Telescope

by Jonathan Buckley

  Within the year Christine and Jack were married, and they’ve stayed married for more than twenty years. She’s a picture-framer, operating from a tiny shop in Dulwich; he runs a firm that makes instruments for chemical laboratories. They live well. They take a minimum of two holidays per year, not counting the odd spontaneous city break; they live in a capacious house with an immodest garden; they have a highly personable son, who is about to leave home for art college. Christine has a life that many women would envy, and many do. She knows this. Yet Christine has increasingly become prey to the suspicion that – notwithstanding the plentiful vacations, which have taken them to Madagascar, the Yukon, Venezuela, Laos and many other wonderful places (with copious film footage to prove it) – she hasn’t really lived. She still, she supposes, loves Jack, but she’s begun to wonder lately if it’s true to say any more that she wants him. Imagining a scene in which she (for the purposes of this scenario unattached and unaware of Jack’s existence) is at a party where she meets Jack (similarly innocent of her), she can’t be sure that she’d pick him out – or vice versa, for that matter. (Well, Celia points out, if you had no memory of Jack and Jack had no memory of you, Jack wouldn’t be Jack and you wouldn’t be you, so the whole idea is bloody daft, isn’t it? This is taken by Christine as hair-splitting rather than a dash of cool good sense: ‘You know what I mean, C. I need you to be supportive here.’) Or it feels too often as if their life together has become – if such a thing is possible – just too damned harmonious. She sometimes thinks of herself and Jack as two different colours that have been blended so thoroughly that they’ve become one perfectly even tone. (Yes, but who did the blending? And what about the amazed discovery, post-Katrina, that she and Jack had been soulmates all along?) A bit of friction and spark is what Christine yearns for, once in a while, and she knows that Celia is the only friend she can say this to, because Celia is the only one who won’t think she’s gone mad. Recently she’s found herself attracted to one of her customers, a man of about fifty, not especially good-looking but well preserved and well dressed, and very intelligent. Over the last year or so he’s brought her half a dozen posters to be framed – posters for art exhibitions, mostly French. He’s Scottish, from near Oban, and that’s about all she knows about him, except that he teaches at Goldsmiths, has been divorced twice and has a son called Jules who lives with his mother in Wales. His name is Douglas. He always wears a luminously white shirt, and he has this amazing deep blue coat that looks like it must have cost a fortune, but his car is a duffed-up old Peugeot. Christine and Douglas have been for a coffee, once or twice, that’s all. Nothing will come of it, but she’s tempted, and is feeling as guilty as she would do if she’d given in. Jack hasn’t the faintest idea that anything is wrong; he’s entirely happy, or so it appears, and assumes that so is she. Perhaps nothing is wrong – there’s just something else in sight, perhaps on offer, that would be different from what she has with Jack. What Christine wants is for Celia to talk her out of it, but she also wants complications. She wants intermittent tumult rather than a slow easy slide into old age. ‘What a laugh, eh?’ says Celia. ‘She thinks she’d like to be me. Well, if she wants to swap, I’m game. Jack’s OK. I could learn to love the walk-in wardrobe.’

  Other women just get on with it and have affairs left, right and centre, moans Christine, so why on earth can’t she? What’s the matter with her, for God’s sake? Why is she so fucking timid? The implication is that if only Christine could bring herself to cast off the burden of her conscience – as Celia and cohorts of other irresponsible good-timers have so easily managed to do – her life would be so much easier. Celia’s opinion, speaking as a woman who has given adultery a go (she made it sound like a lifestyle choice, akin to sampling a new brand of coffee, but Christine seemed to miss the irony), is that Christine shouldn’t do it: at best she’ll get a few orgasms out of it; at worst (and worst is by far the more probable outcome) the bouts of sex will pall, and she’ll pay for them by making herself and Jack (and maybe the boyfriend too) extremely unhappy. This wasn’t the advice that Christine had intended to elicit. Nodding and gazing into her glass, she stoically contemplated the joyless labour of self-denial that lay ahead. Celia has decided that a year is too short an interval between visits to Christine.

  I show the Christine pages to Ellen. ‘Daniel,’ she says, ‘I don’t dislike Celia. You don’t have to convince me.’ I’m not trying to convince her of anything, I say – I’m just reporting what’s going on, and filling in a bit of background. ‘This woman sounds like a nightmare,’ she says, ‘but you’re telling me things about her that her own husband doesn’t know, and that’s not right. I shouldn’t know. I don’t want to know.’ She’s rather annoyed; I undertake to give more thought to questions of confidentiality in future.

