The Life to Come

by Michelle De Kretser

  The waiter, an old ally, rapped on her table with his knuckle and said, ‘A glass of red?’ It was starting to get dark. Lights showed in the apartments across the street, but windows remained open, their curtains hanging down straight. Small children ran about the playground in the square opposite the cafe; women talked to each other, and admired or scolded the children. That morning, Céleste’s diary had informed her that it was Shakespeare’s birthday; now she noticed that the chestnut trees in the square were marking the occasion with hundreds of pink candles. The diary, which noted the birthdays of famous British writers and had a picture of the Bard on its cover, was a present from Sabine, who had spent a week in London at Christmas. Céleste could picture her in the museum shop, her cheeks rosier than ever from the damp English cold, carefully choosing a ‘cultural’ gift—hesitating between, say, the diary and a box of William Morris note cards. The diary had probably been marked down in a post-Christmas sale—Sabine had the French respect for money. Afterwards, in the street, how wonderful she would have looked in her honey-coloured coat. The hair between her legs was the same opulent golden-brown. On Facebook, photos showed her going about London in hideous boots with buckles and high, tapering heels. Under the lovely coat, she wore a synthetic blue sweater with bobbles, picked out by Bernard, that the children had been obliged to give their mother for Christmas. Bernard himself always presented Sabine with the latest celebrity perfume from his pharmacy. This year’s scent suggested chrysanthemums that had stood too long in graveyards before drying down to sugarcoated mothballs.

  The city was full of Easter tourists, but everyone going past had an ironic French face. At the lights, a woman as narrow as a boy was waiting to cross; on the left side of her chest a rectangle glowed. She had almost reached the cafe before Céleste identified Pippa, imposterish without beret and lampshade dress, her iPod shining through her pocket. At the time, it was merely something else unexpected, an element of the mildly extraordinary evening. But long after the open windows and the tiny running children had vanished, that memory of Pippa would persist. She made her way towards Céleste like a citizen of the future, her heart rectangular and glowing in the dusk.

  At the embassy parties, Valerie would introduce Céleste as a translator, but no one made a living translating novels—not the kind that came Céleste’s way, at any rate. For twenty-five hours a week, a language school employed her to teach English to its corporate clients. On Fridays and weekends and in the evening, she translated books for a small New York press that published obscure European fiction, novels devoid of spirited heroines, novels that offered no clear message nor any flashing sign as to how they were to be understood, novels whose authors were neither photogenic nor young—sometimes they were even Swiss.

  Céleste took a fortnight’s holiday every Christmas, staying in cheap hotels. At the mention of Prague, Florence, Lisbon, she saw a curtain of fog. In August, when the language school closed, she stayed in Paris and went on with translation. One summer, about eighteen months before Céleste and Pippa met, friends had asked Céleste to feed their cat while they were away. Every evening, she rode her bike to their apartment behind the Cirque d’Hiver. The light was deep blue and close-woven; whole rows of buildings looked as if they had been cut out with care and glued against the sky. A siren sounded somewhere close at hand. La police, pleine de malice, said Céleste to herself.

  Waiting at a traffic light, Céleste watched two English girls with pink arms and necks greet each other outside a bar.

  The tall one said, ‘I love your new monkey tattoo.’

  ‘It’s an owl, actually.’

  ‘I always get those two mixed up.’

  They laughed together, their breasts spluttering happily under their T-shirts in the blue air.

  Beatriz and Erica were due back late on the first day of September. Céleste called at their apartment that afternoon. The cat, outraged by this break with routine, refused to talk to her. Céleste changed the litter in his tray, and arranged the grapes she had brought in a bowl. She opened the windows in the bedroom and looked inside the wardrobe. Erica was the same size as Céleste and tired quickly of her clothes. Céleste had her eye on a cucumber-green shirt with buttons made of glass. All winter, she had worn a quilted coat assembled from scraps of Rajasthani textiles—on Erica it had looked like a bedspread. The first time Céleste wore it, she was photographed for The Sartorialist.

  Céleste was riding back when a lanky redhead emerged from the florist’s at the angle with the boulevard: it was the English girl who couldn’t tell a monkey from an owl. She was smiling to herself above an armful of purple flowers; she tossed them into an illegally parked car and drove away. The florist had followed her out and was doing something to a bay tree in a tub. When she straightened up, Céleste saw a figure from a painting: heavy gold fringe, wide blue eyes, flesh like solid cream.

