by Joseph Hone
*
I was sitting in one of the pews myself, collar opened, the smoked saucer spectacles peering at me, handing me a glass of water. Helen Jackson was behind her. They were both talking, but I couldn’t take in a word of what they said. The vision of those years in Cairo was still there, astonishingly real, like a dream remembered immediately on waking. I felt if I got up then and there and walked out of the room my feet would immediately sink into the desert, the fields of berseem clover around Maadi where the school had been, the hard cracked earth of the football pitch. I would float away down the feeder canal beyond the last goalpost, past the line of ragged Scots fir, sink happily into the murky water where the bilharzia snails lurked, host to that small fatiguing worm which could now freely feast on me as I trailed away to join the river.
I was suddenly filled, completely inhabited, by this past – these days of teaching and loving, before spying and marriage. I could feel the weight and texture of each of those years – as if the years had been stones in my hand, each one a clear representation of the pain, the pleasure, the ultimate stupidity of that time.
I knew then I’d never teach again, never run back that way. I wanted none of it – nothing, except one thing: the chance now of making good these lost opportunities, the wrong turnings taken long ago. And then, I thought, I’ve heard this idea somewhere before, quite recently. Someone had said it to me. Who? I drank the water.
‘Are you all right?’ Helen Jackson looked at me.
‘Yes, yes. Just faint, that’s all. The journey, culture shock. Wheel said it might happen. Lucky I wasn’t up at a high window.’
The curtains had been pulled across again, covering up the rest of the basement, isolating us. One of the other teachers had quickly taken charge of the children, distracting them with a new game. I could hear them moving about, enacting some nursery rhyme, with one child running round in a circle, chanting:
‘I sent a letter to my love
And on the way I dropped it,
And one of you has picked it up
And put it in your pocket.
It wasn’t you, it wasn’t you,
It wasn’t you,
But it was YOU!’
Then there were the sounds of mad scampering round and round the room. ‘I sent a letter to my love …’ I remembered then. It had been in her letter to Graham, something about the past: ‘We think we have experienced the past …’ Yes, that was it. ‘… because, willy nilly, we have lived through it. But there were hundreds of turnings … which we knew about then but never took. I want to take them now.’ That was it, I was sure; that was her real absorption – this cartography of previous time. And I wanted to ask her about it at once. Why did she want this? What was her old life? What had gone wrong in it? At that moment all this seemed the most relevant business in the world, against which our earlier preoccupations about Graham paled. I hadn’t realised it until then, that this was what she and I really had in common – not just Graham, but a passionate attachment to an unfulfilled past.
We left the basement, moving past the suddenly quiet children, the little woman shepherding us like refugees being taken to a railhead. She had ceased to elaborate on her educational theories; Spock and Froebel and Pestalozzi died in her. Clearly, neither she nor they meant anything to us. Victims of some older, deeply punishing educational tradition, we had stormed into her firm new reason, mad and dangerous, tarred with phobias, nightmares, nursery resentments, fainting spells, upsetting all her dreamless enlightenment.
On the way out into the street I nearly fell again, into the arms of a man coming in the doorway, a tall fellow with a Pancho Villa moustache.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I am sorry,’ as though it had been his fault. He was English.
‘People from everywhere. They must do well,’ I said, doing my collar up in the bright rushing air.
‘They do. But I didn’t. I’ll find somewhere else. I’d sooner they didn’t go to nursery school at all. All these theories. And tough Madames. Hungry?’
‘What?’ I was still dazed – with the bright light now as much as anything. It seemed to be forcing itself down on me, cutting through the tall sheets of concrete, swinging round my head dangerously like a plumb-line in the quick wind.
‘Eating. Food. Fainting like that. You know, you’re thin as a rake.’
‘I should “look after myself” you mean? That’s very English. Like a landlady. What about my finding an apartment?’
‘Okay, you don’t have to eat. I should care.’
‘No. I’m sorry.’
We stood on the sidewalk outside the church – arguing, the childless couple again, married too long. No, I thought, not that again, not that.
