The river is the river

by Buckley, Jonathan;

  ‘And Peter Addison ain’t no genius,’ Martin responds, in a quasi-American growl.

  Amazed, Naomi blinks. ‘You know that film?’ she asks, as pleased as a woman on a blind date that’s suddenly taken an upturn.

  ‘It would appear so,’ says Martin.

  Naomi scrutinises his face. One might think that he had deliberately kept this surprising aspect of his personality hidden from her, and that she is intrigued by the deception. A wry smile appears.

  ‘And at this point I must make my excuses,’ says Martin, rising from the table. He needs to do some preparation, he explains.

  His departure seems to disappoint Naomi, but slightly. The sisters clear up, then they go to the living room, where Lulu, recumbent on the sofa, is watching TV.

  ‘May we join you?’ asks her mother.

  ‘Be my guest,’ says Lulu, withdrawing her legs to make space; having taken the vacated spot, Naomi reaches for her niece’s feet and puts them down on her lap.

  On the screen, a young man in a well-cut suit and white shirt, tieless, is talking in a room that’s not much smaller than a tennis court; he stands on a deep-pile white rug, beside a white leather armchair, in front of a white grand piano; several white vases, overcharged with white flowers, are arrayed in the background, by a wall of glass that gives a view of a swimming pool; a replica of the Medici Venus stands on the water’s edge. The young man escorts the camera crew to another room; in the doorway he pauses, to allow the viewers to be astonished; we are at the kitchen, which is as well-equipped as the set of a cookery programme; in the distance, a woman of southeast Asian appearance is examining the contents of a wardrobe-sized fridge. ‘Good, no?’ says the young man; the accent is strong.

  ‘He’s worth billions, apparently,’ Lulu explains. ‘He found a way of making insulation from volcanic rock. They need a lot of insulation in Russia.’

  ‘And where’s the tasteful residence?’ asks her mother.

  ‘London. That’s what it’s about. Invasion of the Russian squillionaires.’

  Naomi, leaning forward slightly, frowning, watches the television with concentration, as she had watched the proceedings in court. Her hands are massaging Lulu’s feet, a treatment that Lulu accepts without remark, as if this were an intimacy of long habit.

  Now the camera is looking over the shoulder of someone who is standing at the window of a high-altitude London office; the shoulder belongs to a slightly older man, who regards the swarming traffic with the gaze of one who has come to occupy a place far above the trivialities and chaos of ground-level life. He takes a call, and speaks to the caller in English; his sentences are terse and decisive; his accent is a medley of Moscow and New York. Mobile phones and jewellery shops have made his fortune, we learn. He intends to start a bank, and various other enterprises which cannot yet be disclosed. Sitting at his vast and bare desk, in his vast and minimally furnished office, he imparts some of the principles of his thinking. ‘Siloed thinking’ is something he deplores; siloed thinking is the bane of British business. He has a ‘360-degree understanding of how any product will resonate within the consumer’s life’. Appliances are no longer mere tools: they must ‘reflect the personalities’ of their owners. His bank will have a modern personality, he promises.

  With her chin propped on her thumbs and her elbows on her knees, Naomi stares effortfully at the self-bedazzled tycoon, as though listening to the confessions of an unrepentant killer.

  ‘This guy’s a 360-degree knobhead,’ says Lulu, lifting the remote. ‘Shall I zap him?’

  ‘Please,’ Naomi sighs.

  Lulu scrolls through the menu and selects a documentary; small monkeys are leaping into a water trough from the top of a streetlamp, in slow motion. ‘OK?’ she asks.

  ‘Fine with me,’ answers Naomi.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ answers Kate.

  ‘Where are you going?’ her sister asks.

  ‘Upstairs. I have to put in some sort of shift, even if it’s only an hour.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Naomi.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Taking up all your time.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ says Kate.

  ‘If she doesn’t do at least a page she can’t sleep,’ Lulu explains to her aunt, as if talking about some sort of behavioural tic, like having to wear a fresh set of pink pyjamas every night.

  Kate leaves them. In her room, she ponders what can be done with Dorota and Jakub, or tries to; Dorota and Jakub will not materialise for her this evening. Because she intends, one day, to write a novel that might be a thriller, or a police procedural, she writes out the court scene, with different names and altered dialogue. Ideas for a subsequent scene suggest themselves, as does a twist that could be useful; it is not yet clear who will be murdered, or why, but there will have to be a murder. Arson, in a book of this kind, could only be a preliminary. After two hours she stops; Dorota and Jakub remain where they were, but something has been done. The notes go into the file labelled ‘Murder Book’, with a dozen other fragmentary scenes and character sketches.

