Original Bliss

by A. L. Kennedy

  Mrs. Brindle tried to seem contented in her suddenly normal life and to be adaptable for her new world, no matter how hard and cold this made every part of every thing she touched. She allowed herself to betray what she had lost by ceasing to long for it. But when her betrayal became too unbearable and she began to believe she was fatally alone, she tried to pray again.

  At first her efforts felt like respectably articulated thought. No more than that. She found she had lost the power of reaching out. Now and again she could force up what felt like a shout, but then know it had fallen back against her face. Finally the phrases she attempted dwindled until they were only a background mumbling mashed in with the timeless times she had asked for help.

  So Mrs. Brindle withdrew for consolation into the patterns of her day. She sought out small fulfilments actively. There were check-out assistants to be smiled for, chance encounters with cultivated or random flowers and overheard melodies to appreciate and, every week, she would do her utmost to find at least one new and stimulating, low-cost recipe. It was all bloody and bloody and then more bloody again, but faultlessly polite and inoffensive and there were no other bloody options she could take, but in her case, the path of least resistance was the one that she most wanted to resist.

  Now another bloody year was grinding its way into June with hardly a protest or a sign of life.

  Mrs. Brindle encouraged habit to initiate and regulate her movements in the absence of her interest and will. Friday morning’s habit was the recipe trawl: twice round the local newsagents with a fall-back position provided by the library.

  On the third Friday of June Mrs. Brindle found what she needed at only her second high-street stop. A belligerently cheerful magazine winked out at her, shamelessly covered with posing and pouting fruit flans: almond paste, cherries, apricots, vanilla cream and appropriate liqueurs; each of their possible elements boded well. She could explore a good dessert theme for weeks. This would be today’s encouraging victory of the positive.

  When she saw the article, the magazine’s other article, the article which was not about transformative accessories, or any kind of flan, she was standing by her sink, holding a new cup of tea and half-looking out at signs of neglect in the window box. Somewhere beneath her breastbone she felt the warmth, not of surprise, but of familiarity and she may even have smiled down at the photograph of the prominent and fast becoming really rather fashionable Professor Edward E. Gluck. A small article mentioned his theories, his controversial Process and its undeniable results and she knew about these things already and in much more detail from his book. She was able to cast a knowing eye across the journalistic summary of his ideas and find it wanting. They didn’t understand him the way she did.

  Equally, they knew something she did not. They were able to point out that Gluck would soon attend a meeting of high-powered minds in Germany. Professor Gluck would be resident in Stuttgart for at least the week that ran from one plainly given date in July up to another.

  It seemed right that Mrs. Brindle should know where Gluck would be for the whole of one summer week. It seemed right that she should think of Gluck and Stuttgart and be happy and happiness is a considerable thing, a person should never underestimate what a person might do for it. Foreign travel might be seen as no more than a necessary inconvenience along the way. No matter how much justification and expenditure a trip—perhaps to Germany—would demand, it might seem possible, reasonable, worth it.

  Having read Gluck as thoroughly as she could, Mrs. Brindle knew about obsession, its causes and signs. She was well equipped to consider whether she was currently obsessing over Gluck.

  Certainly she was close to his mind, which might cause her to assume other kinds of proximity. Obsessive behaviour would read almost any meaning into even the most random collision of objects and incidents. Chance could be mistaken for Providence. Fortunately, her Self-Help reading meant that she knew her thinking very well and could be sure she was a person most unlikely to obsess. She had never intended to seek out Gluck, she had simply kept turning on through her life and finding he was there.

  “Were you ever happy? Tell me, were you ever truly happy, that you can recall? The right-now, red-flesh and bone-marrow variety of happy—yards and yards of it? Hm?”

  He had a tan. Professor Gluck was standing and talking like a real live person, right over there and with a tan.

