by Lloyd Jones
I cast meaningful glances at Violette while I delivered this panegyric to the tumultuous masses as they seethed on the blood-soaked cobbles; they would spare my life forthwith and promote me to the position of the First Republic’s chef d’amour, giving me her hand in marriage, as one would expect, naturellement.
Thud! would sound the guillotine behind us as we threaded our way through the crowd, towards the Left Bank where I would become an existentialist and she a painter, lovely fingers streaked carmine, burnt umber, French grey, violet, living dangerously and sleeping fitfully under an intense Parisian sky, playing chess moodily by the Seine; we’d drink coffee and share unspoken moments of tendresse following endless nights of tempestuous passion, her ardour pinned in butterfly beauty on the rumpled white sheets of our garret bed.
While I delivered my mute speech to the masses a commotion spread through the van and for a moment I thought we had joined a frieze from French history c1789, since everyone had turned to face the back of our tumbrel with excited and flushed faces – as if Marie Antoinette herself was in the cart behind us, clutching an exquisite silk handkerchief to her powdered breast: some of our company pointed, others exclaimed loudly. The air had cleared a little, enough to let us see the road snaking behind us, and a sight of tremendous beauty met our eyes, truly amazing: shimmering masses of ball lightning were descending from the heavens and bouncing off the ground like so many footballs at a pre-match practice session; they reminded me, for a moment, of the torsos of snowmen, made in winter by little boys with snow-encrusted mittens, begun with a snowball and rolled until too large to move; rough-hewn, lop-sided, fluffed all over with puffy snow – and just like fat snowmen’s bodies the balls of lightning shimmered down to earth, wobbling, jellies on the run, luminescent, evanescent, space-glowed, alive, frightening, getting closer, threatening, magnificent, unforgettable, and exactly the same colour as Violette’s eyes! Vraiment!
I tugged at her sleeve and when she looked at me I pointed to her eyes and then at the balls of fire behind us – and yes, yes! she afforded me the briefest of Mona Lisa smiles before returning her gaze to Venus, before returning her heart to the icy hospital container where it had lain until now, frozen, waiting for a suitable donor.
We escaped, but only just. It grew darker, we fell silent. All the way home we said nothing, none of us, silhouettes in the tumbrel, returning to the Bastille. We disembarked and petite Violette disappeared from my life for ever. We four musketeers left for home the next day. Our working holiday was over; it was time to return, to live normal lives again. Chris and Jo went on ahead together, heading for la Manche with an eight-inch Bowie knife in Chris’ rucksack; a shiny new knife with a mouthful of wolfish, serrated teeth. We looked at it silently for a long time before he sheathed it.
On the morning of our departure I went down to the village café-bar to say goodbye. I don’t know what happened exactly, but I think I drank too much strong coffee on top of a bad hangover; in the next few hours I came apart. As I started hitching with Tim, he and I the last two remaining musketeers, I descended into a frightening abyss, bitten by the black dog. I became panicky, shaky, very depressed.
France being France, no-one wanted to give us a lift and we stood at the roadside for hour after hour, dust creeping up our jeans until we had white puttees. Eventually a 2CV rolled up and I breathed a huge sigh of relief: I just wanted to get out of there.
I was about to get into the car when Tim’s hand hauled me back. I had just enough time to see what he had glimpsed before I dived into the car’s shady interior: a gigantic hulk of a man with long unruly hair, shrouded in a big black coat, straddling the back seat and playing with a flick knife. We moved away from him as fast as we could. I believe that Tim saved my life that day. Had I been alone, exhausted and emotionally vulnerable, I would have jumped in, I would have chanced it. But without doubt we were intended for a shallow grave somewhere deep inside a forest.
The years passed by and our trip to France became a fantasy; when we met occasionally in pubs we talked about the good old days, as you do. About old Bruyes and Lucky, the storm, the cherry orchard, the vigilante hens, the violet thunderballs. We remembered different things. Tim remembered his frequent trips up and down the ladder because he ate too many cherries and they made him want to wee all the time. Jo remembered all the tunes on the jukebox in the café-bar. Nobody else remembered the girl with the violet eyes, nobody except me. But we all remembered Chris’ trip to Marseilles to buy the knife.
