The river is the river

by Buckley, Jonathan;

  ‘We went a few years ago. It was special.’ Kate describes some of the things that she saw during their week in Prague; her words flow away on the air.

  After a pause, her mother says: ‘Which ones have I read?’

  ‘My books, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All of them, I think.’

  ‘What’s the saucy one?’

  ‘Gosh, I don’t—’

  ‘The one in Italy.’

  ‘Giulia the Beautiful.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I remember. I liked that one.’

  It seems that Naomi will not be mentioned if she doesn’t raise the subject herself, so Kate says: ‘So did Naomi tell you about her plans?’

  ‘Not really. I don’t think so,’ she says.

  ‘She didn’t tell you about going to Scotland?’

  ‘She might have done,’ her mother answers placidly. ‘But I forget things. You know that.’

  ‘She didn’t talk about Bernát?’

  ‘Who?’ she asks, and in the space of a second a furrow appears and disappears on her brow.

  ‘Bernát.’

  ‘She talked about a friend, but I don’t think that was his name.’

  ‘Was it Gabriel?’

  ‘It could have been Gabriel, yes. And Martin. She talked about Martin.’

  ‘My Martin?’

  ‘Of course. Who else? She likes him,’ says her mother, and now she opens her eyes and grins at Kate.

  The mischief of this grin is horrible; this is not her mother. ‘No, Mum,’ Kate says, too sharply. ‘He’s not Naomi’s cup of tea.’

  ‘Why not? He’s your cup of tea.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘She likes him,’ her mother repeats, turning back into the sunlight. She closes her eyes on her daughter, and sits at ease in silence.

  ‘And how did she seem to you?’ asks Kate, after a minute.

  ‘What do you mean?’ her mother replies, in a whisper in which Kate hears a sharpness of impatience.

  ‘This thing with Bernát. It’s worrying.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t think he’s a good influence.’

  ‘She’s not a child.’

  ‘I know that Mum. But look at her.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘She looks terrible.’

  ‘I thought she looked well.’

  ‘She’s lost so much weight.’

  ‘You always said she was too big.’

  ‘I said she should do some exercise. That’s not quite the same thing.’

  ‘It was very nice to see her,’ says her mother, with a look that seems to accuse her daughter of a lack of kindness.

  ‘Of course it was,’ says Kate. ‘Of course. But—’

  ‘She said you’re not getting along. She told me you had an argument.’

  ‘An argument about what?’

  ‘She didn’t say,’ her mother answers. ‘Her fault though,’ she adds, as if it were known that Kate resents any suggestion of culpability, in any situation.

  ‘And when did this argument happen?’

  ‘Recently, I suppose.’

  ‘We had an argument last year. Maybe that’s what she meant,’ says Kate. ‘But we were both at fault for that one.’

  Her mother shrugs. She grimaces, but this seems to be because the sunlight has gone; clouds are sliding overhead, advancing from the ridge of the Downs.

  Though she knows the question of the argument should be relinquished, Kate says: ‘She told you this yesterday?’

  ‘Last week,’ is the immediate answer.

  A week in her mother’s world is a flexible unit of time, signifying the middle distance. ‘Didn’t you see her yesterday?’ Kate asks, with the greatest gentleness.

  The question provokes a glance that suggests offence has been taken. Turning away, Leonor examines the condition of the sky, surveying the whole extent of it.

  ‘Well, we had a row this morning. A big one,’ Kate admits. Receiving no response, she explains: ‘About Bernát.’

  Her mother sighs, in boredom, it seems. ‘Naturally,’ she says.

  ‘She’s left,’ Kate tells her. ‘I don’t know when she’ll be back.’

  Still her mother watches the eventless sky. It might be that every word that has been spoken in the past ten minutes has already been extinguished.

  ‘Perhaps we should go indoors?’ Kate suggests.

  ‘In a minute,’ her mother answers. Her attention has become fixed on one cloud in particular; her gaze flickers across it, as though it were a vast and difficult painting. A hand rises onto the upper buttons of her cardigan and tightens there, gathering the material into her fist. Her mouth opens, takes a bite of air, and closes.

