Telescope

by Jonathan Buckley

  She’s sitting on the edge of the bed, smiling, and the angled sunlight is cutting a very comely shadow on one cheek. Above her eyebrow on that side, pollen-like flecks of powder glisten. None could deny that she’s a very attractive woman. Lightly she strokes the upper surface of her thighs, like an interviewee who’s beginning to think that she might have talked too much. My comment is awaited, but my mind has gone walkabout: I’ve been reminded of my mother and the ghastly Mrs Thomas from number 84. (‘How’s Daniel?’ Mrs Thomas would enquire, with her grimace of sympathy. ‘We haven’t seen him for ages. All right, is he?’ Airily my mother would reply: ‘Oh yes. He’s fine. Working hard,’ raising a bubble of cheeriness which nobody would be so hard-hearted as to puncture.) ‘Not a nice man,’ is all I can think to say.

  ‘No, not nice at all,’ says Janina, and the smile intensifies momentarily. I am to understand that our relationship has attained a new intimacy. ‘I must let you get on with your reading,’ she says, rebuking herself for her lack of consideration. As she passes behind me, her hand alights upon my shoulder for a second.

  A walk through swiftly moving mist: one moment the torch beam reaches far into the fields, then in an instant everything is shut off. The moon intermittent, and never brighter than a fleck of old newspaper. Get as far as the houses, where I have to sit down for half an hour. Saturated bricks have the colour and gleam of raw liver. Owl vociferous. Brief waft of complicated stink: silage and wet soil, with an undernote of diesel. Too tired to get upstairs; sleep on sofa.

  This is worth noting: a madman by the name of Marquis Maurice d’Urre of Aubais left all of his property to the French state on condition that his corpse be placed in an armchair under a glass dome, facing the sea, in a place accessible to the general public. Furthermore, his remains were to be spotlit, in perpetuity.

  ‘Well, it was inevitable, wasn’t it?’ Janina remarks at the table, of Celia’s abandonment of the school project, then she and Charlie set each other off, going on about how Celia is wasting herself in Italy, and how what she needs to do is find herself a proper job in England before it’s too late. With her experience, it must be possible for her to find a position with a reputable organisation. ‘She’ll be all right,’ I say, but there’s no stopping Janina, who is concerned that Celia might be leaving it too late to find someone to share her life with. I repeat, a little more firmly: ‘She’ll be all right.’ Janina hopes that she will, but she sometimes despairs over the mess that Celia makes of things. I suggest that living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and being happy for much of the time, could hardly be said to be making a mess of things.

  ‘She needs to take a good look at her circumstances and make some decisions,’ says Charlie. (Subtext: ‘As my wife has done.’)

  I suggest that our sister is fully cognisant of her circumstances.

  ‘She can’t go through the rest of her life just hoping that something will come up,’ says Charlie. ‘She needs to have a clear idea of where she wants to be in five years’ time, and to set about making it happen. It’s time to get serious.’

  I venture that Celia is aware of this. ‘She’s not an idiot,’ I tell him. ‘And how do you make a plan for meeting Mr Right?’ I ask of the room in general. ‘It happens or it doesn’t.’

  Observing that I am becoming agitated, Janina concurs. ‘You never know what’s going to happen tomorrow, do you?’ she says. ‘Maybe Celia’s lucky break is just around the corner.’

  By way of a coda, Charlie restates his line on the intrinsic dodginess of Italian men. In conclusion: he’s of the opinion that Celia would improve her chances on all fronts if she were to come home.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ says Janina; Ellen is of like mind. I argue vigorously and silently, as the conversation dribbles away.

