by C. K. Stead
I’d finished the novel—or anyway a draft of it. Whatever kind of mess it was, it now had a beginning, a middle and an end.
Alice Shrimpton and I were getting on better, in the spirit of Anzac. She let me help with some of the arrangements for the funeral. Zoe sat helpless and desolate, as if she’d never allowed the thought of Clarry’s death even a toe in the door.
And that night there were fireworks. I don’t know what the occasion was—maybe the Queen’s visit to open Expo 88. They seemed to come from somewhere beyond the bridge and Bennelong Point, and they didn’t last much more than twenty minutes. But for that short time the whole harbour and the western sky were brilliant with eruptions and showers of fiery light.
I paced about with all the lights off—up and down the living room, in and out through the doors to the balcony. I was thinking of Caroline and the kids. More than once I began to dial home and then changed my mind and hung up. I set out and walked for almost an hour, around the foreshore and back along Darling Street. When I got back to my eighth floor and my double-locked door, the phone was ringing. I fumbled with keys, dropped them, put the wrong key in the lock and had trouble getting it out. By the time I got inside it was too late—the ringing had stopped. I dialled New Zealand.
‘Were you calling me?’ I asked.
‘Calling you?’
‘My phone was ringing—I thought it must be you.’
She was silent a moment. ‘Does it ring so seldom?’
‘No. Yes. Well—it doesn’t ring all that often. I’d been thinking of ringing you. I suppose that’s why I thought …’
‘That was nice.’
‘What was?’
‘That you were—you know—thinking of …’
‘Of ringing. Oh yes. I was.’ Silence. ‘So, anyway, it wasn’t you.’
‘No.’
‘Well then. I’d better go.’
‘What’s the weather like over there?’
‘It’s been the wettest April since—I don’t know. Since the First Fleet probably. What about Auckland?’
‘We’ve had the driest since 1066.’
‘Good on you.’
‘What about the novel?’
‘Finished. Well—a draft, anyway.’
‘Finished! Congratulations. Is it good?’
‘God knows. Probably not.’
‘You must be feeling great.’
‘I feel awful actually.’
The conversation ambled on like that for quite a long time. There was a kind of embarrassment about being so nice to one another. It would have been easy to slip back into terms of endearment.
I DON’T USUALLY WEEP at funerals. They have a strange effect on me. The closer the relative the more I go inside myself, hidden. Out there is a puppet, dry-eyed, going through the motions.
I didn’t weep at Clarry’s but I had to fight it. There was a lump in the throat and tears in the eyes. I don’t record it with satisfaction. What was Clarry to me? The tears would have been for myself.
But sitting there in the unfamiliar church I had a thought. It was Clarry who sent me off on that wild goose chase to Kings Cross. But it was Zoe who gave me advice about how to feed the birds. There are more ways than one to skin a cat, and more than one to keep a man who’s alone sane and in touch with the common life.
This morning I met Alice Shrimpton in a coffee bar just up from Circular Quay. It turns out she works for Amstrad, and she signed me up to buy a word processor. I’ve had to go into overdraft, but I think there’s a royalty cheque due any day; and Alice is right when she says it will save me not just days but weeks of work now that I’m at the stage of slogging through my novel and making revisions.
The weather remains good though the nights are cool. I miss old Clarry. Zoe potters through her daily routines. She seems stunned. The lorikeets and magpies are here every morning. As I gaze out at it now, Sydney has begun to look not ordinary exactly but just like one more beautiful place. The world is full of them. I think of inviting Alice to come with me to my favourite Greek restaurant, but I’m still a little nervous of those faintly blue-tinted spectacles.
‘And still the sun shines’
‘On va, on vient; il fera jour demain.’
… I made a dive for the door and got it open but it was too late for the brake. The Fiat tilted, tipped, skidded sideways, the door flew back, knocking me flat and when I scrambled up again the car was careering down the slope into darkness, rolling, sliding, doors flying open and flying off, windows smashing, metal shrieking and showering sparks off stone. Peering into the night, trying to follow it, I thought I saw it bounce upright on a little road down there, fall beyond it, roll again, crash upside down where the road doubled back on itself, and then everything was brilliantly lit up as it burst into flame.