  Kate puts a hand over the fist, and the touch makes her mother start, as if a nettle has brushed her skin. ‘Let’s go inside,’ she says.

  On the way out, she tells a lie to the receptionist, to ascertain that her sister had indeed been there the day before. In the car park she starts to weep.

  27.

  ‘Nice to have the place to ourselves again,’ says Lulu, with a smile to show that she knows this is what her mother is thinking too. They are sitting in the kitchen, on the same side of the table, each looking out on the garden as though the view had changed slightly since this morning.

  ‘I thought you two were getting along well,’ says her mother.

  ‘We were,’ Lulu answers. ‘But sometimes she can be a bit—’. And she mimes, briefly, with both hands outspread, the action of pressing down on a large soft ball.

  ‘She can.’

  ‘I mean, having music on your phone – not really a crime against civilisation, is it?’

  ‘She said that?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘Naomi has her principles.’

  ‘But I do like her,’ says Lulu.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Even if Dad’s never going to love her.’

  ‘He’s fond of her.’

  ‘OK,’ says Lulu, raising a sceptical eyebrow.

  ‘But she’s not always been on her best behaviour with your father.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it.’

  ‘Half is enough,’ says Lulu.

  Kate strokes her daughter’s arm, once, in thanks. A sudden sound makes her start – her phone is buzzing on the tabletop; the message is not from Naomi.

  At a thought, Lulu smiles.

  ‘What?’ asks her mother.

  ‘The earrings,’ says Lulu.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘It was nice of her.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘But they’re a bit creepy.’

  ‘They are,’ Kate agrees. Her gaze is following a blackbird as it bounces across the terrace; she is aware that Lulu is looking at her.

  ‘You all right?’ Lulu asks.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘And how about Naomi? You think she’s all right?’

  ‘She says she is.’

  Now Lulu’s phone rings; she reads the message and in fifteen seconds sends a reply. After a small hesitation she says: ‘When I looked out my window this morning she was standing in the garden. Talking to herself. Smiling, but talking to herself. And looking at the Paddock.’

  ‘She’s always talked to herself,’ says Kate. ‘I talk to myself. It’s what I do all day.’

  ‘Not really,’ says Lulu.

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘So you think she’s OK?’

  ‘It would be better if she weren’t going so far away.’

  ‘Can’t picture her on a farm,’ says Lulu.

  ‘I don’t think it’s quite a farm. More like an allotment with accommodation.’

  ‘Can’t picture her on an allotment either.’

  ‘Same here.’

  ‘It won’t work. She’ll be back soon.’

  ‘Maybe,’ says her mother.

  As if to reassure, Lulu says: ‘I think s
he enjoyed being here.’

  ‘She enjoyed talking to you,’ her mother tells her.

  ‘She really does like to talk, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Not always,’ says Kate.

  Lulu gets up from the table. ‘Homework awaits,’ she announces, and she gives her mother a kiss on the cheek, with meaningful pressure.

  For the fifth time since Naomi’s departure, Kate calls her sister, and as before she hears only the voicemail message. She sends a text message: Can we talk? She sends other messages. In the evening, at last, a reply arrives, by text – I’ll be in touch. Thank you & M & L for the hospitality. The following day it is the same: half a dozen messages sent, a single response received – All fine. Same with you, I hope. Lots to do. For two weeks this goes on. Naomi will not talk.

  One afternoon, Kate is told by her mother that Naomi was recently at The Willowes. Her mother is surprised by Kate’s surprise; she had been under the impression that Naomi had been staying at her sister’s house. A man called Bernard had brought Naomi down, but he had stayed outside. The nurses confirm to Kate that her sister had been at The Willowes three days before, and that a man – ‘elderly, with a grey beard’, says Kornelia – had been driving; he had sat in the car, reading, throughout the two hours. Leaving, Kate calls her sister from the car park, and talks to the voicemail. ‘You might have told me you were visiting,’ she protests, with some anger. For a full minute she talks into the phone. No sooner has she hung up, already regretting having lost her temper, than she gets an answer: I think we’ve said all that needs to be said. It seems possible to Kate that she will never see her sister again.