  ‘Bonjour,’ said the Renoir girl. She wore a dark apron over a striped blouse. ‘Vous désirez quelque-chose?’ Polished little teeth showed in her pink mouth.

  Beatriz rang to thank Céleste. ‘Such beautiful flowers! I adore lisianthus.’

  ‘From your neighbourhood florist.’

  ‘That one! Sabine.’

  The year Céleste got to know Pippa was also the year her half-brother, Dominic, visited Paris with his wife and sons. On the last day of their stay, the Harrisons came to Céleste’s studio apartment for lunch. They arrived late. Wendy followed Céleste into the kitchen to explain: it was difficult to persuade her younger son to leave his laptop and his hotel room. ‘He’s been following the Arab Spring. He has all these screens open, watching the protests on different channels, including Al Jazeera. He doesn’t say much, but he’s a very engaged boy, really.’

  As she spoke, Wendy was stacking the dishes and pans that Céleste had used in preparing lunch. Holding up a bouquet of dirty spoons, ‘Where’s the dishwasher?’ she asked. Céleste said that she didn’t have one. ‘Holy moly!’ said Wendy. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve been washing dishes for thirty years?’ She had a halo of bright, bronze curls around an oval face. Her emphatic shoulders belonged to a Renaissance angel—the avenging kind with breastplate and sword.

  Over apéritifs, the older boy looked around and said, ‘Why don’t you have a TV?’

  ‘I do,’ said Céleste. ‘It’s right there.’

  His eyes followed her pointing finger. ‘Oh, that!’ he said. ‘I thought it was a computer.’ Neither he nor his brother ate fruit or any vegetable other than potato. They couldn’t be left alone together because they hit each other—in Perth, the older one had fractured his elbow when his brother pushed him down some stairs. They were seventeen and fifteen but might as well have been seven and five.

  In anticipation of her visitors, Céleste had tidied her room with its long windows, removing papers and dictionaries from the table and stacking them behind a chair. Sabine’s latest flowers, green hellebores and lavender tulips, stood beside the sofa that converted to a bed. Céleste set up folding chairs and laid a stiff damask cloth on the table. The china had been picked up in markets and junk shops—nothing matched, but everything pleased her. She wiped a glass and held it up to the light. It had rained all week, but the day was shiny and cool—perfect for the meal Céleste had planned, gratin dauphinois and chicken in a wine sauce. For dessert, she had splurged on the Charlotte Russe that was the local pâtisserie’s pride. The sun shone on the jasmine she was nurturing on her balcony, it shone on her pretty table. She had felt buoyant and lucky, grateful to life. Now she saw the room through Harrison eyes. A May ’68 poster and a print of Velàzquez’s Aesop were blu-tacked to a wall—they belonged in a student’s room. The sunlight, brilliant and lethal, showed that the walls themselves hadn’t been touched in years. The ceiling, once white, had turned the colour of old teeth. Some of the plates had indelible brown stains, and the cloth didn’t reach to the ends of the table. Tall Wendy and her rangy sons sat in a row on the sofa, inspecting everything with their knees
around their chins. Their house in Perth had a parents’ retreat, spas in two of the four bathrooms, a swimming pool and a guest suite. Wendy was a geologist and Dominic was a mining engineer and there was a minerals boom in Western Australia. Wendy was holding out her iPhone so that Céleste could look at photos of the Harrisons’ trip. Every famous monument—the Hagia Sophia, the Trevi fountain, the Duomo—had a geo pick in the foreground. She always included one, explained Wendy, to give an idea of scale.

  Céleste poured out wine. Wendy said, ‘Oh, that’s so French, the way you turn your wrist when you’ve finished pouring.’ She held up her hand and twisted it, saying, ‘Did you see that, Dom?’

  ‘It stops the wine dripping down the bottle.’

  ‘It’s so French.’

