by Edward Docx
‘Yes.’
‘Pass it here then?’
‘What are you thinking?’
‘Let’s get this trip started.’
‘What are you going to put on?’ I ask.
Ralph takes a considered breath. ‘Tombstone Blues.’
The second tape begins with about twenty minutes of inaudible talking. Then it stops. When it comes back on, you can hear everything that is being said quite clearly. Either the recording device has moved or the people. The first voice is vehement and repetitive but querulous – listing angry consequences and intentions and threats. The second speaks seldom but the tone is composed. Deliberately so. Little by little the first voice is provoked. The second voice starts asking questions in a flatter tone. Why would you do that? And you think this is a good idea? What is that going to achieve? Each question incites a more fervent avowal. It’s hard to be sure but there is a persistence to the second voice that seems false to the moment – as if the second voice is not thinking about what is being said or even what is happening but some other agenda that the first voice – swept along in the rising tide of its emotion – does not heed. The tape cuts out again when the first voice begins to cry – these desolate empty jagged sobs cut ruthlessly short by the click of a button.
THE EARTH’S BRIGHT EDGE
Inside, the cathedral is as cool as the worn flagstones and everything smells of stone and wood infused with a thousand years of incense. We walk slowly up the aisle. Our footfalls echo. Whispers chase one another through the shadows and up the high walls and sound again where they were not. We stop at the crossing.
My father is at my right shoulder, my brother at my left. Above us, the sun is thrown and split by the vast stained-glass windows. Higher than seems possible, the vaulted ceiling appears alive with the play of lapis-lazuli blues, emeralds, ambers, burgundy reds. Great shafts of light fall here and there on the dwarfed human chairs, on the tall pale columns that arch and soar, left and right, forward towards the altar, on the statues of the saints, on the stations of the cross.
I know he wants me to ask so I do: ‘How old, Dad?’
Dad speaks softly: ‘There’s been an oratory here since the fourth century. The place got burned in 1188 and they began building the version that we’re looking at in 1200. It took five hundred years and they still haven’t finished.’
I imagine men hauling stone towards heaven on spindly wooden ladders – brittle-fingered in the winter. I imagine their ‘belief in an idea’ – one of Dad’s phrases that he uses not that covertly to attack me, or my ‘generation’, because he thinks we don’t believe in any ideas. Which maybe we don’t. Because maybe they all turned out to be so staggeringly bad. Dad is heavy where he leans on me. We walk forward again.
‘In 1420, Henry the Fifth came here to do his deal with Burgundy and the wife of Mad Charles the Beloved of France: to ensure that the French throne would pass to him and not the Dauphin – on Mad Charles the Beloved’s death.’
‘I love the word “dauphin”,’ Ralph says.
‘Mad and Beloved?’ I ask.
‘One and the same,’ Dad says. ‘Which tells us something.’
‘Although,’ Ralph says, ‘I think I love the word “dauphinoise” even more. It’s a shame that the British only manage to use it in connection with potatoes. Which also tells us something.’
We stop before the altar. There’s a full-stretch human effort at eternity here, something colossal and awe-inspiring and monumental and yet something monstrously deluded. And there is eternity’s other name – Death – everywhere – in the tombs, in the statues, in the flicker of the candles, in the dying bloodstained body hanging in near-naked agony from the great crucifix ahead of us.
Dad turns on his stick and extends his arm, suddenly animated, alive, spending his energy fast. ‘But Troyes,’ he pronounces the name with the flat French ‘r’ but without self-consciousness, ‘Troyes is most famous for the age and volume of its stained glass. The earliest visible part is the thirteenth-century choir, just up there. My favourite window is that one – “The Wise and Foolish Virgins” – partly because of the name, but also because there’s a panel devoted to the Devil. Can you see it – right there?’
We look where he shows us. There’s a stunted red figure in armour – visor down but beaked and horned and spurred.
