* * *
Soon the audience starts to filter back inside for the second half and Pierre wonders whether they’ll be able to escape. The rest of the play feels like a battlefield that he is too afraid to enter. He is without a voice, without a weapon, and again he feels a surge of hatred towards Hannah for this – for rigging this whole charade.
We’d better go back in, Suzanne says, grinding her stub on a metal bin.
We needn’t, he says meekly. I mean – there’s a nice Italian place nearby. We could go and get a quick bite to eat?
And miss the rest? No fucking chance. You aren’t going to get away with it that easily, Pierre.
Without waiting to see if he will follow her, Suzanne goes back inside. She is both frightened and frightening, just as Hannah was – and his mother was before her.
II
As the piano music drifts through the room, projected letters float across the white wall of books, some of them getting stuck to assemble into phrases that announce the theme of the next act: Lies and Truth.
* * *
When Pierre sat down before the play had started, he immediately liked the design of the set, which is all chrome and glass surfaces, leather couches and tall walls of books that have been painted completely white. But now it feels like a nightmare room, a padded cell. The only colour on the stage comes from a bunch of yellow daffodils that stands in a glass vase on the table like an inverted yellow dress – with Hannah’s drowned head lost somewhere amongst the green stalks.
* * *
Suzanne adjusts herself in her seat, all clicking braids and clacking bangles. She still smells of her cigarette. All around them, the audience sounds relaxed and happy – preparing themselves for the promise of the second half. And again Pierre feels that impotent rage towards Hannah – for airing their story in front of these people for their mere entertainment.
I am not me, he says to himself.
And I am not here.
But there is no way of escape.
Once again, the darkness grows around him.
ACT FOUR
LIES AND TRUTH
Paris
I
Pierre
So sometimes we say, sometimes we speak, sometimes we talk, but these verbs are not always interchangeable. What do we do with a lie and the truth?
I don’t know what you’re trying to say.
Do we say a lie, speak a lie, tell a lie – which?
I think we tell a lie.
And the truth?
We tell the truth.
Occasionally. And your mind?
You tell your mind?
You speak your mind. And you talk nonsense. And you say what you think. Got that?
Yes.
They are sitting at the glass table, as they did for her very first lesson in the apartment. Wednesday morning, ten o’clock.
* * *
She acted surprised to see him, and yet the two blue mugs were there, glowing in the shuttered light, and the coffee was already poured. On the glass table was her usual row of sharpened pencils and the neat pile of workbooks. Like weaponry, he thought. Like instruments of torture.
Until an hour ago he wasn’t going to come here. He had decided the previous week that he would not be going back. He never wanted to see her again, speak to her again. She was a liar, a fraud, a hypocrite. Yet their session approached him like a light, a window full of light, and he knew he would have only one opportunity to climb through it and see what was there – and whether anything salvageable was left.
Now that he has re-entered her room, however, it appears the window is already closed to him – and the light is the cold white light of a surgeon’s room, a torturer’s chamber of her own devising.
* * *
Let’s talk about lying first, she continues.
If you like.
There are a number of modal verbs and expressions we can consider. You can live a lie, you can tell a pack of lies and you can even lie through your teeth. Are you familiar with these?
I think so.
* * *
It isn’t clear whether she prepared this lesson – and designed it specifically for him – or whether she is merely following some already established pathway. That she is mad is now undeniable. That he was wrong about her is something he has come to accept. But how wrong was he? Is she any of the things he thought she was? Are there aspects of her that are still worth engaging with? Are there parts left in her that could match parts left in him?
Usually, he would not have waited around to find out – or come back again. With him it is either love or hate. But it seems something has shifted in him since he started these lessons. He is no longer quite so petulant, or so vulnerable. Also, he has weapons of his own where before he had none. They come in the form of words, or new ideas that for the first time can be expressed in words – her English words.
* * *
To lie through your teeth isn’t separable.
Sorry?
The object can’t come between the verb and the particle.
All right.
But some modal verbs are separable. You have to lie your way out of a situation. Here, the modal verb ‘lie out’ is broken in half by the phrase ‘your way’.
Is ‘your way’ the object? I – don’t understand.
It’s hard to explain. You have to learn modal verbs as units of meaning. Don’t try to analyse their parts. Their parts are not always logical in themselves.
You’re leaving me behind.
For example, there’s the modal verb to ‘make out’. You can ‘make out’ with someone, which is to kiss them, or something – I don’t exactly know as it’s American – but the verb to ‘make’ and the particle ‘out’ do not have anything to do with kissing in themselves. ‘Make’ and ‘out’ have two entirely separate meanings from the expression to ‘make out’. The modal verb to ‘make out’ is inseparable in this case.
You’re going too fast.
