Yet Hannah starts to relax internally as she manoeuvres her suitcase through the flower pots in the front garden and enters the cool interior, with its curved white wall, rocky fireplace, worn brown carpet and smell of cat litter.
* * *
She encounters two cats she has never met asleep at the foot of her bed. Her bedroom still has the same dead pigeon smell and the same view of the neighbour’s overgrown boundary and the glutinous swimming pool. Her mother has hung a bird-feeder from the wisteria – a large plastic Coke bottle with coloured pipes sticking out of it – and Hannah sees some grey sparrows landing to investigate.
The darker of the two cats stretches at her touch.
Tea?
Her mother has arrived in the doorway, facing the same view.
Except for a brief fumble at the airport, they haven’t touched yet.
The door to Oliver’s bedroom remains firmly closed behind her.
Why not?
I cleaned out your room, her mother says. I had the carpets professionally done. Makhosi and I washed your curtains and cleared out your cupboard – except for the top shelf, which is still full of your old rosettes. I’m not sure what you want me to do with them. Send them to Paris?
Hannah imagines her apartment festooned with rosettes from her childhood – from horse shows and gymkhanas before she went to boarding school. She wonders what Pierre and the two Serbs would make of them. It would reduce her apartment to a little girl’s room – her room from childhood. It would make Santiago’s apartment feel like another cave in that chamber of horrors – and another place from which she would have to escape.
We should probably throw them out, Hannah says.
But what if your children one day want them?
Why don’t we cross that bridge when we get to it?
IV
Pierre
All Andrew at the language school can tell him is that she has gone home.
For permanent?
‘For good’ is the correct expression, Andrew says, although I can’t say whether it’s for good or ill. But I do hope she returns. She’s our best teacher, after all, isn’t she?
Pierre doesn’t comment on Hannah’s teaching ability. He supposes she must be good. He finds, after all that has passed between them, that there is too much dust in the air for him to be able to think very accurately about her at all.
* * *
He spends the rest of the week completing his exams at the Sorbonne. He writes a paper on the relationship between Picasso and Braque and another paper on the evolution in ethics from Aristotle to Spinoza. The fact is, he worked hard for these exams because he wanted to impress Hannah, and as he writes he encounters more facts and arguments waiting inside him than he had anticipated. The papers seem to write themselves, carried by the momentum of his love for her, even if it has already ended.
* * *
After his final exam, he drinks English ale with some other students at a pub called The Bombardier in the shadows of the Sorbonne. It has been some months since he spent time with his friends and now that he’s returned to them he wonders whether they are his friends after all. Not only does he not fit, he realises that he never did.
But there is a British girl at the English pub that Pierre likes. Her name is Suzanne and she tells him that one day she wants to be a lawyer. She is slim, brown and long-limbed – with bangles on her wrists and ankles and a tattoo of stars diminishing up her arm. Pierre knows that if he played his cards right he might have a chance with her. But in the wake of that last scene with Hannah he feels too bad about himself to pretend to be the boy this girl might desire. If he spoke about what was in his heart, he would soon frighten her off – as he frightened off the English – South African/Zimbabwean/ Rhodesian – girl only a few weeks before.
The city feels banal without Hannah. It still looks much the same – the ornate buildings, the crowded streets, the surge of traffic – yet he is alone and adrift in it, as if he has never lived there at all. As he returns home from the pub that evening, he wonders how much of his relationship with Hannah was in his head. Whether the girl he came to know, and believed he loved, ever existed. He wonders too whether the boy he was going as existed either. Was it all a game? An experiment in being something more significant than himself?
He has been trying hard to hate her. He imagines that if he were a tall blond boy from a more affluent family, they might have had some hope. Yet, try as he might, he can’t find a convincing way to hate her. She is still too interesting, and their relationship feels too much like unfinished business – even if he knows that it is unlikely they will ever meet again.
* * *
In his attic room, still heavy with English ale, he pages through her notebooks – and then he tears them up and burns them, page by page, in the bathroom sink.
V
Pierre
The day after his last exam, he catches the bus to Gare de Lyon and buys a ticket for Dijon. He drinks an Americano at Costa Coffee as he waits for the train – trying to imagine, as he used to while standing here, that he is in a train station in London. He is surprised to find, however, that the allure of England has drained away from him. With Hannah becoming less English, England has been displaced as a prime destination. As he looks up at the names of all the unknown cities he could travel to from here, he realises that he desires none of them and that none of them desires him.
* * *
The countryside starts to appear before the city is quite done, intruding through lines of brambles along concrete walls, and through outcrops of plane trees and lime trees, which still look tentative and tender in the summer haze. There are long tunnels that make his ears pop, as if he has descended under the sea, and then the train skips back into the light, readjusting itself to the refreshed landscape.
