by David Szalay
He is pouring some muesli into a huge mug, pouring skimmed milk over it. The skimmed milk still seems more like water than milk to him.
Claudia is asking what she should start with.
‘Maybe upstairs?’ he suggests, wanting to be left in peace in the kitchen for a while.
He sits at the table, eating muesli, hearing her heavy feet making the old steps squeak as she marches upstairs with her things.
How old is she? he wonders. Not young. Her son must be thirty. A handsome man. He has met him a few times – he picks her up, occasionally, in his IKEA van.
When he has finished his muesli, he settles in the wing chair in the sitting room – an old one, in need of restuffing – tapping at his iPad. It was a present from Cordelia, while he was in hospital after the heart op. He has always been a technophile, what is now known as an ‘early adopter’ – he was the first among his friends, in about 1979, to own a video, a VHS player. He learned how to use the iPad in a day or two.
He taps at it.
Tap.
Tap.
Emails. Not many. Not as many as there used to be. He has had to stop doing most of the things he used to do – his post-retirement portfolio of interests. Down to nothing now, nearly. There is an email from Cordelia, which always pleases him. She talks about this and that. Asks how he is feeling. She says that Simon – her son, his grandson – has had a poem published in some magazine. Just a university magazine probably, though she doesn’t say so – she wants to make it sound as impressive as possible. Simon is in his first year at Oxford. She has attached the poem to the email and he looks at it while Claudia stomps about overhead, making the little glass pieces of the chandelier tinkle. (The chandelier was there when they bought the house – very valuable, they were assured.) The poem seems to be inspired by the famous miniature of Sultan Mehmet II in which he is shown smelling a flower.
The portrait shows this – his eyes fixed elsewhere,
Mehmet the Conqueror holds a rose
To the Turkic scimitar of his nose.
The engrossing necessities of money and war,
The wise politician’s precautionary
Fratricides, the apt play of power –
All proper activities in his sphere,
And he excelled at them all. So why the flower?
A nod, perhaps, to something less worldly;
Not beauty, I think, whatever that is,
Not love, not ‘nature’,
Not Allah, by that or any other name –
Just a moment’s immersion in the texture
Of existence, the eternal passing of time.
Not terrible, he thinks. Some nice phrases. The engrossing necessities of money and war. Yes, that was nice. (He still misses them, after nearly ten years, those engrossing necessities, waiting for him at the end of the Tube journey to Whitehall, still feels that without them he is not properly living.) Yes, it was a nice way of putting it. And then there was … Where was it? Yes –
Just a moment’s immersion in the texture
Of existence
The words had made him think of the way he spent a minute or two, earlier that morning, staring at the wardrobe upstairs. The sense he had had then of losing himself in the act of perception. A moment’s immersion in the texture of existence – the texture of it. Yes. Well done, Simon. He will write him an email, he thinks. He will praise the poem – not too much, just enough to encourage him, and with qualifications. Cordelia has a tendency to praise her son unqualifiedly, which isn’t healthy. Simon is, it has to be said, just a little odd. He was there, in Argenta, that spring, with a friend. They were travelling around Europe and had stayed for a day or two. The friend – what was his name? – had been a lively fellow. Fun to have about the place. Simon, as usual, solemn and withdrawn. Less so towards the end. They had had some nice talks, the three of them, about serious subjects – literature, history, the state of Europe.
Claudia is at the door.
She wants to know if it’s okay to start on the kitchen.
When she has left, he showers and dresses, and makes himself lunch. He sets a place at the table in the kitchen – the dining room seems too formal a setting in which to eat a two-egg omelette, alone. He wonders whether to have a glass of wine with his omelette and salad. In the end he has two, which means he will not be able to drive anywhere for a few hours. He had thought he might drive somewhere. To the Valli di Argenta, perhaps, and walk there for half an hour – he is supposed to walk a few miles a day, and today the weather is dry and mild.
The afternoon seems to stretch out interminably in front of him. He tidies up a few drawers that haven’t been attended to for years – loses himself for a while in looking at old opera tickets and tourist maps and invoices for things he has long forgotten paying for. He sits at the piano and tries to play – it is terribly out of tune, and his fingers also soon start to hurt. They won’t do what he tells them to do. He keeps making mistakes and stops in frustration. He still feels strangely depressed about the trip to Ravenna yesterday. He went to Ravenna yesterday – just on a whim, he had nothing else to do – and got into difficulties with the traffic. He got lost and flustered, and ended up driving the wrong way down a narrow one-way street. He didn’t know what he had done until he met a van halfway down, its lights flashing irritably, and without space to do anything else, he had to reverse out the way he had arrived, looking over his shoulder, squinting with stress and an increasing sense of isolation. The street was straight; it shouldn’t have been a problem. Somehow, though, he kept losing the line. He kept having to stop and start again. He was holding the wheel tightly as if it was something preventing him from drowning. The driver of the van was shouting inaudibly like someone in a silent film.
He thinks of the faces of the people on the pavement, witnessing the scene, laughing, pointing to show him his mistake, smiling at him. Not unsympathetically, some of them. In a way that just made it worse. It was obvious from their expressions that what they were seeing was something pitiful – an old man, out of his depth, making a mess of things.
