‘No. I didn’t think so. You’re nice. I like the English. I even liked Rochester. You know, in Jane Eyre. Though all the women in my class thought the only good thing about him was that he was punished by blindness and created by a woman. I’d like to go to England, see some castles in storms.’
‘Well, you must come then.’ Stephen hoped he wasn’t flushing.
She smiled, hopped on to another subject. ‘It’s not that I believe in marriage. In happily ever after and all that. Not at all. Men and women don’t really like each other. Don’t really get on. Take my parents. They fought all the time. Were hateful to each other. And they were hardly unique, if divorce rates are anything to go by.’ Her laugh rasped. ‘I read the other day that about 165,000 people get divorced every year in Britain. So I guess most of you don’t like each other very much either.’
‘That’s not to do with liking. Not in the way you mean.’ Stephen suddenly felt restless. He fiddled with his glasses.
‘What’s it to do with then?’ She was looking up at him, as if she might etch his answer in stone.
‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged, tried to find an even tone. ‘The pitfalls of everyday life. People changing. The difficulty of both sides of a couple feeling they’ve got everything they want. An idea of happiness. Everything that life’s meant to promise.’ She didn’t look satisfied and he went on. ‘A kind of selfish individualism. Or boredom. Poverty. Children or their absence. A hundred and one reasons. I’m really better on proteins and enzymes.’
‘Hmmm.’ She folded a paper napkin carefully into a triangular hat.
‘I’m married, you know.’ He said it as if there were still a hot potato in his mouth and he was afraid either the marriage or the girl would dissolve with the eating.
‘I thought you were. You have that safe look about you. Oh, I don’t mean it like that. It’s just… well, I don’t like being afraid and I sort of think, if another woman can vouch for you, well, that makes things better.’
Stephen laughed, despite himself. She laughed too, then, her eyes round, she went on to catalogue her fears. She was afraid of men, most men that is. Two friends of hers had been raped. In the US, there was a rape every 1.3 minutes, she told him with a catch in her voice. That was why she worked out all the time. And she was strong now, really strong. He could feel her muscles, if he wanted. She flexed her arm, but Stephen held back from touch and she grinned and rushed on. She was afraid of going out alone at night, too, but she forced herself. She wouldn’t be beaten by all that. And she was afraid of AIDS, felt terrible abut the pain people suffered.
Her face grew so downcast as she said this, that Stephen found himself patting her hand in consolation.
There was more, too. At night, she was afraid of the sound of footsteps and the sound of quiet. The bustle of the city where men jumped out at you made her nervous with apprehension, but so too did the isolation of the country where they might. She was anxious about the possible poisons in food and the known pollutants in air.
It seemed to Stephen that she lived in a world of imminent violence and in a state of near panic. The peculiar thing was that she carried on taking risks, as if the greater the catalogue of her fears, the greater the dazzle of everyday life.
Over coffee, he found himself saying, ‘You’re excited by fear, aren’t you? You get high on it.’ He hesitated on the word ‘high’ which felt odd on his lips, then rushed on. ‘I can understand that. But it must be hard to live with all the time. Especially when you find it where it might not be.’
She gave him a look of disbelief. ‘Boy, you sure haven’t been a woman,’ she said after a moment. ‘Especially a woman in a country where one of us is assaulted and beaten every fifteen seconds!’
‘That’s true,’ Stephen mumbled. ‘But…’
‘Shall we go?’ She leapt up, her face bright. ‘I’ve got a present for you.’ She patted a dainty new rucksack.
‘Go where?’
‘I thought we might… I thought…’ She was suddenly downcast. ‘You don’t want to be with me.’
‘It’s not that, Cary.’ He paid the bill, draped his arm round her shoulder as they walked through the doors.
‘I bought you a bottle of whisky. We could just have a drink. Antoinette won’t be back for ages,’ she added mournfully.
‘Alright, a drink. A single drink.’
