* * *
What am I supposed to do with that?
I have no idea, says Pierre. It’s all a mess.
Do you think you’re still in love with that woman? That playwright? Is that what this is about?
I have no idea who she is either.
Then what were you hoping for? To fall into each other’s arms? Because let me tell you something, Pierre, life is not like that.
Oh, I am well aware of it.
* * *
It was probably rude to leave his business card, and if Hannah is anything like she used to be, she will have taken offence. But the fact is that this doesn’t matter either. Pierre has no expectation of seeing Hannah, or of speaking to her again. Everything they needed to say to each other was probably said in the play. All that’s left for him to do it to make his life right again. To live more truly. To return to that boy he once was in Paris and pick up where he left off – with all those novels of Hannah’s in his rucksack.
* * *
You know, I read all those books she gave me. Those novels. She would probably be pleased to hear that.
Oh, fuck off.
Some of them I read several times. They are still in my study at home – some of them have pretty much fallen apart.
Why should I give a shit?
I don’t know, Suzanne. Maybe because you’re my wife.
Suzanne lights a cigarette – and lets down the window. The cab driver watches her in his rear-view mirror, but he says nothing. Perhaps he understands that it would be healthier for all concerned if she continues to smoke.
I have stood by you, Pierre, she says.
Have you?
I have carried you all these years like a bloody sack.
Have you?
And what have you done in return? Schemed with this South African bitch behind my back!
II
Pierre likes to tell people about the moment their daughter Rosa was born. It was as though his cares were split into two. Suddenly, he had two things in the room to worry about. He imagined at the time, however, that he would be able to establish a triangle that would keep them clear and strong. All he had to do to live a good life, he told himself, was to situate himself between those two poles.
* * *
We have a child to think about, Pierre says as they finally reach Stoke Newington.
God – I hate it when you pretend to be mature.
* * *
He can picture their daughter asleep upstairs in their double bed. She will probably be sprawled diagonally across the mattress, entirely abandoned to sleep. She looked so perfect when she was asleep. Her eyes firmly shut against the world, her mouth solemn and still, her breath coming from a place deeper than her body, deeper than the room.
* * *
What are you saying, Pierre? That you want a divorce?
I suppose I am saying that, he says. I’m sorry, Suzanne, but I don’t see how we can carry on.
Oh, for Christ’s sake.
I’m being serious.
And what about Rosa? Do you also want to ruin her life?
* * *
The cab driver glances at Pierre as they come to a halt outside the building. There is pity in his eyes. Perhaps there is also something akin to hope – for the unhappy couple, for their child, for the idea of happiness.
Hannah
I
Breakfast takes place in a tinkling cramped room that smells of coffee and croissants and some sort of citrus air-freshener that threatens to give Hannah a headache. It has the same view as her room, albeit from a more modest angle.
* * *
Today, the whole of London is wet and dripping.
* * *
Hannah hasn’t yet had the courage to contact Pierre. Last night she went along to the Italian restaurant, Stephen enquiring what had happened to ‘her friend’, and she had probably said too much and stayed too long and drunk too much of that cheap red wine. But the cast was kind and interested and young Drummond even escorted her back to her hotel and embraced her under a street lamp. It was like that scene from the play – when the character of Pierre first realises he is being cuckolded.
* * *
Hannah tends to avoid reading the reviews of her plays. She leaves the negative ones to slip by like a bad smell and she inevitably hears about the good ones through colleagues or friends. But this time, she has decided, she will read each one of them. Not because she is anxious for another big success, but because she wants to understand what it is she has done – and whether or not any of it has come to any good.
* * *
Did you enjoy the play, Mrs Meade?
It is the lonesome ferrety woman again, still looking bereft of her young.
Sorry?
The play you went to see last night. Is it something I should recommend to the other guests?
Definitely not.
I’m sorry to hear that.
When Hannah says nothing further, the woman glances anxiously towards the doors to the kitchen.
How about a lovely cooked breakfast, Mrs Meade?
Just a single poached egg, thank you.
One egg? Is that all?
One egg, no toast. Properly done.
Hannah may have graduated from half a banana and a ginger biscuit for breakfast, but not far.
