The river is the river

by Buckley, Jonathan;

  ‘You’re not eating enough, though.’

  ‘I’m not eating much at the moment, I grant you. But I’m eating what I need to eat and what I can safely eat. You want me to be careful and that’s what I’m doing. Taking it step by step. Being sensible. You should approve.’

  ‘But have you had a check-up?’

  ‘Why would I need a check-up?’

  ‘Because you’ve put a huge amount of stress on your body. You might have done some serious damage to your heart. I’ve done some research. If your body—’

  ‘I bet you have,’ says Naomi, as if research were a peculiar and amusing compulsion. ‘I have not damaged my heart. Feel,’ she says, offering a wrist, with two fingers pressed to her pulse point.

  ‘What sort of condition is Bernát in?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, clearly he went too far. There could be all sorts—’

  ‘He knows what he’s doing,’ says Naomi.

  ‘So he’s a medical expert too?’

  Looking at her sister, Naomi blinks four or five times, quickly, as if this last remark were inexplicably aggressive.

  With a sensation akin to that of moving out from the shelter of the harbour wall, Kate says: ‘There is something I have to ask you.’

  ‘About Bernát, I’m guessing,’ says Naomi.

  ‘His brother is called Oszkár, yes?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And he’s a marine biologist.’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘Expert on catfish.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A world authority, in fact.’

  ‘So I believe.’

  ‘To be an authority one must have published several articles on the subject, I would assume.’

  ‘Possibly. I don’t know.’

  ‘If you’re an academic nowadays you’re obliged to publish, at regular intervals. That’s how the system works. You publish; the university gets the credit; you keep your job.’

  ‘You may well be right.’

  ‘I think I am,’ says Kate, feeling the swell of the open water. ‘So doesn’t it strike you as rather odd, then, that you can spend hours searching the internet and find no trace of a marine biologist called Oszkár Kalmár?’

  ‘You’ve spent hours searching for Bernát’s brother?’

  ‘Maybe not hours. But a thorough search, yes.’

  ‘Why?’ asks Naomi, as if Kate had confessed to something idiotic but inconsequential, like having her car resprayed with polka dots.

  ‘I wanted to see what he looked like,’ Kate answers. Naomi raises an eyebrow. ‘That’s not so strange, wanting to put a face to the story,’ Kate tells her.

  ‘So I assume you looked for Bernát too,’ says Naomi.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Find anything?’ Naomi asks. She might be an insouciant suspect, asking questions of the policewoman who has just ransacked her house.

  ‘No, but I didn’t expect to.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Given his line of work. But Oszkár – that’s different, isn’t it? You’d expect some sort of public profile. So why couldn’t I find him?’

  ‘Perhaps you were spelling his name wrong.’

  ‘How do you spell it?’

  ‘O-s-z-k-a-accent-r K-a-l-m-a-accent-r.’

  ‘Tried that. He seems to be non-existent.’

  ‘No – you couldn’t find him on the internet. That’s not the same thing.’

  ‘There can’t be many eminent scientists who have absolutely no presence online,’ says Kate. ‘Not a single mention. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?’

  Naomi rubs her face, as if it were middle of the night and the conversation were in its third hour. ‘What’s your point, Katie?’ she asks.

  ‘Can I be blunt?’

  ‘I think you’re going to be, whatever I say.’

  ‘My point is, I’m concerned.’

  ‘About what? Oszkár’s low internet profile?’

  ‘About shutting yourself off with this man.’

  ‘Why? You think he might be dangerous?’ says Naomi, clasping a hand on her mouth and doing horror-struck eyes.

  ‘Well, what he did to himself was dangerous, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You want to interview him?’

  ‘I’d like to meet him, certainly.’

  ‘To put him through the vetting procedure?’

  ‘To talk to him.’

  ‘About his intentions towards the little sister?’

  ‘No. To—’

  ‘It’s not going to happen.’

  ‘Why not? I met Gabriel.’

  ‘I thought you’d find Gabriel acceptable. You wouldn’t like Bernát.’

  ‘I don’t know why you say that.’

  ‘Because I know you wouldn’t. You’d hate him. You’d find him pretentious.’

