by Ali Smith
He reads it over.
He despises himself instantly for using the past tense meant. What she meant to me.
He changes it to the word means.
He despises himself for all the your mothers.
He despises himself most of all for reducing Paddy to an anecdote.
There isn’t anything about it he doesn’t despise.
He deletes it.
Gone.
He reads their email again.
He thinks about photos, lost in a cloud.
What’s that poem about clouds that Paddy likes? Liked. It rhymes the word cenotaph with the word laugh.
He writes in the message space:
Dear Dermot and Patrick,
I’d like very much, if I may, to read in honour of Paddy at her memorial service that poem she always liked about the cloud. The whole poem might be too long but I could just read, say, a couple of its verses. Let me know. Thank you.
He adds, to humour himself, and to make his imaginary daughter laugh,
vbw,
Richard.
The last postcard he’d sent Paddy had been of clouds. He’d sent it from an exhibition at the Royal Academy in the summer. He’d gone to this because it was by an artist Paddy liked; Paddy had a book of hers full of people’s lost photos, which this artist had found in fleamarkets or junkshops. The photos were sometimes really good, sometimes just run-of-the-mill, sometimes excruciatingly bad or blurred or taken at terrible angles, of people, places, cars, animals, trees, streets, concrete buildings, often of things you couldn’t have imagined anyone ever thinking merited a photograph.
The artist had republished them in their own book paying them the kind of artistic attention that important photographs merit. This had made something almost magical happen to them. Whatever they’d meant to the people in them or the people who took them had disappeared. Freed from their old personal meanings, it was not just that they could be seen for themselves, but like they’d become ways to let someone looking at them see how the world really appears.
A woman in winter clothes collapsing in hilarity against a wall in the snow. A surly-looking man next to a fence on which a thick tree branch has broken, next to a wind-damaged tree with a ladder balanced against it. A woman with a parrot perched on her hand in a suburban back garden, two other women watching, one at a table, one in the window of the house behind. A dog standing in an arc of hosewater lit by sunlight. A large man and a small child both smiling at the camera, in a red pedalboat on a boating pond. A red butterfly open-winged resting in snow.
When he had seen this artist’s name on the posters all round town – there were for some reason simultaneous exhibitions by her in major galleries all across London this summer – he’d decided he’d go to one, to surprise Paddy by knowing to do it without being told to.
He showed the ticket person his ticket (expensive).
He pushed the swing door open.
The gallery room he went into smelled brand new and was largely hung with pictures of clouds. They’d been done in white chalk on black slate.
But the thing that stopped him in his tracks in this room was that one whole wall, also chalk and slate, was a mountain picture so huge that the wall became mountain and the mountain became a kind of wall. There was an avalanche coming down the mountain picture towards anyone looking at it, an avalanche that had been stilled for just that moment so that whoever saw it had time to comprehend it.
Above the mountain peaks the sky was a black so dark it was like a new definition of blackness.
As he stood there, what he was looking at stopped being chalk on slate, stopped being a picture of mountain. It became something terrible, seen.
Fuck me, he said.
A young woman was standing next to him.
Fuck me too, she said.
Where can we run to? he said.
They’d both exchanged looks, laughed scared laughter, shaken their heads at each other.
But then he’d stepped back from the mountainscape and looked round that room again at the other things in it, and the pictures of clouds on the walls, done in the same materials as the mountain, had made something else happen, something he didn’t realize till later, till he’d left the room, come out of the gallery and on to the street.
They’d made space to breathe possible, up against something breathtaking. After them, the real clouds above London looked different, like they were something you could read as breathing space. This made something happen too to the buildings below them, the traffic, the ways in which the roads intersected, the ways in which people were passing each other in the street, all of it part of a structure that didn’t know it was a structure, but was one all the same.
He’d sat on the steps at the back entrance to the gallery and turned over a postcard of the mountain. Tacita Dean The Montafon Letter, 2017 Chalk on blackboard, 366 x 732cm. He held it in his hand – like you could ever hold the size of that image in your hand! – and drew a ring around the measurement figures with his pen so Paddy’d get some idea. He addressed it to Paddy’s house. Everything that a mountain can mean, he wrote above the artist’s name. Having a lovely time. Wish you were here.
Then he’d changed his mind.
He tucked the mountain postcard into his back pocket.
He addressed instead the longest largest postcard he’d bought, the one of three connected but separate pictures of an increasing cloud mass. On this card the pictures worked together like moving film frames and at the same time like stills, like windows. She’d like this one. Tacita Dean Bless our Europe (Triptych), 2018 Spray chalk, gouache and charcoal pencil on slates 122 x 151.5cm; 122 x 160.5cm; 122 x 151.5cm. Dear Paddy. A message from the clouds. Having a lovely time. Wish you were here.
He put two first-class stamps on so as not to underpay and jogged round to the post office off Piccadilly so it’d catch the last post and be there tomorrow.
He sits at the table now in his back room.
September.
Paddy is rubble and ash.
He looks at the message he just sent. It still says story of in the subject box.
(My favourite of all the postcards is this one, Paddy’d said to him one day a couple of years ago holding up an image of a bridge in Rome.
