‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I know what you mean.’
‘When we were here last time, there was a lot of sunshine. Remember? But even then, I kept seeing the city the way it wasn’t but felt as if it ought to have been. Now, it’s right. Forget the songs. This is the season for Paris, I think. Rain suits the place.’
‘A lot has happened here. Living and dying. Too much, maybe. That could be why.’
She leaned in closer to the mirror and used her fingertips to stretch and examine the skin beneath her eyes. ‘Everything is so beautiful, the river shining with the city’s lights, and all the lovers, young and old alike, strolling hand in hand or folding into one another on benches, kissing. And yet still, this sense of rain. I don’t know. Even Montmartre had a melancholy, if you let yourself feel it. The artists, the light coming through the trees, a feeling of music. But that sadness too, underneath. That’s what I remember.’
‘Don’t think about it.’
‘Easy to say.’
I tossed the book down on the bed, with a piece of paper, the stub of our flight’s boarding pass, tucked among the pages.
‘Come on,’ I said, sitting up. ‘We’ll go for a walk and find ourselves a nice cafe, and tomorrow we’ll try the Orangerie. You said you wanted to see the Modiglianis. Then, even if it rains, it won’t matter.’
She turned her head and I could see both sides of her profile, her left side – her best side, she often said – reflected in the mirror. She was looking in the direction of the door, but not at it, at something further away. The light from the bathroom was in her face now, and turned her eyes to glass. She seemed about to cry, but I waited and no tears came, and when I felt certain that that wouldn’t change I stood, slipped on and buttoned a clean blue shirt, working my way slowly upwards, stepped into the same day’s pair of chinos, then sat down on the bed again to tie my shoelaces.
After a minute or two, she got up and came to the side of the bed, where her clothes were laid out. Standing alongside me, close enough to touch, she too began to dress. I tried not to stare. When she leaned over, her breasts hung with exaggerated heft, and when she adjusted the elastic of her underwear between her legs I nearly reached out for her. Even all these months on, there was a slight bloat still to the flesh around the low part of her stomach, and the skin there had coarsened to an almost grainy texture.
‘The museum doesn’t matter,’ she said, her voice all air. ‘The paintings don’t matter. I’ll look for them, if there’s time. But there’s a building in Montparnasse that I’d like to visit, if we could. If we can find it. The face in a lot of Modigliani’s work is that of a woman named Jeanne Hebuterne. I’ve been reading about him, and about her. She was his model, his muse, and his lover, too, the mother of his only child. They’d planned to marry, but her family objected to the match. It’s really an awfully sad story. Modigliani was a junkie and an alcoholic, and nearly twice her age. She also painted, but didn’t have what he had. She understood his genius, in a way few others did. At the time, anyway. Now, of course, we can all see, but she saw when it counted. And she adored him. Life is always hard, isn’t it? No matter what you get, there’s always some precious piece either missing or soon to be taken away.’
‘We can go there,’ I said, seeing how serious she’d become. ‘Of course we can. I’ll get directions at the desk. What was it? Their home?’
Ellie shook her head, half turned and considered her reflection in the dresser’s mirror. The blouse, the golden colour of apple skin, went well with the bronze of her knee-length wool skirt. The top two buttons were still undone, leaving exposed a white wedge of chest and emphasising, around her neck, the silver chain, frail as filament, and the small featureless low-hanging cross.
‘No.’
She looked around the room. Her shoes lay where she’d slipped them off, just at the bathroom door. One still upright, the other on its side. She stepped into them, and instantly lifted herself an inch and a half. I picked up my jacket, draping it across one arm, and opened the door for her. We walked down the corridor in silence except for the sound of our footsteps dull on the carpet, called for the lift and stood listening as it dragged itself up through the building, its iron cage groaning like an old sail ship close to collapse in a windless drift. After a minute or so, it reached our floor and braked with the sound of someone screaming through a gag. I pulled at the gate, stepped back to let her enter, then shut us both inside.
