Piranesi(43)

The door opened.

‘Dr Ketterley?’ I said.

He was between fifty and sixty, tall and slender. A handsome man. He had an ascetic-looking head with high cheekbones and forehead. His hair and eyes were dark and his skin was olive-coloured. His hair was receding, but only a little, and he had a neatly trimmed, slightly pointed beard with more grey in it than his hair.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And you are Matthew Rose Sorensen.’

I agreed that I was.

‘Come in,’ he said.

I remember how the smell of rain that pervaded the streets did not die away as I entered, but somehow intensified; inside the house there was a smell of rain, clouds and air, a smell of limitless space. A smell of the sea.

Which made no sense at all in a Victorian terraced house in Battersea.

He led me to a sitting room. The Berlioz was playing. He turned down the volume but it still played in the background of our conversation, the soundtrack of catastrophe.

I placed my messenger bag on the floor. He brought coffee.

‘You’re an academic, I understand,’ I said.

‘I was an academic,’ he explained with a slight weariness. ‘Until about fifteen years ago. I’m in private practice as a psychologist now. Academia was never very welcoming to me. I had the wrong sort of ideas and the wrong sort of friends.’

‘I suppose the Arne-Sayles connection didn’t do you any favours?’

‘Well, quite. People still think I must have known about his crimes. I didn’t.’

‘Do you still see him?’ I asked.

‘God, no! Not for twenty years.’ He looked at me speculatively. ‘Have you spoken to Laurence?’

‘No. I’ve written to him of course. But so far he’s refused to see me.’

‘Sounds about right.’

‘I thought perhaps he didn’t want to talk to me because he feels ashamed of the past,’ I said.

Ketterley gave a short, sharp, humourless laugh. ‘Hardly. Laurence has no shame. He’s just perverse. If someone says white, he’ll say black. If you say you want to see him, then he won’t want to see you. That’s just the way he is.’

I lifted my messenger bag on to my lap and fetched out my journal. As well as my current journal I also had with me the previous volume of my journal (which I referred to almost every day); the index to my journals; and a blank notebook that would form the next volume of my journal (I was very close to the end of the current one).

I opened my current journal and began to write.

He watched with interest. ‘You use physical pen and paper?’

‘I use a journal system for all my notes. I find that it’s much the best way for keeping track of information.’

‘And are you a good record keeper?’ he asked. ‘On the whole?’

‘I’m an excellent record keeper. On the whole.’

‘Interesting,’ he said.

‘Why? Do you want to offer me a job?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’ He paused. ‘What is it that you’re actually after?’

I explained that I was chiefly interested in transgressive ideas, in the people who formulate them, and how they are received by the various disciplines – religion, art, literature, science, mathematics and so forth. ‘And Laurence Arne-Sayles is the transgressive thinker par excellence. He crossed so many boundaries. He wrote about magic and pretended it was science. He convinced a group of highly intelligent people that there were other worlds and he could take them there. He was gay when it was still illegal. He kidnapped a man and to this day no one knows why.’

Ketterley said nothing. His face was a discouraging blank. He looked more bored than anything.

‘I realise that all of this happened a long time ago,’ I offered with a stab at empathy.

‘I have an excellent memory,’ he said coldly.

‘Oh. Well, that’s good. Just at the moment I’m trying to build up a picture of what it was like at Manchester in the first half of the eighties. Working with Arne-Sayles. What the atmosphere was like. What sort of things he was saying to you. What sort of possibilities he was conjuring up. That kind of thing.’

‘Yes,’ mused Ketterley, speaking apparently to himself, ‘people always use words like that about Laurence. Conjuring.’

‘You object to the word?’

‘Of course I object to the fucking word,’ he said irritably. ‘You’re suggesting that Laurence was some sort of stage magician and we were all his wide-eyed dupes. It wasn’t like that at all. He liked you to argue with him. He liked you to put the rationalist point of view.’

‘And then …?’

‘And then he demolished you. His theories weren’t just smoke and mirrors. Far from it. He’d thought everything through. It was perfectly coherent as far as it went. And he wasn’t afraid to merge intellect with imagination. His description of the thinking of Pre-Modern Man was more persuasive than anything else I’ve come across.’ He paused. ‘I’m not saying that he wasn’t manipulative. He was certainly that.’

‘But I thought you just said …?’

‘On a personal level. In his relationships he was manipulative. On an intellectual level he was honest, but on a personal level he was as manipulative as hell. Take Sylvia for example.’