The muddle has its own particular quality. This isn’t particularly evident in the individual pieces of jewelry—intended not as an unkind criticism but as an observation that Pascal might be the first to agree with. It’s plain to see that every one of the amber pendants mounted in silver or wood on long chains and each ring set with a large stone has been produced with a certain lack of enthusiasm. Maybe the impression is different when you look at just one piece on its own—Pascal displays them on draped velvet and brocade for sale—but in here the items of jewelry lying about look as if they’ve been turned out on a production line, interchangeable products made without loving dedication or creative impulse.
“And,” Pascal greets me, “how are you and the fairy-tale prince? Has your range spread beyond the bed by now?”
“It has.”
“But all the same there’s a problem.” She turns back to the piece of wood she’d been working on with sandpaper when I entered the room. “Or you wouldn’t be here, would you?”
Too kind of her, coming straight to the point like that. I’d much rather be talking to Tereza. But I get the feeling that just now I can’t be choosy. Apart from which, although Pascal may well be challenged on a number of issues—such as tact as well as sensitivity—in dealing with other people’s feelings, she certainly isn’t lacking in practical life experience. So I take a deep breath, and then I tell her about my being jealous of Kat, and that she’s far better at getting Nicholas to open up than I am.
“Are you so sure about that?” Pascal looks up for an instant from her work. “He may just react differently to her than to you. But that doesn’t mean to say that he lets her get any closer to him. Why don’t you ask Kat about it?”
“She might take it for distrust.”
“Well, that’s what it is, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes, but—”
She shakes her head. “What do you want of Nicholas, Phil? What is it you really want from him?”
“I don’t know. More certainty, I suppose.”
“That doesn’t exist in any relationship.”
“Right. Well, then, that he doesn’t act so reserved all the time. He knows everything about me, I reveal myself totally to him, and I get nothing back from him.” I draw the bath sheet more tightly around me and reflect. “The funny thing is, I love him all the same.”
“How romantic. Try substituting ‘all the same’ with ‘because of it,’ and you might be nearer to an answer.” Pascal puts wood and sandpaper aside and tips out a few amber chips in front of her on the table. “And what if his silence just means that he doesn’t have anything to say?”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s because you love him.” Now she reaches for a magnifying glass in order to inspect a couple of amber chips more closely. “If you ask me, love hardly comes into it if there’s one doing all the giving and the other does nothing but take.”
“You know what I can’t stand about you, Pascal?” I say after a brief pause. “That you love telling people what they don’t want to hear.”
“Well, someone’s got to…” Without putting down the magnifying glass, she waves one hand at me. “Give me the tweezers over there.”
I watch her as she carefully dabs one of the tiny chips with adhesive and inserts it into the piece of wood she’s prepared. Then she attaches a pin to the back of the brooch. Hard to believe that her thick fingers can do such delicate work.
“That wasn’t particularly helpful,” I say at last.
“Phil, now listen to me.” Pascal puts the finished piece aside and looks up at me. “It’s your life, not mine, and you’re responsible for your own problems. I’d advise you if I could, but I don’t know about men, nor do I want to know about them. OK?”
“OK.”
“Would you still like some coffee anyway?”
“Sure.”
“Then go and get dressed, for heaven’s sake.” Pascal gets up, pushes past me, and points at the bath towel. “Or are you waiting for me to tear it off and throw myself at you?” “Would you do that?”
“Oh, who knows,” she says drily. “What would life be without exotic adventures on the edge of perversion?”
She’s waiting for me in the living room, with coffee and yellow butter biscuits on the table.
“Hey.” I point at them. “Are those leftovers from the summer?”
“They’re fresh, you idiot! D’you think I’d have cut out bells and Christmas tree shapes in the summer?”
Under her distrustful gaze I eat a few biscuits and nod at her enthusiastically—they really do taste fantastic—and I notice how at some point her expression changes and becomes thoughtful.
“Whats the matter?”
Pascal clears her throat awkwardly. “Well … actually, Tereza intended to tell you this today, but as she isn’t here … Wait a minute, will you?” She leaves the room and is back in a second. A folded piece of blue paper lands in front of me on the table.
“Read this. We’ve got a whole collection of them.”
It’s a letter, just a few lines, hurriedly scrawled in thick black felt pen. I don’t know what’s worse, the gross ugliness of the words, which strike me like a punch in the face and make me blush, or the brutality they express.
“Who writes stuff like that?”
Pascal shrugs. “Some guy for whom the notion of two lesbos screwing doesn’t make him jerk off for once, but puts his nose out of joint.” She pulls a face, presumably to show her indifference to this letter, but it ends up as a grotesque, lopsided grin.
“And why … why are you showing me this?”
“Huh.” She moves her hands, trying to smooth her short hair behind her ears. “Shit, I’d rather Tereza had told you, but she’s been trying for weeks and simply can’t bring herself to do it. Well … we’re leaving, Phil.”
“What?”
