by Joseph Hone
And the question remains: why, once reasonably human, am I living up a tree now, back in a savage state, worse than an animal in that I seek vicious retribution, no matter how long it takes, certain that I am right? The only way to account for the strength of this anger, perhaps, is to remember the depth of that earlier peace.
Two
‘Bom Dias!’
The vague old man who ran the lifts in the Avenida Palace Hotel bade us good morning as we came down from my bedroom that afternoon.
‘“Bom Dias” indeed.’ I turned to Laura afterwards. ‘It’s nearly four o’clock.’
That was the first time we made love, in August, almost a year ago in the heavy, gilt-decorated room I had in the old belle-époque hotel, at the bottom of the Avenida da Liberdade, Lisbon’s Champs Elysées, which ran straight through most of the city, like an arrow, down into Pombal’s magnificent eighteenth-century town by the waterfront, with the hills all round, climbing into the summer winds, where you could follow the breeze up in street lifts, ancient trams or along steeply rising cobbled alleyways.
‘Shall we have some tea?’
‘Shall we walk?’ I said.
‘It doesn’t matter what.’
The city was an open invitation. We had no appointments. Clare was at home with her grandparents in the suburb of Cascais. Laura looked at me, still with bedroom glints in her eyes as we passed through the lobby, and I had that sudden sharp feeling, in the pit of my stomach, of youth, when age doesn’t push any more, at least, and there is no end to things in the air.
The hotel was being redecorated that summer. There was a smell of paint everywhere downstairs and sawdust where they were cutting out the wood from an old cloakroom, carpenters sawing away like animals in dark corners.
‘The Retournados,’ Laura said. ‘There were nearly a million of them, ex-colonials back from Angola and Mozambique: the government put them up for months in all the luxury hotels in town. Now they’re “refurbishing” them.’
‘A million of them?’
‘Well, the lucky ones. Four in a bed, I suppose.’
‘The beds are big enough.’
‘Yes.’
We remembered. We’d had lunch that day in the great panelled dining-room, with its mirrors and canopy of chandeliers, on the first floor, the lifts just down the corridor outside, the old man off duty, so that no one had seen us go upstairs afterwards. Not that they’d have cared one way or the other, I fancy. The Portuguese, I’d found in over a month’s stay in the country, had a classic restraint, a politeness in almost every matter; the last people in Europe, it seemed, with such old-fashioned virtues.
But perhaps the old liftman not being there made things easier for us, in our own minds at least, for we were both of us old enough ourselves, with similarly formal backgrounds, to remember all such ancient prohibitions.
Laura wasn’t a prude. She just had a lot of out-of-date manners. She liked to do things in an acceptable way. Despite, or more likely because of, her obvious beauty, she presented a cool anonymity to the public. She tended to hide in the light of the world, her face immobile; her stance, her walk or gaze things calculated to deceive; so that they would not draw attention, at least, either to her body or her soul.
In private, with her parents, her friends – or with me in bed – she was something different. We all are, of course. But with Laura this change, though not schizophrenic, was much more extreme. There was a natural barrier in Laura, which Clare’s fate and her husband’s death had helped increase, between the public and the private person. She could be very formal, even cold on the surface. So that when I’d first met her, more than a month before, she had struck me as the last person in the world I was ever likely to sleep with. Yes; before I knew her, she seemed far too haughty and beautiful for me. She was, I imagined, one of those idle Tory women living abroad, remittance women in the sun, on permanent holiday, rich enough, no longer young, probably divorced, with loud-voiced horsey friends back in the English shires, one of the skin-deep people herself, all floating on gin and tonic.
When I first saw Laura, three pews ahead of me in St George’s Anglican church with Clare fiddling strangely at her side, I thought she was someone merely decorative, those wisps of blonde hair down the back of her neck too carefully tended, with a spoilt child in tow that she had not bothered to bring up properly. Even her name – ‘Mrs Kindersley’, when she was introduced to me at the church’s sardine barbecue afterwards – seemed a perfect suggestion of old upper-middle-class hauteur, impregnability, respectability, foolishness.
But Laura wore all these marks of her tribe as mere camouflage. They were not her real colours at all. When you knew her you found everything different in her mind: strange furniture in what had seemed, on the outside, so conventional a house. And when you loved her, it was different again, for her clothes were formal too, even her casual ones: pleated skirts and blouses – and when she took them off, as she had an hour before, there was another landscape, other attitudes which one could never have anticipated.
She had said, quite suddenly half way through lunch, just after we’d done with the mountain trout and the vinho verde, her hands neatly in her lap, leaning across to me with a look of amused confidentiality, ‘Afterwards, Peter?’
‘What?’
‘Make love.’ She paused. ‘Won’t we? Upstairs. Where better? Don’t you –’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve forgotten most of the tricks though.’
‘So have I.’
But we hadn’t.
