Though Bernát’s father from time to time expressed a preference for Lizzie as she had been in earlier years, when she had been more ‘natural’, as he put it, he nonetheless liked her; he was grateful to her for all the help she had given Anikó; and he felt sorry for her. It might even have been his idea, thought Bernát, that Lizzie should join the family in Cornwall. She was persuaded to stay in a neighbouring chalet for one week of the holiday fortnight. Bernát was now twelve years old.
The week that Lizzie spent with the family in Cornwall – to be precise, one particular day in that week; or to be more precise still, one five-minute conversation within that day – was to be of huge importance to Bernát, he told Naomi. It marked the transformation of his relationship with Lizzie, he said, and Naomi understood that what was happening when Bernát told her about this day was the transformation of his friendship with her – by which she means, she wants Kate to understand, that their friendship became the truest form of friendship, an acknowledgement of the profoundest affinity. Bernát was not trying to seduce her, she insists; in fact, he explicitly told her that this was not his intention. She has never had sex with Bernát and never will, she says.
She sets the scene in Cornwall: a stunningly hot day, so hot that the beach was empty; parasols dotting the dunes; people huddled in the shadow of the cliffs; when the waves broke, the light on the curving water was as bright as a camera flash. Despite the temperature, Lizzie had gone for a walk; every day she took a walk on her own, for a couple of hours. Bernát had watched her disappear into the shimmer that was coming off the sand; she was walking towards the headland at the northern edge of the beach.
Some time later, he decided that he too would confront the beast of the heat; he would go beyond the headland, enduring the sun with the stoicism of an adventurer in the desert. The tide had been going out for a while. As Bernát neared the end of the bay he found in the smooth damp sand a track of footprints, narrow and small, with the toes turned out; he knew that these footprints were Lizzie’s. He followed them as far as he could, to a buttress of rocks at the base of the cliffs. Only when the tide was at its lowest was it possible to walk around this obstacle, so he had to climb. This was a pleasing challenge, because the rocks were steep and the stone was sharp. From the high point of the buttress he could see the next bay – this must be where Lizzie had gone. He detoured in the direction of the sea, as the stone was flatter there, and less rugged, and there were rock pools to investigate. Picking a path between the pools, he approached a tiny cove, a slot of sand from which the sea had not yet withdrawn completely. A few more steps brought him to the edge of the rocks, near the narrowest part of the cove, and then he saw two things, a split second apart: Lizzie’s sky-blue swimsuit, on the sand; and Lizzie herself, with nothing on, lying in a pool that had formed at the base of the rock.
The pool was like a bathtub with gently sloping sides, and she lay with her head resting on the sand and her left arm out of the water. Her eyes were closed and she was smiling faintly, as if remembering something; she had not heard him. He knew that he should not be looking at her, but the water that covered her body was as clear as air in the sunlight, and he could see everything. Of course, he had some notion of what a wholly naked woman might look like: he had seen illustrations in textbooks; from photographs of girls in bikinis, and from real girls at the swimming baths, he had extrapolated the vision of their bodies unclothed. He had seen statues. This, however, was his first exposure to the reality of the fully achieved female, and the diagrammatic forms of his imagination were now obliterated by the sublimity of the mature Mrs Vidal. His gaze slid to her breasts, of course: they were wide and discrepant in size, and their softness, he could see, would feel like no other softness; the nipples were as large as pine cones. The belly, a shallow dome, milk-pale, curved down to a clump of hair that was the colour of rain-soaked brick; it looked like lacy seaweed. For several seconds his attention was fixed there.
Lizzie now opened her eyes. In an instant an arm went across her chest. ‘How long have you been there?’ she asked; she did not seem angry.
‘Only a second,’ said Bernát.
‘With catlike tread,’ Lizzie commented; there was a cleverness in this which he could not fully appreciate, he knew; her wit, her composure – she was like nobody else, thought the boy.
‘I didn’t know you were there,’ he apologised.
Lizzie regarded him, saying nothing; the curve of one eyebrow steepened, and her mouth formed the smallest of smiles.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Bernát.
She continued to look at him, and then she shrugged. ‘Ah well,’ she sighed, ‘you’ve already seen everything.’ The hand came down.
As if she were an object that he had five seconds to memorise for a test, Bernát scanned her body from feet to neck and back again. ‘Now run along,’ said Lizzie, closing her eyes. ‘And I think we say nothing to anybody,’ she added.
This phrase, Bernát told Naomi, was not delivered as a threat, even of the mildest kind; he heard it rather as the proof of an understanding. And he spoke not a word about this incident to anyone, for many years. Lizzie again became a regular visitor to the Kalmárs’ flat, and when talking to Bernát she never made the slightest allusion to what had happened that afternoon on the beach. Nothing in her manner gave any indication that something was being hidden; there were no covert glances. Bernát and Lizzie shared their secret, he believed, as two adults share a secret – as if it did not exist. The stupendous female body had been revealed to him, and the prestige of that revelation was increased by his concealment of it. He congratulated himself on being as devious and self-controlled as a spy, he told Naomi.
