by Jenny Diski
She sat at the table, facing the station in silence for a little while, and then lit a long, dark cigarette.
“Are you watching or avoiding walking over it?” she asked, releasing smoke as she spoke and moving her head slightly to indicate the underground.
“Both, I suppose.”
“It will ruin your day if you watch the stretcher come out.”
“It’s not much of a day, anyway. And a worse one for him or her down there. Or better.”
She shrugged lightly.
“Yes. Or no. Her. I understand it was a woman.”
There was a quality of utter detachment about her, as though she looked out on the world and saw, but was untouched by it. Everything—her clothes, make-up, the way she sat poised and posed in her chair—looked deliberate and yet it was all so well done that nothing seemed artificial. I hadn’t seen her eyes under the sunglasses, but I knew they would be steady whether they looked at me across the table or at the scene along the road. Now she lifted the glasses away from her face and looked me over, running her eyes up and down my body in a slow sweep. Her cool, emerald appraisal was electrifying; the air filled with the static of possibilities.
“Does it excite you, the death down there?”
I took one of her mysterious cigarettes and leaned forward to catch the light she offered. I’m a believer in balance, a serious work-out requires nicotine as ballast.
“I’m thrilled. It astonishes me. I’m bowled over with admiration.” Her brow creased in a question. “At the certainty that’s been acted on,” I explained. “I like a person who knows what they want and leaves no room for indecision or an accident of salvation.”
“But what if it were a whim?” she queried. Her deep eyes were amused beneath their steady gaze. “A momentary thing? Irretrievable once acted on?”
I shook my head briskly.
“That’s a thought the living use to comfort themselves. He didn’t really mean it. So that the next time we stand on a station platform we don’t have to choose between getting on the train or throwing ourselves under it. We wouldn’t mean it, we tell ourselves, we’d be sorry afterwards. What afterwards? The only thing to be sure of is that we wouldn’t be sorry afterwards. In any case, what makes a momentary whim less true than the thought we’ve continued to have for twenty years because we haven’t bothered to change it?”
She sat back in her chair, resting the coffee cup lightly on her silk shirt.
“The only thing that’s true now is the physical end of a life,” she said quietly.
I heard my voice, clipped, angry. “Is anything more important in a life?”
“No,” she agreed calmly. “But you are a romantic. You will be angry at being told so, but it’s true. The fact is that to kill yourself in such a way is childish and aggressive. And stupid, for the corpse down there cannot reap the benefits. Look at the disruption that has been caused. Trains are held up all along the line, people are made late for appointments. Perhaps some of them are important. The traffic is slowed down and passers-by going about their everyday business are drawn in, they cannot avoid being aware of what has happened beneath their feet. Now they feel foolish and petty to be buying a bunch of flowers and a quarter pound of cheese. So much power, so much effect.”
But there was no real anger in her voice. It remained distant and melodic. Even a little pedagogical. She continued.
“It makes people think thoughts they do not have to have. That person was living a few moments ago, they think, I might have passed her on my way to the grocer. Was alive, is dead. Only moments in between. As I am alive now, this moment. What is to become of me? What right has someone ending their own life to impose such thoughts on others who may not choose to have them?”
This conversation pleased me. I liked her matter-of-fact, practical assessment of the anonymous death. There was a hardness in her voice that made me listen. And it was a relief to hear those things said. She echoed the thoughts I hadn’t allowed myself to have, describing exactly my resistance to walking back over the scene.
I think about death a lot, in a general sort of way. I have a tendency to see it as heroic, a feat. I know we can’t help dying, but it’s such a serious and solitary thing. Death seems to me to ennoble the most frivolous and incompetent of lives. And voluntary death awes me with its absolute refusal to tolerate the intolerable. I admire the cold calculation, the rejection of a life of fear and panic in favour of decision.
But as I had walked past the underground station on my way to the gym, what I had actually thought was: “I can’t stand this.”
I couldn’t bear the idea of that person’s misery as she walked along the street, moments before me, and the terror she felt standing on the edge of the platform waiting for the incoming train. I hated her for making her pain and her death so evident and imposing it on me. It angered and frightened me that she had advertised her safely anonymous unhappiness, and required me to imagine that appalling death beneath my feet.
The truth was I’d had precisely the same thoughts that underlay the conversation I had contemptuously dismissed between the women standing by the gym window, but wouldn’t permit myself to say aloud. I couldn’t bring myself to admit the common thoughts, banal, true, automatic, human, inevitable, that were being spoken carefully so that the unease could be dispersed by the sound of the words. I prefer to let those thoughts, pointless as I know they are, roll around in the silence between world-weary shrugs. I want them to stay hanging in the air, recognised by their absence. I am, I must admit, ashamed to be on the side of the living.
The woman sitting opposite me, with her brisk tones and coolly interested eyes, voiced my real thoughts and made them seem acceptable. She spoke knowingly, in the manner of a distant observer, of the uncomfortable effects of death on our doorstep. And always her eyes held me in their gaze, faintly humorous, as if commenting, though not unkindly, on my self-deceit.
