Cleaver

by Tim Parks

  Cleaver took a last look at the gaunt scaffolding with the rusty wheel. There was a very faint sound rising from the valley. Of running water perhaps, or perhaps, very distantly, of traffic. Why did the hiker open the door to my john? Just as he was turning to go, Cleaver caught the smell. Perhaps there had been a shift in the breeze. Yes, it was definitely that smell. He went to the opposite end of the ledge. Just inside the trees, before the ground plummeted, he spied the telltale tissues. He shook his head. No wonder the man had had a smile on his face as he hurried past. He had freed himself of a load.

  But how could I imagine, Cleaver objected, walking back up the path, that I of all people had anything to tell the President of the United States about freedom, when I daily accepted all the coercive mechanisms of television? He felt angry that the ledge had been violated like this. You don’t go crapping by memorials, he thought. How can you even say that you really met or confronted the President when our whole conversation was conditioned by the constraints of the time slot, the sound levels, the concerns with lighting and make-up? After receiving my A level results, his elder son had written – now Cleaver had to lean against a tree for a moment to catch his breath – I went to see my father at the Wood Lane studios to have a last discussion with him about what I was going to study at university. I was in a good mood and ready to rethink things. In any event, I wanted to have it out with him. But in reception they wouldn’t let me through. There were interminable phone calls to various studio managers. They were on security alert. Finally, I was marched along a mile of corridors and admitted to a small bright room where my father was being made up beside a tiny young Indian woman, an actress apparently, who was going to be talking to him about Bollywood. She had written a book called This Spurious Splendour. I wanted to talk to him alone, but the Indian woman was concerned about the timing of the intervals during which another woman was going to sing. Dad, I got three As, I told him. Angela hadn’t even taken her exams. The make-up girl was powdering out the red spots below his eyes. The boy’s a genius, my father told the Indian woman, and he’s going to waste it all on Political Science! Time, someone yelled, time! Hurrying into the corridor, the Indian woman tripped on a step and my father caught her arm. A year later she was present at my sister’s funeral.

  X

  BACK AT ROSENKRANZHOF there was no sign of the hiker. Cleaver showered, though he had showered only the day before. I’m losing ground, he thought. The gorge was in deep shadow now. The shock of the cold electrified his stout body. What on earth had made his son invent such a ridiculous title for Priya’s book? He towelled himself hard and gathered his clothes from the line. This Spurious Splendour indeed! The trousers would have to be hung from the clothes horse. He fed the stove. What would they have used the charcoal for, he wondered, down in the Ahrntal? They smelted iron perhaps. Phillip always spoke of his desire to be a craftsman, to work with his hands.

  Apropos of nothing, Cleaver had a vaguely prurient idea. He would take the rosary beads hanging on the front door and use them to count off the names of all the women he had had. Instead, he went to the armchair and picked up the accordion again. For some reason he couldn’t be bothered to eat. He felt shaken. That troll’s a hopeless conversationalist, he told Olga. Treats the place as a hotel. He sat down and put his arm round the girl. If a guest, his elder son had written, or one of us children for that matter, didn’t want to sit through one of my father’s performances at dinner, we were always accused of treating the place as a hotel. But since it seemed there was no way of communicating with the general manager, I for one couldn’t wait to check out.

  What tunes did Cleaver know, aside from Auld Lang Syne that is? Actually his son was quite wrong there, he remembered. It was Amanda who accused me of treating the house as a hotel when I was so frequently out. But when it’s your house, you can treat it how you like, n’est-ce pas? And his son, as far as Cleaver could recall, far from raring to go, had been extremely reluctant to leave home when it came time to depart for university. Amanda had wanted to redecorate his room and Angela had been eager to use it for her keyboards and amplifier, but le petit prince, as they called him, left it to the last possible moment. He wouldn’t leave. Cleaver had forgotten how they used to call his elder son le petit prince. It infuriated the boy.