‘His paintings in those days could be had for just a few francs,’ Ellie said, not looking at me, looking forward. Beyond the gate’s accordion lattice, layers of hotel rose up before us, floors and the concrete and girders lying between. ‘More often than not, he traded them for food or his next fix. Just try to imagine that, imagine being that great, and no one caring. When he died, destitute, of tuberculosis, at only thirty-five, Jeanne was nine months pregnant, and distraught. Understandably. She was twenty-one. For most people, life is only beginning at that age. The following day, at her parents’ apartment, in Montparnasse, she stepped backwards out of a fifth-floor window.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I know. Makes you want to cry, doesn’t it? How far gone does a person’s mind need to be for something like that to happen? How deep does that kind of hopelessness go?’
In the lobby, a white-haired man in a fine slate-grey suit stood slump-shouldered with two suitcases in the middle of the floor while, alongside, a beautiful young girl – his granddaughter or, this being Paris, as likely as not his lover – maybe eighteen and a little too professionally made up, held a phone to her ear, not speaking but smiling to herself. I followed Ellie past, nodded good evening to the smile of the hotel receptionist’s bonsoir, monsieur, and stepped out behind my wife into the night.
The rain had stopped, but its threat had not abated, and the Rue de Beaune was quiet except for a few slow-moving cars. I took her hand and we followed the traffic the short distance to the Seine. Silence overtook us, and to fill the emptiness we set to walking, keeping to the riverside, until Notre-Dame came up ahead of us, immense in its isolation. We stopped, leaned against the wall. Somewhere in the darkness, a violin was playing. I listened and thought I recognised a Bach sonata, and then something that might have been Rimsky-Korsakov.
I bowed my head. My throat had begun to ache. ‘Why did you have to tell me all that?’ I said, when I could.
Ellie looked at me.
‘I mean, what’s the good in me knowing?’
She shrugged. ‘Good doesn’t come into it. I read it, that’s all. And it stuck. I haven’t been able to get away from it, and I thought that maybe if I went there, if we went there together, we could just stand outside, and it’d make some sense.’
Her hand was dry and cool against mine, but still with a whisper of pulse. A small, delicate hand that I’d studied in so many quiet moments, mapping the veins, the spindles of bone that fanned beneath her papery skin, trimmed nails that I’d kissed and then let run across my chest and stomach, savouring their scrape.
‘Imagine,’ she said, as much to herself as to me, ‘loving someone so much that there’s nothing left of life once they’ve gone. Surely love is only supposed to ask the best of us. I read that there’s no plaque, no memorial of any kind to mark what happened. Nothing to show for it. It’s almost as if, by ignoring them, the facts can be rubbed out. That can’t be right, can it?’
Below us, the river slopped against the paved embankment, its surface brushed with the powdery spill of the street lamps. And along the embankments, both on our side and across the water, couples were walking by in both directions, even this late and even with the cold, holding hands or with arms around one another’s waists. I looked away so that Ellie wouldn’t see me watching, and considered instead the lit facade of the cathedral, the Gothic slab with its bells and relics, built more than eight hundred years ago to replace an earlier cathedral that had stood on this same spot for probably as long again. Sleep would be slow in coming tonight, which me
ant that I’d have to be awake while she wept.
‘Do you feel like a drink?’ I asked.
She was staring at the water as if hypnotised, but after a moment shook her head.
‘No? Me neither.’ I turned back towards the road and waved down a taxi.
‘What are you doing?’
‘The driver will find the place for us.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Why not tonight, if it’s what you need? Even if the taxi driver doesn’t know, he can call it in, get directions. And we’ll ask him to find a late-opening florist. This is Paris. You can leave a bunch of flowers, maybe say a prayer, if you think it’ll help. That’ll be memorial enough.’
