Telescope

by Jonathan Buckley

  Wretched and in his own mind unfaithful (though he knew he was merely infatuated and that this infatuation would amount to nothing), Charlie raised with Gemma, the following day (it had to be done before he next saw Janina, even if nothing was going to happen when he did see her), the possibility that they had become, after all this time, very good friends, the very best of friends, but only that (thinking, despite himself, that perhaps this was all they had ever been). ‘“All this time”?’ she echoed, uncomprehending. For Gemma a new life had begun when she and Charlie became lovers, and that was not a long time ago, by her reckoning. ‘I should have said something before,’ said Charlie. ‘“Before”?’ distraught Gemma repeated. ‘“Before”? What do you mean, “before”? Before when? Before what?’ Floundering, Charlie suggested that there must have been occasions when she had wondered if things were all right between them. ‘No,’ she stated. ‘Never.’ Charlie stared into the wall, blank-brained. ‘This is nonsense. You’re talking rubbish,’ Gemma screamed at him (having, in the preceding three years, rarely so much as contradicted Charlie and never raised her voice). ‘There’s someone else, isn’t there? That’s it, isn’t it? Tell me,’ she demanded. In their early days of the post-Hampton Court stage of their relationship, Gemma had once told Charlie that if ever he were to leave her, it must be because he’d come to feel they’d outgrown each other (though such a thing was unthinkable), not because someone else was involved. To leave her for another woman – that would be too sordid, too banal, she said (she had used that word, ‘banal’, Charlie remembered; he remembered being touched by the strange loftiness of it), and he had told her, genuinely, that he agreed, and that it was inconceivable that either of them would do anything so shabby to the other. So when Gemma asked him if he had become involved with another woman, and to tell her the truth because she’d always much rather know the truth, however much it might hurt, Charlie told her that he wasn’t involved with anyone else, salving his conscience with the thought that this statement was true, literally, even if he weren’t being truthful. ‘Look me in the eyes and tell me,’ said Gemma, and Charlie looked her in the eyes and repeated the words. Gemma became so upset (she locked herself in the bathroom, weeping loudly; breakables were thrown) that Charlie ended up talking himself into half-believing that he had exaggerated his feelings to himself; he agreed that they should talk some more, when their heads were clearer. Gemma talked about making some changes, about finding another job.

  After many more hours of talking, they reached the conclusion that Charlie was depressed for some unspecifiable reason. Time would lift him out of it, they agreed; and indeed, come Monday morning, he was less gloomy. At work, he allowed himself, as a sort of test, to take a good long look at some of the prettier girls who passed the showroom; he felt secure in enjoying, analytically, the sight of them; he was with Gemma; she was his and he was hers. He was seeing sense again. Then he drove round to Janina’s flat, she opened the door to him, and it was, he said, like falling off a cliff. She was wearing a white T-shirt that could have come straight from the shop, and jeans that fitted so nicely he found it hard to make his eyes behave. ‘Can I make you a coffee?’ she asked; ‘Thank you,’ he replied, though he’d intended to stay no longer than it took to unload the car.

  The coffee was real espresso, made with a complicated machine. She showed him round the flat: everything was as tasteful and orderly and well-decorated as a suite in a modern hotel – even the bathroom that she was going to refurbish. She’d been very lucky, she explained to him. Her first months in England had been a grind, but then she’d found a job with a property developer, as his secretary; it was hard work, very long hours, more a PA’s job than a secretary’s, but this man had made so much money on one deal that he’d given her a big bonus, enough for her to put down a deposit on this flat. ‘It was amazing: he just put this envelope on my desk, full of money,’ she said, before adding, as if she were concerned that he might think badly of her: ‘There was nothing going on with us. Absolutely nothing.’ The developer had gone to live abroad, and now she was working for a solicitor, who didn’t pay so well, but it would do for the time being. ‘Every penny goes here,’ she said, gesturing at her living room. ‘I can’t live in a place that isn’t how I want it.’ She’d appreciate his advice on something; this involved inspecting a wall in the bathroom, which in turn involved seeing the reflection of the two of them, side by side in the mirror, which had a strange effect on Charlie, as if he’d been shown a photograph of themselves in the future, as a couple. A glass of wine was offered and accepted. Janina told him a little about herself. Everything she said made things worse – now she became a bold and determined young emigrant, with the extra allure of a complicated lineage. She was exotic and ambitious and self-sufficient, whereas homely Gemma wanted only one thing, and that was a life with Charlie. He loathed himself for making the comparison at all, let alone for being captivated by a woman who was almost a stranger to him. When Janina invited him to stay for a meal (‘It’ll take me twenty minutes. Very simple,’ she said, and he knew that it would indeed take her just twenty minutes to put a meal together, and that it would be excellent), he said that he’d like to but he couldn’t. ‘OK,’ said Janina. ‘Maybe some other time.’ There were no two ways of reading the look she gave him now. Within five minutes he had told her that he had a girlfriend, but that it was finished (which it was, in his mind, as soon as he said it). Not wanting to betray Gemma further by talking about her, he said he couldn’t say more. (And perhaps he was hoping that Janina would react to his evasiveness by telling him to go away.) It had ended, he told her, but the aftermath was proving difficult; they’d known each other for a very long time. (Gemma’s name was not spoken; neither did Charlie have to reveal that he lived with her.) That was enough for Janina, who would rarely ask again about the difficult ex-girlfriend. (Years later, coming across a photo of Charlie and Gemma, she smiled and handed it to him without a word, as if it were none of her business.) ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you know where I am.’