  ‘And he might find me boring and bourgeois. But I’d still like to meet him. I met Gabriel, and he—’

  ‘Katie, it’s not going to happen,’ Naomi states, with a percussive glance.

  ‘Fine,’ says Kate, hands raised an inch from the tabletop, in an incipient gesture of surrender. She stirs her coffee, though there is no reason to.

  ‘There is nothing to worry about,’ says Naomi. One might think that Kate rather than herself was the vulnerable one.

  Kate gazes into the dregs. Perhaps from this position, she thinks, it would be possible to retreat. But she finds herself saying, quietly, as if in closing: ‘But what do you know about him?’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘Seems a straightforward question to me.’

  ‘I know a great deal about him. That’s what I’ve been talking about for the past three days.’

  ‘But I mean: what do you actually know about him? Not: what has he told you? What do you really know?’

  ‘What do you know about me?’ Naomi counters.

  ‘Be serious, Naomi. This is important.’

  ‘I am being serious. I’ve spent a lot of time with him. I know him very well. As well as anyone can know anyone else.’

  ‘Well, that’s—’

  ‘But of course you know that I’m deluded. You—’

  ‘I’m not saying that.’

  ‘Yes you are.’

  ‘I’m not. But I have my doubts, I have to say. The person you’ve described – he makes me uneasy.’

  ‘Then that’s my fault.’

  ‘I don’t think it is. The story of the brother – well, to be honest with you, I don’t think he has a brother. Or not a brother of that name. I think it’s a story.’

  ‘Everyone tells stories,’ replies Naomi in an instant; it might, thinks her sister, be a phrase from some vapid song.

  ‘An invented story, I mean.’

  ‘Everybody exaggerates. Everybody lies. Particularly people who know too much.’

  ‘I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.’

  ‘OK,’ says Naomi, with an indifferent shrug.

  ‘Please, don’t be glib.’

  ‘My apologies. I didn’t think I was being glib. We can’t all live up to your standard.’

  ‘Naomi, please.’

  ‘Please what?’ says Naomi, presenting a sullen and ingenuous face.

  ‘Are you saying that I might be right?’

  ‘Right about what?’

  ‘The brother.’

  ‘No. I’m saying I don’t care what you think,’ says Naomi; she speaks with no apparent anger, but her lips are whitening.

  ‘Naomi—’

  ‘You think I’m a gullible idiot. That’s what you’re saying.’

  ‘Of course not. I just—’

  ‘Yes you do. You think I’ve been taken in by some sort of charlatan.’

  ‘I don’t know him. I’ve never met him.’

  ‘But you have an opinion. You’ve arrived at a verdict.’

  ‘No. I have my doubts. Some of the things you’ve told me, I—’

  ‘You’ve not understood,’ Nao
mi suggests, as if helping.

  ‘Perhaps. But the person you’ve been telling me about – to me, sometimes, he sounds …’. Leaving the sentence unfinished, she makes a hesitating grimace.

  ‘Say it,’ says Naomi. She flicks the empty coffee cup with a fingernail, five or six times, to provoke her with its tuneless ringing. ‘Come on. Words are your thing. Don’t beat around the bush. Finish the sentence – “he sounds …”. Go on.’

  Kate confronts her sister’s gaze, and sees contempt. ‘Some of it strikes me as bogus,’ she says, with a cringe of apology.

  Closing her eyes, Naomi begins to rub her temples with paired fingertips, mechanically, as if turning small wheels. For a full ten seconds she does this, then she looks at Kate. She looks into her eyes as if peering through small apertures into a room in which something very small has been hidden. ‘You’ve been talking to Gabriel, haven’t you?’ she says, smiling at the foolishness of the conspirators. ‘How did you get his number?’

  ‘He rang me.’

  ‘No he didn’t,’ Naomi tells her. ‘Why would he have done that?’

  ‘It was some time ago. When you were together.’

  ‘And how would he have known your number?’

  ‘I gave it to him, when he was here.’

  Naomi scrutinises her sister’s face, assessing the plausibility of the explanation, then sits back, suddenly deciding that it’s not worth the thought. ‘Well, I’m sure you and Gabriel had a productive meeting of minds,’ she says.

