The White Room

by Craig Higginson

  Hannah decided to paint the room white. She replaced the shower curtain and bought new rugs for the floor. By the time her furniture arrived from England – it included thirty boxes of books, packed, rather eccentrically, according to publisher – all traces of Santiago were gone. She had cheap bookshelves installed and filled the remaining wall space with prints of portraits by Modigliani and landscapes by Cézanne and Paul Klee. For Christmas dinner, she bought a bottle of pinot noir and a tinned coq au vin – the bones of which exploded in the new microwave.

  Within two weeks, and having spent too much of her meagre savings on her apartment, Hannah had found a job at Language Works. The school was run by an uptight, bald little man – Mr Joffe called him ‘the homunculus’ – who was originally from Birmingham. She also agreed to take on some private classes, which included the sentimental, wet-eyed Monsieur Levi and the two hungry-looking Serbs. Monsieur Levi was an art dealer by trade. He had a small gallery in the Marais district. The Serbs were film students who planned to one day ‘make it’ in Hollywood.

  * * *

  The move to Paris had been one of Hannah’s more impulsive decisions – exactly as her move to London had been some years before. Hannah had originally decided to leave South Africa not long after her final university exams. In the eighteen months since her brother’s death, she had been placing herself in increasingly hazardous situations – taking a range of drugs of obscure origin and content, sleeping with a man who hurt her and gave her a bladder infection, and driving around the most dangerous parts of Johannesburg alone at night, sometimes so wasted that the next morning she could barely remember getting home – let alone where she had been. Although she did very well in her final exams, this was only out of habit, not because she had actually prepared for them.

  With a few hundred pounds, an ancestry work visa and the dimly enduring idea of becoming an actress, Hannah moved to London. At first, she stayed with her friend Monica in Peckham. She found work at the bar of the Hampstead Theatre on the other end of the city, where she met a girl who had an empty room in a flat in Belsize Park. Her flatmates were a trainee school teacher, a man with a limp who lived off disability benefits, and the girl from the Hampstead Theatre.

  Through her job, Hannah came to meet other theatre people and eventually she became involved in bad experimental plays in pubs. Her major break came some years later, when she was given a small role with the Royal Shakespeare Company. She understudied some of the less significant female parts in the history plays and spent a summer in Stratford. Her mother even visited her there, and they went rowing on the river in the shadow of the theatre, and for a while both she and her mother believed Hannah had become a success.

  But that happy period was followed by a year in a bookshop, followed by a silent version of The House of Bernarda Alba that the Time Out critic slated, and then a stint as Maria in an open-air version of Twelfth Night, which proved to be a disaster because the director fell in love with her and broke off his engagement – even though Hannah, at least in her mind, had given him no encouragement.

  Any relationships that Hannah had in London followed the same sad trajectory: good intentions that led, inexorably, to hell. She was like a house that in the end no one wanted to inhabit. She required too much work. No matter how hard they tried to paint her walls white, she was a step behind, painting them black.

  Only alone could Hannah ever find any peace. She walked every day on Hampstead Heath and wrote poems that no one wanted to publish. She looked after a bookseller’s dog – until the man tried to sleep with her. At times, she found it impossible to swallow her food, and often in the Underground or on a bus she found it difficult to breathe. The doctor said she was suffering from panic attacks. He gave her beta blockers and tranquillisers and advised her to meditate.

  When Hannah finally earned her British passport, she was busy housesitting her father’s brother’s house in Staffordshire while pretending to write a radio play. Her uncle was an airline pilot who commuted from his tax haven in Majorca. She decided to do a course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at the college in Stoke – and then to move to Paris. It was at this time that she went to France for the vendange and met Santiago. When she told him her plans, he immediately offered his apartment – ‘no strings to be attached’.

  VIII

  Hannah

  At seven minutes past ten on the Wednesday, the intercom beeps twice – the second sound more hesitant than the first, as if her new student is already regretting his show of confidence. While he waits for the lift to reach him downstairs, she puts more water in the vase of daffodils and adjusts the shutters so that the light is reduced to a striped rhombus across the floor.

  * * *

  Pierre enters cautiously, like an interloper entering someone else’s place of mourning. He is wearing a bottle-green polo neck jumper and worn-out jeans, and he carries the same canvas bag he had with him before.

  Pierre, it is good to see you again.

  And it really is good to see him. He seems so alive, so full of expectation. Just to be near him is to stand in the sun.

  It is good to see you too, he says, slipping off his trainers so that they join her straight line of shoes at the door.

  When he sees the daffodils, he approaches and gives them a vigorous sniff. But it seems they have no smell, for he stands again, looking slightly thwarted.

  What is the name of this flower – la jonquille – en anglais?

  Daffodils. Those are daffodils.

  Daffodils, he says, as if testing the word for familiar echoes and finding none.

  * * *

  She notices that her teacher’s voice has already entered the room. She leaves it there as she goes through to the kitchen to fetch the coffee tray.

  I made coffee, she tells him as she returns.

