Original Bliss

by A. L. Kennedy

  He slowly sat and faced her and Mrs. Brindle thought she could see a change: a large, cool stillness in his eyes. Inside the mechanism, the metal, oil and cordite Gluck exercised each day—a little to butter his toast with, a little to light the world—he had decided about her.

  “Could you tell me my position, Professor. I have to say, I think I’ll miss your lecture. I’m sorry, but I need to sleep. I haven’t been sleeping.”

  Gluck hunched his shoulders and pocketed his hands. This seemed to be a sign of real concentration, if not actual doubt.

  “Professor? Your audience is waiting.”

  “Mm?”

  “I don’t think there’s one person in this foyer who isn’t watching us.”

  “No. There is one, if you check, by the windows. Her name is Frink . . . no, Frisch and she doesn’t like me for reasons which are quite unscientific. I think we might be kind and summarise them as disappointment.” Gluck took care to appear both modest and bemused. “She hasn’t looked at me once all week which is some trick. Takes a lot of arranging. Anyway, what I was thinking was: there’s an Italian place opposite the cathedral which you can’t miss. Even when you’re tired.” A note in his voice cleared and his eyes dodged away. “You do, I beg your pardon, look tired. Go and get untired and . . . the best time would be about seven. Tonight. I’ll be early, so you needn’t bother. You look the early type. Is that all right.” One straight glance, as if he was fixing her now for later use. “Mrs. Brindle?”

  “Well. Yes. My hotel is . . . I’m not far from there.”

  “Fine.” He was already standing, coughing, changing himself into something public. “That’s fine then. We can shake hands now. Oh, and don’t tell anyone.” He smiled oddly. “If you don’t want my audience, that is. Now, what looks like goodbye forever? Oh yes, I know.” He pressed her hand lightly between both of his, the touch warm but dry. Although she was almost accustomed to something of his scent, his sudden approach left her breathing a pleasant mixture of soap, fabric, lotion. He smelt clean and mild and probably expensive with only the faintest undertaste of sweat. “And what about a Germanic bow?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Customs of the country.”

  “You have . . . too much hair. I mean, I mean, I didn’t mean to . . . mean anything. It would flop. That’s all.” She scrambled to smile intelligently while sounding entirely inane. Gluck remained unreadable.

  “Well, in that case, I’ll just have to leave. Seven o’clock. Ta ta.”

  He turned away and moved through the foyer with a kind of studied grace, head and slightly tensed shoulders above the general height.

  In her hotel room, Mrs. Brindle went to bed. There she lay perfectly still and listened to American Forces Radio while it happily sang the praises of the wily Confederate J. G. Rains who invented fine bombs and lovely torpedoes and that all-time family favourite, the anti-personnel device—another first for the American Civil War. She listened to AP Network News. She listened to the excellent prospects awaiting in the US Postal Service for all those choosing to leave the Military. Finally she listened to the daytime murmur of the hotel surrounding her and the super-heated, orderly silence of Stuttgart beyond. She couldn’t sleep for the ache of listening, her ears wouldn’t fill.

  The bath was clean and deep, if slightly too short to lie down in. The complimentary foaming body gel was not unpleasant; nor, for all it could matter, was the complimentary sewing kit. The towels were in good condition, neither overly soft nor harsh.

  Clean carpet.

  Bedsheet fresh and white.

  She settled back beneath the quilt.

  This wasn’t going to work.

  Mrs. Brindle’s skin, even under the covers, felt impossibly naked—the touch of herself, alone with herself, the brush of her arm on her stomach, of her legs against her legs, tugged her awake. There was something unnatural about her. She felt her limbs cold. The sky that raked between the flimsy curtains was screaming with heat above ninety degrees and her room seemed hardly cooler, but she knew she had a shiver in her blood and whenever she lay down it showed.

