by Ali Smith
It was real coffee, he had wanted to tell her. He wanted her to know he was the kind of man who would never make instant. He couldn’t imagine any way of saying it, though, that wasn’t patronizing-sounding. She’d notice when she tasted it, he was sure. He called Philippa Knott on his walk down the road. He blocked the number first; never ever give out the mobile number. Hello Philippa? Dr Michael Smart here, the sound of his voice in the open summer air was strange, bombastic. He fixed their appointment for two p.m. Just on the bend of the road by the start of the woods was a square little Volvo of some kind, parked quite neatly by a ditch. It didn’t look like it had been broken into. Nothing looked forced.
Its door was open. He let himself in, slid back the driver’s seat. He knew nothing about cars. This might not even be her car. But he inserted the key in the ignition and the engine started first time. Magic, he thought. Magic touch. Stroke of luck. She’d probably flooded it, done something with the choke. Something like that. Maybe it had overheated. She’d said she’d been driving all night. He drove it up to the house rehearsing how best to say it. I turned it over a few times and it started sweet as anything. I had a poke about under there and it all seems okay now. I’m not much of a car expert, but I had a little look at it and now I think you’ll find it’s running sweet as a nut.
Sweet as a nut! Michael was still at the table, sitting back and sitting forward, shifting about in his chair. Eve and Astrid were in the kitchen arguing about something. She still hadn’t come back in the room. She would, any moment. It was actually true, he thought. Nuts were sweet. No innuendo. It was innocent. It was an innocent fact. Nuts had a unique sweetness.
Philippa on the other hand had, as soon as she was kissed, put her hand inside his trousers and cupped his balls. She was an ambitious girl. Let’s start at the very beginning, he’d said to her as he’d unbuttoned her top. It’s a very good place to start. But she didn’t get it. He was still explaining as she unzipped him and pulled him out about how it was a camp reference. She had had no idea what he was talking about. Oh, right, she said, that old film, then squeezed him so hard that he couldn’t speak.
It was a little depressing; he couldn’t help feeling misunderstood, cheated even, as he went in under her dress. He liked to give the little speech about Agape and Eros. He liked to tell the story, how he had admired her in class when she’d said ‘ ’. (He’d been ready, and hadn’t needed, to use the moment Philippa Knott had said the thing about Charlotte Brontë being Emily Brontë on valium.) He liked to describe it, how he’d been pacing his study, preoccupied, unable to sleep for nights on end because the witty or clever thing she’d said in the class had revealed to him out of nowhere, as if he had been struck by lightning, that he wanted to take her and have her right then and there regardless, in front of all the others. He liked to tell it like this then sit hangdog on the chair, not his chair at the desk but one of the chairs they themselves sat in, ashamed of himself, shaking his head at himself, looking at the ground. Then the silence. Then the glance up, to see. One (was it Kirsty? Kirsty Anderson, graduated high 2:1, 1998) he had induced ingeniously; she had looked the type. He had recited the fragment about Sappho, I am undone by a beautiful youth, and told her in his quiet voice, I am myself a lesbian. Don’t laugh. I sense myself as feminine, my soul is definitely anima and the thing is I can’t help but love girls and women. (He believed she was now working for the BBC.) They used to like that kind of thing more; he used to use quotes from writers like Lillian Hellman and Alice Walker, writers whose reputations were clearly passing; now it was Philippa Knott’s proposed Contemp. Amer. III dissertation: ‘The American Presidential Erection: images of power in the novels of Philip Roth’. He had sped there on the train thinking he could let her gently know, before he touched her (if she let him touch her), that she’d passed her exams. Pippa passes, he thought he could say gently in her ear; witty and apt. But she’d brought her own condoms and she rolled one on him herself as she propped him back against his desk, leaving him feeling weak, as if hospitalized.