Oh, that one, he said. Yes. I remember.
She read out what he’d written on the back.
Dear Paddy, my father is in tears because the old man who usually plays the saxophone on this bridge, with the little home-made canopy over his head fixed to his shoulders like an extra instrument in a one-man-band kit, like shade has to be part of the orchestra, one of the instruments, in a hot country, has disappeared this year, canopy and all, and a much younger different man is playing funky guitar through an amp in his place instead. Or some days nobody there playing anything at all. My father is a sentimental old fool. But you know this already. Every day he makes me come back and check this bridge to see if the saxophone man is back. Apart from that having a lovely time. Wish you were here.
I keep them all, you know, she’d said. I sometimes sit and read them, one after the other. Or I shuffle them and deal one. Like a tarot card message for the day.)
Story of. Richard wonders what will happen now to all those postcards from their imaginary child.
Recycling bin.
He shrugs.
As he thinks it, an email appears in his inbox.
Subject: Re: our mother’s memorial service
Dear Richard
very sorry but its close family only who will be speaking at the memorial. Will pass on the suggestion about the poem thank you but it is already a v busy programme. It is shaping up to be a v special day. Look fwd see you Friday, vbw Dermot and Patrick Heal.
He sits back in his chair.
Don’t go, the imaginary daughter says.
How can we not? he says.
We don’t need to, she says.
I can’t not. I have to honour her, he says.
So do some
thing that’ll really honour her, she says.
On a Saturday evening in October, a couple of days before he gets on a train north thinking naively that getting on a train to somewhere else means he’ll be able to escape himself or survive himself, Richard finally opens the latest Terp email.
These are the new draft scenes.
He’s supposed to have read and annotated them by yesterday for discussion at Monday’s meeting.
There are ten. He opens the first. It’s set in a cable car.
EXT. CABLE CARS IN SNOWY MOUNTAINS. AFTERNOON
The cable cars have all come to a halt. The cable car containing Katherine and Rainer sways a little on its cable. A crow caws in the trees.
INT. RAINER AND KATHERINE’S CABLE CAR IN SNOWY MOUNTAINS. CONTINUOUS. AFTERNOON
Rainer regards Katherine from the opposite wooden bench.
RAINER
I did not think to find such a love in Switzerland. Who knew this country would give me such a gift? I have written a poem for you. Tonight I will recite it to you.
Katherine smiles. She closes her eyes. She opens them again.
RAINER
I would like to place a rose petal on each of your eyelids. I would like you to wake to their coolness, and the roses to wake equally to your eyes that send their warmth into nature even when they are closed and you are asleep. I am a lover of roses too you know. I would like roses to enter you and you to enter roses. Now. Close your eyes.
Katherine considers him for a moment with her eyes. Then she obediently closes her eyes.
EXT. CABLE CARS IN SNOWY MOUNTAINS. CONTINUOUS. AFTERNOON
INT. JOHN’S CABLE CAR.
CONTINUOUS. AFTERNOON
John, coming down from Montana, notices Katherine and Rainer in the static cable car across from his own. At first he is pleased. They must be coming up to see him. He knocks on the glass of his cable car to try to attract their attention.
JOHN
Tig! Tig darling!
EXT. JOHN’S CABLE CAR. CONTINUOUS. AFTERNOON
John can be seen behind the glass shouting hello, but not being heard. The sound of wind, crows cawing. He bangs his hand silently on the glass.
A moment later John sees something that he’d rather not see.
He bangs both his hands, and then his whole body, against the glass of the cable car.
EXT. CABLE CARS. CONTINUOUS. AFTERNOON
One cable car in the sequence of hanging cars is swaying about quite violently.
INT. RAINER AND KATHERINE’S CABLE CAR.
CONTINUOUS. AFTERNOON
Katherine and Rainer, who has his hand inside Katherine’s dress inside her coat, surface from their kiss. Katherine notices first, then Rainer, the violently swaying cable car across from theirs with the man in it battering the glass in silence.
RAINER
It doesn’t look safe. It looks like it might – Good God. Katherine. I think that’s your husb – isn’t that your –?
EXT. RAINER AND KATHERINE’S CABLE CAR.
CONTINUOUS. AFTERNOON
Katherine presses herself hard against the glass, with Rainer out of focus behind her. Katherine’s face is terrified.
Oh for Christ sake.
He puts his hands over his eyes. He groans out loud. He shuts his laptop lid.