That was what their faces said they were seeing.
And it was a shock.
That wasn’t how he thought of himself at all.
Afterwards, when he had finally found somewhere to park, he walked the streets for a while, feeling absurdly shaken, and found himself, eventually, outside Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo.
It was hardly warmer inside than it was outside.
There were a few people there, not many, milling about, looking at the mosaics, those echoes of Byzantium. He himself had seen them many times – the long frontal lines of white-toga’d figures, white on gold. He has never been a Christian. Of course he was brought up in the vaguely or vestigially Christian setting of England in the 1940s and ’50s, but even in his earliest years he had not believed in God, in Jesus, or any of that. They had always been just words to him. Just stories, like other stories. That was not particularly unusual, he thought, for someone of his generation. He stood there, looking up at the impassive, pink-cheeked faces. In lines like a school photo. And then that extraordinary image, at the end, of the curtains opening, as if to show us something – only there’s nothing there, just a flat gold space, a surprising area of plain golden tiles. A pigeon had got in and was fluttering about up there.
He stayed for a few more minutes and then went out and looked at the outside of the basilica. The campanile, standing against the grey sky. He knew the history, sort of. Theoderic the Ostrogoth etc. Murdered his predecessor with his own hands – invited him for dinner apparently and personally murdered him. They were fighting over Italy. The Western Empire was falling apart.
Something about the whole episode depresses him. He is still weighed down, the next day, by the sense of his own uselessness that had taken hold of him as he was driving, as he was struggling with the Ravenna traffic – and then the fuck-up in the one-way street. It depresses him. Depresses him out of all proportion, you would th
ink, to what actually happened, embarrassing as that was.
Later, and unexpectedly, Joanna phones.
She asks whether Claudia has been in.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘she was here.’
‘You managed to get the heating going?’ Joanna asks.
This question irritates him – the suggestion that he might not have managed it. He lets a moment pass, his eyes finding the photos on the sideboard where the phone is: family photos, and photos of himself with John Major, with Tony Blair – the prime ministers he served. ‘Yes,’ he says.
‘So the house is warm enough?’
‘The house is fine.’
There is a pause. ‘Well, I just thought I’d call and see how you are,’ she says.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Okay. Now listen, Tony.’ And she starts to tell him how she has to go to New York for a few days, to head office – she is a seniorish manager in a pharmaceutical firm – for some annual appraisal.
Dusk is falling in Argenta. He sees it through the tall windows of the sitting room. Darkness settling on the flat land. She is off to New York. And he is here, in Argenta, with its tractor showroom, its marsh museum.
‘Well, have fun,’ he says.
‘I’ll be back on Friday.’
That doesn’t mean much to him. He isn’t sure what day it is today.
There is a pause, a longer one. ‘You are okay, Tony?’ she asks, sounding slightly embarrassed, as if the question were intrusively personal.
‘I told you. I’m absolutely fine.’
She says quickly, ‘Did Cordelia send you Simon’s poem?’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘And? What did you think?’
‘It wasn’t bad.’
Afterwards, he wishes he hadn’t been so offish with her. It was nice of her to phone. Something about the way she spoke to him though. It was like the way those people had looked at him in the one-way street yesterday as he struggled to reverse in a straight line. That was something he had once been able to do – reverse in a straight line. He looks at his watch.
He waits a little longer and then has some more wine. A very fine Barbaresco, a present from someone years ago that he had been saving for a special occasion. He opened it at lunchtime, impulsively, and drank half of it alone, in the middle of an ordinary weekday, with an indifferent omelette. What was the point of waiting, anyway?
He drinks some more now with some cheese and prosciutto, a few olives, assembled on a plate. A football match on the TV. Some Serie B match between teams he has never even heard of playing out a nil–nil draw on a December afternoon. The stadium is evidently half-empty. Still, it dispels the silence. It passes the time.
He wonders whether to phone Cordelia. In the end he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to disturb her. He is depressed – he wouldn’t be able to hide that from her, she would hear it in his voice – and he doesn’t want to make her feel down too. He doesn’t want her, in future, not to want him to phone. Which she won’t if he’s always whining at her, droning on about his problems, asking questions that obviously don’t interest him, leaving long despondent silences on the line.
He pours himself some more of the Barbaresco. Actually, it’s excellent. One of the finest reds produced in Italy. He is able to appreciate that; there seems to be a sort of hole, though, where his pleasure in it should be. It’s a waste, he thinks, to drink it in this state.
He looks at his watch.
It’s too early, surely, to turn in?
The house, now that the football is finished and he has turned off the TV, is oppressively silent.
He sits in the wing chair and tries to read. His thoughts keep wandering. He thinks of Alan. He has a half-brother, Alan. How old is Alan now? Eighty-five? Hardly able to walk. Hardly able to stand up – any sort of movement at all involves physical pain and mental anguish. Humiliation. He thinks of the last time he saw him. Alan’s hair looked soft and effeminate – and snowy white, obviously, like the large soft trainers he always wears now. He had tried to smile when he saw Tony. He hadn’t been able to stand up. He had just shivered in his chair, trying to smile, his jaw wagging as he struggled to speak, to say something. ‘How are you, Tony?’ he had finally managed, in a weird, slurred voice. His skin looked as though it was dead already, as if the outer layers of him were dead already. His faded eyes peered out with fear, and a sort of hostility, from that dead face.
