“I was so perverse as not to be grateful for my luck. Not to be a giant, at the cost of looking like an ape, didn’t seem to me to be the greatest good luck. Surely Fortune had something in her basket a little better than that? I raved and I raged, and I made everybody as miserable as I could. My grandfather didn’t know what to do. Zurich was full of psychiatrists but my grandfather belonged to a pre-psychiatric age. He sent for a bishop, a good Lutheran bishop, who was a very nice man but I demolished him quickly; all his talk about resignation, recognition of the worse fate of scores of poor creatures in the Zurich hospitals, the necessity to humble oneself before the inscrutable mystery of God’s will, sounded to me like mockery. There sat the bishop, with his snowy hair smelling of expensive cologne and his lovely white hands moulding invisible loaves of bread in the air before him, and there sat I, hideous and destroyed in mind, listening to him prate about resignation. He suggested that we pray, and knelt with his face in the seat of his chair. I gave him such a kick in the arse that he limped for a week, and rushed off to my own quarters.
“There was worse to come. With the thickening of the bones of my head there had been trouble with my organs of speech, and there seemed to be nothing that could be done about that My voice became hoarse, and as my tongue thickened I found speech more and more difficult, until I could only utter in a gruff tone that sounded to me like the bark of a dog. That was the worst. To be hideous was humiliating and ruinous to my spirit, but to sound as I did threatened my reason. What was I to do? I was young and very strong, and I could rage and destroy. So that is what I did.
“It had all taken a long time, and when Magnus first saw me at the window of his workroom I was seventeen. I had gone on the rampage one day, and wrecked Grandfather’s collection of toys. It was usually kept locked up but I knew how to get to it. Why did I do it? To hurt the old man. Why did I want to hurt the old man? Because he was at hand, and the pity I saw in his eyes when he came to see me — I kept away from the life in the house — made me hate him. Who was he, so old, so near death, so capable of living the life he liked, to pity me? If Fate had a blow, why didn’t Fate strike him? He would not have had to endure it long. But I might easily live to be as old as he, trapped in my ugliness for sixty years. So I smashed his toys. Do you know, he never said a word of reproach? In the kind of world the bishop inhabited his forbearance would have melted my heart and brought me to a better frame of mind. But misfortune had scorched all the easy Christianity out of me, and I despised him all the more for his compassion, and wondered where I could attack him next.
“I knew Grandfather had brought someone to Sorgenfri to mend the toys, and I wanted to see who it was. There was not much fun to be got out of the secretaries, and I had exhausted the possibilities of tormenting Hofetatter, the musician; he was poor game, and wept easily, the feeble schlemiel. I had spied on Magnus for quite a time before he discovered me; looking in the windows of his workroom meant climbing along a narrow ledge some distance above ground and as I looked like an ape I thought I might as well behave like one. So I used to creep along the ledge, and watch the terribly neat, debonair little fellow bent over his workbench, tinkering endlessly with bits of spring and tiny wires, and filing patiently at the cogs of little wheels. He always had his jeweller’s glass stuck in one eye, and a beautifully fresh long white coat, and he never sat down without tugging his trousers gently upward to preserve their crease. He was handsome, too, in a romantic, nineteenth-century way that went beautifully with the little automata he was repairing.
“Before my trouble I had loved to go to the opera, and Contes d’Hoffmann was one of my favourites; the scene in Magnus’s workroom always reminded me of the mechanical doll, Olympia, in Hoffmann, though he was not a bit like the grotesque old man who quarrelled over Olympia. So there it was, Hoffmann inside the window and outside, what? The only person in opera I resembled at all was Kundry the monstrous woman in Parsifal, and Kundry always seemed to be striving to do good and be redeemed. I didn’t want to do good and had no interest in being redeemed.
“I read a good deal and my favourite book at that time was Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes — I was not a stupid girl, you understand — and from it I had drawn a mishmash of notions which tended to support whatever I felt like doing, especially when I wanted to be destructive. Most adolescents are destructive, I suppose, but the worst are certainly those who justify what they do with a half-baked understanding of somebody’s philosophy. It was under the banner of Spengler, then, that I decided to surprise Magnus and rough him up a bit. He looked easy. A man who worried so much in private about the crease of his trousers was sure to be a poor fighter.
“The surprise was mine. I was bigger and stronger but I hadn’t had his experience in carnival fights and flophouses. He soon found out that hitting me on the head was no good, and hit me a most terrible blow in the diaphragm that knocked out all my breath. Then he bent one of my legs backward and sat on me. That was when we had our first conversation.
“It was long, and I soon discovered that he spoke my language. I don’t mean German; I had to teach him proper German later. I mean that he asked intelligent questions and expected sensible answers. He was also extremely rude. I told you I had a hoarse, thick voice, and he had trouble understanding me in French and English. ‘Can’t you speak better than that?’ he demanded, and when I said I couldn’t he simply said, ‘You’re not trying; you’re making the worst of it in order to seem horrible. You’re not horrible, you’re just stupid. So cut it out.’
“Nobody had ever talked to me like that. I was the Naegeli heiress, and I was extremely unfortunate; I was used to deference, and people putting up with whatever I chose to give them. Here was little Herr Trousers-Crease, who spoke elegant English and nice clean French and barnyard German, cheeking me about the way I spoke. And laying down the law and making conditions! ‘If you want to come here and watch me work you must behave yourself. You should be ashamed, smashing up all these pretty things! Have you no respect for the past? Look at this: a monkey orchestra of twenty pieces and a conductor, and you’ve reduced it to a boxful of scraps. I’ve got to mend it, and it won’t take less than four to six months of patient, extremely skilled work before the monkeys can play their six little tunes again. And all because of you! Your grandfather ought to tie you to the weathervane and leave you on the roof to die!’
“Well, it was a change from the bishop and my grandfather’s tears. Of course I knew it was bluff. He may have hoped to shame me, but I think he was cleverer than that. All he was doing was serving notice on me that he would not put up with any nonsense; he knew I was beyond shame. But it was a change. And I began, just a little, to like him. Little Heir Trousers-Crease had quality, and an egoism that was a match for my own.
“Now — am I to go on? If there is to be any more of this I think I should be the one to speak. But is this confessional evening to know no bounds?”
“I think you’d better go ahead, Liesl,” said I. “You’ve always been a great one to urge other people to tell their most intimate secrets. It’s hardly fair if you refuse to do so.”
“Ah, yes, but dear Ramsay, what follows isn’t a tale of scandal, and it isn’t really a love-story. Will it be of any interest? We must not forget that this is supposed to provide a subtext for Magnus’s film about Robert-Houdin. What is the real story of the making of a great conjuror as opposed to Robert-Houdin’s memoirs, which we are pretty much agreed are a bourgeois fake? I don’t in the least mind telling my side of the story, if its of any interest to the film-makers. What’s the decision?”