Even as she lay under that single green marble – they can’t have been older than seven or eight at the time – she knew he wished it was his body on that bed instead of hers. Since his death, she has occasionally thought of him during sex – and once she even slept with an Australian surfer in London just so she could experience something for him. She has never imagined a man she is having sex with as Oliver – she has only ever imagined herself as him. They never desired each other in that way. They were a single entity, united against a hostile world.
One of Oliver’s favourite quotes came from Bruce Chatwin: I’d fuck anything once. But then he’d always add, laughing, Except, of course, for my sister.
* * *
But it all sounds a bit perfect, she says to Pierre.
It does?
Is that all there is to you: a kayak and some nightingales?
Well – what is it you desire me to say?
I want you to express yourself, risk something. Tell me something you are – I don’t know – a bit embarrassed about.
Embarrassed?
We only start to speak fully in a language when we have something electric to express. As I say, it doesn’t even have to be literally true.
* * *
One of her exercises with her students is to encourage them to lie. It frees them from the dullness of the actual and gives them the opportunity to reveal something new. When she was a drama student in Johannesburg, one of their lecturers once made them perform their opposite, their antagonist: the person they most despised or detested in the world. It soon became apparent to everyone in the room, however, that the actors only ever ended up performing themselves.
X
Hannah
Would you like more coffee?
No, thank you.
He is staring at his hands, which look paler today and a bit twitchy.
Surely you have a girl you care about?
No.
He says this with the manner of someone not wanting to disappoint. Then he seems to change his mind, and a dark gleam, like black liquid glass, passes through him.
Yes.
Which?
Yes.
You – have a girlfriend?
I do not have a girlfriend at the moment.
Really?
She tries to sound sceptical in order to flatter him – and encourage him to speak.
I have a girlfriend during two years, back in Pouilly. Élodie. But now it is finished.
For two years? What you mean is that you ‘had’ a girlfriend Élodie for two years. It was a fixed period of time, but now it’s finished. Yes?
It is finished. I have a girlfriend for two years.
‘Had’ a girlfriend. You ‘had’ her. But now the relationship is over. It’s gone.
Yes – gone.
Pierre
He was walking up the lane along the river – the stone bridge ahead of him, the water wide and grown dark in the dusk, the line of lime trees radiant with autumn – when he encountered a pair of lovers under a street lamp. All around them were tarnished auras of gold on gold, like a painting by Van Gogh. It was the kind of image he might have chosen for himself: his idea of bliss.
But within a heartbeat he saw the lovers all over again. He recognised Étienne first. He saw the navy blue coat with the collar of silvery fluff, and the hair so black and thick it might have been a beret. It took him another heartbeat to unravel the girl from his friend’s arms and find his girlfriend there.
As soon as he saw them that second time – which was really the first time – the past months slotted into their proper place: the veiled glances, the muttered words, the long silences, the inexplicable absences. He had been feeling permanently uneasy, quietly miserable, without knowing why. But now he understood. All this time, there had been another world running smoothly alongside his world, a world in which he was lied to, and in which it was permissible for him to be lied to – for the simple reason that he had never been properly loved. Not as himself, not as he needed to be. Where he had thought he existed in the world, a shadow stood in his place, which was why he could be so easily discarded.
* * *
He stood there for a very long time, it seemed to him, absorbing the meaning of their happiness. When they turned away from the streetlamp and moved back into the tight alleys of Seurre, he stumbled along behind them. By then his body had become little more than a receptacle for pain.
Pausing now and again to grapple with each other and taste each other, the lovers eventually arrived at Étienne’s house, which was situated above a children’s toy shop. Soon afterwards, Étienne’s bedroom window lit up. It remained illuminated for another few minutes before being extinguished. Then all went quiet. Pierre strained his ears to hear their love-making, and once he even imagined – or half heard – Élodie crying out, but even this moment was not fully available to him.
* * *
After waiting there for another two hours, he left. He walked away under a sky heavy with stars, out of the town and into the silvery light of the fields, through an apple orchard and into a conifer wood, where there was an owl sobbing by a silent lake.
He took off all his clothes and walked into the middle of the water, intending to drown himself. But the lake was so shallow he could still stand there. And as he stood there, his feet lost in the mud, he started to laugh. It was the kind of laughter that had no laughter inside it. He wanted to smash things up. He wanted everything destroyed. But he was also saved by that new wave of rage – like a blast of white light that illuminated every bit of him.
He understood then what a lie their relationship had been. Élodie had been witty, unsentimental, difficult to catch. She had been everything his mother was not. All she had required of him was that he be as bright and breezy as she was. And for a while he had managed to be this person – that is, until he started getting hurt by her forgetfulness and her disregard. He became too inquisitive, too needy – but how else could he have endured it? It was impossible to get away from the great sloppy burden of himself.
