by Tim Finch
It sold the other day. And if that sounds impersonal, if it puts me in a passive place, absent from the action, then that is appropriate because I don’t feel I had anything to do with it – the sale or the house. Both have been in the hands of other people for a while now. Various agents who have managed the house; various families who have rented it. I was neither sad nor happy about the sale. Just as I was neither sad nor happy about moving out of the house, handing the keys to that first agent, hearing that a young couple and their two small children were moving in. They had a little dog. Did I mind? Why would I?
Better friends understood. A house full of happy memories had become another happy memory, an encapsulating one, one that I will always carry with me, so to speak, in this ‘I-used to-love-our-house’ way. Just as I will always carry the days and nights of wild-eyed roamings-around-the-house, when every single thing in it – not just paintings bought for special birthdays or treasured pieces from our travels, but potato peelers and handwash dispensers and napkin rings – connected us by a thread that seemed to offer the possibility of my reeling you back in, until the thread snapped, leaving me there in the dining room or wherever, with a candle snuffer or whatever, in my hands, empty-handed. Where was I?
In a different place. Free of that. Cut loose from reconnection. And on the day of my move, the house was just a shell. As I had a last look around, I wasn’t thinking, ‘Goodbye, old friend.’ I was thinking, ‘Have I left anything behind?’ I had cleared my mind of sentiment. Decluttered. Deep-cleaned. What I needed I had kept or stored. The rest? Gone. Sold, given to charity, junked. I remember thinking to myself – with a grim note of self-congratulation – that this must mean I was moving on emotionally. Moving and moving on. Not much of a play on words, but enough to lift my spirits for a moment. These were still difficult days.
What floored me was the new apartment. Another shell, but one I had to fill. Stuff I had – some old, some new – but how was I to occupy this space? I walked through the empty rooms – I got there an hour or so before the furniture delivery company – and despaired of the height, the light, the potential – all the things that in the abstract had sold me on the place. I wasn’t up to the lifestyle it seemed to demand of me. I slept – and wept – that first night, curled up in a small corner of the big new bed, amid unopened crates and boxes.
The apartment is on the third floor of an elegant nineteenth-century building. It is high-ceilinged, with period features intact, and has massive doors, with massive locks that involve visible and audible – and most pleasing – movements of parts. I can imagine the satisfaction that comes from oiling these mechanisms. Tuning them almost, so that they sing in the sweetest harmony. No doubt a man can be found who has devoted his life to this task. A craftsman. A man to be envied.
The layout of rooms makes eminent sense somehow, though I would be hard put to explain why. One just knows that the first room behind a door on the left as one enters the apartment will be the guest room and first on the right will be the kitchen – and that this is a most apt arrangement. The street-facing windows in the living room are almost floor-to-ceiling and give on to a balcony. It is an agreeable place to read, with a glass of wine – though (shades of Martin Frink and his balcony) I have only done so twice at most. Work takes me away a lot, of course.
I considered Stockholm, Oslo. But Geneva was most convenient, and it is a more interesting city than it is given credit for – not that whatever interest it has interests me much. London, I ruled out early. It was to do with this moving and moving-on business, if you will forgive me bringing that up again. You are there: but that is the point. I kneel, lay flowers, but don’t want to sleep beside your grave.
What about all our friends in London? I visit them often. I weekend away at least monthly, if not fortnightly. I am lucky; I get lots of invitations. On the home territory of others, I come into my own. I am rather a good house guest, I like to think. I help out, clear the table, stack the dishwasher, but know when I am not wanted in the kitchen. I give my hosts space, I take myself off to the living room, or the guest room, or to the summer house. If a walk or a visit to a gallery or pub is proposed, I am pleased to be of the party, but I don’t mind being left behind either. I don’t need to be constantly amused, talked to or sat with. I’m happy to be left with a glass of wine and a book. I never object to someone turning on the television. I put my book down. I stroke the cat or dog. I play with younger children. I chat to older children. I go to bed when it seems my hosts want me to go to bed. Early or late. I am good at reading the signals. I am no trouble. I am nice to have around the place.
