Telescope

by Jonathan Buckley

  An hour later, Charlie has gone to the garage and the three of us are sitting in the garden. Ellen compliments Janina on the garden, and Janina tells her that the garden was one of the main reasons they moved here. She’d always wanted a proper garden, she says. The London house had just a scrap of grass and a border the size of an ironing board. Charles would have been content to stay there forever, but moving to this place was Charles’s way of paying her back, because she’d stayed at home all those years, with the boys, living in a city she didn’t much like any more. It wasn’t easy for Charles. She loved being away from the noise and the dirt, but it took Charles a while to get used to the quietness of it. And of course the commuting wasn’t easy either. She was aware that Celia thought Charles was an old-fashioned man and a bit of chauvinist, but Celia was wrong. ‘How many men would have done what he’s done for me?’ she says. ‘How many men really understand that a woman is working when she’s at home? Not many.’

  ‘You’re right,’ says Ellen.

  ‘In many ways, Charles is more of a feminist than his sister,’ says Janina. Then she adds: ‘But he has great affection for her. He really does.’

  ‘I can see that,’ says Ellen, and Janina smiles gratefully.

  4

  To Charlie’s way of thinking much of Celia’s adult life could be described as nothing but one damned episode after another, and this in itself is something he finds problematic. As an adult, thinks Charlie, one has an obligation to achieve a greater life-coherence than Celia has managed. Herewith a précis of Celia’s incoherent life to date, commencing with her leaving home to go to university (the first in the family). She had decided to read politics, because – as she herself put it (provoked by pompous Charlie) – she intended ‘to study the real world’. Both elements of this phrase are significant: the act of studying in itself elevated her above Charlie on the scale of human endeavour (Charlie was an all-accepting dullard; she would accept nothing until she had tested it); and the decision to make ‘the real world’ the object of those studies gave her a greater integrity than certain airy-fairy contemporaries, for whom the songs of Leonard Cohen were as tough a challenge as they could handle. Charlie’s view was that Celia chose politics because she thought she could bluff her way through it merely by watching the news, and he found it hilarious when she came home for the first Christmas with a thousand pages of Karl Marx to read before the new term began. Our mother, convinced that it was simply not possible to write a thousand pages on anything without repeating yourself a great deal, thought it must be possible to skip about eighty percent of Das Kapital; that would be like trying to skip through a sheep-dip filled with glue, said Celia, before giving up after fifty pages. (There was a boy in her seminar group who was certain to finish it within a week – he could tell her all she needed to know.) Our father, worried that she might be turning into a student activist, was in something of a quandary: dismayed by her lack of application (he’d hoped, arguing against Charlie’s scepticism, that university would inculcate a greater capacity for self-discipline), but relieved that the founding father of communism only bored her to distraction.