  And there was so much of him. Every shift of his shoulders, every weight change at his hips, gave her three dimensions of unnerving reality. She had guessed he was photogenic, that he made conscious efforts to shine, but she had not anticipated how very well-presented he might actually be.

  “Happy so there’s nothing to do except smile and smile and smile and then again, well, you could always smile.”

  Professor Gluck smiled luminously down about himself, as if to demonstrate. His little audience seemed to flinch gently, perhaps distressed by so much personality, all at once.

  “Oh, the first time or two, you’ll try to cough it up and maybe you’ll shake your head about it, but in the end you’ll just have to grit your teeth and grin it out. This is an inescapable thing you’re dealing with. If you want to be happy—for example—it is highly likely that you will. The Process works. Naturally one can’t infallibly predict the minutiae of its results, but speaking very strictly from my own experience I can say you may end up so contented you frighten strangers. Hold that thought. Now . . .” He paused and looked directly across to fix on Mrs. Brindle and she realised how completely she must appear to be out of her place. With only one glance he could tell who she was—the crazy woman who had written to him and said she would be on her way. “I am about to be late for an appointment. Thank you all.”

  The circle around him found its hands shaken and its shoulders patted aside as Gluck sleeked his way precisely to meet her. His attention withdrawn, the group shuffled and broke away.

  “Mrs. um, Brindle?”

  Something in her letter had persuaded him to meet her, which was good because it had taken her weeks to write. Her problem now would be that she couldn’t make herself that clear again; not out loud where he could hear her. She was also too nervous to breathe. The uneasiness under her skin made her hands twitch while she tried not to gulp for air. She wanted to start this all over again at another, better time when she could feel more ready and less like a recently landed and naturally aquatic form of life.

  Gluck’s voice was unmistakable, dipping now and then into an octave below the norm, and holding that constant dry rumble beneath the rhythm of the words, his personal melody. “Mrs. Brindle. I am right?” His face waited, appraising.

  He was said to be quite a singer. She had done her research. God, it was not fair or reasonable that she should be this afraid.

  “Mrs. Brindle?”

  “Yes, yes, you’re right. Professor Gluck.”

  “My favourite sentence. ‘You’re right, Professor Gluck.’ Well done. There’s a table over by the wall where no one will bother us and I have asked for coffee, although it may well never come. Are you staying here?”

  She felt herself propelled by something very like his will, or the sheer force of his words, or maybe just his hand, lightly settled at her back. She made a kind of answer without thinking, while her throat panicked tight. “Me? No. No, I’m not.”

  “Wise choice—I think this is the worst hotel I’ve never paid for.” He nodded in passing at a young man with a briefcase, flapped his hand to a couple by the door, then inclined his head very slightly towards hers. “We may have to make a run for the last few yards, I feel the pack is closing fast.” His mouth barely avoided a smile. “Oh, don’t mind me, Mrs. Brindle—I’ve had to be charming all morning and it never agrees with me.”

  She didn’t know if she minded him or not. She wasn’t sure about the charming part, either, but he was undoubtedly something, a very great deal of something that was definitely Gluck. She walked on as carefully as she could, her awareness of his shape beside
her threatening to distract her so much that she would fall. His hand continued to propel her with a useful and disinterested force.

  Safely installed in their corner, Gluck lounged one leg out over the armrest of his chair, allowing it to be clear that he was both remarkably long-limbed and indisputably at ease with his surroundings. He seemed delighted that he might be adding creases to a suit, already expensively distressed. Now and then he spired his fingers, or bit his brown thumbs with his white incisors while he watched and grinned and watched, his interest held flawlessly at shoulder height. Once he had seen his fill beyond her, he angled round again to catch Mrs. Brindle whole and finish with one slow blink dropping down over eyes the colour of blue milk.

  “Now we shall get to know each other, shan’t we? But do relax first, it will save so much time.”

