Fabulous

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Joseph set down his basket and said, ‘They are sour.’ The man was still watching him, so he went on: ‘I like to have them in my room for the colour. And the scent. You understand? All through the winter, day by day, the scent becomes more powerful.’

  ‘So you’ve been picking them up for years, then,’ said the man, who was bending sideways, touching the top of his sock with the tips of his fingers.

  ‘Yes,’ said Joseph.

  ‘You must live round here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In that hostel.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The man kept bending from one side to the other, blowing air out of his mouth as though he was being punched in the belly. After a while he said, ‘I know this sounds a bit weird, but I don’t get much time for getting home-stuff sorted. I’m just wondering. I’ve seen you around. And I kind of think I could trust you. Do you want to come and live in my house? With me?’

  Joseph was a courteous man. He had once been very good-looking. Now his hair was receding it wasn’t so much of a problem, but he always found it distressing to be obliged to disappoint. He paused, and chose his words carefully and said, ‘It is true that I am not yet married, but I must explain …’

  ‘Oh no,’ said the man, and actually blushed. ‘No. I didn’t mean anything like that. You’ll meet my girlfriend. I mean. No.’

  Joseph smiled and made a placatory gesture, as though smoothing out the unfortunate hump that had jolted their conversation off course.

  The man ran his hands over his head and said, ‘Look, I’m Geordie. I live over there. The thing is, I need someone to do stuff for me – taking the car to the garage, and all that. Signing for parcels. And I just wondered. I just thought, if you like to make your place nice with the apples … Irma’s left, you see. You’d have your own room. No rent of course. I go away a lot, but still. And there’s the parrot.’

  Joseph said, ‘I am a window-cleaner. Very skilled and experienced. I am an independent man. My family own orchards.’

  Geordie seemed flummoxed. He said, ‘Oh orchards. So the apples … But you could carry on window-cleaning. It’s not a job. It’s more like a … Well. I mean you wouldn’t be a servant.’

  The last word hung between them – embarrassing.

  Suddenly Geordie shouted, ‘Hey!’ and began waving. A woman was letting herself into a house across the road. ‘That’s Lola,’ he said. ‘My girlfriend.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you come in and take a look?’

  Joseph said, ‘I will do that. Yes.’

  The apple tree had blossomed and fruited twice more before Geordie said one evening, ‘I’m being relocated.’ He seemed angry. Joseph carried on ironing and waited to find out what this meant for him. ‘Nobody even asked if I like Dubai. I hate Dubai. I’m an outdoor person. Lola’s going to go ballistic.’ Geordie was ricocheting from one side of the laundry room to the other, and there wasn’t nearly enough space there to contain his agitation.

  ‘What am I going to do with this house?’ he asked. Joseph kept quiet. He wanted to know that, too.

  Geordie and Lola broke up. Geordie said the money was too good to say no to. Lola said, ‘Even if it means losing me?’ and when he didn’t immediately answer she began to cry. The truth was they had been very quiet in bed at night for at least a year, which was something of a relief to Joseph – the house’s walls were thin. Lola had said to him once, as they made the shopping list together, ‘Didn’t you ever want children, Joseph?’ He didn’t reply. He considered the question impertinent. He would never have asked it of her. He knew that she was thirty-eight.

  He was a good window-cleaner. He had never seen the village from which all four of his grandparents came, but he had often been told how famous its people were for their immunity from vertigo. The village was in the mountains near to a frontier that had shifted repeatedly over the last four generations. Sometimes his people were citizens of this country, sometimes of that, but always they were the people of that high village.

  He imagined a path with a cliff to one side, a precipice to another. He imagined a notch in the mountain ridge, the entrance to a rocky fold filled in winter with snow and covered in summer with tiny star-shaped flowers. In his mind’s eye he saw pinnacles, carved by the winds of a million years, standing like sentries way above. He saw, at the head of that hidden fold, the village clambering up the rock-face. He saw men stamping on their boots as the sheltering crag caught the first damson-coloured light, and leading out their goats. He had no idea where these mind-pictures had come from but he treasured them.