  The family’s introduction to Janina, which took place some four months after Charlie had met her, went as well as could have been wished. My father was favourably impressed: the new girlfriend was polite (she shook his hand as if being invested with an OBE at Buckingham Palace), her accent was very pleasing, she was easy on the eye, and – more importantly – she seemed like a steady young woman. My mother, still saddened that recently rejected Gemma was no longer around, agreed that Janina had nice manners, and seemed very fond of Charlie, and there could be no disputing that she was pretty, yet she had to admit, under questioning from her husband, that she’d found Janina almost too poised and too finished (Janina evidently had a beauty routine, whereas Gemma barely knew how to hold a mascara wand), and perhaps also – how shall we put it? – a little too forceful. After the second visit – when Janina enumerated for us the various aspects of Canada that she didn’t much like (omitting her family, of course) – my mother reiterated the last of these judgements, adding that Janina wasn’t quite the sort of girl she’d imagined Charlie ending up with. (It was already clear that he had indeed ‘ended up’ with her.) As for me, I liked her: she greeted me with a face that was only lightly clenched, and although she couldn’t bring herself to plant a kiss (no blame there), she did move in for a loose hug. At the table she took care to address me as often as the rest of the team, with no more than transient distress in her gaze, perhaps visible only to me.

  The talk around the table barely faltered, for which Charlie must be given most of the credit. He seemed determined to direct the conversation, and to keep it away from the subject of himself and Janina as much as possible. Once or twice, when our mother strayed into the domain of the personal and particular, I detected a trace of unease about his eyes, especially when Janina, in the course of telling the parents what she really loved about London, made reference to the fantastic fireworks on Blackheath. ‘Spectacular,’ Charlie concurred, with a glance at me, then he started telling Janina, at some length, about the November 5th bonfires in Lewes and the amazing torchlit parade he’d seen there a few years back. The reason for the glance, and for the diversionary waffle about Lewes, was that back in October (as our parents might have recalled, had this strand been allowed to continue) Charlie had been talking about the possibility (and it was never more than the remotest of possibilities) of my going with him and Gemma to see the Blackheath fireworks, but in the end nothing had come of it, because Charlie and Gemma, come November 5th, had been going through a wobbly spell, as he’d put it. Around the middle of that month we’d been informed such wobbles had become commonplace of late, and that this one had proved terminal; we heard of Janina shortly before Christmas. Now it appeared that Mr Charles Foursquare had been less than wholly straight. Before he left, I accosted him outside my room, out of earshot of the parents: ‘Come on Charlie, what’s the story?’ He clamped a hand to my mouth. ‘Later,’ he whispered, as if cornered by a blackmailer.

  The tale of unromantic Charlie’s great romantic crisis was disclosed in three or four instalments, the last of which was our boozy pre-nuptial evening (the evening of ‘She’s a tiger’, et cetera). But before we summarise the revelations, we should give some time to Gemma Prescott, who for many years had been a central figure in Charlie’s life.

  They met at the age of twelve, when Gemma joined Charlie’s class at school, but for a whole year she was an entirely neutral presence. The turning point, as Charlie tells it, was a game of cricket in the park. When Gemma’s brother asked if he could join in, Gemma asked if she could play too, and was begrudgingly given a place in the outfield. Five minutes later the ball flew towards her, and she caught it one-handed, with a leap that Charlie has still not forgotten: the catch was remarkable (it was taken behind her head, and entailed a twist in mid-air), and the shyness with which she took the amazed acclaim of the boys was beguiling. From that day onward she and Charlie were friends, but for both of them no more than one friend among several, and it wasn’t until some time after his fourteenth birthday (she was one of only three girls invited to his party) that she began to come round to our house after school, and even then it was rarely more than once a week. (Gemma led a busier social li
fe than Charlie – she might not have been anyone’s best friend, but she was a pleasant and accommodating girl, unexceptional and unexceptionable, and she antagonised nobody.) It seemed that mutual aid with the homework was the principal motive for her visits: like Charlie, Gemma was outstandingly poor at no subject and outstandingly good at none either. (Only at one thing did Gemma excel, and that was tennis. Celia reckoned this was why Gemma liked him so much – he didn’t object to being thrashed by a girl.) Sometimes, on Saturday, they went up to town together. When Gemma went shopping for clothes, she often took Charlie with her, because he’d always tell her bluntly if something suited her or not. For years they were like cousins; almost like cousins of the same gender.

