‘Well, that’s it,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what else there is. It’s all in the book.’
He made it sound as though I’d disappointed him. I suppose I had, although in what sense I wasn’t sure. I shouldn’t have gone there. I don’t know what made me. But something did. Something that still nags me about what we think of people and what we know of them.
He pointed to the cutting folded in my hand: ‘Let me copy that. It might come in useful if there’s a second edition of the book.’
I gave him the report again. He went over to a machine in the corner, sandwiched the cutting and buzzed a copy. He held it up as if he were performing a magician’s trick for a country dweller, a woman furthermore, who might not know what a printer was.
Our meeting was over. He asked if I would like him to mail me a signed copy of the book rather than get me to send him mine for that purpose. I said yes and gave him my address. For some odd reason I wanted to tell him that Jack returned to the farm on his release from prison in the summer of 1912 to find the men of the Howgill and Cowperthwaite families ranged against him, arms folded. It was part of the complete story. But I forgot. Suddenly it seemed to be irrelevant and uninteresting, like the branches of my tortuous family tree. Before I left and despite his change of mood, Kramer asked me where I was staying and whether I’d like to join him for dinner that evening at a West End restaurant. ‘I can book a table for two,’ he said. So not there, at home, with his strange wife. I said I was visiting friends and staying with them overnight. I declined his invitation. He said it had been an interesting meeting and shut the front door quietly behind me. Looking back, I saw his wife’s face at one of the lower windows.
Later the next day, having fled London and stayed overnight at a motorway hotel, I was driving across the fell, past weatherbeaten holdings where the ghosts of those menacing sentinels could still be imagined barring entrance. I have long been familiar with the countryside between the M6 and the Pennines, which come into view at all high points beyond Orton on roads west: Great Asby Scar and its limestone pavements, for example. The terrain here is as bleak as it must have been centuries ago when the farms of Drybeck, huddled beneath it, first bedded down for winter. This is not land in which hedgerows have been torn out to create bigger, more manageable fields in the name of progress and to meet demand. Anyone can sense that patterns of life here, as well as the arrangements and ownership of pasture, have remained mostly unchanged, the world merely having brought small improvements in ways of dealing with them. Not even the names vary that much. My husband’s a different Howgill from the family of my cowering great-grandmother, but no doubt somewhere along the line they were connected, if only in the sense of being survivors in the same harsh, unforgiving region.
A year has gone by and I’m still waiting for the signed copy of Kramer’s book. In the circumstances, perhaps I was a bit hard on him.
In The Beginning
It was the least he could do, his daughter told him. Stuck up there in his eyrie, looking down on the rest of the world – and spying.
From his window on the top floor of the RapidTrans building, he looks directly across at Korda into the room provided rent-free at Jill’s prompting. He and Korda have never met but he believes it may soon be time for the end of his snooping. Making the room available to Korda isn’t much of a gesture in monetary terms, which is just as well, because Ferenc Korda has no collateral, apparently not even a change of clothes. Each day, the wizened Hungarian appears in the window with his bundle of mail, chuckles to himself and begins opening the envelopes with a blade that occasionally flashes like distant semaphore.
Perhaps he’s giggling at the name of his benefactor, the man staring at him unbeknown across the way – Sam Johnson, head of the country’s fastest-growing haulage company – or at the coincidence of Johnson’s physical elevation in the building with the recent move of RapidTrans into air freight. Sometimes, old Korda is joined by a young female assistant, who wears her spectacles at the end of her nose and sits cross-legged with a notebook, like a stenographer in an old Hollywood film. While ‘spying’, Johnson stands back from the window so that he can’t be seen.
