by Alice Jolly
‘Geneva?’ I thought of small dogs, pen-knives, money laundering.
He shrugged, put some papers down on the top of a case, and began to push it shut. ‘Actually, I think it might be quite interesting. But the problem is, they won’t let you go to Zagreb.’
‘Oh. OK. Yes, I see.’
The moment had arrived when I needed to stop all this. I had a reason to do it now. Rob hadn’t helped me when he should have done. He’d believed in my mother instead of me. I had a perfect right to say, Actually, you can go to Zagreb, or Geneva, or wherever, but I’m not going with you. But I couldn’t summon up the courage to hurt him. I couldn’t bear to see him brought down. I wanted to make him into the person he’d been before. I’d lost two men I loved and I couldn’t lose a third. For better or worse, he was all that was left.
And then the phone rang and it was someone from Geneva. They’d heard that Rob was moving there and they wanted to know if he’d like to take over the lease of their flat. It was a one-bedroom flat in a 1950s’ building with a view over the lake, not far from the centre, light and spacious, in good repair. He’d get it painted for us when he moved out. Rob said, ‘Sounds quite good, what do you think?’
Buy a flatpack life, read the instructions and fix it together with an Allen key. I should be able to manage that, I thought. I’ve done it often enough before. Geneva sounded as good a place as any for a posthumous life. So Rob booked me a flight and he organized for our boxes to be sent there. Shake up the world and pick out a city. Hope that when you arrive you won’t find yourself there.
I woke to hear a voice with a long American drawl. Harvey. I pulled myself further down under the sheets. Rob’s voice in the kitchen was muffled. I heard the clink of china. Then that brash voice again. ‘You know, we’re moving on as well. Going back to Massachusetts. We’d have gone in two years anyway, but this recent upset … No, no, thanks. Sugar but no milk.’
Then I heard – Jack Flame. I sat up in bed.
‘Oh, I’m sorry. Didn’t you know?’ A cough, a shuffle, the clatter of a cup. ‘At first they thought he’d just committed suicide, but now they think he was killed. Murdered. Someone else had been in the flat. Seems he had information which somebody wanted and they were even prepared to kill for it.’
I was out of bed, listening at the door, but Harvey had moved back towards the kitchen. I leant my head against the frame of the door. It was just as Jack said: There’s nothing as mysterious as someone with nothing to hide. People believe in incredible stories when the real ones are too hard to accept. Even in death Jack was distrusted and misunderstood. Harvey’s voice sounded again, as he emerged into the hall. I could see his broad back in its well-cut suit. ‘Of course, you know that wasn’t his real name? No one ever thought it was.’
Rob and Harvey were standing with their backs still turned. ‘Now you must give me your address in Geneva. Maya won’t forgive me if I don’t get that address.’
Rob went into the sitting room, searching for a pencil.
‘Oh, and I nearly forgot,’ Harvey said. ‘Eva left this coat last time she was around at our place.’ I saw the coat as he lifted it from the bag. The top of it was stiff as though a person might still be inside it. I pulled my head back from the door. I hadn’t left that coat at Maya’s flat. I’d left it on a chair near where Jack lay. Why did Harvey have it now?
My mind was running towards a precipice. I watched it, but there was no way I could stop it. I flung myself back into bed and lay with my arms wrapped around my head, my face pushed into a pillow. I was trying not to think about anything at all, but words pushed through to the front of my mind. All the time I had thought that Jack was the one living on borrowed time – but really it was me. I should have died twenty-five years ago. My life had ended then.
In the kitchen, rubbish bags bulged beside the bin. The nails were still in the walls where our few pictures had hung. Rob and I were ready to go, but we still had an hour to wait. My flight to Geneva was earlier than Rob’s plane to Zagreb and so he’d arranged separate taxis.
The sitting-room curtains, which Rob had taken down when he arrived, had been put back up. The bottoms of them hung six inches above the windowsill. A stain, no different from all the other stains, marked the carpet near the armchair where Rob had spilt a glass of red wine. Fluff lurked on the carpet behind the chairs. On the windowsill, circular stains marked where my pot plants had stood.
