Surviving

by Allan Massie

  Erik still slept, with the sheet again twisted round his upper body. She kissed him before slipping out of bed. His breath was milky.

  Back in the apartment the night before, he had read again the reams of fax Kenneth had sent. Gary excited him. She disliked the thought.

  The Calvinist conscience worked both ways. Her emotional reticence brought on self-reproach. Wasn’t it merely another manifestation of her self-centredness? No intruders permitted in her private garden? So, two or three times a week, she forced herself to make a morning round of telephone calls to the other members of the group.

  She called Sol first. That was always easy and short. They assured each other all was well, spoke briefly of last night’s meeting. Yes. Tom had been impressive, hadn’t he? Today she was tempted to speak of her anxiety concerning Kate; nevertheless didn’t.

  Usually she would then have called Kate herself. That was the enjoyable one. But she was reluctant, told herself the sun was too high, Kate might already be working with Gary, even if Belinda couldn’t imagine how she could bring herself to do so.

  She took her mobile out on to the terrace, lay back in a canvas chair and dialled Bridget’s number.

  “You weren’t at the meeting. I was just hoping there’s nothing wrong, that you’re all right.”

  “All right? No.” Bridget spoke on the telephone in a whisper, always. “But then I feel awful till I’ve done my exercises.”

  “Sorry, have I called too early?”

  “No, it’s fine. How are you yourself? All right?”

  “As can be. I’ll let you get on with your exercises then.”

  It wasn’t what was said that mattered, just the act of making contact that reassured them all.

  It was Tom Durward she wanted to speak to, but she had no number, didn’t even know which hotel he was in. He probably preferred it that way. He would be sour with himself this morning. But it was a beautiful one, with just a touch of crispness, hint of autumn. She called Mike, dutifully. Meg answered.

  “Oh it’s you. No he’s not here. I haven’t seen the bugger for three days now, and do you know, that’s fine by me. I don’t give a damn. The second night I didn’t sleep, but then this morning I said to myself, to hell with him, it’s his life, if he chooses to shut me out, OK, I’ve had enough. I think I’ll go shopping.”

  “What set him off this time? Do you know?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care. Does it matter what set him off?”

  “No, it never really matters, I know that. Any given reason is only an excuse.”

  “Too right, and I’m tired of excuses. I’ve had excuses.”

  “How are you yourself, Meg?”

  “Oh fine, just fine. I might not go shopping, I might go to the beach. I’m fine.”

  “That’s good,” Belinda said, not believing her. “I’ve a notion Mike may be with Stephen. I’ll try Stephen.”

  “It’s up to you, include me out. But, say, was a guy called Tom Durward at your meeting?”

  “Yes, indeed. You know him then?”

  “Long time back. He was drunk when I knew him. But … he was a friend of my brother Eddie, Eddie just adored him.”

  “I didn’t know Eddie, remember.”

  “Poor Eddie.”

  “Mike’ll turn up,” Belinda said.

  “I guess so. Too much to hope he won’t.”

  “I’ll ring Stephen, let you know if he’s there. Bye for now.”

  But she didn’t immediately call Stephen. She went down to the bar for her espresso and cappuccino, exchanged the nothings of the day with Aldo and Signora Petruzzi, felt better for it, stepped out into the street. Swifts that in Spring nested high up in the Teatro Marcello hurled themselves to and fro across the intense blue. The scirocco, to her surprise, had dispelled itself.

  Back in the apartment Erik was stretched out in a chair on the terrace, a towel round his waist. He was reading one of Kenneth’s fax sheets again, frowning. He looked almost ugly when he frowned; then he lifted his head and smiled. Kenneth had once told her, regarding himself in the mirror, that Plato had said there would have been no philosophy if there hadn’t been so many beautiful boys in Athens. Well, she was no philosopher and she had never heard Erik say anything remotely interesting. What of that?

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” he said.

  “Never mind. I’m going to call Stephen. Are you here or not?”

