Out in the sculpture garden, mobiles were being propelled by trickling water. Maternal forms interlocked on humps of lawn. Couples were strolling among them, us leading and following each other into the sunshine. Blemishes of green light tinted wall surfaces; a fuller green of the trees outside impinged through glass. Here were flat squares of nature like a triptych whose panels coincide across the frame. Nearing the garden’s entrance, we paused by the architect’s drawings of the gallery itself. Only a few token trees appeared in his impression.
‘To see it like that you would have to cut down all these trees,’ she said.
‘No, it’s not at all faithful.’
After finishing off our picnic of rolls and salami this time, semi-reclined there among the Smiths and Caros, we had both settled down to some writing: Alice on a fan of postcards from the museum shop, me in a notebook, bought specially for that far-off September. After scribbling a few memoranda about the art works I had chanced to see, thanks to this bit of good fortune, I sat watching the motions of her hand and forearm, fingers delicately pushing and pulling the pen nib, then absently reading what was written. She was describing the coincidence of meeting a couple from Brooklyn Heights on the steps outside the Van Gogh Museum. They were leaving for the States the following day, so she’d barely enough time to catch up on their news. Then she put in a bit about how Rembrandt’s house was rather empty of paintings to admire. Her handwriting was tiny, quite the opposite of yours, and she’d practically filled up the space left below the address. Soon she would have to turn it and write up the side. The card was to Isabel.
A crackle of automatic rifle fire reached the sculpture garden. The forest of Arnhem was a military training area, and the modern art museum had been built within a mock-battleground, encircled by gunnery ranges and tank terrain. We were relaxing in the heavily defended art area, surrounded by places in which it would be dangerous to stray. Soldiers with twigs in their hats and donned gas masks would be lumbering somewhere near with their heavy machine guns. Puffy white clouds were in convoy above them, taking their own route towards where, speckled with sunlight and peaceful, we were lying. Arm in arm, between the mobiles a few yards away, a teenage couple came strolling by.
‘Couldn’t possibly be English,’ she said.
But her words seemed to echo far too loudly in the silence of that sculpture garden’s calm. For their part, the young Dutch couple glanced over at the pair of us, but, evidently not that interested in hyperrealism, they immediately decided we weren’t worth the trouble.
The grass around was speckled with coins of light printed out by the colander of foliage above. We too were covered in the spots of light, as if like Danae in her shower of gold. Through the leaves, across the brilliant sky, solitary clouds in strung-out procession were moving almost imperceptibly. Resting in the grass beside her, absentmindedly watching them, I imagined those clouds as thought balloons.
Not far away, behind coverts and bluffs on the shallow horizon, the far noises of battle simulation continued, excursions and alarums being played out in the distance: the white square defended against the red.
Alice let out a sigh, then closed her eyes and allowed her head to rest on the bank of grass, enjoying the sunlight on her neck and face.
‘So what are we doing here?’ she asked, pushing the short sleeves of her white blouse up to the shoulders.
Falling in love—is what I didn’t say.
We spent that Wednesday hitchhiking and by evening had arrived at a place called ’s-Hertogenbosch in North Brabant, a long way from the tourist routes. It stood at a crossroads: one led back towards Amsterdam, the other in the direction of Brussels. We had talked through our plans in a roadside hotel lobby late that same morning. The barmaid was skimming layer after layer of watery foam from an overflowing beer glass. With each repeated gesture, she seemed to be bringing our promise-filled excursion to what felt like an unpredictably premature end.
The recommended hotel in the town was a place used by lorry drivers and commercial travellers. We ate a meal in the nominated café, where a discount could be obtained on the bill. Alice spent most of the time watching sparse traffic interrupt the blankness of the street outside.
‘What will you do?’ I asked.
‘Have a few more days in Amsterdam,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty of art still to see.’