He reaches the novel down from the pile of books on the shelf above the TV. April, by Bella Powell. He opens it somewhere in the middle.
for it was the gong sounding dinner time again, again, hurry down! hurry down! calling the guests to dress for dinner, dress for the pristine whiteness of the tablecloths, hurry down to the Salle à Manger of the Grand Hotel Château Bellevue with its floor tiles so clean that the chair legs and table legs reflected down into them suggesting there perhaps existed another world on the underside of this world, another dining room, one balanced with an exact precision upside down beneath it, touching it at points of contact as yet mysterious, and these the entry points to another world, one full of our differently calibrated other possible selves, but a world unreachable from, yet still attached to, this quotidian one, and here was a moment’s access to, a fleeting vision of, the entrance to that other world with all its possibilities. Because the Salle à Manger was a world where even quite clearly opposing worlds could run into one another, typically via something that could not be more run-of-the-mill, for instance, today, a dish of salmon at a grand hotel, just a dish of salmon at the far end of a hotel salle à manger; today the dresser at the end of the room was spread with such a dish, a huge salmon complete with head, surrounded on the dish by little crayfish coming off its sides like sun rays, and there underneath both the salmon and the crayfish were the petals of dozens of roses, on which the fishes were laid. It made her think of praise, and of gods, to see those little crayfish placed like that, for all the world as if adoring the great god salmon, it was by far the nicest thing that had happened to her today, a very nice supper, it turned even the July rain into a celebration. It made him think, when he thought of the mouth of that salmon in its served-up dead-eyed face, that even language is a kind of muteness, that everything is at an irrevocable distance; it made him wish to cross incomprehensible farnesses and yet simultaneously know he couldn’t, he was hobbled, shackled. It was the nature of things, we are all shackled, hobbled. So they sat in the dining room at their separate tables, this writer and that, not knowing anything of what they had in common, balanced on the surface of the world as if on a surface of sheet ice they didn’t know was there, frozen in high summer, and together quite separately they ate piece after piece of the pink flesh of the same single silver-scaled salmon. Look! she noticed, a red rose petal had travelled with the serving of fish on to the plate of the man sitting solo at the table next to hers, perhaps by mistake, or perhaps the round-faced piglet-pink Swiss serving-maid liked him especially, chose him, had given him this piece of pure colour on his plate especially, of course she herself had no petal, well, she tossed her head a little (though in truth she felt a touch sad she didn’t have one of those bright red gifts of fortune on her own plate too) and she looked away as the man probed the petal with the tines of his fork – for they were utterly remote from each other, there were oceans between them in that same room sitting next to one another at their separate tables, tables made originally (though the people randomly sitting at them had no way of knowing this, nobody had, because it was not thought relevant to anything so never recorded by anyone anywhere) from the wood of the same one individual tree.
Richard lets the book shut in his hand, lets it fall on to the table.
I don’t really need the money, he thinks. I can let this one go. I’ll phone them on Monday and tell them. I’ll phone tomorrow and leave a message on the office answerphone and they’ll get it first thing Monday.
But this is the first thing he’s been offered in nearly four years.
Hobbled, he thinks. Shackled.
He opens his laptop.
But he can’t bear to open Terp’s attachment again.
Instead, as if it’s the same thing as working, he types into the search engine the words Rainer Maria Rilke followed by the words hobbled and shackled. Up comes a quite easy-to-read poem by R. M. Rilke. It’s about a white horse galloping across a field in Russia in springtime, a horse full of perfect joy even though one of its legs has a hobble attached to it.
The poem’s last line is about how images are gifts.
Oh, that’s good.
He immediately wants to tell Paddy.
He looks over at Paddy’s books, on the shelf above the TV too. He hasn’t even looked at them since he brought them home that snowy day. He reaches them all down. He opens one at random.
In it, the real Katherine Mansfield is in Paris in the month of March, 1922. She is spending days going between a hotel and a clinic. Every day when she gets into the hotel lift the little boy who works the lift in this grand hotel tells her in French about the weather, regardless of whether she’s about to go out into
it or she’s coming back in from it. If it’s a rainy day, he tells her it’s still winter. On the days when there’s been sunlight, the little lift boy tells her it’ll be full summer just a month from now.
The too-thin lady. The little lift boy.
Richard stays up into the early hours of Sunday reading here and there in these books, in which Katherine Mansfield, the real person, is writing letters to other real people.
In one of the books her brother has died in the war. In another her TB has just been diagnosed, bad in one lung, like being shot in one wing, she says (and when he reads this Richard can feel his own lungs inside him like two wings). The TB fills her with the furies. She goes to Switzerland for her health. I have two rooms and a huge balcony, and so many mountains that I haven’t even begun to climb them yet. They are superb. She is, what’s the word – sanguine. One begins the wandering of a consumptive – fatal! Everybody does it and dies. She is dry and truthful. I’m sick of people dying who promise well. One doesn’t want to join that crowd at all. At one point she writes at length to a doctor who’s been treating her, to thank him for helping her know how to breathe, how to sit most comfortably, and how to keep her feet warm. She describes to him – I wonder whether you might be interested – a few details, things a tubercular patient has noticed about being tubercular. The patient treating the doctor, Richard thinks; how clever she is to know to switch roles, grant herself that bit of authority. Look how she describes herself stretching her arms when she wakes up, imitating the actions of an opera singer who makes just this gesture before taking a high note which he wants to ‘hold’ as long as possible. This, she tells the doctor, helps in times of fatigue; a thing that also helps, should a tubercular patient chance to feel depressed, is to change your position. A gentle humming under the breath seems to break the feeling of ‘isolation’. Then she advises a conscious relaxation when it comes to facing a plate of food so as not to be terrified out of eating it by your own digestive system, and she ends her letter to the doctor by saying that when breathing is very troublesome and the weather is dark I find it a help to look at pictures.