  Thank you.

  On the tray stand two glazed mugs, kingfisher blue, which she bought from a potter in Hampstead village. There’s also a round silver teaspoon that once belonged to her grandmother, which she stole from her uncle’s house in Staffordshire.

  Please – make yourself at home.

  Make myself at home? This is a way of saying please sit?

  It’s a way of saying please relax.

  * * *

  She is used to a certain self-consciousness from her new students, but this one seems unusually tense. He is peering around the room as if he might be tested on its contents: seven posters, four bookshelves, a glass table with three white wooden chairs, a bunch of daffodils and a fruit bowl – the same translucent colour as sperm – containing only bananas.

  * * *

  As he is still standing in the middle of the room, his bag over one shoulder, she sets down the tray and gestures for him to sit. She takes her regular place at the other end of the table, with the view of the balcony and the brick building opposite – which stands, as usual, in shadow.

  I have the money, he says. You want me to give it now?

  We haven’t done anything yet.

  But you like me to pay you every time?

  It might be easier. That way we don’t have to keep count.

  * * *

  Not for the first time, her current job feels like prostitution: accepting unknown men into her apartment, taking their money from them and, within moments, establishing a level of intimacy that in almost any other context would appear suspect.

  * * *

  So have you revised the basic model for the passive?

  We use the past participle?

  The verb ‘to be’ in whatever tense is necessary plus the past participle.

  The verb to be plus the past participle, he echoes adroitly.

  Could you give me an example?

  He shifts in his chair and his eyes dart back and forth as he gathers his thoughts. His eyes are so dark it is hard to see the pupils. He could be a blind man, the way he is sitting there, with a pleading vacancy where his eyes are meant to be.

  I was born?

/>   Exactly. Because you can’t give birth to yourself, can you? You rely on someone else for that. Another?

  I am taught by you?

  That’s right. Although you’re being taught by me, aren’t you? It’s happening now. The present continuous passive.

  The passive in the present continuous.

  Pierre

  After the internal gloom of the building and the dubious lift, the teacher’s room is bright and white, like a place designed for experiments. If he keeps smiling and remains upright, however, she might not hear the roar inside his head. It seems his tongue has become too large for his mouth and he can barely move it about. He finds he was completely unprepared for this – for the overwhelming columns of books, which are carefully preserved and seem to be shelved according to publisher and colour, and the smell of coffee and something like sandalwood – but most of all for the restless but exacting presence of Hannah. He encounters her there in every single object, and in the arrangement of every object – like the line of freshly sharpened pencils in a row.

  Pierre’s own voice comes from far off. Some far more reliable person appears to have taken over from him and is doing all the speaking on his behalf. Pierre is amazed at how cheerful and alert this other person seems to sound and he wonders how long he will be able to entertain him.

  * * *

  Tell me more about yourself, she is saying. Tell me what you are doing at present.

  Hannah

  You mean right now? Pierre asks, with a perceptible jump.

  I think I mean more generally.

  Ah yes. Well, I study the history of the art.

  Present continuous. You are studying history of art.

  I am studying history of art at the Sorbonne. And Western philosophy. I do an ethics course in Aristotle, Epicurus, Montaigne, Spinoza – and John Stuart Mill.

  And has John Stuart Mill helped?

  Sorry?

  Has he made you a better person?

  We haven’t arrived at him yet.

  Reached.

  She pours the coffee and passes him a mug.

  He doesn’t ask for sugar and she doesn’t offer it.

  * * *

  During her drama degree in Johannesburg, she did courses in philosophy as well as English literature. But she never took to the Utilitarians and their tone of complacent Victorian pragmatism – nor the Analytic philosophers she came to later. She preferred the Continental philosophers such as Heidegger, Sartre, Nietzsche and Lacan, who made philosophy sound as thrilling and transgressive as poetry.

  * * *

  Do you paint?

  Me, I copy mostly illustrations – à l’aquarelle.

  With watercolours.

  It’s something I arrive to do when I’m feeling pensif.

  You needn’t arrive, she says with a laugh. Although I know the French have to, even when they’re already there. Perhaps that’s why they’re almost always late. The being there is not so important.

  Was I – late?

  No, Pierre. I was joking. It was an English joke. About the French.

  Ah, he says, attempting to smile.

  Humour has never been my strong point.

  * * *

  She can’t get away from the idea that this boy, this student, carries something of her brother with him. Outwardly, they could hardly be more different, and yet there is a spirit in Pierre that, increasingly, she recognises – and recognises she has been mourning. Oliver was charming without trying to be charming, liked in spite of never needing to be liked. He was the light towards which other people were drawn. They only ever noticed Hannah afterwards.

  * * *

  So, she continues, copying copies of things. This is something you ‘arrive to do’ when you are feeling pensif?

  Yes.

  Do you often feel sad?

  No.

  Is that why you’re not a proper artist? Too much happiness?

  He must sense that she’s playing with him, trying to draw him out. But as yet, it seems, he lacks the courage to reciprocate.