  The Konigsplatz was bending under the sun while a courteous electronic billboard noted the doggedly blistering temperature in degrees Celsius. She sat downwind of a fountain, trying to concentrate on its regular drifts of spray and the heat that lifted each droplet back up from her skin, almost before it fell. She was still tired and perhaps Gluck had only been joking, perhaps he wouldn’t come. It would only be reasonable for him not to come—she was not famous and he was.

  Mrs. Brindle knew she was wearing the wrong things, lifeless things, their colours insubstantial in the merciless light. A scrabble of panic touched her and faded again, leaving an airless tension in her chest. Gluck was making her frightened already, even though he wouldn’t come. She would go to the restaurant and wait for him stupidly until she was too embarrassed not to go away.

  Or he would come and then she would be too stupid with fear to make any sense and she would waste all the time she was going to get with him.

  But that wouldn’t happen, because he wouldn’t come.

  Beyond the flying water were parapets and cliffs of concrete. The whole city was boxed and canyoned in searing concrete and palely mountainous heat. British bombing had left only tiny islands of the past to stand: a church here, a municipal building there. The evidence of violence didn’t disturb her, only the lack of a tangible past. She felt she had been lost in one vast, white amnesia.

  “Amnesia?” Gluck’s really very large hands killed another breadstick. The table that filled the space between them seemed strangely insufficient. Gluck was of a size to be invasive, effortlessly. “You’re only abroad, Mrs. Brindle. That’s not so bad, people do it all the time—it’s called going on holiday.”

  “Well, I know that.” She failed to sound anything other than abrupt.

  “But even so?”

  “But, even so, I didn’t expect that when I left my country, everything else would leave me. I mean, if the people and the buildings are different—the churches—then I seem to stop believing in anything. I don’t even believe in me.”

  “You are very tired, remember.”

  “Professor, it really isn’t because I’m tired.” He might be an expert on most things, but he wasn’t an expert on her. “This started years ago, in Scotland, and now it’s finished here. I am a person who has no faith. I’m over. That’s that.” Mrs. Brindle was the only expert on Mrs. Brindle that she knew. As a field of study she was more than specialised.

  Gluck softly shook his head and rubbed at his fringe with one hand. A little shower of stubble fell to the tablecloth. For a moment, she couldn’t think why and then she noticed. “You’ve cut your hair.”

  “Yes. About five hours ago. I’ve just spent most of one of them with you.” He was trying to seem aggrieved and managing very well.

  “All right. I didn’t pay attention. I’m sorry. But I came here to talk to you seriously and I’ve now stared at three different courses that I couldn’t eat because I have no appetite and because . . . because, to be honest, I’m nervous—”

  “You don’t say.”

  She thought of giving him a cold look, but then couldn’t. He smiled gently and then she couldn’t look at him at all. “Yes, okay. I know that you know that. But all that we’ve done for one hour is discuss all the people you don’t like at the conference and your favourite type of car and nothing. Now you want to discuss your hair?”

  “I had it cut.”

  “I know you had it cut, that’s why it’s shorter.”

  “You didn’t like the way it was, so I had it cut.”

  This made no sense. Gluck sat, his head seeming slightly larger, more plainly capable of holding all that thinking and more obviously grey. She wanted to be extremely angry with him, but nothing was coming out right and Gluck was being oddly tentative, tense. She could think of nothing to say but the truth.

  “Professor, I don’t know what’s
going on here.”

  “Nothing too out of the way, I assure you. I wanted to do something that would be pleasing, make you relax. Something like that.” He coughed his way into a mumble. “Obviously I haven’t been successful. But that’s what I was trying to do. Small talk. And that kind of thing. I don’t do it very often—work too much.” Another, more forceful clearing of the throat. “Actually, it’s the same with my hair. I usually cut it at home in my mirror to save time. The way it is doesn’t bother me—I don’t have to look at it, after all. So I get it damp, sellotape it down around my face—to keep it even—cut it a bit. Suits me. Suited me.”

  “That’s nonsense.” Still, it was drawing her in, however nonsensically.