We went to bed while it was still early, and attempted to make love slowly, as if piling on the agony of the separation to come; then, curling up together, I tried to go to sleep. Though our caresses on the night before parting might have seemed a vain attempt to re-join two people almost rehearsing their goodbyes, there was nothing to do but try. All that day she had said nothing about my imminent journey into Italy, the journey she would not be making, however much I might have wanted her with me in that other life. Lying awake with the scent of freshly washed hair and the faint note of her breathing, deciding, in so far as it would be up to me, that she would have to be my future, I found myself reliving the night before.
In the dark of the spacious double bedroom at Oterloo, behind drawn curtains, in each other’s arms, we had formed two other areas of dark. Making love with the light off increased the sensation of touching, and though sensing still some intimately known dimensions, still I couldn’t be sure about where each of us ended and began. Glimpses of her features, a shoulder blade or breast, an ear, or a stretch of neck would promise continuity. It was so hard to make out her facial expressions. Kissing with eyes open could seem such bad manners. But how would I meet her gaze and smile? Energetic, passionate, and yet a little too rushed: that’s what our nights together had felt like to me. Overwhelming desire rearranged the features, our faces were so close to each other that her eyes moved into the bridge of the nose, they became so enlarged that the forehead shrank to the hairline. With our expressively misshapen features, confused images of love and fear, we were turning into those paintings by the pupils at Marten’s school. Hanging upon each other’s silence, moving as best we knew how: it made an undulating landscape with sudden and piercing surprises of perspective, vulnerable areas and delicate spots our hands could stray dangerously over. On her back the sunburnt skin still diaphanously peeled.
‘Be careful,’ she whispered. ‘It’s really tender.’
Then there was no wind at all. The fir-trees around that small guesthouse were absolutely still. We were those nudes in the forest.
Now she was moving away from me, stepping out of bed and walking quite naked into the bathroom. She turned on the taps. Her right leg arched slightly and foot on tiptoe, she was soaping herself with a flannel. Then she skipped back into bed, pulled up the covers, and that lovely young woman kissed me once again.
While I drifted off to sleep, my thoughts had gone wandering back along the gallery walls. A one-eyed head was staring at a bride; bottles and siphons and playing cards were shattered in a broken heap on the floor; a pier was being demolished by high seas; tubular trees and naked foresters were shrinking in memory, dislocated nudes withdrawing into distance. Yet now the pictures were staring peacefully across the spaces of their corridors and recessed spaces, wholly unaware of each other. A full moon above the gallery cast its fair cool light onto the trees and clearings of Arnhem’s silent, pitch-black forest and the sleeping village.
But now it was morning in our small hotel. We were sitting alone at a table with a thin white laundered cloth. On the wall above our heads was a carved crucifix. It would be a cloudy start to the day. The sun was fitfully filtering through lace curtains, enough to brighten the tablecloth with its patchy neutrality. On it were the now familiar objects of a Dutch breakfast: fresh crusty white bread, butter, a choice of jams, a small bowl of haajeslag as they’re called, a sort of chocolate sprinkle, coffee pot, milk and sugar.
‘When they write the biography,’ she whispered, leaning over confidentially towards me, ‘this will be called: A Brief Affair
.’
I took another mouthful of bread and jam, hoping to let her painful words die their death between us.
‘But it was nice while it lasted,’ she added, winningly.
‘Yes. No, I’ll be in touch soon as I’m back. It’s not that far from London.’
‘You’ve got my Bristol address,’ she said. ‘Come over and see me in the autumn.’
There was still some early mist outside, no more than the day would soon clear, and a faintly acrid smell from the nearby factories. We paid the bill and walked out across tramlines, up towards the corner where the roads diverged.
A brief affair: her joking phrase had seemed to seal off those days together. Approaching the point of separation, it was as if our few nights together in Amsterdam, Purmerend, Otterlo, and ’s-Hertogenbosch had been framed and put behind glass, to be variously viewed by distant spectators passing before us in the gallery of lost-preserved time.