Her face was very long as she lay flat in the light from the bedroom windows. The shafts of afternoon sun, slanting on her cheeks seemed to exaggerate the natural distance between her eyebrows and jawbone, just as, in this position, it emphasised the slight turn up at the end of her nose, the equal snub at the tip of each breast. Her long body angled across the sheets, toes almost poking through the brass rails at the end, she had an air of vastly settled comfort about her that afternoon – nothing feverish at all, as if she’d just found exactly the right spot in a garden and was sunbathing there. Her lovemaking had the same calm: no rising storms, no vast passions or alarms, simply a firmness, a clarity, something open-eyed where she did not want to forget herself but rather, to remember everything.
Laura, I soon discovered, had a great gift of sharp consciousness. Continually alert behind her cool façades, anxious to invest something in every waking moment, it was sleep she feared. Once you had fallen through her outer reserve, and, beneath that, the layers of the familial or the workaday, when you fell into Laura most truly herself, you were in a continually busy place, a mind always on the move, ever concerned with sights and thoughts and tastes, kingdoms in the sun. She was something of a daylight atheist, I suppose, for the nights were different. Then she fussed and cried in the dark, accused herself of non-existent crimes, murmuring incoherently about her earlier life in Africa, for sleep she feared – the dreams, the panic it brought.
In Portugal certainly, living out in the marvellous light and heat of Cascais by the Atlantic with her parents for a year, she had found what she needed: long dazzling afternoons in their big garden overlooking the bay with Clare, or days down on the beach swimming, constantly involved with her daughter: activities in any case which left her exhausted by bedtime, so that there would be few moments in the dark to fill …
Laura clutched me on the bed then, the only time she hurt. She said ‘Since Willy went, and Clare, too, in another way, I’ve had this thing about not sleeping, as if I at least have to remain fully conscious. Do you know?’
‘Yes.’
‘To stay alive. If I sleep – I mightn’t.’
‘It’s a fear, naturally. Especially since you sleep alone.’
‘It’s as bad sometimes as not putting your hand out under the bed as a child.’
‘Yes.’
‘I want to stay awake, all the time.’
But she didn’t that afternoon. She drifted off ten minutes later, in
my arms, before going out like a light, released at last from fear, at peace. Loving thus was one part of our content.
But there was living, too, the whole city outside the bedroom window: the summer wind, always from the south, whipping the rubbish along the mosaic pavements beside the cafés on the downtown boulevards; the ferry klaxons out in the bay, sliding into my own dreams as I dozed beside her then; or on other empty afternoons when we returned to my bedroom – the great white cruise liners, indolent dreams which materialised in the harbour in the space of a siesta, between lunch and tea. The city had been a marvellous promise for me in any case right from the start. Now, with Laura, its gifts were guaranteed.
She said when she woke, startled, surprised that she had slept, ‘I’ve survived …’
Most things discourage us from love these days. The omens and confirmations are commonplace: it will not survive, it will crack up on the rocks of liberation, impatience, infidelity, so that we embark on it half-heartedly in any case, if at all in middle life.
Laura had had her chances since Willy’s death, she’d told me, vague hints from London friends and other less subtle approaches during her year in Portugal. But they had not convinced her of anything. She felt a great fatigue about all that side of life: it hadn’t tempted her at all, lying fallow as she had, with Clare absorbing all her energy.
I must have been simply lucky, I’d thought, in my timing, in meeting Laura at a moment when things began to stir in her again. Or was it, in fact, something special which we had for each other? One tends to play this sort of idea down nowadays as well. It seems presumptuous to imagine there is anything so unique between two people, especially among the middle-aged; especially with me, who had seen a first wife go and lost several other women since.
I’d loved well enough, but the knack of permanency wasn’t there. In twenty years I’d gone through three women, that was the fact of the matter, and I’d told Laura so one afternoon a few weeks before when we’d gone down with Clare to the little beach at Cascais.
We’d had lunch under the canopy on the Palm Beach restaurant terrace, set right over the sand Clare playing near the small frothy waves almost immediately beneath us.
‘Yes,’ I’d said to Laura, the prawns dismembered on our plates, gathering the soiled paper napkins up. ‘It seems like blind man’s buff, looking back on it: me and women.’ I made the point lightly, flippancy a ready balm to failure.
‘Surely it was your job?’ Laura asked. ‘That intelligence work you told me about in Egypt, America. You were living all sorts of lies then. And so were these women you were with too, apparently.’
I nibbled at a last bit of prawn. ‘Perhaps. Though that’s a convenient excuse. It was probably just me.’
We were hovering on the brink of love that afternoon. We were likely to think the best of each other in any case. So I put myself unduly at a disadvantage, wanting Laura to forgive my past as well as love me now. Age only sharpens the plays we bring to courtship. After forty we know too well how best to present what’s left of us.
But Laura understood all this that afternoon, I think. She was nearly forty herself, after all. She leant across, taking the soiled napkins from me, touching my hand at the same time.
‘Every failure, or success, is both people, surely? One as much as the other. Each of us is to blame – as much as we are not to blame. I don’t see men and women as unequal at all in such things.’
‘If you bothered to count up the score, though: men –’
‘Well, if you’d killed your first wife, or the other women, that would rather tip the balance, certainly. But otherwise you can’t run things on a profit and loss account between people.’
She paused, tidying up the paper plates before looking out over the deep blue sea.
