When Mathilde was eleven, something happened to her mother. She stopped getting dressed in the mornings. She spoke in a way that no one in the family could understand. She sat weeping under a tree holding a blanket in front of her face. She set fire to her husband’s tractor. No one knew why. Finally she was taken from their farm to a hospital in another city and all the children were sent out to relatives. Mathilde and a younger sister went to an uncle who had a pig farm in Alsace-Lorraine. Her father thought it would be a healthy life for them. There was no ballet school there.
Mathilde tended the pigs. The Hungarian woman sent her letters from Rouen with dance exercises in them. She made lace and sold it. Finally when she was sixteen she took the money she had saved and went to Paris, where she found work in a millinery shop. She went to ballet school. She prepared herself to audition.
One day after finishing work she left the millinery shop and as she walked along the boulevard it began to rain. She ran from shopfront to kiosk to tree, the rainwater falling over her face and clothes. She laughed as she made the long leaps of the dancer from tree to tree.
She stopped suddenly when she noticed that the rain was no longer falling on her. She sensed someone standing behind her. She turned and saw a man. He was holding an umbrella over her head and smiling. Drops of water were falling from her face and his. He was standing well within the distance that normally separated her from people who spoke with her. She was out of breath, the laughter leaving her slowly. Her cotton dress clung to her body. The man had hand-made shoes and manicured nails. Everything was shining on him – his cufflinks, his skin, his teeth, his eyes. His hair was white as a dove and parted at one side as though with a ruler. He was wearing an English suit made of cashmere.
‘A beautiful woman should be protected from the rain,’ he said. He gave her the umbrella, bowed briefly, stepped into the back of a long black car and was driven away.
She stood in the rain and watched the car until it disappeared. No one had ever called her beautiful before. She couldn’t even remember anyone ever speaking of her as a woman.
Two days later the man walked into the millinery shop. He stood in the centre of the room. Everyone stopped what they were doing. Again the smile with the gleaming teeth. Years later, Mathilde told her daughter Hanna, ‘He looked like he owned the world and would give it all away in a tip to a waiter.’ The long black car with the driver was waiting, the back door open. There wasn’t a sound. Then he asked her to dinner in front of everyone. She was just eighteen then. She tried to say no, but she couldn’t.
He had a high rank in the Navy at the British embassy. He knew politicians. He went to casinos. He knew how to judge the value of horses. Mathilde hadn’t the strength to resist him. Even the ballet went out of her life – if not out of her mind. What was it that drew her to him? ‘He smoked these strong cigarettes,’ she said later. It was as though she couldn’t understand the force of this herself. ‘It was the way he lit them.’
His job changed. He was to return to London. Mathilde already knew that he was married with four children in a big house in the country, but she went anyway. He got her a flat near his ministry. They lived there together during the week. He took her to Jamaica, Santiago, Hong Kong. Then when Mathilde was twenty Hanna was born.
By then his other children were grown. He divorced his wife and married Mathilde. He retired from the Navy and they moved to a house with a mill on the Isle of Wight. He had cancer of the stomach. When Hanna was five, he died.
‘I can’t remember him very well,’ she told M. as they sat across from each other in the darkness of the bar. ‘My idea of how he looked is from photographs. I remember his smell, which I got even through his cologne. And the rough feeling of his face against mine at the end of the day. I remember a moment in the sunshine when I was running towards him and he was waiting with his arms open. “Here she comes, a mile a minute,” he said. I remember the blur of my feet on the pavement as I ran.
‘I don’t remember anything of his death or the funeral, but I remember that some time after that my mother was sitting in a bank vault and I was with her. She didn’t even like him very much in the last few years and they slept in different rooms, but his death made her suffer. Maybe she was remembering, or maybe she was thinking of herself. But she was crying. It was the first time I ever saw an adult do this. It frightened me. I thought she was losing her mind. She was in the bank vault trying to get his papers in order. I thought then it would be up to me to do that. I thought I’d have to cook the dinner and look after her. I thought I’d have to drive us home from the bank in our car. I wondered if my feet would reach the pedals. I tried to remember how she drove it.
‘She spoke well of him when I was growing up. She wanted me to have a good feeling about him. Later it was different. Maybe she counted all the dances she missed. She could be sitting at a table reading a magazine in silence and then suddenly take her glasses off and begin her analysis. “He was just like a glamorous, spoiled boy,” she said, “everybody always gathered around him, looking at him, wanting him to think well of them, laughing with him, him laughing louder and longer than the others with even less heart.” She said he could act shy in the face of compliments, and according to her he believed that this shyness too made him superior. “This is one of their typical affectations,” she said. I suppose she meant English people of a high class. Anyway, once she started an attack she couldn’t stop herself. “Above everything,” she said to me, “he was cruel. Cruel words came easily to him. He impressed himself with them. Afterwards he would feel bad about it. He was drawn to cruelty because the guilt that followed it seemed to him magnificent. It was certainly more important than the hurt he caused. He thought he should be comforted in his distress over the things he had done. It all gave him a feeling of grandness. He had been around people with power for so long that he was incapable of believing anything or anyone could be authentic, except himself.”
