by David Szalay
*
Over the next few days, Cordelia takes things in hand. She gets a man in to look at the damp patch at the foot of the stairs. She finds and installs an ultrasonic device that is supposed to dissuade mice from establishing themselves in the house. She sets Claudia to work on specific tasks, which Claudia seems to appreciate. Within a few days the whole house seems more orderly and hygienic, more inhabited somehow.
Together they look on the Internet at second-hand cars for sale in the area. They find something that she seems to think would be suitable for him – a five-year-old Toyota RAV4, automatic. The next day they drive to Ferrara to have a look at it and she haggles the price down a thousand euros and they take it back to Argenta, she driving the insurance company’s car and he driving his new Toyota. He finds it much easier to handle than the old Passat. And there is something about the way she makes it all seem so easy – on his own, he knows, he would have been terribly daunted by the task of sorting it all out. Somehow she makes it seem effortless. She makes the phone calls. She takes him through the Italian forms, telling him what to write and where to sign. She sorts out the insurance. Yes, he is slightly in awe of her. She has such vitality. She wins at Scrabble when they play, which they do once or twice on those winter evenings that start at four o’clock, when darkness falls outside, suddenly, taking you by surprise.
*
One afternoon Claudia’s son shows up in his IKEA van, to take her home. He arrives early, while she is still working her way through a load of ironing, and waits in the van.
‘There’s an IKEA van at the end of the driveway,’ Cordelia says, having seen it from an upstairs window. ‘Have you ordered something?’
‘No,’ he tells her. ‘That’s Claudia’s son. He works for them. He’s waiting for her.’
‘Shouldn’t we ask him in?’
‘We could. I suppose.’
From the window he watches her tap on the window of the van and say something to the Romanian, who then leaves the van, and follows her back to the house.
He hears her speaking to him in her fluent if English-accented Italian as she leads him into the kitchen.
After a while he joins them and says hello. He only stays for a minute, hovering awkwardly. Then he is back in the wing chair with The Sleepwalkers, though less able to absorb its ideas than ever.
When Claudia and her son have left, Cordelia finds him there, and they talk about them, the two Romanians. Very nice people, they decide.
‘He’s very good-looking,’ Cordelia says.
Her father nods, apparently in agreement. And then says, hurriedly, as if it was not something he had ever thought about, ‘Would you say so?’
‘Yes, I would.’
‘He’s married, I think,’ he says, oddly.
‘Well, so am I,’ Cordelia points out.
‘No.’ He seems flustered. And knowing that he seems flustered makes him more flustered. ‘I just meant …’
‘I said he was good-looking, that’s all.’
‘Okay.’
He tries to smile – knows he doesn’t quite pull it off.
She is looking at him strangely, is how it feels. He says, ‘Well, it was nice of you to ask him in.’
She doesn’t seem to hear – she just keeps looking at him in that strange way.
He has hoisted The Sleepwalkers up in front of him – is staring without seeing it at a map of Europe in 1914.
She knows, he thinks.
What does she know, though? What is there to know? What does he know himself? That certain men … What would the word be? Fascinate him? And that disturbed by this fascination – if that is the word – he is sometimes … What? Ineffably embarrassed in their presence? That’s it, though. That’s all there is to know. Not even in his imagination has he ever …
Finally he lets his eyes leave the page – the same page, the map of Europe in 1914 – and look for her.
She isn’t there.
There is a sense that something has happened. That something has passed between them. He feels slightly sick, as he did when, about twenty years ago now, Joanna said to him that he was ‘obviously queer’. It had seemed an extraordinary thing to say. With Joanna, the subject was never mentioned again, not even alluded to. That was, however, when they started to live more or less separately. He doesn’t know if she has ever said anything to Cordelia about it.
He finds her in the kitchen.
She is holding a framed photo – her parents. The way they live – mostly apart – has always upset her.
‘What’s that?’ he asks.
She doesn’t answer.
And he thinks, standing at her shoulder, sharing her view of the photo of himself and Joanna – She’s thinking it’s all a sham. It’s not all a sham, though. He wants to tell her that. He doesn’t know what words to use.
He is trying to find a way of saying it when it occurs to him that perhaps Joanna does see it as a sham, their marriage, the forty-five years they’ve spent together, and sort of together. And of course Cordelia will see it from her mother’s point of view, mostly. She will pity her mother, for having had to live for so long like that. With someone who is ‘obviously queer’. The words still seem to have nothing to do with him. He wonders if Cordelia knows about Joanna’s affairs. Probably she knows more than he does – he knows nothing specific. It’s difficult to know what information passes between them, his wife and his daughter.