II
She has an interview that morning in the theatre’s restaurant. The journalist is a large middle-aged woman with emerald clips arranged in her hair like flies. She tells Hannah that she was at the opening night and it soon becomes clear that she has some serious reservations about the play. She confides to Hannah that she also had a relationship with a narcissist once and that she doesn’t think that Hannah’s version of narcissism ‘quite chimes’ with hers.
I think the character in your play conforms more closely to an antisocial personality disorder than a narcissistic one, the woman says with some confidence.
Well I never claimed to be a clinical psychologist, Hannah replies. All I did was write a play. I don’t expect my characters to ‘conform’ to anything at all.
III
After the interview, Hannah catches a tube to Belsize Park to check on her old flat. The tall white building stands there much as she remembers it, although it is in need of a lick of paint. Her room was on the top floor, three windows from the end. It still appears to have the original lace curtains, which would get jammed as soon as you tried to manoeuvre them, but this seems unlikely.
* * *
By now it is raining hard all over London. She wonders briefly about Pierre and imagines him back at Somerset. She still hasn’t felt brave enough to call him. She has been wondering about the meaning of the card – the ‘calling card’, as it might once have been named. Why did he leave the theatre straight after the play? And why did he tell Drummond that he would like her to phone him? Why not mention before the event that he was coming with another woman? And why not tell her whether or not he was married? Was he furious with her? Did he not want to cause a scene in front of his wife? Perhaps he is planning to set his lawyers on her for libel. What the hell was she thinking by using Pierre’s real name in the play?
* * *
She is gratified to find the same horse chestnuts along Haverstock Hill and the same cinema across the road. When she lived here, she still hoped to become an actress. She recalls sitting under a particular tree outside the Pizza Express, preparing herself for an audition for a Sam Shepard play. She hadn’t yet accepted the fact that she was a girl with little to recommend her – at least when it came to being an actress. Yet now that she is here again she feels surprisingly neutral about the place, as if coming to live here was part of a general mistake that she has since corrected.
* * *
It is still raining steadily when she crosses the bridge between the public ponds at the Heath and ascends the path to a favourite copper beech. She stops under the great grey branches, which are streaked like elephant hide, and realises that she is too tired
to go any further.
Pierre
I
He wakes with Rosa bouncing on the edge of the bed. She is still wearing her Tinkerbell pyjamas and her hair is coppery brown in the white morning light.
Dada! she says, showing her teeth. Are my teeth clean?
Sorry?
Are they sparkling?
Yes, says Pierre. They are sparkling. Like they have little stars inside them.
How can teeth have stars inside them?
They can. If you brush them properly. Did you brush them last night?
I forgot. That’s why I did it now. So you wouldn’t be cross.
Pierre stretches as a feeling of irritation towards Suzanne’s sister passes through him. There is something slovenly about the two sisters that he has often resented. It took him longer to see it in Suzanne, but only because she had learned to disguise it better.
What are we doing today? Rosa asks. Are we going to the zoo?
Pierre remembers that yesterday he agreed to take Rosa to the zoo. Suzanne has business meetings all day in the city and Pierre agreed to go with Rosa to Primrose Hill to look at the new tigers.
We’ll go as soon as we’ve had some breakfast.
You promise?
Pixie promise.
* * *
Last night after they returned from the theatre, Suzanne stayed downstairs and drank more wine with her sister – while Pierre went and lay next to Rosa. He was determined not to fight any more in front of their daughter. Sometimes, Rosa would wake up in the middle of one of their arguments and start crying and ask whether they would be getting a divorce. Pierre always assured his child that it was normal for parents to argue, of course they weren’t getting a divorce – and that Rosa must go back to sleep.
He must have drifted off because he woke a few hours later with Suzanne standing at the doorway. She unfastened her dress and let it float like some dark spirit to the floor.
I’m preparing myself to forgive you, she said, sounding slightly drunk.
For what?
Suzanne turned her body sideways so that Pierre could see the line of her body, the shape of her breasts. She liked to parade herself before him. She liked the feel of her body under his gaze.
One last time? Suzanne murmured. Before ye olde divorce?
She showed him one of her breasts.
When she was breastfeeding Rosa, Pierre once asked to taste her milk. He was shocked to find how sweet it was – how sweet his wife had tasted.
Your sister will hear us, he said.