  The boy’s mouth hung open for a moment. He got to his feet and turned away from her, leaning on his elbows on the terrace wall.

  “I don’t want ever to see him again.”

  “That’s very sudden.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s just that I’m saying it suddenly.”

  “But I’ve got to call him and he’s sure to ask if I know where you are. So what do I say? He does love you, remember.”

  “I don’t want to be loved that way, not any longer.”

  “Oh dear. You were anxious, distressed, even about him when you came here.”

  “That was yesterday or the day before. You don’t have to call him.”

  “Oh I think I do.”

  “Say what you like but keep me out of it.”

  “I don’t know that I can. He may not be home of course.”

  XVI

  “Think I’m some sort of specimen, don’t you? Something you can pin to a page.”

  “That’s not how I think of you, Gary.”

  “Then what are you doing with me? Why did you want me here?”

  “You know the answer to that really, don’t you?” Kate lit a cigarette. “Let’s get back to where we were. To your father. How old were you when you realised that in his absences, he was in prison?”

  “Wasn’t a secret, ever. Where I come from …”

  “Yes?”

  He frowned. When his brows came together he looked a different, responsible person. “Yes?” she said again, keeping impatience out of her voice.

  “You don’t understand. You can’t understand. Where I come from, there’s us and them, and you are one of them. Different, that’s what, we’re different. You want to know how I felt when I knew Dad was in prison. I felt big. I felt good.”

  “Because he was out of the way?”

  “No, not that. Because it meant I was somebody. It’s good to have your Dad a hard man. Gets you respect.”

  “That’s important?”

  “Course it is. Respect matters. When you get respect, you matter. I was twelve, maybe still eleven.”

  “And respected? Because of your Dad being in prison.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “What was he in for that time?”

  She knew the answer of course. Joe Kelly was an enforcer. GBH. He had carved a shopkeeper who was slow to pay protection money, carved him to encourage the rest … The only surprise was that he had been arrested and the trial had brought in a guilty verdict. But … it didn’t do to be soft, she had already heard that line from Gary. Was it pure chance however that the shopkeeper of whom he had made an example was a Pakistani?

  “It was his job,” Gary said. “Collecting like. He got longer because the guy he put the frighteners on was a Paki. Didn’t matter to Dad what colour he was. He hadn’t paid. See?”

  “But you felt big because your Dad was in prison?”

  “I’ve said that, haven’t I?”

  Kate stubbed out her cigarette and lit another.

  “You smoke too much,” Gary said. “That’s your seventh since we started.”

  “Does it worry you?”

  “Why should it? It’s not healthy though. Woman like you should take care of herself.”

  “Your Mum smokes, doesn’t she?”

  “Used to hide her fags when I was a kid. Can we take a break? Cup of tea?”

  Was she getting anywhere? She didn’t know yet. He trusted nobody, except, maybe, his mother who went, I’m sure, straight out to buy another packet of cigarettes when she couldn’t find the one which she
knew he had hidden, or to beg a smoke from a neighbour. She would have been at one with her neighbours. Yes, I was right in thinking her a good woman.

  “My Dad never laid a hand on me.” Gary’s voice followed her to the kitchen. “It was Mum used to give me a clip round the earhole.”

  Waiting for the kettle to boil Kate thought of an essay by Borges she had read. It was entitled “A Comment on August 23, 1944”, the day of the liberation of Paris. Borges set himself to answer the question why even those Argentines who had been supporters of Hitler seemed excited by the news. And his answer was that nobody could live in Hell, could wish to live in Hell. He recalled another day, the one on which the Nazis marched into Paris, when an admirer of Germany and Hitler came to announce the news, adding that the Wehrmacht would soon be in London too, and Borges heard a whinny of fear below the chant of triumph.

  And how, Kate thought as she spooned tea (Twining’s Irish Breakfast) into the pot, did Borges account for this?

