Up Against the Night
Page 20
‘Was it lovely?’
‘No. It was a dump. But it had a green parrot in a cage. I tried to speak to it.’
‘Successfully?’
‘No, it bit my nose.’
More and more often I think of my childhood. After the appalling bloodshed in my house, I am constantly reassessing my life as though I might have been responsible for what happened. As though I were wilfully courting disaster in some way. As though being a careless Retief may have been a factor in what happened.
We four dine together in the Wärdshus. We feel privileged to have Vanessa and Bertil with us. As you get older you need to be in proximity to young people, to fortify yourself with their youth. There is nothing more dispiriting than older people who have sunk below the horizon, from where they utter their muffled discontent.
Soon after noon the next day, the guests start arriving, and Nellie introduces me to her friends and relations. I imagine them looking me up and down, assessing, in their polite, intense Nordic fashion, if I am good enough for their home-grown Nellie. I imagine that they know what happened to us. I feel clammy and unwelcome and in some sense diminished. The men hardly speak at first, while the women go into huddles and exchange information about babies and divorces and children. After a few drinks the men become vocal. They have a chortling, communal laugh, uttered unexpectedly.
The blessing is given by a Lutheran priest; it is short and to the point, wishing us happiness and godliness. Why not? Both are desirable. And I need help. There are toasts in aquavit. Nellie’s two brothers and a cousin speak, saying what an exceptional sister and cousin she has been. The men make a roaring sound: whoar, whoar, whoar – expressing their approval without recognisable words. Then we move to another room where a huge smorgasbord of gravadlax and herring and Arctic char and cinnamon cakes spreads into the distance. The scents of cinnamon and dill float around us solicitously. Some of the friends and family are soon very drunk. I am drunk. I am actively seeking oblivion. We dance and we sing and we go to bed late. Lucinda sends us a text message, asking for photographs, and she says that little Isaac is fine and that she has already made progress in adopting him. His mother has died of an overdose.
There are aquavit headaches at breakfast: saunas and swimming are the favoured antidotes. On my way for a swim I see children gathering wild strawberries and stringing them on lengths of grass. It is the most innocent activity I have ever seen. In its simplicity there lurks a reproach for me. I think of Lucinda and her troubles; she hardly had a childhood and to add to the charge sheet I have, with my familial lack of judgement, subjected her to unimaginable hell. I start to sob, and head for some trees and shelter. She says she has adopted little Isaac. They will be coming in September.
We make our way back to Stockholm in the course of the following day. At the airport an email pings onto my phone: Alec has died of a catastrophic stroke. I can’t tell Nellie; I don’t want to upset her at this moment; she is staying on for five days in Stockholm with her family; Bertil and Vanessa are staying with her to see the sights. I need to be home, not for any obvious reason but because I feel that I should be home with my books and my paintings and my house where I will calm down and where, alone, I will possibly be able to shake off the fear that I am responsible for what happened.
Jaco is probably a psychopath. He suggested when I last saw him in Potchefstroom before going home that he had upheld the honour of the Retief family by killing the two Congolese. He sees himself as the victor of this particular Blood River. His view is that it was them or us. This is, of course, a natural law.
When I have unpacked I set out for Sotheby’s to pick up the wedding-present picture – now also a legacy – given to us by dear old Alec. I walk all the way from Kensington Gardens and on through the park, which is in full bloom; I see that the early daffodils have died off, so giving a rural effect to a gently billowing hillock in the grass; and in the famous flowerbeds, and climbing upwards on ropes and trellises, roses are heavy in promiscuous flower. Swans are landing heavily on the Serpentine as though it is their first ever attempt at this difficult manoeuvre. Egyptian geese are investigating potential nesting sites. Horses pass listlessly on the bridleway. They are chivvied into a canter and the sound of their hooves – perhaps I am imagining this – makes the earth resonate deep down. There are no Romanian gypsies to be seen.
I walk through Mayfair, past the casinos and oligarchs’ town houses and long-established restaurants and beautiful churches and unexpected small gardens.
