Hannah and Oliver, their mother said, get in the car at once.
She said this in a voice no one could argue against.
And so Hannah and Oliver jumped into the car and their mother turned on the engine and drove off across the garden – screeching through the rose bushes, bumping away over the lawn, and leaving their father standing there, holding what he knew was Hannah’s favourite kind of cake.
But Mum – what about Dad? Are we leaving him behind?
It was Oliver asking this.
Do you want to live or die? was all their mother said.
They didn’t stop driving until they had reached a friend of their mother’s in Johannesburg. Hannah can still remember that endless journey. The hot plastic seats, the long wait at the border – and now and again Hannah vomiting on the side of some shimmering road while her mother sucked on a cigarette and cursed her fate.
When they reached Johannesburg, Hannah’s father had already been reported dead: a passive construction in the past perfect. His body had been discovered by the maid that morning when she had entered the bedroom to make the bed.
In his briefcase, the police found extra syringes and enough morphine for the whole family – along with a note explaining why the family was better off dead.
* * *
But that is only the beginning of the narrative of Hannah’s childhood. It is where her memories start. They arrived in Johannesburg at the exact moment the children of Soweto were taking to the streets. Gradually, Hannah learned to live with another source of shame: growing up in apartheid South Africa was like being in an abusive relationship in which you were never sure whether you were the abuser or the abused.
II
Hannah
Although Hannah has yet to teach Monsieur Levi anything new, each week he insists on seeing her. It is not that he is opposed to learning English, it is more that he is content with the standard he has attained. It has enabled him to say whatever he has needed to say, and what he can’t express probably can’t be expressed in any language anyway – whether it be English, Italian or French.
It may be that he only continues with the lessons so he can carry on staring at Hannah. He likes to call her his ‘woman from Whistler’. Little does he know that she grew up in a rather uninspiring suburb in Johannesburg where there were termites climbing over each other in the dead grass at almost every street corner. Not only is Monsieur Levi inconsistently deaf, he also has no ear for what Hannah considers her dirty English.
Monsieur, how is your niece?
I have an exhibition opening next Wednesday and half the bronzes haven’t arrived from the foundry in Madrid!
Monsieur Levi also happens to be a master of the non sequitur.
They are sitting in the gardens of the Musée Rodin. This is the first time they have ventured outside. Usually, they find an inside table by the sliding doors of the café, Monsieur Levi complaining about his joints, his niece’s pending marriage and the stupidity of the tourists, who pass by Rodin’s work only long enough to photograph it.
Monsieur Levi has a dewdrop looming at the end of his nose that Hannah is doing her best not to look at. He was sick recently and was unusually reticent about the cause of it. Last week, and for the first time, he even missed their class. But today the life seems restored to his large wobbly eyes and there’s more colour in his cheeks. So they have decided to brave the morning light.
I liked your last exhibition, she says. Those oil paintings. The grey ones.
The paintings in question looked like slabs of pale grey concrete at first, but after sitting with them for a while they started working on her. There were mysterious sources of tension inside the oil paint that seemed to be straining to get out.
No one wants to buy art, he says, unless they know what they’re looking at. We have forgotten the true meaning of work, of work that makes us work – of the pleasure of work and of working a thing out for ourselves.
So it’s a Spanish artist you’re exhibiting next?
I should tell you my news, my dear.
His fingers almost alight on her hand as a sparrow arrives in the gravel not far from his foot.
I am dying of cancer. I had a small mole on my belly, right here. It was years ago since I bothered to look at it, but it has been breeding, all this time, and now the cancer has entered my blood and my glands, like little black spiders climbing through my veins – and they are stuck there now, and have made themselves at home, and there’s no way for flushing them out.
She doesn’t move as she absorbs this news. She thinks at first it’s a joke, but she sees from his ironic forbearance that he is trying to be as brave as possible.
But, Monsieur, what will you do?
I will die, my dear. Like each one of us.
He encloses her left hand in both of his, his hands dry and cool and leathery as the soles of an old foot – and for the first time she can feel the rasp of death in him.
Don’t worry, he says. The world is for the young – like you. Have you found your Parisian lover yet?
Monsieur Levi is constantly trying to marry her off – or at least to get her to have some sex. She may be forty years younger than him, but often she is the one who feels older.
Do you want to know why you’re sitting here with a man like me? Because you think you want a father. But you don’t want a father. You want a lover. Tell me – am I wrong?
Do you have anyone you can recommend?
If I was younger, we wouldn’t even be talking, the old man says, without a trace of humour. The men of today are always talking too much. Because they think the women expect it. But they’re making a big mistake, you see, the men as much as the women. In matters of the heart, no good ever comes from talk.
I suppose you’ve never been in analysis? she asks, hoping to shift the subject.
Before I die, I want to see you happy. There’s too much sadness in the world.
I’m trying.