I don’t know what effect it had on the others. For a while I just stared at the flames flicking higher and higher, lighting up the road and the hill slope and the pines. I wanted to get away from it, to disown it.
The gendarmes would come. They would question us. I would have to give my name—and for a moment I had to be sure I knew what it was. That blow on the head from the door … ‘My name is Miller. Rod Miller.’ I said it aloud. ‘Age thirty-two, divorced, and in France because …’
Because I thought I was a writer, and wanted to prove I was. Could I say that? And would they want to know?
The flames were brilliant, the pines beautiful. Somewhere down there, away down, beyond Garavan, the sea stretched out far and burnished under the stars. I felt a sense of loss, of losses …
1. Buying a car
IT WAS LONG AGO — not so very long, perhaps, but before the world was invaded by cell phones and caught in the web of the Web; when intercontinental flights were not uncommon but not quite commonplace; when the Wall was up, and Vietnam was still raging, and South Africa was still an apartheid state.
It was a town in the South of France, the Côte d’Azur, later than Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night and Cyril Connolly’s The Rock Pool, but before the sad demise of Grace Kelly, the Hollywood star who had become Princess Grace of Monaco. West along the coast at Mougins, Picasso was still alive, painting and making pottery; and east was Ezra Pound, but silent, no longer writing poetry; and in Paris Georges Pompidou was President of France. But all three, the painter, the poet and the politician, would die in the next year or two. The movie The French Connection, which linked Marseilles and New York and drugs, had just won an Oscar, and the Don McLean song about ‘Miss American Pie’ was top of the charts. So it was a time, you could say, when literary novels told sad stories about alcoholism, and popular songs had words that could be remembered and tunes you couldn’t forget. Who that was alive then can’t still sing about driving the Chevvy to the levee when the levee was dry, and the good old boys drinking whiskey and rye? Some time ago, yes—long enough to be looked back on with a certain nostalgia.
I remember the first time I walked up into the hills behind the town and down to the village of Garavan. I hadn’t bought a car yet. I was looking for an apartment and there was one offering at Garavan. I’d walked there around the waterfront a couple of times. I had a tourist map and it showed you could walk partway up into the hills behind the town and down to the waterfront again on the other side of a ridge. But tourist maps don’t give you much idea of ups and downs. It was a steep climb. I found myself up by the cemetery behind the ancienne ville—the medieval town—and next minute I was looking down over the Baie de Garavan. It was mid-winter, late afternoon of a clear sunny day, and there it all was, laid out, a large part of what was to be my scene. Below and to the right there were the yellow walls and orange tiles of the old town. Further down, right away down, almost as if it was under my feet, the waterfront road and the new (as they were then) swimming beaches and breakwater—beautiful pieces of public works, empty and waiting for summer. Along the waterfront road, following east towards Italy—that was the village, or perhaps it was a suburb, of Gar
avan. The railway followed the same direction as the road, but a contour higher. Then further up ran the boulevard de Garavan—the road I was standing on; and higher still the terraced hill slopes rose more and more sharply at the same time pressing in towards the sea until, just beyond the frontier post dividing France and Italy, the rock faces, orange and pink and grey in the changing light, hung directly over it. Beyond again, eastward, it all stretched away, dwindling into the fading afternoon—Ventimiglia, Bordighera, San Remo: another country, a different story.
The Garavan apartment was too big for me and I settled a day or so later for a small bungalow villa, shared with the landlady, who kept the nicest two rooms for herself. It was back in town, up a hill conveniently placed and looking out over centre-ville and the sea.