  Dominic was dark like their mother, like Céleste. Their mother had died when Céleste was thirteen and Dominic was eight. He had been a shy, affectionate child to whom Céleste fed Milo straight from the tin. Sometimes she tortured him, singing, ‘Dominiquenique-nique…’ while slitting her eyes until his chin shook. He had a present for her now. ‘It’s the new Ottolenghi. We were worried you might already have it but we decided to take the risk.’ Céleste examined the beautiful book, the sumptuous photographs. She was wearing her mother’s cornelian necklace. She tugged it—a bad habit. Dominic laid his hand on the cookbook, saying, ‘These are really amazing, these chard cakes with sorrel sauce.’ When had his fingers grown so fat? A photograph that existed only in Céleste’s mind preserved the shapely hand of a small boy stroking a kitten. Dominic went on, ‘We love this quinoa and broad bean salad—and this one, barley and pomegranate seeds. We lived on this food during the heatwaves, didn’t we, Wen?’

  ‘Dom’s a brilliant cook,’ said Wendy. ‘We think he should go on MasterChef. Right, guys?’

  Her younger son said, I am so weary of these embarrassing retards who pass themselves off as my relatives. He did this by first closing and then opening his eyes with exaggerated slowness. He had Wendy’s hectic colour, her brazen curls. Pinned to the sofa between his mother and his brother, he looked imprisoned and wild.

  Céleste excused herself, saying she had to see to lunch. The younger boy set his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.

  The kitchen had no door—it was scarcely bigger than a larder—but was out of sight of the sofa. Céleste turned on the tap and ran cold water over her wrists. Her life, which she thought of as improvised, anti-consumerist, modestly dedicated to art, now seemed as inadequate as her TV. The meal, chosen to appeal to her nephews, was revealed as heavy and unimaginative. Céleste could rarely afford to eat in restaurants, but when she did the menu offered terrines, roast meats, grilled fish, canard au sang—familiar, reassuring dishes. What was quinoa? When had they started eating pomegranates in Perth? Thirty years earlier, aged twenty-two, Céleste had fled barbecued chops and an abomination called salad cream. She had fled the AMP building, the hot, flat streets, the catastrophic light. Roy, her stepfather, had driven her to the airport, with Dominic silent in the back of the car. Not long before that, her brother had started to take an interest in clothes. For the trip to the airport—still, at the start of the 1980s, a ceremonial journey—he was wearing a second-hand rodeo shirt. Céleste couldn’t stand the sight of him. She stared out of the window. The arthritic eucalypts were an incentive and a reproach. At the airport, she went around to the back of the car to collect her pack, but her brother had got there first. Light struck his eyeballs, the silver points on his collar, his red lips.

  Her older nephew came and filled the kitchen doorway. He said tonelessly, ‘Mum says do you need a hand.’ A dish of succulent white asparagus stood in the deep porcelain sink. At the last minute, Céleste hadn’t been able to resist them. The greengrocer had murmured, ‘The first of the season’—foreigners, all sentimentalists, would pay exorbitantly for a worn-out tag. Céleste, aware of manipulation, nevertheless pictured herself producing Paris in the spring for Wendy and Dom. Now she feared that the sight of asparagus would ruin the meal to come for her nephew: how repulsive the spears looked, mauve-tinged, like severed fingers. She had just checked the potatoes and was still wearing orange silicon oven mitts. ‘Quack!’ said Céleste, opening and shutting her hands like orange beaks to distract attention from the sink. ‘Quack, quack!’ Even as she spoke she was overcome by shame—why was she behaving like a dim infant teacher?

  The boy’s face came alive. ‘Cool!’ he said. ‘Mum! Look at these.’ He was as dark as his father, his skin the velvety brown achieved by lucky Australian teenagers. His name was Mitch. His brother was called Barr. Modern names, names like bullets, thought Céleste. The story of her own name, told and retold to her in childhood, had the status of myth. Her parents, both Communists, had come to Paris from grim towns in the north of France. Their families had disowned them or were scattered. At the first Party meeting Céleste’s mother attended in Paris, a young man, stuttering with nerves, questioned the Soviet invasion of Hungary—he was expelled at once. Yvette stood up and followed the traitor out of the room. She had never given any thought to Soviet foreign policy but couldn’t stomach bullying. But three years later when she learned that she was pregnant, she wanted to call the baby Karl—her ideals hadn’t faltered, only the Party’s. A daughter would be Rosa. Here Lucien, her husband, demurred. He worked at a car factory and had left school at fourteen, but he was a reader. It had begun with L’Humanité and was going on with Proust. Swann, the duchess, the band of girls at Balbec, la petite phrase de Vinteuil mingled with the international proletariat and dialectical reasoning in a misty, vital realm. Why not call a girl Albertine or Gilberte? Yvette was a reader, too, but preferred facts. To be named after a fictional character struck her as a flimsy start to life. She offered a compromise: they could call a daughter Marcelle, after the great novelist. Lucien vetoed the suggestion—it was his detested mother’s name. The argument ran on, not very seriously, for each was sure that the child would be a boy. When she wasn’t, her father remembered that Proust had had a servant called Céleste.