‘The interesting thing is that the Devil is everywhere in these windows.’ Dad leans on his stick and points again and again. ‘Up there, being chained to a mountain by Raphael. Up there, being invited into a convent. And up there, being chased out again by the Virgin. Look how much life and movement the artists give him. It’s as though he, not Christ, were the animating spirit.’
Ralph and I turn and turn again as my father speaks, following where he points. I’m dizzy, looking up and thinking about how much my father knows – how much he carries in his mind – not only about the cathedral, the history and the glass, but also the stories that lie behind, the reference of one thing to another, the architecture of ideas and thought. His knowledge is so real and present to him. It is as if he somehow partakes in these stories simply by knowing them. Once, when someone had used the word ‘outsource’ at the clinic, he said to me: ‘Be careful not to outsource your mind, Lou.’
‘Give me a hand, boys. Let’s sit down there at the front.’
My dad leans on me. We settle into the pew. I am on one side and Ralph the other. We stare up at the cross for a while. Dad is resting. Time slows. Then Ralph clears his throat.
‘“Good afternoon, Herr Jesu,”’ he says with his comic Sigmund Freud accent. “‘Well, how was your week? We were talking about your mother, I think. Yes? The Virgin? Tell me – this virginity – do you remember your mother as affectionate or cold, distant?”’
‘Ralph—’
‘“It’s not me, Herr Freud, who calls her the Virgin. My followers give her that name.” “Your followers? On Instagram? One moment, one moment, let me consult my notes . . . Ah, yes, these are the people whom you call your sheep, correct? They worship you – is that right?”’
‘Ralph—’
‘“Yes, my flock.” “But tell me, Herr Jesu, how do your flock worship you? What happens?” “Most of the time they kneel before—” “The sheep kneel?” “They are sheep only in metaphor.” “I see. And the Virgin – a metaphor?” “No.” “I see . . . Sorry, you were saying, the sheep kneel?” “My sheep kneel before a statue of me being crucified.” “Ah, yes, I remember from last week – this also is to do with the thorns and the lashes, yes?”’
‘Ralph—’
‘“I know what you are going to say, Herr Freud . . . narcissism.” “Narcissism, Herr Jesu, certainly. But also I think we must now accept . . . sadomasochism.” “Then I have my followers eat my body.” “In metaphor?” “No, here I must be adamant: in reality.” “Ah, so. Cannibalism.” “And I invite them to drink my blood.” “There’s a vampiric element?” “This is because I am the lamb of God.” “You, also, are a sheep, Herr Jesu? Ah. So. This is most interesting—”’
‘Ralph.’ My father holds up his hand and commands him to stop but he’s not angry, he’s nervous of being overheard. And I can tell that he is smiling. Though it’s the cold war between the two of them, I had forgotten all the backchannel alliances and diplomatic understandings they have. I’d forgotten, too, how much my father dotes on Ralph.
We are shuffling around the stations of the cross when Dad says: ‘You’ve been here before – when you were a baby, Lou. The first trip we all made after you were born.’
‘Blocked it out,’ I say.
‘Me, too,’ Ralph nods.
‘You and Jack were bickering all the time, Ralph,’ Dad continues. ‘And Julia was finding it miserable – no sleep and the screaming you used to do, Lou.’
‘I feared abandonment.’
‘She probably had post-natal depression,’ Dad says.
‘So did I.’
‘We all did,’ Ralph adds.
We stop before the painting with the number eight in Roman numerals above it.
‘I still thought I might actually have to go to court to fight Carol,’ Dad says. ‘And Julia kept asking me why I was trying so hard to keep you and Jack when you were both being such bastards all the time.’ He winces. ‘Everything was so tense and fraught.’
I don’t like it when my father uses my mother’s name in the same breath as Carol’s. I don’t like to hear him say Carol’s name at all, the name itself.
‘I don’t know why,’ Dad says, ‘but I knew I was doing the right thing back then. I had this sustaining surety about the divorce.’
‘Don’t,’ Ralph says.
‘Even when everyone was screaming in the back of the van and I knew Julia was looking out of her window so that she could cry without me seeing her.’