  As a matter of course, like all the men of his family who went abroad, he became a window-cleaner. He contacted his cousin as soon as he arrived in London and by next morning he was standing on a windowsill with a plastic bucket and an implement halfway between a paint-roller and the windscreen-wiper of a car. Two days later he was left alone in a house. ‘I trust you,’ said his cousin. ‘You’re a good boy.’

  A sash-cord broke, and he found himself on the outside ledge of the spare room window with no way of getting back inside. The ledge was just wide enough for his two feet placed one behind the other, heel to toe, and it canted very slightly downwards towards the paved terrace three floors down. He leant against the glass and prayed. It was nearly two hours before the woman of the house came out into the garden and saw him there. She called up, but he didn’t dare speak, could only whimper. She went back indoors and came upstairs, and yanked the sash up roughly so that he teetered, but she grabbed his shirt and he climbed back into the room. His feet and legs were so cramped he had to slide down the stairs on his backside.

  That night he thought, If I had fallen I would never have married her. With window-cleaning there are always risks, but he was careful. All he had to do was stay alive, and make a home.

  Geordie went away. Lola took the parrot. She thought it could say her name, although Geordie had told Joseph one night, after Lola had gone to stay with her sister, that what it was actually saying was Rolo. Its previous owner had loved chocolate.

  ‘No point selling,’ said Geordie. ‘London property’s the sweetest place to keep your money. Joe, how’d you like to manage the place if I let it out?’

  No one else called Joseph Joe. The name sounded alien to him, but he understood it was intended to be friendly. He wasn’t sure what Geordie was proposing. He waited. He was good at eliciting information by remaining silent.

  Geordie said, ‘All you have to do is let them in, and then check everything before they leave. Clean sheets and a bit of a tidy-up every time there’s a change-over. Self-catering – you won’t have to cook. You can keep your room. They’ll like the service, and you’ll let me know if they get out of order. Anything else they ask you to do, they’ll have to pay you extra.’

  ‘Extra?’ thought Joseph. Geordie had never paid him anything at all. But London rents being what they were …

  He thought, Now I must ask.

  He said, ‘I would like the basement, please. I am going to get married.’

  The basement had its own entrance. It was dark, as basements are, but a door from its kitchen opened onto a fenced-off part of the garden – a concrete yard with enough space for two chairs. She could plant sage and rosemary in an old ceramic sink out there. It would be a home.

  Geordie didn’t answer for a while. Instead he pretended to be immensely excited about the forthcoming wedding. He said things like ‘You dark horse you’ and ‘Jesus, that’s tremendous’. After a bit he quietened down and said, ‘I’ve never really asked about your private life.’ He didn’t sound apologetic, only as though he regretted having missed out on something that might have been amusing. He kept jabbering away. Then at last he said, ‘Well, I suppose that way we could look for tenants who’d want the whole of the upper house. Lot simpler, and we could still charge short-term rates.’ He was ruminating. Talking to himself. ‘OK, Joe,’ he said, his voi
ce louder, ‘the basement’s yours for the duration. When’s the happy day?’

  Duration of what? wondered Joseph, but he thought it was time he trusted to luck. He had savings. He said, ‘Thank you, sir.’ He knew that it made Geordie uncomfortable to be so addressed but he wanted to signal the formality of their agreement. ‘I must go back to my country as soon as possible to make my proposal. Would it be inconvenient if I set off on Saturday?’

  Geordie said, ‘Wow, you’re a fast mover,’ but he didn’t say no, so the following morning Joseph went to Victoria Bus Station and bought a series of tickets. He could be there and back in a week.

  When he told his cousin he would be taking a short holiday the cousin looked irritated. When he explained why, the cousin looked troubled. ‘Ioachim’s girl?’ he said. ‘But how have you two been courting? When have you ever met? She is a child, still only a child, in spite of all.’ He didn’t explain what he meant by the last words.

