The Fog Garden

by Marion Halligan

  She walks with Oliver to the tube, her arm hooked through his, walking at that comfortable swift pace that matches so easily for them, waits while he buys a ticket from a machine. He turns and hugs her, puts his hands round her head so her hair slides against it and kisses her mouth, beautifully, and a kind of quotation.

  She walks away without looking back, and that’s a kind of quotation too, and sets off for Selfridges, quite a long walk but she needs it, she is warmly dressed and softly booted and the rain holds off. She wanders round the glittering Christmas shop and its trappings for what it calls the new millennium: champagne, bare little strappy dresses and sandals (who cares that it’s midwinter—the English don’t), tiny beaded handbags. She buys some food and catches a taxi back to the apartment. She is sitting in the back, the seat-belt done up like a good Australian, dreamy, when there’s a violent bang and she is thrown forward against the belt. The bag of provisions tips over and spills. The people from the car that the taxi has run into—it seems incredible, she didn’t think London taxis ever ran into anything, were somehow magically able to twirl and twist in the traffic, always missing disaster by the snicker of a hair—the couple jumps out, full of anger. It’s their fault, the taxi driver shouts, pointing to two gaudily dressed women on the pavement. At first she is shocked; how can he blame two women on the pavement for his inattention? Is the old Adam still pointing the finger? But then she understands. When the women dart out into the traffic, sliding between the cars, one middle-aged, the other very young and more limber, except for carrying a baby, well, not a baby, a large walking-age child, but it is swathed in tightly wrapped blankets so it imitates a baby, she can see its rolling imprisoned eyes, it’s real, not a bundle of clothes. Its weight and unwieldiness hamper the slight young woman, and she looks in danger of losing hold of it.

  The women are begging. They run out among the cars, holding out their hands, making motorists so afraid for their safety that they give them money. It’s a kind of blackmailing begging: look, their bodies say, we are in danger, of being run over, of dropping the child under your wheels, reward us. The women’s clothes make them look like gypsies, their bright flounced skirts and shawls and dangling jewellery could come out of a pantomime, and maybe they are gypsies, and maybe they are masquerading, claiming the stereotype. Possibly it isn’t even their baby.

  The run-into couple come to understand this, watching in horror the ducking and weaving through the stopping and starting cars. The taxi driver is deeply upset, he was afraid of their being run over, he was paying attention to avoid them, not the car ahead. And despite the shattering crump of the noise not much damage seems to be done to the rubber bumper of the rammed car, and they go on their way. Clare has picked up her groceries, they are safe back in their bag, she is unhurt, but the taxi driver needs comforting, he is still trembling and agitated. It should be stopped, he says, it shouldn’t be allowed, where are the police when you need them, it’s criminal, innocent bystanders, poor motorists, there’s bound to be a really terrible accident. You’d blame yourself forever but it wouldn’t be your fault. She gives him a good tip.

  And so she sits in a pretty flat in London, the first-floor drawing room of a merchant’s house, with tall windows and ceilings and a mirrored marble mantelpiece with long-stemmed lilies, the Annunciation kind, in a row of wine bottles, three of them, the wine drunk and now the bottles making vases for the flowers Oliver bought her. He has always given her flowers, well, now and thirty-something years ago, the extravagant flowers she loves. She has a glass of wine and a fig on a pale blue plate. Nice plates in this apartment, Spode mostly, a pleasure to use. The wine is called le Pigeoulet de Brunier, lucky it didn’t break in the taxi. The fig is slightly sharp, full of rich seeds. Oliver doesn’t like figs, she found that out when they were shopping, but he isn’t here, she said, No I don’t want figs when she found out he didn’t like them, and neither she did, but now he isn’t here and she has bought figs.

  There is time, without men around. Time to think, to write words on paper, time to go to Selfridges and find some of her-favourite solid graphed paper, to search out some cartridges with black ink for her pen, to sit at a desk in a tall London drawing room with the pale sun extinguished though the sky is still light, and the alabaster lamp Ht so she is looped in a pool of light with these words that she is writing down. Maybe she will become a woman who writes with a glass of red wine always there, never getting drunk exactly but never the glass empty.

