The Optimists

by Andrew Miller

  ‘I came for you,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to leave?’

  She put off the lights in the living room, left the light on in the passage and a small shaded side-light in the kitchen. ‘Walk softly,’ she said. Her room was towards the front door; the bathroom was on the other side of the passage. She went into the bathroom while Clem waited for her, sitting on the end of her bed. The walls of her room were lilac, the ceiling was white. He began to shake. He stood up and circled the room, pressing his shoulders and arms and looking at the photographs of Emile, the little vase of silk flowers on the dressing-table, the magazines spread on the carpet beside the bed. When she came in she was wearing a Japanese-style robe, blue and white. She had wiped off the little makeup she had had on. Her feet were bare.

  ‘You’re still in your clothes,’ she said. He undressed, quickly, leaving his clothes on the floor. She stood in front of him, touched his face, his chest. Her hands were cool. She went to the dressing-table and lit a candle of honey-coloured wax, then put off the overhead light and loosened her robe. They lay beside each other on the bed. ‘We must be quiet,’ she said, Very quiet.’ She took his hand and pressed it between her thighs. He leaned across her, kissing her face, kissing her breasts, feeling her wetness on his fingers as he stroked her. She wanted him to suck hard at her nipples, and made a hushed but joyous sound when he did. They began to build a rhythm together. She was strong. As he went to mount her she pushed him back and straddled him, hanging over him, her breasts swinging between them, her nipples grazing his skin. In the honey-coloured light they stared at each other—a sex trance—as if each hoped to see some evidence of secret life, the soul like a white-bellied carp flick its tail and ripple the surface of the other’s gaze. When they grew too vigorous, too noisy, she slowed them down, lapping against him, a fierce smile on her face. He licked the sweat from her neck. Her thighs shone. She clung to him, arched from him, clung to him again, then dug her hand between them and used her own long fingers to hurry on her pleasure, turning her face away and groaning in her throat as though at the recollection of some grievous memory.

  For two or three minutes, hearts pounding, they held each other like castaways; then she peeled herself off him, picked up her robe from the floor and went out of the room.

  ‘Leave the candle,’ he said, when she came back. She climbed under the covers beside him. ‘Did you know we were going to do this?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘How could I have known? And you?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘But you hoped?’

  ‘Yes.’ He laughed quietly. ‘I hoped.’

  His sleep was dreamless, intense. When he woke, the candle was almost done, the flame swaying on its wick, the light over the ceiling like a reflection of water. Laurencie, her eyes wide open, was watching him from her pillow.

  ‘What is it?’ he whispered.

  From the landing came the hum and clanking of the lift gear. A moment later a key scraped at the lock of the front door. The door was opened, softly shut. Laurencie raised a finger to her lips. Footsteps drew level with the bedroom door, paused for a second, then continued along the passage towards the living room.

  ‘No one,’ she whispered.

  ‘No one?’

  ‘A lodger,’ she said: un locataire. ‘Comes late, leaves early.’

  The footsteps approached again. A tap ran in the bathroom, a man coughed, the toilet was flushed. Then once more the steps receded towards the rear of the apartment.

  Was it not strange that she had failed to mention this before? Where did he sleep, this lodger? Was there a room beyond the living room, a door he had not noticed? He might have asked her but she had shut her eyes and was, apparently, already asleep. With a little flare of jealousy he thought of the young man with the muscles—what had she called him? Jean? Could he be the lodger? But why should he be? What reason was there to suppose such a thing? And to have a lodger was a sensible idea if she was only working half-weeks at the FIA, piano lessons to pay for, bicycles. He lay, listening hard, but heard only a soft wash of rain on the window, a car, streets away, reversing. Beneath the sheet he reached for one of her hands and folded it gently in one of his own. She muttered something, his name perhaps. He slept.