Ellie remained by the wall until the taxi, which was stopped at a red light up ahead, just at the junction beside the Shakespeare and Company bookshop, crossed a couple of lanes with practised ease and drew up to the kerb for us. When I opened the car door for her, she came to my side and for just a second put a hand on my back, and in the frail lamplight I saw that she was crying, in a silent way. But she was smiling, too. I sat in beside her on the back seat and in a convoluted mixture of English and broken French helped her explain to the driver, a burly man with a thick grey moustache clotting most of his lower face, what we were looking for and where we needed to go.
Wildflowers
He came up the road a little after six, a big man with a soft, lumbering gait, worn out from a day that had begun with the dawn milking. A brief but violent late-morning downpour had caught him in the fields and soaked him through, and even after several hours spent behind the tractor’s wheel his shirt and jeans remained damp to the touch, and warm-smelling with the mineral tang of sweat. But because the sun had come out, hot enough for a while to scald, and settled the whole island with the burnished glow of a perfect August evening, his humour, having given way to torpor, was light and easy. Dragging at the air through a smile, he followed the road up between the head-high briar ditches bright on both sides with blooming fuchsia and honeysuckle and alive to the bother of wasps, bees and the occasional flitting greenfinch or babbler. He made the same traipse at roughly this time every day, even though his own home lay in entirely the opposite direction.
At home, if she’d already finished her day’s chores, his wife would be sitting at the table beside the open window, her broad head bent over the crossword puzzles that she never seemed to finish. She’d fill in the short words with fat capital letters, then spend several minutes glaring at the rest of the clues, tapping the butt of the pen against her upper front teeth. When it eventually became clear to her that she’d reached an impasse, her way was to seek a six-letter space, preferably Down, because that for some reason appealed to her, though Across would suffice at a pinch, and with her usual slow care she’d spell out her own name, M-A-R-T-H-A. Were he to enter at such a moment, he’d invariably meet a look that seemed equal parts wonder and confusion, as if his appearance, even after thirty-one years of marriage, still held for her a stranger’s surprise. She’d stare, eyes big behind the thick round lenses of her bifocals, then return her attention to the page, to set about colouring in the remaining blank squares so that, from a distance, if you happened to be colour-blind, you might assume the puzzle had been completed.
The evening had turned languid and the dead smut of earlier rain cloud lingered now only as a memory in the east. Weather for sitting out, he thought, pausing once just where the ditch on his right side broke for a four-rung gate, its iron rusted down to the maroon marrow of old blood. Weather for sipping a glass of cold beer and savouring the end part of another day well spent. He leaned on the gate’s top rung, stopping not because he was out of breath, though he was, but so that he could savour the spill of the land, the misshapen fields empty except for patches of the same measly yellow grass that grew everywhere on the island at this time of year, and the dappled blue-glass stretch of the ocean. As a young man he’d thought often about the things that must lie on the other side of the horizon line, but having fished that water almost from the time he could stand up in a boat without needing to be held, the lesson time and tide had taught him was that the sea went on without end, with neither bottom nor sides. Beyond the horizon, there could only ever be more of the same. That saddened him, especially when he saw others go, friends, neighbours, neighbours’ children, because their leaving caused him to remember again how he’d had his own heart taken that one time and drowned, and because he’d come to understand that there was nothing to be said, no words of warning that they’d heed. The whispering promises of the surf and the gold and silver that flecked the water’s surface were a lure, tempting the curious-hearted away from solid footing, but those who took the bait would have to learn for themselves, the hard way, the way everybody did.
He continued to smile, forcing it now, until the sadness receded and the day was again sweet. On impulse, in turning away from the gate, he stooped and plucked some strands of goldenrod and red campion and, as an afterthought, a few wild roses, their white petals blushing a touch pink in places. Then, flowers in fist, he continued up the road, whistling the first airy strains of a tune he knew as ‘The Minstrel Boy’, to the little cottage set so neatly into a hard sweep of ground that it lay entirely hidden from view until you came within barely five paces of its front door.