In the presence of the family Lizzie remained, for a time, perfectly even-handed in her dealings with Bernát and his brother, her two quasi-nephews: praise was distributed equally; questions about school, friendships, interests, and so on, betrayed no preference. In moments alone with Bernát, however, there were signs, increasingly frequent, that her affection for him was of a different order – a quick remark, a smile, an enquiry as to his opinion. Gradually it became understood that Lizzie’s sensibility was more closely attuned to that of the younger boy than to that of the older. Many years later, she admitted that she had for a long time found Oszkár too tightly focused, too single-minded. ‘You need more than a single mind to get the most out of life,’ she declared, said Bernát, as Naomi tells her sister.
According to Bernát, Lizzie’s partiality caused no resentment: even more than his father, Oszkár had misgivings about what they were inclined to perceive as Lizzie Vidal’s artificial qualities. ‘She puts too much work into herself,’ Oszkár once remarked. He thought she was pretentious. Bernát, however, was flattered that Lizzie – the most exciting person he knew – took such an interest in him. She began to educate him in areas that were overlooked by his schooling, to transmit some of the enthusiasms that she had acquired during her time with Christopher. Christopher had inspired her, she said, and he continued to inspire her – not to create but to learn. She knew her limitations: she was an artisan, not an artist. She was a professional picture-taker and picture-maker, with a solid grasp of the technicalities of her craft. She lacked the spark of creativity, but had a good eye and a good ear, and her curiosity was as keen as a child’s. Almost everything that young Bernát knew about music, he learned from Lizzie. French music, especially the music of the Baroque era, had been one of Christopher’s passions, and it became, via Lizzie, one of Bernát’s. She took him to concerts and exhibitions and plays, sometimes with Oszkár, more often without. Lizzie and Bernát even travelled to London. Everything interested her, said Bernát: Japanese ceramics, Sicilian puppets, Turkish carpets – he learned something about them all through his friendship with Lizzie.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ says Naomi, interrupting the story. She tells her sister what her sister is thinking, and her guess is not inaccurate. But she wants it to be understood that Bernát’s
emotional and intellectual development was in no way warped by this relationship, a relationship that she acknowledges might be considered strange. It might be supposed, Naomi proposes, that young Bernát’s choice of girlfriends would have been influenced, consciously or not, by the girls’ resemblance to Mrs Vidal. This would be quite wrong, Naomi asserts. His first full sexual experience was with a girl named Melanie, Bernát had told her, and only in her femaleness did Melanie resemble Lizzie: she was underweight, nervous, bookish, taciturn, and opposed to all make-up on principle. The sex, Naomi reports, was less than wholly satisfactory, at first. Was this because the young man’s mind and body had been corrupted by his infatuation with the older woman, his illicit and unattainable ideal? Naomi posits the question with the pomposity of a self-appointed expert in the subject of human relationships. Devoted to the forcefully ripe Mrs Vidal, was he unable to find excitement with the slender and girlish Melanie? No, said Bernát, says Naomi. They were young and inexperienced, that’s all. They had not yet got the hang of the intricacies of copulation. But they soon improved, Naomi assures her sister.
‘This is rather more information than I need,’ says Kate.
‘You never know,’ says Naomi, and she smiles to encourage reconsideration. ‘Can the mill have too much grist?’ she asks. Without waiting for an answer she resumes the tale of Bernát’s sentimental education.
One momentous day, in his seventeenth year, the year of Melanie, Bernát cycled to Lizzie’s flat: she had bought a recording that she thought was startling, and she wanted him to hear it; it was a recording of the B Minor Mass, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, he remembered. This was the first time he had been to the place where Lizzie lived. Her style at home, he discovered, was a version of her holiday style: she was wearing jeans, a man’s striped shirt and thin-strapped sandals. She looked more French than English, he thought, and her flat – occupying the lower floor of a large Victorian house – was not like any he had previously been in. A scent of lavender pervaded the rooms and the floors were bare wood, waxed, with a large azure and oatmeal rug in the centre of the living room. Blinds, not curtains, hung in the windows. It was brighter than any house he had ever seen. From the kitchen a door opened onto a garden that had a wide oval of gravel where one would have expected grass to grow, and there was a bench made of lengths of warped grey wood. The zinc of the kitchen table bore dozens of scratches and interlocking stains, some faded, some not; the blatancy of these stains, he knew, signified a kind of sophistication that was very subtle. Pictures – most of them photographs; none of them bought from shops – were in every room, the kitchen included.