  He could play: Rock Of Ages, Abide With Me, Oh My Darling, Guantanamera and Don’t Cry For Me Argentina. The mournful tunes were definitely easier. And Amazing Grace. Cleaver listened sceptically to the sounds the squeeze box made as he worked his arms back and forth. It’s as if you never quite believe in what you’re playing, Angela would complain. Then when his elder son had actually gone, to Durham (the boy had refused even to apply to Oxbridge), he would call home almost daily. He spoke to Amanda. What about, Cleaver had no idea. Is Mother there? he asked, if his father answered. In the end, his room was neither redecorated nor given to Angela.

  Irritated, Cleaver thrust the accordion aside. The Buddha did not spend his time dwelling on auld acquaintance. Or amazing grace. How could you believe in such songs? That saved a wretch like me! He hated these emotions. Perhaps an eighteen-year-old girl, he thought, could throw herself heart and soul behind such a song, could put her weight into the yoke without embarrassment, but not a man who knew what Cleaver knew, not a man who had buried that girl. Songs are vehicles for entering into emotions, he thought, for the most part unwanted. It was curious, though, how close that accusation of Angela’s was to Priya’s: You never let me close to your real life, to what you really believe in. Auld Lang Syne is a sort of mounting frame, Cleaver laughed, which holds the mind still while it is violated by a certain rapacious emotion. Perhaps a bell clangs. And through that emotion the song brings you close to other people, as when everyone sang so movingly at the funeral: Abide with me, fast falls the eventide. Including his partner’s lover, and her Scottish parents. It was horrible.

  Then Cleaver remembered that other women too had accused him of being detached and cold. For all your kindness, Sandra said quietly, you are frighteningly cold. Women had a way, Cleaver had noticed, of filling oceans of time with airy chatter, before suddenly coming out with something absolutely leaden, lapidary. When I’m with you, Giada had told him in the hotel by the ski lift not ten kilometres from here – Sonnenblick, Cleaver now remembered it was called – it’s as if I saw everything quite differently. I feel cool and objective, she said, emancipated even, as if I saw everything from outside. And it’s really nice. But I feel it’s wrong too.

  Cleaver remembered this conversation very clearly, if only because, as his young girlfriend spoke that afternoon, he had been acutely aware that she was telling him that their affair was over. This mountain holiday was to be the end. My last affair, he now realised. I see why my dad’s always on at me, Giada told him. You explain my family to me so well. I see what my relationship with journalism is, why I get so obsessed and everything. She paused. He watched her. Cold, I may have been, Cleaver thought, but I always knew at once when a girl was leaving me. It’s as if my life was a story, Giada said, that you were reading to me, a story that finally made sense. After the morning’s skiing they had spent the afternoon in bed, drinking wine and talking. Somehow it doesn’t help, she said. You know? It doesn’t help me to live.

  There had been no catch in her voice. She was firm. It doesn’t go anywhere, she said. You’re so perceptive, and kind, but you don’t go anywhere, you won’t take me anywhere. I’m always back at square one. We’re in the South Tyrol! Cleaver had objected wryly. He would never fight a woman who wished to leave him. Perhaps he relished these moments. Exactly, she replied. We’re stuck up some frigging cold mountain in the middle of nowhere.

  Do you think I’m cold? Cleaver suddenly demanded of Olga. Detached? He struggled to his feet. The house was in darkness and growing chill. He would get the rosary. He hadn’t lit the fire and he couldn’t be bothered to, but he did shove a splinter of pine into the stove to light the oil lamp. Otherwise it would be hard to negoti
ate the stairs. He trimmed the wick, lowered the flame. Who had put that rosary on the door? I am parasitic on an environment I know nothing about, Cleaver reflected, fiddling with the vents on the stove. But everyone feeds on the corpse of a world that came before.

  Cleaver climbed the stairs and set the oil lamp down on his bedside table. You haven’t eaten this evening, he remembered. You haven’t cleaned your teeth. You haven’t brought in more firewood. You haven’t put away the cheese. Let the slide begin. Otherwise what will life be up here but one day after the next on and on, marking time, muttering to yourself? Let’s go downhill, Cleaver suddenly decided. Perhaps that’s the achievement we’re after. I should start drinking heavily. In which case a trip to a supermarket was required.