‘Do you have – secrets?’ she said at last, still gazing out at the ocean.
‘Professional secrets?’
‘No. Wife-beating, drink?’ She picked up the nearly empty wine bottle, offering it to me gently. The sun was just beneath the canopy now, settling down in the sky for a blazing afternoon. ‘You peep through keyholes?’ she went on shading her eyes. ‘Read other people’s letters. What is it?’
‘Worse. I tend to be possessive.’ I poured myself a last glass.
‘Ah! The heavy paterfamilias?’
‘I’ve not had children.’
‘Perhaps that’s why. The women were everything.’
‘Possibly.’
I looked down at Clare then, playing in the sand beneath us, or rather obsessed with it, running it endlessly through her fingers, from one cupped hand into another, then back again. As I watched she stopped suddenly before starting off on another manic pursuit, spinning a plastic bucket round by its handle, with great dexterity, on the very tip of her index finger.
I said, ‘With you there’d be children, wouldn’t there? Clare’s half a dozen in one.’
I was rushing my fences. But age as much as youth can have its sudden fevers, its imperatives. The sky was lead-blue all the way down to the horizon. And yet the sea glittered, the waves capped with froth, for there was still that summer wind from the south, flapping the canopy gently above us. The breeze cooled my cheeks.
One day all this would be lost to both of us: the marine vision, the soft airs, lunch in summer. The cliché struck me forcibly, of loss, an end of things. Pain came then, just as strongly as hope arrived two weeks later as we left the lobby of the Avenida Palace Hotel. Laura must have seen it in my face.
‘We’d share the burden, you mean?’ she said, looking down at Clare. ‘Or do you want to marry me?’ she added brightly, almost mockingly.
‘Both. They’d go together wouldn’t they?’
‘Marriage?’ She looked at me quizzically, suddenly serious.
‘Well, that’s too grand, perhaps. Sounds too formal. I suppose – I’m too old,’ I went on, backing out, piling up the excuses. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Oh don’t be! Not at all. That’d be fine. If you think –’ She leant across, pausing.
‘What?’
‘Clare is more than a handful. A big commitment – to me, I mean.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘You see, I think she can get better, with a lot of love, attention, effort. Oh, not the child psychologists, the quacks. We’ve tried that. Just me.’
‘Or us. You said it was Willy dying that had put her back so much.’
Laura smiled. ‘You can’t just pick new fathers up off the street though, can you?’
‘Or wives.’
‘It’s barely six weeks, since you came out here.’
‘You count the weeks?’
‘Yes,’ she said candidly. ‘I have.’
‘Well then?’
‘Oh, I love you. That’s not the problem.’ She looked down at Clare again.
‘Nor that either, then,’ I said. ‘Unless you think she’s taken against me. Or would do, if I took Willy’s place in that way.’
‘I don’t know. She likes you now, I know that. But if we lived together …’
Clare herself answered the problem later that afternoon, when we’d all swum out to a wooden raft, anchored fifty yards from the shore. She and Laura were up on the platform, I was still lolling in the water, my arms on the edge.
‘Come up!’ Clare said urgently. ‘Come up! Please!’
Yet there was nothing imperious in her tone. She was simply worried, frightened that I might sink or disappear or swim back to shore on my own. She put her small hands out, gripping my wrist, tugging at me strongly. I joined them, heaving myself out of the water and onto the burning wood so that the whole raft pitched and the water boomed and belched among the drums beneath.
We lay in the sun for five minutes, the light too bright in our eyes to look at each other for more than odd seconds. Clare knelt over my back, scooping up the sea beside her, trickling it through her hands so that it fell in little cool points all over my skin. I could just see Laura, the line of her body
like a run of small golden hills against the light, stretched out in front of me, lying on her back, one arm across her eyes, the other barely six inches from my nose. I could see the fine hairs like a forest on her wrist.
The ocean warbled all round us, the sounds from the small beach drowned in the afternoon heat. Without looking at me Laura moved her hand, blindly searching out the features on my face, before finally letting her fingers come to rest on my lips. She spoke then – but softly, her voice lost in the sea murmur.
‘What?’ I looked up.
‘I said “Yes”,’ she said.
*
The garden in Cascais had some strange trees round its edges – strange to me at least: like overgrown olive trees, the branches extraordinarily twisted, with heavily crusted bark, the whole blown sideways from many years in the south wind. They were old cork trees, last remnants of a time when this slope that led down to the sea had been part of an estate attached to a large house on the hill immediately behind Cascais.
The big house was long gone and all the open land, too, cut up years before into half-acre plots and filled now with expensive villas, ranch-style bungalows, ugly hotels, or tactless modern apartment buildings.
But Laura’s parents, Captain and Mrs Warren, when they’d left England more than thirty years before, had bought one of these empty plots intact and kept it that way, a last completely rural garden, a largely overgrown retreat amidst the vulgar glamour all round. Their house had originally been a farm building on the edge of the old estate and, apart from a new terrace looking out over the little harbour, they had left the property as it had been, a simple two-storied whitewashed house with thick bright umber slates running down a single sloping roof above.