‘That’s how she would go on. It was as if she had been thinking of these things through all the years since he died. And she had to tell me about it.
‘I didn’t believe her. This was my father. She could forget that. She could think instead that I was her friend. I would try to picture how he would be if he was still with me. I’d think of him and me walking along a road, his arm through mine. Maybe he’d have a stick. I’d tie his tie for him. I’d comb his hair. I’d think of us in a big room full of people, each of us going from person to person. We’d be having a good time. We’d be laughing. But we’d never forget about each other. I’d always know where in the room he was. I’d have to know if he was all right.
‘It’s not that I think of him so often. But that’s how I do it.’
Hanna got down off her stool and lit a cigarette by the till. She walked out from behind the bar and over to the door. She looked up at the windows of the buildings across the street. She seemed to be thinking. Then she came back. M. looked at her closely. He felt shame at making her speak of these things.
But when she came back she went on with her story.
Mathilde, she said, stayed on in the house with the mill on the Isle of Wight. She had a pension from the Navy and some cash. She had Hanna. But she had nothing to do. She was twenty-six years old.
In summer she went for walks very early along the beach. One day she met a young man from Finland. At home in his country he was studying the construction of ships, but that summer he was cooking breakfasts in a hotel. He was just then on his way to work. They met later that day, then every afternoon in the house while Hanna was at school, then at night in the dance halls along the esplanade. Finally he came to live with them. When the time came for him to return to Finland, Mathilde sold the house and followed him there.
They lived in his small flat in the city of Turku. They married in the spring. Each day Mathilde took Hanna to school in the morning and then passed the day waiting for him to come home. He had become a kind of god to her. Sometimes they drank brandy. Someti
mes they took Benzedrine. Sometimes he was not there.
One day she went to the bank. She had an account there where she kept all the money she’d got for the house with the mill. When she tried to take some of it out she found that nearly all of it was gone.
‘How can this be?’ she asked the man in the bank. ‘I have not used this money.’
‘You must ask your husband,’ he told her.
She went around the town looking for him. She went to the university where he was studying, up and down the streets, into shops and bars. She found the man who sold them Benzedrine.
‘Where did my money go?’ she asked him.
‘He has a mania for bingo,’ said the man. ‘Didn’t you know?’
He got away before she could find him. Maybe someone at the bank warned him, or maybe the drug dealer. She heard he went to Denmark and was living with a woman who sang on boats.
She went into a kind of trance then. It seemed to go on for years. She moved like a ghost from room to room. She sat in a chair in front of the window while the light changed on her face. She did not seem to be seeing anything.
Then one day she was different. She went to the owner of a building that had some empty rooms. She rented the first floor. She put a sign out – BALLET LESSONS, FRENCH-TRAINED TEACHER. That became her life then. She started to teach young girls to dance. She does it still. Somehow she never forgot.
‘It’s a strange story, no?’ said Hanna. Her eyes met M.’s and there seemed to be a flash of light in the dark bar. He thought he sensed in it an invitation. Then it closed. But he could not be sure.
She laughed, and pushed away from the bar.
‘And you have no way of knowing whether any of it is true, do you?’ she said.
Did M. tell me those last words? Did I add them myself?
Sometimes I think, and nothing appears before me. I go to the window and look out. I return to my chair. I get up and walk in straight lines up and down the length of the room. I get into bed and put a pillow over my head. Sometimes I let out a call like a crow. I will myself to see pictures. But nothing arrives.
At four o’clock in the afternoon M. drove along the main street of the little town where Hanna worked and lived. The shutters of the shops were closed. A dog lay at the entrance to a bar, one eye open. The cars in the showroom of the man M. found so monstrous in his pursuit of her seemed as strange and still to him as stones beneath the sea. Flies circled in the dusty air.
M. was very nervous. Two days before she had accepted his invitation to go with him up into the mountains and walk with him by the river. Would she be there?
The road bent a little as it neared her house and he saw her. She was standing in the sun. She wore blue jeans and what seemed a man’s striped shirt buttoned to the neck. Everything starched and pressed, the two rounded sweeps of hair around her face like hands holding a globe. And lipstick. A deep red. She was squinting in the sun and looking in the wrong direction as she waited. He thought this made her look innocent.
When he stopped she took a skip towards the car and got in with a movement so fluid it seemed oiled. She was smiling, easy. She dropped a shoe on to the floor and hooked her foot under her knee on the seat. She leaned back against the door, facing him, and said, ‘So, here we are,’ which also seemed to ask, And what will you do about it?
He drove with her out past the warehouses and along the dry road towards the mountains. The air trembled over the hot earth, but it cleared and brightened as they rose. She put tapes into the machine, played one or two songs and then changed them.