  “No it’s not.” Gluck registered a mild degree of hurt. “That’s how I do it. And I liked it long because I knew I was going grey, as you can see; or white. I thought of trimming back my sideburns where they’re white.” He turned his head to show her and rasp at one with his thumb. “But that could go on forever; I’d end up with a kind of bridle path cut over the top of my head and I wouldn’t like that. I am vain.”

  He might have been stating his nationality, rather than a character defect. Gluck’s vanity was part of Gluck and therefore could not be a fault.

  “Professor, you don’t need to talk to me, or to make me relax.” A moment of irritation or alarm seemed to shadow across his eyes, but she continued anyway. “I don’t relax any more. I don’t expect to. Just tell me, can you help?”

  He tapped at his glass and watched the red surface of the wine sway and settle. “I don’t know.”

  She’d tried to be prepared in case he gave a sore answer, but what he said still hurt. Within the plainness of it, there was nowhere to fix a hope. He seemed to understand she needed more and went on.

  “I would like to know. And to help. Very much. I feel for you. But I do not know. And now it’s time for us to leave.” He patted his jacket to find his wallet out and looked about him for their waiter; Edward E. Gluck, someone used to restaurants and being served.

  Mrs. Brindle studied her dessert fork and tried to understand that this was all the time she would be given, finished and over with. She would have to go back to the dark in her hotel room and the night that was already waiting for her outside. Gluck had made her used to the pressure of his mind, his presence. It wasn’t fair that he should make her so alone now and so fast.

  “No—”

  “Mrs. Brindle?”

  She fumbled towards what she could tell him, now that she’d started to speak, and a broad, familiar sadness smeared all her words away. Why bother?

  But to make him understand—only to try and make him understand—she lifted one of his hands—brown, healthy, heavy, warm—and pressed his fingers to the open face of her wrist. Her pulse overwhelmed itself while he held it, running dark and high with only her skin between him and her fear.

  Gluck winced, but kept his hold. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” His voice smaller, close. “Mrs. Brindle?”

  “That’s the way it is. You feel that?” His face said that he did. “I’m scared. That’s what’s wrong. That’s what’s always wrong. I’m scared.”

  He smoothed his grip forward to cup her hand, whole inside his, and keep it as if she might be pulled away suddenly, against both their wills.

  “Mrs. Brindle, there’s no reason to be scared. Nothing will happen to you. We’re leaving because I’m taking you somewhere else—a place where I’ll be able to think and you can be distracted. Nothing bad will happen. Do you understand that.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Listen.” The waiter hovered, courteously embarrassed by the way they were clutched together. “You say you’ve lost everything. Well then, how much worse can it get?”

  Gluck passed over his credit card, while setting his focus firmly on her face. The waiter stalked away. “We are here now, in this moment, and nothing is anything other than it should be. We are both equipped with minds to perceive and alter all possible worlds—we will be fine.”

  She wouldn’t have thought Gluck would be good at reassurance, but as he led her away to a taxi she felt something approaching safe. Mrs. Brindle did not wish to feel safe because of Gluck the man—she found that intellectually alarming—she would have preferred to find comfort in his thinking, his advice. Then again, any help should be appreciated and if she was feeling relief, it was her feeling so she would have it and like it, no matter who or what was responsible.

  Gluck sat away from her in the back seat of the car, folded uneasily into the possible space. “This won’t be a long journey. So we needn’t talk. Unless you would like to. What do you think?”

  Mrs. Brindle would have preferred not to think. Thinking at night was unsafe.

  He reached over and found her wrist faultlessly, no doubt in the evaluation of his touch. “You’re not so frightened now.”

  It wasn’t as if he was actually holding her hand. If he’d been holding her hand, she would have told him to stop. This was taking her pulse which was different, scientific. Still, she felt the uneasy snag of something: a cautionary chill tugging her back.

  Gluck continued, touching, talking, “Not that I can tell anything except that your heart’s going slower. I’m glad I’m not that kind of doctor.” He released her back to herself.

