The river is the river

by Buckley, Jonathan;

  Kate sits at the table. The lid of the honey jar is not straight; she removes it and replaces it. Idly she turns the jar on the tabletop; she tilts it, and watches the liquid slide; she gazes into it, as if impersonating a phony gypsy with her crystal ball. A memory duly rises.

  At the waterfall in the Gorges de la Méouge, Kate remembers, Naomi was wearing a short dress, a yellow dress. She walked down to the lip of the rock. ‘Be careful,’ her mother called, and Naomi, mechanically obedient, took a couple of steps back. Now Kate can see more of the scene: the pool of green water; the smooth walls of limestone, streaked and curved; the deep blue sky, with one small cloud in it, a tattered globe of vapour, a small pretty stain on the vast plain of blue. At first the rock was too hot for bare feet. She found a ledge, shaded by a bush, on which she could sit and read; her parents were close, by a larger bush, and her father’s head was resting on her mother’s lap. It was noticed that Naomi had crept back to the edge; she stood motionless there, looking down into the churning water, her arms straight at her sides, with the fingers pointing stiffly down, like a soldier on the parade ground. Three or four boys in swimming trunks ran past her and leaped without stopping; one of them brushed her shoulder as he went by. ‘Naomi,’ her mother called, and Naomi turned and smiled and raised a hand in acknowledgement, but did not retreat; she turned back, and lowered her head to resume her examination of the water. Kate was sent to talk to her.

  When Kate was ten yards away, Naomi raised her arms to the horizontal, brought her hands together and flexed her knees; she assumed an expression that was excited and fearful and prim, as if mimicking a Victorian girl on the brink of an extraordinary act of daring. ‘Mum says—’ was all Kate had time to say: Naomi sprang and plummeted, upright, her arms clamped to her ribs. Their mother screamed; the boys, bobbing in the pool, applauded and cheered. When Naomi emerged from the water, they gazed appreciatively at the butter-coloured form she offered; she would have been fourteen.

  ‘It’s perfectly safe,’ Naomi assured her parents. Her mother, distraught at the close encounter with calamity, laid out the yellow dress on a rock with tremulous care, as if performing a ritual of thanks for her daughter’s safe return. Admonishment was the job of the father, but his annoyance lacked force; thinking he was not observed, he winked at his younger daughter. The boys were preparing for a second jump; they disappeared from view; five minutes later they clambered back onto the ledge, uninjured. Now in her swimming costume, Naomi conducted her father to the precipice, so that the danger might be assessed. The judgement was in her favour. ‘Come on,’ she yelled to Kate, who was urged to comply by her mother, in the belief that the risk of mishap would thereby be reduced. Before Kate could reach her, Naomi jumped again, stiff-armed and stiff-legged, looking straight ahead as she stepped off, with the expression of someone facing down a challenge. Kate peered over, and saw her sister standing within the cascade, with her eyes tightly closed, aghast with pleasure as the water shattered on her head. When Kate called her name she waded out, and swam into the deepest part of the pool. Turning onto her back, she beckoned her sister to jump, but Kate stayed on the ledge; the warmth of the air was pleasurable; the water did not appeal, and neither did the leap. Naomi climbed back up and took her hand and hauled her to her feet. ‘Together,’ ordered Naomi, but Kate pulled her hand free. Naomi looked at her queryingly, then put her arms around her sister and pressed her against her cold wet body. ‘Courage,’ she whispered. Then she let go, turned sharply and marched to the launching point. Her palms slapped onto her thighs simultaneously, her chin went up, and into the air she stepped. It had to be done: Kate moved onto the sill of rock; she dithered there, watching her sister swimming into the waterfall; Naomi turned and shouted the order, and Kate went over, screaming. The smack of the water was exhilarating, and her face came up into the air in an instant. Naomi led the way back up and they jumped again, many times. Their legs went red from all the smacking of the water, she remembers.

  Kate makes herself another cup of coffee, then goes up to her room and writes some notes about the afternoon at the waterfall.

  19.