  She couldn’t remember his exact words though she had copied them into the commonplace book she had kept since she was a child at school in Aberdeen, and Miss Fiddes, a dry spinster on the surface, whose soul was enflamed by a passion for literature – so that her life, seemingly confined between the frozen granite of the school buildings and the Thirties semi-detached bungalow in the suburbs which she shared with her war-widowed mother – was in the reality of her imagination a succession of dazzling images and wonderful journeys, had told the class that such a book would be “an everlasting treasure”. They had sniggered and later imitated her precise way of saying this, but Kate at least had found that she spoke truth.

  Borges then: he concluded that for Europeans and Americans – and Argentines were both – only one order was possible. It used to be called Rome and was now known as Western Culture. To be a Nazi, Borges thought, or to be playing the fierce barbarian, Viking, Tartar, conquistador, gaucho, Indian, was to try to deny the reality of this order, and was in the end unendurable. “Nazism,” Borges wrote, “suffers from unreality like Erigena’s Hell,” since nobody, not even Hitler, nobody in the intimacy of his silent soul, can truly wish Hell to triumph. Even Hitler, Borges conjectured, sought defeat. Why else – this was Kate’s gloss – his infatuation with Götterdämmerung?

  And Gary, her little Nazi, for that is what he was inasmuch as he espoused nihilism, could she bring him to the point where, confessing his uninhabitable world, he could enter into the reality of the sane?

  She took the tea through to the workroom. The telephone rang.

  “Reynard Yallett here …”

  “Yes?”

  “Making progress with my little chicken?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Cautious, eh? I suppose he’s with you.”

  “Yes,” Kate said. “What do you want?”

  “Always to the point, eh, Kate? Thought you’d like to know. I’m flying out to Rome this weekend. Can’t keep away from your fascinating experiment.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with you.”

  “After I set it up? That’s not very nice. And another thing, there’s a question going to be asked in the House, about how our chicken was returned his passport.”

  “There was no reason not to, no legal reason. You know that, you argued the bloody point.”

  “So I did. But the law and politics are clean different things. That journalist Trensshe has been stirring the pot. The Home Secretary is not amused. Trouble ahead.”

  “That’s nonsense,” Kate said, and put the telephone down.

  “That was Mr Yallett,” she said. “He’s coming to Rome. This weekend. I don’t know why.”

  “So?”

  “So I thought you should know.”

  “He was my brief, that’s all. Over. What they call a purely professional relationship.”

  “That’s how it should be of course,” she said, admiring the audible quotation marks he had put around the last phrase. “I’m not so sure that’s how he sees it.”

  The telephone rang again.

  “If that’s Mr Yallett, tell him to fuck off. Or don’t answer.”

  But Kate had never acquired the indifference which would allow her to leave a ringing telephone unanswered as Belinda often did.

  “Kate? I’m not interrupting, am I?”

  “Oh it’s you.”

  “Were you expecting someone else? You sound disappointed,” Belinda said.

  “Not disappointed. I was getting ready to bite his head off, that’s all.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Fine, we’re having a cup of tea.”

  “Oh good, then I haven’t interrupted. It’s just that you didn’t sound all right when you answered. You sounded stressed. Mustn’t get stressed, you know.”

  Kate laughed, “Easier for you, that, than for me, as we’ve often agreed.”

  “Listen, it’s such a lovely day, going to be hot, I thought a picnic. On the Palatine. I’ll see to the food. Livia’s house, about half past one. You’ll have finished work by then, won’t you?”

  “It’s a long way from Parioli. But why not? We’ll be there.”

  “Where’ll we be?” Gary said.

  “A picnic lunch.”

  “Kids’ stuff.”

  “Oh I don’t know. You might even enjoy it.”

  XVII

  Approaching Stephen’s apartment, across the river in Piazza Piscinulla, on what Belinda thought of as the wrong side of Viale Trastevere, Erik stopped.

  “Let’s have a coffee.”

  In the bar he said, “I’ll wait for you here. Honest, I can’t face it. He’ll make a scene. I know his scenes. It’ll be easier all round if you go yourself.”