  Joseph said simply, ‘I saw her many years ago, and then I made up my mind. She is of age. Now it will be for her to decide.’

  ‘And her parents,’ said the cousin.

  ‘And her parents, naturally,’ said Joseph.

  Every summer her family moved from the high orchards to a small town on the coast. For three months Maria worked in the kitchen of her parents’ beachside bar. It was in a clearing in the pinewoods on a rocky shore. Every morning her father rode out from town on his scooter, dragging a trailer loaded with bottled beer and canned fizzy drinks. Maria and her mother went to the market at sunrise, wheeling their bicycles through empty streets where the cobbles were wet from the street cleaner’s hosepipe, and loaded their panniers with tomatoes and cucumbers and melons. They pedalled laboriously through the forest, their front wheels skidding on the sandy path, the meat and cheese in their backpacks heavy and damp. As soon as they had unloaded, Maria’s mother went back into town – they had another bar there, too, and that needed seeing to – while Maria began to slice and dice and dress the food and her father got the stove fired up. They called it a kitchen, but it was really no more than a patch of sand screened off by a low whitewashed wall.

  Her father liked to talk to the tourists. Sometimes the young men leaned over the kitchen’s only wall and asked Maria to join them, too. She’d shake her head. ‘Thank you, too busy,’ she’d say. She made flatbread on the stove, and grilled kebabs on the barbecue. Everyone else there, on the plastic chairs under the pine trees, with the sea only a step or two away, was virtually naked, the men dropping crumbs on hairy thighs, the women wiping fingers, oily from eating olives, on smooth bellies already oily with sun-cream. Maria wore her blue dress, and every night she washed it and spread it out on the flat roof of the cousin’s house where they slept. Putting it on damp in the morning made her shiver, but soon it would have shed its moisture and be floating around her legs in a way that made the foreign men watch her movements as attentively as the scrawny cats did. Her hair hung down her back in a long plait.

  Septembers, they went back inland to the orchards, for the apricots. Mid-October, Maria returned to school. Her teacher would gather together those she called the ‘summer-slaves’ – there were several of them in the class – and say, ‘Now I have you back again. Now we work.’

  Each of them would think, ‘Work? She doesn’t know the meaning of the word.’

  It was the darkest time of year when Joseph came back to see them. Most of the men in the village had found winter employment under the plastic that made the coastal plain shimmer like a lake. Their skin looked sodden. The humidity in the polytunnels made it hard to breathe. But the money wasn’t bad. Not bad for winter. And at the end of the week they would bring home sacks of bruised or misshapen tomatoes.

  Maria’s father took care of himself – he couldn’t afford to weaken. As soon as he was home, before he entered the house even, he would go down into the square, the only flat and open space around, and stretch and bend and then run on the spot like a caged creature. The older men smoking on the benches outside the café watched him silently, until one of them said, ‘The morning is for effort. The evening is for repose.’ Another one spat. A third one said, ‘Running away from his trouble at home.’ The others looked at this man askance. There are things of which it is not prudent to speak.

  Joseph had brought a bottle of whisky, because he knew it was expected, even though Maria’s father would not drink it. He had two cashmere jerseys that had not been as expensive as you might suppose (he’d bought them from a market stall). Rose-pink for Maria’s mother, the palest pearly grey for Maria herself, because it reminded him of her eyes and of how, once, when she was a tiny child, years younger, even, than she was on the day he had fallen in love, she had said how cosy it would be to be snuggled up in a cloud. And he had the small square box covered in green leather and stamped with gold curlicues, that would not be brought out unless all went well.

  He arrived in the village quite early on a Sunday morning. A time when he knew the family would be up and about, but not yet so late that they would feel obliged to invite him to their Sunday dinner, should they not wish to do so. He hoped, of course that they would, that by the time the lamb was roasted he would have a cogent new claim on a place at their table.