  VI

  28.

  The day’s post includes an envelope that contains a photograph and a note. The photograph shows a white stone fountain, topped by the figure of a naked male archer, green with patina; in front of the fountain Naomi smiles, shielding her eyes with a hand; beside her a bearded man – in appearance not dissimilar to Brahms in later life – similarly shields his eyes; the shadow of the photographer rises from the bottom edge of the picture and tapers towards the feet of Naomi and the bearded man. The note reads: Me & Oszkár. Have advised him he needs to do something about his web presence. He is grateful. Am well, and heading north. Shall write. The shadow, it is to be assumed, is the shadow of Bernát. Naomi’s hair is lank and unkempt, as if washed without shampoo shortly before the picture was taken; she’s wearing a sack-like coat that seems to be lacking some buttons; she looks like a jolly tourist from some less favoured country, on the holiday of a lifetime. Kate rings her right away, but cannot get a connection.

  29.

  From the window of her room Kate sees a young man and a young woman walking up the sloping road. They are perfectly in step, but apart; their shoulders do not touch as they lean into the wind; his coat, unbuttoned, flails the air behind him; she stumbles, and he catches her by the arm, then immediately lets go. They are not lovers, it seems, but might soon be. The woman is looking into his face as he talks; she laughs. This might be an episode, it occurs to Kate. From a distance, Jakub is observed by Dorota; he is walking with a young woman; there must be some indication of the closeness of their relationship – a hand that touches her back as they cross the road, perhaps. Kate makes a note to this effect. And there would be some doubt, of course, as to whether or not this is in fact Jakub; and some sort of obstacle is necessary, to prevent Dorota from pursuing them. They could be on the opposite bank of the river; or perhaps the river is too wide. The carriage might be better employed here, she thinks. The carriage in itself would be a sufficient sign of intimacy. A boat would be another possibility. Pleasure boats on Vltava, c. 1920??? she writes. A boating lake in Prague? Immediately the boating lake seems to have the fullest potential. She pictures it: Jakub rowing, the woman holding a parasol; the water sparkles in the sunlight, making it difficult for Dorota to make out what is happening. Details offer themselves: on the path, governesses with over-dressed children; a young boy in a sailor suit; a bandstand; the gleam of brass instruments; straw hats, canes, moustaches; perfumes of pipe smoke and eau de cologne and mown grass. There is research to be done here. What style of dress would a governess be wearing? How would a smart young man of that time be attired? Would couples have held hands as they walked in the park? Does such a park exist?

  The work of research is something that she has always enjoyed. At times, she has wondered if it might be the part of the process that gives her the greatest pleasure. The satisfaction of completion is immense, but the conclusion of a book never has the excitement of the beginning, when the material proliferates week by week, taking form in different ways from day to day, from hour to hour, like the changing shapes of clouds. On the shelves of her room are ranged the books from which her own books grew. The notebooks have a case of their own, beside the desk; within each one are the seedlings of a dozen novels. Without looking, she reaches down and takes one out: it’s the maroon notebook, bought in Paris, for the project that became The Women’s Palace. It comes open at a page of names: John Sedgwick; Caroline McGhee; William Arbuthnot and others, each annotated with a description and salient points of biography. These were to be the members of a company of actors, performing in London in the early days of gas light. There were to be intrigues and betrayals of various kinds, and a fatal accident, possibly not an accident. But what emerged instead was a book set in Chenonceau, the chateau that spans the River Cher, which for several years was the home of the irresistible Marguerite Wilson-Pelouze, the daughter of the Scottish engineer who put gas lights on the streets of Paris and made so much money from the enterprise that he could give the chateau of Chenonceau to Marguerite as a wedding present.