The cool air of the train smells of the flavoured peanuts being consumed by the pretty Japanese girl sitting across from him. He is once again surprised by the countryside’s flatness, the cropped umber fields, the spiky lines of poplars, the confidence of the pylons. It is rare to see an animal or a worker or a farmer here. The fields seem to have been handed over to the machines. Now and again, there are little groupings of houses, and then a crane flashes past – feeding off a rubbish heap like some giant mechanical insect.
Sometimes, they sidle up to a country road, where small grey cars fail to keep up. The train flies along with a low hum and the occasional quiver, as if at any minute it might take off. Only gradually does Pierre see the more familiar emergence of wooded hills, shorn fields in small valleys, creamy cows, a bright green tractor, little meandering streams, barns for storing cereal. There is a long row of windmills along a ridge that he has never noticed before. They look huge and futuristic and stand completely still.
* * *
He changes trains at Dijon, and from Seurre he walks upriver towards his parents’ house. He hasn’t told them he is coming and he hopes they’re away for the weekend and he’ll have the place to himself. He passes through a caravan park and a children’s playground, both of which are empty – and then enters the line of prefabricated summer chalets along the river’s edge, which are still locked up, the icy grey water of winter having only recently retreated from their concrete stilts.
* * *
The first sighting of his house is of the brick wall that he helped his father rebuild several years ago, and the venerable lime trees that have just come into leaf. The forge stands behind this – and, higher up the slope, he sees the house, the blue wooden shutters closed upstairs, the downstairs windows shining and dark.
A small grey cat springs forward and purrs between his legs, and he scoops her up, so soft and delicate he can barely feel the weight of her. He plonks her on his shoulder as he enters the garden. There he scratches around behind a wooden flower pot at the side entrance and finds the key, as usual, under the flat rock.
The house still seems to carry the chill of winter about it. The ceramic tiles and damp wood
and sagging ceilings give it the feel of an old church, or some sort of side crypt where vestments are hung and wafers and wine are stored. But from the sitting room, which has his bird watercolours framed along its walls, he can already smell his mother’s kitchen.
During spring, the front lawn is filled with daffodils. They appeared on their first year at the house, completely by surprise, and they have come to surprise the family every year since. As a toddler, Pierre stood in their buttery light, oblivious to the bees, and as a young boy he lay amongst them and looked up at the sky as they jostled for attention all around him – like girls in their party dresses. But as he opens the kitchen door and steps back outside, he sees that he has missed them this year. All that is left are the green stalks and the occasional withered head. They came and went while he was lost somewhere in the streets of Paris.
He wonders briefly whether it was the daffodil-yellow of Hannah’s dress that first caught his heart’s attention. He was drawn to her before he’d even fully registered her – and he longed for her as he might have longed for an idea of home. But now that he has lost her forever, even his old home feels desolate – as if all of humanity has gone with her and left him. The place feels smaller, more diminished – or is it that he feels smaller and more diminished? Once again, he feels like a criminal, a murderer of happiness – his own happiness. The world has since denounced him and left him to the contemplation of his sins. Even his own parents – who are out there living somewhere, and were never murdered in the Congo as he described to Hannah – seem to have forsaken him.
VI
Hannah
You find your mother’s cigarettes and step outside into the desert cold of early winter. The creaking frogs flop back into the swimming pool. And you find the Southern Cross there, as expected, in the rust-brown sky, a misplaced kite headed back towards the earth. It is a shape from your childhood, as fundamental as the smell of Milo, the touch of a horse’s muzzle, the sound of afternoon thunder, the illustrations from Babar the Elephant and Dr Seuss. You might not like to admit it, but you know you’re home. Or at least as close as you’ll ever get.
The next day, you and your mother try to reaffirm your old pathways, visiting the shopping malls so your mother can show you the new shops – and the new shopping malls. At an organic market, you buy the honey-in-the-comb that Oliver liked. Your mother grows impatient with your indecision in shops and you go together to an ‘art movie’ and eat popcorn. You are both weeping silently and privately by the end of it.
Driving home, a scene from your childhood returns to you. You are alone with your mother in the car on the way back from school. You are upset, crying. You are telling your mother all about it. I don’t like Annabel, you say. She’s mean and selfish and cruel. Instead of asking more about Annabel and why you feel this way, your mother tells you those are only adjectives, ‘describing words’. It is your first lesson in grammar. After that moment, whenever you feel anything, you say to yourself: Those are only adjectives. You come to understand that ‘bully’ is a noun, ‘hate’ is a verb. The monsters at your nursery school are only there to provide you with opportunities to improve your English.
All your old friends are living in houses with husbands and children. Every exchange takes place while a peanut butter sandwich is being made or a mop of hair is being unknotted. Each of your former friends – including Monica’s sister, whom you have never really liked – pretends to envy your life in Paris, which you continue to describe in the most glowing terms. But each of them is also relieved to see you slip away again – looking ten years younger and more beautiful than any of them, but inwardly aged before your time, a spinster doing her best to undermine, from within, the body of a beautiful blonde woman.
