Without Her
A Novel
Rosalind Brackenbury
For Simone and Charlie
PART I
1.
A small, thin girl playing chess, one hand against the other, perched on a bench in the cloakroom where girls milled around and the air stank of coke from the boiler: that was my first view of Hannah. She doesn’t remember this scene; even argues that she never played two-handed chess, especially in the school cloakroom. But I see it now: her, the hanging cloaks and raincoats, the muddy hockey boots shoved into open shelves, the hard and dirty floor. I smell it, the sweaty polluted air. I waited for her, and I remember the feeling. She made people wait, even then.
I said, “Do you want someone to play against, ever?”
She looked up. Gray eyes behind the National Health issue glasses with the pink plastic frames; later, everyone would peel those frames off and reveal the wire underneath, copying John Lennon. She flicked back two pale braids of hair so that they bounced on her shoulders.
“Well, maybe. But I kind of like playing like this, I never know which side is going to win.”
I watched her stoop again to make the kind of decisive last-minute move that people make when they know what they are doing. There. Top that. The black knight, that little dwarf horse, crossed forward and sideways, took the white bishop. Which side was she on?
“But they are both you.”
“Hmm, I know.” She contemplated her game for a minute. I didn’t know all the rules of chess, though I had seen my father play. It seemed like an adult occupation, remote from me, at that time.
A bell rang, as bells did on and off all day in that place: a jangle summoning us all to the next activity, lining up for lunch. We were always lining up, clattering up or down stone staircases, swallowing food we had not chosen, sleeping in dormitories with people we did not like. Was it supposed to be a preparation for a future life? If so, we were all destined to be convicts. I was impressed that this quiet girl did not put her chess set away immediately, but went on pondering what to do with her black queen. Everybody had left the cloakroom, except the two of us. At last she said, “Well, we’d better go.” It was the first time there was a “we.” And she swept her pieces all scrambled into their box and pushed it out of sight behind a hanging green cloak.
We walked fast towards the stairs with the kind of hobbling gait we had all adapted for speed, running not being allowed. We went one behind the other up the back staircase with its dark green paint to shoulder level, a black line above it and dirty cream above that, a worn central strip of dark green linoleum underfoot, and came late into the hush of the dining room. Girls stood already at the tables for grace to be said, heads bent. The housemistress, Miss McKinley, had already bowed her head to begin, but she looked up, sharp as a bird, and saw us, and frowned in a way that let us know that we were in trouble, then ducked her bird-head again against her ruffled white blouse and intoned, “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.” Then chair legs scraped on the bare wood floor and covers were lifted off dishes and the usual Monday disappointment showed in girls’ faces because Monday was always cold leftovers and beetroot, though you could always hope for something more, like an extra scoop of mashed potato. Perhaps there would be a pudding, jam roly-poly that we called Matron’s Leg, or even pie. Then everyone sat down and water jugs were passed and the prefects began doling out the food. By this time Hannah and I had slipped into our places, but not unobserved as we’d hoped. Being late for anything was a crime, and would be marked up against us; we would be seen to be potential troublemakers, Hannah Farrell and Claudia Prescott, simply because we had been late together; efforts would be made to separate us as soon as possible. We would be told that the other was a bad influence. It had all begun with our being late for lunch, coming in shamefaced but without even an apology.
Later, we stood before the housemistress on a patch of carpet worn away by many miscreants’ feet and muttered, “Yes, Miss McKinley, sorry, Miss McKinley.” While we tried to escape her piercing stare—birds of prey, I discovered later in life, especially small hawks, were her prototype—and also not to cry. “What were you doing, Hannah?”
“Playing chess, Miss McKinley. I forgot the time.”
“Well, Hannah, there is a chess club for that. Everything in its time and place.” This Hannah told me afterwards, with a smirk. We often quoted it to each other. “Everything in its time and place.” Later we shortened it to T. and P. “T. and P., Claudia, T. and P.,” she’d hiss at me from time to time.
