Do come in, Hannah Kallenbach said, with an emphasis on do. I followed her across the entrance hall and down a corridor towards the back of the house. She faced directly ahead, not turning to check whether I was still behind her, her trim legs making neat, purposeful steps. The black jacket she wore was unusually severe for a woman her age: it ballooned from her body like the bomber jackets worn by doormen at certain expensive restaurants.
The small room at the back of the house had high ceilings and was warmly furnished in no particular style. Hannah Kallenbach gestured to a string-bound chair in the corner and sat down across from me in a chair that was similar to mine, only more weathered. Two long-legged spiders dangled from the ceiling above her. She observed me through narrowing eyes, the muscles around her eyeballs contracting very slightly as though focusing on something very small or squinting against the sun. I turned away to survey the room. Under the window was a heavy mahogany desk with brass half-moon handles on the drawers down either side. Beside me was a wall-to-wall bookshelf full of books – big books, the kind of grand European novels which concern themselves with the human condition. Otherwise the space was decorated with only a few mismatched ceramic pots and a vase of hyacinths that infused the room with a sickly, sensual smell, the heat of the day having loosened their petals and released their scents and moistures into the air. The atmosphere was close. Perhaps it was the walls, which had been painted a shade of cream so rich it was almost yellow, a colour which caught the sunlight and softened it, giving everything a luminosity and making the room feel intimate, as though I’d come on personal rather than professional business.
We were sitting now, on either side of the room, she with her profile sharply defined by the light coming in through the open window, before which, facing one another, we sat. On her desk were papers and a pile of CDs, Brahms recordings. Why does she like Brahms so much? I wondered. Because I didn’t like Brahms. When I listened to Brahms I always felt I was wasting my time. In the silence which opened up I became aware of an uncanny feeling, as if the room I’d entered was not a stranger’s room but my own, only a room I’d known or lived in so long ago that I’d lost all memory of it. I wanted to say something or make some noise to express this feeling but what to say was unclear, and in any case the feeling was almost immediately replaced by a sort of heaviness, a sadness, even, but a small one, not one whose source I could immediately identify. A wish for something, perhaps. Not something outlandish, something tangible, something I could have had if only I were quicker or bolder or different somehow. Hmm, I said. It was a nice sound. Like an engine starting somewhere deep inside. Hmm.
Are you an architect? Hannah Kallenbach asked. No, I said, I know nothing about architecture.
But you do know, she said, that the house was designed as a holiday house? That it was never meant to be lived in.
As Hannah Kallenbach reached into the drawer of her heavy mahogany desk – I made a list of people who might be useful to you, she said, but where’s the piece of paper where I wrote it down? – my mind returned to the evening I told Mim how I’d spent my compensation payout. We were eating artichokes. The Villa what? she’d said, tapping salt into her hand. Savoye? she asked. Savoye? S-A-V-O-Y-E?, as though it was the word rather than its meaning that mattered. I know Savoie, she said, we went skiing there as a child. The food was terrible. Then she mumbled what sounded like savoir faire and ruffled her hair and laughed a laugh that betrayed the hateful things she thought about me. What do you like about this house so much anyway? she said, and I said, I don’t know. Why did I like the house? Who knows. A man feels what he feels and he can’t feel anything else. I just like it, or admire it, or something, I said. But those were bland words, too fearful, too subtle to describe my feelings. Something about it is just wonderful, I said. But what makes something wonderful? Nothing in life is really wonderful, said Mim, as though my wishing it so were the source of all her disappointment.