  The fragrance of bath oil had reached her in her room, though the door was closed; on the landing the air is as densely scented as the cosmetics hall of a department store. The light in the bathroom is on, but there’s no sound; standing within inches of the door, Kate hears nothing. She taps, and whispers: ‘OK in there?’

  A woozy singsong voice replies quietly: ‘Hello darling.’

  ‘Just checking you’re all right.’

  ‘Very much so, thank you. Have you done what you had to do?

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Come in, if you want,’ says Naomi.

  ‘Are you out?’

  ‘I’m never getting out.’

  Kate opens the door, releasing an immense quantity of overperfumed vapour.

  It seems that half a bottle of oil has been poured into the bath; the water should be barely tinted, but it’s almost ultramarine. Naomi lies back, with her hands on her thighs; saturated by steam, her hair droops over her head and neck like a ragged cloth; her eyes are closed and she is smiling in drowsy contentment. ‘What time is it?’ she murmurs.

  ‘Half eleven.’

  ‘I should stir myself,’ says Naomi, but she does not move. Her smile falls away; she lies in the water as motionless as a woman in meditation.

  It is apparent that Naomi is inviting inspection. Kate looks. Pleated with empty skin, her sister’s belly looks like a decaying peach; her breasts resemble enormous dead tongues; her collarbones are as stark as the rim of a bucket. Kate sits on the edge of the bath and leans over to raise the plug. At the rush of the water Naomi opens her eyes; it is obvious that she has been crying.

  ‘What’s up?’ Kate asks, stroking her sister’s cheek once with the back of a finger.

  ‘Nothing’s up. I’m happy. Couldn’t be happier. Honestly.’

  ‘Good. But—’

  ‘Just having a sentimental moment.’

  ‘About what?’

  Naomi takes her sister’s hand; she opens it and presses her cheek into the palm. ‘I’m extremely grateful,’ she says. ‘You do know that, don’t you?’

  ‘You’re my sister. Gratitude shouldn’t enter into it.’

  ‘Well, it does.’

  ‘You’re my sister, Naomi. I love you.’

  As if the verb were a gift that had surprised her, and could not be accepted without thought, Naomi looks at Kate uncertainly; she takes Kate’s hand and touches her lips to it. ‘Same,’ she murmurs, letting go. The water has withdrawn from her breasts; her gaze moves along her body, with the minimal curiosity of someone examining a zoological specimen in a dull museum. Then she says: ‘Do you think you would have made such a success of yourself if Dad hadn’t died?’

  ‘I’m not such a success.’

  ‘Yes, Katie, you are,’ Naomi states.

  ‘I’ve written a few books. But that’s—’

  ‘Success.’

&nbs
p; ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do,’ she says.

  ‘Is that what you’ve been thinking about? The stuff that happened with Dad?’

  Squinting at her feet, as if they were ambiguous objects in the middle distance, Naomi frowns. ‘It was terrible for all of us, of course,’ she says, after a delay, ‘but I think you came out of it best. More determined than ever. You were not going to waste a minute.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Whereas I wasted many minutes,’ says Naomi, without regret or self-pity.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ says Kate.

  ‘But perhaps now I’m benefitting too.’

  ‘Benefitting from—?’

  ‘From being a half-orphan.’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  Continuing to squint at her feet, Naomi does not respond immediately. ‘Bernát,’ she then says; she pauses and the frown reappears. ‘This friendship. It’s possible it wouldn’t have happened otherwise.’

  More than possible, Kate is inclined to answer; and the same could be said of the relationship with Gabriel and with his predecessors, none of whom – or none of the ones of whom she is aware – were notable for their youthfulness. But all she says is: ‘Because—?’

  ‘Bernát knew,’ says Naomi.

  ‘Knew what?’

  ‘He knew what the story would be.’ When she had told him about her father, she says, it had confirmed what he had already known; he knew, without talking to her, just by looking, in the bookshop, that a parent had died when she was young; her father, he thought. There was something in her demeanour and bearing – an ‘inflection’, as Bernát put it – that was unmistakeable.

  ‘But you told him what happened,’ Kate points out.

  ‘Yes. But that’s not the point.’