  The next time he surfaced the candle was out, and for a moment, until he heard the slow to and fro of her breathing, he thought he was back in the quarryman’s room at Colcombe and that the fuses had gone again. He slid to his side of the bed and swung his feet to the floor. Naked, he crossed the black room to the black door and into the blackness of the passage, a kind of swimming. When he pulled the cord in the bathroom he flinched at the sudden flood of light. The digital clock on the shelf above the bath said 4:47. He urinated, put down the toilet seat, left the bowl unflushed. He did not know where the passage lights were: he found his way to the kitchen with the light that spilled from the bathroom. The door to the kitchen was shut He went in, filled a glass with mineral water from the fridge, drank it, then filled it again to take with him to the bedroom. He was almost out of the room, already anticipating being beside Laurencie again, shaping himself to her, when he paused, raised his face and sniffed the air. Cooking smells—the chicken, the oil. A whiff of tobacco. And something else, a scent that had been in the bathroom too but here was stronger.

  He went into the passage, peered into the empty living room, then returned to the kitchen. No one, she had told him, no one he needed to think about, but he knew the scent now, had smelt it three days ago in the café by the church of St Boniface. Sweet rum; sweet rum and spices. He set the water on the table and turned to the curtain he had seen behind Emile’s head as they had sat talking before supper. Did it move? Did its pleats shiver in some draught? Three quick steps took him to the sink and to the rack where he had stacked the supper dishes. He lifted the cleaver and the boning knife, hesitated, weighing them in the balance of his hands, then put down the cleaver and kept the knife. He crossed to the curtain and stood there, listening. When his blood had settled he gripped an edge of the material between thumb and finger and flicked it back along its rail. Inside, dim but discernible, was a shallow room, an alcove like a monk’s cell, a single bed—made-up, unslept in—and a plain wooden chair, the only furniture. No face appeared, no fierce or terrified gaze rising to meet his own, but left on the seat of the chair was a half-devoured bar of chocolate, a book, and a pair of folded spectacles. He stooped and picked up the book, holding it out towards the lamp. It was a copy of the New Testament bound in creased and weathered pasteboard, an edition distributed by a French evangelist organisation with an address in Algiers, the ribbon marker stretched between two pages of the gospel according to John. He read a line—He who does not dwell in me is thrown away like a withered branch—then shut the book and reached for the spectacles, but as his fingers touched them he heard once more the soft opening and closing of the front door, and seconds later, the humming into life of the lift gear, the descent ending in a final muted click. He hurried to the kitchen window. All it showed to him was the stair-lights of the neighbouring block flickering beneath a sky of starless indigo. There was no view of the street from there, no glimpse of any figure, exposed, groping his way in the open.

  He went back to the little room, to the bed so like his father’s on the island, or Silverman’s ‘dream of discipline’ in Toronto. He sat on the blanket, the knife against the skin of his thigh, and turned the spectacles in his hands, examining them, the heavy frames, the unwiped lenses. Then, very cautiously, as though there might be some real danger in the contact, he raised them to his face and tried them on, blinking at the kitchen, the slewed table, the muddled play of shadow across the tiled floor. He had no idea, of course, what was wrong with the Bourgmestre’s vision—he had no good idea of what was wrong with his own—but after a minute or more of feeling the little muscles around his eyes slacken and tauten, his sight began to adjust. Things seemed clearer.

  PART FOUR

  3.01 The totality o
f true thoughts is a picture of the world.

  Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus

  24

  A last hymn (‘Jerusalem’) then the vicar with his vicar’s voice, then the little organ playing the march. The doors opened: Frankie and Ray stepped into the shadow of the tower. Above them the gold hands of the blue-faced clock pointed to half past four. The photographer, a plump veteran with teeth the colour of onion skin, teetered on a chair and called shrilly that he couldn’t see the people at the sides. ‘You’re all family now,’ he shouted. ‘Squeeze up, squeeze in.’ He counted to three and fired the flash; fired it again. Everyone streamed down the churchyard steps. William Glass, in one of the suits he used to wear to work in Filton, slipped on a mush of damp leaves. Clem helped him up; Laura brushed off the back of his jacket. The Alfa with its yards of ribbon was parked on the road. The day was mild enough to have the hood down. Frankie started the car. Kenneth, primed, flung the first confetti, then a dozen others reached into bags or pockets and drew out fistfuls of blue and pink petals. As the car raced away the petals scattered from the back of it, a pink and blue cloud that fell on to the muddy road, on to verge and hedgerow.