‘Hello?’ he called, pushing his way inside without bothering to knock. The door, as always in hot weather, was ajar. After the sunshine of the hill road, the hallway, which led in from the side of the house and divided the tiny building fairly neatly in half, had a gloom that encouraged sighs. To his left, just inside the door, was an immaculately white late-edition bathroom, complete with toilet, sink and shower, that had been converted only in the early 1980s from a small box bedroom; and further along, another slightly larger bedroom, a shadowy room that across the span of some five generations had known seventeen births and probably a dozen final breaths.
‘Hello?’ he called again, raising his voice a little and feeling its heft out of place in the hallway. ‘Are you here, at all?’
‘I’m here,’ an old woman’s voice answered, after a couple of heartbeats, from ahead and to his right. Pitching without effort, though tinged with impatience. ‘I’m still here.’
She was sitting in the armchair beside the living room’s empty fireplace, and he knew at a glance that he’d woken her from sleep. He lingered within the frame of the room’s doorway and felt his eyes drawn to the two small windows opposite. The light in here was soft and dull, diffused and made shadowy by the thin fleece of net curtain. ‘There’s a nice bit of sun out now,’ he said. ‘That drop of rain from earlier is after making the evening grand and clean. You should bring a chair outside for an hour. It’d do you a power of good.’
‘Was it weeding, you were?’
‘What? Oh, these.’ He smiled at the posy of flowers still in his fist. ‘I saw them on the way up and thought they’d brighten the place a bit for you. The ditches are full of colour.’ A chipped brown vase sat in the centre of the old mahogany folding table, full still with the last bunch of flowers he’d picked, some ten days or so ago. Late crocuses, violet and butter yellow, sprigs of bluebell, cerise and lilywhite foxglove. The bluebells were beginning to wilt, but the bouquet as a whole had yet to lose its vibrancy, and instead of replacing or thinning the older blooms he simply added the new cuts to the mix.
‘Lazy man’s load,’ she mumbled, watching him from the fireplace.
He looked at her, then considered the new display. ‘I don’t know. I think they look good. The way they were born to look. You haven’t a drop of beer going, I suppose?’
She flapped a dismissive hand. ‘If you didn’t finish what you brought up last week then there ought to be. You’d know better than I would.’
He continued to stand there, awkward with his size, in the middle of the floor, shoulders still slumped, the knuckles of one hand set in a frozen knocking gesture against the table’s polished top. His expression looked stuck
between thoughts.
‘Well?’
‘Well, what?’
‘Is it waiting for me to pour it, you are? Go on. It’ll be in the pantry if it’s anywhere. And sure I’ll take a drop too, so, if you’re having it. Half a glass. Just for the taste. I’ve had the flavour of copper in my mouth all day. It’s like I’ve been sucking pennies.’
He went through into the pantry, opened a cupboard in the corner and took out two of the small brown bottles from among the five that he’d tucked away the previous Sunday. He twisted off the caps, poured half of one bottle slowly into a tilted glass, then stood watching creamy froth rise from the cloudy golden-red liquid. While the ale settled, he drained the remainder of the bottle in a couple of deep, thirsty swallows, then picked up the glass and the second uncapped bottle and returned to the living room.
The old woman had closed her eyes again. He stood a moment, then settled across from her in the other armchair. The only sound in the room was the thin stutter of the mantel clock shucking seconds, and because something about the thick, cool seep of the light let him consider her without needing to break down the defence of her own returning stare, he saw her more clearly than he had in the longest time.
‘I’m not asleep,’ she whispered, after a minute or two, in a voice almost too soft to catch.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I have my beer.’
The faintest hint of a smile tipped the corners of her mouth. ‘I wasn’t worried in the least about that.’
Her face this past couple of years had begun caving in around the prod of bone, so that everything was becoming juts and hollows, her cheeks beneath their pointed ridges, her mouth between her chin and the long slender ridge of her nose. As long as he’d known her, she’d been thin. Hawkish, he supposed, in the eyes of those who didn’t know her softness. But now it seemed as if her bones were shrinking, leaving her skin, baked to hide and cobwebbed with creases, to sag in a mournful way.
The Boatman and Other Stories Page 10