It was McKinley’s technique to spot and separate potential wrongdoers before they had even begun to do anything really wrong. She let us know this. She had her raptor’s eye upon us, almost from the beginning. She also knew who was what she called the Ringleader, and who the hapless Follower. In our case, it seemed to be Hannah who led, leaving me billed as the stooge. But all this attention to rules and protocol, graces and rituals, tellings-off and forced apologies only made it easier and, yes, more necessary, for us to be the friends we became.
2.
That was then. This is now, a lifetime later. On a hot afternoon in May, I’m in a classroom in a college town in Virginia. Different century, different continent. Green leaves at the high window like hands against the glass. Footsteps on the gravel outside, shouts from down below where students lounge on the dried grass, trees cast dense shadows, chestnut and live oak, and the whole semester shrinks to its end. In here, the smell of enclosed rooms, dust, hot bodies, the chill of air conditioning to keep us all awake. I’m teaching my Advanced Film Studies group for the last time this semester. The credits have rolled and the screen is white again. We all go to sit around the table; there’s the sound of chairs dragging on the floor and someone’s phone buzzes. We’ve been watching Antonioni’s film L’Avventura, made in 1959. It’s old history; it’s life in black and white. For them, it’s strangely dressed people doing incomprehensible things. It doesn’t even have a proper ending, they grumble. I was expecting this. We’ve talked about sound, and how the camera follows each person along the narrow paths of the island. We’ve discussed the use of light and dark, the attention to detail: a cup on a table in the boat’s cabin, a lit cigarette. But what they want is story—and they find it lacking.
If Hannah is briefly in my thoughts as I watch this film again with my students—how many times have I watched it in my life? I forget—it’s because I first saw it with her, at the Arts Cinema in Cambridge, in 1962. We sat on after everyone else had left, in the dark cinema; and when the lights went up, we were still sitting there. It was because there wasn’t an ending. And also because the two women in it had nearly identical names to ours: Anna and Claudia. So yes, she is in my thoughts, not as a small girl in a school cloakroom, but as her student self, black-clad, loose-haired, smoking. When I look at my cell phone minutes later and see that Philip, her husband, has left me a message, I’m not entirely surprised. This kind of synchronicity still surprises people; but I’ve noticed over the years that it happens relatively often in life.
I turn to my class, and smile at them because, after all, they have been patient, and it’s the end of the semester, and it’s hot outside and smells of cleaning fluids in here. “Maybe there are no solutions, then, just further questions.” As soon as I hear myself, I feel them shifting their behinds on their seats, like people waiting for a plane to board, who are told it has been delayed or, worse, canceled completely. There’s a faint groan.
“It isn’t me saying that,” I tell my class, “It’s him. The filmmaker. Antonioni.”
They hate this. They hated the film and they hate having to talk about it, especi
ally this afternoon so near the end of the semester, as the summer burns outside and a hundred other more seductive things are waiting to be done. Their minds, like the phones vibrating in their pockets, are just waiting to be freed. They want solutions, of course they do. They are nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, they are young Americans, my so-called Advanced Film Study class, and up till now their knowledge of film has been mostly what has been playing in the multiplexes downtown. No, that’s not quite fair; they opted for this, and they have sat through Breathless and Hiroshima Mon Amour and early Hitchcock—all of which, by the way, have outcomes, solutions, or at least endings. Antonioni and most of the Italian neorealists have them irritated, even scared. The French New Wave is just downright depressing. The young women with their tight scoop-necked T-shirts, their astonishing décolletées—apples in a net—tanned now from all the hours spent lying out on the grass in front of this building pretending to study for their exams; the young men with their tight muscles moving under tattooed skin. I like them and I think they like me. But it’s nearly the end of the semester, it’s May, it’s hot, and they long to be out of here. Of course they do. And I’m telling them—or letting Antonioni tell them—that there aren’t any solutions? There is just life, open-ended, inexplicable? How unfair is this? If you want to feel your age, spend time with college students, let them in on what has been one of the formative experiences of your life. See their bafflement; feel your own.