  There was a dewiness under his eyes.

  “Please …,” he said, “I really can’t, you must know I can’t.”

  “Oh all right then,” she said. “But it may take some time.”

  “It’ll be better this way, believe me it really will.”

  She leaned over and kissed him

  You really are a coward, she thought.

  “Poor Stephen,” she said.

  “You won’t tell him I’m down here, will you? You won’t tell him anything yet. Promise.”

  “He’ll have to know sometime,” she said, not knowing herself what there was to know, not really.

  Stephen answered the intercom more quickly than she had expected. The apartment door was open when she reached the landing. He looked terrible. He had several days’ growth of grey grizzly beard and he was dressed in an old brown woollen gown. His feet were bare and very dirty. When she kissed him, his breath stank of stale liquor and days without toothpaste.

  “You’re the only person I could bear to …”

  “Not Erik?”

  “Oh God, that was a mistake. I see that now. Oh yes, I was crazy about him but now I never want to see him again. Oh it’s such hell. Why do we do it?”

  There was more in that vein, there always is, while she busied herself setting out what she had brought him: aranciata, mineral water, Redoxon.

  “You could, probably do with an injection,” she said, “but I’m not competent to give it. Needles, you know. Why didn’t you call Sol, he’s your sponsor.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t, I’ve let him down.”

  “But that’s what he’s there for. He’d tell you that himself.”

  “I’ve been thinking seriously about killing myself. Then I thought, I won’t give Erik that satisfaction, he’s not worth it, little tart.”

  “Can’t think it would please him, he’d be cut up, rather. Come let’s get you settled.”

  The bed was filthy and there was a bucket with slimy vomit beside it. There was vomit on the sheets too. The smell in the bedroom was horrible. She got him into the chair and opened the window as wide as it could go.

  “Just sit there while I clear this up. Where do you keep your sheets?”

  “Why are you so good to me?”

  “All part of the se
rvice, you’d do the same for me.”

  He got to his feet and stood, shaking, clutching the back of the chair to stop himself from falling.

  “I feel suddenly much worse.”

  “Are you going to be sick again?”

  Long pause. Then, “No, maybe not.”

  “Tell you what, I’ll run you a bath. You’ll feel better when you’ve had a bath.”

  She had to help him through, hold him steady while he climbed into the bath. Then she went back to the bedroom, looked out a clean towel and pyjamas, resumed her tidying. There were photographs among the bedclothes and some fallen to the floor. She collected them and set them on the bedside table. They were of school groups and boys and youths in games clothes or swimsuits. They couldn’t be called pornographic, not exactly. Not even indecent, yet there was indecency in the thought of Stephen leafing through them in misery and indulging in sad fantasies. There was one of Erik lying on a bed, propped up on an elbow, and smoking a cigarette. The lower half of his body was hidden, the upper naked. She was tempted, momentarily, to keep it, for when he left her too. Most of the boys in the photographs were blond and looked English or German or North American.

  Poor Stephen, she thought again, imagining him imagining these boys as he lay sick and in fear. You were always afraid when you were coming out of a succession of heavy sessions. She knew that, though her own drinking had taken a different form. The depression and terror were the same.

  She took the dressing-gown Stephen had discarded through to the kitchen and put it in the washing-machine; it felt as if she was expunging disgrace. Then she found a tin of soup – Baxter’s Beef Consommé from that delicatessen in Via Mario de’ Fiori, opened it and put it to heat over a low flame. She looked at her watch; ten minutes to twelve.

  He called from the bath. She told him to wait a moment, returned to the bedroom, put clean sheets on the bed, fetched the towel, helped him out of the bath, dried him, got him into pyjamas and back to bed. Then she fetched the soup, tested the temperature, and put one arm round Stephen while she held the mug to his lips and let him sip. He got perhaps a third down before he said ‘that’s enough’ and sank back on the pillows. In a little she got him to swallow a couple of vitamin pills and the rest of the soup.