She is still looking at the photo. He’s in morning dress, you can just make out. It’s the day he got his knighthood, twenty-odd years ago.
‘The day I landed the K,’ he says.
It is so obviously not what she is thinking about, so obviously not the aspect of the image that is absorbing her, that to say it makes him sound much less sensitive than he actually is, much less perceptive. He knows that, and knows that it’s the price he pays for steering things away from what he does not want to talk about, or for trying to steer them away.
She seems to have taken the hint, though. ‘Yup,’ she says, and puts the photo down. ‘Is it too early for a glass of wine?’
He looks at his watch.
It’s not even five.
She says that in London it’s office-party season, the Christmas drinking season, liver-punishing time. Afternoons in the pub. All that.
‘I vaguely remember,’ he says.
‘Do you still miss work?’ she asks, obviously not very interested, but knowing that he doesn’t mind talking about that so much.
‘Not as much as I used to.’
He stoops thoughtfully to the wine rack.
‘Not as much as I used to,’ he says again.
He puts a bottle on the table.
‘I’ve had to accept,’ he says, matter-of-factly, ‘that my life, in terms of potential, is over.’
It’s as if he is trying to make up for not wanting to talk about what she wants to talk about – the forty-five years he has spent married to her mother, what was the story there – by talking with unusual frankness about something else.
That’s what he thinks himself as he starts to open the bottle, first nicking the lead foil, and then unpeeling it. With a satisfying heaviness, it separates from the glass underneath. He says, ‘I don’t have much left to offer. In a practical sense.’
‘You shouldn’t say that.’ She still seems distracted, her mind on something else.
‘Oh, I’ve achieved everything I’m going to achieve.’
‘Professionally, you mean?’
‘Yes. Partly. I mean, I’m not down in the mouth about it,’ he says. ‘I’m very proud of what I’ve achieved.’ Which is true. Even as he says it, though, he is aware of how weightless, how intangible, how even strangely fictitious, his achievements feel – even the ones he is proudest of, like his minor part in negotiating, over many years, the expansion of the European Union in 2004. Something, he is not sure what, seems to nullify them. He says, trying to maintain his philosophical tone, ‘I’m very proud. It’s just tha
t that’s it now.’
‘Do you want a hand with that?’ Cordelia asks. She means the wine he is struggling to open.
He hesitates for a moment. He seems to think about what to do. Then he says, ‘Yes, okay, please,’ and passes it to her.
‘Now this wine,’ he says, obviously keen to talk about happier matters, ‘we got, your mother and I,’ he slightly emphasises, as if to point out that they did sometimes have fun together, which indeed they did, ‘some years ago, when we went down to Umbria, in the old Passat, may she rest in peace, and we got this wine in Perugia, I think. Anyway, it’s one of the best, supposedly, that they make down there, and I think it’s time it was drunk.’
‘Hear, hear,’ Cordelia says – though something is still missing from her voice.
He pours out two glasses, not too much in each, and slides one over to her.
‘So,’ he says. ‘To …?’
He waits a moment – long enough for her to smile, and shrug. The smile is wistful, sad, it withholds something, is unpersuaded.
He does not let it deflect him.
‘To life?’ he suggests.
She seems to weigh this up, then acquiesces. ‘To life.’
*
The next morning they drive to Ravenna. He needs to have another scan at the hospital. They take the new Toyota. Cordelia drives.
As they drive towards the sea the farming country gives way gradually to something more garish – the tourist economy of the sandy coast. There are signs for theme parks. Hotels. Everything shut up for winter. Except that the prostitutes who line Strada Statale 309 in summer are still there, though fewer. Bosnian girls, quite a lot of them, he has been told.
‘Poor things,’ he says.
Cordelia nods, driving.
They near Ravenna and there are signs for the Area Industriale. For the merchant port. She handles it all unproblematically – the tricky, poorly signposted approach, the Ravenna traffic, the one-way system; he is almost embarrassingly impressed by the way she handles it.
‘You’re doing very well,’ he says, as they stop at a traffic light somewhere in the city – she seems to know where they are, though he has no idea.
She laughs and says, ‘Thanks,’ and they set off again, with that sureness of purpose that so impresses him.
They decided, that morning, that they would have lunch in town, and then present themselves at the hospital for his appointment, which is at two o’clock.
They park in a public lot near the Zona Monumentale, and start to walk. They are looking for a hat for him. She wants to get him one for Christmas.