  Charlie’s first girlfriend was a girl called Carol, a scatter-brained tomboy with frizzy black hair and a penchant for dungarees. (She’d been another of the favoured trio at the fourteenth birthday party.) That relationship lasted no more than a couple of months, but slightly longer than Gemma’s first liaison – it was soon clear that the boy was interested only in getting her knickers off, and quickly lost interest when it became apparent that they weren’t coming off any time in the foreseeable future. (His parting shot, as she told Charlie, was that she was a nice girl but too ‘uptight’; and she had legs like a footballer.) Each went through one or two desultory kissing-only romances, and with the demise of each one Gemma and Charlie carried on as before. A few months after they left school one of Charlie’s friends threw a party before going off to university, and Charlie ended up reelingly drunk and in bed with a girl called Judith, a friend of the friend’s sister. Thus was his virginity disposed of, and he didn’t think much of it as an experience; neither, it would appear, did Judith, who did not return his call, to the relief of shamefaced Charlie.

  He didn’t confess to Gemma about the romp with Judith until a year had passed, by which time she was working in a kindergarten and had become involved with Ralph, the father of one of the children in her care. During this period she and Charlie didn’t see each other regularly: Ralph didn’t like her hanging around with another bloke, as she told Charlie when they met for a drink one evening; ‘Neither do I,’ quipped Charlie, surprised to find that he was in fact, now he’d come to mention it, mildly jealous of Gemma’s relationship with Ralph, which was the first serious affair for either of them. He felt disloyal at not being entirely sorry when, after Gemma had returned from a holiday with Ralph and his daughter, she told him that it wasn’t going well, because Ralph spent far too much time talking about his ex-wife. This is when Charlie owned up about the business with Judith. When Gemma was twenty her mother was diagnosed with cancer; she ditched Ralph, on the spot, when he declined to come with her to the hospital because hospitals always gave him the creeps. (He’d been scarred for life, it seemed, by the sight of his ailing grandmother in a ward full of moribund and emaciated old ladies.) Stalwart Charlie, it goes without saying, visited Mrs Prescott in hospital and subsequently, frequently, at home. One afternoon, after her mother had been to see her consultant and been given a good prognosis, Gemma and Charlie went to Hampton Court for the day. Walking in the garden there, she dabbed her eyes with Charlie’s handkerchief, and as she gave it back to him she said: ‘You know Charlie, you’re the only person I can talk to.’ And then she said she loved him and made him stop so she could say it again and he would understand what she meant. ‘I do love you Charlie,’ she said, and to Charlie it seemed that of course they loved each other.

  To some observers (e.g. Celia, for whom Gemma was the dullest girl in London – ‘Have you ever heard her make a single interesting remark about any subject whatsoever?’) it may have appeared that Gemma and Charlie were lacking the passion one would expect of young lovers, but it was incontestable that Gemma really did come to adore Charlie. Other boys couldn’t resist showing off, but Charlie never showed off, as she told his mother proudly. Charlie was kind and considerate, and he was perfectly content to be quiet if there was nothing to say. Most people can’t bear to be quiet, she said; they talk just for the sake of it, but Charlie wasn’t like that and neither was she. And what did Charlie see in Gemma, other than a woman who adored him? Well, she would never let him down, he could be certain of that. (The immediately pre-Gemma girlfriend, having given no warning of which he was aware, had posted a message through our letterbox: ‘Can’t make tonight. Or any other night. Sorry.’) She was thoroughly genuine and they saw eye-to-eye on almost everything. He could not imagine arguing with her, ever, and he knew – from what he’d observed of the parents of some of his friends – that such compatibility was not common, and was not to be undervalued. There were times, it’s true, when they seemed to have become becalmed, as it were, but these episodes passed; he accepted that this is what happens when you are serious about someone, that a shared life necessarily has these intervals of uneventfulness. Such was the nature of adult life.

  For almost three years Charlie and Gemma were a couple. After two years they rented a flat together. It was understood that one day, when they could afford it, they’d buy a place. There would be children; two of them, most likely – certainly no more than three. (Gemma had an aunt and uncle who’d had eight kids; they were grey at forty.)