Come, come, let’s go inside and look at some sculpture. Rodin’s marble works – for me, they are the first time a male sculptor started to do the woman’s body justice. All those who came before – the Greeks, the Italians – they were too much in love with young men ever to look at the women properly. Come, my sweet petite – let’s go and find something with some life left inside it.
III
Pierre
You’re told the car has been ‘written off’. As if the accident – although in Freud there are no accidents – was an act of writing, a scribbling out of a sentence. You’re the person who is responsible, you suppose, and you’re still surprised to be alive. The incident was like a dream and everything has felt dream-like since.
It happened on the highway approaching Birmingham. You had just come from Stansted airport. The road was busy with trucks and passing cars and there was barely space to breathe. You could feel yourself slipping off to sleep, and dimly thought you’d pull over at the nearest service station, but at the same time you were aware that you didn’t seem to mind that you were drifting away, and away from your body – which carried on driving for a few crucial moments without you – and away from the road, the car, the whole of England.
You suppose it’s what Ophelia must have experienced. It was not that you actively wanted to die, it was more that you’d given yourself over to another current, one with far more authority than any ideas you might have retained about your own existence.
You regained awareness only when the car was spinning across the road. By some miracle, it missed the trucks. You felt like James Bond. You had complete control as the last sightings of the world whirled away around you, and – perhaps because you were still half asleep – you managed to bring the car, unscathed, to a complete stop, at a right angle to the flow of the road.
All would have been well had there been no other cars, but a pale silver Volvo coming down the fast lane saw your car too late and hit you. It impacted with the rear wheel on the other side of the car, which is what saved
your life. You walked away from your Freudian slip-up without a single scratch.
* * *
You’re told the car has been ‘written off’ —
A passive construction in the present perfect.
* * *
His homework for the week is to narrate a story about himself. According to Hannah, however, the passive is generally not used in the telling of stories. If we are without a subject who has agency, the story becomes less interesting, less engaging. Passive sentences are only occasionally useful: to emphasise the object, to de-emphasise the subject or agent of change, or when the speaker doesn’t know, or doesn’t want to know, who is responsible for the action. Pierre is a good enough student to see that Hannah’s journal entry only begins with the passive – and that it sets up everything that follows, everything that ‘happens to’ her.
He has read her notebook twice now. The writing is difficult to make out at times, and sometimes it stops, or there are gaps, as well as sections scribbled at – scribbled at so darkly that in places she has literally dug into the page. There is much about an Oliver, who seems to have gone away somewhere, and there are many lists of things she needs to do before she leaves for Paris.
Pierre has learned, however, that the notebook was written while Hannah was looking after an uncle’s house in the English countryside. She was using the car to drive to her English-teaching course. After the car is destroyed in the ‘accident’, she moves in with a fellow student, a boy who lives alone in a large house with his father, who is a doctor. She and the boy have sex, it seems, even though she doesn’t much like him. But it’s hard to tell for certain what passes between them – for these are some of the sections that are the most thoroughly blanked out.
Apart from this, Pierre can find no further information about Hannah. She doesn’t say where her parents are, where her home is, or whether the rest of her family is alive or dead. All the journal provides is slightly disheartening clues, all written in the second person, as if the writer is trying to remind herself of what might have happened, or writing her way back into believing that it happened at all.
In these pages, Hannah comes across as far more disorientated and disorganised than she looks – and somehow less impressive. Yet all this does is make Pierre want to consume more. Contrary to what she said in her lesson, he finds himself completely transfixed by such an apparently passive subject.
IV
Hannah
Oliver was born twenty minutes ahead of her and he remained ahead of her in everything else – even death. She can still see the stark stain he left on that suburban pavement. Within days it was washed away by the summer rain, but months later the area still seemed to be darker than the concrete flagstones around it.
Eventually, she parked the car and went to look more closely, hoping she was imagining it. There she found a kind of moss growing, the tiny plants no doubt stimulated by his gift of blood. The crumpled traffic light had been replaced by then, but the new one – although it had been painted the same bright yellow as the others – still stood out because it had not been given a cement base. It would look forever provisional.
* * *
On the Wednesday morning before Pierre’s next lesson, she eats half a banana and a ginger biscuit for breakfast and phones her mother. Her mother still lives in the house where she and Oliver grew up. When they arrived in that new suburb in the late seventies, her mother installed brown lamb’s wool carpets, mustard-yellow curtains, straw lampshades and sleek wooden furniture. Since then, she has done nothing further to the house except replace the avocado-green tiles in the kitchen with brighter yellow ones. These days, the house looks so typical of the nineteen-seventies that it has started to feel overdesigned, like an overdetermined film set. The final effect is one of slight inauthenticity.
