The social life of Naomi and Gabriel was meagre. Teaching children how to play the flute is no way to establish connections with interesting adults, and from the outline of Gabriel’s career, if career it could be called, it might be concluded that this was a man intent on maximising the tedium and isolation of his life. After abandoning his thesis, he had worked as a Gypsy and Traveller Liaison Officer for ten unhappy years, spending too many hours, as he put it, ‘arguing with people in muddy fields’. He’d had dogs set on him several times, and a Calor gas canister thrown at his car; the final straw was a punch in the face. The punch was delivered by an eight-year-old with fists like lumps of volcanic rock; the boy was applauded by his father, who earned a living by tipping asphalt over people’s driveways and leaving the job half done; the father’s van had the promise All work guranteed painted on the side. Enough was enough, Gabriel had decided. A sequence of undemanding and unremunerative jobs had followed, a downward trajectory that had brought him, by the time he met Naomi, to the payroll of a large London bookshop, where all of his colleagues were younger than him, by some margin, and none could be regarded as friends. No friendships remained from earlier years. This situation did not bother Gabriel greatly, but Naomi, though by no means gregarious, had begun to chafe, she says. The invitation from Bernát would have been welcome even if he had been less intriguing.
Having a low tolerance for the music of Bartók, and none of the skills that one needs to negotiate a room full of strangers, Gabriel decided to absent himself from Bernát’s soirée. The following month, he again preferred to stay at home; he always preferred to stay at home. He could not allow himself to go, says Naomi, because it was important to make it appear that he was not jealous, which he was, even though she told him over and over again that she was not going to have sex with Bernát, ever.
Bernát’s house was a nondescript semi, postwar, in a cul-de-sac of miscellaneous houses within ten minutes’ walk of Wimbledon Common. It was sizeable, with an extensive garden, but Bernát lived alone; there had never been a wife, it was ascertained, somewhat later. On the evening of the first gathering that Naomi attended, eight or nine other people turned up. They gathered in a room that ran from the front of the house to the back. By the garden window stood a piano, a Broadwood baby grand of considerable age. The floor was bare boards, sanded and varnished, and the walls and ceiling were white; there were some photographs, framed, monochrome, of grasslands and forests, some of them populated by hunting parties of moustachioed men with long feathers in their caps and large dogs at their feet, or dead deer. Three chrome and black leather armchairs, placed against the walls, were the only furnishings. Cosy was not a word that would come readily to mind when you looked at this room, says Naomi; the implication is that Kate would not have liked it, because Kate is a woman for whom cosiness is a domestic necessity.
Bernát greeted Naomi with warmth, as if her arrival were a guarantee of the evening’s success. First he showed her the kitchen, where a table was laden with plates of bread, pretzels, sausages, cold meats, cheeses, pickles and bottles of Hungarian wine; it did not cross her mind until she was going home that Bernát had perhaps assumed that, being a large lady, she was someone for whom the food would be of paramount importance. After the presentation of the kitchen he introduced her to Helen and Amy, whose conversation seemed to be in need of refreshment. Helen was a demure but powerfully perfumed woman of about sixty, with damson-coloured eyeshadow, lavishly applied. Amy, perhaps thirty years younger, was thin and twitchy, with the corroded teeth of a long-term bulimic and a tendency to laugh at moments when a smile would have sufficed; her mouth barely opened when she laughed, and the sound was like a small yelp, as if she had been jabbed with a pin. She was a maths teacher, she told Naomi, in a tone of insincere apology; Bernát was also a mathematician, she said; she had met him at a concert, whereas Helen had met him at the cinema, at a screening of a film by Miklós Jancsó, the title of which was now eluding her, but it was set during the Second World War and Bernát had made some very interesting comments about it.
Amy told a joke. Enrico Fermi was once asked by colleagues at Los Alamos why, if there were intelligent beings elsewhere in our galaxy, we hadn’t yet heard a peep from them. And one of those colleagues, a Hungarian, replied that extraterrestrials hadn’t merely made contact – they were living among us, and were quite easy to spot, because they roamed all over the planet, spoke a language that was unlike any other, and were much more intelligent than humans. They called themselves Hungarians. The violinist, who was now tuning up, was Hungarian too, Helen believed. Her name was Marta, thought Helen, and she was an unusually handsome woman, tall, forty-ish but slim as a highjumper, with oaken hair and glacier-blue eyes. Hungarians were also known for their beauty, Helen remarked; she had a list of good-looking Hungarians – Zsa Zsa Gabor, Paul Newman, Tony Curtis. Until this point, there had been no male guests, but now a man arrived – the one who had been talking to Bernát after the Feldman concert, Naomi thought. He took possession of an armchair after a businesslike greeting for Bernát, and listened to the recital with the impassivity of an almost unimpressable connoisseur; he left within minutes of its finishing, having fiercely congratulated the violinist and the pianist who had accompanied her for the Bartók piece. The performance was of professional standard, says Naomi.