Ten years ago it had been romantic, inspiring, energizing (Harriet, Ilanna, that sweet page-boyed one whose name escaped him now but who still sent a card at Christmas). Five years ago it had still been good (for instance, Kirsty Anderson). Now Michael Smart, with twenty-year-old Philippa Knott jerking about, eyes open, on top of him on his office floor, was worried about his spine. He closed his own eyes. How disappointing it was, he thought, that the film actress Jennifer Beals, whom he’d watched a late-night programme about by chance a couple of months ago on one of the endless channels they now subscribed to at home, had clearly had facial surgery to make herself look like all the other Hollywood women.
He could see the rough wood on the underside of the desk. Maybe Philippa Knott had been the wrong choice. Maybe he should have gone, after all, for the shy redhead, what was her name, Rachel, from Yorkshire, who reputedly wrote poetry and whose dissertation subject was comforting: the importance of authenticity of voice in post-war British working-class literature. Would Rachel have been more authentic? Different from this. But then again. This had its satisfactions. Michael’s brain emptied. He came.
When he could think again, when Philippa Knot climbed off, stood up and rearranged herself, he found he was thinking of Aschenbach in Death in Venice, the moment when he takes sly pleasure in the thought that the delicate beautiful boy will probably die young. She checked her mobile. She had missed a message. She combed her hair and redid her make-up in a hand-mirror she propped on his bookshelves, by the dictionaries. He got up with his back to her, tucked in his shirt, reholed his belt, straightened his crease. Had he had her or had she had him? The teacher fucks the student. The student fucks the teacher. He began talking, because the room was resounding with the little noises of Philippa Knott. Word order was crucial in English, he told her, in a way it wasn’t, interestingly, in many other languages, for instance in German, because subject and object were signalled separately by masculine / feminine inflexion. There wasn’t much call for accidence in English, which had lost its inflexion tendencies in the Middle English period. Accidence won’t happen, he said, ha ha, as he folded the used condom into a sheet of A4 off the top of the pile of old Yeats handouts. O love is the crooked thing, the handout said halfway down. He saw the words. A stanza from one of the pre-Responsibilities poems, from when Yeats was still young. Then the ageing Yeats, trying to restart the dodgy old motor of his virility. Yeats, the old monkey. Philippa was talking about results and degree projections. I did quite well, she was saying. Justine in the office told me. I’m really pleased actually. I got a projected 2:1 for my Shakespeare and a projected 1 for my Victorian and a. Michael had felt suddenly exhausted. Before she’d left she had sat down in her usual seat three along from his desk and got a pen, a foolscap pad and a clutch of shiny Roth paperbacks out of her bag. She sat, waiting. Terribly sorry, Dr Michael Smart said. But we’ll have to do this next time, Philippa. I’m afraid I have other appointments this afternoon.
Okay, she’d said unconcerned, and fished in her bag for her diary.
After she’d gone he looked at his watch. It was 2.24. He stood for the next ten minutes at his window. It looked into an empty courtyard, nothing in it, brick on brick. He liked it, usually. He could usually make something of it. But today the courtyard was irrefutably nothing.
He switched his computer on and checked his email. One hundred and seventy-three new messages. The weight of admin in this profession was becoming more than a joke.
He walked the length of the department corridor and met nobody else; he listened at a couple of doors and heard nobody. Friday afternoon, post-exams, not exactly surprising. When he called in at the office for his snail mail Justine was polite but untalkative, seemed disdainful. Secretaries were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. He hated it when they took against him. It made it such hard work. Justine never liked him at the starts and ends of term. It was possible that she was jealous.
H
e washed himself in the staff toilet, dried himself off with paper towels. He looked away from himself in the mirror. Back in his room he went through the new emails and deleted without reading the seven messages from Emma-Louise Sackville, who had just graduated with a rather poor 2:2 and was at the needy, tearful stage. Even if her results had been better, no difference. He made it very clear. He took pains to make it clear all year. After graduation there were no more supervisions.
He switched off the computer. He locked his door.
