by James Lasdun
She was singing in a low voice, with a slow, syncopated beat from the band behind her. It wasn’t the kind of singing she used to do in the group she and Richard had played in together back at Ryden College: bluegrass and Gaelic music with its three or four chord changes and correspondingly simple emotions. Either the listing hadn’t mentioned it or else Richard had missed, somehow, that she had become a jazz singer.
She glanced through the lights in their direction as he and Victor squeezed through the tables. As he sat down, Richard caught her eye and for a moment a look of shock appeared on her face. Almost immediately, however, she turned the look into one of delighted amazement, dropping her jaw, hamming it up a little.
‘Well, well. I’ve just seen an old pal of mine,’ she said into the mike. She smiled again at Richard: ‘Evenin’ there …’
He nodded back, acutely self-conscious, but also relieved. He really had been afraid he might get a hostile reception.
From her exaggerated accent, he recognised an old game she liked to play among New Yorkers – ‘putting on the Irish’, she used to call it.
She looked very self-possessed in her sheath of green silk, legs crossed with a high-heeled shoe dangling from a toe. Her strong, high-cheekboned face was sculpted a little cleaner than he remembered, so that her expressions appeared more sharply drawn. But her hair was the same wild, unruly mass, brown with gold glints in it, tumbling down over her shoulders.
The band had begun playing an instrumental passage to which she was laconically snapping the fingers of one hand. With the other she raised the microphone to her lips and picked up the lyric again. Couldn’t they do away … with April … Leave no space … so there’s no trace … of April … The melody, intricately at odds with what the ear expected, flowed from her with the same unaffected clarity as in her Ryden College days. But at the same time the music, with its off beats and diminished chords, was so absolutely strange in relation to the Francesca he had known, it was as if she were revealing some entirely new aspect of her personality. The song petered out, dispersing into broken phrases, snare-drum rustles, stray tinklings on the piano.
Then on some invisible signal the instruments began reconverging, the more urgent beat of a new number kicking in with a slapped thump of bass notes bouncing against a Latin-sounding pattern on the drums … I don’t know what to think … About anything any more … She grinned, eyes half-closed. The things I used to enjoy … A sip of my favourite drink … A kiss from my favourite boy … Her voice itself, Richard realised, while it still carried the unmistakable imprint of her warm-humoured, self-mocking personality, had changed too: deepened in timbre, acquired an expressiveness that gave a precise definition to every shift in the song’s rapid flux of moods while at the same time salting each note with a half-amused irony. Yesterday they thrilled me … Today I find them a bore …
He gazed at her, riveted. What had happened to her? What seas had she swum in since that night they parted company in New York, eleven years ago? He sipped at his drink: a bourbon he’d ordered in deference to the atmosphere of the place, even though hard liquor didn’t agree with him.
At the end of the set she came to their table, greeting Richard with what appeared to be uncomplicated pleasure.
‘Richard! What a lovely surprise!’
‘Well, I saw the listing … Thought I’d catch you while you’re over.’
‘Over? I’m living here. Been back almost two years. We have some catching up to do, mister!’
He introduced her to Victor, who had sat expressionlessly through the performance, but now, to Richard’s relief (he could be painfully candid) complimented her.
‘Nice songs. Some Sarah Vaughan in there, right? One or two I didn’t recognise. Did you write them yourself?’
‘Aha, yes, busted, guilty as charged. I did, I did.’
She seemed a little giddy; no doubt on a high from her performance. She signalled a waiter, then rested her hand on Richard’s.
‘You haven’t changed a bit, Richard.’
‘Nor have you.’
She was looking into his eyes, her own shining with an almost disconcerting intensity.
‘Victor’s writing a book on jazz,’ he heard himself say. ‘Scandinavian jazz, right, Vic?’
She turned to Victor.
‘Is that right? Funny – I was at the Dyllmar Hotel just last summer with a whole bunch of them fellers. Lars Gullen, Ulf Adgaard …’
‘The jazz hotel?’ Victor asked. ‘In Stockholm?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘I was there. The same weekend.’