She snuggled close to him as they walked down the cold, empty street, raced ahead of him up the stairs, so all that he could see was the flick of long, jeaned legs. When they got to his room, she flung off her coat, passed him the bottle of whisky and stretched out on his bed, her chin resting on her elbow, her haunches high. In imitation of that picture, she had supposedly so hated in the Paris flat, Stephen found himself thinking with a little inner smile.
He sat on a chair and looked at her and sipped the whisky he didn’t want. She stretched out her hand to him, patted the space beside her. When he didn’t move, she touched his knee. In confusion, Stephen suddenly saw Tessa’s face where Cary’s had been. Her lips had their wry curve. She stroked his leg with arched fingers, flung her hair back, touched her throat, and as she did so, his penis grew painfully hard against the seam of his trousers. He stood up with an abrupt gesture.
‘Look Cary. I’m not like this.’ He gestured feebly. ‘My wife… you’re too young. It’s not right. We can be friends.’ He didn’t dare look at her for fear that Tessa would appear again.
She leapt up behind him. ‘Okay, if that’s how you feel,’ she said with a morose note in her voice.
‘That’s how I feel. I’ll see you home if you like. Or ring for a taxi.’
‘Sure. Whatever…’
‘You’re being very understanding.’
She laughed with a funny pitch in her voice.
Later, he lay on the bed where Cary had lain and wondered sleepily whether desire was as random as it seemed and whether with assiduous probings that particular biochemistry might reveal any immutable laws. He imagined strings of complex linkages and bindings shifting and coiling, secrets waiting to be plumbed and exposed. Then he thought of Tessa and uncomfortably saw her with Ted. She looked very young, her hair bound unusually in an innocent plait which Ted unwound with greedy fingers before he obscured her from Stephen’s view, his buttocks moving in unseemly frenzy.
With savage distaste, as if he were master of life’s kaleidoscope, Stephen forced the image to fragment into a thousand coloured segments before it could work its perverse magic on his dumbly stirring nether parts. A statistic with reassuring properties bounced helpfully into his mind. He couldn’t remember its source. Nor could he vouch for its accuracy, but it claimed that 80% of sudden deaths during sex were related to extramarital activity, whereas sex with a long-standing partner made no more claims on heart and blood than a brisk climb up and down two flights of stairs.
He buried his head in the pillow which smelled of an unfamiliar body and imagined Ted Knight happily dead.
-17-
____________
U Mecenáse lay tucked in a half-renovated arcade on the east side of the central Malostranské Square dominated by the baroque bulge of the church of St Nicholas.
As he crossed the Karlův Most and picked his way through crowds of foreigners, old and young, Jan Martin wondered at the residual dislike he still harboured for the side of Prague on which the Castle was situated. Like the glimpse of a hairy spider for an adolescent who thinks he has long mastered his fear, the proximity to the site of state power always triggered in him first the desire to avert his eyes and run, and then the need to challenge and confront. Even though now everything had changed and a stealthy bureaucracy no longer injected its daily dose of poison into the social order.
He had been happy to see the last of that police station, too, this afternoon, pleased with himself for not allowing the old discomfort to show. How long would it take for all the traces the old order had so deeply imprinted on nerve and bone to vanish? Five more years? Ten? A generatio
n?
He watched a young couple kissing in the shadow of a stone saint and smiled. Eva would be free of it all. That was certain. Though perhaps he would never be.
With something like relief, he pushed open the heavy leather-embossed door of the restaurant and let it fall completely shut behind him. Only then did he walk through the second door into the richly appointed medieval interior with its medley of gothic arches and crystal chandeliers. He spied Simone almost instantly. She was sitting at an alcove table studying a menu and he allowed himself the pleasure of looking at her for a moment before moving to greet her. The sheen of her hair, the concentrated drama of her features, even with her eyes lowered, the regal set of shoulders and neck in the high-collared blouse, all gave him pause. She had aged well, not like those women who had the faces of young girls in an advanced stage of withering. Hers bore all the traces of experience, an accumulation of riches, like one of those Rembrandt portraits which drew the eye and fixed it in contemplation.