  For the first time in his life, Charlie was barely able to control himself, but he controlled himself sufficiently to delay until the following weekend the conversation in which he would explain to Gemma that his problem seemed to be a fundamental one, not a mere matter of mood. He needed time to think, he told her – time, and space. So desperate was Gemma’s distress (‘No, no, no’ she murmured to herself, eyes closed, as if he’d died), he had to pretend that he might be back. By the start of November he had rented a room, but he continued for a while to pay his share of the bills for the flat he’d shared with Gemma. In the morning he’d sometimes find a letter from her on the doormat, describing the desert of misery she was in, pleading with him to come back. She’d ring him at work, saying they had to talk, or would appear on the street corner opposite the showroom, waiting for him to finish work. Charlie, terrified that Janina and Gemma would come face to face on the street, had to go out to her and promise he’d call round later, which he did. (‘It was such a mess,’ he told me, and there was something in the way he said it that made me suspect that he might have been sleeping with both of them. Why else would he have been ‘terrified’? He denied it. ‘But it was all tangled up,’ he admitted. ‘I just didn’t know what to do. She went bonkers.’) And one day the dreaded encounter between Charlie’s two women nearly happened. Gemma was at her station on the opposite side of the road; Charlie, exasperated, was holding out for as long as he could; then Janina unexpectedly came in. Before he could think of how to handle the situation, she’d kissed him. Over her shoulder he saw Gemma cross the road. As if inspecting the display, she stood outside the window nearest to Charlie’s desk. She let the tears run down her face for half a minute, then looked up to give Charlie one last, long look of heartbroken reproach. She never spoke to him after that, and there were no more letters, except for a note that listed the possessions of his that were still at the flat. One night he went to collect them. She’d crushed the stuff into hal
f a dozen plastic bags, which she passed to him on the doorstep before closing the door, having not wasted a word on him. He wrote her a long letter, which she didn’t answer. The last we heard – which was only a couple of years ago – she was living just a few hundred yards from her parents’ house; she married a man who looked, or so our mother thought, remarkably like Charlie.

  9

  In the garden, reading, when I hear a girl’s voice calling from somewhere near the stream. Two or three minutes later, a rustling in the leaves beside the shed, and then I spot a patch of red close to the ground – a T-shirt. A glimpse of a child’s face – I yell, and the face vanishes. The girl calls again, and a boy’s voice answers. Words indistinguishable. Garden henceforth out of bounds.

  A call from Peter – he has to give a talk at a conference in London, as a last-minute substitute for a speaker who’s suddenly indisposed. He’ll stay with Freddie and then come down – and he’ll make sure his brother comes too. I’ll believe it when I see it. Janina is also doubtful: she tells me yet again how busy Freddie is at work and how much pressure he’s under.

  E: ‘Are you in a lot of pain?’

  D: ‘There is pain. But not sure if there’s an I in it.’ (E baffled; but perhaps my speech is incomprehensible today.) ‘Yes, Ellen, I am in pain.’

  Famous last words: I don’t know; Keep me from the rats; I’m bored; The fog is rising; Wait a second; Tell them I said something; It’s very beautiful over there; Now what? I ask Ellen to take her pick; she declines.

  Since coming back from Canada, Janina has become notably more attentive. She brings me drinks and newspapers; she plumps pillows and adjusts blinds; she puts her head round the door and asks if I’m ‘disturbable’, as though concerned that she might be interrupting the composition of a masterwork. I wonder, to Ellen, if Janina feels she has to prove to herself that she’s a good person, rather than a bad daughter. This notion, says Ellen robustly, is poppycock. (How nice to hear that word.) She doesn’t accept that Janina for one moment thinks of herself in that way. Janina genuinely cares for me, she says. That may well be true, I reply, but things have changed since Janina visited her parents, wouldn’t she agree?

  ‘Yes, well …’ says Ellen.

  ‘And I’ve changed too. You’re right.’

  ‘I just wish you weren’t always cynical about her.’

  ‘Not the right word, El.’

  ‘I think it is.’

  ‘No, it’s not. I like her. She and Charlie have been very good to me. I know that.’ And I tell her that Janina had been extremely kind to my father as well. He had found it easier to talk to Janina than to me, I tell her. Once boyhood was over, I was rarely on the same wavelength as my father – as either of my parents, for that matter. But with my father I always felt that there existed, buried, a resentment of the burden that his wife had been forced to shoulder.

  ‘Charles doesn’t think that’s true,’ says Ellen. It would appear that: I have already made this point to her and have forgotten it; she has passed on the observation to Charles and they have talked about it.

  Unreasonably, this sets off a small flare of annoyance. ‘He wouldn’t know,’ I tell her, and I close my eyes, feigning exhaustion. I fall asleep.

