Pierre
He picks up the charcoal and returns to her eye, but he finds her gaze has switched far away from him and he has to start again.
You keep moving.
She laughs then, as if finally beginning to enjoy herself.
Can’t you give this a break?
I am accustomed to drawing birds, not English girls.
And who is to say I’m English?
You are English – in everything you do.
Her mouth is shining slightly, catching the light, as if she’s just licked her lips. Her neck and cheek are coloured by the knowledge of his gaze. The only sounds in the room are of the scratching charcoal and a ticking clock. Each time the charcoal meets the page, it’s as if he’s touching her in a way that is indecent.
The zero conditional. Give me an example.
If John gives, Jane will give?
She laughs again, her voice sounding more confident.
You’ve slipped into the future simple. It should be: If John gives, Jane gives. But the zero conditional is not very common. Such clear causality is rare. The zero conditional is used for such things as scientific experiments. If you heat water to a hundred degrees, it boils. Humans need a greater deal of uncertainty to express themselves. They don’t obey the laws of science.
* * *
Whenever he thinks he has apprehended her, she flies off, like a kite burying itself deeper into the sky. As for his drawings, each of them remains an embarrassment. Within moments, he falls short of her. He lacks the skill, let alone the experience, to make a convincing start.
* * *
Look towards the sky, he tells her, starting a new page.
It’s called the ceiling.
Hannah
It was not the overwhelming grief that undid her after Oliver’s death as much as the absence of feeling. In her head was a faint ringing sound, as happens after a bomb blast. Everything was vague. The billowing dust, the shards of glass, a man wandering about, looking for the rest of his arm. And her sitting there, forgetting herself, not yet knowing where she was, not yet able to separate the living from the dead. She supposes at some point she must have got up, dressed herself, washed herself, returned to her lectures. She supposes she was waiting for something more to happen, but nothing ever did. The world carried on – and she was carried along with it.
Pierre
The model for the first conditional?
If John likes Jane, she will like him.
Correct, but slightly presumptuous.
He moves from the nostril to her almost smiling mouth.
I still want to know why you never want to talk about yourself.
Can’t you accept me as I am – sitting here now? Isn’t that enough?
But you said we must make up stories. To represent ourselves.
Then let’s make it up in the present, as we go along. Why should stories from the past, whether hideous or dull, represent us? Surely we can free ourselves from what happened? Or do we have to drag it along behind us, like some kind of festering afterbirth?
So what happened to you?
Nothing.
What did you do?
This time she says nothing.
Or not do?
She shifts again.
Tell me the model for the second conditional.
Hannah
What exactly is wrong with men? The more distinctly she tries to mark out boundaries with them, the more determined they seem to be to cross them. Are boundaries nothing more to them than challenges, new borders to traverse? And is everything that lies beyond those boundaries – which is everything that is most endangered in her, that land of dragons – is that only another land to be conquered?
The emerald marble of Pierre’s gaze moves across her flesh, igniting it, setting off all her alarm bells. Yet she does nothing to stop him. Perhaps he has as much right over her own body as she does.
Who is to say we own ourselves?
Who is to say we own anything?
* * *
Don’t look at the drawing, she tells him. Look at me and let your hand move across the page. It’s called contour drawing. You don’t concern yourself with the page, you only look at the subject. It’s supposed to help you to see more directly, without interpretation.
III
Pierre
He turns a new page and starts again.
Hannah
This time, Pierre looks at her with such a demonstration of intensity that after a few of his scratchings she has to smile.
Can I see it?
He passes her the sketchbook with his usual automatic complicity, but he looks quieter now, as if for the first time he is becoming pleased with what he is drawing.
It looks like a pile of spaghetti! she laughs.
But the eye looks a bit like yours, doesn’t it?
He shifts forward on his couch.
And the way your hairs falls – here.
He picks up a golden thread of hair and returns it behind her ear.
You’re very sweet, she tells him.
If he wanted —
Yes?
The second conditional. If he wanted to —
What?
Touch her. She would let him?
Yes. No.
No? Yes?
I mean – that would be the correct use of the second conditional.
Yes?
No.
No?
No, she would not let him touch her, if he wanted to.
Pierre
You see, you can swap the clauses around with conditionals, she says, and they still work.
* * *
Whenever he tries to reach out and touch the place where she is supposed to be, he sees she has moved away again, as if she is little more than a trick of the light.
* * *
I think we had better stop for today.
But I am paying for one hour! he says.
Perhaps I don’t like being paid for this.
She stands and goes through to her bedroom and clicks the door closed behind her.
* * *
Pierre sits on, simmering, not knowing what to do with himself.