I said, ‘Yes, I’d like something. Maybe I could do the apartment business another day? I’m exhausted.’
‘There’s a French place lower down on Amsterdam. Norman – or Breton. I’m not sure. It’s supposed to be good. Shall we try it?’
*
The taxi cruised down Amsterdam. I’d not yet become used to the long straight avenues, the size of the huge cars that floated about the place, gliding in and out of lanes like boats. Everything I’d learnt was so clearly from a smaller, more careful world. The huge heights, the long lengths and depths of Manhattan, the hard grid of the city – there was no subtlety but it spoke of things that I’d missed hearing in a long time. It said: ‘Things are as they seem here.’ It was blunt. There was no mystery, beauty or imagination about it. And for once – that day, the light showering down and the huge tin cigars floating about around us – I liked that. The lines of shoddy buildings and transient, three-dollar hotels, shops with steel gratings over the windows, the taxi doors locked on the inside – one knew the risks here at least, the facts – knew where you stood. And it was almost a balm – this horror, this open wound of the island – after all the polite murder, the old-school-tie men in Whitehall, their graceful houses in SW1. If you died here I felt it would be in open combat; if you were happy in the city it would be a condition truly earned, without provisos, conventions, compromises, traditions – a true state, free from the drag of the past.
‘You’re prickly. As well as thin,’ she said as though I was a fruit for bottling.
‘No. It’s just the old clichés. They weary me.’
‘But you are thin as a rake. You don’t look to have eaten properly in years.’
She was on to me again, Sherlock Holmes inspecting the mud on my boots, seemingly caring only for the present, but anxious really for the past: who was I? What had happened to George Graham? But now I had the same ambitions. Not just ‘How had she met George Graham?’ But who was she? I wanted to go right back. I was as anxious for her past as she was for mine. We’d become lovers in that respect.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let’s make up for it then. Let’s make up for it.’
4
The restaurant was small and crowded – and Norman, I suppose, Au Gars Normand. There were coats of arms from the region and photographs of old Tour de France cyclists on the walls, the traditional poster of Mont St Michel, and dark, diamond-paned, leaded windows which completely drowned the light from the street.
We had come to some happy spice island moored just off a barbarous shore. The air was warm with strange savouries, something sharply burnt, thyme crushed with lemon, the perfume of many freshly opened bottles. I thought of my four years on old mutton in Durham, and of that moment several weeks before when I had struggled with McCoy in ‘E’ block, yelling at him, trying to punish him for all the lost time. Normandy had been a place of mine – a school trip to Dieppe one Easter and afterwards, when I’d worked for McCoy in Holborn, I’d slipped away there for odd weekends: the boat train pulling out of Victoria Station, through the orchards and chalk lands, wheels groaning round the pier at Newhaven: then the sudden grip in the stomach, already abroad on the French steamer, the early light-headed nonsense of travel: the burnt tobacco, a Pernod or some other rash drink in the saloo
n, and later – watching a foreign spring come up from a train window vanishing southwards. All that expectation; and that at least had never disappointed. And so I had shouted at McCoy about Muscadet and lobsters like a crazed emperor, clamouring murderously for cheese, creamed chicken and sole Dieppoise. What a fool I’d been, I thought to myself afterwards, as if these things were the one saving grace in all the world, the only part of life worth regaining outside those granite walls.
Yet perhaps I’d been right: the act of eating and drinking, the agreed necessity, companionship in that shared desire – why deny these were fair ambitions, sure emblems of our humanity? It was not the food I cared so much about but the truce it brought, the peace. And I felt then that I’d been right to shout about it, to try and kill McCoy for it – for here it all was at least, at last the recompense, so that there were no more questions to be asked, no anger, no other answer needed.