I get reinvited anyway. ‘What are you doing for Christmas/New Year/Easter, Edvard?’ I get booked up months in advance. I have to turn people down.
I don’t invite people back to my apartment, though. It’s not that I don’t have room. The apartment is spacious. I have the guest room, a big double. It is very comfortable and is made-up as if for visitors. Fresh sheets on the bed. A clean towel laid out. A visitors’ book. Why I bought it I can’t imagine. I have leafed through it once or twice as if I may have somehow missed some visitors.
Then there is the cabin in Urke. We were always going to, if you remember? Get back in touch with my ‘Norwegian roots’, that is. (Your exact phrase, with more than a touch of mockery about it, but my sentiment.) Not that I ever lived in the Vestlandet – just holidayed there as a boy, laying down a bank of memories that called me back – or so I always told myself.
Then last year a distant, much older cousin died and his widow, not wanting to keep the place, hardly having been there in recent years, got in touch. Would I be interested in buying it off her? There was no discount for being family. I paid a fortune for what is basically a shepherd’s hut. (I could almost hear the old widow of the distant cousin cackling at the end of the line.) But what else am I going to do with our money? Your money, so much of it. Give it away, of course, a lot of it. To all the causes you supported. And then there is the Foundation. But no one, least of all you, would begrudge me this one indulgence.
Of course not, darling. Your Norwegian roots and all that.
With the cabin, I’m always telling friends to go up and stay – for as long as they like. No, of course I don’t want them to pay rent. It is a way to pay them back for all their hospitality, their solicitude, their forbearance. And one or two have been up there. And invited me along with them – missing the point, I always say, laughing. When I go there myself, I want to be by myself. To get away. Not from them as such. Not individually, anyway. But collectively, perhaps. From being among them and yet always somehow apart. After a bereavement, being with other people – this is hardly an original observation, I realise – can be the loneliest experience of all. It is certainly when I feel the absence of you most keenly. Being single again, I have found, is harder than simply being alone. It still jars so.
Even assuming it was practical to do so, I would not want to set foot in our old house – so loved – ever again. It is, as they say – another grim note – of satisfaction this time – dead to me.
I looked in on the Geneva apartment – my apartment – during this whistle-stop. ‘Looked in’ is right: it captures that sense of visiting a distant elderly relative for the briefest time possible out of a sense of obligation. The flat exudes a sullen air when I first let myself in – unvisited in ages, it is grudging in its welcome. ‘Oh you …’ as it were. Although it is still winter, and this big freeze has followed me down from the mountain and around the continent, I threw open the windows on the pinched resentment of the apartment. Blew some cold air up its dowdy skirts, so to speak.
I note that I am gendering the apartment as a grumpy old woman – which won’t do these days. Or any days. And we exaggerate for effect – me and the apartment. Two grumpy old men, then, with a harrumphing regard for one another, though no love lost.
In fact, it – he – gets a regular visitor – a bright and breezy young woman who comes in and cleans a
nd freshens once a week. Only once have I been there at the same time as the cleaner. She called out cautiously from beyond the front door when she realised that the apartment was not on its own. I was making coffee in the kitchen and did quite a good job of seeming to welcome this intrusion. ‘Bonjour. Entrez. Je suis le propriétaire. Oui, M. Behrends. Bien qu’ Edvard, s’il vous plaît. Ravi de vous rencontrer … Monique, c’est vrai. Non, ne me dérange pas.’ She – Monique – cleaned with a diligent cursoriness. (Necessarily, the actual amount of cleaning that can be done is limited, but she stuck at it for the full two hours.) She was constantly around me and behind me, singing gently to herself, singing along to songs in the buds in her ears, as I endeavoured to get ahead of her, moving from room to room, unable to settle. I had a flight booked for later that afternoon. I wished I had booked for the earlier one.