When he had met her in 1968, during those short intense weeks of their affair, she had seemed to him not only finer and wiser than any woman of his acquaintance, but yes, also far older, a creature from a different world. Now, strangely, it was as if the distance between them had receded. He had hurtled over the barrier into middle age and she, like some friend embued with greater vitality, had waited for him there.
He had been so young at the time of their first encounter, as fresh and full of hope as a child. A time it was now almost impossible to recapture, before Hanka, before fatherhood, before the long, grim years of quasi-occupation. Simone had taught him so much, not only about passion, though here she had taught him everything, but about time itself. She had shown him how to take his time and how to appreciate the particular textures that time took in that intimacy which was as vast as the world itself. Time’s swiftness and its slowness, its capacious intensity, its miraculous distance from history.
She had taught him so well that, after her departure, he wanted to immerse himself in it time and again. Wanted to recreate that magical world away from the world - a sphere both of minutiae and grand tectonic movement. Here, like a naturalist, he could study the miracle of sameness and difference, the down on skin, the arch of ankle or toe, the sweep of a brow or the curve of a breast, the ripple of laughter as it worked its way down from a woman’s throat. And bathe in that small eternity of pleasure. It had everything and nothing to do with love. Hanka didn’t understand that. Wouldn’t understand the relief of it after the blanket generalisations which had made up the fodder of their stifled intellectual lives. Or maybe she had understood.
Jan gave himself a mental shake and focussed on Simone again. What she wanted with him today, he didn’t know, but she had made it clear that she wanted him alone. He suspected she might broach the subject of why she had abandoned him so abruptly all those years ago, why she had never come back or written. He had never believed her ‘trouble at home’ story. After the initial shock, the inevitable depression, he had flattered himself with the notion that perhaps she had upped and gone so quickly because she had taken him more seriously than he assumed. At least that was what he had told himself during that long month in prison in ‘69, when there had been all too little else to flatter oneself with.
Yesterday their talk had all been external, about politics and the state of the nation and the progress of the Congress. Today, he sensed, the agenda would be of a more intimate nature.
‘Jan!’ Her grave smile was on him. ‘You see how eager I am to see you. I got here very early. And I’ve already started on the wine.’
‘I hope I won’t disappoint your eagerness.’ He sat down opposite her, found himself suddenly nervous at the intent examination of her eyes. She was nervous too, he thought, as he listened to her chatter about the old style delicacies of the menu, the hare and wild boar and stuffed duck.
‘As long as they’re not cooked according to our Recipes for Warm Meals. Our new government has been too busy to abolish the law intended to ensure quality in our state-run restaurants. And you can imagine what kind of quality that meant!’
She joined him in laughter. It didn’t altogether ease the air, so they ordered quickly from the new style, pony-tailed waiter who hovered assiduously over their table. Then, like fencers who had forgotten the art of thrust and parry, they danced round each other, commenting on the irrelevant, waiting for the first serious pass.
It was she who made it, once the thick mushroom soup they had ordered as a first course stood in front of them.
‘Contrary to appearance, Jan, I did keep up with you over the years. Messages came, through Stephen, of course, but also through others. I know things were not altogether easy. Sometimes very hard. I admired your courage.’
He shrugged.
‘I know it doesn’t excuse my abrupt departure or the fact that I never communicated with you directly.’
‘You don’t need to make excuses to me, Simone.’ He met the intentness of her eyes for a moment, then looked away. ‘You came like a present out of the blue. It was only natural that you should go that way.’
‘You never questioned it then?’ She sounded a little disappointed.
‘You mean did it hurt? Of course it hurt. You were everything and I was nothing. But I understood what we had to be an interlude. And I was resilient, have had to be.’ He put his hand on hers to bridge that distance and to ease her mounting tension. ‘It is a long time ago.’
‘I am glad you are resilient.’
Her face surprised him. He was suddenly aware that this little dance of emotions and nostalgia was not what was at issue. The thrust he had intuited was yet to come.