* * *
Somewhere deep inside the building, another door slams shut and there is a clatter of feet along a corridor.
* * *
Life continues elsewhere, but not in here. Here, everything is lost.
IV
Hannah
She can hear the lift from her bed. The slap of the trellis door, the jolt into action, the groan of the engine taking him away for good.
It is too early to feel anything yet.
If she is patient, she may not feel anything at all.
Nothing lasts, she tells herself.
We are sieves.
Everything that is poured into us dribbles out again.
We are a place where things pass through.
Things we don’t choose, and whose final destination remains unknown.
* * *
You think I don’t understand?
Pierre has entered her room. The lift had nothing to do with him.
Understand what?
Everything.
How can you – when I don’t understand it myself?
Everyone knows everything. It’s just that we are afraid of it.
Pierre
The whole of her room is white except for her. The emerald green and gold of her, and the black legs twisted back as if she’s just been thrown violently onto the bed. The room smells of some faint, off-white lemony rose. And grief, thick and hot like a fever, in spite of the softness of everything: the light and the shadowy walls, the silken garment dropped over a white wooden chair, a pale yellow towel folded neatly at the foot of her bed and still slightly damp from her morning shower.
* * *
He wants to move towards her, but she is full of electricity and he knows that if he touches her in the wrong way she will bolt from the room and be gone.
* * *
The third conditional. If he had touched her, she might have wanted it?
Something – along those lines.
V
Hannah
I grew up with my mother and my brother. In an ugly house, in an ugly city, far away from here.
Now you want to talk?
My mother was a journalist. She was often away. Her speciality was Africa. Conflict areas, stories of horror. She would have liked your story. She might have put you in a book. She wrote several books about Africa. She was translated widely – throughout Europe. You might have heard of her. Samantha Meade?
Sorry – no.
It doesn’t matter. These days all her books are out of print. That’s the problem with those stories – stories like yours. They soon become outdated. Replaced by new stories, new horrors.
* * *
Her voice shakes as she speaks.
He watches her from the end of the bed.
He looks ready to devour her, but still he hasn’t moved.
* * *
We were often left alone, me and my brother. We were twins, you see. Two peas in a pod, my mother said. We had no father. And for most of the time we had no mother. But we had each other, and we decided at a young age that we didn’t need parents anyway. As long as we had each other. That’s what Oliver said – and I did my best to believe him.
Who looked after you?
A woman called Mary. She dressed us each morning, walked us to school, brought us home, fed us. She could barely read or write, and in those days we had no television, but she looked after us for days at a time, sometimes for weeks. We called her Mary Poppins. She had a large straw bag she was constantly taking things from. Little toys and sweets she bought for us from the Chinese supermarket.
* * *
He has placed his hand on her towel: they wait for it to move as she carries on talking.
* * *
My mother was continually drawn to African men. I think she had several affairs. But she always left them there – where she had found them.
Very sensible.
She came back from each of her trips with gifts for Oliver and me. Dolls made out of beads, carved wooden figures with straw coming out of their heads.
Black magic?
* * *
He says this as the hand reaches her knee and encloses it.
* * *
Are you afraid of me?
My first memory is of being driven in convoy through the bush. I’m sitting in the back of my dad’s silver car. A Volvo, I think. The plastic seats are tall and sticky, the tyres are rumbling along those concrete strips – and outside I can see the same acacia being repeated, over and over again. Sometimes it might loom larger, or smaller. At times it might be slightly distorted to the one side – but each time I know that it’s the same tree.
* * *
The hand moves up the outside of her thigh, towards her hip.
* * *
You know what I experience whenever I remember that moment? Fear. The fear I felt then and can still find inside me – now. At the time, I didn’t understand the exact nature of my fear, but I knew it stood behind every single tree. Which is perhaps why each tree felt the same. It wasn’t the tree that was being repeated, it was the fear that stood behind it.
* * *
Pierre’s hand has arrived at her zip, which starts at the top of her skirt and travels halfway down her thigh. He draws the zip downwards as she speaks, revealing white cotton underwear and the glow of a thigh – her thigh.
* * *
Later, I would learn to call that memory ‘the Rhodesian War’. I would learn the word ‘terrorist’. Later still, I would learn to rename the memory ‘the War of Independence’, and those men hiding in the bush ‘freedom fighters’. But those old words still stand somewhere behind the new ones for me, like that fear behind every tree.
Hannah, I am not a terrorist.
Whoever said you were?
VI
Hannah
He has sex with her right there on the bed – with her sobbing, not once asking him to stop.
Pierre
But he doesn’t.
He knows he could have, but he doesn’t.
Instead, he asks if he can buy her lunch.