So it was with an awful sense of fate that we all happened to be sitting in separate pubs, independently, when we heard the news. A man had been stabbed in the next town; he was dead. He hadn’t been stabbed with the Bowie knife he’d bought in Marseilles, but it was Chris who’d died. And although he hadn’t been named as yet we all thought of him and no-one else, straight away, when we heard the news.
From that day on I have believed in fate – not as something preordained, but as a collection of possibilities and probabilities heaped inside two buckets and balanced on the fulcrum of an ancient weighing machine somewhere just like Bruyes’ orchard, see-sawing throughout the duration of our lives. In a matter of seconds only, when the weight of the world tipped one way or the other, it was Chris who was taken down to the guillotine and it was I who was spared.
chocolate
HE remembered the room as rather old-fashioned, even then, dowdy and cluttered and squashed, with frayed seats and dusty corners. People still smoked at work and took their sandwiches with them in tins or plastic Tupperware containers which released personalised wafts of cheesy or fishy smells into the air. Old Tom had died on the job many years previously but his gunmetal sandwich box was still used to hold the tea money – and still it percolated old aromas into the atmosphere. Anwen the older-than-sin cleaner had scrubbed it many times and even kept soap in it for a while, but it continued to exude Tom’s spiritual dinners, as if it had been an amphora containing rich wine set aside for Odysseus’ long-awaited return. At lunchtime a no-nonsense programme of cheese and tomato, fishpaste, or ham and mustard hit the airwaves. Tastes were simple, exotica rare. Some people were still described as poets or intellectuals with awed reverence. Doctors were saints and politicians were damned clever, to a man. That was a long time ago and he struggled to picture it in his mind. But a few memories lingered on in ghostly isolation.
From the window to his left, glued shut by countless layers of old paint, he recalled a view over slate rooftops aslant, more often than not shining with fresh rain, their purples and mauves coming to life under the constant showers which varnished them. On the windowsill squatted a big brass plant-holder, Victorian and vulgar with embossed nymphs or caryatids rippling the metal and dead flies clogging a dusty necklace of spider-silk inside it. Within this bulbous, Brasso-profundo monstrosity reclined an aspidistra or suchlike, brought back to life periodically after bouts of neglect, its long crooked stems naked without the leaves it had shed during enforced droughts.
Morgan had started as a junior in that office, indentured. Now, in the conservatory of his rather grand home, he chuckled to himself and said the word over and over again. Indentured. He sat passively with his useless legs tucked under a crimson rug, under strict orders not to move. Indentured, he said again to the plant by his elbow. A contract of employment – a thing of the past, like him. He tried to formulate a pun about dentures, for his own were loose and hurtful, but his mind refused to grapple with the words. He toyed with the crumbs in his lap, feeling their texture under his fingertips, and then he returned to the past again. After his indentureship he’d qualified and gone on to consolidate his career in the little office at the top of the stairs – the only room in the world for him then.
Mags brought him a fresh cup of tea and busied around him, tidying his newspaper. He’d been ordered to drink plenty of fluids, so she sat in the wicker chair opposite him, across the table, nagging him silently into taking a few sips. Time slipped by and when he next looked u
p she’d dropped off to sleep under the heat of the glass. He studied her, dispassionately. Again, he went back to that office where they’d met for the first time, more than fifty years ago. He tried to recover the pungent smell of the printer’s ink and the hot lead, fresh white paper and beery masculine smells in the compositing room. When she was taken on suddenly – the firm was going through a period of prosperity – there had been nowhere for her to sit so she’d been given a spot on his table, after he’d been consulted in the corridor outside by his boss, in whispers. He knew he had no choice, though he was used to having the table to himself. It was a large but surprisingly light affair made of ash with a square section of inlaid baize in the centre. A typewriter had arrived on it one Friday afternoon, and the following Monday morning Mags had been ushered in to sit behind it. He’d bumbled to his feet, as was the custom then, and stammered a welcome. Small talk wasn’t encouraged, so he glanced at her whenever he thought she wasn’t looking in his direction, as subtly and indirectly as he could manage. As the days passed into months the paraphernalia of office life gathered around her, partly obscuring her from his gaze. She became a fixture at the end of his green baize table. He was able to study her in the soft slatted light which lit up the aspidistra and wove a delicate pattern of blind-slats and green plant-shadows in her chestnut hair. She took responsibility for the plant immediately and it prospered; she was quickly popular, and he sometimes felt envious of the easy rapport she shared with the other staff. One day it occurred to him that the distance between them across the table was somehow too formal, almost ceremonial – just as configured as a boardroom table, or even the round table at Camelot.