  An afternoon amid Eugène Atget’s photographs of Paris. In front of the church of Saint-Médard, a blurry horse appears to be the only living thing; but look carefully: there, by the railings – a black-caped phantom. Another picture: light flares at the end of passage Montesquieu as if an angel might be about to step out of it. More: a dead man looks at me through the reflections on the half-glazed door of L’Homme Armé, rue des Archives; two dead women, each occupying her own pane of glass, gaze at me through the door of À la Biche, rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire. And here’s a rarity, a full-length person in focus – a mustachioed man in slipper-like shoes, selling lampshades on rue Lepic. (Might his wife, I wonder, upon seeing this, have said to him: ‘That’s not a good picture. It’s not you, Gustave. It doesn’t look like you at all.’ Now he is no longer a likeness of anyone – he is perfectly what he is, the pedlar of lampshades in the photograph entitled Marchand d’abat-jour, rue Lepic, 1900.) Walking along rue Saint-Dénis, window-shopping in the Galerie Vivienne, strolling on rue du Petit-Pont, people have rubbed themselves out, leaving smudges of smoke in their stead. And on a day in 1907, outside a shop in rue Chérubini, to the left of a group of transparent people, stands a man in a long apron, with his cuffs rolled up; and there he is again – on the corner of rue Chérubini and rue Sainte-Anne. It’s the same face and body, without a doubt. It’s a shock to recognise him, as if the figure has crossed from one page to the other to prove that he was alive.

  E: Why do you like these pictures so much?

  D: They get me out of the house.

  E: Seriously. Why do you like them? I want to know.

  D: I was being serious.

  E: Please don’t talk to me as if I’m stupid.

  D: Any news of Roy?

  E: Did you hear what I said?

  D: Yes. I’m sorry. I don’t think you’re stupid. Any news of Roy?

  E: No, Daniel, there is no news of Roy. Roy is a waste of space and effort. The situation is unchanged.

  It’s possible that, as the thickets of middle age begin to envelop her, Celia is coming to see her unattached state (previously a badge of integrity) as a condition that now has more negatives than positives. The idea, however, that Matt Taussig was the soulmate whom she, by neglecting to make clear how she felt about him, allowed to slip by, is a rewriting of history. She didn’t let him go: he ditched her, for Vanessa Koskinen – Vanessa of the website, mother of Lothar – and the ditching was not caused by any failure on Celia’s part other than her failure to be Vanessa Koskinen.

  Vanessa was not short of a few dollars (father a director of big-budget TV commercials; mother a TV producer), and was a fairly smart young woman (degree in Film Studies), but the exterior surfaces of semi-Finnish semi-American Vanessa were what made her stand out. Slim and well-toned as a dancer, with deep-set almond-shaped cornflower-blue eyes and a sulky mouth, she made you feel, when you looked at her, as if you’d walked into a glass door. She did not affect to be unaware of her impact: when meeting a man for the first time, she had a way of withholding herself a little during the preliminary exchanges, as if to give him some time to master his confusion, to adjust to the flawless face and figure. In Matt’s studio she
shed her clothes as if she’d happened, alone, upon a secret tropical beach. At the sight of the unselfconsciously nude Vanessa, Celia experienced no more than a tweak of envy (the girl was a different species – you wouldn’t envy a gazelle, would you?), and the merest touch of jealousy (Vanessa was just a ‘breathing statue’, Matt assured her; she was vapid; and there was a boyfriend, wealthy, to whom she was engaged). But less than six months later Matt told Celia, as he boxed up some prints for a show in Paris, that he thought it would be best if he went to Paris on his own, even though the flights and hotel had already been booked. This was a great surprise to Celia. But hadn’t she once said, Matt reminded her, that she’d want their relationship to end with a fall of the blade rather than a slow fading away? She might well have said that, but they were nowhere near fading away, she said, to which Matt replied that he felt they were settling into a routine, by which he seemed to mean that they now watched television together from time to time, instead of fucking each other to the brink of cardiac failure at every opportunity.

  It was from Matt’s sister that she learned what had really happened. Once a month Celia and Ursula used to meet in the West End for a drink at whichever designer bar Ursula had discovered in the intervening weeks, and when Ursula rang to say that she’d only just heard that her idiot brother had broken with Celia and to ask if she still wanted to get together, Celia – who had always enjoyed accompanying supercool Ursula to places she’d never have had the nerve to go into alone – readily decided that there was no good reason not to. So they met in a bar where purple and turquoise and scarlet Perspex prevailed, and on the second cocktail Ursula let slip that Matt had recently received a black eye from Vanessa’s ex-fiancé: ‘The least he deserved,’ she said, at which point she realised that Celia was not aware of the full extent of Matt’s idiocy. ‘The thing about Matt,’ said the beautiful Ursula, ‘is that he makes a fetish of beauty. It’s always been his weakness. It’ll mess up his life and it’ll mess up his work.’ This analysis was of some consolation to Celia, and before long it had become possible for her to think of blandly gorgeous Vanessa as nothing more than the emblem of Matt’s pitiable enthralment to pleasing exteriors. She soon convinced herself that the fire had indeed started to go out, and that sooner rather than later she would have ended it herself. ‘I’m not sure Matt can handle a real woman anyway,’ Ursula flattered her. (They continued to see each other, until Celia’s final departure for Italy.) ‘Is there anything more to be said about shapely young women with no clothes on?’ Ursula would ask, and Celia would agree that there was not. Matt’s latest pictures were deplored. ‘They are very tasteful, very accomplished, and very uninteresting,’ Ursula would drawl, which may or may not have been what she thought.