We waited for a table next a small bar by the curtained doorway, almost a zinc comptoir in the old fashion, with a French girl who managed the hats and coats and moonlighting with the drinks. The whole place was such a genuine import – with a signed photograph of Georges Carpentier behind the bar – that I thought when the girl came back she might say: ‘Monsieur, vous désirez …?’ But she didn’t. She said nothing, simply looked at me with a query in her awkward smile.
‘What would you like while we wait – a Pernod or some other rash drink?’ Helen Jackson got a long thin cigarette out of her bag and fiddled with it.
‘Whisky, please.’
‘It may not go with the wine – that’s if you like wine. Grain and grape.’
‘So you have clichés too, do you?’
‘I think I’ll try a Pernod. It’s years since I’ve had one.’
‘Whisky, please – just with water. Does that make it any better?’
I lit her cigarette.
‘Fine.’
The French girl turned away to arrange things. We stood there – she at an angle to the bar, elbow on the wood; I was facing it squarely, leaning against it, both arms outstretched. The drinks came and with them a plate of black olives. I raised my glass, but the word ‘cheers’ seemed out of place. I’d denounced clichés.
‘Cheers,’ she said in an English way, with that thought-reading ability she held so lightly.
‘All right. You win.’
We drank, saying nothing. We had made a silence in the noisy place, intended and happy. Waiting. White clouds stormed slowly in my glass, the medicine of anis on my tongue. Zibib. Cairo on the hottest days when the coldest Stella beer did nothing but increase the sweat. I picked up an olive and bit into it decisively, and then into another.
‘Sorry.’ I pushed the saucer towards her and she took one without a word. The pips started to pile up on another dish. We drank. She smoked. I smoked too. It struck me suddenly that she liked smoking and drinking, as a man might – not as a necessary social attribute, to survive bores in smart drawing-rooms, but as something genuinely enjoyed, for its own sake. Over all her appropriate surfaces here was a minute crack, perhaps, a depth to possible excess willingly embarked on, a happy fault in the otherwise so carefully tended geography of her life. Of course, one might have said that she appealed to me because I shared these tastes, because she was simply a drinking man’s woman, a half-bottle girl. And perhaps there was some truth in that – sisters-under-the-skin in the thirsty kingdom. Certainly her appeal had begun. It started just then, at the bar. I know, because of all the descriptions I must make here, I feel that the small business of her just standing there, carefully chewing olives before lunch, is the most important, the most necessary.
You will have to try and see what I saw – exactly. No other woman’s face will do, or an approximation, a face and body close to hers, or some sheer invention or a shape made up from other faces. It will have to be her alone – the easy bearing, the precise falls of flesh and cloth: the particular slope of shoulder, the sunflower-coloured Donald Davies dress, the loose sleeves crushed against the counter, fingers resting on the glass. It will have to be that particular hand, fairly flat and wide with ordinary fingers. Yet the long wrist, longer than most, disappearing into the yellow tunnel of wool. And you may not have another face but this one – the one staring at me lightly now, this face that has aged without telling anybody, yet which is a curtain behind which some people have been told everything. A naïve face that immediately takes on depth when you look at it properly, the large eyes gathering knowledge, the long cut of the mouth, sometimes so formless, becoming firm with intention the whole expression grasping definition, meaning, purpose from nowhere, so that in the passage of a few seconds you have looked at two separate people.
You will have to see this warm envelope of skin, the stamp of bright colours, the lines of life all meeting eagerly on this one moment of time, a particular presence cutting deeply into present experience, giving herself to it, being carried along with it. And yet for all this happy commitment to the immediate, a mysteriously inhabited envelope as well, trailing long sheet anchors in the past – not the completely buoyant spirit but one which, as I had discovered from her letters, was as deeply linked with previous time as to any present moment of whisky and olives.
I had been surprised initially by the force of her letters to Graham – as one must be by the intense fact, the unalterable evidence of another’s passion suddenly disturbed by an outsider – and surprised again by the glimpsed countries beyond, the times and places of its being.