The RapidTrans building is shaped like a closed staple, so that the gap between them is no more than thirty feet. Yet they take circuitous and opposite routes to their stations and have never acknowledged each other, at least not informally, even across their wind-blown divide, where seagulls often skew wildly upwards, their reflections distorted in the high windows. Korda sent him a brief letter of thanks for the room, typed with a jumping letter ‘o’ on the back of a torn-off advert for odourless garlic capsules. The room is at the end of a slightly larger area containing the company’s employee records – those who have retired after long service and those still ploughing the furrow – intended for Johnson’s stalled adventure in company history and nostalgia. Part of his reason for looking across at Korda is to envision the scheme as up and running, with Korda the man in charge of maintaining contact with former RapidTrans staff and producing a thrice-yearly newsletter. The Hungarian’s grubby black suit seems appropriate for someone who would be recording deaths and achievements as much as pursuing the activities of the elderly.
But Korda’s zeal is emptied into running an obscure poetry magazine called Genesis. Jill came across it while researching her doctorate on the tradition of small literary publications. Small, she assured her father, referred to circulation rather than influence. ‘You mean like muggers,’ he said provocatively. Korda is anything but an opportunist and, as a man possibly in his early seventies, could well have come to Britain as a young adult after the Soviet invasion. A victim, therefore. He is almost comic, with tufts of grey hair spiralling outwards from behind his ears. Anyway, Jill convinced her father that old Korda, awash with manuscripts and memorabilia in a Peckham basement flat, needed a system and space to survive. Johnson’s suggestion was typically bold, reckless even.
Johnson himself will soon be eligible for inclusion in his imagined newsletter, not as a footnote beneath a passport photograph but as someone meriting an edition of his own: the single-minded founder of RapidTrans, already gliding from his summit towards the region of slow dancers and faltering music, where only one outcome is certain. It’s a prospect that has turned a chummy nature into one which is almost inconversable. He has become morose for the first time in his life. He is a figurehead, but his minions now take him for granted.
Korda never looks across directly; if he appears close to the window at all it is to gaze down at the ornamental lake – once part of the docks – while dictating something to his secretary. She holds her notebook in front of her face and scribbles away almost as if she were pretending unsuccessfully to be something she is not. Her hair is bound in the shape of candyfloss on a stick, which Johnson vaguely remembers as a ‘beehive’ style. Once, it began to come adrift: a kiss-curl dropped on to her forehead as she was taking notes. When she is not there, Korda spends hours licking buff envelopes, and often rests his head on clenched fists, as though observing some sort of religious rite or journeying in the depths of memory.
One of the conditions of tenancy, apart from Korda’s understanding that he is to offer no money for the magazine’s lodging, is isolation. Johnson told his daughter to explain that the office should be viewed as a public footpath across private land: in effect, Korda owned it and was simply establishing his rights. After the message was delivered, Johnson thought it might have sounded patronising, but Korda said nothing. So far, no-one had questioned Korda’s coming and going, though Johnson decreed that it should be no secret: if questions are asked, let them be answered, he told his senior managers. He has since heard the tenancy referred to as ‘Sam’s whimsy’. Anyway, no-one ventures to Korda’s room or even to the records department of which it is an extension, because they have no need to. Johnson sometimes muses on Korda’s panting progress to the tenth floor (the lift in that part of the ‘staple’ goes only to the eighth) and his passage t
hrough all those records of lives spent working, which hang suspended in their folders on metal rails. He’s been reading up on poetry since Korda moved in. A poem, he has learned, is a song to forgotten lives. The last time he read a poem was as a schoolboy and even then under sufferance. He is tying to recall its details when the office messenger knocks at the door and enters with his mail. Among it is an envelope of the sort that Korda is forever licking and addressing. It bears a white stick-on label with Johnson’s name scribbled across it. Inside is the current edition of Genesis. The cover is glossy, professionally produced and consists of a photograph of a boxer wearing what looks like a Lonsdale belt, with the name of the magazine and a description of its contents overprinted. Apart from a photo credit to one Manfred Bauer on the inside front cover, there appears to be no further reference to the boxer or boxing. There are many poems interspersed among pages of densely printed prose, and he notices that a word at the end of one stanza has been Tippexed out and over-typed in a different font. For the moment, he does not examine Genesis closely but catches the whiff of a region from which he is excluded. The names of its contributors mean nothing to him, but at the end of a one-page editorial bewailing the costs of printing and urging subscribers to remain loyal and recruit a friend is stamped F. KORDA, EDITOR. Jill has told him that Genesis was founded in 1958, a fact confirmed in parenthesis on page two. He peers into the envelope. There is no covering letter, not even one written on the remaining half of an advertisement for homeopathic garlic.