The following month, some Bach preludes and fugues were played by the pale woman who had been with Bernát at the bookshop; her name was Jolenta; she was often at Bernát’s house and she was never seen to smile. Jolenta’s face registered no emotion whatever as she played; her eyes tracked the movements of her hands as if observing the workings of a pianola. Her style was too austere and analytical for Naomi, who warmed rather more to the young flautist who performed a fantasia by Telemann one evening. Her breath control was astounding, says Naomi, and she was a remarkable sight too, with a wild thatch of stiff auburn hair, which veiled her eyes completely. Upon discovering Naomi’s profession, Bernát asked her if she might play for them one evening; having heard the auburn-haired flautist, she demurred, and Bernát did not press her to reconsider.
Sometimes, when most of the guests had gone home, Bernát himself would sit at the piano and play. His technique was unremarkable; at the age of twelve Naomi could play things that would have been too difficult for Bernát. Yet he was, she says, ‘deeply musical’. The compositions that he played were simple and brief, but they were far from trivial, and his playing was of great sensitivity and eloquence. He understood what lay ‘beyond the notes’, Naomi tells her sister, who declines to ask what this phrase might mean. There was a ‘powerful sincerity’ to Bernát’s playing, says Naomi; he knew how to phrase the music, how to give it shape. His preference was for music that was quiet and contemplative. Three or four times he played a short piece called Angelico, from Mompou’s Musica Callada; it’s a delicate and melancholy miniature, in which the left hand conjures the chime of church bells, Naomi explains, and Bernát’s performance of it moved her deeply. It was like ‘an act of devotion’, she says.
Another room was set aside for Bernát’s hi-fi system; the equipment was self-evidently engineered to the highest specifications, and the collection of CDs was vast, filling two entire walls. For his guests he would play recordings that he had recently bought, and there was rarely an occasion on which he did not bring to Naomi’s attention a composer who was unknown to her. His knowledge of the repertoire was ‘astounding’, she says. Sacred music was a particular interest: Morales, Victoria, Palestrina, Tallis, Guerrero, Josquin, Schütz, Lassus – these were of the greatest significance to him, and Bach, as goes without saying. He did not much care for Beethoven and his successors. The high artifice of the Baroque was healthier than the self-advertisement of Romanticism, he declared, says Naomi, as if this pronouncement were something one might wish to write down.
Music was not the only attraction of Bernát’s salon. For some of the guests, it seemed, the place was akin to a private club, and th
ey came in the expectation of good conversation. In the months that Naomi attended these gatherings she met as many as fifty different people, she estimates. The company was remarkably disparate. In the course of a single evening Naomi met a physicist who was working at CERN, a film-maker who had spent six months alone in a forest in Siberia, a tree surgeon who had been struck by lightning twice, and a designer of artificial limbs. On another occasion she passed an hour with a mountaineer who had fallen five hundred feet in the Andes and broken only a wrist. She came to know a woman who had worked on the Tube Alloys programme, and an ex-jockey who had become a stuntman. The stuntman had many tales to tell and alarming scars to display.
Even tougher than the stuntman, though, was the young man named Connor; this was the Connor who had been in Scotland. Naomi met him on her third or fourth evening; she went out into the garden and came upon him, sitting on one of the benches by the magnolias; he was smoking, and staring at the wall in front on him. He did not look like any of Bernát’s other guests: to be frank, admits Naomi, he looked rough. He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and both items were less than pristine. It was immediately noticeable, too, that he was powerful: the biceps were substantial, and the whole neck and head arrangement, says Naomi, had the shape of a lump of cement that had been cast in a bucket. Above one ear, visible through the crewcut, he had a tattoo of a sniper’s cross-hairs; the forearms were heavily inked. What’s more, his expression as he stared at the brickwork suggested that some grievance was uppermost in his mind. But when he caught sight of Naomi his expression changed entirely, in an instant; he raised a hand and smiled, and the smile was disarmingly diffident. ‘Nearly done,’ he said, indicating the stump of the cigarette; it was as though he thought she had some prior claim to the garden.
‘Don’t go on my account,’ said Naomi; despite herself, she sounded like the lady of the manor, she thought. She made some remark about the mildness of the evening; he responded in kind.
‘I’m guessing you’re a singer,’ said the young man.
‘Big lungs, you mean?’ said Naomi. ‘The proverbial fat lady who sings before it’s over.’
‘Not what I meant,’ he lied; he had beautifully thick-lashed eyes, she noted, and eyebrows as sleek as a woman’s.
‘No, I’m not a singer,’ said Naomi.
‘Come out for a fag?’ he asked.
‘Don’t sing, don’t smoke,’ said Naomi.
He stubbed out the cigarette on the underside of the bench. ‘How’s the show?’ he asked, nodding towards the house.
‘Excellent,’ said Naomi; it was one of Jolenta’s evenings.
The music wasn’t his kind of thing, he said, but there were some fine-looking women here. ‘Pity I’m not their type,’ he said, lighting another cigarette.
Jolenta was quite a woman, Naomi agreed.
It was a nice house, he remarked – the nicest house he’d ever been in, unless you counted the ones he’d entered without permission.
Naomi did not react in any way, so Connor made sure that she understood: he had been in prison, he told her.
‘Is that how you met Bernát?’ she asked.
‘Fuck me, no,’ he guffawed.