Mr Balashov came down and said that he wanted to show me something before I left. I trailed up the stairs after him. He’d been arranging things, tidying up. A little of the junk had gone and he had dusted and cleaned. Mrs Balashova’s bottles of pills were ranged neatly on the table. The blanket which had covered her chair had been pulled straight. On a low table near the television, a range of objects were laid out as though exhibited in a museum. Her knitting was there, carefully wrapped up so that the stitches wouldn’t slide from the needles, along with rings and her watch. A magnifying glass lay next to a pair of diamanté earrings. Different coloured wools were twined around folded scraps of cardboard.
Mr Balashov gave me two tiny dolls, a man and a woman, stitched together. I realised from the miniature veil which the female doll wore that they must be getting married. I kissed him goodbye, suddenly wanting to cling to him. Then I wrapped the dolls in my handkerchief and put them in my bag – the one souvenir of Moscow I’d always keep.
I went back downstairs and walked through the four rooms of the flat saying goodbye to each of them. The table where Rob and I had eaten so many suppers was wiped clean and pushed against the wall. The corner of a note remained stuck on the door of the fridge under a slanting strip of Sellotape. In the bathroom, steam still hissed from that defective tap and the mirror was still propped on the sink at that same drunken angle. The doors to the balcony were shut and the junk which had always lived there was back in its place. In a panic I searched for us, for Rob and me. Our feelings, our words, must be somewhere, encrypted into the walls or hidden behind the doors. But no, this was just a flat – tables, windows, doors, a bed.
We walked through the flat again and again. Both of us longed to be gone and we longed to stay. We had had all the conversations we could possibly have. Yes, I did have my passport. Yes, I knew the address in Geneva where I needed to pick up the keys. Yes, it would probably take some time to get the phone in Geneva put into my name but, of course, we’d keep in touch. Yes, I had the address of the office in Zagreb.
We stood near the sitting-room window, staring down into the courtyard. ‘You know,’ Rob said, ‘I’m going to have to phone your mother. I left things unclear. Practical things …’
‘Like what?’ I was running my finger around the circular stains on the windowsill.
‘Well, you know, she’s probably still organizing things.’ I looked up and saw him searching for words. For a moment, I imagined my mother in her sewing room, pins held in her pursed lips. She was hurriedly sewing seed pearls on to a cream satin dress. This time the curve of the neck would be absolutely even, this time she would get it right.
‘Perhaps I should just say we’re going to delay?’ Rob said. ‘Because, after all, it’ll be hard to sort things out while I’m away.’
‘Yes, why don’t you do that? That’s a good idea.’
I thought back to that evening nearly a year ago when he’d asked me to marry him. And I’d sat at the kitchen table turning that coin in my hand. Heads, tails, heads, tails. Surely something must have changed since then? But it hadn’t done.
Down below, I saw the taxi man waiting for me under the arch. ‘I must go.’ We stood staring at each other. Surely all this must come to some conclusion? But no. We kissed each other with an awkward shuffle of cheeks, and arms and knees. And, like people in an unconvincing play, we said, See you soon, I’ll miss you, not long to wait. And Rob stood watching me go down the stairs, and inside I was weeping for him, and for us, and for the wretched pointlessness of it all. But all I could do was turn back to hi
m, summon a smile, raise my hand, wave.
12/20 rue de Lausanne, Geneva
December 1991
So this is grief. It rips through me again and again, shaking everything loose. From one day to the next I can make no prediction of what it might do. Sometimes I weep until I’m dry of tears. On other days I’m fired with a fragile energy. His death was not all sadness, there was beauty in it as well.
I telephone a former colleague who now works for the British Council in London. He says, ‘Of course, for someone with your qualifications there are always jobs available.’ He knows of possible openings in Lima, Sucre, La Paz. I tell him that I’m most interested in La Paz. That’s somewhere I haven’t been before. He asks me to fax an updated CV and ring back in a week. I go to the travel agent to look at the price of tickets, but it’s closed so I sit on the doorstep in the rain, and wail for an hour. I had no idea that grief would be so capricious and impure.