I heard myself say, “I’m trying to write something. But I can’t. I just can’t do it.”
And held my breath, horrified to hear the words out there in the world, but certain, now that they were said, that she could give me the right answer. I hadn’t thought of that harsh, reassuring voice of my imagination belonging to a woman; it hadn’t occurred to me, but it didn’t seem to make much difference now that I saw it was.
She stubbed out her cigarette with a sudden urgency, as if she had been waiting for a signal and now, having received it, could get on. Putting her glasses back, she smiled, but so slightly it was hardly there.
“Do you have to be somewhere?”
With you, I thought.
“No, not really.”
“Then why don’t we go back to my flat and have a drink? I live just around the corner. It’s too depressing sitting here. Why don’t we turn our back on this melodrama? Refuse to allow it any power.”
She gathered her black leather bag from the table and stood, inviting me to join her.
“My name is Diane.”
We crossed the road at the traffic lights in front of the café and she led me to a street directly opposite the station. If we had turned to look in the other direction we would still have been able to see the entrance to the underground. But neither of us did.
The flat was as well-manicured as her fingernails. She made me a drink.
“So you find death exciting?” she said, handing me a large scotch.
“I suppose so.”
“And does going home with a strange woman excite you, too?”
“Yes, that also excites me.”
She smiled.
“Death has a way of sharpening our desires. It makes us want to eat good food, or listen to a sublime piece of music. Or make love. To lie in someone’s arms and feel warm flesh respond to our touch. Death is very sensual, don’t you think? The dead have a secret we can’t grasp. The secrecy of sex is as near as the living can ever get to it.”
Did I say she was beautiful? Apart from all those other things, she was
beautiful. Her face was a carved frame for the long, green eyes that looked and looked. Her body was beginning to show its age, loosened a little, but full, ripe and round. I haven’t ever rejected the idea of women as lovers, but the event had never occurred.
She undressed me slowly, looking carefully at my body and then checking back with my face. Whatever she saw in it seemed to give her permission not to hurry. When she had finished her slow examination she took off her own clothes, just as leisurely, giving me as much time for taking her in as she had given herself. Then she took me in her arms with as much passion as Dan would show, but it was different. Not his fast, harsh, funny fuck, but a long, slow pleasuring, a drawing out of desire. It was a lesson in timelessness. By the time she led me to the bed she had woven a veil around us with her intricate caresses that seemed to exclude the light. She made the world contract to a capsule containing only the two of us on the white expanse of her bed. And I knew that was what we were there for: to create that veil that confused time and light.
All the while, the green eyes watched with the same humour and detachment I’d seen at the café. But I didn’t mind. It exhilarated me that she was in control, building my excitement with careful touches and stroking, checking my response as she increased or decreased the pressure of her elegant fingers and beautiful mouth. Then she took my hand and guided me towards her pleasure. And all of it was more than sensual delight, it was also a promise that she could respond to my cri. That she could give me the energy and certainty I couldn’t find for myself. Everything she did corresponded to that person in my head who seemed too weary now to help.
I lay naked in her arms, waiting. There was no urgency. I drifted in and out of sleep, listening to the buzz of traffic in the distance, content with the memory of the tone of her voice and the touch of her hands. I knew nothing about her beyond her name and the style in which she lived. But that, along with her capacity to guide me through desire, was enough information, and I had no real curiosity then about her past. Now that I was sated, it was my solved future that interested me. She would, I knew, encourage me and insist I work, understand my necessity, wrap my insecurities in a blanket of her strength. At that moment I thought I had everything. Found, at last, the solution to the panic that threatened to swamp me. I remember the quality of that moment, even now. It was, I think, the first and only time I really felt that everything was going to be all right.
“So you write?”
Her voice was languid and deep, the scent of sex seeped into her low murmur.
“What do you write?”
I lay pillowed in the angle between her arm and breast, smelling the sharp mix of expensive perfume and satisfied desire.
“Stories, articles,” I told her, whispering. “I think soon a novel.”
I held my breath at the power of the moment, those seconds before one’s life comes right.
“You must show them to me,” she said, and stroked my hair gently. “I’m sure they must be very good.”
And the moment was gone.
I sat up and looked about the room. The afternoon sun poured in through the long windows, washing the beige tones of the furnishings with a warm pink. But I was cold. I wondered for a second if they had brought the stretcher up.
“You met me two hours ago, you can’t possibly know whether I can write or not.”
I was as confused by my chilly reply as I suppose she was. She sat up beside me and rubbed the side of her face against my hair.
“Well, then, you must show me, so I can judge. I’d like to see the story you’re working on at the moment. The one you’re having trouble with. We’ll have dinner tonight and you can bring it.”
I swung my legs out of the bed and stood up.
“I don’t show unfinished work. Unfinished work is nothing.”
“Then perhaps something you’ve completed. Bring that so I can see what you do.”