  “You don’t like touching people?”

  “Oh, I don’t think that would be true, no. I just would have been no good—diagnosing and all that. So tell me how you are and then I won’t have to guess.” The bars and splashes of light from the windows made him seem to advance and retreat arbitrarily. “Mrs. Brindle?”

  “It doesn’t go away, the feeling, it only goes to sleep, so I can’t. That’s how I think about it. As soon as I’m not doing something, as soon as it gets dark, the thing wakes up and gets me. It always knows where I am.”

  “But what is the thing that wakes up?”

  “Did anyone you cared about ever leave you?”

  “Yes.” He answered immediately, as if she had a perfect right to know. “My mother. She died while I was in America studying. I was twenty-two. We’d never been more than a few hours apart until that autumn. Not to bore you; she had looked after me before her divorce. My father didn’t . . . I was too tall for him to like me. I stood out, annoyed him, made him want to knock me down. And she saved me. Always. When they separated she worked very hard and was very ashamed of herself so that I could be very educated and she could be very proud of me—from a suitable distance, of course.

  “Blood clot on the brain. Killed her.”

  “I’m sorry.” That sounded completely inadequate, even though it was true.

  “Sorry? Oh, yes, so was I, but people adjust. Who did you lose?”

  “God.”

  “Not a person?” He didn’t understand.

  But she might make him. “More than a person. Someone that was Everything, in everything. There wasn’t a piece of the world that I could touch and not find Him inside it. All created things—I could see, I could smell that they’d been created. I could taste where He’d touched. He was that size of love. Can you imagine what might happen if a love so large simply left you for no reason you ever knew. One morning, you’re looking through the window and you can’t make any sense of the sky. It’s like dying. Except it can’t be, because dying ends up being what you want, but haven’t got.”

  That was such a melodramatic thing to say, she hoped he could tell it was only a fact now and something she was used to—not some kind of female, hysterical threat.

  Instead of making any comment, he reached for where her hand rested on the seat and pushed his knuckles against hers with a light, slightly varying pressure that could not cause offence. They were driven on together quietly.

  “Mrs. Brindle?” She had been letting her fingers relax against his so that their contact would not mean more than it should inadvertently. “Mrs. Brindle, I would rather not keep on calling you Mrs. Brindle. I would be
quite happy to be Edward. Would you be happy to be something else? Something other than Mrs. Brindle?”

  “Helen.”

  “Is that your name?”

  “No, I just made it up. Of course it’s my name. Helen. I’ve always been Helen.”

  “Not always Mrs. Brindle, though?”

  “My maiden name was Howard. Helen Howard. Too many H’s, really, for one person.”

  “So there was a Mr. Brindle?”

  “There still is.”

  “Oh.”

  Helen realised she hadn’t thought to mention Mr. Brindle before, because she hadn’t thought of him, not for several days. She had forgotten him and never felt the difference. Astonishing. “He’s at home. Didn’t want to come. But, yes, he is at home.”

  “Why doesn’t he . . .”

  “Why doesn’t he what?”

  Gluck rubbed at the back of her hand and drew away, aligning his balance with a turn in the road. He set his fingers near his mouth and she realised without intending to that he was breathing in the scent of her skin from his hand while he thought of whatever it was that he couldn’t quite say.

  “What? Why doesn’t he what?”

  “It’s none of my business.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Well . . . I don’t mean to presume, but I’m surprised he doesn’t help you with this . . . your problem. Does he try? Does he know you’re so upset?”

  “Not all the time. There’s no reason why he should. Not if I don’t want him to. He’s, um . . . he works, he’s busy, and he’s not, I don’t know . . . religious. He didn’t like it when I was. But the way I am—my problem—isn’t his fault. This isn’t his fault.” She did think she was being accurate to say that—she wasn’t defending him.

  “Still, maybe it would be better if you were more alike.” Gluck coughed, rubbed his neck.

  “Maybe. But we’re not. There’s no point in thinking otherwise.”