She pushed her plate to one side. ‘I have never been a great one for confessions, Jan. Pre-scripted purges or the more personal kind.’ She gave him a hint of a smile, then rushed on. ‘What I have to tell you now is something that I have kept back for many years. It’s telling may do neither of us much good, even if it is the truth. The truth is sometimes too much for flawed beings, like myself, to bear.’
Her voice had taken on a density which threatened to submerge the individual words. She paused, forced herself into irony. ‘Luckily, yesterday you told me you believed in the aegis of truth. I understood you to mean not the single big capitalised Truth of the sort which inevitably needs guns and terror to keep it alive and well-fed - but lots of smaller everyday truths, including unpalatable ones.’
‘Go on, Simone.’ He found himself reaching for one of her cigarettes, emptying his glass of wine too quickly. The waiter scurried to refill it. She waited. Her eyes lowered to the white table cloth, she slowly traced its embossed pattern of flowers.
‘I knew your father, Jan.’
‘You knew Josef?’ He looked at her in confusion. It was hardly an announcement which necessitated such tension. ‘You didn’t tell me back then. Embarrassing for you, I guess.’ He grinned imagining his own embarrassment at the age of eighteen, if he had known he was making love to a friend of his father’s.
‘Not Josef Martin. But Stanislaw Manés, your biological father.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. He was my first husband.’
He tasted the flavour of that, found that like a hot, untried spice, it burnt his tongue. He hadn’t known about the existence of Stanislaw Manés until Josef had taken him aside during the excitements of that long ago Cambridge summer of 1967 and told him that now, given the way the political wind was blowing, it was time Jan took on board the fact that he had a hero for a real father, not just dull, steady Josef Martin. He had no memory of Stanislaw Manés, but the revelation, its attendant story, had acted like an electric charge, stimulated him into a political awareness, a concern for the history and present and future of his country he had never before had.
‘So are you trying to tell me that I’m…?’
Her eyes had never left his face and now she shook her head vigorously, let out a sharp, abrupt laugh, so that the people at the next table turned and s
tared. She lowered her voice to a murmur.
‘No, Jan. I am not your mother. Not quite Jocasta. Staszek and I were divorced and he married your mother, Karolina Dostolova. After, or perhaps it was even before his death, she married Josef Martin.
‘I see.’ His voice had a peculiar pitch and he tried to alter it. ‘And it was when I told you about what to me was a new and exciting family history that you upped and ran. Of course.’ He smiled, tried a joke. ‘Like father, like son. A familial attraction. Or perhaps you unknowingly recognized something in me.’
‘If it were only that, I think I might never have mentioned it.’ She gave him her woman of the world face, all shadowy delight at the impishness of fate. ‘No, Jan, I’m afraid there’s more. And it’s the more that makes the difference.’
She told him then slowly and in great detail, so that his mind began to reel, about her vengeful hatred for his mother, about her sense that Karolina had helped to destroy Staszek, about the retributive justice she had blindly sought, about its unhoped for success, his mother’s imprisonment, her eventual death. She spared neither herself nor him. When he asked her questions, she answered fully, coolly, like a judicial archivist who had no vested interest in the documents on display. She gave him new insight into his father and his history. As well as into herself.
‘So you see,’ she said, after his questions had given way to extended silence, ‘it is not a pretty story. Not one I wanted to tell you when you were eighteen and full of hope in humanity. And, though I flatter myself, a little enamoured of me.’
‘You loved my father very much,’ he murmured. He didn’t meet her eyes which were too full of fire.
‘That is to put a very kind light on it. Thank-you Jan. You could have said, instead, that my antipathy for your mother was of an unforgivable pettiness. I suspected you might hate me. You may still, yet.’
‘If you’re afraid that I may want to avenge myself in my mother’s name…’ He paused, picked a crumb off the table. ‘No, what I need to do now is come to terms with the fact that my mother was so distinctly on the other side.’
The Things We Do For Love Page 29