* * *
Pierre went home and tore up all his paintings and drawings and snapped his paintbrushes and pencils in two. He put everything he valued – the jumper Élodie had given him, his camera, his book of birds – into the bin and he threw them out. By the morning, only his most essential items remained and his little attic room resembled the cell of a monk. He went to school and pretended nothing unusual had happened.
* * *
A week later, Étienne summoned up the courage to tell him about the illicit relationship. Pierre patted his friend on the shoulder and gave him his blessing.
* * *
Pierre has done his best since then not to hope for anything, or anyone – that is, until a few weeks ago, when he first laid eyes on Hannah Meade.
* * *
I never loved her, he says.
Of course you did, Hannah laughs. Otherwise you wouldn’t say it like that.
Now I love someone else.
Hannah
Hannah feels a shadow pass through the room. It is not the fact that Pierre is unavailable that puts her off – she generally feels more relaxed in the company of unavailable men – but that he strikes her as weak. Falling for this woman and then that, without a sufficiently developed sense of self.
Oh yes? she says. And who is that?
He looks towards the balcony – dislocated, it now seems to her, and slightly reckless, like someone drunk.
She doesn’t yet know.
Then why don’t you tell her?
I wouldn’t have the words for it.
I think you would. All you say is ‘I love you’. Those words will go as far as any words will ever go in expressing it – whatever ‘it’ is.
He looks at her with surprise or disappointment. Perhaps he doesn’t quite appreciate the quality of humour he keeps encountering in her.
The problem is that I have only seen her the twice.
Then you must try to see
her ‘the thrice’, she says, still trying to sound satirical. I’m sure she’ll like you once she gets to know you better.
You think?
Why not? You seem nice enough. Good looking, gentle, unafraid of your feelings.
He looks pleased by this – as he feels his way towards this version of himself.
* * *
It is the self-centredness of men’s desire that fascinates and repels her. The emerald marble taught her that. It was the journey of the marble those boys were interested in, its narrative across the blank page of her skin. Who she might have been beneath that marble was the last thing on their minds. She was merely a landscape for them to traverse – mute and submissive – while they continued on their way to somewhere else.
* * *
But how can you know? she asks.
Know?
How can you know you love her when you’ve only seen her twice?
I’ve seen her many times, he admits. It’s just – she hasn’t seen me.
She hasn’t? And why not?
He looks hurt, as if this unknown girl has done him an injustice before they have even started.
She lives in the same street as I do, he continues, scrambling on as though trying to correct some internal error. La rue de l’Odéon? It’s far away from – here.
I see.
I see her in the supermarket, choosing the cheese. I see her in the Shakespeare bookshop, buying the books. I have even walked behind her a few times in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
She smiles with what she hopes looks like discouragement.
And I have uncovered many things about her.
Like what cheese she chooses?
Yes.
And you follow her about?
No!
He looks shocked at the idea on her behalf – until he realises that she herself doesn’t seem quite so shocked.
At least, he concedes, I don’t follow for long.
* * *
She gives him her unblinking teacher’s gaze. A clock has started ticking inside her flesh. She is not sure what triggered it, but she knows it will develop a will of its own if she’s not able to shut it down.
* * *
How do you know you even like this woman? she continues. I mean – all of this is clearly more about you than it is about her.
He almost shrugs.
All right – so you know she likes Comté instead of Emmenthal.
Manchego, actually. The sheep’s milk cheese from Spain.
Right. But I’m sure many people buy that.
* * *
She has been to the Luxembourg Gardens only once. She went to see an exhibition of Modigliani at the Musée du Luxembourg: ‘L’ange au visage grave’. She bought a poster that she got mounted on chipboard, which now hangs in the yellow light above her toilet. After the exhibition, she walked along the gravelled avenues of the park. There were a few boats traversing a grey pond and bare branches scribbled against a blank sky. People criss-crossed her path in dark coats, each looking as if they were heading for a different funeral.
* * *
I see the way she smiles, he continues, looking up at her as she finds herself smiling. You see – she can hold her head to the one side like she’s listening to something I can’t hear.
She’s just anyone, Hannah says, adjusting the angle of her head.
She isn’t.
She’s probably a nutcase.
She’s the one I was waiting for.
Have been waiting for. It continues into the present, doesn’t it?
* * *
Since she was a young girl – and far too young to be looked at in such a way – she has had men staring at her. It’s not so much that they undress her with their gaze as that they redress her, giving her and her choices a meaning that is entirely their own. But this boy seems different. It’s as if he is trying to put himself at her service, chivalrous and absurd, like a young Don Quixote. He wants her to know – or at least suspect – that this girl he thinks he loves is her. She has gradually come to understand this, or absorb it, like news that you anticipate and start to dread. It doesn’t frighten her or excite her, exactly. She just feels doomed, doomed to the slow and irrepressible tick-tock of her flesh.
