She pushes slowly away from me, her face averted. She too is breathing heavily. The young people move into the circle where we were dancing and I can see her only intermittently. She is walking back in the direction from which she came. There is a primness to her movements, little dainty steps, her hands clasped in front of her. I would like to speak with her but a boy with blond hair and cheeks the colour of apples steps forward and hands me a full glass of vodka with ice. A girl arrives with my vest, jacket, shirt and a towel to dry myself with. She keeps her soft, liquid eyes on mine as she presses them into my hand, an act of charity for a man drawing a pension. I keep looking around for the woman. Finally I see her walking towards me, settling her fan-tailed glasses back on to the bridge of her nose. She stops, nods briefly and says, ‘Thank you.’ Then she shakes my hand like a priest at a church door and disappears back into the crowd. I watch her pass through the tables towards the door. She is big, the biggest woman I have yet been so close to. I stand with my glass and think of the comfort I found with her on the dancefloor. Jacob comes up with my coat and hat.
‘Where are we going?’ I say.
‘We’ll go somewhere to cool off.’
‘All right,’ I say.
I drink the vodka, and then rise like a vapour up the stairs and back into the night.
In the library I read of how an uneducated Englishman’s construction of the first dynamo ended one hundred and fifty years of tranquil certainty in the world of physics. Up to then it had been thought that Newton had found the mathematics for all the workings of the visible world. There remained only the work of refining them and building on them and closing some gaps in what they addressed. But the dynamo demonstrated the existence of wave radiation and there was nothing in Newton which could make sense of that. Shortly afterwards it was demonstrated that light moved at a constant speed irrespective of its source or what was around it. It was the only thing in all of the world to behave in such a way, but it was enough to break the most fundamental of Newton’s laws, the laws of motion. Einstein found the solution in his special theory of relativity. Then he in turn was upended by quantum mechanics. And so physics has moved through time, a beautiful, harmonious and nearly complete picture of all that is elaborated by one physicist undermined in turn by a single troublesome discovery made by another.
There is a sound here now of books closing and of shuffling feet. I look up. The stained-glass window is black, the light inside harsh and white. Jacob clicks closed his pen and places it in his pocket. I am a small man, all around me now the records and the written labours of others with whom it is fruitless to compare myself. When I go I will leave no mark. Yet in this history of the scientists is a kind of dream of my life. That feeling of reaching for the final piece, then it all falling away. There is something in the thinking of this that pleases me. Those prayers at the foot of the altar. Dialectics. Love. Are they all illusions? Or is it that I expected of them the wrong thing? I don’t know yet. Maybe it’s that I can’t know. Still, I would like to go on thinking of it. But here and now there are only the librarian and Jacob, waiting for me to leave.
13
Eleanor
I GET UP. I put on a cardigan and then my bathrobe and go out to the kitchen. I make tea and a boiled egg and bring them with a banana and a slice of bread back into the bedroom. Light spills like a halo around the curtain and I think to look out. The day is cold and bright. There must have been rain, for there’s a fine skin of gleaming ice on the pavements and window ledges and frozen drops like crystal earrings on the trees. I look out for a long while until the cold drives me back into the bed. I eat my breakfast there sitting up. I get some strength. I begin to feel ready for M., and for her. I want to hasten to that part of the story where more of her may be revealed, but the hell of this kind of thing is that you must be patient, you must go step by step, for each of the steps can change what follows. You cannot afford to miss even a single one. So first of all M.’s sad interlude, and the story of Eleanor.
The day after M.’s father’s funeral M. got into his car and drove to the home of his aunt. He was to bring something. I can’t remember well what it was. Let’s say it was a photograph of his grandmother in a silver frame. He had it beside him on the seat, face up, as though she too had been laid out for burial. On the night before his death M.’s father had got up from his bed in his pyjamas and walked around the house with his hair on end touching walls and photographs and books, smiling and nodding and whispering. The nurse who was minding him followed him. She got him back into his bed and played tunes on a whistle for him and then he went to sleep. The next day she got him up to bathe him. He stood beside the bed, his knees shaking. ‘I can’t get there,’ he said. He lay back down then, closed his eyes, and she watched the life go out of him.
There were six messages for M. when he got home that night in Barcelona. They had to hold back the funeral for a day to give him time to get there.
The air inside the car pressed in like a solid wall over the entire surface of his body as he drove. When he arrived at the driveway of the house of his aunt he did not enter. Instead, he kept driving. He was in a fine, smooth-running car the colour of lemon which his father had bought from a German whose fish farm had failed. He moved out of his aunt’s village on to the open road. The tyres hissed, the cool air flowed around him. It was a winter morning that had begun with rain but then the clouds rolled away and now the air seemed unable to contain the late morning light which flooded the valley around him. The trees were black and twisted and the grass shone with rainwater. Steam rose from the mouths of a gang of men cutting trees by a lake. He did not know where he was going. He did not turn the radio on. For a long while he looked at nothing save the road and the sky flaring out above it. He did not wish to see anything familiar. He did not wish to know where he was. He was alone, and free. Who was there to report to? He thought, What if I don’t stop? He imagined himself far away, the wheels endlessly turning, just him under the sky gliding along as though through space, on and on through the villages and forests and fields of Europe to some place out beyond the limits of his knowledge.