‘No!’
‘I was. I was there for the Lars Gullen concert.’
‘No kidding.’ She turned back to Richard. ‘Glad you’ve friends with some taste in music!’
He smiled, not trusting himself to speak. His head felt thick with some dizzying sweetness.
‘Too bad they closed the place down,’ Victor said.
‘What? They did not! Tell me they did not close down the Dyllmar Hotel!’ Her hair swung across her bare shoulder as she turned again. Gazing at it, Richard remembered the time he had found himself plying his fingers through it. His hand itself seemed to recall the sensation, with its own strange ache of nostalgia.
‘It’s a shame, I know,’ Victor was saying.
‘That’s puttin’ it mildly! I loved that place.’
‘Me too …’
They talked about this hotel that they both knew – evidently a place of considerable bohemian glamour, and from there they moved on to other subjects: musicians they both liked, new clubs in Harlem and Hoboken.
Richard listened, contentedly. Victor was on good form: always a pleasure to observe. There was never any pretence with Victor. When he was down he looked like a bum. But when he was up there was something splendid about him. His large belly under the spotless cream linen shirt he was wearing, the mottled flesh of his skin bulging over the buttoned collar, gave an impression of bursting vigour rather than excessive weight. His broad shoulders shook frequently with rich laughter. But it was his eyes above all that illuminated his singular spirit of revelry. Like those of mystics or people susceptible to hypnosis, they rolled upward at moments of high animation, with an uninhibited ease that suggested he was perhaps never very far from a state of ecstatic trance. Up they went now, as Francesca finished an anecdote about a dancer who’d done a strip act with a vacuum cleaner at some burlesque evening, sucking the clothes off herself piece by piece. ‘Cherry Chakravarti,’ Victor said, laughing in recognition, a brief delirious rolling whiteness visible over the lower lids of his eyes. ‘I saw her in Vancouver. She’s very funny …’
Smiling along, Richard was conscious of the extent to which he had withdrawn from this cosmopolitan world of theirs with its dense circuitry of entertainments and personalities. More and more, the minds of city-dwellers seemed to him like the buildings they inhabited: strange artifical miracles of integration and compactness. As in the city itself, so in these minds there appeared to be no empty space, no contour that wasn’t shaped in response to the lives crowded around it, no tolerance for anything that wasn’t purposeful, brisk, decisive. Since moving to Aurelia he had felt the pace of his own mind relaxing, the clutter emptying out. The children at his school kept him abreast of the names of new celebrities and fashions, but beyond that he’d more or less cut himself off from popular culture. They had no TV at home, and only a dial-up internet connection. The books he read were almost all written in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. The only CDs he’d bought in recent years were Smithsonian archival recordings of railroad and mining songs.
Was it possible, he wondered, that he had become a little too complacently detached in his rural retreat? Certainly he would have liked to be able to contribute more to the conversation right now. But on the other hand, there was something that suited his conception of himself, in being perceived as somehow above or beyond these matters … Francesca turned his wrist over to look at his
watch.
‘Time to get back to work. Can you stick around? We finish at eleven. Maybe have another drink?’
‘Definitely,’ Richard said as he calculated how much time this would leave him to catch his train.
‘Smashing.’
She went back up onstage.
Victor turned to him.
‘Want me to leave?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Well … Put it this way, I think she’s forgiven you.’
Richard smiled.
‘Stay,’ he said.
The music began again. Francesca stood now instead of sitting, casually magnetising the attention of the room onto herself as she moved lightly to the beat. What was I ever … but a ghost to you … a mist of dreams … the colour blue … The silk dress, clinging to the curves of her body, made her look fuller in the figure than Richard remembered; voluptuous almost. Between that and her playful rapport with her band, all men, it seemed clear to him that she had fully embraced, as the phrase went, her own femininity. Not that she had exactly been inhibited before. He remembered the day they’d spent in her hotel room in New York. The room itself had become a kind of charged space in his mind: one that he’d done his dutiful best to keep closed since getting married. It opened now as he watched her, and it seemed to him he was there inside it again, taking in the unmade bed, black dresser, orange velour wingback chair and Francesca herself, not in a green silk dress but an old faded T-shirt, throwing her arms around him as he came through the door, her mouth opening on his, her mass of hair enveloping him in the clove-scented perfume she wore at that time …
She’d bought champagne at the duty free. She opened the bottle, pouring it into plastic cups from the bathroom – too fast, the foam spilling over onto the dresser top. She was in an exuberant state, just as she had been here in the club tonight; high on the audacity of what she had done. And a little manically intent on seeing that the occasion lived up to the extreme measures she’d taken to engineer it.