One damp Sunday afternoon, fresh from chapel and inspired by something the visiting preacher had said, he decided to make a scale map of the room where they worked.
He went in early on the Monday morning and measured the place as accurately as he could with his feet, planting his shoes one after the other in a slow caravan across the desert of the office floor. The preacher had talked about dimensions: in particular, the cubit as the distance between the elbow and the tip of the middle finger, an ancient measurement quoted in the Bible as it described Noah making his ark. The preacher had pumped himself up and hit a state of hwyl-inspired excitement delivered in a singsong voice, his spade beard waggling with emotion. He’d finished off with the fathom – the six feet or so between fingertip and fingertip when the human arms were outstretched. Nowadays, thought Morgan, he’d have mentioned the Angel of the North. Why did the human race have to fathom everything out, the preacher had asked, why couldn’t people leave everything in the hands of God?
After pacing out the office Morgan had taken his measurements home, inside his lunchbox. On his way from work that Monday evening he’d bought some graph paper at WH Smith and pushed it under his coat hurriedly, while he was still in the doorway, damaging it slightly. In pencil at first, and then with coloured pens, he’d drawn out the floor plan and added (in black) each arc and interstice. Once this was done he’d noticed that his own seat fell on an interstice while hers didn’t, lying outside any of the black lines which connected all the other points of the room. Armed with this information he studied her avidly, day by day, watching the shafts of light criss-crossing the room and meeting in sunny places, doubling the yellowness where they met. He watched the sunshine as it candyflossed her hair, or threw her profile in shades of peach and butter. Sometimes the sun made her eyelids luminous, finely webbed with her bloodlines. At such times she seemed scented and feminine and vulnerable. On other days the soft down on the back of her neck glowed and burred in the summer light, and during those moments she seemed vigorous and robust. Then she was gone, leaving for another job as suddenly as she came.
Morgan watched her now, in the conservatory, waking up slowly. The profile was still there, though more etched of course, with deep lines fingernailed into the clay of her face. She stood up slowly, patted down her hair and her clothes, then took their cups away, chinking all the way back to the kitchen. He fell back into his reverie on dimensions and intersections.
The next time they’d met was at her home. A senior reporter by now, he’d been sent to another sloping terrace on another sloping hill because she’d done something remarkable enough for the rather stuffy newspaper he worked for to take notice: she’d qualified as an architect – the region’s only female architect, astounding everyone around her, especially the men in suits (himself included). They’d sat in her mother’s immaculate front room, on either side of the household’s best oak table, every doily in its allocated place, and an aspidistra plant between them, so that she’d had to move it – thus ruining her mother’s elaborate arrangements.
It’s the same plant, she said with a smile. The one in the office.
He studied it dutifully, a quarter of cucumber sandwich poised in his curled right hand, hovering over a white china plate – curiously shaped, square with cut-off corners – in his left hand. No crumbs yet. The cucumber reminded him of the aroma in old Tom’s gunmetal tin, but that was a coincidence, surely. She was talking to him, he watched her mouth move, fascinated by the slender shadow under her lower lip. What was she saying? The plant – ah yes, she’d taken it with her from the windowsill in the office – a killing field for plants – and replaced it with another, more adaptable bit of office vegetation: a cactus. He hadn’t even noticed.