My body feels small and empty. Jack is like some internal organ – heart, kidney, or liver – which has been ripped out of me. I lie in bed cuddling a hot-water bottle just for something to hold. The future pursues me like a persistent man trying to recover a debt. I need to decide something. For three days I spend every hour redoing my CV. The process feels like wading through treacle. I scream at the concierge when she presses me about some service-charge bill which hasn’t been paid. To me, it feels as though I’m shot through with bullet-holes, so why doesn’t this woman see? Why is she bothering me about a bill? I want to wear mourning so that people will know that they need to treat me differently.
But then, by the next morning, that strange energy has returned and I think, Jack died, so what? Everybody dies some time. What does it really matter? There are things I must sort out, decisions to be made. I can’t just keep wandering around this flat waiting for each day to turn itself from the present into the past. I plug the phone back in, and look through a pile of post which lies on the sofa.
I find three letters from Rob and open the one with the most recent postmark. It turns out that he’s going to be back in less than a week. The letter doesn’t say much more than that, but there’s something comforting in his bold, even writing. But I’m going to La Paz. I mustn’t allow myself to be drawn back into his world. I open up the other two letters. You’ll never guess what, one of them says, but the man in the flat next door has got a smelly, slobbering Dobermann which sits on our doorstep. Home from home? I shove the letter back into its envelope. I’ve got a lot of things to organize. I look at flight prices, and find that once I’ve bought my plane ticket I’ll have only fifty dollars left. I consider getting in touch with Uncle Guy because he’s the only person I know who’d write me a large cheque with no questions asked. But I can’t ask him for money so that I can leave his son.
I feel my nerve failing, but I convince myself that this plan will work out somehow. Jack comes to seem like a powerful force inside me. When I’m frightened, I summon him up and he gives me the strength to go on. I know now that I need to wring every last bit of life out of each day. I need to live because he can’t. I’d never have thought it possible to have such an intense relationship with someone who is dead. I’m going to make something out of my life for him and for me. I’m going to turn what happened to us into something more than a series of random events. We suffer losses in order that we may know the full value of what’s left behind. So simple, but I never saw it before.
In two days Rob will come back. I telephoned about the La Paz job. The man at the British Council said that, if he recommends me for the job, then there should be no problem, but he won’t know anything more for another week. I don’t want to be here when Rob arrives, but where else can I go? I have keys for Uncle Guy’s flats in both London and Paris but, if I spend money getting to either of those places, then I won’t have enough for the flight to La Paz.
And still Jack’s boxes are in the flat. I need to get rid of them before Rob gets back. Jack said he wanted them burnt. There’s an attractive drama to that idea but the reality is more complicated. This flat has no fireplace and, in this country, if I burn boxes in the gardens, I’ll probably be sentenced to five years in prison. I’ll have to move the boxes down into the lobby, then hire a car and drive them to somewhere outside Geneva.
I feel Jack inside me and I know that together we’re going to do this. I start to move the boxes, sliding them along the floor and edging them into the lift. I move two downstairs and then go back for more. A box is shunted out of the lift, and pushed to the side of the lobby. I cut my hand on a staple and suck at it to stop the blood. As I’m doing that, an old man comes in through the front door. I can’t see him properly but, in the pneumatic swish of the opening door, I have the impression that I heard my name. I look towards him but my ears have tricked me. I bend down again to push at a box. When I look up, the man has moved towards me. He speaks to me and I answer in irritation. How does he know my name? His hand moves up and touches the scarf he wears around his neck.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I did try to telephone.’
I turn away and I’m about to head up the stairs. Then I turn back. This isn’t right, it isn’t right at all. I don’t know who this man is. His head is slightly turned to one side but he watches me intently. I can’t talk to him now. I’m busy with these boxes, I’ve got too many things to do.
