The Book of Revelation

by Rupert Thomson

  There was someone else.

  Each time I tried to prove her wrong, my mind would fill with images from the room—the black steeples of the women’s hoods, their cloaks swirling around me like unconsciousness itself. . . . I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what had happened. I couldn’t admit to what I’d been through, I suppose, not even to myself. I didn’t want it to be true. Each time I tried to speak, my tongue just froze.

  Finally, at seven o’clock, Brigitte stood up. “I have to leave,” she said.

  My right elbow jerked sideways, knocking a knife to the floor. “Where are you going?”

  “I have a performance tonight. I’m due on stage in an hour.”

  I rose to my feet, then stood there uselessly and watched her take her coat down from the coat-rack in the corridor. “Don’t forget to do your exercises. . . .”

  She gave me a suspicious, almost hunted look, as if I had succeeded in acquiring information that should not have been available to me. And yet I always used to remind her to warm up properly before a performance. It had been my way of wishing her good luck.

  When she had finished buttoning her coat she looked at me again, this time across one shoulder. “Will you be here when I get back?”

  I stared at her. “Yes. Of course. Where else would I—”

  She nodded to herself, then turned and let herself out of the apartment.

  •

  Exhaustion hit me with the force of something coming from outside. I could have fallen asleep on my feet, standing exactly where I was. I fought it, though. I had to. If I had given in to it, I would have felt as if I was taking things for granted.

  I stayed awake by walking through the apartment. As I moved from one room to another I had the sense that I was somewhere I did not belong—that I had broken into the place, in fact, and was about to steal something. I felt edgy and remote, both at the same time. I stared at the fish swimming in their tank, the exotic plants under the window, the contents of the fridge. I opened the wardrobe and looked through all my clothes. I studied photographs, read letters. . . . Everything that came under my scrutiny appeared to regard me with supreme indifference. I meant nothing to any of it. Even a book on iconography that Brigitte had given me (avec mon amour, toujours—B), even framed pictures of us dancing together. . . . The sense of being an intruder would not lift. Instead, it began to seem appropriate, and, as the minutes ticked slowly by, it deepened into a feeling that was not unlike loneliness.

  I climbed the stairs and, opening the french windows, stepped on to the terrace. I sat on the wrought-iron chair that we kept out there. The night was cold and damp, and a fine mist had settled over the city; the church bells ringing in the distance had a fragile, glassy sound. Four floors below, a single street-lamp gave off a soft-edged orange glow. The air moved towards me warily, the way a wild creature might. I went on sitting there, and, after a while, it came up close and pressed itself against me. I was shivering by then, but it didn’t matter. I felt as if I had been acknowledged at long last. I could tell where I began and ended, how much space I occupied. I knew the limits of myself, and it was something, to know that.

  Back inside, I prepared for bed. I left two lights on, one downstairs, the other in the corridor outside the bathroom; I didn’t want Brigitte to walk into a dark apartment and think that I had gone. Leaving the bedroom door ajar, I undressed quickly and slid between the sheets. All I could see then was a thin column of yellow light at the far end of the room. It reminded me of childhood, the way all the brightness was in the distance, and how it faded as it reached towards me, how my own warm darkness swallowed it. As my eyes began to close, the little boy appeared in front of me. I remembered his pale-blue cardigan and his red trousers, and I remembered how his face had altered when I spoke, as though it was not the sight of a man in a hood that frightened him, but communication, language—speech itself. I kept seeing his mouth open into a round black shape. I kept seeing him turn and run off down the street, like a jerky clockwork toy. . . .

  •

  Though I woke when I heard Brigitte come in, I pretended to be asleep. I felt one side of the bed dip. There was a stillness then, and I was sure that she was looking down at me. I tried to keep my breathing regular. At last, the mattress tilted again as, turning in the bed, she drew the covers over her and settled for the night.

  Sometime later I woke again, the sheets all wet and twisted. The windows to my right—a set of pale rectangles—seemed to be in the wrong place; they didn’t correspond to any windows that I knew. If you had asked me where I was, I could not have told you. I turned my pillow over, then lay still, waiting for my heart to slow down. I must have been dreaming that I was back in the white room, with only one small square of glass above my head—or at my parents’ house, perhaps, in the New Forest. . . .

  In the morning I heard the bed creak and, opening my eyes, I saw Brigitte reach out and switch off the alarm clock. Once again, I was tempted to touch her, to place one hand against her naked back as she leaned away from me—the skin covering her ribs the way snow covers fallen branches, her shoulder-blades like little buried shields. . . . Instead, I waited until she looked in my direction, then I smiled at her. I wanted to reassure her, wanted to let her know that things were going to be all right. She acted as if she hadn’t noticed. Since she saw me in a guilty light, I suppose she thought I was just trying to ingratiate myself.