She’ll be pleased for us, Suzanne told him with a laugh.
She will?
It was her idea that I come up here and forgive you in the first place.
Suzanne stepped deeper into the room, the air thick between them, as if they were pretending to be actors on a stage. It was often like this before sex: the two of them moving in electric air, eyeing each other dangerously. They had to become estranged from themselves in order to become interested in one other again.
II
Rosa is finishing her cornflakes when Hannah finally calls him. The child picks up the phone, contemplates it for a moment, and then skips up the steps towards her father, holding the rectangle of black glass like a baton.
It’s your phone, Dada! she says. And this time you have to answer it.
Cape Town
Hannah
All morning, the girl has been playing on the beach, collecting bits of mussel shell and arranging them in a broad circle around my feet.
I never tire of watching her.
She calls the broken shells fairy fingernails.
Before the tide comes in, she is making a fairy garden at my feet.
* * *
In the neighbouring bay, my mother lies dying in her retirement home.
* * *
In the bay after that, Pierre sits in the study, translating one of my ex-student’s writing into French, the glass box catching the light like a magnifying glass.
* * *
This is Rosa’s first visit to Africa. For her, it is still an adventure land of mountains that look like tables, and beaches populated by penguins, and rock pools filled with sunlight and silver fish – where only yesterday a small dark octopus moved towards her feet like smoke, attracted by the glitter painted on her toes.
Should I tell Rosa that I am afraid of the sea?
Do I tell her that a great white shark swallowed an old lady a few years ago just off those rocks?
Must I show her the great meandering scar that runs through everything in this country, through every single park bench?
Of course not.
For in Rosa’s little leaping heart right now rests all our hope.
Whenever I look backwards, into the white void that swirls at my heels, the only evidence I can find that I existed are my words, wandering away behind me like wet black footprints.
Here, at least, I have dwelled.
On this blank page.
Open this book, and you will find me here.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Andrea Nattrass, Terry Morris and all the staff at Picador Africa for their continued support. Thanks also to my editor, Alison Lowry, for her sensitivity and care. Dawid’s art draws inspiration from the work of South African sculptor, Angus Taylor. Thanks to Malcolm Purkey, Nat Ramabulana, Marianne Oldham, Jeremy Herrin, Karina Magdalena Szczurek, Darryn Costello, Craig Mackenzie, Fred Khumalo, Marie-Pierre Bay and my beautiful wife, Leila.
This novel is dedicated to our three children, Amelia, Jack and Phoebe – and the braver new world their generation will create in our wake.
About the Author
Craig Higginson is an internationally acclaimed writer who lives in Johannesburg. His plays have been performed and produced at the National Theatre (London), the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Trafalgar Studios (on London’s West End), the Traverse Theatre (Edinburgh), Headlong (London), the Stadsteater (Stockholm), Salisbury Theatre, the Citizens Theatre (Glasgow), Live Theatre (Newcastle), Next Theatre (Chicago), Theatre 503 and the Finborough Theatre (both London), the Market Theatre (Johannesburg) and several other theatres and festivals around the world.
Craig’s novels include Last Summer (M-Net Literary Award finalist), The Landscape Painter (winner of the UJ Main Prize for South African Literature in English), The Dream House (winner of the UJ Main Prize and shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Award) and his new novel, The White Room. Craig’s novels and plays have won several awards in the UK and South Africa, including the Sony Gold Award in the UK and an Edinburgh Fringe First.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Epigraph
Entrances
London
I
II
III
IV
V
Act One. The Passive
Paris
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
Act Two. Narrative Tenses
Paris
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
Act Three. The Conditional
London
Paris
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
Interval
London
I
II
Act Four. Lies and Truth
Paris
I
II
Act Five. Degrees of Uncertainty
Between Europe and Africa
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
Paris
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
Exits
London
I
II
III
Pierre
I
II
Hannah
I
II
III
Pierre
I
II
Cape Town
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE WHITE ROOM. Copyright 2019 by Craig Higginson. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Michiel Botha
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at (800) 221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
First published in the South Africa by Picador Africa, an imprint of Pan Macmillan South Africa
First U.S. Edition: January 2019
eISBN 9781250230973
First eBook edition: October 2018
The White Room Page 20