The Teleportation Accident

they both collapsed backwards, he thought, their corpses, observed from above, would present the neat rotational symmetry of royalty on a playing card. The room was fluffy with sunlight.

‘I love you,’ Phoebe said. Her knuckles were white on the grip of the revolver. ‘I don’t regret anything.’

‘Same to you,’ said Scramsfield.

Did something in Phoebe’s eyes flinch in bafflement at the banality of his words and the casualness of his tone? He wasn’t sure. But she still leaned forward to kiss him. Then she nodded ready and he nodded back. ‘Three,’ she said, and Scramsfield’s finger tightened on the trigger. ‘Two,’ she said, and a tear rolled down her cheek. ‘One,’ she said, and Scramsfield felt a firework of panic soar inside him as he realised for the first time that this was actually going to happen.

Then Phoebe shot herself.

His ears ringing, Scramsfield took the derringer from his temple, slid the safety catch back on, and put it on his pocket. Then he got up, left the bedroom, hurried down the stairs to the front door, and got out of the house before any of the servants had interrupted their card game to investigate the noise. When he got home, he looked in the mirror and found that he didn’t have a speck of blood on him. That night, after receiving a telephone call, his mother poured him a gin and tonic and then told him that Phoebe Kuttle had been killed by accident when handling one of her father’s guns. Scramsfield burst into tears.

He never worried about getting in trouble. Nobody remembered to enquire about his fictional birdwatching expedition with Rex Phenscot (although someone mentioned that twenty years ago the Phenscot family had lost a beautiful daughter of their own) and as far as he knew nobody noticed the disappearance of the derringer, which he threw into the Charles one night. A coroner did investigate Phoebe’s death, as a formality, but he correctly concluded that the gunshot could not have been anything other than self-inflicted. Still, because Phoebe hadn’t left a note — they had decided suicide notes were pretentious and egotistical — a police officer was sent to speak to a few of her friends. In the drawing room of his house, the grandfather clock ticking like a bone chisel, Scramsfield was asked how long he’d been one of Miss Kuttle’s suitors. Then the police officer said: ‘The coroner tells me that Miss Kuttle appears to have been party to some sort of … improper transaction shortly before her death.’ That was how he put it. He had an Irish accent. ‘Would you know anything about this?’

Scramsfield shook his head. ‘That’s a very disturbing thing to hear,’ he said solemnly, leaving it deliberately ambiguous whether he even knew what the police officer meant or was just bluffing along. ‘I guess it could be a clue, though. You know, to what Phoebe was doing with that gun. Maybe you should ask Mr and Mrs Kuttle about it?’ The police officer nodded, although they both knew no such discussion would ever take place.

At the wake, Uncle Roger took Scramsfield aside. ‘Look here, Herbert. I am beginning to see now that I may have been a little harsh when we talked the other day. I think after a shock like this, a good long trip is just what a young man needs. I’ve talked to your parents and they agree. The money’s yours if you still want it. A return ticket and plenty more for hotels and so forth.’ Scramsfield didn’t think Uncle Roger had any idea that his earlier refusal had led indirectly to Phoebe’s death — rather, he just felt guilty for having been uncharitable to a relative who was now bereaved. That night, Scramsfield dreamed that while he was kissing Phoebe in a hat shop he stole a coin out of her mouth with his tongue. Someone had put it there to pay for her steamship ticket but he needed it to pay for his own.

The Melchior was full of young men and young couples, and to Scramsfield every single one of them seemed to be auditioning for the roles of Phoebe and himself in some inept small-town musical- comedy production of their intended life together. Insincere and ugly, they gabbled enough about all the things that Phoebe had loved to make Scramsfield hate those things; they used words like ‘art’ and ‘love’ and ‘truth’ and ‘poor’ and ‘glad’ and ‘free’ and ‘real’ and ‘good’ — words in which he had come to believe even though he didn’t know what they meant — in ways that made Scramsfield realise that what they meant was nothing at all, that earnest monosyllables had nothing to do with life. The older couples were the worst, because they were the ones who could easily have gone to Paris in 1922 or 1923 if they’d wanted, when it was still new, but had not had the imagination to go until everyone else had already been. They all read The Sun Also Rises like an instruction manual, and of course they were all rearing novels of their own. Scramsfield kept to himself until he met a girl from New York who was thrilled when he told her how his fiancee had shot herself because she couldn’t be with him. One night they were both drunk in her cabin and she asked him to make love to her. But as soon as she lay down on the bed he thought of Phoebe on the floor and his erection fell down. It only took her two days to find another man who said he had a dead girlfriend. After that he didn’t see the point of admitting that Phoebe wasn’t still alive.