  I watched her leave the bed. She pulled on a T-shirt with details of our recent tour of South America on the back—São Paulo, Caracas, Buenos Aires—and I had a sudden image of her painting her toenails on a hotel balcony at dusk, the sky stretching behind her, immense and soft, the wind so warm that it could dry your hair in sixty seconds. . . . The memory was proof of something, it was evidence, and I wanted to recall it for her—Remember the time we. . . .—but it was too late, she had already walked out of the room. I listened to her opening and shutting cupboards in the kitchen, lighting the gas, making a cup of Chinese tea. Later, I heard the bath running. Her usual routine. I lay back against the pillows, my eyes already closing. I was aware of my body only as a weight. My fatigue seemed inexhaustible.

  The next time I woke up, Brigitte had already left for the studio.

  •

  On the third evening after I returned, she did not have to give a performance. When she came home at half-past seven she found me sitting by the window in the dark. The house opposite our house had all its lights on, and the bright golden rooms were reflected in the surface of the canal. The water lay so flat and still that the reflections didn’t waver. A quiet night in Amsterdam, as if the city existed in a vacuum. . . .

  She folded her arms across her breasts and leaned against the doorway, watching me. “Perhaps you should come to class tomorrow.”

  I thought about it, then slowly shook my head. “I’m not ready.”

  A silence fell between us.

  “I think it will take time,” I said. “To readjust.”

  I looked up. Her body appeared to warp and then swim sideways. And yet she hadn’t moved. I pushed my thumb and forefinger into my eyes. To my surprise I heard myself begin to tell her what had happened to me.

  “There were three of them—I don’t know who they were . . . They took me to a room . . . a white room. . . .”

  My sentences were tentative and unconvincing, but I forced myself to carry on.

  “They did things to me—things I can’t describe. . . .

  “Three of them. . . . three women. . . .”

  Once, while I was talking, I glanced at Brigitte. She had the strangest look of pity on her face—not just pity either, but sadness too, and even a kind of admiration; she was almost in awe of the lengths to which I was going in my attempt to exonerate myself. At the same time, it was clear that she didn’t believe a word of it. And who could blame her, really? The story she had concocted seemed so much more probable than mine. In desperation, I unfastened my trousers and showed her the tattoo, the scars. She ree
led away from me, the back of her left hand pressed against her mouth. Her eyes had filled with anguish, but also with disgust. What about me? I wanted to cry out. How do you think I feel? Somehow I couldn’t, though.

  How difficult it is, sometimes, to find the right words. Or any words at all.

  The marks on my body became proof not of my story but of her theory: I’d had some kind of affair, some perverted liaison, which, naturally enough, I felt I had to lie about. It also confirmed something she had always suspected about the English, namely that our politeness, our diffidence, if you like, is just a cover for some deep unpleasantness that flourishes precisely because it is concealed.

  Throughout that evening I clung to the feeling that everything could be explained if only I could find the correct approach. But when I told her how much I had missed her during those eighteen days, when I told her that I loved her, more than she could ever imagine, she turned away, exasperated, and once she even put her hands over her ears and shouted, “No!”

  She returned to the same point again and again, as if it had magnetic qualities. She kept asking who the woman was, and I kept shrugging and telling her I didn’t know.

  “You don’t know?” She stood in front of me, with both hands on her hips. “How can you not know?”

  I gazed at the floor.

  “You didn’t even know her name?”

  “It wasn’t like that,” I said.

  “So what was it like?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain—”

  “Merde.” She paced the length of the living-room. “Je ne peux pas croire que tu aies fait ça.”

  “Mais je n’ai rien fait,” I murmured. “I didn’t do anything.” I put my head in my hands. Veins pulsed against the inside of my fingers.

  When I finally looked up again, I saw that she had come to a decision. She couldn’t live with me, she said, not like this. She didn’t recognise me any more. I frightened her. She would have to leave. . . . Though, even as she spoke, her dark eyes swept round the apartment, one wild, despairing look, as if she could not imagine how her life could take place anywhere else.

  “I love you, Brigitte,” I said.

  It made no difference.

  Sometimes, when I look back, I think that what we talked about that night was all irrelevant. The reasons for my absence did not matter. What mattered was the absence itself. I had left her once. I could leave her again. She could no longer count on me. Promises, once broken, can never be mended.

  It also seems to me that I colluded in her interpretation of events. I let her believe what she wanted to believe. It saved me from having to tell the story. It meant I could pretend that none of it had ever happened.

  Or maybe it had happened. . . .

  To someone else, though. Not to me.

  •

  That night Brigitte stayed with her friend, Fernanda, while I lay in our double bed, alone. I was still awake at three-thirty in the morning, my eyes wide open, cool air moving through the room. I heard ducks cackle on the canal outside. I heard the clatter of a loose mudguard as a bicycle went past.

  Stefan, the photographer, had called me earlier. Something weird, he said. He had seen me from his car on the afternoon I disappeared. Later, he had talked to Brigitte about it. He had told her how happy I looked, which seemed to confirm some suspicion she had, that I was on my way to meet someone—another woman. And now he had heard that we were splitting up. . . .

  “News travels fast,” I murmured.

  He said he felt responsible. He felt guilty.

  I told him, as gently as I could, that he was probably overestimating his own importance, and that he should forget about it, and, by the end of the phone-call, I could hear the relief in his voice. I had given him what he was looking for—a form of absolution.