  Opening the bottle of wine seemed a good thing to do, coming back to the empty flat.

  She goes out on to the balcony, looks at the rows of brownish brick houses with their ground floors cream painted over rusticated plaster more or less fresh, their entrance ways like little bridges across the areas (only fancifully drawbridges) and the doors painted bright blue or red or black or brilliant cream, with shining knockers and numbers, and these doors proclaim the life inside: we are paying attention, they say, we are spanking and sharp and we are telling you that the house in here is kept very well. And Clare is a woman on her own in London, and in a minute she’ll lie down and have a little nap, just to keep her strength up.

  And of course the lives in these houses could be just as disorderly and dangerous and damaged as anybody else’s, it just doesn’t show, it usually doesn’t.

  In the morning Clare dozes in her bed in the drawing room beneath the tall sash windows. A thin light squints along them; it’s too early yet to see whether it’s going to be one of those days of pale dazzling sun which make you gloat, make you look at the bare trees and the last leaves bathing in this thin rich liquid wash of light and recognise how precious it is. A bane of being Australian is that the sun is too often hateful, an enemy. Beautiful, but you need to keep your distance.

  She dozes, and dreams of inviting old lovers for dinner. Cooking them a fine dish of buttered parsnips. Parsnips the sweet root vegetable that she is fond of, the rich earthy taste, the comforting wintriness; she cooks them in butter so they brown a bit then serves them in a blue and white Spode dish with a lot of extra butter.

  She’s only half asleep in this dream, so she watches herself dreaming it, though she isn’t controlling it, she is enjoying it. And when she wakes up properly she knows what it means: Look, she is saying, I know how to butter parsnips, here is the vegetable in all its rooted earthiness, and here is the butter, great wodges of the French unsalted butter she bought at Selfridges, this is how you butter parsnips. As all your fine words cannot do. Does anybody know this any more? That fine words butter no parsnips? You can bet the old lovers do. When they see the real thing in a blue and white Spode bowl. With some black pepper to sharpen it up.

  Of course, this is a dream. The butter on her parsnips isn’t real either.

  And its meanings disingenuous. Because she doesn’t want her parsnips buttered. She has other fish to fry.

  If I were not already married I would ask you to marry me. If I were free I would want to be with you always. And they go home to their loving wives and their connubial pleasures, from breakfast to fucking, and are comforted. While she, she is her own mistress.

  With time to think, time to compare. A wickedness she has never achieved before. Neither of her lovers matches, in his heyday, her beautiful brilliant Geoffrey. The urgency of the one, the mind-stopping abandoned losing yourself little-death sex, the gentleness and dreaminess finding yourself of the other: Geoffrey was both. But Geoffrey was her youth, and his, her young lover, the father of her children, the companion of her days, the love of her life. He was all those things together and her friend as well. Her best friend. These men love her, sometimes desire her, will be kind to her when they can manage it, are her friends. And they go back to their own lives. All they can offer is a little help in the drawing-up of her erotics of grief.

  She did have Geoffrey for thirty-five years and maybe that should be enough. No. Of course it shouldn’t. It isn’t, not at all, but it’s something. Thirty-five years of Geoffrey comp
ared with fifty or sixty of certain others, oh yes, if you want to measure that you can. Measure. She can’t get away from her scales and calibrations. Because it is all out of kilter.

  Your problem, she says to herself, is you want moments to go on and on. As they did with Geoffrey. So they become a whole way of living. Now you have to be satisfied that sometimes there will be moments, just that, moments, and they will pass and be gone but still exist, just as her life with Geoffrey still exists, there will be moments like small richnesses in a novel, like epiphanies minor or greater, and they will pass and you can hope that other small luminosities will come.

  The kiss at the tube station: would three or five or a hundred have been sweeter? It’s a memory now, and one kiss in the memory may be more powerful simply because it’s the only one.

  Less is more, she says to herself. You are a novelist, you know that.

  But she also knows that sometimes more is so much more.