  She takes down a copy of The Women’s Palace and skim-reads the scene that one reviewer selected as a highlight, the scene that she too regards as the most successful: Madame Wilson-Pelouze daydreaming as she listens to the playing of the pianist she has employed for the summer of 1879. The pianist is a teenager; he is Achille-Claude Debussy. The real Marguerite was ‘as sensuous and intoxicating as a magnolia’, wrote Robert de Bonnières, and Kate is still pleased, quite, with the character that she made of her; her Marguerite might not intoxicate, but she is forceful and intelligent, and a young man might readily have fallen under her influence. The scene has an air of veracity; the period details are not overdone. Kate glances at other pages. The book has a tone that is hers; in the back-cover quotes, the adjective ‘atmospheric’ appears. On the cover of The Whore of Augsburg the author is praised as the creator of ‘remarkably atmospheric’ prose. She turns to the chapter in which Gregor completes his limewood image of Mary Magdalene; she reads it as if the writer had been someone other than herself; these pages, she finds, do succeed in creating an atmosphere; this is how things might have been in Augsburg in the sixteenth century, when Gregor Erhart, the master sculptor, was at work. And Giulia the Beautiful, opened next, does not disappoint. In a bedroom of the castle of Carbognano, a conversation is taking place between Giulia Farnese, the governor of the comune, and a man called Paolo Bortolo. He is an invention of the author’s, but an invention with some historical warrant: Giulia la bella is known to have had lovers between the death of her first husband and her marriage to her second. The conversation concerns – among other things – the Borgia pope, Alexander, formerly Giulia’s lover; Paolo and Giulia talk about Cesare, recently killed at Viana, and about the circumstances of the pontiff’s death, and the scandalously horrible state of the papal corpse. In places the dialogue is perhaps a little stilted, but for the most part the conversation is the conversation of real people; the research is evident, but not ostentatiously so; Paolo and Giulia don’t tell each other things that they would already have known. This is something more than costume drama; it is more than escapism, Kate tells herself. She can permit herself some satisfaction.

  Her readers now have certain expectations of her, as do her publishers. The word ‘brand’ has been used. Every two years she has delivered a
new book, and this cycle has become established, as if her productivity were merely a matter of biological gestation. A book bearing her name will have a strong story, an emotionally engaging story, with a woman at its centre, more or less in command; the location will be foreign, both geographically and temporally; a rich social milieu will be evoked, replete with fixtures and fittings; it will be atmospheric. So far, there have been seven; Kate ticks them off, reading the spines, as if it might be possible that she has misremembered the number. A great deal of work has gone into them and the work has been rewarding, in every sense, so it perplexes her a little that she should now seem to be hesitant. If there is a problem, it is not, she thinks, that the subject is weak. The idea of the revenant husband, seen in broad daylight, in that year, in central Europe, has had a feeling of rightness since the moment it occurred to her, with all those elements in place. It is possible, of course, that this rightness will prove to be illusory; this is what has happened before – ideas that seemed perfect at the outset began to fail as the work proceeded. At the moment, however, the dead/living husband, in Prague, around 1920, seems a strong foundation for a book – stronger, much stronger, than all the other possibilities that passed through her mind before this one arrived. And yet she has not begun to work properly on it; she is idling. At this stage she should be reading, planning, taking notes; there should be some exhilaration at the prospect of what lies ahead. Before, it has felt like arriving in a city for the first time. Instead, it is as if she were sitting on a train that has just come to a halt; she can see towers and domes in the mid-distance; the city of the book awaits her; its streets begin on the other side of the station – from her seat she can see, through the windows of the ticket hall, the trees of a wide avenue and a slow flow of traffic. She does not move. Time could be spent profitably in this place, she knows; it would give her pleasure to explore the streets, however busy they may be; but she would rather be where she is, in this carriage, on her own.

  This image appeals to Kate, and she makes a note of it. People are waiting for her in the city, she writes, but perhaps, instead of going to meet them, instead of spending time here, she will stay on the train until the next stop. And what is the next stop? She doesn’t know. Maybe it’s only a little village, where there’s nothing to see except the hills around it. This might be something that Dorota might think, or it might be a notion conceived by some other character who has not yet appeared. But, she adds, someone is speaking to her. At first, in her reverie, she had not heard him. She is being told to disembark. This is the end of the line. She reads what she has written, and takes a pencil to score it out; she puts the pencil down without using it.