  From her apartment, Céleste could hear the bells of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. In the nineteenth century, rich men had installed their mistresses, known as lorettes, in luxurious quarters in the surrounding streets. Now their apartments were occupied by the families of lawyers. Céleste thought of the lorettes every Tuesday afternoon, hurrying home from teaching to wait for Sabine. They had two hours together: five to seven, le cinq à sept, the timeslot consecrated to French adultery. Since pundits of the Right and Left alike were given to thundering that the permafrost of EU regulations and the quicksand of American political correctness had conspired to destroy every cherished French tradition, Céleste had consigned le cinq à sept to that lost golden age when it had been possible to blow smoke in the faces of one’s fellow diners or rape a cleaning woman without risking reprisals. Sabine assured her that this was far from the case. ‘It is happening every day. That I can tell you without error. In my work I sell love, you know.’ When a man entering her shop felt compelled to announce that he was buying flowers for his wife, it was always a lie. On St Valentine’s Day, it was customary for a man to buy two bouquets, explaining that they were for his wife and his mother. ‘The more expensive one is always for the mistress.’

  Bernard believed that his wife was at English lessons on Tuesdays. ‘He likes the idea, he is a snob.’ It was the kind of cheerful, disparaging remark Sabine made about her husband, saying, ‘He has no sense of direction,’ or ‘He doesn’t know the first thing about managing children.’ At first, Céleste had been somewhat shocked by Sabine’s criticism of her husband—quite pleased, too, of course. Later she realised that it was simply the offhand way Sabine spoke about everyone. Her assistant in the flower shop had gone up to a size 42 and she was only nineteen: ‘She is practically obèse.’ In principle, French was banned from le cinq à sept, so that Sabine’s English really might improve. ‘Figure yourself,’ said Sabine, ‘Bernard imagines he will start to write
songs. He had a band at school. His friends are telling him they could not see a future for him. Now he say he has wrong to listen. He is dreaming!’

  Bernard was a pharmacist in the pleasant, lifeless suburb where he had always lived. His father had been the doctor there. Now that his father was dead, Bernard and his family lived with his mother in the doctor’s house. Sabine said, ‘When my daughters will be grown up, I will change my life.’ Her stubby lashes trembled a little, as Céleste unhooked her bra. Sabine’s dark nipples were wild strawberries. All her colours were intense, her hair metallic gold, her lips rosy, her eyes as blue as ink. She lay and shone in Céleste’s bed. The only lacklustre thing about her was her ring—Bernard’s dull little diamond. Sabine’s daughters, five and eight years old when Céleste first met her, were now seven and ten. They were called Madison and Jennifer, which Céleste thought peculiar. What was wrong with Albertine and Gilberte? How old were French children when they left home? Bernard the snob, the dreamer, had never left home. On Facebook, he had an intrepid French nose. He didn’t look like a failed songwriter but a curly-headed circus poodle, one that knew it was charming and expected applause.

  Céleste’s inheritance, a direct transmission from provincial Sundays spent with L’Humanité, was a disdain for guest suites and swimming pools. A recent headline had declared Australia the richest country in the world—Céleste considered it a shameful distinction. The way she lived—in a rented room, wearing castoffs, getting a ride with a neighbour once a month to shop for groceries at a suburban hypermart—enabled her to do work she valued in a city she loved. But now came the thought, Is this all there is? The thought wasn’t new, but after the Harrisons’ visit it tripped Céleste up more often. That summer, she always felt tired, and there was always more to do. Familiar problems of translation turned insurmountable—what was she to do with les bestiaux, for a start? The author was using it to cover sheep as well as cattle, which ruled out both ‘flocks’ and ‘herds’. Céleste would have to settle for ‘animals’ or possibly ‘farm animals’. The sense that something vital had eluded her only grew stronger as her work advanced.