The Garavan apartment I passed on to my compatriots Clifton and Katy Scarf, who arrived in town a week or so after I did with their three small children. Clifton had a year’s leave from his university and, through a connection with the University of Nice, had got permission to spend part of it on the Riviera instead of in Paris. He’d brought the family with him, all the way from New Zealand by sea, which was cheaper in those days. It was January. They’d spent a day in Paris cracking ice on puddles and then taken the night train south, and next morning they were having breakfast outdoors at a café near the station. I had done the same journey. You leave Paris sometimes up to its ears in fog, sleet, rain, anything winter can throw at you, and in the morning when the sun comes up you’re already racing along the Mediterranean coast, catching sight of green palms, white villas, red rocks, yellow mimosa, blue bays. Colours!—almost candy colours. But that impression can be misleading.
After their hot chocolate and croissants by the station Clifton phoned the Agence Bienvenue and Ernst Bergen came for them wearing one of his immaculate suits and driving his Lamborghini Miura. Bergen was the international Dutchman, but not genial like most of his country-men and -women, managing (as the Dutch seem to do so effortlessly) three or four languages with ease, buying, selling, letting real estate, and then, as if the profits weren’t enough, sitting all summer, when he wasn’t out attending to his properties, behind the bullet-proof glass of his Change, swapping deutschmarks, francs, lire, sterling—any of the pre-euro currencies, so long as the customer accepted his rates. I don’t suppose much of that part of his business survived the advent of the euro, which on the other hand would have done no harm to the real-estate side. Bergen had an American wife, Peggy, and two small children somewhere up in the hills, and in his office one inscrutable local woman who might have been his mistress. There were a few signs of strain. He could never meet your eye, even in shadow and wearing tinted glasses. Sometimes late in the afternoons when business wasn’t brisk he sat outside on a canvas chair on the pavement, drinking. He became subtly insolent then, with what seemed to me a suppressed displeasure, as if he disliked everyone, and his work, and his life. It was boredom, I decided. Like so many people who were affluent and had found a way to what they considered success in life, he was profoundly bored.
Bergen had made a mistake that day—or his office girl had given him the wrong information. He thought I had taken the Garavan apartment and the bungalow-villa was vacant. There was a ring at the gate and I went down and there he was, his car loaded with the Scarf family, the children bouncing around (no seat belts in those days) and making him nervous. He was offering them the place I had taken.
I invited them all up and we sorted out the confusion. That was my first meeting with the Scarfs as a family, though I had known Clifton at home in New Zealand—not well, but we’d belonged, briefly, to the same tennis club in Auckland and had friends in common. I asked him about his academic career and though he responded with due modesty it was clear he was having success. He was on sabbatical leave and more than one suggestion had been made to him that he might like to apply for posts in England and America. I asked was he thinking of doing this and he said no he wasn’t—rather fiercely, as if I’d been suggesting he do something improper or dishonest.
We sat on the terrace drinking kirs, Katy saying she hadn’t slept much on the train and looking gorgeous, while the kids played, skidding on the shiny floors. As they were leaving I reminded Bergen about the Garavan apartment. It was a bit shabby, just about right if you were going to have three kids hurtling about in there, and it was big. He drove them there and I heard a day or so later they had taken it.
SHORTLY AFTER THAT the rain started. Not just a few passing showers. Real rain. It went on for days. The spiky plants shone, the feathery ones drooped with it. The sea lost its blue enamelled look. The English colonels and German businessmen and Parisian Jews wintering in the south disappeared from the waterfront. So did the band. I didn’t mind. The South of France has its seasons, and the winter one is not the most appealing. Turning out on the promenade on a good day in January or February when the sun brings all the visitors out was in those days like taking a stroll in an outsize geriatric ward. Just one street inland was a normal French town going about its winter business. One street inland was the rue Saint Michel, and it was there, while I was trying to buy myself a car, that I met Katy Scarf in pouring rain hurrying along under a transparent umbrella, with a square of red silk over her black hair. The pavement was so narrow there you had to step into the street to let people pass; and the street was so narrow, when you stepped into it you were holding up the crawling cars.
Katy and I ran into one another. She said hullo and we both stepped into the roadway.