‘I should have written perhaps.’
This scene isn’t meant to take place in the half-lit lobby of a block of flats. I’ve always known how it will happen. I meet him at a railway station where he’s getting off a train. The steam from the train clears on the platform and I see him there, and I fling myself into his arms. That is what happens.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’ve shocked you.’
He should be wearing a grey turtleneck sweater with a cable twist down the front. Instead he’s wearing a white shirt and a charcoal-grey suit from twenty years ago. He has white hair and skin burnt brown, his beard is knotted and he walks with a stick. He probably smells of mothballs or hair oil. I do not know him, he shouldn’t be here. If this is what it means to be cured, then isn’t it better to be ill?
But the normal patterns of behaviour surface. ‘You had better come upstairs.’ That’s what I say, but I don’t want him in my flat, or anywhere near me. I want the afternoon to go on just as it was. I need to finish moving these boxes, hire a car, drive out of Geneva. It’ll probably be difficult for this old man to get up the stairs, but I can’t have him standing beside me in the lift. I’ve always worried that if this person turned up then he might look like Jack. But he doesn’t at all. Not one bit. I place my feet carefully on each step and don’t look back. The old man walks behind me and I hear his breath, and the rubber-ended sound of his stick. The door to the flat is half-blocked by Jack’s boxes. I sigh as I push one out of the way.
‘Would you rather I went away?’
Something in the generosity of his question breaks through my outrage. ‘No, no. I’m sorry. Of course not.’
He follows me into the flat. ‘Perhaps you’d like some tea?’ I walk through to the kitchen.
‘You sit down,’ he says. ‘I’ll make the tea.’ I take off my coat and hang it on the back of a chair. The old man hooks his stick on the door handle and sets about making tea. He seems undaunted by the task, despite the half-unpacked boxes heaped on every surface. He washes up cups, lights the gas with a match, fills the kettle. He rummages through a half-unpacked box and finds the teapot and a mat. In a trance, I stand and watch him. I keep thinking of things I should say, or feel, but all maps, all patterns, have disintegrated. I see the old man bend towards the stove and, like a shadow inside him, I see my father bending down towards the fireplace in the sitting room at Marsh End House.
I clear aside a few of the glasses which are lined up on the table. I move them carefully but that isn’t what I want to do. I want to sweep them all on to the floor and see them smash. I pick one up and move it from hand to hand. The old man l
ifts boxes from the table, wipes the surface with a cloth, warms the pot, pours the milk into the cups, improvises a tea cosy out of tea towels, wrapping the teapot snugly between them.
Then he sits down, with the teapot next to him, as though this is something he always does. He wants me to sit down but I won’t. As always, the grand scene is refusing to take place. I stand by the table, moving the glass from hand to hand. I imagine it smashing on to the kitchen floor, then all of the others following it in a shower of crystal. The old man starts to talk and his voice is all wrong. I remember it as fluid, hasty, unpredictable. Now it’s precise and careful, his phrases measured, as though English is a language he has learnt with care. His words are too quiet, so that I find myself leaning closer to him in order to hear. He says he has come on behalf of my mother. She wrote him a letter.
I tell him that I also wrote a letter. He got a letter from Rob, he says. No, I wrote. I wrote. But he didn’t get that letter. He’s very grateful to me for having written and, of course, he would have replied. When did I send the letter? Ah yes, well he moved house around that time. Where he used to live, right on the Pacific coast, there are often violent storms. My letter would have arrived at around the time when his house was flattened for the second time. Perhaps it was lost, or delivered to what remained of that house. The postal service is not always reliable.
The old man’s careful voice continues. Before he left England he had been ill, he had been in a violent state of mind, perhaps I hadn’t been told that? The tone of his voice angers me. What is this old man talking about? He doesn’t know anything about this. How dare he presume to tell me what happened?
‘I know,’ I say. ‘Before you left England – I know what happened.’
He unwraps the teapot. ‘Ah yes.’