For some time, there has been no need for Sam Johnson to turn up at RapidTrans every day. Amusingly for a company that moves freight, it runs itself. The assumption of his dispensable status simply coincided with his interest in Ferenc Korda and the magazine, so that he now buys his lunch down in the re-modelled docklands (it’s full of baguette shops and wine bars) and sits back from his window, watching the slow motion of the enterprise to which he has thrown some sort of lifeline. Korda keeps irregular hours. Some days he makes no appearance; on others he is there first thing and leaves late. He, too, eats sandwiches and drinks from a Thermos flask, which early in the morning of a few cold days steamed like a factory chimney. Korda wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket. In the middle of the afternoon he eats an apple or a banana. Once inside the room, he never leaves the building until it is time to go home.
Johnson has noticed that when Korda stands well back from the window and his door into the records room is closed, he cannot properly be seen. So, two days ago, Johnson bought a pair of miniature binoculars; the green sort easily tucked away in a birdwatcher’s rattle-bag. Sitting upstage, as it were, from his own window, he has been training it on Korda. There is the thinnest of stripes in the Hungarian’s suit and on his right forefinger a large gold ring mounted with an emerald. In close-up Korda can be seen reading aloud from manuscripts when the secretary is not there, presumably for the pleasure of doing so or to discover if a poem improves by being vocalised. He can see it is a poem by its shape on the page but he cannot decipher the words. For some strange reason he thinks Korda might speak with an accent which has lost everything bar some tell-tale rolled Rs. It is a long time since Johnson, among foreigners, drove lorries at steady speeds across the Low Countries and on the Autobahns, with that picture of Mary and the boys clipped to the windscreen alongside a separate one of Jill on her own. There was always the hint of a forced smile on Mary’s face at that time, the smile of someone stoically suppressing pain; but she hadn’t let on until it was too late. Korda, he now notices, wears a hearing-aid and has a faint tic, a twitch in the face muscles as though they were recalling something with a tendency to drift. The comparison makes him uneasy. He is reminded of that print of a Francis Bacon picture which some gauche interior designer thought fit for the boardroom. He had it removed.
In Johnson’s OUT tray lies the draft of the financial report for the shareholders’ meeting. RapidTrans is freewheeling. Always an advocate of delegation, he sometimes wishes a reverse of the process so that he could claim more than a founding credit for the company’s success. He picks up his copy of Genesis and suddenly recalls that schoolboy poem. It was Tennyson’s Morte D’Arthur. He begins mouthing the lines, and amusingly they seem to be relevant as he watches Korda, perched at the summit of the building like a nonchalant mountaineer:
The bare black cliff clang’d round him, as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels –
He puts the magazine down and lifts the binoculars again. Suddenly, Korda is standing at the window with his hands behind his back and this time looking his way. But there is no contact. Korda turns and leaves the room, an old man taken short.
The route follows the staple’s shape: down in the lift, along a corridor, a ninety-degree turn, a slightly longer stretch, another turn, a lengthy haul past Reception, another right-angle, a further corridor and turn, then the lift to the eighth floor. Johnson takes the two short flights of stairs quietly. At the foot of the second, he can hear a cistern re-filling. As he walks down the middle of the Records room towards Korda’s open door, he notices that the files are moving on their hooks, buffeted by someone who has recently passed by or sucked into the slipstream.