‘We’re holding up the traffic,’ she said, and we stepped back again.
Now we were holding up the pedestrians. I steered her into a doorway. ‘Do you speak French?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. And then, ‘Well—a little.’
‘You don’t know what a luggage rack’s called, do you?’
‘A … which?’
‘On a car. A luggage rack.’
‘Oh yes I think I do. A luggage rack. It’s a …’ She thought a moment. ‘It’s une galerie de bagages.’
I was pleased with that, and so was she. It sounded right. ‘Brava,’ I said.
I had been looking for a house called L’Atrium. I’d been up and down the rue St Michel three or four times asking shopkeepers, but either they didn’t understand me or they hadn’t heard of it. It was the home of an architect whose name was given as M. Hirondelle—which seemed improbable: Mr Swallow. But maybe, if you thought of it as Mr Martin, not improbable at all. These had been my thoughts as I’d hunted, but I did not share them with the lovely Mrs Scarf—only explained that M. Hirondelle was offering a Fiat Dino for sale and I’d decided I wanted it. I’d seen it parked in a big garage off the avenue Edouard VII where a young man explained that its owner left it there because he had a weak heart and couldn’t drive any more. He’d written Hirondelle’s name and address on a piece of paper and now I was standing in a doorway just across the street from a little square, La Place aux Herbes, paved of course, with not a ‘herbe’ in sight, listening to the soothing sound of the rain and thinking of Katy Scarf, who had just left me there—thinking of her black hair under red silk and great drops skidding over the transparent plastic of her umbrella; and saying over the new fragment of French she’d given me, ‘galerie de bagages’. And then, as if it swam up hazily through that film of wet plastic, I saw it, L’Atrium in ornate, shallowly carved lettering in pale-yellow stone.
A stone passageway curved up from the street and opened on to a cobbled path with buildings rising on either side. A flight of stone steps led into a garden hung with leafless vines, brown-black in the rain. The last leaves still floated in the blue-tiled lily pool, drained but filling with rainwater. Two or three large trees grew up the face of the building enclosing the garden on two sides. All the shutters were closed. In the angle formed by the two wings of this building there was an entrance and a stairway. I climbed the stairs, stopping at each of three landings to look at the names on the doors, and then to look o
ut on the garden with its brown vines and blue pool and unswept paths.
At the top landing there was just one door and the name Hirondelle. I rang, and in a moment an elderly lady answered. Mrs Swallow (or Martin), I assumed. I told her I’d come about the Fiat. Her face was contorted for a moment by some strange convulsion, but it passed. ‘Entrez, Monsieur,’ she said. ‘Laissez votre parapluie là-bas, s’il vous plait.’
I put my umbrella down where she pointed, wiped my feet and went in.
I DIDN’T SEE M. HIRONDELLE that first morning—he was unwell and still in bed—and I had to call twice more before the business of buying the car was settled. I remember the last visit (I had gone to hand over the money, which he wanted in cash) he told me a story—something that had happened to him during World War II. I’m not sure why he told it; not sure where it happened either. It was in one of the mountain villages—possibly Gorbio—but I’m not certain of that. Anyway, Hirondelle was an officer and he’d retreated with his men into a village in the mountains. They sat out of doors in the little square eating and drinking and cracking jokes while away down towards the coast where the sea glittered in the sun they could see puffs of dust rising off the roads and that meant an Italian column was coming after them.
They took their time and enjoyed the food and the wine, and some time during the early afternoon the first shells whistled in and the battle started. One thing he remembered especially was that when he thought about it afterwards he was sure (and yet couldn’t be sure) that the cicadas had stopped before the first shell exploded. There was a minute’s complete silence, and then the first bang—followed by the screaming of one of his men who had been wounded. It wasn’t a mortal wound, he said. In fact he thought the fuss had more to do with fright than pain. But now at last they had a real enemy and were engaged in shooting and being shot at. So much of the war had been waiting, and he was excited it was possible for it to become real.