  Boredom was to be a recurrent problem during the ensuing three years, from which she emerged with a poor degree and no enthusiasm for heavy-duty political participation. Disenchantment with her coevals played a part in this conversion. She had a comprehensively limp liaison, for example, with the aforementioned book-devouring bright boy in her seminar group (every weekend another demonstration to attend; every trip to the corner shop another struggle with the ethics of high-capitalist consumerism) and an ill-considered dalliance with a faux-prole pretty boy who now works for the Conservative party, to the surprise of very few. After these and other disappointments with student politicos, she developed a penchant for tunnel-visioned big-brains of a more scientific cast of mind. (It was notable, however, that none of these deep thinkers occupied the ugly end of the spectrum.) Unfortunately, most of these boys were too immersed in their subjects to bother themselves overly with the needs of Celia, and so they gave way to a sequence of more or less handsome boys of a vaguely neo-Romantic tendency (the English Literature department was fertile territory), whose general attitude to the short- and medium-term future (it’s too soon to worry about money; let’s get some living done now, while we’re equipped to enjoy it) came to be her own. Most durable of this squad was Louis, who by his final year (the year of his affair with Celia) was marching to the beat of a drum that none but he could hear, attending only lectures that had nothing to do with his courses, submitting a couple of pages of aphoristic jottings (he’d recently discovered Nietzsche) in lieu of a dissertation on King Lear, et cetera, et cetera. He possessed a fine library of poetry (a tribute to his shoplifting skills), and was an inveterate composer of verses. A sonnet sequence dedicated to Celia was found in her room at home by her mother, who declared that it was sheer pornography (the parts of it that were comprehensible, that is); Charlie’s angle was that Louis had espoused poetry because his brain was so scrambled by dope that he couldn’t rise to the logical connections of prose. Three months after he and Celia had decided that their world-views were not, after all, entirely compatible (an incident in which he pitched face-first into a plate of curry seems to have been pivotal), Louis embarked on a spiritual quest to northern India, accompanied by Melanie, a fey and floaty-skirted first-year philosopher with an untameable mane of russet hair, preternaturally assertive breasts and a perpetual expression of semi-vacant astonishment in her huge indigo eyes. Though Melanie returned within the month, Louis was now lost to all his erstwhile friends. Celia came across his mother once, on Oxford Street; Louis was by then living in northern Thailand, and had changed his name to something Celia made no attempt to remember. His mother gave the impression that she held Celia in some way responsible for her son’s decline into para-Buddhistical lunacy.

  Long before she went to university it had become clear that Celia would never have any interest in the family business. After she had graduated it became clear that she had no interest in undertaking anything that her parents or older brother might term a career. Political engagement was henceforth to be limited to voting in every election in which she was eligible to participate, a donation of a steady percentage of her income to various Third World charities, and a few protest marches. (But no marches after Lisbon, where, running from the cops, she received a clout on the cranium from a baton; the consequences were half a dozen stitches, brief experimentation with a Jean Seberg crop, and a briefer fling with Cristiano, the dishy doctor.) ‘You have absolutely no idea what to make of yourself, do you?’ Charlie once accused her. She didn’t think of herself as a self-assembly kit, she replied. As for her future, all she knew for certain was that she couldn’t bear to stay in a country run by the vicious, money-grubbing, life-denying, self-serving cabal of free-market zealots for whom her brother had unaccountably voted. In addition, she positively wanted to travel. (Charlie, by contrast, was a devotee of anti-travel, having a penchant for resorts with swimming pools and tennis courts and perimeter fences and a tour rep constantly on hand, to ease any social interaction with the natives. His honeymoon was spent in a five-star compound in the Bahamas, which was technically abroad but with the quotient of foreignness reduced to nil, or near enough (and unlimited tennis coaching included in the package, plus as-much-as-you-can-eat buffet breakfasts and lunch). ‘Having a wonderful time,’ Janina wrote, underlining the word in red, and on the front of the card she or Charlie had scored an X across one of the hotel windows, though God knows why they supposed we might want to know behind which of the fifty or so identical windows of this top-bracket dormitory block they had been frolicking.) Celia also knew that she wanted, for as long as possible, to live and work among people who were intelligent and vital and youthful. (Charlie, as far as Celia was concerned, had leapt from adolescence to middle age in a single bound.) And so, having no need of an income above what was necessary for the maintenance of a bedsit and a moderately s
ociable existence, Celia thought she’d have a go at teaching English as a foreign language. It did not take her long to get herself hired by a school in Barcelona, on a one-year contract.

  Led to believe that another contract would be offered at the year’s end, she went into the job at full throttle: studying for a diploma, attending Spanish lessons two nights a week, plus lessons in Catalan at weekends. Though her room was a trek from the school and the ill-fitting windows made it so cold in winter that she could barely afford to keep it heated to a tolerable temperature, she loved the city and would have stayed there, given the chance, but when the year was up her employers regretfully informed her that they would have to let her go (money was found for a replacement – at a beginner’s salary), and so, as an interim measure, she came back to London to teach and gather more qualifications. In London, after a year, a better contract was on offer, but by then she was pining for the sun and better food and livelier people, and was profoundly antipathetic to English men, in the wake of a sequence of deadbeats that culminated with Patrick Fontenoy.