We soon reached the signposts. She glanced up towards the words. It was like a subtitled film when, only knowing a little of the language, your eyes flit between the moving lips and the white printed words which shimmer below them. But they weren’t quite synced, and the lips didn’t fit the phrases. The speakers’ bodies were continually leaving them, even though appearing to be going on ahead. So the two of us gazed at each other, kissed once more, and—catching one another’s eyes—began to turn away. I looked around and, with the sad relief of a tricky parting over, said yet again, ‘Goodbye … goodbye.’
CHAPTER 9
When you emerged from the crowd at Brussels international railway station, with a red paisley handkerchief fitted behind your ears and tied under the fall of hair at your neck, my relief was strained with fear and anxiety. The scarf had been adjusted like a cowl around your face—a face in shadow. You were wearing your blue jeans with frayed white ends and the pale green flowery smock you’d made yourself; you were carrying a grey frame rucksack through the crowd that funnelled towards the barrier, and fanned out across the station foyer. Coming clear from among them, not noticing anyone standing beside the black wood kiosk, you took a few steps further, were beginning to turn around, when a sign of recognition flashed across your face.
‘Let me help you with that bag,’ I offered.
‘No need—I’ve carried it this far,’ you said. ‘Have you found a hotel?’
Directed out into the nine o’clock dark of that September night, you turned and blankly gazed into my face. Then you strode towards the exit, leaving my hand behind.
‘I’ve booked a place over on the far side of the square. No distance at all.’
Outside Brussels station, as we headed towards the hotel, traffic came pounding over the cobbles, cars veering past at the junctions. Beyond the railway lines, backs of dilapidated housing blocks loomed up out of the night, a rare lit window against the surrounding darkness.
‘How was the ferry?’ I asked.
‘Rough. People being sick everywhere,’ you said. ‘I had the snack bar all to myself. We were late docking. There was just time to run for the last train to Brussels. It was actually moving when I got on. Count yourself lucky I’m here.’
‘Have you eaten dinner?’
‘In the restaurant car.’
The picture of a thick, white table cloth, a few scattered crumbs of fresh bread, an empty wine glass with a pale red stain, a wiped-clean plate and a railway waiter hovering to refill a coffee cup came over me like a pang of more than hunger.
‘I haven’t had a thing to eat since breakfast.’
But there was only further silence as we crossed the nighttime square. Raised railway lines were overarched by a mast-work of signals and gantries. Beneath that confusion ran tunnels with approaching car headlights that were picking us out, silhouetted in the glare interrupting urban darkness.
‘Because I ran out of money … I’m glad you came. I wouldn’t even have been able to pay the hotel bill.’
Leaving most of my holiday savings for you to change into traveller’s cheques had seemed a convenient arrangement. Why risk carrying all that money around in Holland? Why not give you that assurance I would be here in Brussels?
‘Alice not with you then?’
You must have been imagining your worst nightmare.
‘No, most likely she’s in Amsterdam …’
Dropped off by a travelling salesman near the centre of Brussels not long before midday, I had stumbled over temporary surfaces for pedestrians, along avenues congested by works in progress. They were building a new metro system. Past pleasant-smelling cafés, I headed by guesswork for the railway terminus in its enormous square. The room’s window gave on to a vast empty space with the station, a large clock face on its tower, in one far corner.
So then, as we stood waiting in the dark, waiting for a gap in the traffic at another tunnel under its railway tracks, I was letting you know that the room had a shower, but, unfortunately, it didn’t seem to work.
‘Oh great,’ you said, and it seemed better not to let you know why it didn’t.
That morning, when I walked into its lobby with travel agents’ posters for decoration, the hotel had seemed cheap enough. One of the images showed a man cheerfully chasing a blonde girl in a swimsuit through sand dunes, while the other was of a black waiter serving a cocktail to a richly dressed woman at a boulevard café.