They climbed higher, the turns growing tighter, the pines more dense. A single saxophone played on a tape. Light flared over the windscreen and M. put on his sunglasses. She was leaning back, her knees up on the dashboard, her bare foot turning to the slow movement of the music. As the sun lowered a little more the colours of the land seemed to him too rich for the shapes that were holding them. She could be mine, he thought, the way we are here and now – except that she isn’t.
‘What happened to your mother?’ he asked her.
‘When?’ Her head fell towards him on the seat.
‘After she started the ballet school.’
‘She kept going. More girls started to come, and boys. She put on productions. She always has one at Christmas. One year a very big man in a red shirt came in and asked her for a part in her Christmas show. His name was Ritso, he said. He couldn’t dance, but he knew something about acting. He had a big red face and he laughed all the time. She gave him a part. A little while later she began to live with him. She seems peaceful. I think he must be the kindest of the men in her life. He makes her laugh, he pays attention to her. At the beginning of every month he brings her a book in French.’
‘Do you like him?’
She didn’t answer right away. Her head rolled back on the seat and she looked out towards the mountains.
‘He’s always there. There’s always the same ceremony when I come back – flowers, vodka and a cake with a strawberry on top. He never changes. He doesn’t ask questions. There aren’t so many people like that.’
They drove through a village hung with banners for a festival, then out again into open land, the air cooling.
She bobbed her head lightly to the music on the tape. She tapped out its rhythm on her leg.
‘He’s very big,’ she said. ‘And round. Almost no hair on his head and a round red face. He has a kind of black beard, not very regular. He wears clothes that aren’t connected – like striped trousers from a formal suit and then sandals with socks and a sweater with lots of colours like a child would wear. It’s surprising how he looks because when he was younger he was beautiful. I’ve seen photographs. He looked proud, with big strong eyes and long black hair curling just over his shoulders and split in the middle. The lines in his suits were like knives. But something happened to him. He had an accident. He fell off a roof he’d climbed on to for a bet. He injured his legs. He didn’t care so much about how he looked after that.’
A herd of goats ran up a slope, all their bells ringing together like chimes blown by a wind.
‘Did you hear that?’ M. asked her.
‘What?’
‘The goats.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. She looked over in their direction. She seemed preoccupied, as though she were working through an equation.
‘Ritso was only a child when his father died,’ she said after a while. ‘Sometimes he reminds me of this, and then he says, “You see, we’re alike, you and I.” But Ritso had an uncle who was a diplomat and hadn’t any children of his own. So he looked after Ritso and his brother. He sent them abroad to study. The last place they were in was Rome. His brother grew very religious there and eventually became a priest. But Ritso spent all the extra time he had going to the theatre. He got degrees – I think in mathematics and something about government. He also studied medicine for a while. But every chance he had to see a play, he took it. He wrote reports about each of them in notebooks. And he had theories about how plays should be presented. He said you could make discoveries if you looked at a play from different angles than just the one that people in the audience could see.
‘When he came home to Finland he told his mother that he wanted to be a director of plays. But she wouldn’t allow it. She said that would be ingratitude after all the help he got from his uncle. She said he was to go to him and ask him for advice and whatever his uncle said he was to do it. That would be the only way to show his appreciation. So he did that. His uncle never even knew about his interest in the theatre. He found a job for him in the government. It was in the department that dealt with currency.
‘But he didn’t forget. He came home in the evenings and made little models of stages with pieces of wood. For actors he put figures from a chess set. He used his notebooks from Rome. He tested his theories. He was like my mother with the ballet. He still does that. He pours himself glasses of wine with ice and moves chess pieces around his stage.’
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M. stopped the car where the river cut between two high rock-faces before gathering in a pool where children were swimming. He walked with her upstream, the trees becoming more dense, small fragments of light running down her like rainwater on glass. She looked different by daylight. She seemed less a riddle, her skin pale and translucent.
At a bend in the river there was a gathering of large flat rocks in the shade of the trees. M. asked her if she would like to sit. It was cooler in the mountains. There was an edge in the air as the sun moved down towards the peaks that rose above them. She sat close to him, her arms folded over her knees. She seemed to be waiting.
M. knew that between a man and a woman there is a moment before which everything is possible and after which everything is lost. Was this such a moment? He knew too that there were those who would not fail to act. He felt fear pass through him as he sat on the rock. I know this fear – the fear of losing for ever what we do not yet and may never have.
He tried to find her in the way he spoke to her – the beauty of her lines, what hurt her, what moved within her. He wanted her to discover that he could know her, that he could walk with her through the world. He spoke of the fall of land there in the mountains, the light on the water, and that other beauty of the north where she came from of snow and night and stars. He moved through his memory for stories that would make a bridge between him and her. He spoke of those who had known loss as children, the emptiness they must carry, and he spoke of those forced to wander, who must leave their languages and landscapes and their beds behind them. His face was set in the evening light. His hands were moving in the air. His words were measured —
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