  She had already eased herself back in her seat and now tried not to move her arms in case they proved unreliable. Her limbs felt slightly less anxious now, but also strangely insubstantial. Still, it did seem she could trust both her hands not to shake. That was good, she could build on that. She just wished she didn’t know she was pale and that there were obvious shadows around her eyes. Red was prickling on her cheeks and nose after yesterday’s unaccustomed sun and she felt visibly sticky, despite the extremely efficient air conditioning at work on every side. Her physical condition should have been irrelevant— Gluck would hardly be concerned with how she looked—but she did wish she could have seemed slightly less hideous, for the sake of her pride. A person was unlikely to enjoy asking favours from a position of grotesque inferiority.

  “Tchick, tchick, fffop. Zippo.” Gluck winked at her and indicated a bullish man in his shirt sleeves who was straining at a fresh cigar. “Zippo lighters, they always sound the same. When I was younger, I wanted to smoke, just so I could use one.” The white of his eyes blared a little too loudly over his grin.

  “You never considered pyromania? Better for your health.”

  He sat round to stare at her squarely, his face shining briefly with a peculiar kind of appetite. “That’s certainly true, certainly true. Remind me of what I can do for you, Mrs. Brindle. Now that we’re really speaking.”

  She liked that she could sometimes change how people thought of her, just by saying out some little surprise. This didn’t work in crowds because quite often no one heard her—she seemed often to be an inaudible person—but undoubtedly the good professor was now offering her a further chance to shine. He was trying to work her out, hoping to uncover just exactly who she was. She came very close to admitting she knew how he felt.

  Gluck leaned in. “Don’t be alarmed, by the way, if we never get our coffee. They used to send it over with a very attractive young waitress—now she no longer comes and I often get nothing. You’re in bad company with me, I do admit that, but I also wonder what precisely I did wrong. It is a shame, she was a nice girl.”

  She knew he was watching for a reaction, to check which offence she would take, and she tried to maintain a correct indifference. He drove on with his stare, unconvinced, and then exhaled into a kind of shrug. “Ah, well. I don’t have your letter here with me . . . but . . . might I say first of all how impressed I am that you should have travelled so far. I do hope your journey will be adequately rewarded.”

  “I needed a holiday.”

  “And this is almost as good a location as any. Quite true. Do talk to me, Mrs. Brindle, I’m beginning to feel alone.” Gluck pulled away, his eyes leaving first, cooling, their light closing down.

  “You know about the brain. You . . . when you write—”

  “I know about me, thank you. Tell me about you and your problem and I don’t intend to rush you, but I must be in the Conference Room by 2:25 at the latest. You’re attending the lectures?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes. Most of them, at least. Some aren’t open to the public.”

  “So it isn’t only my work that interests you?”

  “Your work interests me the most. That’s why I’m here. Please, if your time is so limited . . .”

  She gathered a stiff breath and forced out something she hoped might be what she believed she thought, or hoped she thought, or hoped he thought, or just something someone might have thought at some time when they were trying to make sense of something. “Religious experience, spiritual feelings . . . do you know if it’s only chemistry . . . electrical spasms. Can you tell if . . . ? Is it likely . . . anything . . . from descriptions. Do you know that process? Possibly it never occurred to you—why should it . . . I mean . . .” She tried not to sigh. “I have a problem.”

  “Obviously. One you currently seem quite unable to describe. Have you had a religious experience?”

  “No, at least that’s—”

  “Would you like a religious experience?” He failed to hide the glint of a smirk.

  “Spiritual.”

  “You would like a spiritual experience, or you would like a definition of a spiritual experience?”

  “Either.”

  “I think you might be a little more specific about your requests—it’s the only way to get what you want.”

  “I’m sorry.” But she didn’t feel sorry. Humiliated, that’s what she felt.

  “I certainly can’t give you a spiritual experience.”