  She gets the shuttle to Heathrow and checks her baggage for the Paris plane.

  I do not suppose I shall see Paris again, said Geoffrey. Oh well, she replied, who knows. I expect I shan’t myself.

  When she said it, she knew she was lying. She expects to see Paris again. God willing, as the leisurely Moslem woman charging her groceries at Selfridges (the Pigeoulet, the figs) said when asked would the shop be open on Sunday. Yes, she said, till six o’clock. God willing. Inshallah, Clare knows is the Arab word. And God willing, she will see Paris. Her luggage is gone, she is waiting to be called. Geoffrey’s Paris.

  the sons of heaven

  OF COURSE, THAT ISN’T THE END of it. How fine if it were. Brave Clare, clever Clare, jetting off to Paris and a new chapter in her life. In fact, she falls into a pit.

  A pit, a trough, an abyss. Is abyss a bit fanciful? A bit melodramatic? When she’s in it she doesn’t think so. It feels like an abyss.

  It’s a cold that does it. Or maybe Oliver’s unwitting words. I should hate to travel on my own. I don’t think I could stand it.

  There were a lot of replies she could have made to that. She looked at him and thought of them but felt too tired. It was as though those words punctured something and her strength began to drain away.

  You are tough, he said. I don’t think I am, she said.

  Strong is what she is, not tough. But the strength isn’t part of her substance, like muscle or sinew, as toughness would be. It’s something she contains, and conserves, and it can drain away. She thinks of a china cup, so good at containing: hot liquids, cold, a bunch of flowers, borrowed sugar. Until it cracks, and leaks, and maybe breaks. So strong while it’s whole, but all the time so fragile too. And once it’s cracked it’s done for, it’s no good, its next step is to break. Whereas she hopes her cracked state is temporary, that she will be healed and strong again.

  This is the trouble with metaphor, it may take you places you don’t want to go. But perhaps you ought not to refuse. Perhaps the crack is final in people as in china.

  On her first night she goes to dinner with old friends, Parisians, whom she hasn’t seen since Geoffrey’s death. They are sad about him, they’ve known him longer than she has, without him they might never have met one another, and they are chastened by illnesses of their own. The sense of mortality is vivid. In fact they are quite okay; one is recovered from his cancer, has been clear for a good while, the other has had an odd turn and is being checked in all the technological detail she knows so well. Nevertheless, they have been forced to pay attention to their own deaths. She talks about Geoffrey, as is her wont. He is still so lively in her mind, how could she not? They all three speak of him with affection and delight and small jokes. But she fears that she there as Geoffrey’s widow is a warning of what life can do. She’s the emblematic skull, which says, As you are, so was I. As I am, so shall you be. Her situation will come to one of them, one day, maybe not too long away. This is the end of the marriage contract: I love you, and I will stay with you, and in the end I will bury you.

  The Paris hotel is in a courtyard off the rue Jacob. It’s very pretty, with a kind of conservatory where you eat breakfast and beyond that a garden with white iron furniture, no more than a view in this cold weather. The conservatory is extremely flowery, with poinsettias and white hyacinths in pots as well as in patterns on the looped bobbled curtains. Through its roof you can see the tower of St Germain des Prés. Her room has flowery curtains, too, very scarlet and orange, with fabric on the wall in wide stripes of the same colours plus a chalky bright blue; when you sit on the narrow bed you can nearly reach over and touch the opposite wall. When you sit on the lavatory you can’t shut the door. Of course it is a single room. The hotel is comfortable and warm and very quiet. Terribly full of couples, on the stairs, handing in keys, crossing the courtyard, and even not walking together or touching and sometimes quite bad-tempered with one another, nevertheless carving out that space in air that contains them both and proclaims their belonging.