  He lay down on the bed and spread his fingers in the string of the rosary. How many beads were there? Five sections of ten each. Not enough, he smiled. Susan one, Elaine two, Hilary three, Avril four. Beginning was always easy. Or should I say, Hail Avril? No doubt this is the height of blasphemy. Then Katie, Louise, Janice. There had been a couple of pornographic magazines in the old Nazi’s locked room. Fairly innocuous things. Nothing sado-maso. Cleaver had them by the bed. He hadn’t masturbated, he felt no urge, but he couldn’t quite decide to throw them away either. He flicked through a few pages now in the light of the lamp. Hail dear Connie and Ruth and a certain charming girl in Nottingham. These images too follow their metalled ways, he thought. The girl-on-girl shots. The two girls one man, two men one girl. Cleaver of course has a number of his own private snapshots – hail Denise in particular – images that have served him well over the years. Hail Patricia. But that isn’t what he is after now.

  This question of being detached, Cleaver suddenly thought, wasn’t that also to do with freedom in the end? Hadn’t the Buddha given his son a name that meant fetter or shackle? He fingered the beads. Whenever he tried to count his women, he always had the impression that he had missed one out. The most important. Hail Susan-two and Marilyn and the Romanian woman who cleaned his office in Farringdon Street. She was middle-aged even then. I was in my twenties. Probably dead by now. But he could well be missing as many as ten. On no two consecutive counts, after all, has Cleaver ever got the tally to come out the same. Sometimes it went as low as eighty, sometimes right up into the upper nineties. Perhaps I’ve been counting some girls twice. That was why it was such a good way of getting to sleep. The mind began to hunt down dark corridors for missing women. Sometimes you stopped to listen for the sounds of their voices. Sometimes you failed to connect attribute, circumstance and name and counted all three: the ambassador’s daughter, the redhead with the small breasts, the moment by the swimming pool after the garden party. I’ll never make my century now.

  But it wasn’t really the number that was bothering Cleaver tonight. And he isn’t eager to fall asleep. It’s very early. No, the real achievement now, he decided, would be to put these women into chronological order; to understand if there had been some kind of progression to it all. If I could get them in order, Cleaver told himself, and it was rather an odd reflection, perhaps I’d understand what it all meant. Perhaps it was the women who led me here. Perhaps it will be a woman who comes to take me back.

  He slept with the windows closed these nights. The dark glass gave back the low flame of the lamp. It was the kind of light women liked to make love by, liquid, soft and mobile: the light most like the mind, as Cleaver had once scored points by observing. For some reason he thought of that ugly troll and his frozen axe. They dragged off their damsels by the hair. And of Amanda. Dear Amanda. Would it ever be possible to see her again? Or would it be like the return of someone who has already taken last rites and said his farewells. No one wants you back when they’ve already divided the spoils. The liquid mind, Cleaver thought, finds relief when it settles in a well-shaped vessel, a project, an analogy, a home; then relief again when it is poured out. It is free. Free to find another vessel. Another woman. Hail Tracy and Jane. Who came first? He had no idea. Certainly these early affairs, and he ticked off Monica and Sarah and Isabel, had been little more than a declaration of freedom from Amanda. You never really contemplated living with me, Isabel had said, did you? That was the time Amanda had thrown his record collection into the street. The girl was quizzical rather than bitter. She couldn’t understand why he had stirred up so much trouble for himself if he had never really intended to leave home. Olga and the troll are brother and sister, Cleaver suddenly said to himself. How do these thoughts come into my head?

  In any event, he could remember almost nothing about these women. Chronology seemed irrelevant. The only thing that came to mind were colourful incidents, odd places they had made love: on a train, in a bathroom in Broadcasting House, on the Heath at night. There had been the business, for example, of arriving at Martha’s parents’ holiday home, near Hove, and having to escape through the upstairs toilet window when her father and his mistress arrived in the early hours. Cleaver laughed quietly in the half-light. Martha had been most upset. She had the highest possible opinion of her father and then she had twisted her ankle quite badly slithering down from the roof of the porch. Annalisa, Cleaver counted, and Susan-three. He slid the beads along the chaplet. Every ten there was a larger one to separate the sections, to help keep tally. It was subtly satisfying this tactile business of fingering and counting, the murmuring of the mind and the rubbing of the skin. It was reassuring. He could see how people might get into this, muttering away their time with prayers or women.