My presence – the fact of me, in the apartment – must have intrigued her somewhat, I fancy. The mystery owner. ‘He does exist!’ To people like her – living and working in the same city every day, rarely, if ever, leaving a narrow circle of family and friends – my peripatetic life – London one day, Paris the next – only occasionally, and then only fleetingly, visiting the apartment that is nominally my home, must seem alien. To be envied, perhaps? To an extent. But pitied too. Every sterile surface and unused utensil reflected back on me. What sort of a life was this?
A Monday, I think it is. Her day for cleaning. I leave things like her days to my managing agent, a young woman I have never met. All by email. Yesterday was a Thursday. I hadn’t been to the apartment for a couple of months. My managing agent is supposed to deal with it, but some post had accumulated in my pigeonhole downstairs in the lobby. A neighbour – a designation I bestow only because he clearly lives in the building; I don’t know the man – nodded to me as I retrieved my letters. (There was a stray birthday card. From Dom and Lindy.) He was carrying an ornamental dog rather as one might a baguette, though presumably this snooty, snouted creature (I took against it straight away for some reason) would deign to walk at some point. We are not far from the Parc de la Grange. Nor from the Quai Gustave-Ador. He – the dog, that is – was wearing a tartan waistcoat. His owner was wearing a green loden coat, as would appear to be mandatory among Swiss men of his age. He was also wearing snow boots. I was in business coat, suit and formal shoes, the same outfit that had been inadequate for the weather in Berlin, London, Paris and now here. My neighbour had just come down in the lift. He had hauled open the brass concertina curtain with a clatter. I was going up the way he had come down. Why am I telling you all this?
It is not that the apartment is not done out most comfortably. Our decades-long accumulation of books is there. As is most of our less extensive art collection, with some additions I think you would approve of. (I have had some pleasant afternoons at art fairs in recent months.) So too is what furniture and others of our possessions that were transferable and suited this very different space. Yet for all that, there is nothing really of our house in the apartment. I have adopted the studiedly neutral mode of living of a leading diplomat, of whom there are hundreds, living just like this, across Geneva. And in cities like Vienna and New York. What is lost is all the funkiness and edge you brought to the party. That had to go, I felt. I couldn’t replicate it. I didn’t have the heart for it without you.
I find myself – today and on other days – wandering about this space I have bought and furnished, and which I pay to be kept ready for me, as one might a museum once the house of a rich merchant of some sort. A man of taste but at the same time rather dull. There are areas which might as well be roped off or behind glass. Please keep off. Strictly private. Can I ever imagine having a dinner party – or even dinner on my own – at that dining table, for instance?
This sense of disconnection has its compensations, though. Climbing into bed in the master bedroom, slipping between the sheets, immaculately laundered, ice-cold but sensuous, is deliciously transgressive. A volunteer guide will find me here in the morning and tut-tut-tut and turf me out. The girl who cleans will come in and see this minimal disturbance – on one side only of the bed, of course – and try to imagine the night spent. (I concede there is something rather creepy about this imagining of her imagining.) In the same way, leaving a single teabag in the biodegradable waste bin – this one tiny thing to bag up and dispose of – gives me a kick somehow. Otherwise, what am I doing here? At the risk of repeating myself, I seem just to be looking around. Aimlessly traipsing. A half-day in a foreign city before catching a flight.
I dined, as I tend to do when I am here and when not required to dine elsewhere, in the brasserie around the corner. It is the type of restaurant that gets described (it would have been by you) as ‘just a little local place that we rather like’ – which is to undersell the food, the service, the general ambience, but with good reason. Nobody – and the owners and staff can be included – wants it to become more than it is. It doesn’t need to attract a new clientele, or to bring in tourists. It has worked out the magic formula. It is always full, but they can always find you a table. There is no need to book. Everyone is a regular. ‘Ah, Monsieur …’
Almost invariably I dine alone. In that now familiar ‘happy to be sad to be alone’ way of mine. As the evening wears on, I lean and swerve into the table, the book that is open in front of me swimming in and away from me, pleasingly. I find at the end of the evening, or the following morning, that I have read only a page or two at most. And forgotten that page or two almost completely. I am competent, though, through great concentration and precision guidance, to order the final one-too-many drink without slurring – perhaps a Calvados or Benedictine – and then to settle up, retrieve coat and bag and umbrella, and take the short walk back to my building. There is perhaps some weaving along the way – and some evidence of that when fresh snow has just fallen. The hush in this quiet neighbourhood on snowy nights is immense. The odd car shushes by all but silently and seemingly quite without occupants. The apartment blocks are shuttered up. One could run down the middle of the street, kicking up powder, laughing and shouting, and the sound would echo around the city, the lake, the mountains – and away. No lights would appear at windows.
