The Rose Gardener

by Charlotte Link

  In truth, then, there was no reason for him to still be on Guernsey, but something kept him from getting on the next plane and flying back to London. He had never been one to lie to himself — sometimes he conjectured that he would never have become an alcoholic if he had had a better command of the act of self-delusion — and so he was also prepared to admit to himself, this midday in The Terrace, that what was holding him back was the fear of his empty apartment, the fear of his empty life.

  He had always hated to come home and not have anyone there waiting for him. A man of his age should have had a wife to greet; two somewhat rambunctious kids, who were just about to begin their teenage years; a tail-wagging dog and a purring cat. He should have to be bombarded with urgent news, like that the cleaning lady had quit, that the math teacher gave unfair grades, and that not a word would be spoken ever again to a certain former best friend.

  “Oh god,” he would say then, “could I maybe wash my hands and sit down first?” And they would follow him into the bathroom and keep on talking at him, and he wouldn’t pour himself a whiskey, because he wouldn’t have the time to. He also wouldn’t feel this vacuum in his life that made it necessary to reach for alcohol to be able to cope.

  A mucked-up life, he thought, and the hopelessness gripped him with ice-cold fingers despite the heat of the day. A completely mucked-up life.

  Maybe that was also why Helene’s death had hit him so hard. Maybe any death in his circle of close friends or relations would have deeply affected him at this point in time. A life coming to such a sudden end showed to him with cruel clarity the limits of the time that was accorded to him, same as every other being under the sun. Even if it could probably be ruled out that he’d be found lying on a country path with his throat cut, still he would one day stand before the final exit, and it would be just as inescapable for him as it was for Helene when she had met her end. Helene had often deemed her life a waste. Just like he did. How bitter it would be to die with this knowledge.

  He considered whether he could summon the energy to get up and get himself a third glass of wine, and was about to stand and join the line at the bar again when he saw Maya coming towards him.

  She approached him in such a determined way that it was clear to him that she’d long since seen him, and there was no sense anymore in putting his head down and making like there wasn’t anybody there. He thought of the joy with which he’d once greeted every chance meeting with her, because in every encounter he had seen a chance for the two of them. It was new for him to wish himself in a mouse hole in order not to have to speak to her.

  Probably, he thought, almost amazed, this is what it feels like when a relationship is finally over.

  He stood up to greet her. Her lips felt cold on his cheek. She wasn’t wearing makeup, and he saw that her eyes were red from crying.

  “Hello, Maya,” he said.

  “I was standing over by the church,” she explained, “and I saw you sitting here. I wanted to know if it was really you. I thought you’d be back in London by now!”

  “No, I’m not,” he responded somewhat lamely, and then gestured towards the chair on the other side of his table. “Wouldn’t you like to sit down? I was just going to get myself another glass of wine. Can I bring you something?”

  “Bring me a water,” she said, and added after a barely noticeable hesitation, “please. I can’t stomach any alcohol in this heat.”

  He stepped inside the café and took his place in the line which was only slowly moving forward. Most of the people wanted to eat something at this time of day and were having difficulty coming to a decision. Alan looked out at the table where Maya was sitting. She reached into her purse, pulled out her sunglasses and put them on. Normally, she’d have used this gesture as an opportunity to draw attention to herself, would’ve thrown back her long hair, crossed her legs, and sent a defiant look around her before hiding her eyes, with their long, sensuous lashes, behind the dark lenses.

  But this time she didn’t put on any hint of a show. She didn’t even look around to see if there was an interesting man sitting somewhere who possibly had his eye on her. She stared straight ahead of her at the table’s surface, and bit her fingernails.

  Finally he’d gotten their drinks and he went back to her.

  “If you’d like a bit of wine …,” he said. “You look like you could use it.”

  “No, thanks,” she sipped at her water. It was entirely unusual for Alan not to see any red trace of lipstick on the edge of the glass after she had set the water down again. “You should maybe switch to mineral water, too.”

  “Wine suits me better right now.”

  “Whatever you say.” She took another sip. “And why,” she asked, “aren’t you in London?”

  He fed her the same lie he’d told his secretary. “I’ve got to look after my mother. I can’t just leave her all by herself.”

  But of course Maya knew better, “Oh, come on! If there’s any person on this earth that you can always leave on her own without having to worry, it’s your mother! You certainly don’t have to stay here on her account.”

  “I know my mother a little better than you do.”

  She smiled, but it was a sad smile. “Keep telling yourself that then. If you’ve got to have a reason to be able to stay, go ahead and stick with your mother.”

  “And you’re going to stay too? I mean — you won’t actually be going back to London?”

  “Where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to live on? I don’t even have the money for a plane ticket, not even for boat fare.” She lifted her head a little. Alan saw that she was trying with this movement to hold back the tears that already were in her eyes again.

  “I’ve mucked everything up. I’ve mucked up my life.”

