Telescope

by Jonathan Buckley

  His wife, the following week, went to stay with her parents, and Gianluca and Celia, instead of going to their usual bar, went to a bar on the other side of town, near her flat, and thence to the flat itself, where the affair was feebly consummated. In the course of the next two or three months he came to the flat two or three times. There was more talking and weeping (from Gianluca) than sex, and what little sex they had was dire, because Gianluca was rendered all but impotent by guilt. The last time he slept with her, he was asleep most of the time; he was most apologetic, but wanted Celia to know that she shouldn’t feel insulted – the reverse, in fact, because at home he never slept well, but with Celia he could almost forget his troubles. The following week, Celia looked out of the window of her classroom and saw Gianluca walking down the street with a woman she knew immediately was his wife. She knew Mrs Nevola was slightly younger than her husband, but she looked about twenty years older. They walked side by side, a foot apart, heads lowered, as if walking behind an invisible coffin. The next day she told Gianluca that they must stop seeing each other, even for their Wednesday drinks.

  He accepted without protest: she had more sense than he did, he told her; he was glad she’d taken the decision; he thanked her for the time she’d given him. He was as courteous to her as he had ever been; nobody, observing them in conversation, would ever have suspected that anything had ever happened between them. One evening, however, Celia walked past the door of a classroom that was in darkness and, glancing into the room, saw a silhouette at the window. The silhouette changed shape and a voice spoke her name. When she turned on the lights she saw Gianluca staring at her as if she were a police officer who had come to arrest him and he was about to choose between surrendering and flinging himself through the glass. Pages of students’ work were strewn about the floor. He couldn’t function any more, he told her. ‘I love you,’ he said, as if revealing that he had terminal cancer. They went for a walk, and in the course of the walk they agreed that there was only one thing to do: Celia would look for another job. There were no further intimate conversations with Gianluca. Two months later, she left the school.

  Of all Celia’s affairs in Italy, I think the one with Gianluca Nevola (not his real name, by the way – we must consider the innocent wife; and the real name is less melodious) is the only one she regards as an error. So keenly did she regret it, in fact, that she didn’t tell me about it until a considerable time after the event, and she asked me, furthermore, not to say anything about it to Charlie. (Previously I’d been given free rein, more or less, to pass on to big brother as much or as little information about Celia’s social life as I chose. So Charlie knew something about Stefano (a.k.a. the Student Prince) while the relationship was in the process of dying, and about Mauro, whom he pictured from the outset as a sort of lower-budget Silvio Berlusconi.) Charlie and Janina still don’t know any of the specific details of the Nevola business, but are aware that there has been, in Italy, an affair with a married man. Celia told them of this one evening at dinner, when, pushed beyond the limit of self-restraint by Janina’s remarks concerning some adulterer who was in the news at that time, announced that she herself had been a co-committer of adultery and – leaving her own failings out of the discussion for now – she would most strongly take issue with anyone who suggested that the man in her case should be consigned to the ranks of the damned. ‘I’m surprised,’ was Janina’s immediate response, before assuming the appearance of a woman whose face had been struck by a flash flood of Botox. Unable to bring herself to look her sister-in-law in the eye, Janina left it to Charlie to make the case for the sanctity of marriage. Celia pointed out that, if you do your research, you’ll find that, in the terms of the Seventh Commandment, a married man plus an unattached woman does not equal adultery, and at this provocative irrelevance Janina re-entered the fray. ‘We’re not saying that we’ve never fancied anyone else, Celia,’ she said – at which Charlie’s eyes momentarily registered a small shock. ‘What matters is that we would never do anything about it. That’s what’s important. It’s all about what you do.’ To which Celia countered, giving the exchange a theological spin: ‘But isn’t the sin in the thought as much as in the deed? And how am I to make my thoughts behave?’ And here Janina employed her customary tension-reducing tactic, a retreat kitchenwards.