  ‘It—’

  ‘No, it’s not. He knew,’ says Naomi, with an incontrovertible glance. All the water has drained away now; Kate lifts a towel from the rail; Naomi takes it and drapes it over her body like a blanket. ‘You think he was trying to make an impression?’

  ‘That’s not so outrageous an idea.’

  ‘I’m not stupid, Katie.’

  ‘I know you’re not. All—’

  ‘He doesn’t bluff. If you met him, you’d know that.’

  ‘Well, I’d like to meet him.’

  ‘Some people are more observant than others, that’s all. It’s like looking at someone’s hands or the way they walk and knowing what kind of work they do. He wasn’t trying to make me think he had some sort of super-intuition.’

  ‘OK,’ says Kate. ‘So he—’

  ‘And he wasn’t talking about any sort of scar or injury,’ Naomi goes on, to forestall her sister’s use of such banalities. What Bernát had observed was not the evidence of damage but the evidence of a certain cast of mind, of a particular kind of knowledge; it was, said Bernát, like recognising ‘an initiate’, says Naomi. This is what he had said to her one evening, in the garden of his house; they had listened to music, just herself and Bernát, then they had talked, for a long time. For both of them this was a conversation of significance, says Naomi, fixing her gaze on the ceiling, as if to concentrate on recalling precisely, for the benefit of her analyst. They had listened to some music by Morales, and then Bernát had told her about himself and Lizzie, his ‘first love’, says Naomi. ‘Lizzie was the woman at the concert, the grey-haired woman with the red beret,’ she explains, now turning to look at her sister, and smiling to see that this development had piqued. ‘Are you tired?’ she asks.

  ‘I have another hour in me,’ answers Kate.

  ‘So would some more back story be of interest?’

  17.

  In the first few years of her life in the West Midlands, Bernát’s mother, Anikó, had only one friend of her own, Bernát confided to Naomi; all other friends and acquaintances (not that there were many) were workmates of her husband and his brother. Anikó’s friend was a young woman named Lizzie Salter, who worked as an assistant to a portrait photographer, who was Lizzie’s paternal uncle. He was the town’s only professional portrait photographer.

  To mark Oszkár’s first birthday in England, Anikó took the boys to Mr Salter to have their picture taken, for the people back home. Naomi has seen the photo that resulted, she tells Kate: it’s a sepia-toned scene, in which the boys are crammed into the cockpit of a half-size wooden replica of a sports car, against a background of painted fields and clouds; they look thoroughly disgruntled, she says. But Lizzie was charming and elegant: his mother would never forget the fuchsia-red colour of the dress that Lizzie was wearing that afternoon, said Bernát, nor the sumptuous long wave of her hair. Anikó took an immediate liking to her, as did the boys, and vice versa. Lizzie understood the young mother’s situation; she empathised. The following week, in her lunch hour, she called at the flat, knowing that Anikó might otherwise go through the whole day speaking to nobody but her sons and husband. Mr Salter’s studio was only a hundred yards from the paint and wallpaper shop above which the Kalmárs were living, the shop in which Anikó would in time be employed. At least once a week Lizzie visited Anikó, sometimes in her lunch hour, sometimes on her way home. Thanks to Lizzie, Anikó’s proficiency in English improved rapidly. Soon she was introduced to Zsiga, who invited her to eat with them, that very evening. She became the boys’ honorary English aunt.

  When Anikó first met her, Lizzie was unattached. She remained unattached for some time – or rather, there were boyfriends, but none of any duration. It was assumed that the local lads were too unpolished for so poised a young woman. Then came the day on which Lizzie accompanied her uncle to the local grammar school, to take the end-of-year photo – that is where and when she met Christopher Vidal, the music teacher. He was the youngest member of staff, and by some margin the easiest on the eye. In the moment he introduced himself, Lizzie knew that this was the one. His name in itself was attractive, and it became more so when she learned that it was an old Venetian name. It turned out that Christopher had no Venetian ancestors, or none of whom he knew; he had been born and raised in humdrum Bedford. No matter: he was nonetheless exotic, because Christopher inhabited a world of which Lizzie had hitherto known very little, other than that it was inaccessible to her – the world of music, of serious music. The violin was Christopher’s instrument, and he was a fine musician – not good enough to be a professional, but good enough to play in public, and to make Lizzie marvel. When he showed her the scores of the pieces that he played from memory, she found it hard to believe that anyone could make anything of these blizzards of notes, never mind remember them and play them at such speed. ‘Every music college in Britain has a dozen violinists who are better than I will ever be,’ said Christopher. His modesty was a further enhancement. And he seemed to be immune to regret and disappointment: he was content just to be earning a living in music, he told Lizzie. She attended the school’s Christmas concert, for which Christopher conducted the pupils’ band. The boys were desperate to please him, she could tell; parents lingered in the hall for a chance to talk to him.