No doubt foreseeing some resistance on Richard’s part, she had put herself into a doting, worshipful frame of mind. He remembered vividly the effect this had on him. He’d never thought of himself as particularly receptive to the suggestion of subservience in a woman, but the many variations Francesca played on this attitude that afternoon had aroused him like nothing before or since, branding onto his psyche a series of incandescently erotic images. One in particular, in which, whether by accident or design, he’d been confronted by the image of himself behind her in the mirror, her breasts heavy and yielding in his hands, had seemed the promise of an existence founded on pure bliss.
And yet he had rejected this existence. The reasons he’d given Victor for his change of heart – his sudden sense of the disparity in circumstance between himself and Francesca; the tug of loyalty he’d felt towards Sara – were accurate, at least to the extent that they were how he’d explained it to himself. But he’d always felt that they weren’t quite adequate to the extreme nature of his reaction; that some other, less rational force must have been obscurely at work. And as he thought back to that moment in the stucco-walled restaurant, when the waiter had lit their candle and the look of pure love had appeared on Francesca’s face, and he had felt, suddenly, an overwhelming desire to extricate himself from the situation, it seemed to him they explained nothing at all.
What had he been recoiling from? In hindsight his behaviour seemed to him unnatural, freakish almost, and utterly mysterious. Cringing at his coldness, he remembered the little speech he had made after they’d walked back to Francesca’s hotel, where she was evidently expecting him to stay the night. He had been ‘impulsive’, he told her. He’d put them both ‘in danger of making a grave mistake’. He needed to ‘step back and think about what had happened …’ In an attempt to soften the apparently devastating impact of his words on Francesca, he’d offered to go for a long walk in the park with her the next day, and talk things over. But when he called early the following morning she’d gone: disappeared like the seal maiden in one of the ballads she used to sing.
The second set ended at almost ten past eleven: he had under half an hour to get to Penn Station. Francesca was making her way over to their table. He shouldn’t have agreed to stay: better to have left gracefully earlier than put himself in a situation from which he was once again going to have to make an abrupt exit. He was about to stand and make his excuses when their waiter appeared with glasses of champagne.
‘This is on me, fellers,’ Francesca said, throwing herself into a chair. Her face was flushed, her eyes sparkling. ‘All that exercise makes a girl thirsty. Cheers now!’
The three of them touched glasses and drank, Richard glancing uneasily at his watch. He could stay over with Victor, he supposed, but there was no spare room and Victor’s sofa-bed, he knew from experience, was filthy and uncomfortable. Anyway, he had to be at work early the next morning.
‘So Richard,’ Francesca was saying, ‘do you think I’ve come on a bit since the old days?’ She turned to Victor: ‘Richard and I used to play together in a folk ensemble. I was the damsel with a dulcimer. Richard was our unofficial musical director. Kept us all tidily in step on those old-time tunes of his …’ She waved a pretend baton, singing in a high voice that made people at the next table turn: ‘Cumberland Gap is a noted place … Three kinds of water to wash your face … Not that I didn’t bring along some pretty hokey stuff of my own. But it was great fun all the same. Was it not, Richard?’
‘It was.’
‘Those were the days, right?’
‘They were,’ he answered her. ‘But listen, Francesca. I have to go. I feel terrible, but I have to be on a train in twenty minutes.’
‘Well, goodness, why didn’t you say so, you absurd man? We’ll drink up our medicine here, then get you a taxi.’
