropes, neatly cat-cradled in them, a parcelled crucifixion. ‘How did all this start?’
    â€˜We took this house, you see, and it’s in a fairly slummy part of London, because houses are the very devil to get in London but –’
    â€˜You’ve been in London long?’
    â€˜Oh yes.’ He stared at me as though his coming to London had been headlined in the more reputable newspapers. ‘Hard to get, as I say, but the Department helped and we didn’t want a flat any more, and Brigitte said that she was to be an
Englische Dame
with stairs to go up and down –’
    â€˜Come to this wrestler.’
    â€˜We went into a pub for a drink, you see, in Islington it was, and then there was this big blond man talking bad English with a very strong German accent. She spoke to him, talking about
Heimweh
– that’s homesickness, she was homesick, you see, for somebody tospeak German to, and she found that he came from about thirty miles from Elmshorn. So that was it pretty well. He’s under contract to wrestle in England or something and he said he was lonely. A very big man and very strong.’
    â€˜Wrestlers usually are.’
    â€˜And very ugly. But we had him back for supper.’ Roper spoke as though ugliness would not normally get you an invitation. ‘And very – you know, absolutely no intelligence, with this big grin and his face all shiny.’
    â€˜That was after eating, I take it?’
    â€˜Oh no, all the time.’ Roper was growing as obtuse as his wife to the tones of irony or sarcasm. ‘But he did eat like a pig. Brigitte cut him more and more bread.’
    â€˜And she’s rather taken to him, has she?’
    Roper began to tremble. ‘Taken to him! That’s good, that is. I came home one night, late again, very tired, and you know what I found?’
    â€˜You tell me.’
    â€˜On the job.’ Roper’s voice rose. His hands