  There was a period during which my mother attempted to make me into a gardener. As an occupation that combined a controlled exposure to fresh air with a modicum of engagement with the living, gardening was deemed to be of considerable therapeutic potential. Our garden was tight but sun-favoured, and my mother packed plenty of colour into it. I admired her industry and her horticultural talent, just as I admire Janina’s. (Hours of assistance in the garden were what made my mother truly appreciate her daughter-in-law. ‘She’s so helpful. She’s such a worker,’ my mother would repeat, over and over again, in overcompensation for her earlier doubts about Charlie’s beloved. And it was from my mother that Janina acquired much of the knowledge that has gone into making her garden the marvel that it is today.) I appreciated the vision whereby my mother could look at a plot of soil and instantly envisage the medley of flora that could be made to thrive there. I envied – albeit weakly – her ability to create and sustain an ever-changing yet ever-pleasing colloquy of flowers and foliage. Once in a while, from a wish to please her, I would set aside time to study some of my mother’s gardening manuals. These studies were futile. Whereas I had no difficulty in memorising, for example, the names of the churches of Ravenna (a city I knew I would never see), I found it almost impossible to remember the names of the half-dozen varieties of common hardy annual that grew within a ten-yard radius of our back door. I had a negative aptitude for gardening and not a great deal of interest in overcoming my incompetence.

  For my mother’s sake I pretended to be more interested than I was, and professed to be perplexed that my brain should be so inadhesive when applied to botanical facts. To Hildi Goffman, who approved of my mother’s project, I likewise confessed bafflement at my selective amnesia. Dr Goffman associated the problem with my dread of public spaces, even though I told her that I was perfectly happy to take the air in the family garden, where I risked being observed only by neighbours who were habituated to the sight of me. Despite the best efforts of the comely Dr G, I never became anything more than a part-time assistant to my mother. From time to time I would volunteer to water the flowerbeds or trim the grass. Armed with secateurs, I would occasionally perpetrate some light vandalism of the bushes.

  That was more or less the extent of my father’s involvement too. Understanding better than any of us the garden’s therapeutic value for his wife, he was content for this to be entirely her domain. At the weekend he would take time to inspect the vegetation admiringly, and on summer Sunday evenings they might play a game of cards at a folding table outside. Otherwise, my father was rarely to be seen in the garden until he’d retired from the company – after that, he would frequently wander outside, to gaze vaguely at the vegetation, for rather longer than he’d ever gazed at it before. A bench was bought, on which, when the weather was fine, he would read the newspaper. He disliked being retired, and although he was proud of what Charlie had achieved, I think there was also a degree of humiliation in his son’s having proved to be more adroit a businessman than he himself had been. Becoming an old man was another humiliation. It had always been a point of honour for him (to say nothing of thrift) to hire licensed professionals only when absolutely necessary. He replaced loose roof slates and broken panes, fitted sinks and ceiling lights, decorated the house from top to bottom. Then came the day on which he had to admit that the repairing of a high gutter was an operation that he could no longer safely perform. I remember him squinting up at the builder at work on the summit of the ladder – he looked ashamed, as if he’d created the damage that the younger man was fixing. I remember, too, the way he examined his first pair of bifocals, turning them in his hand ruefully, as if they were some sort of badge of senility. He was astonished at the speed at which the years had gone. Once, after a visit from Charlie and Janina and the boys, he said to me that as he’d watched his grandsons playing he had remembered an afternoon at a relative’s house, when he was perhaps six or seven. He could no longer remember whose house it had been, but he’d vividly re-experienced being watched by his parents from an open window as he played on a path that had plump wet moss growing between the slabs, and it had occurred to him that when he looked at children and young people, and remembered what it had been like to be their age, it was like looking through a telescope, because the years of his youth seemed far nearer to him than they actually were – and, conversely, when children and young people looked at him they were looking through a telescope held the wrong way round, which made where he was, in old age, look far further away from them than he now knew it to be. In his last decade my father acquired a proclivity for sagacious pronouncements. ‘There are many good things about getting older,’ he said to me once, ‘but getting older isn’t one of them.’

  My mother, on the other hand,
although her body disappointed her more severely than my father’s did him, took her ailments with less complaint. ‘Nobody of our age is healthy,’ she told me. ‘We’ve all got something wrong.’ She had many things wrong. After the birth of Charlie she’d gained a stone, and with each decade she had gained a quantity of excess material, and no diet made the slightest bit of difference. By the time she reached fifty the lower joints were defective and often sore. And at sixty came breathing problems and the chest pains – diagnosed as angina pectoris, with consequent prescription of perpetual medication. One day, returning from Christmas shopping up in town, she collapsed on the train. There was talk of a bypass operation, eventually, but a change in the drug regime proved effective in controlling the discomfort, and for eight years there were no significant events until the afternoon she emerged from the post office and went down as if every muscle in her body had failed at once, and this is how my mother’s life ended, on the floor of Wardle Street post office, with people gathered around her in a circle, looking down into her face, I imagine, as though they were peering down a well-shaft, and shouting into her. Some things cannot be thought about for long.