The elderly man in the café asked her the same thing the second evening she went there.
He sat at the table he was at last night. He nodded to her and smiled as she passed; she could hardly be impolite and not take the table beside him. Once again she edged between the tables that pressed against her thighs. The man folded his paper as he had done last night, but once the waiter—a different one, she was glad to see—brought her the glass of wine she had ordered, he asked her politely and in English, ‘You are having a good time?’
He was the easiest person to talk with. This surprised Rachel a little. She did not think she was good at random conversation. In fact she had brought with her the book of stories she began last night, brought them to the café against this very thing. She liked the way he dipped his head and listened to her, and the way the light moved across the stubble of his head. He told her he had once worked in London, at a place called Lewisham, had she heard of it? He asked about her own work and she described her library with more than a million books, many of them on artists no one knew about that only specialists wanted to read. ‘So if you have a book about you then you are probably forgotten?’ She laughed and the man smiled, and she told him why she was here, with her friend who was detained in Cologne. She wondered why she said that word ‘detained’, which she had never used in her life. Then as he sipped at the glass of red wine he had ordered to follow the first, he spoke about his work, which was to patrol the long corridors of the catacombs, whose official entrance, he said, was no more than fifteen minutes from where they sat. Yes, one needed to say ‘official’, because there were many other places to find one’s way beneath the city. Hundreds of kilometres, he explained, which was like a shadow replica beneath the glittering city, that is how he thought of it. ‘I am at home here. I am at home there. It is like having two lives.’ He told her the authorities were vigilant to prevent those who also had two lives, but were real to themselves he supposed only when they passed from an ordinary street like the one they looked out on now, and found themselves in the corridors most people feared. They go there for love, he said, for celebrations, for their own curious religions. And those who are most difficult to understand. The ones who choose to walk through the catacombs alone, in darkness, keeping to themselves.
As he talked about where he worked, Rachel’s attention rested on the dark stone in his tie-pin. Last night it had seemed black, yet tonight, when the light caught it, it was different quick shades of red. She wondered if she had ever listened to anyone who was quite so casually strange. Strange and yet still nice. Only once did she interrupt him, when he puzzled her with ‘celebrations’.
‘Parties,’ he said.
‘Down there?’
He said, ‘Drug people, but not always. There are two men who dress as monks and sing the old chants. There are others who rearrange, not with disrespect, the way things are. But even the solitaries, you see, they break the law.’ And without irony he said to her in French, as though quoting from regulations, ‘It is expressly forbidden to enter without permission.’
He looked at his watch and tapped its glass, and stood up. ‘Even so,’ he smiled, ‘they are not people to keep waiting.’ He sprinkled several coins beside his emptied glass. Then, as he had done last evening when he had taken his overcoat from the metal stand inside the door, he paused to ease a cap from its pocket and adjust it on his head, tapping its sides with his hands. He turned towards her from the pavement and bowed slightly, his forefinger touching the cap’s brim.
It was now the younger waiter who brought her the simple steak and salad she had chosen. He grinned as he placed the plate in front of her. His hand dipped sharply as he pointed to the floor. ‘This very moment, Madame, they are waiting for our friend.’
‘That’s all, thank you,’ she told the waiter. Now that the man who reminded her of her father was gone, she was glad she had brought the book of stories. Not that it was easy to keep her mind on them. It was a book she should have read years ago, when she was at home. Its stories seemed so remote from her, to tell the truth, and quite what they were getting at was not always easy to decide. Some weren’t even finished, like lives one knew half of then nothing of the rest. As she tried to read, an image she could not get rid of kept playing in her mind, the circle of her new friend’s flashlight hollowing out the dark ahead of him, the vague yellowish stacks at the edges of its beam. She imagined, but of course he had not actually said so, that there was the smell of ash in the air, as there was when you brushed a grate. He had told her there were tablets and slabs of marble over doorways where new corridors began, with different things written on them, bits of poems and words that famous people had said. But what they meant was always the same. It was resentment, he said: that was what they said in different ways.
Ricky said he wished he was there this very minute, he hated not being there. He wished they were lying together in bed while she watched the cranes for the Olympics on the morning skyline, didn’t she wish that? Yes, she told him. Tell me then, he said, don’t just agree with me, and so she told him as she knew he wanted to hear. First thing, he said, the morning after tomorrow. ‘Bugger Notre Dame,’ he joked, ‘that can wait till the afternoon!’ As she talked to him in Cologne, she looked at the Modigliani print on the wall that faced her, the woman slender and inert as a lovely fish.
Rachel thought how first thing in the morning she would change her ticket back. It would cost, of course, that was the disadvantage if you changed your mind with Eurostar. Yet how easy it was to do just that, to change your mind. She read for a little, but again the stories hardly held her interest, although she laughed at the aptness of it when one she would never guess the end of told her, ‘Winter is all for bones.’ She put the book on the bedside table and opened a half-bottle of wine from the room’s service fridge. She was not in the least unhappy. She supposed he would be angry when he arrived and she was not there. But Ricky was never cross for long. He would always find something to listen to. She phoned the desk and told them of her change of plan. The concierge spoke to her so nicely you would think she had done him a favour.