She knocked back the rest of her champagne. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or hurt that she wasn’t more upset at his hurry to be gone. ‘Come on! Come on!’ she was saying. ‘Coats. Wallets. Briefcase …’ She bustled him and Victor out through the club. A moment later she was flagging down a taxi on Varick Street.
‘Quick. In you get, sir!’
They embraced.
Victor climbed in beside him.
‘You can drop me off somewhere.’
Richard stuck his head out of the window.
‘Shall we stay in touch this time?’
‘Well now, that’s your call I’d say, wouldn’t you?’
‘Give me your number.’
He keyed her number into his phone and waved goodbye as the taxi pulled off.
‘Nice person,’ Victor said, sprawling back in the seat. ‘Talented too.’
‘Well, thanks for coming along.’ Richard said, vaguely. He was turning her last words over in his mind – that’s your call I’d say, wouldn’t you? – feeling the gentle reproach in them but also, he sensed, the invitation.
**********
Sara had installed the swan in her studio, moving the loom to one side, covering the floor with newspaper and setting up the straw bedding next to a zinc water-trough. It liked to dunk its cresses and duck-pellets in the water before eating them. Swiftly, and with a willingness she couldn’t quite account for, she grew attached to it, drawn to its presence as if by an enchantment.
Richard had come to see it the first evening, back in May. Despite his dislike for Carla he was usually careful to encourage Sara’s involvement with these injured creatures. It seemed important to him to be thought of as a lover of animals, although the truth, as Sara had realised some time ago, was that he was nervous of them – squeamish about feather-mites, deer-ticks, bacteria; afraid of being scratched or bitten. Out of sheer determination he would sometimes force himself to handle one of them; stroke it or even pick it up. She appreciated these gestures, but it was a bit dismaying to observe the effort they took.
Hanging back in the doorway of her studio, he made the usual approving noises, admiring the swan’s beauty, even
suggesting Sara call Deirdre Wagoner, the science teacher at his school, to arrange for the children to see it. But as he stared across the room at the pale creature sitting motionless on its bed of straw, there was a more than usually guarded look on his face, as if its presence there disturbed him in some way that mites and ticks and germs couldn’t quite account for.
The next day he told her, in a studiedly neutral tone, that Deirdre had reacted indignantly to the news that a mute swan was being rehabilitated under his roof. She had participated in a DEP-sponsored ‘egg-shaking’ programme in which volunteers spent several weekends destroying the cygnet embryos without breaking the eggs, so that the swans would be tricked into trying to hatch them rather than laying a new clutch. It was typical of Carla’s amateurish meddling, Richard reported Deirdre as saying, to try to return this animal to the wild rather than have it humanely destroyed, as any responsible conservationist would have done. To prove her point, the teacher had given him a thick sheaf of printouts documenting the many varieties of environmental havoc wrought by this species. Richard knew better than to attempt to lay down the law in his home, but he gave Sara the printouts, and the sense of his opposition was unmistakable. It didn’t deter her, but it exacerbated a certain tendency of hers, to withdraw into herself.
Daniel’s reaction was more surprising. Unlike his father he had a real affinity for the animals she took in; an easy, affectionate curiosity. He still seemed to enjoy helping her with them. Sitting with him on the porch, feeding a brood of orphaned squirrels or chipmunks with pipettes of warm formula, was a lingering reminder of their old companionship. She’d assumed he would want to help with the swan – take charge of the evening feed perhaps, or collect waterweeds from the stream. More than that, she’d hoped the bird might produce the same delight in him as it had in her. But he had notably failed to rise to the occasion. A laconic ‘cool’ was all he’d uttered when she first showed it to him, and he’d quickly gone off to play elsewhere.
Why his reaction should be so subdued, she wasn’t sure. Maybe it had to do with the size of the creature – too large to pet; too powerfully itself for the kind of half-imaginary relationships he liked to form with these animals. Or maybe it was that her own interest in it was too strong; too nakedly apparent. It did seem to her, as he’d turned to go, that his guileless brown eyes – still those of a child – had a look of puzzlement in them, as though her excitement had disturbed him.