* * *
My advice is that you leave her alone, she tells him as firmly as she can manage. When you project your desires onto other people, you can only ever disappoint yourself.
He looks at her quizzically, almost politely – and then, with the attitude of a man rescuing a woman from a compromising situation, he says:
The coffee. Please. Can I have it now? I change my mind.
You ‘have changed’ it. You changed your mind, but we don’t know exactly when.
XI
Pierre
While Hannah is making the coffee, Pierre crosses to the bookshelves to take a closer look. There he finds two rows of what look at first like workbooks: there is a series of about thirty of them that are pale brown with grey spines and then dozens of charcoal-black ones with the same grey spines. As she moves about the kitchen, he extracts one book from near the end of the last row and opens it cautiously – as one might peer under the lid of a cauldron. There he finds pages crammed with blocks and blocks of black and green text. There is an entry starting:
You’re told the car has been ‘written off’. As if the accident —
* * *
Before he can be discovered, he snaps the book shut and slips it into his rucksack.
These are all your books? he asks, to cover up the sound of the zip.
The kettle switches itself off and it takes another moment for her to answer.
Yes – although I only try to hold onto the most essential ones.
They are impressive.
Books are books. They are not in themselves impressive.
I mean you – to read all these.
* * *
Most of the books are novels. Pierre is surprised at how many of them are to do with Africa. He recognises some of the authors and has even read a few of their works. Generally, however, he prefers detective novels and crime thrillers. He likes a story with a mystery at the heart of it – preferably a murder. It is from such books that he has derived many of his ideas about England and the English. Often there is a woman like Hannah at the heart of the tale, with pale gold hair, who smells like a rose. Sometimes, the woman is the one who is murdered. Sometimes, you are surprised to discover that the woman was the real murderer all along.
* * *
I haven’t read all of them, she admits, reappearing with more coffee. A book can sit on a shelf for ten years before I get to it. That’s the beauty of books. They have such patience.
He nods without conviction and regains his seat.
So, she says, for next week’s lesson I would like you to prepare a story for me using the past simple.
A story?
I’d like you describe in detail where you are from and where your relatives are from. I mean originally. I’d like a story about you, and about what you think of as your – starting place.
Using the past simple?
We tend to narrate stories using the past simple. In spite of the fact that the past is never past – and never simple.
He nods again, his eyes straying towards the line of her neck, the faint blue vein in her throat. Throughout the lesson, there has been that same disconnect between the form of her – that image of apparent perfection – and her voice, which sometimes seems in danger of disappointment.
But the past simple is a useful tense, she continues. It gives the illusion that our lives can be reduced to a series of events. Events that can be captured in rounded, completed actions: I climbed out of bed, I switched on the shower, I ate my breakfast. This has never been my experience of the world, she laughs, but it’s as good a place to start as any.
ACT TWO
NARRATIVE TENSES
Paris
I
Hannah
In Paris, Hanna
h is known as the English girl, the girl from England. No one has ever asked her where she is from originally and she has never found the need to mention it. While living in England, she managed to shed most of the remnants of her South African accent, although she betrayed herself through the pronunciation of words and expressions such as ‘milk’, ‘alcohol’ or ‘fuck off’. Here in France, however, no one can pick up such nuances and she often goes as ‘la fille anglaise’, or more simply ‘l’Anglaise’.
* * *
The narrative of her upbringing is one she has done her best to forget. It is not a story over which she has any control. Her early years provide excellent examples of the passive: she was born into a civil war, she was almost killed by her own father, she was evacuated from the country of her birth.
Hannah was four when her father wanted to kill their family. The circumstances surrounding his actual death are never discussed. Avoiding difficult narratives from the past is something that has been handed down the generations. But Hannah learned from Oliver that their father – who was a gynaecologist by profession – had recently returned from a so-called contact in the bush. No one knows what happened there exactly – another narrative that will be forever lost – but he came back more paranoid and withdrawn than usual, and far more inclined to shout. He drank too much ‘alcohol’, raged at them over every drop of spilt ‘milk’, and if her mother tried to stand up for herself or her children he pressed her against the nearest available wall and told her to ‘fuck off’.
However, Hannah does remember the day they ran away from him. Her mother packing a single suitcase and bustling them into the car in the front garden. The bald lawn, the low brick bungalow, the scant crop of rose bushes, the jacaranda trees along their street beginning to turn yellow – her last impressions of her hometown Salisbury/Harare.
Hannah was about to climb into the back seat of her mother’s car when her father arrived in the driveway behind them. With the hot ticking nose of his pale silver Volvo, he parked them in. When he got out of the car, he was balancing a chocolate cake in one hand, a half-formed expression on his face – as if he was feeling terrified, hopeful, vengeful all at once.
The White Room Page 5