At the front door to my building, and then again at the door to my apartment, the key describes airy figures of eight until through some magnetic attraction it docks with the lock and magics me in. Back in my flat, I am sobered for a moment by its utterly cool unrelation to me. Let me just crash here tonight, I think, and tomorrow I will be gone.
Before bed, I attend to the necessary ablutions in my pristine, white-tiled bathroom. These ablutions are strung out like a dream. Ten minutes feeling like an hour. Hangovers I treat prophylactically – which may extend a certain brain death into the indefinite future, I don’t know.
The following morning – this morning – my head in an ibuprofen-induced neutral, I pack the suitcase I never really unpacked and leave the apartment with as little sentimental parting as I would a hotel room. If I could I would hand in the key. But there is no concierge here.
Six hours later I am back. Yes, I am in this hotel room: the suite – bedroom, sitting room, bathroom and balcony – that has been a home of sorts these last few months. It has served me well. I am back on the mountain and it is good to be back. I go out on to the balcony, hail the view and breathe deep.
The cleaners here have cleared away what disorder I left behind (not much). They have tidied my things (clothes) into wardrobes and drawers; piled them (books and papers) up neatly on tables. (Again, not much.) But for as long as it lasts, as little as it is, I am happy to call this my own. The bar beckons and I will greet some familiar faces.
Peace talks.
PROGRESS
My initial reaction on learning the news – some sort of defence mechanism? – was to make up silly puns in my head. ‘Noor is no more.’ Or ‘Oh, Noor’ (requires Geordie accent like that character, Ruth, in The Archers. Yes, I still listen to it: your favourite rad
io programme).
The news was, though it was in no sense broadcast, that Noor had been ‘recalled’. I learnt this only after noticing that he was absent from the morning’s, then the afternoon’s, proceedings. That is unusual in plenary and so I enquired.
As Noor is – was? – only the Number Three, my team didn’t feel it needed to be flagged. This was reasonable enough. What wasn’t reasonable, what unnerved me and would certainly have unnerved my team, was that I was so shaken by the news. For that very reason I trust I betrayed nothing of my feelings. I am practised enough at the inscrutable, the deadpan, to have got away with it, I think.
Let me not exaggerate the extent of my concern. I was somewhat thrown by the news, that is all. ‘Recalled’ can mean to certain death, or immediate imprisonment, or summary dismissal. Or at least has done, in my experience. But it can mean other things. It can mean for consultations or instructions. Noor might very well return. I have known that to happen. Perhaps the whole thing will turn out to be an elaborate piece of theatre. As it is, they are constantly trying to rush bits of paper into proceedings. Envoys arrive, ‘hot foot’ as they say, like bit players in Shakespeare, with supposed concessions or new proposals or evidence that must be heard.
Sabbagh knows, presumably. Why Noor has been recalled, that is. But Sabbagh is never going to tell me and I am never going to ask him. If Noor returns, he returns. Otherwise he is history. The waters have closed over his head. We move on.
I thought all this and yet I also thought: is it somehow connected? Am I somehow responsible? Connected how? Responsible in what way? Having met Noor that once in the churchyard and exchanged a few words? Because I accepted – or at least didn’t return – the gift of the Koran? Well? Well, what? Who is interrogating who here? My conflicted self, it would seem. I came to no conclusion.