  Clem unlocked the doors of the old Volvo and let in Laura and his father. Fiacc’s van was parked behind them. Clare waved to Clem through the windscreen; he waved back, climbed into the Volvo and spent ten minutes trying to coax the engine into life. They were the last to leave, the last to arrive at the house. By the time he found a space on the drive and Laura had rocked herself off the car’s high leather seats, the hired four-piece in the marquee had launched into an upbeat cover of ‘Non je ne regrette rien’. Inside the tent several couples were already dancing. These were mostly Frankie’s friends, the men in jeans and white linen jackets, the women swirling in long, vibrantly coloured dresses. Whoopers and huggers, vodka drunks, heavy smokers, poets, social-security fraudsters. A slightly fragile-looking crowd descending into middle age with whatever defiance their narrowing means afforded them. Ray’s crowd was no crowd at all. His mother was there and two other women of similar age. Also, a wall-eyed girl with a cold, and a young man with a heavy fringe, the badge on his lapel reading ‘Destined for Greatness (but taking my time)’. The best man was Greek, though other than Ray, who treated him with considerable deference, no one seemed to know the first thing about him.

  Down one side of the marquee were trestle tables with ranks of green bottles, Paris goblets, tins of beer. Two schoolgirls in white shirts—who had found these girls?—carried plates of mini Scotch eggs, smoked salmon on squares of brown bread, sausages on sticks. Clem found chairs for his father and Clare. Fiacc kept her distance, standing with a tumbler of mineral water at the far side of the dancers.

  The speeches were short. Laura spoke sweetly about Frankie. About Ray, she said, she had had some doubts but she had been wrong. Ray was a good man and—she laughed—an incorrigible optimist. She asked people to drink a toast to Frankie’s father, Ronny; a second toast for Frankie’s aunt, her own dear sister, Nora. She dried her eyes with a bud of pink tissue. Frankie stood up to embrace her; everyone sighed and clapped. The best man spoke as though he had trained at some school of classical oratory. He stroked his beard, evoked the relevant gods, quoted Aesop, was charming and little understood. Ray thanked everyone. He said he was the living proof that wonderful things could happen to the most unpromising people. No one, he said, should give up on love: all hearts were visited in time. On the practical front they had, with Mrs Harwood’s help, finally secured a mortgage for the flat in Poplar. They would be moving in before Christmas. Anyone who knew how to wield a paintbrush was welcome to visit. He took Frankie’s hand and limped from the pallet stage on to the flattened grass. The band played ‘Summertime’ as though it were jive, but with Frankie in his arms Ray swayed to a tempo entirely his own.

  Clem saw Jane Crawley by the entrance to the marquee. She was alone. He went over to her and said hello.

  ‘Can I get you a drink?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t stay. Will you tell Laura that I was here?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Have you seen Clare?’ he asked. ‘At the surgery, I mean.’

  ‘I saw her last week.’

  ‘You think she’s doing well?’

  ‘Exceptionally well.’

  ‘She couldn’t have managed a party like this when we Erst came down.’

  ‘No. She couldn’t.’

  ‘And you think it will go on?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Her recovery.’

  ‘If she’s careful.’

  ‘Looks after herself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She smiled at him; he smiled back. He wondered if she had forgotten about his eyes or simply considered herself to be off-duty. He was not, of course, even a patient of hers, not officially. ‘I’ve been away,’ he said.

  ‘Laura told me. Was it a success?’

  ‘Nothing happened,’ he said.

  ‘You didn’t find the man you were looking for?’

  ‘Not in the end.’

  ‘A pity.’

  He asked again if she would have something to drink.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘There’s someone waiting for me.’