Now the first thing to do was take a shower. The equipment stood in the same room as the bed. Water was carried from a fitting mounted on the wall, with flow and temperature controls, up a flexible tube and into the spray, attached by a bracket to the ceiling. I took off my clothes, stepped onto the plastic tray, and was trying to adjust the hot and cold tap, but couldn’t seem to get it right. Suddenly, pressure forced the flexible tube off the shiny spray fitting above my head. A spout of lukewarm water gushed up from its free end. It splashed across the grimy white ceiling. It was raining all over my head and shoulders, drenching my hair in its downpour. It overflowed the shower tray, sluiced the plastic curtains, and sprayed onto the carpet that blossomed with a sodden, dark stain.
The double bed’s soft-sprung mattress groaned. The hotel room had been emulsion-painted pale yellow many years before. Scales of pigment were flaking away at the angle of wall and ceiling, and there was a small heap of flakes on the worn brown linoleum in the corner near the door. After throwing a few clothes back on, I took a look at the shower attachment. Its plastic tube wouldn’t stay fixed to the nozzle. The peeling emulsion told me to make something of that. The thin bit of damp grey carpet spoke wearily of all the other transients who had occupied the room. A frilly plastic lampshade, roses printed on its side, signally failed to cheer up the ceiling. With nightfall, it would try in vain to diffuse a weak, cold light. And it was too late now to look for another hotel.
By the railway station clock, the time was just twenty-three minutes past two. For some while now, across its intersections, the cars had seemed miraculously to be avoiding accidents, even though there appeared to be no markings on the roads. Vehicles continued nonetheless to wander around each other. The station’s square was edged with small hotels with unlit neon adverts built on latticework above their roofs. The timetabled expresses would arrive and leave, and when a train roared outside the bedroom, the loose brass and enamel bed-head clattered against the radiator behind it. On the enormous clock face, large steel hands moved imperceptibly around.
All that afternoon I would raise my reading glasses as attention drifted from Gombrich’s Art and Illusion to the long and short hands on the clock, then back to the closely argued text. Each detail in the day’s altering light altered its aspects under my half-absorbed regard, and each was interfused with a spreading uncertainty as slowly but surely the horizon darkened and the clock became obscured.
Now it was nearly black outside. The drivers below had turned on their headlights. Through the gloom, I could no longer
make out how long there was to wait. There seemed no need for me to wear a watch back then. Soon it would be time to go down and walk across the square once more to see what time it was. The shower nozzle leered from the wall. And what if you’d missed your connection?
But there was no need to worry. Here you were, and peering at the hotels round that Brussels’ square, illuminated now with flickering neon. A sliver of moon shone a blur through the patches of drifting, darker-blue cloud. The frontage of our hotel grew more distinct, its name unlit, unreadable below the first floor windows. In silence, we entered the haven of the lobby’s electric light, and presented ourselves at the varnished wood reception desk. A night porter gestured to the book where you were to sign your name. Behind the late-shift receptionist, a youngish woman was eating a mouth-watering cheese and lettuce sandwich.
‘Passport,’ he said, and reached out his hand.
You found the blue booklet in one of the small pockets of your rucksack and handed it over. He nodded us into the hotel. Then I led you up the two narrow flights of stairs to the room.
‘Sorry it’s no better. There’s the shower. And every time a train goes by that brass bed-head rattles against the radiator.’
‘Why don’t we move it away from the wall then?’
You put down your backpack and examined the offending object.
‘Look, it’s just resting against the bed,’ you said. ‘If you give me a hand we can shift it somewhere else.’
After the heavy brass object had been leant against the wall by the door, you pulled back the shower curtain and took a look at the broken attachment.
‘No, this looks like it can’t be fixed.’
Alone with you again, I felt your unfamiliarity like an accusation. Your sunburnt face, averted eyes, and the stillness of your lips were not as I had pictured them during those hours of waiting. It was as if we were tentatively reading each other, moving uneasily about the confines of that hotel room—as if it were the first night of an old-fashioned marriage, as if we’d never seen each other without clothes on, as if I didn’t know how to kiss you. Oh but I needn’t have fretted.
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