  Of course I’d looked happy, I thought as I lay there. The spring sunlight, the man in the linen jacket singing—and no notion that anything might change. Because, at that point in my life, I wouldn’t have changed a thing, not if you had offered me wealth beyond my wildest imaginings. I looked happy because I was happy.

  I turned over slowly in the bed. There were places on my body that still hurt. A clock somewhere struck four. I needed to listen to someone talking, I needed a voice other than my own—I needed not to think. . . .

  I thought and thought all night, and none of it came to anything.

  At half-past five I heard the mutter of a boat as it passed beneath my window. Then it began to rain. The steady grey rain of dawn.

  Not long after that I fell asleep.

  •

  Later that morning I called Isabel van Zaanen. I had known Isabel for years. It was Isabel who had persuaded the company to audition me when I was seventeen. It was Isabel who, being a famous choreographer herself, had encouraged me to try my hand at creating ballets. Despite the difference in our ages, we had become good friends. In her retirement, she had moved to Bloemendaal, which was on the coast, about half an hour’s drive from Amsterdam. She lived in an old mansion that had been divided into four or five rambling apartments. I had slept in her spare bedroom once, with Brigitte, and I had never forgotten the window that looked out over the pine forest behind the house, and the smell of the air at night—a mingling of the garden and the sea. . . . It was a magical place—timeless, somehow, and at peace with itself.

  When I talked to Isabel on the phone I didn’t say anything about my disappearance. I didn’t even mention the fact that Brigitte and I were separating. I simply asked if I could come and stay with her for a while. Her response was immediate and typical: I could stay as long as I liked—in fact, I’d be doing her a favour, she said, because she had to teach in Oslo that summer, and she’d been thinking she should find someone to move into the place while she was away. This was also typical of Isabel, that she should underplay her generosity, disguise it as self-interest.

  That evening I dialled Fernanda’s number and spoke to Brigitte. I told her she could live in our apartment. She had her dancing to think of, her career—her life. It would make more sense, I said, if I was the one to leave.

  “What about your career?” she said. There was a curious flatness in her voice, a sort of reluctance, as if she was only asking out of politeness.

  I said something noncommittal. When she asked me where I would go, I told her not to worry. I would find somewhere.

  “What about money?”

  I didn’t follow.

  “The rent,” she said. “I can’t pay the rent by myself.”

  “Oh, I see.” I paused. “You’ll have to find someone to share with you.”

  She took a quick breath, as if I had startled her, and I realised that she was smoking. She often smoked when she was on the phone. She would be holding the cigarette packet and the lighted cigarette in one hand, and the receiver in the other. This whole thing had started with the absence of a cigarette, and now, as we came out the other side, Brigitte was smoking. There was a neatness about it, a symmetry, that was almost comical. But she was saying something.

  “Someone to share with me?” She sounded nervous, apprehensive.

  “It shouldn’t be too difficult,” I told her. “It’s a nice place.”

  •

  I have heard people talk about the comfort a woman can provide, but it’s not something I’m particularly familiar with. Perhaps there’s a lack in me, some kind of failing or deformity. I don’t know. Or perhaps it’s just that I never looked for comfort, never needed it—at least, not until that still grey afternoon in May when I walked back into our apartment after an absence of eighteen days. . . .

  Then I needed it more than I have ever needed anything.

  Since it wasn’t offered, though, since it didn’t become available to me, I couldn’t begin to unburden myself; I couldn’t begin to shift my anger or my sense of shame. I was unable to forge a link between the life I’d had before and the life I would have from that point on.
Instead, the two lives became separable, at odds with each other, like stray cats fighting for the same piece of territory, and it would not be long, I felt, before one of them was driven off for good.

  I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Brigitte had put down the glass jug she was holding and said, Come here. If she had taken my head in her two hands and drawn it gently to her breast. . . .

  It’s a fantasy, of course.

  Certainly, it would have been unlike her. Brigitte was a dancer—an artist. The only thing she was capable of nurturing was her own talent. I don’t mean to sound bitter or resentful. I don’t even mean to criticise her. It’s simply a fact.

  The truth is, in the context of our relationship, there was only one person who was capable of providing comfort and support, and that was me.

  •

  I took almost nothing from the apartment—my notebooks, a few photographs, some clothes. Midday was striking as I walked to my car. I loaded the boxes into the boot, then I unlocked the door on the driver’s side and climbed in. Through the windscreen I could see a man of about my own age reading on the roof of a houseboat. He had tangled black hair and wore a pair of oil-stained dark-green Bermudas. He was too deep in his book to notice me. I watched a cat pad past him, its tail curling round one of his thin tanned legs. The sun lay flat on the canal, making the water look opaque. In the distance I could hear a motor launch, a drowsy sound, like a wasp trapped against a window-pane in September. I slid the key into the ignition, but didn’t turn it. I wanted to stay exactly where I was, for ever. The man reading the book, the cat, the sunlight on the water. . . . One minute passed, and then another. The spell lasted. Then I started the car, shifted into gear and, pulling out into the street, drove in the direction of Haarlemmerweg, which, as its name suggests, would take me to Haarlem, and then on, towards the coast. . . .