Autumn had passed into winter and on into a new year since he entered that bar with his armful of roses. Did he think of her still? Not so much. He would like to have known where she was, why she went. He would like to have known about the man in the wheelchair. But the feeling was vague now. It embarrassed him to place so much drama into something so lacking in form. He did not labour at the memory any more. She was passing, it seemed. When she went away he filled the time. He took up hill-walking. He went into churches and attempted to pray. He applied for jobs in distant places. There were diversions. They preoccupied him, but they did not please him. A Hungarian. A girl in his office. There was time and he filled it. He went on, alone, prowling, vacant.
Before the light faded he arrived at a town by the sea he knew well. He stood for half an hour like someone hypnotised and watched a boy with enormous teeth screaming ballads in a square. He thought his veins would burst. He had a pocketful of his father’s money. He bought a newspaper and sat down on a bench but found he could not read it. He took a drink and watched the people come and go, their bags of shopping, their loud hailings and imprecations and eruptions of laughter. He had the idea as he sat there that he hadn’t the ability to look normal. He had lobster and wine in a restaurant and then drove out of town. He would find a hotel somewhere, then another the next night. He felt for a moment the great unending freedom in this idea and drove on into the darkness. I remember those roads. They are full of twists and pastel-coloured villages, dogs attacking your wheels and children eating chocolates. They are dark and empty for a time and then they are full of intimacy. You cannot be lost or unseen. You cannot get that feeling he was looking for when he had the idea of driving without a destination. He pulled over to the side of the road by an entrance to a field and sat there for a while before turning around and driving all the way back to his father’s house. He tur
ned on all the lights and opened the windows. He played music very loud. He lay down on a bed somewhere. He knew that he would not sleep.
M. is with me now. Well, let us say the M. that I have found somewhere between him and me. I have the feeling that he will stay with me now until the end. Perhaps that is presumptuous. But there is not far to go and I know the way. How is it that in one phase of our lives everything is impossible and in another everything is clear, open, possessable? Why did M. leave me one day and come back another? It is noticeable in athletes. The great have days of mediocrity, others briefly rise. But they train laboriously and learn all manner of tricks to minimise the effects of inevitable lapses of strength or rhythm. And the rest of us? Does it happen too to plumbers and hairdressers? If it were so wouldn’t a portion of our buildings be erupting with water and certain unfortunate people bear scars on their faces where a razor slipped from its path? How does this work? Why do I feel so well just now? I wake sharp, clear. I have the wish for food. And there is the sense that I am carrying something, of the need to mind it well until I have delivered it. I never had that before. I had something very like it with Angelina, but accompanying it, unseen, unacknowledged, was a feeling of dread, as though just as I was living that glorious time another force was labouring at destroying it, as termites gnaw at posts supporting an edifice, so that whatever the effort, whatever the care, I was to lose it anyway. But this is something, at least now, that I feel I can keep close to me. Well, I must make the most of the hands as they are dealt in this unfathomable game.
He went through the rooms of the house of his father taking pictures from walls, making lists of furniture, placing objects in boxes. Some things for his aunt, some for the fire, some for the nuns. Every hour he got so tired of this that he went out and walked around this house which now looked as cold and inert to him as a corpse. Someone had come around and cut the grass after his father died, the cuttings still in lank heaps. The green paint on an outbuilding door was flaking, one hinge rusted through. Why does a corpse seem less than stone or a plank of wood? There was nothing out there for him, just a dark landscape, a house losing its meaning. He went back in and continued with his work. He telephoned his father’s banker and lawyer. M. hadn’t thought the bicycle valves he made would bring in so much. Or was it that he spent so little? He called an auctioneer about selling the house. He called the local refuse collection department. He found one of his school essays trapped beneath a desk drawer. Photographs, funeral cards, letters, a silver spoon sent on the occasion of M.’s birth from an uncle in Massachusetts. There was a cloth shoe bag containing his mother’s bracelets and rings. ‘For your wife,’ his father used to say to him. ‘When you get one.’ The past assembled and disintegrated. He went into the room where his father died. He sat at his desk. There was a pile of unopened letters going back three months. ‘He feared the post,’ the nurse had told M. Bank statements, promotions, bills, news from the church. This tired M. too and he got up and began to open drawers. Vests, socks, a kind of corset for his father’s bad back. He found a leather box he vaguely remembered. Inside were tie pins, a nail file, pens, all neatly arranged in the compartments of a tray. He lifted this off and put it aside. Below were religious medals, his mother’s wedding ring, an old photograph of Vienna and another of M. at his First Communion, a comb, a few silver strands of his father’s hair still caught between the teeth. There was a poem about a father’s love for his son cut out from a newspaper, yellow at the edges, the border jagged where his hands couldn’t control the scissors. He walked through the rooms, out the door and along the road into the hills until all this played itself out there in what was around him. He looked out to the hills, then to the house, then back again. It did not gather itself into a meaning for him. He found no love for it, nor did it give him comfort. It has only familiarity, a little tired, not altogether welcome, like a school door, or the sound of the footsteps of a disagreeable neighbour as he passed through his gate. Yet to rid himself of it all, to make a cut so harsh, to have no way back …?