  In a strange way it touched him to hear her say these words. A few minutes before he had had the same thought — concerning his own life. And he’d thought of how Helene had often spoken like that. How many people, he reflected, cudgel themselves with this thought? It had to do with how we’re allotted such a cruelly short amount of time. And that we have so many expectations, so many dreams, plans, desires. And at the same time are so weak. We stumble along in pursuit of what we want to do, and meanwhile we keep running out of breath and have the sense that we’re failing.

  He reached for her hand across the table and pressed it, briefly. It was a loving, fatherly gesture that held in it nothing more of the erotic thrill there had usually been between them.

  “You’re so young,” he said, “you’ll bounce back.”

  “Oh, just look at me!” she replied forcefully and took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were even redder than they were before. “You can already see it in my face, right? Anyway you’ve always said so. That it was already showing!”

  He studied her. Soberly and objectively, as he’d never looked at her before. She looked very young, like a sad, stubborn child with pale cheeks and a red nose. But it was true what she said: there was something hardened, something common in her features. Alcohol and late nights might still be leaving her body untouched, her skin didn’t yet look like that of a person who drinks and smokes too much. But for years she had been easy to have, had thrown herself at both dockworkers and suntanned tourists whose surfboards seemed surgically attached. Her irreverent life had shaped her features: Cheap, he thought, and was at the same time horrified at how merciless the thought was. She looks cheap.

  It didn’t escape her, what was playing out in his head.

  “Yes,” she said softly. “You see it too, then.”

  “Oh, Maya,” he said wearily. “We’ve talked about this so many times. There’s just nothing more to say on the subject.”

  “Will we see each other again?”

  “For sure. I’ll keep coming here from time to time. We’re sure to cross paths.”

 
“Good then. What do you call what it is we’ll be? Good friends. We’ll be really good friends.”

  “Better than if we keep trying to have a relationship. Eventually we’d barely find a friendly word for each other. It would end in hatred on both sides. I like the new version better.”

  “There will be other men in my life,” she said abruptly. Something had changed in her tone of voice. A seed of hope seemed to be growing within her once more. As beaten down as she was, as much as Helene’s death had shaken her, as shocked as she was at the end of the relationship between the two of them, still she had strong powers of resistance. She had lived dissolutely, had never taken care of herself, but she still possessed a highly developed capacity for recovery.

  She’ll pick herself back up, he thought. She’s already there.

  And then he saw what had stirred her attention, what had made her sit up and become more sure of herself. A guy came out onto the terrace from inside the restaurant. The same greasy guy with whom he’d seen her come up Hauteville Road and disappear into her apartment. The rotten visage that he’d never have been able to describe from memory was now standing before his eyes, crystal clear — and also that dreadful afternoon that he’d spent in boundless, self-agonizing pain outside her building, the closed, unwelcoming windows of her apartment in front of him and in his imagination pictures of lustful intercourse, as Maya gave herself to this guy who could have played the clichéd gangster in any third-rate sex-and-crime show.

  He saw the man walk between rows of tables, he held a glass of beer in his hand and was obviously looking for a free spot. He was accompanied by another man who, to tell by his age, could have been his father; but his complexion and his eyes were both too dark for that to have been the case, and, besides that, he looked a few degrees more respectable. He was also holding a glass of beer, also looking around. Obviously neither had seen Maya yet.

  “Isn’t that …” Alan asked.

  Maya quickly put her sunglasses back on. She had likely become aware just then of how unattractive her swollen eyes looked. “You know Gérard?” she asked.

  “Gérard? I didn’t know that was his name, and I can’t say I know him, either. But I saw you with him once. A half a year ago. You two were just on the way to your apartment.” Strange, he could say this with complete calm. He’d never been able to do so before. It didn’t hurt anymore. Emptiness was there, a great deal of emptiness, but no pain. And he understood how much the pain had filled him, and very tentatively the realization dawned on him that people sometimes couldn’t rid themselves of pain because it seemed more bearable than the nothingness behind it, and that in this complicated mechanism of the human psyche, something lay hidden of the secret of his years-long, self-destructive attachment to Maya.

  “The guy looks like a criminal,” he said, and the beginnings of an unusual relief coursed through him, because he had bid farewell to Maya’s world and would never again have to share a woman with men who in normal circumstances he wouldn’t even have shaken hands with. “Are you still with him?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I haven’t seen him for awhile, since I, as you know, was in London. I also wasn’t exactly together with him. I just …”

  “You just slept with him every now and then, I know.” He looked at her thoughtfully. “Maya, it’s none of my business anymore, and I hope you don’t take me for a schoolmaster again. But be a bit more careful with your choice of bedmate. Something horrible happened to Helene. The world can be rather cruel and wicked. And your … friend over there really does look like a …”

  “Like a criminal, you said so already.” She turned her gaze away from Gérard and towards him. Behind the deep black lenses of her glasses, he couldn’t see her eyes at all. “He is a criminal, Alan. A rather rotten, villainous crook. The guy he’s with, too, by the way. I made it with a criminal and I thought it was incredibly hot. I’d never had that before, you know? When you live like I do, you always need a new kick, ‘cause eventually it all gets boring. It got me riled up when I …” She said nothing more, but instinct told Alan what she’d wanted to say.