You are happiest when you set off in your mother’s car. You drive towards the old city centre and park outside the house where you and Dawid used to fuck. The grass on the pavement is pale and dead. All the trees inside the property have been cut down and a high wall has been erected so that you can hardly see the house at all. What you can see of the house lacks any of the twee English atmosphere you used to so appreciate about it, and it now looks like what it originally was: a miner’s cottage for white immigrants starting out.
The corner where Oliver died is exactly as you pictured it. The replacement traffic light still stands without its concrete base. But there is no sign of where Oliver’s blood once was. The moss that grew there afterwards has vanished. Perhaps it died when there was nothing of Oliver left to feed off.
One morning when your mother has gone to get her moles photographed, you enter Oliver’s room. It always seemed like another world when you entered it, with books on the shelves that needed explanations and unlikely pictures stuck to the walls – photocopies of Aubrey Beardsley prints, photographs of particular trees or avenues that he wanted to remember. There was often maudlin music playing on his plastic double-deck tape player – which still sits there, along with all his tapes – including those containing all the birdcalls of southern Africa. The tapes stand in wonky piles, dusty and chaotic, with the names of the artist and album written along the spine of the cover in Oliver’s black calligraphy. You play an old favourite of his and recall walking in the rain with him, along the roads around your house – until the tape snarls and exudes itself inside the machine, so that you have to snap the tape to get it out.
You get permission from your mother to ‘tidy’ Oliver’s room. You make it sound as if you want to clear away the cobwebs, straighten and order the pile of tapes, but what you really want is to find some kind of communication from him.
You take out his khaki shorts and his long-sleeved grandpa T-shirts – he always wore long-sleeved shirts because he didn’t like anyone to notice his cuts – and you realise again how thin he was and how shabbily dressed. The grandpa shirts have spots of ink and paint on them and you find the pair of dungarees he used to paint in, the thighs of which he would wipe to clear the excess paint from the brush. You see his colour decisions – the gradual paling of blue, the movement towards a fleshier pink.
In a wooden paint box, you discover some of the letters he decided to keep. There are several from you, from boarding school days, which you read with amused forbearance. There are also letters from friends of his who went to study in England and America after school – from families much wealthier than his, written by boys brought up to be happy and successful. Then you find a letter that at first you fail to understand:
29 October 1993
Hey Olly
Thanks for the letters you wrote.
I’m sorry I never once wrote back and I’m sorry I pretended I couldn’t hear you on the phone the other day. I could say it wasn’t a good time to talk, or that I didn’t know what to say, but the thing is, I was afraid.
I don’t want to be afraid any more.
That night you climbed into my bed, I was awake. I wanted you to climb into my bed. I wanted you to kiss me. There – I said it.
I only shouted out because I knew some of the others were awake and that they were probably listening. I was afraid of what would happen to me. It was your last night, but I still had a few years left at this place.
But I have about a month of school left now. I think I’ll be coming up to my aunt’s house before Christmas. Can I visit you in Johannesburg? Or is it too late?
I hope after all these years you’ll give me another chance.
Simon
* * *
The letter is dated ten days before Oliver’s car accident.
He must have received it a day or two before he died.
He didn’t want to die, you tell yourself.
Oliver died a happy death.
VII
Pierre
He walks down to the walnut tree in the far corner of the garden and hoists the yellow kayak onto his shoulder. With his other hand, he picks up the paddle and squeezes through the bottom gate that leads to the river. With a practised manoeuvre, he places the kayak on t
he water and steps into it, pushing away from the riverbank with the paddle as soon as he is seated. The river opens up for him, the walled chateau soon appearing to the left, the bridge of the highway approaching ahead. He settles deeper into the water as he paddles upstream, adjusting to the rhythm of the river’s amber swing, his breath heavier than usual after his months in the city.
* * *
He paddles for an hour, enjoying the pain in his arms, the burning in his hands. At Glanon he stops to buy an ice cream and decides to continue up the river’s curve to the banks where the bee-eaters will soon be nesting.
Pierre?
He is about to push away from the riverbank when he hears his name and turns to see Étienne and Luca approaching on bicycles. Étienne’s hair is longer than it has ever been and Luca – a boy who arrived at their playschool from Trieste and couldn’t speak a word of French – seems to be imitating Étienne’s hair, only his is shaggier.
Étienne, Luca.
Je croyais que tu étais à Paris? says Étienne.
Je suis ici pour le week-end.
Étienne and Luca are looking stoned and beneficent. Pierre can see they are also curious about his time in Paris and interested to see what changes they can find in him. He knows Étienne never believed him – when he gave Étienne and Élodie his blessing. Étienne knew him better than that. But over time Étienne came to appreciate Pierre’s tact: it made him less of a bastard in the eyes of their friends.
The White Room Page 15