VII
Hannah
They go to Le Refuge and he orders the onion soup. She does the same – since there’s nothing worse than onion breath.
Tell me a thing you’ve never told to anyone, he says, swallowing his second beer. Something dangerous. Because we only speak fully in a language when we have something electrical to express.
Electric!
I want to know everything about you.
People say that, but they never actually mean it.
* * *
She is wondering what they will become.
It is all happening too fast.
But Pierre is looking pleased with himself.
After the onion soup, she knows they will return to her room and he will have her at last.
And then he will have her again.
And again.
Until she is sick.
Because that is what happens with her.
Within a day or two of sex, she is usually peeing blood.
VIII
Hannah
She had her first boyfriend when she was eighteen. Or was it that he had her?
* * *
Hannah was in the first year of a drama degree by then, doing those extra courses in English and philosophy. Her first few months of university were some of the happiest of her life. Each book she encountered was like opening another window. Inside each book – and often inside each page – were lands of which she had never conceived. She could be sitting in her bedroom, with its large view of her mother’s tatty garden, and be a fly standing on the eyeball of a dead horse in the Battle of Crécy, or she could be mourning a friend whose bones were wrapped by the roots of an ancient yew in Somerset, or she could be a child’s foot in Chile that didn’t yet know whether it wanted to be a butterfly or an apple.
Dawid was already in his third year of a fine art degree, majoring in sculpture. He was larger than anyone she had ever seen before. He had grown up on a cattle farm outside Pretoria and all his work was made from the local earth and rock. He liked to tell people how a meteorite had landed near Johannesburg two hundred million years ago. When it entered the earth’s atmosphere, it was twenty miles wide. It was burned to half its size within three seconds. When it landed, it sent shock waves that could be felt as far away as North America. The surrounding mountains were turned upside down, burying the gold reef in the koppies that would, one day, lead to the birth of the city of Johannesburg.
How Dawid knew any of this – how anyone knew any of this – was not important. Dawid was a natural storyteller and she liked listening to his stories.
When she met Dawid, he was making larger-than-life human figures out of granite and jasper, mixed with the terracotta earth of the Witwatersrand and the ancient natural binding agents of animal blood, egg and lime. Dawid said that the artist must be invisible. The history of the earth should speak through him. The artist was never the source, he was only ever the conduit.
Hannah liked this idea of the invisible artist, especially coming from someone so visible. He made love to her for the first time in his rented basement room in an old house in Auckland Park. They disappeared for a whole weekend. During that time, Hannah told him every single thing she could think of about herself. She believed that in order to be loved properly, she would have to be entirely visible. His gaze would have to encompass every single part of her – even those parts that could potentially put a person off.
Your brother sounds like a bit of wanker, he once said.
To which Hannah – sacrilegiously – laughed.
When they resurfaced at university on the Monday, Oliver was furious. Not only had he been worried about her – in spite of the message that she had gone away for the weekend with a friend
, which had reached him through their mother – but because Dawid was a bone-headed Dutchman who sucked on women like fruit and then spat out the pips. She and Oliver had their first fight since early childhood – and it lasted for about six months.
Hannah knew that her brother was jealous – jealous of her virile lover, and jealous of her woman’s body, which was the only thing she had that Oliver lacked. It didn’t take long to realise that he was also jealous of Dawid’s art. At the time, Oliver was still in his first year of a fine art degree and, in spite of being considered an artistic genius at school, he was rarely managing to get above sixty-five per cent for any of his practical work. For his most recent sculpture assignment, he had cynically turned a whole lot of household implements into phallic objects and had achieved his best result that year. This confirmed for him what he had secretly suspected: that the whole degree was a farce.
Yet while Oliver griped and sneered, Dawid was applying himself to those large totemic figures of his, some of which had recently been bought for a sculpture park in France. Hannah said something to Oliver during their fight that she always regretted afterwards: Dawid was the artist, Oliver merely a critic.
Hannah lacked the conviction to be either.
When Dawid dropped her at the beginning of the next year for a first-year student with locks of orange hair and a shock of lipstick – and spat out Hannah’s pips – she slipped back into Oliver’s shadow. She was grateful that Oliver had the grace to say nothing about the interlude. The name of her lover was never mentioned between them again.
By the end of that second year, Oliver had dropped fine art and taken up English and European literature. He had decided to become a poet – he told anyone who might listen – and within a year he would be dead.
* * *
I gave a secret part of me, says Pierre. Now I want a secret part from you.
She stares at him as he sips his beer.
Haven’t I given you enough? she asks. I told you about my mother, my brother, my first memory.
I mean something worse, he laughs. Something you’re embarrassed about.
* * *
The White Room Page 10