  The parents were both standing on the patch of ground in front of their low stone house, talking intently. He saw them, as he walked up the hill, long before they saw him, and it was evident they were arguing, not in hostility towards each other, but as allies argue who have a problem before them, and who cannot agree on how it is to be solved. When Joseph was almost within touching distance of them the father turned and laughed harshly and said, ‘Then let’s hope God will provide,’ and as he turned he saw Joseph, and cried out with pleasure, and the two men, who had loved each other since boyhood, began to grasp each other’s shoulders, and push each other away, and draw each other forward, and laugh in that way that has nothing to do with amusement, but expresses wonder instead.

  Two hours went by. The men sat at the metal table beneath the arbour from whose timbers bunches of red peppers hung. They drank mint tea together, and then beer. The woman kept going back into the kitchen to check on the meat, and coming out again with walnuts, or small dry biscuits, or sliced beetroot.

  The men’s conversation was repetitive and ceremonious. Both understood, from long experience, how such conversations must go. They exchanged information, but what they were doing was far more than a transfer of data. It was more like a dance, in which participants meet repeatedly, and perform the same movements over and over again, but each time with more energy, until the dancers are loose-limbed and amorous and the atmosphere in the dancing-place – be it room or yard or threshing floor, is so altered that the discrete persons who first entered it merge and become a pool. It takes music, and a night with no pre-ordained ending, for the process to take its full effect, and Joseph knew he did not have so much time, but he felt hopeful. He felt that he had come a good way.

  He smiled at Anna, who was Maria’s mother, and she smiled kindly too and enquired again about the basement flat he had described, and the little yard with space for herbs. And then she said, because a woman can sometimes presume, and ask the question that must be asked, in a way that’s hard for men, ‘And who will you live with, there, in your underground home?’ And Joseph thought Now! And he said, ‘I would like to live there with your daughter Maria.’

  And at that moment Maria came in through the gate from the dirt road. She had been to church. Her thick long braid was twined around her head and there were glass beads in it again. A plaid shawl hung across her shoulders but the midday sun was warm and she had let it fall back like wings to either side of her so it was easy to see at once how her belly lifted the front of her faded blue dress.

  Joseph stood up. He was pale. He said softly to the parents, ‘Please forgive me. Forget what I said. I am too late.’ He trembled as he stepped forward to take her hand,
saying, ‘I am Joseph,’ and she said, ‘Of course. I know.’ And she gave him her hand and her fingers were still short and tapered and he couldn’t help it, he stroked them between both his hands, and remembered how once they had reminded him of carrots. And then he bowed, and let himself out of the gate. He had not slept in a bed for nearly three days. He went to the churchyard, not thinking anything, his mind numb, and he lay down under the chestnut tree there and slept until sundown.

  When he woke his neck was cricked, but he lay warm under a sheepskin. Anna was near him, her back against a tombstone, darning a sock. When she saw his eyes were open she held out an enamel mug full of tepid milk. It tasted sour and unmistakably animal in origin. From the goat, he thought. He said, ‘Thank you.’ She said, ‘My husband is ashamed. These things are puzzling for men. And this story, this one is strange even for a mother.’

  He said, ‘I have no claim. There is nothing you have to tell me.’

  ‘There is. There is something.’

  ‘I mean you are not obliged.’

  ‘No.’

  She looked up at the sky and the flesh of her face fell back and he saw how beautiful she had been, how beautiful she still must be in her husband’s eyes when she lay beneath him.

  He said, ‘I loved Maria when she was still a child. I have waited until I thought the proper time had come, but I have waited too long.’

  ‘She has no husband. No boyfriend. No one.’

  He waited.

  ‘Ioachim and I, we were communists when there was still communism. We do not go to church. She does. Maria. She says that an angel spoke to her. She came to me, very calmly. She told me she had been chosen. That was over a year ago. She was quiet after that, serene, but it was as though she was always elsewhere, waiting for what had been promised. Then, in the summer, something happened on the beach.’