  Alone in the house for two hours, Kate returns to Dorota and Jakub; or rather, they return to her, promptly, as if they had been awaiting her full attention. Of course Dorota cannot tell her husband that she has seen Jakub. (Might the second husband’s name have the same initial as the first – Julius?) Dorota no longer knows what her true feelings are, Kate writes. Two days before Easter, the phantom of Jakub appears to her again, by the railway station. Dusk is falling. He is striding towards the station, very quickly – so quickly that his feet perform a little skip every four or five strides. At any moment, it seems, he might break into a run. Anxiety is evident in his posture; he glances from side to side frequently. Before the war, Jakub had worked in a factory, but this Jakub looks like a businessman or perhaps a clerk. He is smartly dressed, in a black suit, and he carries a briefcase. She sees him take a watch from a waistcoat pocket – and now, apparently in a panic, he starts to run. Dorota hurries, but she loses sight of him in the crowds on the concourse. Then a glimpse – Jakub is stepping onto a train. (Where is it going? This might compound the mystery, it occurs to Kate. Perhaps the train will pass through the town or village in which he was born? Thread to be followed – Dorota & Jakub’s parents, Kate notes.) Dorota runs to the platform, but the guard is already blowing his whistle; seconds later, the train is in motion.

  She needs to think about Dorota’s relationship with her second husband. His name will be Julius, she decides; he is a bank clerk. Dorota has told Julius nothing about the apparitions, but he has begun to wonder if she might be hiding something from him, Kate writes, and in an instant, before she has written the last syllable, a development presents itself: Dorota catches sight of Jakub in an open carriage; the horses are being whipped by the driver to make them hurry, and Jakub is not alone – he is with a man whom Dorota knows, a former workmate. Dorota goes to the factory, where she is told that the man has not been seen since he went off to fight. She is given the man’s address, and goes there; his wife opens the door, and Dorota understands immediately that this woman is a widow. She also understands that this woman cannot be told what Dorota has seen. So what story does she tell the woman? Pretends was looking for someone else? Yes, Kate writes.

  20.

  Kate drives back to The Willowes to collect her sister. There is still almost a mile to go when she sees her: Naomi is leaning against the gate of a field, looking at an ill-kempt horse which is cropping the grass only five yards from the gate, wholly indifferent to her scrutiny. ‘A beautiful day, so I thought I’d take some exercise,’ Naomi explains, stamping the soil off her shoes before getting in. The shoes are old moccasins, wholly unsuitable for gravel-strewn country lanes. ‘Might have overdone it,’ she says, putting fingers to her sweat-sodden hairline. She fusses with her coat before fastening herself in; she unbuckles it, having found a twist in the seatbelt; she unbuttons the coat, refastens the buckle. ‘OK,’ she at last announces, giving the dashboard a light tap; Kate turns the car round. ‘Nice part of the world,’ Naomi observes. Other remarks are made, none of them about their mother.

  At the first pause, Kate asks: ‘So, how was she?’

  ‘OK. But she kept calling me Kate.’

  ‘That happens with me. She jumbles up the names.’

  ‘It was more than the names she was jumbling. Seemed to think I’m married to Martin.’

  ‘She does get very confused. Did she think it was me she was talking to?’

  ‘On the whole, no.’

  ‘How long were you with her?’

  ‘Forty minutes. Bit less,’ says Naomi. ‘She fell asleep,’ she adds, defensively. She regards the passing countryside for a few moments, then says: ‘She talked about Dad.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘She called him John, but it was Dad she meant.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘She said “Your father”. Seems
safe to assume she had Dad in mind.’

  ‘She never mentions him when I’m with her. Well, hardly ever. Was she upset?’

  ‘Far from it,’ says Naomi. ‘Fond memories.’

  ‘Gosh,’ is all Kate says.

  ‘Talking about a trip to the zoo, as far as I could make out. Or maybe a park. Some deer were involved, anyway. Dad putting his hand out and a deer coming up to lick it. Ring any bells?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Before our time, I suspect.’

  ‘Must be,’ says Kate. ‘So she didn’t get upset?’

  ‘Not about Dad. But very peeved about her necklace.’

  ‘What necklace?’

  ‘I have no idea. Apparently I’ve broken one of her favourite necklaces.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Maybe a crime of my youth.’