One of the pictures was of Christopher. ‘My favourite,’ she said, drawing a thumb lightly over the surface, as if to clear dust from it. ‘A looker, wasn’t he?’ she said. Bernát’s parents had a wedding photograph of Lizzie and her husband, and he would not have known, at a glance, that the groom was the same person as the man in this photo. In the wedding picture he was wearing a buttoned-up suit, and his stance was so stiff it was as though the trousers were made of steel; his smile was the sort of smile you make in the mirror when you’re brushing your teeth. The photo in Lizzie’s flat showed him sitting against the trunk of a tree, in the shade of its foliage, with a smile that seemed to have been caught in the telling of a story; his shirt, white, was half undone and he had not shaved that day. Together young Bernát and the widow regarded the face of happy Christopher, and she smiled at his image as you might smile while reading a postcard from a close friend, in which he tells you of something good that has happened to him. And Bernát would never forget what Lizzie then said. ‘Does it ever strike you,’ she said, facing the picture of her husband, ‘that you’re never just in one place? That you’re here, where your body is, but at the same time you’re always elsewhere?’ The riddle was garnished with a quick and almost teasing look, as Bernát described it. ‘What I mean,’ she went on, ‘is that you exist here, in your body, and you exist in the mind of anyone who is thinking of you. You live in your body, but you also live in the wider world, in the ideas that people have of you, in their memories of you. While you’re still alive you live in other people’s memories, and for most of your waking life your mind is occupied by memories too. We live in memories more than we live in the present.’ She looked at him again, and the look was that of someone who regarded him as an equal, said Bernát, says Naomi. ‘Does that seem like gibberish to you?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he answered.
‘I thought it wouldn’t,’ she said, rewarding him with a smile of commendation. Her eyes, looking into the eyes of the dead man in the picture, now narrowed; she pressed her lips together, and sadness came into her face. ‘But the thing is,’ she said, ‘despite everything, he’s fading. Bit by bit, he’s going away from me. I remember that certain things happened, but I don’t see them as clearly as I used to. I know them as facts, which isn’t the same thing. And there’s nothing I can do about it,’ she said, with a heavy shrug. He had an impulse to put an arm around her; he knew, however, that this was something that could not be done.
Bernát thought it could be said, he told Naomi, that he loved Lizzie Vidal as he had loved nobody else: he loved her for the loss that she had endured, for the fortitude with which she borne it, for her devotion to the dead man, whom she had loved so greatly that she had not been able, for a long time, to speak of him. He admired her and was improved by her, he said. They had a bond that he had never experienced with anyone else, until now, he confessed.
As the years passed and Lizzie remained single, Bernát’s father talked with increasing frequency of the ‘black cloud’ that Lizzie, to his way of thinking, had elected to live under. Gloominess was not an attractive quality in a woman, he maintained. Bernát saw no black cloud: he saw a woman who was intelligent and self-reliant and imcomparably dignified; there was an undertow of melancholia, certainly, and this undertow was perhaps becoming stronger with time, but this only compounded her allure. As Lizzie passed her fortieth birthday, Bernát’s father concluded that she was doomed to loneliness because her dead husband, though a decade deceased, blighted the chances of any new candidate; Lizzie could not settle for less than one hundred per cent, and only Christopher could ever hit that mark; her fidelity to the ghost had become morbid. For Bernát, of course, Lizzie’s absolutism was magnificent.
Ever-curious Lizzie was a compulsive participant in evening classes: pottery; French cinema; Italian cinema; flower arranging, Japanese style; continental literature and more. Various men of varying degrees of eligibility were encountered at these classes, and with some of these men Lizzie had sex. Bernát in his twenties became a confidant; he knew about relationships of which his parents knew nothing. A man called Max, from the pottery class, secured Lizzie’s interest for longer than any of his predecessors, but he too was soon found wanting. He was a cultured man, she told Bernát, and rather debonair, and considerate. One could not wish to meet a nicer man, she said, ‘but you can have too much niceness. And he is totally incapable of surprising me.’ Besides, she went on, a woman has to make too many compromises in order to maintain a relationship with a man. A woman has to make something of herself that she is not, so that she can be fitted into the life of someone who is making much less of an effort to fit more closely into hers. She would never marry again, she declared. Marriage, Lizzie believed, was a prison for women, reports unmarried Naomi to her married sister. It might be a well-appointed and sunny prison, with spacious grounds and comfortable cells and a fence around the perimeter that was barely visible, but it was nonetheless a prison, and ‘sooner or later you need to get out,’ said Lizzie. Perhaps, even with Christopher, marriage might have started to chafe; she doubted it, but the possibility had to be accepted. She was enjoying life as a single woman, she said to Bernát, as they sat in the sunshine, outside a London café; she exchanged a subtle smile with a waiter, in demonstration of her liberty, he remembered. Women, she wanted Bernát to know, are less in need of
men than men are in need of women, and she didn’t mean merely that men didn’t know how to cook or do the laundry or generally look after themselves, though in many cases that was true. Her point was more a philosophical one: that men – ‘most men’, she clarified, making an exemption of the young man to whom she was talking – require a woman to be their audience, their mirror, ‘to assure them that they are important’, said Lizzie, says Naomi. It was odd, Lizzie thought, that it should be commonly believed that women require flattery, when in reality it was the other way round. Too many relationships, she pronounced, are based on the terror of being alone. ‘Women, in my experience, are braver,’ she said. ‘Widows fare better than widowers.’
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