  No one is filled with too much happiness, he says. But some happiness, it is normal, no?

  A degree of happiness is probably normal, she concedes, somewhat stiffly. Who would know?

  Pierre

  All through that first lesson, Pierre imagines Hannah is mocking him in that English way. It is probably supposed to be entertaining – and perhaps, he hopes afterwards, it is even the beginning of a kind of affection. But he is like a sack of wheat and he finds he can’t move or respond in any of the ways he might have hoped. It is just as well they are revising the passive, which has a simple rule guiding it that he can soon master.

  For their next lesson, she asks him to prepare to talk about his home and where he grew up. He tells her it is boring – and difficult.

  But it is what people expect, she tells him. They expect us to make up stories about ourselves. To represent ourselves.

  * * *

  There is an anarchic spirit in her, a kind of reckless impulsiveness, that he will ponder over the week afterwards. Although she comes across as so perfect, so in control, a shadow seems to lie under everything she says and does. She is forever moving about, deflecting everything with her bright, ironic intelligence. Underneath that impeccable mask is some other kind of creature: relentless, feral, endangered. It paces up and down behind the bars she has placed there for it, straining to peer out.

  * * *

  But why must we represent ourselves? he asks, not so much because he wants to know as because he wants to extend the lesson beyond the allotted hour – he wants to keep her talking.

  I suppose people want to see if your story fits into theirs.

  She smiles at him and sips her coffee.

  In my experience, she continues, the actual facts about a person are not so important. It’s how we present the facts that matters more. It’s not so important if my story is half fantasy, something I want to be rather than what I am. My imagined parts, you see – they tell you something else, something that might signify more. My desire, what I want, what I want to move towards. A sense of a future. The past can become – less significant.

  Then she looks at him from another angle, as if she’d forgotten for a while that he was there.

  Are you following this? she laughs.

  IX

  Hannah

  Oliver liked boys before she did. He never had to tell her this. She absorbed it from the air around him. In what she thinks of as her first sexual encounter, she is lying naked on her bed at home while Olly and his friends roll a single green marble across her startled flesh. What she can recall for certain is that her mother is not in the house, and when she pictures the scene she imagines a Siamese cat curled at her feet and a lawnmower droning outside.

  The centre of the room, however, is not her body. It is the single point of molten light that moves across her skin, its shadow a small green flame. It is as if the intensity of those boys’ collective gaze is magnified in that light. She feels completely alone. Her body is another country, far away and inaccessible – as much to herself as to those boys.

  * * *

  They begin the next lesson with a revision of the passive.

  I was grown up? he says.

  You were brought up – or raised. Tell me where you were brought up.

  In a small village next to Seurre. A village called Pouilly-sur-Saône. The house of my parents is on the border of the River Saône. This is where I have my childhood.

  Remember, it is far away. You’ve already had your childhood.

  ‘That’ was where I ‘had’ my childhood.

  Although we ‘spend’ our childhood, like money. Something precious that is used up. Carry on.

  There is little to tell about Pouilly. It is a small place, typical of the Bourgogne. One boulangerie, owned by a woman who hates all people and never smiles. Her husband runs the tabac.

  Tobacconist.

  The husband also hates, but only his wife.
>
  This is a joke he’s probably made before in French. She is careful to smile at it in English.

  Then there’s the post office, with the diamond patterns on the roof. By the church, there’s the monument for all the men who died in the war. The wars.

  Was it a bit dull there?

  No, it was very colourful in the summer. I have a yellow kayak, which I use to paddle down the river to Seurre. In the summer the water is warm, and I like to swim.

  A country boy, she says, altogether provençal.

  I suppose.

  And do you have brothers? Sisters?

  There is only me.

  * * *

  She is accustomed to feigning interest with students, and she has found that if she feigns for long enough, she can usually begin to become interested. But with this student, it is already completely different. As he describes the house he grew up in, his room in the attic, the illustrations of the birds he likes to copy, she feels drawn into his idyll: a simple, clear-eyed song with a dark-skinned boy at the heart of it.

  * * *

  I like to watch the birds during the day, he continues. Les martins-pêcheurs? The little blue fishing birds?

  Kingfishers?

  Et les rossignols in the evenings. There are the nightingales. These I know the name for. Sometimes, there can be five or ten or fifteen of the nightingales singing in the same time. When it is spring, like now, they are all singing in the one time.

  They all sing. A general rule. Present simple. What else?

  Les guêpiers.

  Wasps?

  Bees. Bee-eaters, I think.

  Ah yes —

  These birds are bright like jewels. They are from Africa during the summer. They nest in the river cliffs up the river – just before Glanon.

  * * *

  Oliver also loved birds. A few weeks before they left for boarding school, he was given a pile of cassettes with all the birdcalls of southern Africa recorded on them. He spent the rest of the holiday memorising them – so by the time they arrived at their new school, the sounds around them could be named and had already been rendered familiar. At the time, this struck Hannah as nothing less than a miracle.