Hannah Kallenbach handed me the keys to the house. As I stood to leave, my eyes were drawn, not for the first time, to the painting on the wall behind me, which I had taken at first for a child’s drawing but now realised was a print by Chagall or someone after Chagall, whose childlike affect came from the crude style in which its three main figures – a woman, a dog and a house – had been drawn. They were representations of types: the sad woman, the friendly dog and the kind of rudimentary house – a box with a front door and smoking chimney – which nursery-school children draw. The woman’s hand was pressed to her chest and she was looking to one side. Her eyes were slits, as if she’d half-closed them or was looking into the distance. The dog wore a mild expression and its innocent-looking face was so round – a bubble of a face – that it seemed to have no snout. Behind them was a swirl of faint blue paint, as if they were immersed in water. None of them seemed aware of each other’s presence, they were just floating there, suspended in the pale-blue paint, dreaming or reminiscing perhaps, with their edges partly obscured by the blue so it was hard to say which was the foreground or the background, the figures or the blue paint, and which had been painted first. The painting had a sketchy quality, as though the artist had been in too much of a rush to get it finished. The boundaries of the figures trailed off in places. The woman’s arm, which was folded over her body, had lost its outline at the forearm and seemed to melt into her chest, while the dog’s legs, fading below the knees, merged with the roof of the house beneath. There were gaps where the four lines representing the walls of the house didn’t meet up, in the corners, which I couldn’t help mentally ‘plugging up’ to stop the house’s contents from seeping out. I stood there for a moment, looking at the woman, herself gazing, as if lost in a daydream, at something I couldn’t see beyond the picture frame, while the dog in turn gazed at her with his large and compassionate eyes, his expression, like hers, suggesting that he was not looking at her but looking at nothing, just resting his eyes on her while lost in thought. And I must have taken off my jacket because then I’d put it on again, awkwardly, ruching the sleeves of my shirt in my hurry to bundle myself back into the packaging I’d arrived in.
The leather seat was moist when I returned to the car. Following Hannah Kallenbach’s directions, I drove out along the highway for an hour or so before turning onto a smaller mountain road that wound its way towards the house in tight curves. I caught myself thinking, from time to time, about the woman in the painting. Her predicament was compelling. It seemed to me, from the way her eyes gazed longingly towards whatever was beyond the picture frame, that she was missing home. What was she looking at? The only way to find out, I thought, would be to take her off the canvas and ask her. I had the idea that Russia was home because she wore the same style of headscarf as the Russian woman – educated under Stalinism – who’d taught me piano as a boy, a pale woman with pockmarked skin who’d practised so hard that she could play Czerny by heart while reading a novel. Beside the road were fleshy succulents and trumpet-shaped red flowers I couldn’t name. A few buck grazed here and there on the mountainside. The road twisted past a cluster of rudimentary red-brick school buildings and a low-rise concrete military hospital tucked inside a forest of blue gum trees, tilted to the wind. Then it narrowed and rose sharply upwards, angled so steeply towards the top of the mountain that the hire car’s little engine struggled noisily and I turned off the air-con to help it. I opened the window. The coast was nearing; I couldn’t see it but I knew it was there because there was a sea smell in the air. The car edged so slowly up the incline that a queue of motorists was piling up behind me, and just as I feared it was about to give up completely the road levelled out, giving way to sea stretching in every direction. As the view opened up I felt something inside me open up too, as though while my eyes stretched out towards the horizon an equal gaze was extending back in, reversing from my eyeballs to the depths of my skull. How wonderful it was to have nothing to look at! How long have I longed for this, I thought. How many times, in London, where everywhere you look
there is a building or a bus in your line of vision, have I longed to stretch my eyes into the distance? How many times have I thought that in a city one has no sense of perspective, that with no sense of perspective, one has no space to think?