  Clem walked her out of the marquee and watched as she slipped between the parked cars, turned at the gate, and disappeared. For some seconds he felt her absence very sharply, as though he had lost sight of the one person—the last?—who might help him. Then he entered the tent again, took a bottle of red wine from a trestle table, and went to where his father and Clare were sitting together holding hands like lovers.

  He poured the wine. They drank to each other’s health. Clare excused herself and left to find Fiacc. The band played a can-can. A line was formed and people kicked up their legs.

  ‘She’s not such an ogress,’ said Clem’s father.

  ‘Who?’ asked Clem.

  ‘Finola Fiacc. Not quite the Amazon I’d expected.’

  ‘No,’ said Clem. ‘And if Clare likes her...’

  ‘They do seem very close, don’t they?’

  Clem glanced at the side of his father’s face but saw that nothing had been intended, nothing wry or louche. For a moment he was tempted to say it baldly, your daughter’s an invert, a tribade, a follower of Sappho, but the fact was he had no real evidence for it, nor did he wish for any. Clare, though not yet fully herself again, was something very close to it, and whatever helped her (besides Boswell’s drugs), whatever category of the intimate, he welcomed it. When the music was calmer they danced together.

  ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I was dreading this but now I’m actually enjoying myself.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘And Daddy seems to be surviving it.’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘And Laura.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t think you told me everything about your trip,’ she said.

  ‘Did you want everything?’

  ‘I’d like to know if I’m supposed to feel guilty about it.’

  ‘You’re not.’

  ‘Finola wanted to help you. Though I told her off for making such a piece of theatre out of it.’

  He smiled. ‘I would have heard about the arrest sooner or later.’

  ‘So we’re all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Promise?’

  He promised.

  ‘I just want you to be happy, Clem,’ she said.

  Midnight was announced with a crash of cymbals. Frankie and Ray left the party. There was no honeymoon planned—they needed the money for Poplar—but it had been decided they would spend their first night in the privacy of the cottage. Clare and Fiacc had moved up to Laura’s where the old rooms had all been dusted and aired and put to service again. Everyone gathered around the Alfa. There was a last long hug from Laura, a cheer from the guests, then the car swept down the drive, past the concrete
boy (who wore tonight a wreath of ivy) and into the lane, the clattering of tins clearly audible for the two minutes it took them to arrive at the cottage. Another cheer, half satirical, then the circle broke and people wandered away, some to the house, some to the marquee, some into the garden where a score of candle-lanterns flickered daintily in the darkness.

  The weekend after the wedding Clem was back in Somerset, this time to help shut up the cottage. Clare and Fiacc were going to Dundee. The mattresses, the pots and pans, the desk and the lamps, were carried to their old places and stored again in rooms and cupboards where they could continue the slow disappearing that the summer had briefly interrupted. The painting of the bread and cherries went back on to its hook on the landing; the garden tools were returned to the garage; the fridge was emptied and switched off; the mains switch under the stairs put to the off position; the fire grate swept; the windows closed. They checked drawers, carried out the cases, an almost forgotten mug, a black bin-bag. Laura came down to lock the cottage doors and to inspect the progress of the crack on the side of the building. In places she could slip the width of two fingers inside it. She said the sooner the place collapsed the happier she would be. It was, she complained, like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  Two days later, Frank Silverman called. There had been a message from him on the answerphone when Clem arrived home from Belgium, a call it had seemed then easier not to return. ‘How is it,’ said Silverman, ‘we make such a hash of staying in touch with each other?’ He had heard from Shelley-Anne that Clem was in Brussels. Belatedly (‘I listen to strictly local news these days. I listen to the city gossiping about itself) he had discovered the reason for his being there. He had even, he claimed, considered flying over, and might have done it if he could have found someone else to collect from the restaurants, set up the kitchen, serve there and do the hundred and one other damn things that needed doing. He said he assumed Clem appreciated that. Clem said that he did. ‘So,’ said Silverman. ‘Tell it from the beginning. All of it. Slowly.’