And now, waiting for lunch, I was able to see in Helen Jackson the two people together properly – the innocent and the old – and feel their real weight for the first time, as through a stereoscopic device where a quite ordinary photograph, a landscape of hills, say, will take on completely new values, where it ceases to be a flat representation, one truth at one time, but becomes a succession of different truths going back over many different times.
She looked at me and I at her – just as the door opened and someone outside shouted ‘Hello,’ just as the girl left us for the coats and hats, just as the waiter came and told us our table was ready … And that is the moment you must see: a look where language is well lost, where one starts to live, feel life, under the impetus of another person’s regard – after which, with such shared regard, two people must then live differently; where speech will be in a new tongue, the whole grammar of exchange made afresh.
We drank Sancerre to begin with, a year old. The smell of it was so fresh and rich that one feared to taste it and lose touch with a vineyard – the wooden fruit-filled aroma, of chalk soil and rain on some small hill, that blew out of the glass, moist and chill, a cloudy genie released from the lamp that I cradled in my hand. And at last we seemed to be able to talk of other things besides George Graham. She must have noticed my unusual application to the food, sensed something of my four-year denials, for I could barely restrain myself over the menu, nor the attack I made on the meal when it came.
She said, watching me, ‘Food is going back isn’t it? I mean – the basic reassurance – of one’s right to greed and sympathy, like a baby. It’s just a chore for most of us – most of the time, something to fill the day with. But you eat the other way, as if your whole life depended on the meal. As if it was your last.’
‘You mean “Do this in memory of me”? Christ, I’m just eating.’ I looked at her, pausing over the blue-point oysters.
‘Yes, but not the gourmet or the gourmand, that’s not you. You eat as if you were – as if the whole food thing was something you’d lost.’
‘Symbolic of good fellowship and warmth? That’s a pretty common reason for going to restaurants.’
‘Have you lost that?’
‘Maybe. Like Rip Van Winkle.’
I let the oyster lie in my mouth for a moment, then bit it gently before it slipped away. ‘Food is a homecoming, if that’s what you meant – when you said eating was “going back”. A house that’s always there, even when everything else has disappeare
d. A constant. It doesn’t disappoint.’
I sipped the sea-water and lemon juice from the last oyster and the waiter took our plates away. We had ordered the plat du jour: gigot d’agneau de Beaumanière. I didn’t know quite what it meant. But apparently it was the main smell in the room – the leg of lamb cooked in pastry somehow, with veal and herbs the waiter had tried to explain – and the smell was good. The Sancerre in its ice bucket was sharp and cold as ever but now its taste of orchards was mixed with that of the sea, and the astringent lemon, and when you drank it, it was neither the sea nor the wine that was in your mouth but some new flavour, echoing down the throat, indeterminate and frail.
The waiter carved the gigot we’d ordered from a small table beside us. The Beaumanière consisted of a parcel of brown, egg-basted pastry which enclosed the leg of lamb, which in turn – the bone removed – enclosed a black stuffing of mushrooms, pork, and veal. Each time he sliced it, the knife fell through the strange football without any resistance. It was as firm yet as pliant as ice cream. Afterwards, he carefully spooned up the debris of herbs and stuffing and laid it over the slices of meat. Nice, but a fiddly way to cook a leg of lamb, I thought.
‘You wrote about that to George Graham, didn’t you?’ I asked. ‘I’m sorry to drag it up again – but it seemed to absorb you.’
‘What?’
‘This “going back” thing. About not wanting to re-live the past, that it had nothing to do with nostalgia – but to “live now all that was unlived then”. I think you said “What was so un-lived then? You’ve lived pretty fully surely?” Yet you seem to see yourself as somehow unawakened – the sleeping beauty, Rip Van Winkle.’
‘It’s too long, that story.’
‘Of course it is. You’re all of thirty-five.’
‘Well, if it’s not nostalgic – it’s unrealistic, isn’t it?’
‘Why? Being unhappy with a man? That’s not unrealistic. That’s exactly what people mean when they want to change, to divorce: the chance to live what was unlived, to move away from an unlivable life. You wrote about that to Graham too.’