WELCOME TO FALSE BAY, a sign said. As the car passed from one side of the mountain to the other, the landscape went from tropical to arid, from fleshy to brittle, as though I’d entered another country with different plants and different animals and different flowers. Signs lined the road: SLOW DOWN PLEASE! CAUTION PORCUPINES! DANGER FALLING ROCKS! BEWARE POTHOLES! Something rousing was playing on the radio, something by Mahler, and as the car bumped along the tarmac, which hadn’t been resurfaced for some time, I bounced around in my seat in a kind of involuntary dance. As the narrow road dropped to sea level, hugging the peninsula, the town came in and out of view across the bay. I passed roads whose names – Capri Road, Warwick Street, Edinburgh Drive – recalled the wealthy European settlers who’d holidayed almost a century earlier in what was then known as the Cape Riviera. Most of their sprawling villas huddled against the mountain had been converted into youth hostels or care homes. I passed a boarded-up Edwardian railway station and a strip of beach, a row of colourful but tired Victorian bathing huts whose paintwork looked untouched since they were built. Then, on a distant slope, the house appeared. The grand white box, as in the photograph in the newspaper, rising from the rocks on its thin white stilts as if signifying, albeit tenuously, the victory of architecture over nature. From afar, the house’s stark geometry stood in such sharp contrast to the style of the neighbouring houses – mostly colonial villas adapted for the local climate, Edwardian terraces with louvred windows or Mediterranean villas with thatch roofs – that its presence seemed a form of critique. In the setting sun its walls were luminous, as if lit from within by a fluorescent bulb.
Unlike the Villa Savoye, which is approached by car, the House for the Study of Water was on too steep an incline to drive up and had to be reached by a staircase called Jacob’s Ladder. At my age, Hannah Kallenbach had said, that many stairs make life not worth living. I’d have installed some kind of electric funicular system. At the top of the stairs I found a garden in disrepair and a filled-in fish pond. My first impression of the house itself, in its actuality, was that it was much smaller than it had looked in photographs. The exterior plaster was weary and sad, with cracks spreading across its surface. I wandered around looking for the entrance, which eventually I found around the back of the house.
I had to push past the layer of overgrown ivy which covered the front door as if to deter unwanted guests. Flanking the entrance hall were a ramp and a spiral staircase, while a corridor directly ahead of me led past a small washbasin, the kind for hands, to a door set slightly off-centre at its far end. Assuming a horizontal organisation, I made my way down the corridor towards the door, which opened onto what looked like a disused laundry. Then I backtracked and ascended the ramp that led to the first floor. The white walls flanking the ramp were crumbly and stained, but decorated with patches of light and shadow cast by the striations of the reinforced-glass windows and the vertical lines of radiator bars overhead. A long blue corridor led off the first-floor landing towards the bedrooms, kitchen and living areas. Here and there were traces of the house’s previous occupants: something black on the bedroom floor (a rat, I thought, but in fact it was a leather glove), a jar of instant coffee so old its contents had congealed into a single mass. A glass wall separated the living room from a first-floor courtyard whose presence, since it was enclosed by the same ribbon-shaped windows as the rest of the house, I’d not detected from outside. There was some furniture in the living room – a chaise longue, an armchair – but not enough to make the oversized space appear any less institutional.
The ramp continued its journey from the courtyard, rising along the exterior of the house before turning back on itself towards the roof. The final section, hemmed in on one side by head-height walls, terminated at an S-shaped wall enclosing the sea-facing side of the solarium. In the middle of the wall was a hole whose placement, at the end of the ramp, suggested that it was, if not the reward, then at least some compensation for the arduous climb. Unlike the windows in the lower levels of the house, this uppermost aperture was tall, framing a view of the sea so picturesque it might’ve been a product of my imagination. A concrete slab projected from beneath the window: a table, I supposed, but one with a certain contradictoriness in it, since measured against other tables it seemed too small, and anyway, if it was a table then where were the chairs? In the absence of chairs it seemed logical to rest on top of the slab as if on a high bench, a position which was presumably at odds with the architect’s intentions since it oriented me with my back to the view (which, in any case, was difficult to appreciate since the afternoon sun shone so brightly off the water that it hurt my eyes to look). I don’t know, I don’t know, I said. Because on the one hand, it seemed a pity to have reached what was clearly the high point of the house only to turn away from it. But wasn’t it also just a relief to let my legs go for a minute? After all, I’d been climbing non-stop since arriving at the house, so, really, sitting down was not a bad outcome at all.
Chapter 3
The word ‘hole’
The sun was shining brightly off the whiteness of the page before me when I opened the newspaper. It was hot. Watery noises rose from the tide pool where children were swimming. The silence was otherwise disturbed only by occasional shouts from their strident games mistress who, since the narrow windows encircling the courtyard hid the upper and lower reaches of the world from view, I could hear but not see.