  It’s possible, nonetheless, that Celia feels a nostalgia – an ever-deepening nostalgia – for her time with Matt Taussig.

  The affair began when she was back in London, not long after she had started to teach the language teachers at the school in Covent Garden. Celia had finished work early, and after searching for two hours she’d at last found the right present – a blouse – for Janina’s birthday. She was on her way home when she saw a photograph in a gallery window. It was the presentation of the photograph (placed on its own against a black background, secured by tiny clips to two vertical wires) rather than the picture itself that had caught her attention, but the image – three city streets, converging symmetrically at the camera – proved interesting. Shops lined both sides of all three streets, and the doors of some were open; the shadows indicated strong sunlight; in one of the streets a scooter was parked; three bikes leaned against a wall; and in the entire scene there was not a single person.

  Inside, two dozen photos were on show. All had been taken in daylight, in central London, and every street in every picture was deserted. The flank of an office building occupied the side of one photo, and Celia checked each window: nobody was to be seen at any of them. Standing as close as she could, she searched in phone boxes, in the shadows, in the far distance, but she couldn’t find anyone. Four or five people were going round the exhibition; one of them – she looked like an art student: twentyish; waistcoat over an untucked white shirt; frayed camouflage trousers; khaki canvas bag over her shoulder – was peering at a picture of Northumberland Avenue, as Celia examined the adjacent vista of Threadneedle Street. The student looked at her, perplexed, and remarked: ‘Has he rubbed them out?’

  ‘I can’t see where they would have been,’ Celia replied. ‘Can you?’

  ‘We could ask him,’ said the student, pointing towards the end of the gallery, where a pink-haired leather-jacketed woman of about fifty-five was talking loudly to a tall man of Celia’s age. Celia and the student sidled closer to them. Receiving a smile from Matt, the student signalled that she’d like a word with him, and took up a position a couple of paces behind the woman, arms crossed as if waiting in a queue at the bank. Celia, struggling with an urge to leave, tried to concentrate on a picture of Waterloo Bridge.

  Here perhaps is the place to offer a description of Matt Taussig, because his appearance was not irrelevant to Celia’s confusion. He was tall, and altitude has always been regarded as a good thing by Celia. Her catalogue of lovers also suggests a strong preference for the dark-haired – to my knowledge no blonds other than Stefano have ever made the grade. The Lisbon footballing boyfriend was another anomaly, in being both a sub-six-footer and sporty, as Celia’s taste has for many years inclined towards the artier varieties of masculinity (e.g. the undergraduate poet; Fontenoy; Stefano (to whom we must find time to return)). As Charlie has more than once observed, tall and dark are somewhat banal predilections for a self-styled enemy of convention; one could also argue that Celia has generally adhered to a similarly orthodox line when it come to the issue of handsomeness. ‘Handsome’, however, was not the right word for Matt Taussig. Most of the time, in fact, he was unequivocally not good-looking. At certain moments, on the other hand, he would suddenly become extraordinarily attractive, just as at other moments he would suddenly become quite strikingly not so. The nose – broken twice before he’d reached fifteen – was not a noble thing; the cheekbones, prominent and high, might have worked better in a different context, but in combination with his heavy brow they severely limited the space available to the lovely green eyes; and the mouth (though it proved to be superb kissing equipment) was too wide for the head, which flared outward at a jaw that, while sharply modelled, would also have benefited from being narrower and shorter. In other words, Matt Taussig’s face was unlike any Celia had ever seen before, and the English language did not have the right word for his alluringly strange unhandsomeness; Italian did, however, as she was later to learn – he was brutto-bello. The attire didn’t detract from the attractiveness – jeans (Levi 501s – nothing pretentious), plain white shirt, and what looked like an expensive jacket, cut from a remarkably fluid and deep blue material – and neither did his way of dealing with the garrulous pink-haired woman: he seemed courteous and modest (the self-deprecating shrug, however, would come to be seen as a mannerism: Matt was not uncomfortable with compliments), and he brought their conversation to an end with a handshake, in a manner that seemed to leave his admirer – though she’d have gone on talking until nightfall, given the chance – well satisfied with the attention she’d been granted.

  The student stepped forward, beckoning Celia to follow, and said: ‘I think we’re going to ask what everybody asks.’

  ‘OK,’ replied Matt, squinting at her as if to read the text of the question in her eyes. ‘Well, the answer is: what you see is what was there.’

  ‘No tricks?’

  ‘None,’ he confirmed. Even the pitch of his voice – light, with an underlying deep vibration in the throat – was uncommon. Celia, fearful that she’d say something inane if she tried to join in, let the student do the talking.

  ‘So you’re there at dawn?’

  ‘There for sun-up, plus Sundays and Bank Holidays. Sit and wait a
nd hope it works out. Sometimes you’re lucky, sometimes you’re not. More often you’re not. Usually I have to go back.’ Only now was there a reciprocated look between himself and Celia. ‘That one was a pig,’ he said, pointing to a shot of Ludgate Hill in orange light. ‘Seven sessions. People start work at ludicrous hours. You wouldn’t believe it. Cleaners going in and out at dawn. Suits getting out of taxis. Terrifying.’