A rack of candles is lit in one of the alcoves and their flames dance, the spirits of the dead. For the first time since Ralph arrived, I feel the surge of emotions rising again – but deeper, darker, some weird and mingled turbulence of resentment. I want Dad to stop talking.
‘I remember driving to this cathedral,’ Dad continues. ‘The way we have just come. From Reims. In the rain. I remember dreading going back to the campsite afterwards. But, still, I knew I was doing the right thing. I knew I had made the right decisions, even though all the people that I loved were crying or shouting at me.’
I can feel the Devil’s redness rising in my face.
‘And the thing is . . .’ Dad turns away from me and towards Ralph. ‘I don’t have the certainty now. Not like I felt it then.’
Ralph is standing dead still; a white statue keenly chiselled.
And then it hits me. Dad is not sure.
All of this, the last eighteen months, the trips to the shrinks, to the doctors, the discussions, this journey itself – all of this is because I thought my father was determined. But it’s a lie. A deception. A performance. My brothers are right. And suddenly, I can’t stand to be there. I have to leave. Now that he’s decided to show up at long last, Ralph can walk the old bastard down the aisle.
Outside, in the square, men and women I will never know are eating and drinking, oblivious, talking about nothing that will ever matter, breathing in, breathing out. There are restaurants beneath top-heavy wooden-beamed medieval houses with boards advertising ‘prix fixe’ in the side streets.
Jack texts. He hasn’t got a flight but he’s going to the airport on standby.
A white Citroën van is loading brown boxes. As the girl in the boulangerie turns the sign to shut, light flashes in the glass from a sun I cannot see.
I call Eva.
‘Are you OK? Where are you?’
‘I’m in the square – outside Troyes Cathedral.’
‘What’s wrong? Shall I come?’
‘Dad just told Ralph that he wasn’t sure.’
‘About the whole thing?’
‘About the whole thing.’
‘And what did Ralph say?’
‘Fuck knows.’
‘. . . But that’s OK? Isn’t it?’
‘Why is he asking Ralph? He already decided. Twelve months ago. It’s not got anything to do with Ralph.’
‘It’s—’
‘It was all bullshit. The last year. Everything we said.’
‘No, no . . . that’s not right, Lou. Think about—’
‘He isn’t sure.’
‘No, listen, Lou. You can’t—’
‘He isn’t sure. Now Ralph’s here.’
‘Lou, he’s going to want to talk with all his sons. You have to expect that.’
‘Yes – he is now. He used the whole threat of this trip – just to get them here. That’s what he has been doing.’
Silence bounces off some satellite somewhere above our lonely blue ball. I can’t speak.
‘Lou?’
‘I hate this. I hate what it is doing to me.’
‘Shall I come?’
‘What’s the point? I’ll probably be home tomorrow night.’
‘You think?’
‘He’s changing his mind and I don’t even know why this is making me so angry. Last night I was . . . Jesus, I’m so fucked.’
‘Take time out, Lou. Go somewhere on your own for a bit. Sit down. Write something. Write something for me. Take an hour away from them. Find your way back.’
I owe thirty thousand pounds. What’s a little more debt on top of that? So fuck this, fuck it all, is what I am thinking. I can get on a train right now and go to Paris – and check in somewhere with a balcony and a view of the Seine. And I can sit there smoking and drinking and waiting for Eva to arrive. And when she comes through the door, we won’t speak, we’ll just stand in the middle of the room, facing one another, between the windows and the bed, and we’ll keep our eyes wide open and I’ll look into those dark irises of hers as if I’m disappearing into some dream about the beginning of men and the beginning of women, and I’ll sense the shape of her, of her body, where it comes towards me, where it dips away; and then, slowly, we’ll raise our hands and touch each other with the fingertips of our fingertips, so that we can almost feel where our prints pattern into one another, and we’ll move closer, but by less than any measurement so that it all slows slows slows right down . . . until at last there comes a moment when we’re kissing – kissing – and suddenly we’ll be doing the mad ragtime dance of taking off our clothes (the first beat of every bar another kiss) and I’ll know her then, not only with my eyes, but with my hands and with my soul, and she’ll know me, and we’ll fall on the bed, but still we won’t speak because we will be everything we might ever want to say to one another, we will be what we most mean, and we will have become what creation first meant to say when it whispered itself into existence from that bitter bitter nothing all those billions of years ago.