  ‘I don’t remember you breaking a necklace.’

  ‘Perhaps it was you.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘Maybe it was Daniela.’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Usually it’s Lulu who gets mixed up with Daniela, but you never know.’

  Facing away from her sister, Naomi puts her forehead to the glass. She mutters: ‘That was terrible.’

  ‘I did warn you.’

  ‘She was extremely annoyed about that necklace.’

  ‘She’s often angry,’ Kate tells her. ‘Tells me to leave her alone sometimes. As if I’m persecuting her. It’s hard. But you shouldn’t take it personally.’

  ‘I didn’t break the necklace, but it’s me she was angry with.’

  ‘No, Naomi, you can’t take it personally. We don’t know what she was thinking about. It wasn’t you who broke the necklace. Assuming there was a necklace, which—’

  ‘It wasn’t about the necklace,’ Naomi interrupts.

  ‘What do you mean?’ asks Kate, fearing that she knows what is coming next.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ says Naomi.

  ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘I’m always letting her down. That’s what she feels.’

  ‘No. She—’

  ‘And she’s right. I should visit her more often.’

  ‘I live nearer.’

  ‘I’m not good with her. I can’t keep a grip on myself.’

  ‘Well, it’s not easy.’

  ‘But I bet you manage it,’ says Naomi. ‘You’re much better than me. You’re a nicer person,’ she says, looking at her sister.

  ‘No I’m not,’ says Kate, concentrating on the road.

  ‘You are,’ Naomi states. For half a minute she does not speak, then she says: ‘I should go back.’

  ‘Sure. I’ll take you whenever you want.’

  ‘I mean now. I should go back now.’

  ‘There’s no point, Naomi. We can come back tomorrow,’ says Kate, opening the glove compartment to pass a packet of tissues.

  Looking away from her sister, Naomi presses a tissue once, firmly, to each eye. She scans the fields and the sky with a dull gaze, like someone who is under arrest; then, after a minute of silence, she asks: ‘Get anything done?’

  ‘Not much,’ says Kate. ‘Some notes.’

  Naomi glances at her, detecting an untruth. ‘But good notes,’ says Naomi. ‘I can tell.’

  ‘Something might develop,’ Kate admits.

  ‘But you don’t want to talk about it,’ says Naomi; there is no tone of complaint in the suggestion.

  Kate says: ‘I’m happy to talk about it. But there’s not much to talk about at the moment.’

  ‘I’d be happy with not much,’ says Naomi.

  So Kate tells Naomi about the widow Dorota and the day she sees her dead husband on the tram, and the scene at the railway station, and other possibilities that she has in mind. During the drive to The Willowes a scene had occurred to her: Julius spying on his wife. Julius might see Dorota looking across a street and suddenly reacting as if she had seen something terrifying, she tells Naomi; he could follow the direction of her gaze into the people who are walking on the opposite side of the street, and be unable to understand who among them might have caused her to react in this way.

  ‘I like it,’ says Naomi. ‘Good stuff. Go with it.’

  ‘You think so?’ says Kate.

  ‘I do. Definitely.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says Kate, though she knows that Naomi’s interest is feigned; it always is, albeit impressively so. Naomi has read all of her sister’s novels, and praised them, but they are the only novels she reads, and she reads them because she is obliged to. Fiction for Naomi is a pedestrian and encumbered art; this has been implied, if not stated in these terms.

  ‘And how much of that did you come up with this morning?’ asks Naomi.

  ‘A couple of scenes.’

  For ten seconds or more Naomi peruses her sister, as if in the presence of a great enigma.

  ‘Only the outlines,’ says Kate. ‘There’s nothing substantial yet.’

  They have reached the junction with the main road into town. Leaning forward, Naomi looks to the right and to the left, as if there’s a flotilla of hot-air balloons up there, and she says: ‘Day in, day out. Such dedication. Every day, year after year.’

  ‘Not every day.’

  ‘As near as makes no difference,’ says Naomi. ‘How many did you write before the first one was published? Three?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Four. And you still kept going,’ she says, as if such perseverance were heroic.