  Lizzie and Christopher were married in the spring of the following year. Not long afterwards, they moved to Birmingham when he was appointed head of music at a more prestigious school. Encouraged by her husband, Lizzie set up her own photographic studio, specialising in the type of work that her uncle had taught her. Their life, she would later say, had been almost perfect. They wanted children. There was some sort of problem, but they were told that it might not be insuperable; they had time. Every morning, when she emerged from sleep, she felt grateful to be where she was, Lizzie would later tell Bernát. But one morning she was awoken by the ringing of the alarm on Christopher’s side of the bed; it rang for ten seconds or more, and he did not stir; she stroked his arm; his arm was cold. He was thirty-five years old, and they had been married for only four years. ‘His heart simply stopped beating. It happens,’ she told Bernát, as if talking of a terrible misfortune that had befallen someone other than her
self. Bernát never saw her cry, though the loss of Christopher was a blow, as she said, from which she could never recover.

  Though he had met Christopher several times, Bernát in adulthood had no precise memory of him. He remembered more strongly the aura that surrounded Christopher after he had died. The surname was an aspect of that aura, as it had been for Lizzie, and it was significant that Christopher had been a musician: young Bernát understood music to be a mystery that was far removed from everyday business, and was wholly dependent on that most elusive of qualities, talent. And one other consideration was of importance: Christopher Vidal was dead, and had died at an age at which most men are only halfway through their lives. For Bernát, Christopher’s premature decease augmented the lustre of his name and expertise, just as Lizzie’s charisma was enriched by her immediate experience of his death.

  For a year or so, Lizzie did not visit the Kalmárs. Bernát’s mother went to see her in Birmingham, and reported that Lizzie was coping as well as anyone could have hoped. She had returned to work, and was finding that she could maintain her composure as long as nobody mentioned her husband, though she often had moments when, as Lizzie put it, she felt as if she were an actress who was playing the role of herself, and kept forgetting her lines. The evenings, however, were unbearable; she wept for hours. Most nights, she would come awake three or four times, and the loneliness into which she awoke was terrible. Unable to live in the place where Christopher had died, she moved to a flat in a different part of the city, where she would not have to deal every day with people who had known him. A month or so later, she wrote to Bernát’s mother, saying that she would come to see the family soon. Another four or five months went by; letters were exchanged, but the visit was repeatedly postponed. And then, when Bernát was eleven years old, Lizzie reappeared, transfigured.

  This Lizzie Vidal, the first that Bernát could remember in any detail, was a woman of bold bearing and considerable glamour. Though not tall, she was a powerful presence, with curvatures that commanded attention: the waist was tight, the hips generous, the bosom assertive. She held herself upright, and the angle of her head suggested the image of someone looking over an invisible wall that came up to her nose. When she spoke, she often moved her hands as if she were putting things in their rightful places. She was never flustered, and made no remarks that were unconsidered. When she listened, she looked you in the eye, always; she compelled you to talk sense, said Bernát. Her hair was spectacular: multifarious tones of straw, pale brass and barley were in it, and it was usually worn in a complex chignon. Her dress sense was distinctive: she had a penchant for short jackets and pencil skirts, often black, combined with blouses of bright colour; she was partial to cashmere twinsets. The style of her wardrobe was not modern; it was some sort of declaration, as young Bernát dimly understood. Lizzie’s hands – slender, with long fingers – were as sleek as a mannequin’s, and the fingernails were perfectly tended ovals, never without varnish; deep red was the customary colour. In summer the toenails were likewise painted, and her shoes had high and sturdy heels, always. Her face was strong rather than winsome, said Bernát. The brow was heavy, the eyes deep-set and dark, the jaw squarish, the nose aquiline and robust. She wore lavish perfumes, bringing with her the air of a well-stocked florist’s shop. Her voice was quietly forceful and rather low. In short, for the boy that Bernát was, Mrs Vidal was a figure of some bewitchment and mystique; he knew that she was a person who was not to be trifled with.