But the morning was drab when she woke early and felt, before she opened the shutters, that it had rained during the night, and that the temperature had surely fallen. She crumbled her croissant and drank two cups of coffee in the little breakfast room whose yellow matched the chairs in the lobby. The disappointment of it all came in on her. As she crossed from the hotel to the Métro the day seemed so out of kilter, as if Paris had been drained of so much that it was famous for. It felt tired and from another time. There was some incident further up the road where an ambulance and a police car had stopped and pedestrians, anxious at what may have happened, were directed to cross further along. Yes, that was it, she thought, it was as if someone else’s eyes took in the morning, now the sense of expectation was gone that it is Paris’s business to provide. A February morning, windy, cold, with chill-looking clouds hurrying over a pale sky and chill snowdrops for sale in the grey streets. People look small and shrunken as they flit by; they look scared as if they were trying to hide inside their coats from something big and brutal. The shop doors are closed, the awnings are furled, and the policemen at the crossings are lead policemen. Huge empty vans shake past with a hollow sound; and there is a smell of soot and wet stone staircases, a raw grimy smell …
HOLDING ON
Does anyone not think, one time or another, of that story we first hear as children, and which becomes more disturbing as we grow older, that story of a drowning person seeing his life run in its entirety before him? Although even as a child we might sensibly consider it unlikely. How does anyone ever know what a drowned person thinks, for who has ever told what it was like? Or if a drowning person was saved and told that story, how do we know that a truly drowned person would experience the same thing? What cleaning of the slate there might be in those last seconds?
If such rather pointless questions occur to us, they are likely to do so i
n passing at most. We brush away a fly. The phone rings. The computer gives that ding we hear in the next room, and know some new message has arrived. We are quickly pulled back to where life goes on. Those vague and unpleasant images of a dark sky above rolling breakers and a figure waving, sinking, under the heavy pewter sea, or the wallow beneath a surface that rocks its sheet of dirty glass—vivid enough for their moment, but gone in an instant once the fly or the computer’s ding drags us ashore to what’s immediate and real. I say this now not because it is of the least importance really, but it struck me as I woke with the light slipping its summer strip where the curtains don’t quite meet. The dream I had woken from still so detailed the strangeness of waking from it put that in my mind at once, that story or superstition or old wives’ tale or whatever you want to call it, about a drowning man remembering what it was like, the life that led up to the second it was no longer there.
That mention of the strip of sunlight shining between the curtains. I deliberately leave apart the last inch between them as I go to bed each evening. But it is not the light that actually wakes me, so much as what I am first aware of when I wake. It is the sliding of the van door across the road at precisely the same time each morning, the neighbour whose red and yellow van will dash round the city for the next ten hours, that does the waking. I’ve not bothered to set the alarm radio for the past twelve months, the courier’s sliding and then slammed door being so reliable. In fact it used to irritate me immensely when I did wake to the radio alarm and heard the cluck or shrill or fluting or whatever from the variety of bird calls the broadcasters assume made waking easier. An odd thing too: I used to remember, at the first witter or muffled squawk or pure ringing note, how a friend who had been in the studio where the canned forest was no further away than the press of a technician’s thumb, told me that where the announcer sat and waited to begin speaking, there was an instruction pinned to the wall beside him, ‘Don’t Talk over the Bird.’ I used to jerk awake each morning. At once, the memory of my friend telling me that came into my mind, so that every morning I waited to hear if the announcer ever did, ever talked across the bird, which not once did I hear him do. I was glad when the neighbour across the road began his work as a courier. I liked waking to see the strip of light between the drawn curtains. I liked not having to worry about some poor man in a studio thinking Christ, has he said anything while the bellbird rang out so beautifully. An entire country would hate him if he did.
These past several months I have been preoccupied with my divorce. It surprises nobody to hear that lawyers so easily become a problem. The man I go to see is in the rather lovely old building in lower Princes Street, up two flights of stairs with on each landing the names of accountants and actuaries and indeed QCs, spelled out in gold paint on black strips of board, old-fashioned and would-be assuring. My own QC has a passion for militaria, a word I’d not heard spoken until then. He saw me look at the row of little figures on the table to the left of his expansive oak desk, and the medals with their colourful crinkled ribbons in a glassed panel just inside the door. ‘Enniskillen Dragoons,’ he said of the front row of tiny figures, although I had not asked. And as he saw me glance to the glass case, ‘Everything except the big one, I’m afraid.’ Guessing, I expect, that like every other client I looked for the scrap of purple cloth, and the iron cross beneath it rather unpleasantly unlike a later cross that of course was a far cry from the New Zealand Wars whose decorations Mr Gibbons collected. I was put onto him by a friend who had divorced but did not inform me that a QC was obliged to employ an acting solicitor, is that the term? That in such run-of-the-mill legal procedures as the division of marital property, the settling of marital scores, this would mean additional expense. Which apparently, in extreme cases, the litigants seem not to mind.