“We’ve thought it over hundreds of times, and there are as many reasons.” She points to the letter. “That’s only one of them.”
I get the crazy feeling that if only I can manage to leave this room quickly enough, I can reverse what she said. If I act as if I hadn’t been here at all. “And the others?”
“For example, that I’m feeling homesick for my country,” says Pascal. “Or for my previous career. Or that Tereza’s sick of clients whose only problem is the neighbor’s dog shitting in their garden.”
I stare at the letter. “So when?”
“Next year, sometime in the spring.”
“In the spring!” That soon. My thoughts rush in all directions. “And what about Glass? She’ll lose her job. She’ll go crazy when she finds out you’re going to move!”
“She already knows.”
“She already knows! Why didn’t she tell me?”
“Because she thinks it’s up to Tereza. And because she seemed quite relaxed about it herself.”
“Relaxed about it …” I must stop repeating each sentence like a scratched record. “But what about her job?”
“There are dozens of lawyers in the area,” says Pascal calmly. “Glass is good; she expects she’ll find a new job anytime. She could even work in Michael’s firm.”
“And Tereza?”
“She’s tracked something down in Holland. She was looking round while we were there on vacation. International law. She’ll have to do some more studying for a few months, but she’s definitely got a job.”
Of course she’s right. Holland isn’t the other end of the world. We’ll be able to visit each other, we’ll telephone. All the same, my stomach turns at the thought of not having Tereza nearby any longer.
“Well, that’s about it.” Pascal empties the rest of her coffee, looks at her watch, and gets up. “I’ve got to go.”
“It’s all right.”
“You could come along and help me set up if you like.”
“Don’t feel like it.”
“Well, stay here, then. Make yourself at home. I expect there’s someth
ing in the fridge you can heat up. Oh, and clear these dishes, will you?”
She’s already taken three steps toward the hall when she stops and turns back to me once more. “And as far as your Nicholas is concerned …”
“Yes?”
“Maybe it would help if you took the initiative more and acted less like a detached bystander drifting around the world.” She grins. “That’s precisely what I can’t stand about you.”
chapter 15
secale
cornutum
A postcard turns up, this time from Cape Town—Gable announces he will definitely be coming for Christmas. This is the signal for Glass to apply herself to planning the Christmas festivities with military precision. Tereza and Pascal are invited; Michael’s presence is taken for granted.
I find Glass in the kitchen sitting at the table with a pile of cookbooks and a heap of scribbled notes on scraps of paper in front of her and, as is customary at this time of year, deep in concentration over the composition of a multicourse Christmas menu. I’ve long since ceased wondering why she spends so much time on something that will never get beyond the planning stage. Glass has never so far sorted out one of her strange menus. Glass didn’t buy the cookbooks for herself— they belonged to Stella. Like all the festive meals planned by Glass, Christmas dinner will end up consisting of just one course: chicken in a ready-made marinade with roast potatoes. When I tackle her about Tereza’s plans to move, she doesn’t even look up from her jumble of papers.
“Of course I shall miss her, darling,” she mumbles.
“And what are you going to do?”
“Not think about it.”
“I mean, what will you do when you lose your job?”
“Well, what d’you suppose? I’ll find another one.”
Glass snaps one of the cookbooks shut, opens another, and makes some cryptic notes. The tiled stove roars into action, filling the kitchen with pleasant warmth. I’ve had to pay for it with blisters on my hands—and there’ll be no end to the wood chopping before April next year.
“And don’t think I haven’t often thought about it before now,” Glass continues. “I’ve been in that law firm longer than the longest-serving house plant. Actually, I should be grateful to Tereza. If she wasn’t going, I’d never shift my ass.”
“Will you start working for Michael?”
“Of course not! I can work for Michael or I can sleep with him. Doing both is out of the question.” She pushes the scraps of paper aside and reaches for the next book. “Tell me, darling, what d’you say to chicken with potatoes for Christmas?”
“Terrific idea.”
“Isn’t it?” Glass looks up, beams at me, and begins crumpling the hundred scraps of paper. “Why don’t you and Dianne each invite your friends as well?”
Dianne stays with Kora nearly all the time now or with her in their girlfriends’ home. When I ask her whether she’d like to invite her friend to Visible for Christmas, she just shakes her head dismissively.
“Kora’s only seen Visible from afar, and that was enough for her. She says there’s something magnetic about it. She maintains there are probably dozens of water veins crossing energy lines below the foundations.”
“Water veins and energy lines?”
“Well, she believes in that sort of thing.”
“And you?”
“Well, maybe.” Dianne cocks her head to one side. “At any rate, Kora says that houses like Visible would devour anyone entering them.”
“I don’t want to upset you, but that sounds a bit nuts.”
“If you like. But believe me, Phil, there’s no one more clearheaded than Kora.”
Asking Kat whether she feels like eating chicken and roast potatoes elicits the information that she’s off with her parents over Christmas and New Year’s to endanger the Alps on skis.