Via Cavour is hung with Christmas decorations, and the smart little shops shine in the darkness of the day. They stop at shops that seem promising and in the end he gets a soft brown Borsalino, which somehow fits his thin face. His face is thin now, and haggard-looking. The damage from the accident persists in nasty yellowish patches. Obviously pleased with the hat, he wears it as they look for somewhere to have lunch. They find a place on Via Maggiore that he thinks he once went to, years ago, and, if it was the same place, has positive memories of. Snow is starting to drift down in small flakes when they go in, into the sudden, stunning warmth, and ask for a table for two.
‘This is the place,’ he tells her, as, having shed their outdoor things, they sit down.
‘Okay.’
‘The food’s excellent. Or was. Now, who knows.’
The decor definitely tends to kitsch.
There is no written menu. Just a jovial man who wanders up and tells them, as if they were old friends, what he has today.
When they have told him what they want, someone else – a small woman, with a face as hard as a dried pea – arrives with his quarter-litre of red wine, and Cordelia’s green bottle of sparkling water.
All around them, office workers, it seems, are eating lunch.
Outside the snow is still falling.
He is trying to tell her about Amemus eterna et non peritura, about ‘the eternal passing of time’. It is on his mind again. This morning he woke very depressed. He lay there for some time, not moving as the turquoise walls appeared. The hospital loomed, that was part of it. The CAT scan, and whatever news it had for him. He has been having headaches, the last few days. He has been as weirdly aware of what’s happening in his head as he has been for months now with his heart. That sense of physical fragility frightened him during the night, and he tried to find again the feeling he had last week of everything impermanent embodying, through the very fact of its impermanence, something endless and eternal.
He is trying to explain that now to Cordelia.
‘It’s important,’ he says, struggling to make sense, he can see that on her face, ‘to feel part of something larger, something … something permanent.’
‘Yeah,’ she says patiently, pouring herself some more water.
She doesn’t see the point of this, he thinks.
He’s not sure he does either. It seems so elusive, even to him, when he tries to put it into words – or indeed when he doesn’t.
‘I’m not making much sense,’ he apologises.
‘No, it’s interesting,’ Cordelia says.
The pasta dish arrives – some sort of massive ravioli, in a heavy iron frying pan, still sizzling, which the hard-faced woman puts down without a word on a wooden place mat, and leaves there for them to serve themselves.
‘Grazie,’ he says, as she walks away.
He is still trying to formulate his thoughts, what he was saying to Cordelia, trying to say.
Hungrily, she has started on the ravioli.
‘Is it okay?’ he asks.
‘Lovely,’ she says.
And he is very moved, suddenly, by the sight of her.
Overwhelmed.
His eyes overflow.
She notices his moist-eyed stare and smiles at him, questioningly.
Feeling foolish, he shakes his head, declining to explain, and starts to eat. In a sense this love he feels just makes it more awful, not less, that this is all going to end. It is extraordinarily painful to think that there will be a day when he sees her for the last time.
Still nearly tearful, he stops eating for a moment and looks up.
There is a sense, he is sure, in which he is tricking himself into these feelings, about everything embodying something endless and eternal. Fear and sadness are obliging him to come up with something. Something to soften the nightmarish fact of ageing and dying. These ideas about the eternity of time. Within the eternity of time there is only a mystery – only a sense that there is something that we will never know or understand. An empty, unknowable space. Like, in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, that mosaic of the curtains opening to show us nothing, only a patch of plain golden tiles.
Cordelia is talking about Simon. Normally she talks about him a lot. This week she has made an effort not to. He is aware of that. Now she is talking about him, though.
He listens, his fingers on the stem of his wine glass.
She is touching on the aspects of her son that strike other people as odd and admitting, unusually, that she worries about them sometimes.
He tries to soothe her. It’s not exactly unheard of to be a bit strange at that age, he says, especially highly intelligent people, and Simon is undoubtedly one of those.
‘I wouldn’t worry,’ he tells her, putting his hand over hers.
She nods.
It’s what she wants to hear. Whether it is true or not, who knows.
Only time will tell.
He pays and they leave, putting on their coats and scarves near the door. He puts on his new hat and looks at himself in the mirror: an old man.
With a definite effort he pulls open the door.
He lets Cordelia leave first, then follows her out.
The air is frigid, stings the skin of his face.
Via Maggiore is fading away in the dusk.
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Copyright © David Szalay 2016
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First published by Jonathan Cape in 2016
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