  Some chuckles from Ellen, but of course the pleasure is not unalloyed. Problem one: too much sex. Far too much sex. Problem two: I’ve put her in the position of knowing more about Celia than her brother and his wife do, which simply doesn’t feel right. I point out that she knows what I look like in the buff, which is a morsel of knowledge that has been withheld from Charlie and Janina. ‘You are privileged in so many ways, Ellen,’ I sigh. ‘And I know that Celia would talk to you about things that she would never discuss with Charlie.’ Ellen tells me that I’ve used this argument before, and though she’s flattered by the compliment she’s not at all sure that it’s true, and even if it’s true it’s not really the point. I’m too tired to banter; it took three days to type the tales of Celia and her Italian paramours. Then Ellen becomes irksome, in a Goffmanesque way. I could, she insinuates, be doing something useful for the similarly afflicted if I were to write more about my own life. She seems to have in mind a heartwarming tale of the survival of the human spirit in the face of awful disease. Why, I want to know, should I feel obliged to make myself useful? That’s not quite what she meant, says Ellen. I suggest that she might propose to Charlie that he write a book about his experiences, to help future retailers of high-grade flooring. That would be of far greater benefit to society, I tell her. In fact, ‘fucking society’ is what I say. ‘Don’t talk to me like that, Daniel,’ she says, ‘and don’t shout.’ I ask her if she’d ever considered a career as a primary school teacher. ‘Yes,’ she replies flatly, and she’s out of the room before I can ask her if this is true or not.

  8

  A taxi delivers Janina not long after breakfast. ‘It’s good to be back,’ she says, and that’s just about all she says. With apologies for her weariness, she goes upstairs for a lie down.

  At four there’s a knock at the door and in steps Janina. The hair has reacquired much of its bounce; lipstick is in place. Looking around the room as if I might have carried out a few alterations to the habitat while she was away, she apologises again for having been so uncommunicative earlier: ‘I was whacked – I was asleep within five minutes,’ she says, eyes widening at the incredibleness of this occurrence. She comes over to the side of my chair to take a peek at what I’m reading. ‘Good?’ she asks, and I reply that it is. She progresses to the window, where there are some particles of dust to be removed from the latch. ‘You went out for a walk with Ellen, I hear,’ she says. Indeed I did. ‘That’s good,’ she comments, encouraging me to agree. Entering into the spirit of things, I nod. Last year she saw kingfishers on that stretch of water, she tells me. That was the first time in her entire life that she’d seen kingfishers, and it took a while for her brain to process what the tiny flashes of colour were – she’d got it into her head that kingfishers were much bigger. A common misunderstanding, I believe.

  ‘So, how did it go?’ I ask. She surveys the room for a few seconds longer before turning to me and answering: ‘Not great.’ Her parents are getting old, and her father’s health isn’t good. It was nice to see the city again, but she felt like a tourist. She gives this idea some thought, and revises it: ‘It didn’t seem real,’ she says. She looked at things she’d looked at hundreds of times when she was a girl, and it felt as if she was playing the part of that girl grown up, and feeling not a thing. ‘Does that make sense?’ she asks. I nod, though I’m not concentrating entirely on what’s being said: Janina’s manner is making more of an impression upon me than her words – she’s talking to me as if she’s in the habit of taking me into her confidence. Also, the perfume she’s wearing now is exciting and unfamiliar, and I want to ask her what it is.

  Her father, she continues, wasn’t in as
bad a state as her mother had led her to believe. When she arrived at the apartment her mother opened the door. Of course Janina knew that her mother would be looking much older than when she last saw her, but it was still a shock – when you haven’t seen somebody for so long, it brings home to you how time is flying. From the living room came the sound of a hockey game on TV. It was very loud, so perhaps – she thought – the reason her father didn’t turn round when she came into the room was that he hadn’t heard her. She said hello, and he looked at her with lifeless eyes and said her name, making it sound like a question. ‘This is awful,’ she thought. ‘He doesn’t know what’s going on.’ But then she saw the vodka bottle, half-empty. ‘And that just about set the tone,’ says Janina, with a wan smile for the tawdriness of it. As far as she’s concerned, her father is pretty much in the state you’d expect of a man who’s well into his eighties, was never very robust, drinks too much, and has always drunk too much. He wants a reconciliation, she says, so he can feel better about himself. ‘We must forgive each other,’ her mother kept saying, as if wrongs had been committed equally on each side. ‘I did things I shouldn’t have done, things that hurt them, a lot of things, I don’t deny it,’ Janina goes on, ‘but it wasn’t equal. Not by a long way.’ She does forgive her mother, she tells me. She doesn’t love her, but she does forgive her. No lasting harm has been done, after all. There’s a big distance between herself and her parents, but that’s no disaster, is it? ‘I could even tell my father that I forgive him,’ she says. ‘I don’t like him, but what harm does it do to lie?’ In this instance, none at all, I agree. ‘A lot of men are jerks, and my father is one of them. That’s all there is to it. With a lot of people, they can’t see straight when it comes to their family. It’s like different rules apply. They can’t see what other people see when they look in from outside the family. But me – I see what they see. The fact he’s my father doesn’t make any difference. He’s a jerk, I can see that. End of story.’ Has Janina ever been so voluble with me? I think not.