  (Let’s get him out of the way now. She met Fontenoy at a party. He was skulking in the garden, letting his moody charisma do its work. Prison-cut hair, with a neat scar athwart the crown; eyes like olives in glycerine; broad-shouldered but lean; jeans on the verge of disintegration, paired with a classy belt – a philosopher-assassin kind of image. The day before the party he’d put in his last performance as a deranged Spanish prince in a pub-theatre production of some minor Jacobean tragedy. His rent was being paid, however, by a TV advert in which he appeared as a yogurt-fuelled grand prix driver. Celia was much taken by Fontenoy’s combination of self-mockery and saturnine seriousness, and by the cold-eyed stare with which he silenced the dandified idiot who shrieked at them: ‘Forgive me for asking, but are you two fucking?’ A few weeks later she went to Canterbury to see him in an adaptation of a Kafka story; he was ‘unbelievable’, she told me. His finest moment followed: a surprise trip to Morocco for a long weekend. That he’d recently borrowed a couple of hundred quid from her was of no concern – there was a TV role in the offing, in a big period-drama production. It was a small part, but enough to settle his debts, and his agent was confident that major roles were just around the corner. Celia was also certain that Fontenoy’s breakthrough was imminent, and this was a source of some anxiety: once his name was made, would he still want to be hanging around with a language teacher? Celia kept him ‘grounded’, he reassured her. She was his ‘anchor’, he liked to tell her, but might there come a time when an anchor was merely an encumbrance?

  Patrick Fontenoy did not become famous. His turn as the sinister factotum of a dissolute Regency buck did attract the attention of a casting director, thanks to whom he landed a part in a low-budget movie, playing the sinister English boyfriend of a kidnapped heiress. This led to an appearance as a sinister lawyer in a low-budget British gangland film, after which he reached what turned out to be the zenith of his fame, in an American sci-fi thriller that was released only on video: he impersonated a sinister Russian scientist who turned out to be a robot. ‘He gets killed by a blood-sucking blancmange in the third reel,’ wrote Celia, who had long since been cast aside in favour of an Irish actress, fifteen years Fontenoy’s senior, who had played the pious aunt of said Regency buck. This was a blow which she had not seen coming, as Patrick had seemed to find this woman as irksome as she had. Celia encountered her at a post-production party, and described her as a hefty specimen with the smug half-smile and drowsy eyes of a mature yet highly sexual woman who had learned to look with indulgence upon the foibles of the inexperienced. A week or so after the party, Patrick sent Celia a note. He hated himself, he told her, but he really didn’t know who he was right now, and needed to take some time to find out. (The time he took out, she discovered, was a fortnight in Galway with the worldly-wise middle-aged fatso.) ‘You might not know who you are,’ Celia replied, ‘but I can tell you what you are,’ and she told him, at considerable length. I met him once: he had insisted on being introduced to the mutant brother and I had succumbed to Celia’s pleading. I recall him examining my room with spurious deliberation and respect, as if it were some sort of art installation, and subjecting me to much guff about the ‘little mind’ being absorbed into the ‘great mind’ of creation, by which I think it was intended that I should know that Fontenoy had considered deeply the subject of suffering. ‘What do you think?’ Celia asked me. ‘Never trust a man who wears a necklace,’ I replied, and she barely spoke to me for a month. Enough.)