“Definitely the last time,” she declares over a pre-Christmas session of violin scraping while I’m visiting her at home. “And this time I’m going to have a wild time, after that Malta disaster in the summer!”
“Are you still on the lookout?”
Kat pulls a face. “What are you giving Glass and Dianne for Christmas?”
“We’re not doing presents—we’re broke.”
“What about Nicholas?”
“No idea.”
Apart from running, he doesn’t have any hobbies. Of course he has his strange museum, but he might consider it a betrayal of confidence if I told Kat about it. And to be honest, I relish the idea that this confidence gives me the edge over Kat.
“We’ve arranged to do a bit of Christmas shopping together,” she says without putting down the violin. “He’s really great fun to be with, don’t you think?”
“Depends.”
“By the way, he thinks it’s a great idea.”
“What idea?”
Kat lowers her violin. I can almost hear her mother pressing the stopwatch somewhere in the house. “Oh, that I’m going to have my hair dyed black.”
“Kat!”
I decide to make a display case out of wood for Nicholas. It’s a project that is totally beyond my capacity until I quickly decide to ask Michael to help me. It seems there’s nothing he can’t do. One of Visible’s empty rooms is selected as a workroom. We plunder the cellar, where we find well-seasoned timber, and in the days that follow we’re busy together hammering and sanding and nailing and sawing directly Michael is back from work in the early or, more frequently, late evening.
“What d’you intend to do after high school?” he asks me at one point.
“No idea. Maybe study, but don’t ask me what. But I can just as well see myself sailing round the world for a bit with Gable.”
“I can’t wait to get to know him.” Michael brushes some wood shavings off his sweater. “You’re very fond of him, aren’t you?”
“As a child I always wished he was my father.”
At which Michael looks at me thoughtfully in a way that could mean everything or nothing, more likely everything. I smile at him and turn back to my work. Should he and Glass decide to move in together, they’ll announce it soon enough.
The row with Nicholas happens as quickly as a sudden summer storm. And it’s over just as quickly. But in the same way that one of these brief summer thunderstorms rarely clears the humidity from the air, our argument also leaves a hint of more to come, a background rumbling that I seem to be hearing even days later. Nicholas arrives at the house of Tereza’s father, where I’m waiting for him. As I open the door to him, he stomps into the hall in a state that I’ve never seen him in before.
“It’s all over the place—they’re all talking, saying you’re gay.”
“Who’s saying?”
“Kat’s ex-boyfriend! He claims you groped him, and that’s putting it mildly!”
“Didn’t. I only kissed him.”
“You did what?”
The room temperature seems to plummet by several degrees. A hole forms somewhere in my insides through which all my strength and energy drain out.
“Kissed him, so that he’d leave me alone.”
“Are you completely out of your mind?” Nicholas raises his arms, and for a moment I really think he’s going to hit me. “How can you possibly provide these people with ammunition?”
“Let the idiot say what he likes! I could say the same thing about him. I could let people know how much he enjoyed it.”
“Don’t be so damned naïve. Haven’t you given a moment’s thought to Kat?”
“She ought to be pleased I’ve saved her having to use her powers of persuasion.”
“Which she didn’t ask you for!”
His face is Hushed with fury. The dark eyes glitter angrily. I think of chess. When I was trying to learn how to play, Michael explained to me how to maneuver one’s own pieces or those of one’s opponent into certain positions. I can’t remember whether it’s stalemate or a draw when no one can make another move without checkmating the other person’s king.
But this is just how I feel at this moment—defeated.
I ought to ask Nicholas why he’s hiding behind Kat when it’s really just that he’s afraid to be seen with me. I ought to ask him why I have to defend myself to him when he’s obviously the one with the problem. But to do so I’d have to be able to suppress the quiver in my voice and calm my racing heart. I lack the courage to go over to the offensive, the way Pascal advised me to do. Since he turned up here in a razor-sharp fury, I’m consumed with fear he might go off and leave me on my own. He must see this fear, for suddenly his face softens.
“Phil …”
I turn away so that he can’t see I’m fighting back tears. He places his arms round me from behind. His breath brushes my neck.
“Phil, I’m sorry.”
“It’s OK.”
“I don’t want to fight with you.”
“I don’t want to quarrel either.”
“Come along, come.”
Later, after we’ve slept together, we’re lying on the bed staring up at the ceiling and listening to the now familiar ticking sounds of the heating. Darkness and wind push against the windows from outside. I ask Nicholas if he wouldn’t like to come over to Visible one day over Christmas.
“I can’t. My parents and I are visiting relatives.”
“Why go with them?”
“I can’t leave them alone.”
“If things are so bad, surely it won’t make any difference whether you’re there or not. With you there too, that’ll make three of you to give each other hell instead of two.”
“You don’t understand.”
I turn on my side to face him, tracing the outline of his eyebrows and stroking his hair. “Is there some dark family secret you haven’t revealed to me?”
“No. There’s nothing.”
“But if you tear each other apart, why d’you go to relatives, then?”
The Center of the World Page 28