‘Make out’ can also become separable, but its meaning will change. You can say: He will make an honest woman out of me. Here, ‘an honest woman’ is the object, I suppose, which comes in the middle of the modal verb – and the verb and particle ‘make’ and ‘out’ have entirely new meanings. As I say, you must learn these as units, in isolation. Don’t try to analyse them for logic. There is no logic. There is only learning it, and accepting it as something that already – exists.
Are you – all right?
Hannah
On his last night at school, Oliver went down to the old school gates and drank half of the bottle of Old Brown Sherry he was supposed to give to his Latin teacher. He stood as a train rumbled past and – he told her later – seriously considered stepping in front of it. But instead he stumbled back up to the illuminated school buildings, which looked like a gothic castle in the night air, took off all his clothes and climbed into the bed of a boy he thought he loved.
The boy, whose name was Simon, woke to find Oliver naked and trying to kiss him, and he shouted out in disgust or fright – or perhaps both. A light was switched on and Oliver was revealed in all his shame. He was the head of his house and someone who was supposed to set an example. The boy was some years younger and was sporty and popular. Before the other boys were properly awake and had digested what was happening, Oliver grabbed his clothes, bleary-eyed and muttering apologies, and ran out of there.
He left behind all his belongings – the rest of his clothes, his hockey stick, his books, his folder of paintings – and entered the vast summer night. He would never return to the dormitory or to his house or to the school. When he reached the tarmac road that ran along the railway track, he hitched a lift in the direction of Hannah’s school, which was fifty kilometres away towards Durban. The man who gave him a lift was a farmer’s son who was completing his national service on the border. Oliver told him he was going to visit his girlfriend at the school Hannah attended. The farmer’s son thought this was hilarious, and together they drank the rest of the sh
erry – which Oliver had left in a bush by the school gate. The farmer’s son dropped him outside Hannah’s school just before dawn, thumped his shoulder and wished him the best of luck.
When Oliver arrived at her hostel, the first drongos were creaking and the redbrick buildings were adrift with mist. From the kitchen, the clanking of the breakfast plates could be heard. Oliver slipped into her building, crept up the stairs and arrived at her shoulder – which he nudged into life.
I’ve run away from school, he said.
What? Why?
Because I have done a terrible thing.
Their mother was due to pick them up later that day – Oliver first, after final chapel, and then Hannah. She was staying with a friend nearby, in an old bent farmhouse made of stone and wood, with leaded windows filled with pale blue glass and a view of Howick Falls. Hannah phoned her mother and explained that Oliver was drunk and had come to find her in the night and their mother agreed to pick him up at a nearby shopping centre in an hour.
While Hannah completed her last day at boarding school – assembly, chapel, a water fight between the leavers in the quad – Oliver lay in the attic room of that farmhouse and started to imagine himself dead.
Pierre
Hannah, are you all right?
Absolutely. Fine. I’m sorry.
Her eyes are glaring bluer than he has ever seen before. She puts down her pencil as if a moment before she was about to stab him with it – or stab herself. Since his arrival, she has barely looked at him. It is as if she is only prepared to address an idea of him and is willing the rest of him not to exist.
Honesty is the best policy, he says. That’s another expression – no?
Hannah
Oliver’s final day at school might not have been such a disaster, but in Oliver’s imagination it became so. One likely reason, Hannah later decided, was because of what had happened at his previous boarding school, the one they both attended from the ages of ten to thirteen. At this school was a charismatic young teacher called George Collins. On their first day, as she and Olly stood outside the ‘Cottage’ where the new children were to stay, she remembers how the teacher ruffled Oliver’s hair but not hers.
Mr Collins, who was the housemaster, must have been in his early thirties at the time, but to them he was as big-boned as a tree, with a booming benevolent voice, wide arms that swept together whole horizons, and stories to transfix any listener within a sentence. They only had to stand in his shade in order to feel safe. They had no father and had never experienced the presence of an adult man so closely before, and they climbed into his branches greedily, without a thought, knowing instinctively that here at last they would be safe.
And the world looked good from up there. They saw hills rolling all the way to the twisted basalt wall of the Drakensberg, they swam in rivers and dams, they learned to sail and fish – they went out into the world and returned to his branches to tell him what they had discovered, a chattering cloud of starlings under the spell of a single, murdering crow.
Pierre
Are we never going to talk about it?
Hannah
It wasn’t what he did to Oliver physically that sent a crack right through the middle of him – because he did almost nothing physically – it was what he did to every other bit of Oliver – his resting places, his instincts, his gaze. Oliver learned to see himself as Mr Collins’s beautiful boy and he learned to dance under that particular sun. Or was it a small glittering moon made of black glass – the eye of the murdering crow?
Throughout his time at school, Oliver was either loved or hated. When he started at that first boarding school, he soon came to be loved. The other boys were drawn to him and listened to him when he spoke. There was nothing obviously likeable about him. He wasn’t the cleverest boy, he wasn’t unusually good at sport, he never did anything in order to assert himself. The only thing he appeared to be any good at was riding horses – and the other boys stood amazed as he was able to subdue the mad mountain ponies down at the stables, getting them to jump any cross-country obstacle Oliver liked in the bottom woods.