He thought about going home, to the empty house across the city. There would be no maudlin kids there with their foreheads high and full of misery, there would be no preoccupied grumbling dark-eyed Eve. The house to himself. He looked at his watch. Too late. He walked to the station. The streets were full of irritating young and happy people. He sat down on the train. The carriage was sparsely peopled, unlike on the way in, when the train had been crowded and sun-flashy, the trees cornucopiae of summer greenness and his mood as buoyant as the trees were. He had shot into the city today like a fool, laughing to himself at the local villages’ free paper left on the seat beside him. Coffee morning advertisement with an appearance by the Norfolk Beatles. The Norfolk Beatles! A report of local vandalism. Several angry letters about a group of travellers putting up semi-permanent caravans on some local fields. (Which begged the question: was there really such a thing as a semi-permanent caravan?) A column about the mystery of who could be stealing the council paper-recycling boxes from one particular village. He had been looking forward to telling someone, Justine, Tom, maybe Nigel if Nigel was in, how funny, how odd, how interesting a place it was they were staying for the summer from the point of view of social interaction and demographics, in terms of metaphor for the larger England. He would have told the stories and everybody would have laughed.
But now that he was headed back there the untold stories made him feel dull and squalid inside. The train doors shut with a cheap beeping noise. He should have gone home when he thought about it, when he had the chance. They should have gone to Suffolk. Nobody went to Norfolk. Everybody went to Suffolk. Dr Michael Smart would never be head of department, not even acting head, via Norfolk. Tom was in Suffolk. Marjory Dint was in Suffolk. She had her own summer place there. Of course, the Dints were loaded. They could afford it. Several people he could think of were in Suffolk, and several others he didn’t know about were probably there too. The train swung out of the station. It was one of those lightweight unimportant trains. His heart was heavy. It was heavier than the train. It was heavy all the way through the suburbs. His eyelids were heavy too. He fell asleep.
But it was when he woke up God knew where, in the middle of nowhere, that he saw the empty seat opposite him.
It was just a seat with no one in it, just an empty seat on a train. There were lots of empty seats exactly like it throughout the carriage; there was hardly anyone on this unpleasant train. The seat’s fabric was worn and grubby, municipally brightly coloured, as if for children; these trains were an embarrassment when it came to design. But now something in him dismissed what it looked like etc., because what mattered more than anything was that he knew, from nowhere, as if he had been struck by, well, yes, lightning, that he wanted that woman Amber from the house this morning sitting there opposite him in the empty seat.
He shook his head. He laughed at himself. Struck twice by lightning in the one day. He’d just had a girl. Dr Michael Smart here. Incorrigible. He settled back in his seat, closed his eyes again and tried to imagine that woman, Amber, sucking him off in the train toilet.
But it didn’t work.
He actually couldn’t imagine it.
How curious, Dr Michael Smart thought to himself.
He tried again.
He put her down on her knees in front of him at the back of a near-empty cinema. But all he could see was the shaft of light from the projector above him, the movement of lazy dust in it as it changed with the frames, and ahead of him a stray pinpoint of light reflecting back off the screen where the screen had been tinily pierced.
He put her down in front of him on the floor of a London taxi in winter. All he could see was how the lights of London streets and traffic coalesced in the pinpoints of rain on the car window.
Curiouser and curiouser, as the paedophilic mathematician wrote in his book for children, Dr Michael Smart noted cleverly to himself.
But actually it was a little disturbing that all he could picture her doing was sitting there, opposite him, on this train. That was possible. That was perfectly possible. There she was. She was looking out of the train window. She was examining her nails. She was examining the ends of her hair. She was reading a book in a language he didn’t know.
He thought about how those two girls in the tent, when he was a boy, sat him down between them, fed him the minced meat and onion they’d fried on their blue-flamed primus stove and ignored him, leaving him dozing against them with his book open at page one in front of him, warm in their body heat as they talked to each other over the top of his head in a language he didn’t recognize any of the words of.
Epiphany! dear God it was an epiphany! the empty seat filled with nothing but goodness was a holy moment! and on a filthy train crossing the filthy fens!