She had to tell him that she had been joking.
‘Well, you can never be sure,’ said Connor.
‘So how do you know him?’ she asked.
‘We drink together,’ Connor answered. There was a pub in Wimbledon where Connor often went, and that’s where he had come across Bernát. One evening Bernát turned up, on his own, took a pint to a corner table, and sat there with the newspaper; after an hour or so, and a couple more pints, he left. He was noticeable, said Connor; he looked like some sort of wizard, with the grey beard and the all-black outfit. A few nights later, he was back; the same routine – in the corner with the paper, on his own, two or three pints, go home. He kept coming back, and it was always the same routine. Then Connor said something to him at the bar, and they hit it off. Connor was a mechanic, and he liked motorbikes; Bernát’s father had been a mechanic, and he had built motorbikes; there were things to talk about, and ‘you know how he can talk’, said Connor. ‘Can hold his drink as well,’ said Connor, and this was something that Naomi had already noticed; Bernát never appeared to be drunk, but he put paid to at least one bottle of wine in the course of an evening.
So they became acquainted, and then an incident occurred that made them more than acquaintances. They were sitting in Bernát’s corner, chatting, when a man at a nearby table got it into his head to take exception to the way Bernát was looking at him. This character was someone who wanted to be noticed, said Connor: a loud bastard, a gym bunny. And Bernát duly noticed him. All he did was glance at him once or twice, when the dickhead was yelling into one of his phones (he had two, laid out on the table), but ‘you know the way Bernát looks at you’, said Connor; Naomi knew what he meant – when Bernát looks at you, even if it’s only for a second, you know you’ve been looked at. The ‘laser vision’, Connor called it. ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ the dickhead enquired, and words were exchanged, with Connor acting as Bernát’s spokesman. At closing time, out in the street, more than words were exchanged.
‘I have anger issues,’ Connor admitted. ‘When I lose it, I really lose it,’ he said, eyes widening at the enormity of his rage. He had been in the army, and the things he had seen had done his head in. Before the army he had been a bit of a handful, he told Naomi, but after the army he’d really had problems keeping the lid on it. ‘Not that the army wasn’t great,’ he said, to clear up any possible misunderstanding. Many men have confided prematurely to Naomi. In recent years, some of her dates – for want of a better word – have quickly become something more like confessionals. Her ‘maternal bulk’ is the explanation, she has concluded.
‘Don’t go looking for trouble, but if trouble finds you, strike first, and always go for the face.’ This was Connor’s golden rule, and he had put it to the test several times since learning it from his father at the age of ten, a few months before his father had buggered off. In accordance with the rule, a fist was brought to the dickhead’s nose with all available force, and down he went, ‘like his legs had become balloons’, as Connor put it. ‘I didn’t start it, but I sure as fuck finished it,’ he told Naomi, with some pride. But things had gone a bit tits-up after that. It came to court, where Bernát gave evidence, to no avail. So Connor was back in the slammer for a while and when he came out he didn’t have a job; then his girlfriend decided she didn’t want him living in her flat any longer, because it was just one thing after another with him – and she had a point, Connor conceded. This is where Bernát stepped up to the plate: he had a spare room that he offered to Connor, rent-free, until he got himself sorted out. And he was getting himself sorted out quickly, he told Naomi; through a friend of a friend of a friend of Bernát’s he’d got a job – a crappy job, in a warehouse, working nights, but it was a start, and he was going to do a flatshare with one of the blokes from work, so he’d be out of Bernát’s way in a week or two. Bernát was a great bloke, Connor asserted; he was like the uncle you always wanted, he said. ‘How many people do you know who would have done what he did?’ he asked. Bernát was an unusual man, Naomi agreed.
Bernát in turn was fond of Connor. Given what Connor had experienced as a boy, it was a wonder that he was able to function in society at all, said Bernát. A sister had died of meningitis; the girl might have pulled through had the parents not been too pissed to notice that something was seriously amiss. After his sister’s death, Connor was taken away for a while, but then he was returned to the parents, who spent most of each day in a stupor. The father seems to have been his wife’s pimp; Connor’s reading of the situation was that his father absconded when she became too much a wreck to earn any sort of income. Then, when Connor was twelve, his mother took him to the shops one morning. In his mind’s eye, Connor could still see her: she was wearing flip-flops, though it was November, and a red sweatshirt; in his
memory, she was wearing that sweatshirt all the time. When they reached the checkout she realised she had forgotten something. ‘Wait here,’ she told him, pressing down on his shoulders, as if to plant him in the ground. Connor watched his mother slouch away. Five minutes passed, and she did not come back. He waited for another five, then walked down the aisle to the place where his mother had last been seen. There was no sign of her. She was gone for good.
Connor had been through some terrible things, Bernát told Naomi one evening, when every other guest had gone. Connor’s time in the army, for all its danger and horror, had been the best part of his life, Bernát believed. Bernát knew that he could not have endured the things that Connor had endured. ‘I am not courageous,’ Bernát confessed, as though he had once been found wanting. ‘But my father, he was brave, like Connor.’ Now, many months after their first meeting, Naomi was told about Bernát’s family.
The river is the river Page 3