  Then, late on a dismal afternoon in September, Charlie looked up from his desk in the showroom and saw a rather severe but rather handsome young woman walking towards him. She was wearing a short black and white houndstooth jacket, black knee-length skirt and very high-heeled shoes. At first sight she had the air of a dissatisfied customer, but as she came up to the desk she gave him a smile that was disarmingly apologetic. ‘Do you have a minute?’ she asked, sitting down before he could answer. ‘I have a problem,’ she said, and she smoothed her hair on one side; the cut was so shapely it looked as if she’d had it done within the past hour. From her bag she extracted half a floor tile: stone-effect ceramic, poor quality. She set the fragment, like a piece of police evidence, in the middle of the desk. ‘Now,’ she began, ‘I bought this for my kitchen floor. Don’t be worried – not from here,’ she said. This was the story: she’d bought these tiles from another shop; a man (found in the phone directory) had put them down for her; at first they had looked all right, but then they started to go blotchy; she complained to the shop, but they said there was nothing wrong with the tiles; she complained to the man, who said that it was the tiles that were bad; she went back to the shop, but they wouldn’t help, so now she had come here. Charlie lifted the half-tile and examined it, though there was no need to – he’d known at once what the problem was. ‘Blotchy?’ he asked. ‘Twenty, thirty big spots. Like a disease,’ replied Janina. Charlie twirled the exhibit slowly between his hands for a few seconds, eking out the interview, before explaining that the wrong type of adhesive had been used. Gravely sympathetic, he told her that, sadly, the only thing to do was rip it up and start again. Janina considered the diagnosis. ‘Thank you,’ she said, rising. ‘You’ve been very helpful. I shall be back.’ She retrieved the half-tile and shook Charlie’s hand. She had extremely fine fingers, with long and narrow nails. ‘But first I will get my money from those idiots,’ she told him.

  From this discussion of low-grade flooring materials and incompetent workmanship Charlie emerged unsettled – Charlie who claims that not once, in all his time with humdrum Gemma, had he experienced even the tiniest temptation to stray. Some time before this crucial day, he and Gemma had drifted into one of their regular becalmings. Usually, it took a month or thereabouts for his perspective to rectify itself, for him to recognise that the temperateness of his life was a form of contentment. All he had to do was wait, and waiting required no effort of will: as surely as the weather improves, eventually, he would again be actively grateful for what he had. Now, however, he had to instruct himself to believe that this would happen, to remind himself that it had always happened before.

  The following week Janina returned, having failed to get redress from the floor-layer, who had been extremely rude to her. Charli
e recommended someone reliable and helped her choose new tiles. After she’d gone, he held on to her cheque for a minute, fascinated by the name and the shapely flourish of her signature. He wondered if he would ever see her again, and almost managed to convince himself that he was glad it was unlikely. Then Janina came back to the showroom on a Saturday morning, shortly after opening; Charlie’s assistant went to serve her, but she said she needed to speak to Mr Brennan. The floor had been successfully replaced, thanks to Charlie, and now she had decided to go the whole hog and have the bathroom done too. The selection took more than an hour; for the trim she chose narrow strips of cobalt blue glass, made in Italy and somewhat more expensive than her budget had allowed. ‘This is mad,’ she reproved herself when Charlie had totted up the bill; as she took out the chequebook Charlie risked a remark that could have been interpreted as flirtatious, and Janina gave him an ambiguous look – possibly encouraging, possibly the opposite. As if someone else had taken control of his vocal cords, out of his mouth came an offer to deliver this batch himself, one evening after work. That would be very nice of him, said Janina, with a handshake so devoid of erotic nuance that as soon as she’d left Charlie began to reconstruct every sentence he’d spoken to her, trying to persuade himself that he had not made a fool of himself, that everything he’d said would have been taken innocently. He was in turmoil. The current hiatus with Gemma was no transient phase of dullness, another shallow trough before the next shallow rise. Instead, he now knew that they had travelled their full course, that they had come all the way downstream to the motionless lower reaches and were adrift on water that was as flat as a floor all the way to the far horizon. He had never before been unhappy with Gemma, not in the sense of being conscious of unhappiness; there had been, rather, intermittent absences of pleasure. Now he was definitely unhappy, and he was shortly to become unhappier, and at the same time happier than he had ever been.