That’s what I want.
And after that, we will drink cold white wine together in a big hot bath in a room of pale mirrors and dark marble. We will dress one other and I’ll breathe the scent of her perfume and warm-bathed skin. And then we will walk out to some underground place down steep iron basement stairs where we will drink and talk and drink and talk about how people really are. About the masks. And behind the masks, yet more masks, and yet more, and yet more . . . And then, when we’re both messed up, we will walk home on those slippery Parisian cobbles that fan out in the rain. And then we’ll make love some more until it hurts too much to carry on and we can’t come or cry or care about anything else – and then we’ll open the window and sit on that balcony wrapped in the same sheet with a bottle of something that it doesn’t burn to drink and just watch the night turning from sapphire to blue on those steep French roofs until the dawn slips under the east and the air smells of rain recently passed and we get that feeling that we are new again – a new man and a new woman living where the sun is rising on the bright edge of the turning Earth.
‘Do you speak English?’
‘I am Canadian, sir.’
‘Is this a French-Canadian restaurant?’
‘French-Canadian owned.’
‘Interesting . . . OK, well, we’d like the oysters on your board, please, and champagne of which no greater can be conceived. No short cuts. My brother is sulking and we’re worried he might take his own life. We are a very suicidal family.’
‘Shall I get the sommelier?’
‘Will he help?’
‘She.’
‘In that case – as soon as possible.’
Now the light catches in the leaded attic window of an old half-timbered medieval house across the square.
‘And to eat?’
The waiter is looking at me. I am trying to respond. But my appetite has vanished; eating is some kind of endorsement that I cannot tender.
‘Yes,’ Ralph says. ‘More oysters. And some fresh bread.’
‘Another six?’
‘Yes . . . And the paella.’
‘We don’t serve paella, sir. I’m sorr
y.’
‘That’s all we eat. That and oysters.’
Confusion from the waiter. ‘Is paella on the menu, sir?’
‘How should I know? You tell me.’
‘I don’t think it is.’ The waiter regards the unopened menu in front of my brother.
‘We also eat pork pies . . .’ Ralph offers. ‘If that helps.’
‘Ah! Ah! Yes. We do have a tourtière, sir.’
‘A pork pie?’
‘A pork pie.’
‘I knew it.’
Pride from the waiter. ‘Originating from . . . Quebec.’
‘Québécois! Superb. And another beautiful word. One of those for me, please.’
‘Certainly.’
‘Is it on the menu?’
‘No.’
‘You see the problem with going by the menu?’
‘Je voudrais le carré d’agneau, s’il vous plaît,’ my father says.
‘Of course . . .’ A moment as the waiter looks round. ‘And will that be all?’
My father’s eyes are shiny, my brother’s a danse macabre, mine I know are zinc-blue and everything slides off them like those Parisian roofs.
‘A green salad for my brother . . . No, please, don’t fall into his trap. He likes to punish himself as a means of punishing others. To project his suffering onto the world. It’s a trait he has inherited from his father.’
‘OK . . . So . . .’ The waiter hesitates and then decides his best course is simply to reprise the order. ‘And that will be all?’
‘Just the sommelier.’
‘But here she comes.’
‘Mademoiselle.’
‘Bonjour.’
‘Are you married?’
‘Excusez-moi?’
‘You speak English?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you married?’
‘Yes.’
‘So Madame not Mademoiselle. I apologize. An easy mistake to make.’
A smile.
‘We need to rescue my brother,’ Ralph says. ‘Which is your finest champagne?’
‘C’est une bonne question.’
‘Les plus bonnes,’ Ralph returns. ‘Forgive me, my French is terrible.’