  “The attraction was in the combination,” he finished the thought for her. “To alternate between going to bed with me and going to bed with him. With a lawyer and with a crook.”

  “By now,” she said, “not even he wants anything more to do with me.”

  “You’ll only know if you try,” Alan said casually. “You were gone for awhile. Maybe he’s interested in you again.”

  He’d hurt her with this remark, he could see it in the light twitching at the corner of her mouth, and his words struck him immediately as being very childish. He’d just warned her about guys like Gérard, and in the next moment he was daring her to test her effect on him — and that only to carefully play with a new freedom, that allowed him to endure Maya without any disturbance to his emotions.

  “Sorry, that was stupid,” he said. “Seriously, Maya, stay away from the guy. I don’t know what he’s involved with, but in any case he’s bad company, and …”

  “Would you like to know?” Maya asked.

  “What?

  “What he does. How he earns his dirty money?

  “I don’t know, I …”

  She leaned forward. She came very close to him, he could smell her breath, a mix of cigarette smoke and peppermint candy. She lowered her voice. “You’re a lawyer. If I tell you something right now as a lawyer, you can’t repeat it, right?”

  “I don’t believe I’d like to know what your lover …” He had an uneasy feeling. The matter had nothing to do with him. He didn’t want to know.

  “Maya …”

  Her voice was just a whisper now. “They steal ships. Here, out of the marina. The ships get repainted and renamed and taken to France. It’s a lucrative business. As far as I know they make quite a good profit from it.”

  “Oh God!” He had a bad feeling. “Have you …?”

  She reached in her bag for a cigarette. “I wasn’t directly complicit. But sometimes I … lord, where are my cigarettes?” She’d finally found the pack, took out a crumpled cigarette and accepted a light from Alan.

  “Sometimes I … made a few enquiries,” she went on. “About ships, and about how long their owners would be away, and so on. I mean, yeah,” she obviously noticed his horrified expression and tried to play down the matter further, “every once in awhile — rarely, actually — I scoped out the terrain a bit. That was all. Oh, Alan, don’t look at me like that! That was before, it’s already a rather long time ago. I needed money, and Gérard said …” She broke off. She looked suddenly like a sheepish little girl. “Do you think it’s really bad?” she asked. He’d be needing another glass of wine. He didn’t know what had shaken him so, but suddenly he felt horribly miserable.

  “Oh, Maya!” He was helpless to say anything else.

  “Hello, Franca,” called Beatrice. “Do you know if Alan is back yet? The car isn’t in the driveway, but I figured it could be that …”

  “I haven’t seen him anywhere,” said Franca. “Neither him nor the car. Where was it he drove to?”

  “I don’t know. I assume he was going to St. Peter Port. I’m a bit worried …” Beatrice broke off, bit her lip. It always made her feel disloyal when she spoke to strangers — and in certain respects even Franca counted as such — about her son’s alcohol dependence. Everybody knew anyway, and Franca too, but sometimes she had the sense that as a mother she had to act as if this disease didn’t exist. It seemed to her that in so doing she was protecting Alan from the maliciousness, the gossip, the poison comments of the world. As if through keeping silent about the circumstances of his life she could wrap a kind of cloak around him that would deflect everything that could strike him in his vulnerability. Just as when he was a baby she had wrapped him in a plush quilt, so that drafts couldn’t …

  Nonsen
se, she brought herself to her senses. He’s not a baby anymore! Treat him like a grown man, and that means subjecting him to people’s mercilessly dissecting eyes, no matter how much it might hurt him. He has to be strong enough to endure it.

  “Franca, I’m afraid,” she said. “Things aren’t at all good with Alan. He’s putting off going back to London, he’s living here without any regular activity … It can’t be good. What I’d most like to do is tie him down someplace to keep him from reaching for a bottle, but how am I supposed to make that happen? This very minute he might be sitting in a bar in St. Peter Port getting completely tanked.”

  She and Franca had run into one another in the hall. Beatrice had come from the garden, where she’d been halfheartedly tending to the flower bushes, and Franca was just coming down the stairs. Beatrice noticed how healthy the young woman looked. Her skin had taken on a deep brown tone by then, and the sun had made her hair even lighter. She looked lively and full of expectation. Though she had been grieved by Helene’s death, still, among all the people who had been in some way affected by the tragedy, she seemed the strongest and most healthy. She had all five senses about her and had a firm grip on day-to-day life; she did the shopping, cooked their meals, loaded the washing machine.

  Really, I can’t take any money from her for her stay, thought Beatrice, by now she’s seeing to it that everything here still functions.