But here was a new truth for Dr Michael Smart–because who in the world gave a damn, when he was really alive, like this, about ‘epiphany’, in other words about what things were called, about devices and conceits and rules and the boundaries of genres, the learned chronologies, the sorted and given definitions of things? Now he had finally understood, now he knew for the first time, exactly what it meant, what the Joyce and the droney old bore of a Woolf and the Yeats and the Roth and the Larkin, the Hemingway, the authentic post-war working-class voices, the Browning, the Eliot, the Dickens and the who else, William Thackeray, Monsieur Apollinaire, Thomas Mann, old Will Shakescene, Dylan Thomas drunk and dead and forever young and easy under the appleboughs, and all of them, all the others, and every page he had ever read, every exegesis he had ever exegesed (was that even a word? who cared? it was a word now, wasn’t it?) had been about.
This.
He had sat opposite her at supper. She looked the kind of girl, no, the kind of good full adult woman, that you’d pick up in a car on the road and give a lift to the next village, then she’d get out of your car and wave goodbye and you’d never see her again, but you’d never forget it.
She looked like the dishevelled, flower-strewn girl in Botticelli’s Spring.
He had got off the train surprised at himself. He had stood for a moment in the sun. He had stood watching simple sunlight glinting off his car in the station car park. He had felt strange, different, shiny under his clothes, so much so that on his way home he had begun to think he should maybe take an antihistamine. When he got home the Volvo was still in the drive. He parked his car alongside it. He walked round the side of the house. She was lying on her front in the garden examining something, like a girl. When he saw her his heart was a wing in the air.
He had made supper. He had made an excellent supper. Is she staying for supper? he’d asked Eve when she came in. I’ve no idea, Eve said, have you asked her to? He’d called to her in the garden, where she was lying on the grass with Astrid. Would she like to stay for supper? Astrid, sweet Astrid, called back that she would. Now she had pushed her chair back and left the table, gone upstairs, and Michael Smart had opened his eyes into what he knew was light, like a coma patient after years of senseless dark. He could see Eve. He could see Astrid. He could see his own hands like he’d never seen them. He had seen the light. He was the light. He had been lit, struck, like a match. He had been enlightened. He was photosynthetic; he had grown green. He was leafy and new. He looked around him and everything he saw shone with life. The glass. The spoon. His own hands. He held them up. They floated. He was floating, he hovered in air here on this chair. He was a defiance of gravity. He was fiery, full of fire, full of a new and uncorrupted fuel. He picked u
p his glass again. Look at it. It had been shaped in an intense heat. It was miraculous, this ordinary glass. He was it. He was this glass. He was that spoon, those spoons there. He knew the glassiness of glass and the shining spooniness of spoon. He was the table, he was the walls of this room, he was the food he was about to prepare, he was what she’d eat, sitting opposite him, looking straight through him.
She had ignored him over supper.
She had ignored him the whole time.
She had sat opposite him as if he wasn’t there. He may as well himself have been an empty chair opposite her, a space, an innocent nothing. But he had made her car start. He had made an excellent supper. He would make warmed pears in hot chocolate sauce and then he would watch her cut with the edge of her spoon, scoop it up, put her spoon in her mouth and chew and swallow something that tasted very good indeed, and scoop more food into her spoon and open her mouth for the spoon again.
Any minute now she would step back through the door into the room.
There she was now, in the doorway.
Oh
the beginning was keeping her awake. She by far preferred the edit, the end, where the work in the dark was over and you could cut and cut until you saw the true shape of things emerge.
Where was Eve, exactly? Eve was lying in bed in this too-dark too-hot room, completely awake in the middle of the night, next to Michael completely asleep with his head under his pillow.
No other reason she couldn’t sleep? No.
Honestly? Well. That girl of Michael’s was a little distracting.
What girl? The girl who had had the effrontery to turn up at their holiday house, eat their food, charm Eve’s children, tell what Eve suspected was one of the most blatant packs of lies she had ever witnessed anyone straight-facedly tell. The girl who, at the end of the (actually rather pleasant) evening, for no reason at all, had taken Eve by the shoulders and shaken her hard.