  Janina has been unburdening herself to Ellen too, I discover. Ellen was taken aback a little, she admits, by the way Janina talked about the trip. When Janina said of her father, ‘I won’t ever see him again,’ she made it sound as if she was saying something like ‘I don’t think I’ll go to that shop again.’ The expedition was really more Charles’s idea than hers, she told Ellen. Right from when they’d started going out with each other, he’d wanted her to build bridges. (‘This is what I mean about you putting me in an awkward situation,’ says Ellen. ‘I had to pretend that I didn’t already know.’ I am abjectly sorry.) ‘In the end, I gave in,’ Janina told her. ‘So we all went over, and it wasn’t brilliant.’ (‘It wasn’t easy,’ says Ellen, ‘having to make out that this was news. And not nice, either.’ I would lash my back in penance, if only I could.) Janina joked that Charles should have been born into the mafia, because he’s always had this ‘blood is thicker than anything’ idea. Having made the joke, she closed the subject – ‘Moving on’ – as if concluding point four on the agenda of a business meeting.

  ‘I admire her,’ I tell Ellen. ‘And Celia admires her too. Celia really admires her determination in making a new life for herself. Problem is, it’s the wrong kind of life.’

  ‘Is that Celia talking, or you?’

  ‘Celia.’

  ‘Well, I think she’s wrong,’ says Ellen.

  The Vegliot Dalmatian dialect ceased to be a living language on 10 June 1898, the day on which Tuone Udaina, its last known speaker, was killed by a land mine while attempting to clear a roadblock on the island of Veglia (present-day Krk). One year earlier the linguist Matteo Giulio Bartoli had visited Tuone Udaina in order to compile a vocabulary and grammar of the dialect. Bartoli’s work was compromised by the fact that Tuone Udaina, by then at least seventy years of age, had not used the Vegliotic language for some two decades, since the death of his parents. He was, furthermore, both deaf and entirely lacking in teeth, and was thus not the most lucid of interlocutors.

  Again Janina comes up to see me: two private audiences in as many days. Even by Janina’s high standards, this morning’s turn-out is unusually smart: pristine white linen shirt; black pencil skirt, of bespoke-standard fit; shoes that cannot have seen more than half a mile’s wear. She’s as crisply attired and made-up as a weather presenter. I ask about the perfume: it’s a scent called Lily & Spice, new this month, bought at the airport, she informs me, proffering a wrist for inhalation. She’s going to have lunch with a tutor from the college, to talk about training as a counsellor. Precisely what kind of counsellor isn’t yet entirely clear – that’s one of the things she needs to talk to this woman about, but she thinks it’ll be practical stuff: ‘debt management, marriage guidance, that sort of thing.’ She made her mind up when she was away: she has to do more with her life. She’s a bit worried about being twice as old as the other students, and she isn’t sure she has what it takes when it comes to studying, but she reckons it’s better to have a go and fail than to sit around at home wishing you’d done things when you were younger. ‘If you want to do it, I’m sure you’ll succeed,’ I tell her. ‘Thank you,’ she says, as if England’s greatest living curmudgeon has just praised her.

  Standing at the window (no dust to expunge today), she gazes over the houses. She scans the sky. It would appear that another significant utterance is imminent, but then, distracted by something down on the road, she mutters: ‘Oh, look who it is.’ On the edge of the pavement stands the miserable old sod from the farm. He’s stationary and bent at an angle of eighty degrees, and the walking stick is wobbling as if the end of it is being gnawed by an invisible terrier. ‘Watch this,’ says Janina. She’s seen him pull this stunt so many times, she explains – he’ll stand there, making out that he’s going to topple over any moment, until someone arrives to give him a hand. ‘It has to be female. I think he’s seen one coming,’ she says, and sure enough a woman enters the scene from the left and hurries across the road to help him out. The face and the form – she’s in the region of thirty, clad in tight T-shirt and jeans – seem to please: he touches his cap and he smiles like a ventriloquist’s dummy. She escorts him to the opposite shore, where it seems he needs a little more help. With trembling stick he points towards the centre of town; at half a mile per hour he shuffles out of the picture, his free hand clamped to the womanly bicep. ‘If you had a camera rigged up in the High Street,’ says Janina, ‘you’d see that routine a dozen times a day.’ He has a regular route – newsagent to chemist to bank to library. For every stage he’ll hang around in the doorway, fishing for a sympathetic woman to drag him to his next stop. ‘Between three-thirty and four you’re guaranteed to see him dithering by the pedestrian crossing, hoping for a pretty sixth-former. Failing that,’ says Janina, ‘any woman up to fifty. Except me. He hates me. Which is fine, as far as I’m concerned.’