The journey through the edifice of RapidTrans, his memorial made concrete, leaves Johnson dizzy. Perhaps it really is time for him to go. He remembers a few more lines of that Tennyson poem. He repeats them silently to himself, though his lips move, approaching some memorable region of speech. Korda is sitting hunched over the desk with his back to him, the hillocked back of a burden-carrier, and only when Johnson is looking down does Korda turn and ripple for a second with fright.
‘Ferenc Korda?’ Johnson inquires, his voice rising to the final syllable.
Hotel De La Paix
Tiny Mr Kesselman is in the garden again, fussing over his buttonhole and looking back at the building as though he owns it. From where Bobby Samson sits in one of the attic windows, staring down at him, he really does seem small, but it’s his comic self-importance rather than his size or his pride in appearance that makes everyone smile. Beyond the garden, the formal part that leads the eye down to the lake, clouds are leaving the mountains to hover as mist above the water, offering a glimpse of snow-capped peaks.
‘I know autumn is here because we need the light on,’ says Greta, who is stretched out on the divan with her hands behind her head.
‘Don’t put it on yet,’ Bobby says, without looking away. ‘Old Kesselman might think I’m spying.’
‘Mr Kesselman is in a world of his own. He’ll probably believe you’re sympathising with him. You’re the sympathetic sort.’
They have all succumbed to the stability of the lake. Even in squally weather the revisions on its normally glacial surface seem like affronts, and they respond accordingly, becoming irritated while waiting for its restoration. They have arrived in Switzerland seeking not so much peace after the tumults of war but the continuity of peace, proof that somewhere beyond the battle lines it has always existed undisturbed. Of course, there are issues concerning neutrality in a place where the expatriates talk a lot about politics and reconstruction, even to the extent of wondering if neutrality in the circumstances of the recent past belonged to the category of craven acts. But they have come to embrace the land, not so much its people. And the lake, deep, windless and smooth-surfaced, mirrors their long-held need for rest and tranquility.
Bobby, Greta, Mr Kesselmann and the others occupy rooms in the hotel’s converted attic space. It’s a big, famous hotel so the space is huge, and chilly when it’s cold outside. However, they work long hours and are happy to do so, the better it seems to make the new lives they desire for themselves.
In a few minutes, Bobby has to put on his waiter’s uniform and take the lift to the dining-room. There he will linger near the door for two hours while the guests have tea. Lingering – being unobtrusive but always on hand – is one of the arts he has
learned since arriving a month ago in his ‘civvy’ suit and with his dyed RAF greatcoat over his arm. He has also learned that Mr Kesselman, though having fled persecution, has not arrived in a country entirely free of prejudice. Greta says one overhears much when rendering oneself invisible, in some circumstances the only bonus of servitude. Greta is a housemaid and a psychologist-in-waiting.
Bobby and Greta are good friends and see each other often. He believes they both sense some unspoken knowledge about each other. Still, they have spent a lot of time together in the past few weeks. He finds this odd, but he guesses she behaves in exactly the same way with other men when she is not in his company; in fact, he saw her laughing and flicking her hair back in a way he recognised when he passed the Café Vendome on his bicycle the other day. One of his colleagues, Lorenz, and a woman he didn’t recognise were sitting at the table with her, drinking coffee. The town has been full of such people since the war ended – young, carefree individuals mellowed by events or reports of them. They are a community, whose members are still getting to know each other. Mr Kesselman is excluded from it for at least three reasons: he is older, he keeps to himself and the origins of his arrival lay not in the war itself but in pre-war intimations of trouble, which the end of the conflict has vindicated in the most ghastly fashion. He has told Greta as much, partly because of anxiety about scattered relatives. Bobby is aware that Greta’s friendships are of equal intensity, whether they be with men or women. If anything, the little group of females to which she is attached exudes a collusive air. Some of the local men – expatriates sarcastically call them ‘the observer corps’ – have a reputation for leering. Bobby’s breath is condensing on the window pane, and through the opaque cloud a fly leaves tracks like footprints in snow.
Funderland Page 6