He is still sitting there with the book in his hands – Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.
You couldn’t really talk to Alan any more, that was one of the saddest things.
He was fading away.
Fading away.
Do we all end up just fading away?
*
There are moments of serious fear, during the night. At one point, he is sure that something is going wrong with his heart. Then later, a nightmare of some sort.
A huge stick-insect-like thing with lazy eyes.
For a long time it is motionless, until he almost stops fearing it.
Then it starts to move.
Touches him.
He wakes with a yelp of horror, and takes hours to fall asleep again, once the fluttery panic of the nightmare has swum away, thinking about Alan, and about how little time he himself has left. He lies there in the dark, somehow horrified by his situation, as if it is something he has only just found out about. As if someone has just told him, for the first time, that he is seventy-three years old.
2
When he next wakes it is light in the room.
It is nearly eight.
He feels, dragging himself into a sitting position, exhausted and depressed.
Today he must do something.
He decides, staring defeatedly at some fresh mouse droppings on the antique tiles of the kitchen floor, to drive to Pomposa abbey. When he was sorting out one of the drawers yesterday he found some old entrance tickets to the abbey – they went there years ago, with Alan and his wife, he thinks, when they were staying once – and he decides that he would like to see it again. He doesn’t remember much about it. A medieval monastery, near the sea, some way north of Ravenna.
Anyway, what it is isn’t really the point. He has to do something, drive somewhere. Where exactly hardly matters.
It will take an hour or so to drive there, he thinks. He’ll arrive at eleven, say, have a look at the abbey, whatever there is. Have lunch perhaps – he seems to remember there was a place to eat there – and then drive home. Stop in Argenta to pick up a few things. And then have tea and spend an hour or two on Clark’s Sleepwalkers.
Freezing fog hangs outside the windows. The sea of freezing damp that spreads over this floodplain every winter. He has, these days, an intense physical aversion to the cold. The house’s old heating is just about doing its job – it is faintly warm in the tall rooms – and he finds the thought of leaving that warmth distressing. And driving in this fog. That would be asking for trouble.
He takes the stairs, slowly, and in the bathroom starts to fill the tub with steaming water. He will have a hot bath and see how he feels after that. He takes his pills, a multicoloured meal of them. Then he struggles over the tall edge of the tub and submerges himself in the heat of the water. He lies there sleepily in the steam. Feels his joints ease and loosen.
Afterwards, while he is shaving, the sun shines in at the window. The fog is lifting.
He dresses warmly. Two jumpers. His heaviest socks.
The trees that line the edges of the property – serving as a windbreak – are nearly leafless. The bushes and shrubs of the garden look brown and dead though the grass is still green. He opens the garage. A dark blue VW Passat estate. British originally, it has Italian plates now.
The idea of driving still makes him nervous. He takes his seat at the steering wheel with an unwelcome sense that he is perhaps not up to this.
Now that the fog has lifted, everything seems unusually well defined. The leafless po
plars standing along the road, which is whitish with cold, throw faint shadows across his path.
He is not particularly aware of driving slowly. People keep overtaking him, though – there is a permanent little queue of them.
He has already passed through Argenta, and turned at San Biagio onto the road that leads to the lagoon, the long straight road across flat farmland. There is nothing in particular to love about this landscape. They had wanted, originally, something in Tuscany. This was twenty-five years ago, when Cordelia left home. Something in Tuscany. It turned out, however, that Tuscany was more expensive than they had anticipated. So rather than settle for one of the disappointingly poky little houses they were shown in the Chianti they decided to widen their search to other areas, and as they moved further and further away from Florence, the houses they were shown started to look more and more like what they had in mind – a substantial elegant villa with an acre of mature, secluded garden. That was what they wanted, and in the end that was what they got. What they had not foreseen was that it would be here, all the way over on the other side of the peninsula, in an area in which, at the outset, they had had absolutely no interest. And such a desperately flat landscape. (When, in the 1970s, as deputy head of mission at the embassy in Rome, he had had to attend an event in San Marino – to follow an oompah band and people in operetta costumes up to the top of the rock – he had seen it from up there, the flat land stretching north, and shuddered.) The house itself had won them over. Its distinguished, almost aristocratic demeanour. Still, it had seemed eccentric, and when it was theirs they wondered whether they had made a mistake. Slowly they made their peace with the place, until they felt a kind of love for it. You learn to love what’s there, not what’s not there. How can you live, otherwise?
Sun falls on the fields on either side of the road, on sudden expanses of still water. Even though the heating is not on in the car, he starts to feel too warm in his coat and stops to take it off – at a sleepy petrol station, Tamoil, one of the unmanned self-service ones they have around here. Next to it is a dirt track leading off into empty fields, and irrigation ditches, half-frozen now. Silence, except for a passing vehicle sometimes.