Sotheby’s has delegated a tall slender Italian woman to lead me to my picture. She tells me her name is Ilaria. With long, delicate fingers – her nails a deep dark blue, almost exactly the blue of my Parker’s school ink – she unwraps the brown paper to reveal the painting.
‘I love this painting,’ she says. ‘It is so beautiful, so special.’
It’s a Howard Hodgkin. A banker friend of mine has a Hodgkin above his desk in his office and I have always admired it, as Alec knew. The banker, Julian Tubal, told me that his cleaner had reproached him for buying a painting by someone who is so hopeless that he paints all over the frame.
Ilaria is waiting for me to say something. I am silenced and disconcerted as I look at the painting.
‘I ’ave been tol-e-d that your friend ’as died, I am so sorry,’ Ilaria says, briefly placing her elegant hand to rest on my arm. ‘You will remember him by this picture I am sure.’
I accept her kindness gratefully. I need it at this moment. Ilaria is right: I will remember ridiculous, pompous, kind and generous Alec.
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I will remember him. He gave me a job when I was young.’
‘Very special friend, for sure,’ she says, with her gaze directed to the picture.
She wears a lot of black and blue make-up around her eyes, giving her a Nefertiti appearance.
Now she wraps up the picture expertly. It’s a special talent to be able to wrap unruly parcels, one I don’t have. She hands me the parcel. I thank her. I want to embrace her. She strides away elegantly in her black dress, and turns back to me with one warm glance. I want to speak to her about the deeper meanings of art, but she has gone.
Also, I wanted to tell Ilaria that the deep red tide of my Howard Hodgkin, escaping over the frame of the picture, will remind me for ever of venous blood – dark red, depleted of oxygen. I am an expert on this subject. It has infiltrated my dreams for the last few months. It has entered my being. And I know that I will never be able to put behind me the memory of the torrents of blood that desecrated my beautiful house. Dark blood has been projected and fired right to the top of the walls to make awful congealed patterns. And the blood formed puddles and meres and eddies that overflowed out into the landscape in trickles to become rills and streams that in turn became rivers. Further down the hill, the blood was finally reclaimed by the dry soil, leaving, for a while, only a damp trace, which faded fast.
I saw that I had come full circle.
Acknowledgements
I would like first to acknowledge the wonderful James Gill, my agent. Without him I would be adrift.
Publishing is a complicated, many-facetted, enterprise. Over the years with Bloomsbury I have come, more or less, to understand what everyone is doing. And these are the people who have worked patiently and calmly on my books.
Michael Fishwick is my editor and plays a key role, one of reassurance and light discipline. And lunch. Anna Simpson has been diligent and cheery and kept the process moving smoothly. Thanks too to Madeleine Feeny and Anika Ebrahim. All the people who sell the books in to bookshops are, as I have seen at first hand, both indispensable and persistent. I have seen Bloomsbury’s sales team in action, and they aren’t easily fobbed off.
I would also like also to thank Alexandra Pringle, Kathleen Farrar, Richard Charkin and Nigel Newton.
Writers, inhabiting their own, self-serving world, are not necessarily the best choice of partner, and I acknowledge warmly all that my wife, Penny, has done
over the last many years.
A Note on the Author
Justin Cartwright’s novels include the Booker-shortlisted In Every Face I Meet, the Whitbread Novel Award-winner Leading the Cheers, the acclaimed White Lightning, shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award, The Promise of Happiness, selected for the Richard & Judy Book Club and winner of the 2005 Hawthornden Prize, The Song Before It Is Sung, To Heaven By Water, Other People’s Money, winner of the Spears novel of the year and, most recently, the acclaimed Lion Heart. Justin Cartwright was born in South Africa and lives in London.
@justincartwrig1
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Interior
In Every Face I Meet
Masai Dreaming
Leading the Cheers
Half in Love
White Lightning
The Promise of Happiness
This Secret Garden
The Song Before it is Sung
To Heaven by Water
Other People’s Money
Lion Heart
First published in Great Britain 2015
This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
© Justin Cartwright 2015
Justin Cartwright has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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ISBN 978 1 4088 5823 3
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