  After Fontenoy’s desertion she applied herself to securing another post in Barcelona, which was duly found. This time, though she enjoyed the city as much as she had done before, the school itself was less than satisfactory (a martinet at the helm; staff resigning every month; classes too large) and the latter stage of the second Barcelona sojourn was soured by a libidinous landlord who insisted on collecting the rent every fortnight in person, bearing gifts of steadily increasing desirability (extra-virgin olive oil; a bottle of Rioja; two bottles; a case; two tickets for a European game at the Camp Nou), progressing from amusement through incomprehension to indignation at her resistance. In the end he evicted her to make way for a young woman who was purportedly his god-daughter. The offer of better-paid employment soon took her to Cyprus for a brief interlude (too many Brits, and nothing to do except lie on the beach), then to Athens (another mistake: air you could chew, heat that liquefied her brain, monotonous food, tough language), whence she transferred herself to Turin, which revealed itself to be not quite Italy as she recalled it from the family holidays: an attractive city in parts, but it could almost have been England when the rain came off the mountains, and the natives were a different breed from the expansive and highly tactile extroverts who seemed, in her memory, to have populated every picturesque cranny of the regions she had visited as a girl. Almost everyone was friendly, and the students were the most appealing she had ever taught, but half a year passed before any colleagues invited her to visit them at home, and at weekends she often spoke to nobody but shop assistants. As acutely as in Spain, she was conscious that she could never be anything other than a spectator here, and, perhaps dulled by the isolation, she struggled with the language (‘if anyone tells you Italian is easy, you can be certain they don’t speak it’). Nonetheless, as a spectator she liked much of what she saw in Italy, so from Turin she migrated south to Bologna, where the climate was more to her liking, the city more pleasing to the eye and the colleagues more congenial. She shared a flat with Maria, a teacher at the same school, who had been born and raised in Calabria and can be glimpsed for an instant (aged four) in the background of a scene in Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew. Maria was a good friend (and has remained a friend ever since), and the Bologna experience was generally good, being blotted only by the incident of Mr Cipolla, which happened at the beginning.

  The pungently unattractive Mr Cipolla (an administrator at the school; late forties; thinning bouffant, with blatant colourant usage; pillow-belly; over-applied and noxious aftershave; fascist in all but name) one morning, alone in the lift with Celia, reached for the top-floor button at the same time as she did, and allowed a finger to graze against her hand with unmistakeable meaning, an advance that Celia ignored, as she ignored the next one (a summons to his office to receive item of information that could have been transmitted by phone in five seconds; compliment on new shoes), and the one after that (cigarette lighter proffered with absurd lingering gaze). Maria explained that the attentions of Mr Cipolla were a rite of passage for any female employee, and that sooner or later the perpetually jealous Mrs Cipolla would be making an appearance, because although Mr Cipolla – to her knowledge – had never succeeded in seducing anyone other than his weird wife, he evidently made a habit of tormenting the poor woman by regularly letting drop the name of the latest object of his horrible affections. And lo, very soon afterwards, Celia was confronted on her doorstep by a woman fitting Maria’s descri
ption of Mrs Cipolla (deep red lipstick applied a centimetre too widely; hair held in place with huge silver combs; face of a boxer), who told her – with a violent faceward jabbing of the fingers – to stay away from her Sergio, then stormed off before Celia could work out how to say in Italian that nothing could give her greater pleasure. Incorrigible Sergio tried his luck again, inviting her to join him and some friends for a drive to Rimini on Sunday. Again Mrs Cipolla appeared outside the apartment (this time she was waiting when Celia came home): ‘I’m warning you. Keep away or there’ll be trouble.’ To Celia’s insistence that she had not the slightest interest in her husband Mrs Cipolla laughed (or yelped – her laugh was the sound you’d make if you trapped your finger in a door), as though the very idea that any woman could fail to feel a flutter for her Sergio were utterly preposterous. ‘My wife is obsessed with you,’ Mr Cipolla informed Celia one morning in an empty classroom, his face (a saggy assemblage at the best of times) expressing the sadness of his wife’s unreasonable behaviour and of his hopeless love for Celia. When next she came face to face with Mrs Cipolla, Celia seized the initiative and said to her, before the wretched woman could open her mouth: ‘Leave me alone, and tell your husband to leave me alone as well.’ Speechless, Mrs Cipolla clutched at her head as if to assure herself that it hadn’t cracked under the pressure of her anger, before withdrawing with an insult. Thereafter, Mr Cipolla kept his distance from Celia (in the lift he’d stand as far from her as possible), and life was extremely enjoyable until Maria had to go back home, to look after her ailing mother.