  In her entire life, she says, she has met only three people to whom she has taken an instant and very strong dislike. One was a man who worked in the office she worked in when she first came to England: he stank of feet, had eyes as dead as marbles, and was always reading books about Hitler. The second was a young woman who for a few months lived across the road from herself and Charlie, not long after they married; she used to snigger for no apparent reason when you talked to her, and thought it was hilarious to wave to Charlie from her bedroom window, with her shirt unbuttoned and nothing on underneath. The third was Mr Ridley.

  She first encountered him at the postbox at the end of the road. She was forwarding some letters that had arrived for the people they’d bought the house from, and as she was cramming them into the postbox she became aware that this man was standing three or four yards away, looking at her as if the box were a private amenity and she was committing a breach of some bye-law by making use of it. ‘Good morning,’ she said, and explained that they’d recently moved in. ‘I know,’ replied Ridley, ‘the Anketells’ place.’ That was right, she confirmed. ‘Nice
people,’ said Ridley. ‘Very nice,’ answered Janina. ‘Down from London, aren’t you?’ he enquired. That was correct, she said. ‘Commuting, your husband, is he?’ asked Ridley. ‘He works in London, yes,’ she replied. ‘Not working yourself, then?’ Ridley went on, eyeing her up and down as if to say he knew a moneyed layabout when he saw one. In short, he made her feel about as welcome as an Albanian drug-dealer. Nonetheless, when – a week or so later – she came out of the bank to find the old man propped against the wall of the bank, quivering with the effort of remaining upright, she offered her assistance. Perhaps, receiving help from her, he might show a less hostile side of his character. He took her arm as if availing himself of some form of public transport for which he had a season ticket, and during their walk (they covered a hundred yards in what felt like an hour) he spent the entire time moaning about the schoolchildren who were thronging the street.

  After that, uncharitable though it was, she took a detour whenever she saw him ahead. What she and Charlie were later told by several neighbours about Ridley and his bullying of his wife and son made her feel less uneasy about avoiding him, and the last scrap of that uneasiness was vapourised by a meeting in the local sports hall to discuss the new housing project. There, upon raising for consideration the idea that the development may have some economic benefits for the town, she was heckled from the back of the hall by a surprisingly strong-voiced Ridley, who treated the gathering to some very robust opinions on the undesirability of taking in even more outsiders.

  From that day on, whenever Ridley and Janina have passed each other in the street, they’ve pretended not to notice each other. However, a few weeks ago she was on the High Street when she spotted our man in the middle distance, leaning against a wall, waving his stick aloft. It soon became clear that he was intent on catching her attention. When she came within close range he shambled towards her, his face contorted by what might have been intended as an ingratiating grin, but looked like the grimace of a man in the grip of neuralgia. ‘I need to be over there,’ he informed her, whisking his stick in the approximate direction of the bank, on the other side of the road. If that was the case, she thought, it was odd that he’d let at least two women younger and more eligible than her go past. ‘How’s your lodger?’ asked Ridley. ‘We don’t have a lodger,’ replied Janina. ‘Not what I heard,’ wheedled Ridley; a sour smirk tilted the mouth. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I always say it’s best not to believe everything you hear, Mr Ridley.’ He appeared to hear the implication of the emphasis she placed on his name – i.e., ‘You may think you know something about us, but we really do know things about you.’ It was time for Ridley to elicit some sympathy: he leaned heavily on the stick, lurched, gazed forlornly towards the distant door of the bank. ‘A lovely day, though, isn’t it?’ Janina proposed, smiling skyward, and then she abandoned him, adrift on the expanse of the pavement. Since then she’s always given him a full-blast smile, just for the satisfaction of seeing his expression change: he looks, she says, like a man who’s bitten on a slice of lime.