My gaze rested on the newspaper in front of me, whose pages I turned without thinking. The headlines (the news was always about the heatwave or the cricket) were immaterial to me. I had only a vague sense of what was going on. The news interested me only insofar as it provided something to look at and I let my eyes engage momentarily with this or that piece of information, not so much reading as giving them something to do to pass the time. Then I placed the paper face down on the table, stood up and sat down again.
I’d never liked crosswords or any kind of word games. It was a musician’s sensibility, perhaps, which made me pay more attention to the sounds of words than to their meanings. I couldn’t even read a novel since before long I’d always find myself in the middle of a sentence or a paragraph with no idea of where I was or what had come before. Tracing a plot or following a cast of characters required a mental gymnastics my mind seemed incapable of. Yet that morning, beneath the obituaries and the classifieds, the crossword drew me in. Who invented the telephone? What nationality was the first dog in space? My hand picked up the pen as if of its own accord. It felt pleasurable to be filling in the empty grid. It felt like doing something, a meaningful activity. Like work, even, to be exerting effort and producing results. The answers came easy at first. But one question led to another and sometimes, beneath the crossword questions, I detected other questions, small, half-formulated questions, questions that were almost too vague to warrant my attention. Why do you just sit there? Why don’t you go out? Why don’t you go for a walk or sit in the garden? But it was too hot to be outside and the grass was full of ants from the figs that had fallen from the tree. And what is the point of walking when there is nowhere you have to be? So I returned to the crossword, which wasn’t as inviting as before. The boxes looked somehow sinister and without purpose. Like moulds, or the husks left over from something that had been there once and been taken away. Like holes, I thought. Empty holes. I said the word hole. Hole. Said out loud, it led in two directions: Hole. Whole. There was something about it that my ear liked.
A worm shrinked and shrugged its way along the raised flowerbed beside me. Half a dozen cigarette butts were balanced on a leaf of a nearby hydrangea but I didn’t look at them or think about them or ask myself why Mim had resumed smoking, which she’d given up for some time. I saw sailboats tacking across the bay, their sails facing a
way from where they were headed. The way the windows cut off the lower half of the view made the boats seem nearer than they really were, as though they were right there, sailing through the garden. But at the same time the illusion of proximity made them seem very far away, since unlike whoever was on board raising the sails or taking the helm or doing whatever people do on boats, I was just sitting there. You ought to be doing something, said the voice in my head. You should be playing the piano or sailing a boat or something. But these were idle fantasies. What would a man like me be doing on a boat anyway, I thought. Not raising the mast or taking the helm. I’d just be waiting for the boat to dock so I could sit down somewhere and have a drink.
My thoughts were interrupted when all the children in the tide pool started screaming at once. I looked down, thinking a fight had broken out, but it hadn’t, they were just screaming in pleasure as they threw themselves into the icy water. A particular boy caught my attention. He was standing on the wall in a pair of swimming shorts that made his legs look very small. What are you waiting for? the games mistress was saying. You’ve got to wet your whole body then you’ll be fine. I stood at the window, feeling the sun pouring into my own body, filling my head and my chest and my shoulders until the temperature inside me was the same as the temperature outside. The tide pool was a confused soup of bodies, one child’s limbs hard to disentangle from another’s. It felt, standing there, as though the heat was bringing me out of myself the way that, in summer, warm weather brings people out of their houses to spend time in the garden or out of their clothes to spend time in a swimming costume. Then a movement in my peripheral vision caught my eye. Behind the glass wall Mim was making her way down the ramp. She was facing me and I could see her lips moving but the glass between us cut off her voice. As in a silent film, the absence of sound drew attention to her body. There was something strange about the way she moved, chest first and legs trailing behind as if she wasn’t in control of herself but being sucked forward into a vacuum that had opened up in the air in front of her.
OK, Mr Field Page 2