They yawn, fidget, eye each other. Michael Paulson in his faded Grateful Dead T-shirt—maybe it belonged to his father—groans, “Then what’s the point?”
“I think the point is Claudia’s search for who she really is,” I say. A little self-conscious that I share this character’s name, although I’m nothing like Monica Vitti, never was. I say, “I know it’s hard. We are all so geared to finding one, these days. But I think the greatness of this film is that it doesn’t pretend to provide one. No easy answers, no happy ending.”
Michael runs brown fingers through spiky black hair, rolls his eyes, grins, sighs, stretches jeaned legs and sneakered feet farther under the table. The table is littered with cardboard coffee cups and laptops, tablets, and other devices that I won’t let them use in class. Peyton Mackenzie leans back, flicks blonde hair back over her shoulder, smooth, plump in a spaghetti-strap top. “I guess it’s that we’ve gotten used to mysteries always being solved. Isn’t that right, Professor?” She’s always on my side. She pads beside me down corridors, almost offering to carry my books, except that I don’t carry books, just a light laptop of my own in a shoulder carrier. Teachers hardly carry books now, any more than their students do.
The girls get it. The sexism in the film has made them groan and mutter. He’s just so arrogant, he can’t spend five minutes without a woman, those Italian men, all he can think about is sex, she’s right to want to get away. They get it too thoroughly, these twenty-first-century girls. None of them, they say proudly, would put up with this loser groping them for a second. They become a team, they begin to sit up straight, as the boys in the class slump lower in their chairs. The white rectangle of the screen has been rolled up—such an old-fashioned way of watching a movie—and they have come back to the table to discuss it, as we had to discuss films, always, when we were young. As well as the lack of an ending, what has come up is the old division between the sexes, men’s invariable lust. We sit in the clammy chill of air conditioning. Alicia Bond lifts her mass of hair from her shoulders and holds it aloft, for coolness, showing her shaved armpits, the pale insides of her arms. Gerry Shaughnessy can’t help looking, then begins to play with the ballpoint pen he has, clicking it open and shut. We sit in the knowledge of failure, emptiness, a retreat from any certainty except this one: that men will always be men.
Eric Nilsen says suddenly, on behalf of his gender, “Nobody would get away with it now. They’d dump him.” He’s another tanned, blond, handsome young American, and he’s playing the girls’ team now, grinning sideways.
I say gently, “Yes, that is one aspect of the film that dates it. Good thing, eh?” We seem to have run out, run through, come to a stop. I lift my hands, letting them leave if they want to; but some of them stay. There is something I want to tell them: that film is the one art in which we control time, in which two hours can contain everything. Perhaps I have told them this; perhaps I said it at the very beginning. Now is not the moment for it anyway, as they begin to run out, scattered, into their lives, with their youthful sense that they have all the time in the world.
Going down the steps of the department into the dazzle of late afternoon, I peer to retrieve Philip’s message. I’m on my way home. I walk towards my car in the college parking lot, under the spread green leaves of the campus chestnuts and magnolias, thousands of miles and an ocean away from my caller, in the damp summer heat of Virginia. I hear his voice. “Claudia, could you ring me back? It’s rather important.”
Being English, and diffident by nature, he’d have to reduce the urgency, but I hear it in his voice. Philip, my oldest friend’s husband, whom I have known for decades, yet still hardly know well.
I park my car outside the house, let myself in, feel the chill of air conditioning like a caress before it becomes simply clammy, pour myself a big glass of water from the refrigerator. The old refrigerator that ticks and hums. Ice that crashes into the sink. The silence of the house, my rented college house where, in spite of my years here, I have never quite made myself at home. I pour cold wine left from last night and go and sit down on my sagging couch, my feet up on the coffee table, and press in Philip’s number. When I call his house number in England, I hear that Philip and Hannah Macauley have left for the summer but can be reached at this number. The code is 33 rather than 44: it must be the house in France. It will be about my plans for the summer, then; he is a bit of a fusspot, as my mother would have said, wants everything planned in advance, probably wants to know exactly on which train or plane I will be arriving. But—“rather important”? And muted, as if he feared to be overheard?