Paris was a trial. He didn’t want to be friends with any of the new arrivals, he wanted to be friends with the genuine exiles, but they were hard to find, and when he did find them, he didn’t know how to talk to them. He knew it would have been a lot easier if he’d been half of an attractive couple. He spent all of Uncle Roger’s money too fast out of boredom. Then in the autumn came Black Tuesday. Later on, people who wanted to be dramatic would say it had been like a bomb going off at the American Express on the Rue Scribe, but in truth the result was not immediate: lots of companies raised their dividends to ‘restore confidence’, and there were more Americans in Paris in the summer of 1930 than at any time in the 1920s. Soon, though, the dividends fainted away again, and everyone went home — first the poor, then the rich, and then all those in the middle who had depended on the rich: bank clerks and portrait painters and reporters for English-language newspapers. Scramsfield’s parents wrote asking him to come home too. But he’d been there less than a year, and he hadn’t conquered the city like he was supposed to.

‘So I stayed,’ Scramsfield said. ‘That was five years ago. I don’t like it here, but I’m not leaving until I finish this novel and publish it. That’s what Phoebe would want. You don’t think I should go home, do you?’

But there was no response from Loeser. Scramsfield looked up. The German had passed out in his chair, his fingers still curled around the neck of the champaggne bottle. Out in the street, a woman was singing.

Some time later, Scramsfield fell asleep too.

The next morning they were both awoken by the determined slamming against the apartment’s front door of what sounded like a gravestone, jewellery safe, bust of Napoleon, or similar object of medium size and considerable mass, but what turned out — upon Scramsfield’s displacing himself from his bed by a sort of gastropodous undulatory motion, rising to his feet, and reluctantly unbolting the portal — to be nothing but the dainty gloved fist of Miss Margaret Norb. Just behind her stood Elisalexa Norb, and in the crook of Elisalexa’s elbow squirmed little Mordechai. The aunt looked angry, the niece looked angry, and even the iguana had a kind of resentful squint.

‘Good morning, Miss Norb, and to you too, Miss Norb,’ said Scramsfield. Because he’d comprehensively vomited, his hangover wasn’t as ruthless as it might have been, but his mouth still tasted as though he’d been tonguing Mordechai all night, and yesterday’s clothes were now stuck to him in various places by muck’s cruel tailor. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure of this—’

‘Mr Scramsfield!’ said Margaret Norb, interrupting him with a stinging emphasis on the initial syllable of the honorific. ‘I must ask you to explain yourself.’

‘Uh, yes?’

‘This morning we made sure to get to Shakespeare and Company before it closed for lunch. While we were there we found ourselves in conversation with a very agreeable clergyman from Philadelphia, and we confessed to him our excitement about the prospect of being introduced to so many of your celebrated “friends”. But this clergyman was a cultured fellow, and he was able to tell us that Joyce sees no one, Hemingway isn’t even in Paris any longer, and Diaghilev …’ She swallowed. ‘Diaghilev is dead! Thank goodness he wasn’t more tactful otherwise we still mightn’t know.’

‘Miss Norb, I assure you—’

‘Let me finish, please. As luck would have it, our conversation was overheard by a third party. This other man, from Chicago, told us that he had a cousin who came to Paris and had a very similar experience with a scoundrel who drank a lot of whisky on his tab. The cousin actually went as far as to put up money for a dinner party that never took place. He also bought a signed first edition of Ulysses, which a book dealer later informed him was a very poor fake — for one thing it was only fifty-eight pages long, including woodcuts and glossary. The man from Chicago gave various other details that led us to believe that you were the souse involved. The shop had your address in its lending library records and the proprietress was happy to give it to us after we explained that you had told lies about her for personal profit. Unless you can satisfy us that an improbable mistake has been made, we are going to report you to the gendarmerie as a confidence trickster.’