While she was still working, Hannah’s mother started using Hannah’s old bedroom as a study, so amongst her university textbooks and horse-riding trophies there are fluorescent Post-it notes – bleached by the sun – and staplers, files and disused computers. But Oliver’s room is exactly as he left it. His dried-out fountain pens sit in the beaker he made at nursery school out of one long worm of clay that was later glazed cobalt blue, and his university notebooks still make the shelves above his bed sag dangerously. His bed faces the large window, now enclosed in burglar bars, and at its foot is folded the green tartan blanket he used to take to boarding school. Oliver’s bed catches the morning sun and his Siamese cat, called Mouse, used to sleep there, waiting for Oliver to return from school.
Their house has become far too upsetting for Hannah to inhabit. Oliver’s watercolours and drawings are still in every room – from his lopsided childhood efforts to his later patchwork abstractions in the manner of Paul Klee – and even the glass ashtrays have remained the same, their positions unchanged since Oliver’s death. Hannah has never understood how her mother can continue to live there. But perhaps that is the point: is she really living there? How often does her mother go into Oliver’s room and sit in that morning sun, fingering his stuff? Every day? Once a week? Or does she never have the strength to go in there at all?
* * *
Hello, darling, is that you?
Her mother usually answers the phone just as you’re beginning to decide that she’s out – as if she wants to test the caller’s commitment.
Hello, Mom.
I’ve been trying to get hold of you for two weeks, her mother says. I was beginning to worry.
Sorry, I’ve been busy – taking on new students. There seems to be no end to the people who want to learn English.
And are any of them nice?
All of them are ‘nice’.
You know what I mean.
Hannah can’t help but slip into the tone of the disappointed teenage girl she was when she and her mother last lived together. It is another one of the things that has endured – this intense, testy antagonism.
No, Mom, I haven’t found an appropriate husband yet.
She wonders what her mother would make of her new student were she to bring him home as her latest ‘prospect’. Hannah hardly ever brought boys home for her mother’s scrutiny. She tended to dismiss them before her mother got the chance.
* * *
Although her mother has travelled throughout Africa and slept with a wide range of men, Hannah knows that Pierre is very far from the man her mother would have imagined for her. Some young French doctor with a tailored suit is probably closer to the mark – the kind of student Hannah teaches on Tuesdays and Thursdays at the pharmaceutical company a few blocks away from Language Works.
* * *
So when are you planning to come home?
I can’t even begin to think about that, Mom. Paris is so expensive.
I’m sure I could find the money to pay for your ticket.
Where? Under the bed?
* * *
Since her early forced retirement, her mother has become increasingly reclusive. The closest relationships she seems to have these days are with her cats and their vet. Although she was once a prominent journalist, she neglected her pension and these days she has barely enough funds to live off. Recently, she had a dry wall built between her old bedroom and the rest of the house, and she now rents her bedroom out to a very well-behaved Afrikaans-speaking youth. She has moved her bed into the old TV room – positioning it exactly where Oliver and Hannah used to throw their uneaten broccoli and peas behind the couch.
* * *
I’m not getting any younger, her mother continues. If we don’t manage to see each other more often, what’s the point of carrying on?
* * *
Her mother has always spoken like this: with this bleak fatalism. She used to claim that journalism was her way of entering the world, but in fact it was her way of evading it. She could pass through realities sufficiently distant from her own and then come home to visit her children – or so it seemed to Hannah – between trips. Hannah and her mother have more in common
than her mother would like to think, which is why she has been more critical of her daughter than she ever was of her son. Even in death, it seems, Oliver can do no wrong.
* * *
Don’t worry, Mom. I’m sure we both have many decades ahead of us.
* * *
Hannah considers telling her about Monsieur Levi and his cancer, but once she starts telling her mother about her life in Paris, she knows she won’t be able to stop. Her mother is very good at getting people to reveal the very things they have decided not to talk about. It made her a good journalist and, on occasions, an overly invasive parent.
* * *
Well, I really wish you’d just knuckle down and finish your MA.
What for? I have no intention of becoming an academic.
* * *
Hannah registered for an MA in English literature at London University a few years ago – as soon as she’d attained indefinite leave to remain and could apply for a bursary. But a few weeks before the course was due to start, she dropped out. She realised she had no appetite to be a student. She preferred the idea of reading for her own pleasure and forming her opinions by herself.
* * *
You were just as capable as Oliver, you know. Even he used to say that.
As capable of what? Driving into a wall?
But she doesn’t say this.
If Olly said it, she says instead, then it must be true.
I don’t mean to nag you, darling. You do know that, don’t you?
I do, she lies – they lie.
It’s just that I worry about you. You didn’t even participate in those last demonstrations at La Bastille, did you? Isn’t that right next to where you work?
I had bronchitis, remember? Hannah lies again.
V
Pierre
The rain is invisible against the bright blank sky but thick and wet on his face, and the steps leading down to her road are running dark with water. While those around him wrestle with umbrellas or duck for cover, he descends deliberately, at ease, the picture of contentment.
The White Room Page 6