“Claudia.” At last, his so-English voice, across the wide Atlantic. I imagine him, balding now, tall and slightly bent, his eagerness still boyish; a very English way of not quite growing up, something appealing about it from this distance. “My dear.” Yes, it does sound affected, from my American side of the ocean. “I’m so glad to hear you. It’s rather desperate. I don’t know what to do, you see. Hannah has disappeared. I don’t know where she is.”
“Disappeared? What do you mean?”
“She never arrived. I’ve waited for two days, she was meant to be getting the train on Friday, and she wasn’t there. I waited for three trains, I tried calling her, her phone was dead. I simply don’t know what to do.”
“Phil, I thought you were going down there together. What happened?”
“No, I was to drive down with our stuff, and she was going to follow on the train. She had something she wanted to do in Paris. Then, I just never heard another thing. Do you think you could come? I mean, as soon as you can? I’m finding it very difficult to cope, actually.” He coughs, but I’ve heard the catch in his throat, the stoic man’s alarm.
“Well, yes, I was coming next week, after the semester ends here, but I could come sooner, I guess. I’ll see if I can change my ticket.” We’re not doing all that much, finishing up, evaluations and that sort of thing. All the students are pretty much asleep, anyway, they party every night and they can’t wait to get away. “You’re at the house?”
“Yes. It’s worse, in a way. I mean, if I were at home I’d have more of a clue. Should I tell the police, do you think? I think I must.”
“I don’t know. I mean, you don’t want to start an Interpol hunt if she’s just shopping in Paris.”
“But it’s so unlike her,” he says. And I say nothing, but remember times—oh, long ago now, but more than a few times—when Hannah simply did not show up, but wandered in hours or even days later,
smiling, with no explanation. I wonder that her husband of nearly forty years has not suffered the same thing before. Do we change, essentially? Can we ever predict how another person will behave, even if we’ve known that person since girlhood and gone with her through every kind of adventure and mishap? In her sixties, is there still the child Hannah, wanting to surprise, even shock people, making them wait so long that they will call the French police, set up a hunt, call old friends in from across the world? I don’t know. To the extent that I have changed or not changed, the same will be true for my old friend. Circumstances change. Technology changes. It would be far harder now in these days of almost total surveillance to hide out in the woods than it was in our childhood, or even our wild adolescence. But do we change? Isn’t the irritation I am feeling, here, now, in my little clapboard house in a university town in Virginia, the same that I felt then, when she let me down, hid from me, stayed out all night, and came in brilliant and smiling in the morning, announcing, “Claude, I do believe I’m in love!”
I hunt online to change my flight to Paris, to Marseille, to Nice, even to Toulouse. All the airlines are booked. The only available flight within my shrunken budget—I am on half pay, semiretired now—is Atlanta to Miami and then a Swissair flight to Paris via Zurich. I can get a train south from Paris more cheaply than a flight. I want a night in Paris anyway—ah, the plans our minds secretly make for us while we think we are thinking of other things—because I want to see Alexandre. This I can’t say to Philip, since his wife has gone AWOL somewhere between Paris and the south and everything therefore has become urgent; in fact, until now I have not consciously admitted it to myself. But he, Alexandre, would be impossibly hurt if I were to spend even a few hours in Paris and not see him. It is not what we do, anyway. Philip will never know. I will say that the flight got in late from Zurich, it made sense to go to a hotel and get the morning train, and anyway, jet lag is always a valid excuse. When you cross the ocean at our age, you are allowed to feel tired and want to go to a hotel. You don’t have to say if you are going to it alone.
Without Her Page 1