  ‘Good for nothing else,’ says Kate.

  ‘No, Katie, that’s not true,’ says Naomi, to the window.

  They are approaching a level crossing, and barriers are coming down. Kate stops the car and turns off the engine; there is no sound of any train and no other cars are waiting; the quietness, for Kate, has the quality of an incipient headache, but she finds that she is disinclined to talk. Her sister is staring at the flashing light on the barrier, but is seeing something else; she emits a sort of hiccup, an aborted laugh, and her mouth forms a rueful quarter-smile. ‘What?’ asks Kate.

  Naomi continues to scrutinise the flashing light, as if there were something not quite right about it. There is some puzzlement in her voice when she says, at last: ‘Dad and Mum.’

  ‘What about them?’

  Never taking her eyes off the flashing light, Naomi answers in a soft drone of a voice, as if recalling a dream. When their mother fell asleep, she says, she looked around the room, trying to decide what to do, and she picked up one of the photos on the chest of drawers, the picture of Leonor and her husband, taken a year or two before the first daughter was born, and she was shocked, as she is always shocked, she says, to see how bright and pretty her mother used to be. Then she remembered a day when her father had surprised her – ‘surprised isn’t a strong enough word’, says Naomi – by talking about how he had courted his wife. Naomi was in the midst of a crisis at the time; she was on the point of abandoning music. This was not the first impasse, but it was the worst so far: she knew that she had reached the limit of her competence; all pleasure had gone from it. Many times her father had told her that she must not give up; the rewards, in the end, would be immense. ‘Never give up – Dad’s First Commandment,’ says Naomi. He had encouraged her, several times, with the lesson of his own career: he had struggled for years with the complexities of actuarial science, and through sheer application had succeeded, overtaking others of more agile intellect. But now, with Naomi in the depths, the example of his career would not suffice; a different kind of story was needed. So he told her about the time he was in hospital, when he’d been smitten – ‘his very word’, Naomi remembers – by the lovely Portuguese nurse. She’d made a bout of pneumonia seem like a price worth paying, he told his daughter. A friend had visited him one afternoon and had seen Leonor: she was extremely nice, he agreed – and far too attractive to be bothering herself with a sickly number-cruncher like Richard. This was the consensus – he would not have a cha
nce, friends told him. But he refused to accept that defeat was inevitable. It wasn’t that he had too high an opinion of himself: he knew that he was not the best-looking man that Leonor would meet that month; he wasn’t even the best-looking patient on the ward. He was prepared to be rebuffed, which he was, several times. In the end, though, he got his woman, he told Naomi. The relevance of this tale to Naomi’s situation was not apparent to her, she tells her sister. Perhaps what her father was thinking was not so much that she’d be inspired by this example of his persistence, but rather that she would feel unable to let him down now that he had opened his heart to her in this way: ‘I’d been made his confidante, so I would have to repay him with a bit more exertion,’ she concludes, as the barriers start to rise.

  ‘Well, it worked,’ says Kate, restarting the car.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ says Naomi. ‘Maybe I just snapped out of it anyway. I can’t remember. But the chronology is interesting.’

  ‘Because?’ Kate asks.

  ‘Well, he must have been seeing that Wilson woman at the time. Do you suppose he was persistent with her as well?’ Naomi wonders airily, scanning the sky.

  ‘I think we know the story of what happened with Janice Wilson,’ says Kate. She glances at her sister, who is looking at her as though beguiled by her naivety. ‘Nothing to be gained by revisiting that one.’

  Naomi sustains the look for a few seconds more. Turning away, she sighs and says: ‘You’re right.’ After a half-minute of silence, she resumes: ‘Can’t have been easy for her, coming to England on her own.’

  ‘Who? Mum?’

  ‘Maybe she recognised a kindred spirit in Dad. A fellow non-quitter.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘And that’s why she prefers you.’

  ‘She doesn’t prefer me, Naomi.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Naomi tells her, with a smile that seems genuinely tender. ‘We don’t have to pretend that the love has been spread around equally. It never is. How could it be? She prefers you and has done for a long time, and that’s fine. In her situation I’d prefer you too. You’re the better daughter.’