M. walked back along the lane to the house. He called the auctioneer. He told him he was withdrawing the house from sale. ‘Maybe later in the year,’ he said.
That night he drank with his cousins in muted yellow light in the corner of the pub, rain lashing the windows. Men from the village tipped the peaks of their caps at him as they passed. A girl came in not long before closing time, red-cheeked, rain sparkling on her face and in her hair, a little out of breath. ‘I thought I might be too late,’ she said to one of M.’s cousins. ‘Eleanor,’ the man said, nodding, then bought her a tall glass of beer. She sat down across from M. She called him by name, expressed condolences. He tried to find her in his memory, but couldn’t. ‘I’d have gone to the funeral, but I’m only back,’ she said.
‘That’s all right,’ said M.
She had blonde curls, clear mahogany eyes and a laugh that surprised him. It was raw, guttural, like something you might hear from an old man selling wares in a port, someone who maybe once was a criminal but no longer had the strength. She didn’t hide her mouth with her hand in that feminine way whenever she did it. After another round of drinks M. understood who she was, the daughter of a doctor who came to the village two years before he had left for university. Her older brother, a spectacular athlete, was in his class. Where had she just come from? he asked. From the Andes, she said, helping to plant maize. She and M. spoke Spanish together then for the amusement of his cousins. By the time the bell rang to close the bar he had nearly forgotten that they were there. They stepped out together into the rain.
‘Have you a bicycle?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There’s one in the shed.’
‘If it’s fine tomorrow will we go out the coast road together?’
‘All right,’ said M.
The day broke well, the high clouds blown inland by the sea wind and the sky clearing as if the earth beneath it had been shifted by a lever. She called for M. on her bicycle and they drove out along the coast. She knew about everything there – saints’ wells, ambushes, the way the stone was formed, the place where some warrior was said to have seduced a beautiful girl with black hair. She had a poem about it. She took him off the road into a valley where there was a small lake rimmed in orange earth. She had fruit in a saddlebag and they ate it by the shore. They pedalled on then through the rain-cleansed air, her legs pumping rhythmically in front of him, high cliffs leading down to the sea silver in the sunlight, blue mountains beyond. A man went by on a tractor and saluted. Dogs lying on stone walls watched them pass. Water flowed around and below them, rocks tinkling like ice cubes in a glass. The land swept down from the mountains in clefts and wide green valleys, white houses set against the rises in groves of trees. She turned off the main road again on to a neck of land thick with pines and oaks and ferns. It turned to grassland and dunes on one side and rock frothing with waves on the other and at the end there was a small cove and harbour with a pub beside it. They went in and ordered lunch. She told M. stories about her wild aunt who lived up on the top of a hill with her hens. When the food arrived M. went to the bar for more drinks. His hands were full as he sat and she took a shrimp from her plate and placed it with her fingers in his mouth. A softer, slower version of that laugh, the mahogany eyes closing a little. He wished she’d go on doing that.
Eleanor did not make him think what man was, or woman. She did not make him think of miracles and wondrous things. He did not go down into the marrow for her, and of course I need not speak of whether he kept anything back from her, for he offered her almost nothing at all. What she got were the forms he had learned, not the thing itself. Yet it was not as it had been with those other women whose paths he crossed in the months after Hanna had vanished – the farmer’s daughter, the Hungarian, and that other woman, somebody’s wife he told me, who drove him around on the back of her motorbike. I forgot to mention her before. They all made him feel alone, futureless, they awakened a distaste bec
ause that was what was inside him. He liked to think of Eleanor. At least in moments, and then he moved on to another thing in case the thought turned bad. He liked the spring in her hair, the way she knew about trees, her lack of elegance. He found he could be easy with her. She came out of his world, or at least a world he had known well and not entirely forgotten. He understood her gestures and jokes. Nothing had to be guessed at. The days went by one by one like time passed in a stadium waiting for a spectacle to begin. But what he was waiting for he did not know. He unpacked boxes. He signed documents. He brought mementoes around to neighbours and members of the family and clothes to nuns. He looked at a pair of his father’s shoes as he placed them in a bag and wondered who next would be wearing them. In the afternoons he went out with Eleanor on the bicycles and found her in the pub in the evenings.
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