  Gluck’s eyes were enjoying her unease, raising an unpleasant shine. He had decided to treat her as an interlude, a joke, and she wanted to be angry about that, but there was no room in her mind now to do anything but listen for what he might say. She was too hungry for any trace of help to be dignified. Their gazes crossed and locked and broke. Gluck’s voice almost disappeared in a resonant rumble. “As far as definitions go . . . I could give you a roomful—chemistry, electricity, extremity, psychosis, psychotropics, trauma . . . If that all seems distressingly un-supernatural then you must simply remember that an answer is only true until it’s been discredited. I don’t work in a field of absolutes. Even a Completed Fact isn’t really complete, it’s just our current best attempt—a healthy admission of constant defeat. Sometimes a definition is no more than a convincingly detailed guess. Or are we talking about God? Faith? About which I know little or nothing.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m wasting your time. But there was something about your work, your understanding . . . there was a quality about it, perhaps not the theories themselves, but perhaps in the theories . . .”

  The foyer, she knew, was quietly noting their every exchange: gestures, pauses, glances. She was using up time they wanted, wasting away the moments they could spend near their favourite: hoping for a trophy, a token, a moment of recognised intimacy; anxious to figure, even badly, in one of his famous anecdotes. If Gluck himself registered their attention, he was keeping it tightly at bay.

  “A quality. A spiritual quality in my theories? Hhum, well, that’s natural—any genuine exploration will touch the boundaries of our experience, will press forward into what is unknown and possibly unknowable and there we will experience humility. Humility is, I believe, something somewhat on the spiritual side.”

  “You’re humble? Even when you say you’re an egomaniac?”

  He licked away a sudden grin. “Remember when you quote from interviews, that they are very often works of fiction and should be treated as such. But yes, I am possessed of a considerable ego. I use the word in a strictly un-Freudian sense, no need to drag him in. But I still experience humility. I personally can be completely in awe of myself—humbled. I am, after all, working at the forefront of a field I single-handedly created. Good trick if you can do it.” She watched as his face paused, relaxed, betrayed that it was frighteningly tired. “Mrs. Brindle, the size of the work and the beauty of it—not my part in it, the work itself—that is something humbling.” He stopped again and might almost have sighed while he swept back a droop of his over-long hair. “I’m not helping you, am I? I can tell.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,
you are now frowning far more than when we first met and looking truly distressed. And we’ve had no coffee—I couldn’t even offer you that. I have failed and, I’ll be perfectly honest with you, I am no longer used to failing.”

  “No, I suppose not.” She tried not to sound impatient. “Look, I didn’t mean to . . . I think it’s being here, this bloody foyer and all the people. I’m too tired now. And this heat is killing me. It was so hard to arrange a meeting and the hotel people here wasted so much time and I thought . . . I know you’re leaving tomorrow and . . . Do you think I could speak to you? . . . later?” She dwindled to a quizzical whine and felt stupidly close to crying.

  Gluck’s head dipped forward, his voice emerging in a low, solid growl, unpleasantly patient. “Mrs. Brindle, as we speak, I am being considered for a Nobel Prize. Again. My lectures this week are relayed from the theatre to a hall that will barely accommodate my audience overspill. I have only recently declined the offer of an interview with a major—if mildly sleazy—gentleman’s magazine. To be blunt, there are quite a few people, besides yourself, who would like to speak to me.”

  With her head lowered, he wouldn’t notice that her eyes were closed, sealing in any sign of unsuitable emotion. “I quite understand. As I said, I came for a holiday. Thank you for . . . for your time.”

  He was standing over her, frowning her down, almost before she could reach for her bag.

  “Mrs. Brindle, don’t be so impulsive. You really are a one for that, aren’t you? All the way to Stuttgart with no guarantees . . . of any kind. No stopping you, is there, hn? It would be impossible for me to talk to everyone. That’s what the lectures are for. But outside the lectures, I choose who I like.”

  His face cleared into a portrait of benevolence and she tried not to think of what he might mean and who he might like and how she might like to reach up and shake him by the shoulders so that Gluck could understand she was relying on what he could do to set her right.