It transpired that she’d grown attached to the aspidistra, and he could see – in between nibbles of cucumber sandwiches and then home-made chocolate cake – that it had thrived in its new home. He inquired about the cake. She’d made it herself, and by golly it was delicious. He complemented her on her many talents – he meant it, he was really quite impressed, as he told his mother quietly in the kitchen back home. During that hour in the front room Mags had relaxed in her chair, allowing him to admire her openly. She’d seemed friendlier, warmer and more open. He could see more of her, physically, than he’d been able to in the office when they worked together – her typewriter had blocked most of the view – and now he was forced to avert his eyes from the swell of her bust in her Sunday best, a scalloped Irish linen blouse. As they chatted after the interview, which went well, he tried to memorise the dynamics of the room: its planes and focal points, its radii and tangents. At home, later, sleepy and charmed, he’d made another map, this time a rough-out on foolscap paper. Again, she’d sat just outside a line in the nexus of connections. But they’d sat easily together, and there had been a gentle rapport, he thought. He was puzzled. In his mind’s eye he went over the meeting again, dissecting the scene: her stance, her posture, and her position in relation to his own body in that room. Had she been closer, physically, was that it? But his mental arithmetic discounted the possibility. She had seemed closer – perhaps his response had been more subjective and emotional. A subtle angling of their bodies, perhaps, had synchronised their orbits.
He closed his eyes in the conservatory and slipped into a daydream. When he opened them again Mags was standing in the doorway, and he looked at her again in the way that old people do, as if she were a marble statue. She was a half-shadow in the doorway, hands on hips, her trademark stance. She seemed to be disappearing into the shadow – and the stoop he’d noticed recently, was it getting worse? She asked him a question.
No, he didn’t want any supper yet. The blanket was overheating his knees, he noticed, so he took it off laboriously, folded it unevenly, and draped it over the arm of his chair. She tutted, but left him alone to his thoughts. She was baking a cake, he could smell it. Chocolate. Her tour de force, feted by her friends at the Townswomen’s Guild, and all those other societies she belonged to, in which the sisterhood filled the hours – like spare rooms – with junk and said to each other wordlessly, let’s not give up hope just yet. To every person God gave a special gift, and Mags made divine chocolate cakes. A strange gift to receive through heavenly providence, he thought. He never touched so much as a crumb now. The consequences were too
dire.
They’d met again, only days after the interview in her mother’s front parlour, which on reflection had more of the royal levee about it than a simple act of courtship. Morgan closed his eyes and rested his head on the back of his chair. He could remember the phone call almost word for word: his shyness mingled with excitement, his fearfulness and stammering. He’d asked to see her again, to clear up a few things, but it was a ruse, they’d both known that. They met in the tea rooms at the top end of town, near the funicular railway which took tourists to the top of the limestone cliffs. He was in his best suit again, his only suit, a bit shiny around the bottom but she said nothing as of yet. She was dressed quite racily, he thought, in a pencil skirt and a flimsy peach blouse: he could see her bra straps, but he said nothing as of yet. A little black hat and crimson lipstick… by god she was a looker, gathering admiration from all around; he was puffed with pride as he sat beside her on his slightly shiny bottom.
He’d worn his rugby club tie – not a player but a good secretary, vital role really – and he’d tried to impress her with his knowledge of words: his special gift from the man above. After all he was well on the way to becoming an intellectual, and he read poetry before going to sleep, though only socially approved material, Dylan Thomas and RS Thomas, no outlandish stuff. What was the connection between funicular and funambulist, he’d asked her as they drank their Lapsang Souchong. He’d pointed towards the railway, for some unfathomable reason. Amazingly, she knew. A funambulist was a tightrope walker, and funa was Latin for rope. He was visibly astonished.
Then she’d poked fun at him and he’d blushed. The women around them all noticed him blush, and he blushed again. But the meeting went well, and by the end they both knew that something was on the cards. Her shapeliness and intelligence did it for him. And as for her? Oh, there was his boyish interest in everything around him, and his blushes perhaps. What with nobody much else on the scene and time running against her she might as well get it over and done with – she agreed with her mother on that. Her parents’ marriage had been sturdy and strong like a cast iron stove but there hadn’t been much love or finesse. Mags and Morgan might be lucky, and it was all down to luck in the end, wasn’t it? Look at all those arranged marriages in Persia or wherever, the success rate was round about the same.