Gibbons at various times hinted at interests so wide I thought at first he must also include the ‘& Son’ who appeared in gold paint on the slat of wood in the building’s foyer. Militaria, yes, that is one thing, but a surf lifesaving club, Masonic loyalties, an office held in New Zealand cricket which meant sitting very close if not next to the Governor-General at important matches. And add to those a swag of charitable boards, funds for an observatory, an opera society and so on, those are some of what I remember his touching on in the months when details of divorce meant my having to sit in a comfortable armchair on one side of his desk while he amiably chatted from the other. How cheap that sounds too, that ‘so on’ in the previous sentence, when it encompasses such energy and commitment and hard work, another life lived so fully. How my glib little phrase seems so dismissive of where that lifetime has been spent. I am not entirely clear why this is so, why I think of those movies I used to enjoy as a teenager and still enjoy when I chance on them, flicking the TV channels late in the evening, where a quite nondescript character sits at a baize-topped gambling table with a simple pack of cards, an uncut pack, in front of him. Then as deftly as a surgeon might hover his hand for an instant above a tray of glittering options, the man’s hand in the movie poises there above the stacked cards and descends. In a flash as it were, like that, where the untampered pack beneath the top card had lain, there was now a broad slew of overlapping cards splayed out like an elegant fan, the value of each showing thinly between the card on either side. Something like that, in the movies I liked and only dimly remembered, was by way always of preliminary. A kind of ‘serving notice’ of how much more there was to all this than you would ever guess.
Since my ‘taking advice’, as the saying is, on this business of my divorce, I find I tend to qualify, to distinguish subtleties in a way which is really quite new to me, which I’d not have suspected. Which also bears out that remark I’ve heard, that divorces are never the same, and if they seem the same, it is because for the moment we have not yet spotted the difference. Although that too strikes me as being rather like other old clichés we assume carry a kind of wisdom until we stop to ask, how do they know? So much is already under the sea.
My divorce and Gibbons, Gibbons and my divorce. So much happens quickly as marriages are unwrapped. The snipping of the string, the ripped Sellotape, the sound of tissue dashed aside, however you want to put it. It is all pretty much beside the point as we strain to see what’s there—the present of freedom that takes our breath. The psychology of divorce is old hat, even in Sunday papers. It isn’t what interests me, certainly. The breaking of the chains, the resurrected man. I suppose talk like that is sometimes to the point. I’m not cynical in the least when people speak in those terms. ‘In my case’—that is all we are really able to lay down the law about, isn’t that so? ‘In my case marriage was so-and-so.’ Mind, laying down the law I don’t much care for either.
But here then is how the story went, in my case. Married for several years, no children. That was chapter one. Married for several years more, still no children, was chapter two. Gibbons, whose forefinger absently touched the headgear of one of his dragoons, said, ‘Sometimes when a second marriage ends there is more passion than when it began.’ Not a note of reprimand as he says that, any more than disillusion about ‘the human condition’, a literary phrase which as far as I can make out no decent legal mind would commit itself to. I think he was surprised that I answered his questions so tersely. Or when he allowed a question to hang in the air, I showed no inclination to draw it down. At another time he said, ‘Through guilt or whatever else you want to call it, clients tend to say more than they’re ever obliged to say. They have a story and they want to tell it even if it’s not the story that for the moment matters.’ I know this was a way to let me know that I, on the other hand, said not quite enough. Then without knowing quite why, I told him of something I had recently read, about an early officer in our own Land Wars he would be bound to know about, who was awarded a Victoria Cross for some action in the Waikato. It was in a magazine from my old school, which is why I was so certain Gibbons would not have seen it. It said how ownership of the medal had caused such horror for several
generations. A suicide. A bankruptcy. I forget what else. The medal was offered to the school, and politely rejected, and was now to be auctioned by a descendant who said she could not get rid of it soon enough. It was as though family history had been frozen, she said, since the afternoon her forbear killed over and over like the hero he was, and now it would again move free. I thought that with Gibbons’ interests he would appreciate the story more than he did. He was far too skilled and professional to say outright what he thought, but his demeanour (that old-fashioned word!) conveyed its message, and the message was this: divorce was one thing, and divorce was why we met and spoke. Medals were another. On the field of sentimentalised violence after the event, with its miniature glamour and almost boyish triviality, the march of toy dragoons, the decorations that had once been worn, were a world unto themselves. That world was pure, as ours was not. No further damage could be done.
After my gaffe matters oddly changed, yet not because of what I had said. That same week he read in the Herald and heard it reported on TV, and later I believe followed it up in the women’s magazines and the Auckland glossies, that my wife had been walking on a beach on the west coast where Asians were fishing from a long protruding tongue of rock. She was walking with a recent friend whose interest was bird-watching. Her friend was riveted by the tuck and plunge of some seabird when without a word my wife was no longer beside him. She was running along the beach towards the little promontory which a freak high wave had crashed across, dragging two men into the sea where she saw them rise and fall and spin like pegs in a bath a child swished about. Her two white shoes were left beside the man who lowered his binoculars and began to run after her. My wife had been a fine swimmer in her student years, but had laughed when I once suggested we put a decent-sized pool at the side of our house. ‘To think of it,’ I had said. ‘Sliding back the bedroom door onto the patio, and stepping straight into the pool.’
The Families Page 5