She lay back in bed and I began to dress. Everything, suddenly, had slipped from my grasp and I watched as reality wrenched at my fantasy of reassurance and tore it to shreds.
“I don’t want to talk about my work,” I heard myself say. “It’s not something anyone else can be involved in. You have to do it alone, or it’s not yours.”
And this, also, was something I knew bone-deep, but had forgotten in the surprise of death and sex and comfort. There is no alternative to the panic and the fear, because it is the panic and fear—and the isolation—that are the writing. The desperation created the necessity that made me write. I fed on it.
I was only ever half a romantic, the rest of me, the part that keeps on going, knows how things are and would not swap the final satisfaction of a finished piece for the easy comfort of that voice in my head. I had forgotten that voices in the real world have bodies and intentions of their own—they have flats and furnishings and they make dinner, and need.
I looked at her lying on the bed. She looked to me tired, terribly weary, worn, but her green eyes shone bright and hard still.
“All right.” She watched me tie the laces on my shoes. “Dinner without your work. We must get to know each other better. When you’re ready I may be able to help you. I have contacts. I can help in various ways. But tonight, just dinner.”
She didn’t want to be alone, I realised, although there was nothing of that in the tone of her voice which remained cool and steady. And not just tonight. I wondered, at last, about her life.
“Do you live here alone?”
“Yes. I do now. There was someone living here with me, but she’s gone.”
Her voice was so vague it was impossible to place this information in time. She could have been talking of decades or moments. I felt as if one of us was no longer in the room.
“I must go,” I said, turning to the door. “I’ve got to get back to work. I don’t know about tonight. It depends on how the work goes. Shall I ring you later on?”
She reached for a cigarette. The phone rang as she drew on the flame from her lighter, but she made no attempt to answer it.
“Yes, call me later,” she said airily, and lay back on the bed watching the smoke spiral through the light beams. The phone continued to make its mechanical bird call.
“Your phone . . .”
“I’m not going to answer it.”
“But it might be imp—”
“I know what it’s about.”
She got out of bed, slipped on a faded silk kimono and moved away from the phone to stand and look out of the window. There was nothing to see except the houses across the road. The phone went on ringing.
“It sounds important.”
She inhaled deeply on her cigarette and turned her head slightly in the direction we had walked. From this angle, the station was out of view.
“They will have found this address on Helen. She must have had a letter or something in her jacket, because she didn’t take her bag with her.”
She turned and glanced at the chair by the door where a tan shoulder bag lay open.
“I suppose they’re calling to find out if a relative lives here. They’ll be wanting to inform her next of kin.”
She spoke more to herself than me, her cool unchanging voice almost inaudible beneath the insistent squeal of the telephone.
“Are you sure you won’t come to dinner this evening?”
She looked at me questioningly, her face an impassive sculpture of angles and planes.
“You lived here with Helen?”
The room for all its elegance was a desert, suddenly, an empty cold place being worn away by time.
“Helen lived here for two years. She left this afternoon. She wasn’t a happy girl. I tried to look after her, she needed to be taken care of. But some people just won’t be helped.”
The telephone stopped ringing as she spoke. We both stared at it for a moment. The silence was shattering.
“I must go,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t stay.”
She smiled.
“We must meet again
soon. I would very much like to read your work.”
But I was already closing the door behind me.
My Brother Stanley
I knew my brother Stanley only as an oil painting and some photographs. He hung on the wall of the living room, above the sideboard. I thought of it as Stanley’s wall. I can’t remember if the other walls had anything hanging on them or not. Oh—that’s not true; it’s much harder to cheat memory than some would have us think. There was, opposite Stanley, a framed print of that greenish oriental lady in a cheongsam, looking cheap and inviting: the one that hung in many an otherwise art-free home in the fifties. These days, I keep my walls white and blank. Nothing hangs on them, perhaps as an anti-mnemonic of the walls of my childhood.
On the gloomy mahogany sideboard which squatted massively beneath Stanley’s portrait was a cut-glass bowl which sometimes had fruit in it. It was the sort of thing people were given as a wedding present, but I thought of it as Stanley’s bowl. It had an air of importance and fruit—spotted bananas, pallid apples, we were not big on fruit in my family—never looked quite right in that bowl. It seemed to me more like a trophy, or a memorial object, only masquerading as a useful container.
The oil painting was just a head-and-shoulders portrait of my brother Stanley, his shoulders fading into a neutral greenish background. Stanley looked down from his wall, disembodied. Somehow, I felt the cut-glass fruit bowl was there to make up for the absent rest of him. I don’t suppose it was a good painting; in fact, I’m sure it wasn’t: there was too great a striving for documentary realism in it, I think, though I’m not much more of an art critic now than I was then. But that was the point, the realism, that was why it was painted; and, in any case, how could it have been other than dutifully realistic when the painter lacked a sitter, who might fidget and chatter his personality into the picture? No, like the bowl, the painting was an icon, and I suppose it was intended to be. Stanley looked down on us, from his ornate gilt frame, present and absent, and the look in his eyes never changed.