  She goes out, and walks along the streets, marvelling at the rich caves of the shop windows in these ancient grey buildings, walking down to the river and along past the mostly shut bouquinistes to St Michel and then back along the rue St André des Arts, stopping at a big cafe restaurant that’s always been there, at least for more than twenty years as she knows it, to drink a glass of their favourite gewurztraminer which is always very good here. The establishment is called l’Alsace à Paris. They do spectacular choucroutes and know where to find good Alsatian wine. Once on a long summer evening when the triangle of the place St André was filled with tables they had dinner here. She can’t recollect what they ate, but does remember the green iron drinking fountain, called a Wallace, said Geoffrey, after the Englishman who made a present of quite a lot of them to the people of Paris so that even the poorest would have clean drinking water, and this fountain with its cheerful iron cherubs spouting water was beside their table and the children who would have been eleven and eight in that year kept filling their glasses which was great fun and much cheaper than the Badoit they would drink on such occasions. Badoit because it was fluoridated and she was keen to keep this up for their teeth’s sake, and indeed even now they have no cavities. They liked it because it tasted good, and was fizzy. Once they went to buy a large plastic bottle of it in a supermarket in the rue de Rennes, round the corner from their apartment, and dropped it on the terrazzo floor, when it exploded with a loud noise, and a shop assistant comforted them.

  The gewurztraminer was still good, slightly deliciously oily and full of flavour. It came with pretzels which she didn’t eat because they were salty and she’d want another of the small round green-stemmed glasses of wine and it was quite expensive. She sat on the sheltered terrace surrounded by a hedge of winking Christmas trees. The long triangle of the place was empty. No tables. Just bare branches. It was very cold. She went back to the hotel and lay on the bed and folded herself in her red linen wrap the colour of a persimmon in the hand of the Christ Child and then in the quilted bedcover and knew she had a fever. She’d walked down the wrong street to the river, forgetting the way the rue Mazarine curved round which meant she’d had a long walk back along the quais to St Michel. Geoffrey would never have made that mistake, he knew these streets by heart, from when he was a student here in the late fifties. This part of Paris was one of the sets of narratives of their lives. His landlady with her husband and little dog who all sat placidly and getting fatter in their own apartment, on the rents of all her other properties. The Algerian bomb that went off down the street. Police raids, and one night a shoot-out. Going to the dentist and being told to give up drinking until his tooth was mended. (The goodness and nature and cheapness of the food and wine at the student restaurant was another narrative.) Geoffrey said of course, he’d stop drinking wine with dinner. Wine, said the dentist, who’s talking about wine, I said to stop drinking. Alcohol. Don’t drink alcohol. Wine’s okay.

  And the classic story, being given giant pills to take away the pain. Mutter
ing that they looked hard to swallow. The dentist guffawing. You don’t swallow them. You put them up your bum.

  The old French belief in suppositories. Don’t muck about with your stomach. That’s got to be kept in good nick for eating and drinking. Apply painkillers from the other end.

  She got up and put on her coat and gloves and two scarves and went out again. The stairs, the lobby, the courtyard still traversed by couples. She bought aspirin and took a roll of film to be developed, to make sure her new camera was still working properly. She’s taken a picture of the tower of the church of St Germain des Prés reflected in the mirror of the breakfast room of the hotel, among the bobbly pink and red curtains, the poinsettias, the painted tin chandeliers; she wants to see how it’s worked. She still has a hankering after arty photography.

  She went back to bed and slept and woke and was feverish and sweated and felt miserable and said words to herself like abyss. The long dark night of the cold. She wondered if Oliver hadn’t said how he couldn’t bear travelling on his own, she might have borne up better. She recognised that she was dropping her bundle. And she also thought that maybe she needed to.

  I shall never see Paris again, said Geoffrey when he was ill, and she replied, Well quite likely I won’t either. Knowing she was almost certainly lying. Maybe she should have made it be true, she thinks, sweating and not in her right mind in a narrow bed in a narrow room in Paris. Maybe I shouldn’t have come without him.

  Paris is Geoffrey’s gift to her. Without him she would have surely visited it, would have liked it, as nearly all the world who’s been here does. But she wouldn’t have lived in it, housekept, sent her children to school, learnt it as she did with Geoffrey. Paris belonged to him, and he gave it to her. Then she wrote articles saying that Paris was a tart, and belonged to nobody, that possessing her was an illusion, and a good thing too. All true.