But as Oliver emerged as Mr Collins’s favourite, the boys grew uneasy around him, and cooler – until one day, inexplicably, this broke into open hostility. It was not that Oliver had done anything to gain favour, it was more that there seemed to be some suspicious ingredient in him that drew the teacher and repelled the boys. Partially, it was that Oliver never laughed at the teacher behind his back in the way the other boys did. Partially, it was because he slipped into Mr Collins’s current without any resistance, without any instinct for self-preservation. What offended them most, perhaps, was that it soon became clear that he didn’t care what anyone else thought.
Privately, however, Oliver cared far too deeply – and that crack twisted its path right down the middle of him, splitting him in two. From that moment onwards, the two sides of Oliver would have to do battle, each half wanting to bring the other half down. And it would be a fight to the death.
Pierre
Hannah?
Hannah
Mr Collins fed off some of the other boys while barely touching Oliver. The other boys he desired, it would appear, but Oliver he said he loved. Then one day another boy who had fallen under the teacher’s spell jumped from a third storey dormitory window and landed on the tarmac road outside the housemaster’s front door. Both the boy’s femurs shot right up into his abdomen. By some miracle, the boy survived, but he would never walk again.
There was an inquiry and the teacher was asked to leave. He must have had good references because he went to teach in Botswana. When the scandal reached that other school, however, George Collins fled to New Zealand, where he ‘settled down’, got married and had children of his own.
Pierre
What is there to talk about? she says. If there was something to talk about, surely you would have phoned?
I wanted to, but I —
I waited all week. Silence. And then you arrive here today as if nothing’s happened?
Every Wednesday morning, ten o’clock.
Hannah
What Oliver feared more than anything else, Hannah has come to believe, is that he would become like Mr Collins. He would climb into the crown of the teacher’s vacated tree and become the reigning crow. This is why he hated himself for what he did at his next school – climbing into the bed of a boy who never asked him to be there.
* * *
Hannah came home from university one afternoon to find Oliver sitting in his bedroom, the inside of his arms shining with mulberry blood. He told her he’d been sitting on the bus – the 80B, which ran all the way along Jan Smuts Avenue from the university to their house – when a schoolboy had climbed on with some of his friends.
* * *
Oliver watched him the whole journey and didn’t get off at his usual stop. The boy, who had dark hair and a mole on his cheek, was very good-looking, Oliver said. When they both got off at the bus stop afterwards, Oliver called the boy and told him he was a fine art student. He asked if he could take photographs of the boy for a painting. The boy went pale and mumbled that he would have to ask his father. Oliver went home and started cutting his arms.
I’m a monster, he said to Hannah.
But Hannah – who knew him better than anyone – just laughed. You’re not a monster, she told him, you’re just looking for love in the wrong places. You’ll soon find someone, I promise.
Then she sat next to him and, to make him feel less awful about himself, she made a small series of cuts along her arms to match his. They mixed their blood together and he did a painting with blood and charcoal – a very bad painting, probably, which still sits somewhere inside their mother’s house.
Pierre
What was it? she continues. You got what you wanted and then I no longer mattered?
You did.
I thought we had a relationship.
We did.
You said it didn’t matter – what you read
in the notebook. You said you still wanted me.
I did.
The past simple. Thanks.
He shakes his head, tries to laugh at her.
Do you know how insane I went? she continues. All week – waiting for you to phone.
I hope you aren’t blaming me for this.
Every time I went out, I hoped I would find you following me again. I even stopped at street corners so the imaginary you could catch up!
Hannah
One day after university Oliver phoned his old school and asked to speak to Simon, the boy whose bed he had climbed into a few years earlier. Simon came to the phone and when he realised it was the disgraced Oliver calling he pretended he couldn’t hear him and hung up.
* * *
A month later, Oliver drove into that garden wall.
* * *
No one ever knew whether Oliver intended to kill himself. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, but that was nothing new. In life, Oliver consistently wanted the last word. In death, however, he left no note.
II
Pierre
He first saw the prostitute after watching a movie in Montmartre. He was half-looking for a café where he could sit and ponder the film when he was approached by a middle-aged woman who asked him for a cigarette. He thought she was someone’s mother. She looked nothing like a prostitute.
Je n’aime pas fumer, he said.
Mais – aimes-tu faire l’amour?
He didn’t know how to answer this. He hadn’t had sex before or since Élodie.
Viens dans ma chambre. Nous pouvons découvrir.
Her room was a block away. It was neat and clearly rented. They spent the full hour together – as they did every other time he saw her after that.
Only when he started lessons with the English girl did he miss his appointment with the woman. Her name was Sabine. They had sex on several occasions – not only ‘the twice’ – and yet he has barely thought about her since.
* * *
The White Room Page 13