  Priya is the larger bead, he realised. At once he was on the alert. He gripped the rosary tight. Priya is the watershed. Cleaver bit the inside of his mouth. But to jump straight to Priya would mean to miss at least a dozen others. It doesn’t matter. Priya is the different shape that marks the passage between one era and the next. But I won’t. Cleaver doesn’t want to recall Priya. Count her and pass by. This is a body count, buddy. I can remember everything about Priya, he was aware, unlike the others, but I don’t want to. I won’t. Something was tugging at his mind. Amanda’s grip weakened. He came home half drunk and she drew him into an embrace on the stairs. The kids’ bedroom doors were open. We hadn’t made love in years. Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, Amanda murmured. She knew that turned him on. At some point I will have to remember Priya, Cleaver thought. Auld acquaintance should be forgot, another voice told him. There had been other girls of course during the Priya phase. It should never be brought to mind. Amanda’s embrace was ferocious. He saw the liquid lights of Priya’s apartment, the gold and green hangings trembling on the wall. They would drape a red nightdress over the lampshade. He can see her golden body turned to him from the couch. Priya was a real alternative. That was when the phone started ringing. It is because Angela died while you were with Priya.

  Cleaver sat up. For a moment he imagined he had caught the sound of footsteps again. The oil lamp was steady in the bare room. There was the constant murmur of water passing over the roof and down through the kitchen. Some nights it was noisier than others. Angela died while you were with Priya. His hands still gripped the beads, but he knows he has no use for them now. At the funeral you lost Angela and Priya together. There will be no more counting. Cleaver sank back on the bed. Why do I feel so exhausted? Who would have thought it could be so hard to be alone? So noisy.

  He lay still, waiting, as though expecting to be attacked, or to see a ghost. After Priya you remember everything about your women. He realised that now. Your girls rather. Between one talk show and another. Or do I mean after Angela? I remember them for their problems, their families, their hangups. It was quite different from the women before. Why? They were banal hang-ups for the most part. Allison’s father had wanted her to work in the family company, waterproof fabrics, but she wanted to go away to Paris to use her French. Why can’t I decide? she wailed. Avuncular lover Cleaver had tried to help her. The girl washed her hands and crotch obsessively.

  He would have any number of girls at a time now. That too was different
from before. He tried to help them all. He tried to explain their lives to them. My father always understood more from any conversation than you had put into it, his son had complained. Though I stopped seeing them, of course, if they didn’t want sex. Anna’s father needed a kidney transplant. She wanted to donate an organ herself. It had become an obsession. Cleaver dissuaded her. I wouldn’t want it if you were my daughter. There was the complicated situation in which Jeannie had found herself with her boss on one side and her uncle on the other. Sometimes Cleaver got their problems mixed up. Mary’s father had committed suicide. It’s crazy to imagine you are guilty, he told her.

  But why had he listened to so many sad stories? As if you had no story of your own. Were the lovers before Priya all carefree? Surely not. In the past, he used to enjoy sharing erotic details with friends. With Simon and Clive. He didn’t listen to sad stories. But not now. He still made love with relish, but that wasn’t quite what it was about. The Horny Samaritan, Sandra called him. Maeve called him Uncle, Uncle Hal. And the e-mails Cleaver remembered. And later the text messages. How time-consuming it had been, showing all that thoughtfulness. My father had any number of affairs, his elder son had written, with his various studio groupies. The boy had no idea. He could think only in terms of the dirty old man, an easy stereotype for a best-selling book. One of the reasons I stopped reading pornography, Cleaver had explained to Giada, was that none of the standard descriptions of sex made much sense any more. He remembered the girl who was constantly taking calls from her retarded sister, even while they were making love. Cathy. Why didn’t I mind? She was straddled over him talking to her sister on the phone. And meantime his own phone vibrated on the bedside table.