  ‘He still cares about you.’

  ‘So he says.’

  ‘We all do.’

  ‘But you’re not happy that I’m happy,’ says Naomi, not in protest, but as if simply drawing attention to a paradox.

  ‘I do want you to be happy. Of course I do. But I’m not sure—’

  ‘I understand: you think you know best,’ Naomi interrupts. ‘You think I need to be saved from myself, and from this charlatan. But I don’t need to be saved. I know what I’m doing. I know Bernát, and you don’t,’ she goes on, in a passionless near-monotone. ‘There is nothing bogus about him. He is a mathematician, and there is no such thing as a bogus mathematician. But that’s only part of who he is. You haven’t heard him talk. You have to hear him to know how he thinks, to appreciate his mind. He’s an original. His brain doesn’t work like yours or mine. But it’s not just a question of how he talks. Forget about the stories. What’s most important is what he does. That’s the main thing, for everybody, isn’t it? Martin always says so. Your character and what you do are not separate things. You’re not acting out of character when you get drunk and hit your girlfriend. That’s what you are: you are a man who gets drunk and hits his girlfriend. You are what you do,’ she says, seeming to believe that a point has been unanswerably made.

  ‘I’m not following,’ says Kate.

  ‘It’s a simple point,’ says her sister. ‘He gives money away. That’s what he does. It’s not a pose. And it does some good. Money is what gets things done in this world,’ says Naomi, as if she thinks her sister would be inclined to disagree. ‘And what happened in Scotland – that wasn’t for my benefit. It wasn’t a performance.’

  ‘I never said it was.’

  ‘It was very, very real, and true. And brave. Extremely brave. I couldn’t have done what he did,’ says Naomi.

  ‘Thank God,’ Kate cannot prevent herself from muttering.

  Naomi pauses to consider her sister; there is some disappointment in her eyes. ‘It’s hard for you to understand,’ she says, with sudden sympathy. Then she proceeds to tell Kate that Bernát is a deeply spiritual man. In three sentences she uses the adjective four times. It is to be inferred that the spiritual is for Kate an alien domain. Hearing Bernát play the piano, Kate would think that Bernát was unaccomplished, Naomi tells her. Kate would hear the mistakes and think that he was pretending to be able to play. But the wrong notes don’t matter – the spirit of the music is what matters, and Bernát always understands the spirit. Kate needs everything to be in order, her sister tells her, as if commenting on something as neutral as her height. Kate is like Martin in this respect, says Naomi. They are both supremely reasonable. But Bernát knows that the rational can only take us so far. He cannot be put into a category, and that’s why Kate is uneasy about him. ‘You want explanations, but all I can give you is descriptions,’ says Naomi. Her voice has a terrible calmness; anyone overhearing her from outside the room would think that point was following point in a way that was logical. She no longer seems to be trying to convince her sister of anything: it’s more like a recitation of points that she has committed to memory and now needs to discharge, omitting nothing. Kate’s problem, Naomi tells her, is that she thinks that living in isolation is irresponsible.

  And here, at a slight hesitation, Kate can interrupt. ‘No,’ she says. ‘But society is what makes us what we are. We are social animals. We need other people.’

  ‘I don’t,’ says Naomi, with a rueful half-smile, suggesting that she wishes this were not the case.

  The ruefulness is entirely for Kate’s sake, Kate knows. ‘You won’t be alone in Scotland,’ she points out.

  ‘For most of the day I will be,’ Naomi answers. ‘We’ll each have a cell,’ she says, putting some humour into the phrase, by way of appeasement. Kate slides a hand towards her sister; it is taken, lightly, as if it were a globe of thin glass, and quickly released. ‘I will be happy,’ she says, and it sounds like a declaration of modest intent.

  26.

  Kate’s mother is in the garden, by the pond. Her hair has been washed and teased into as full a form as it can support, and she is wearing the pink cashmere cardigan that Kate bought for her last year. The wheelchair has been set in the sunlight. Her mother’s face is raised; her eyes are closed and she is smiling.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ says Kate.

  Her mother’s eyes come open, as if from sleep, and her smile broadens. ‘Hello, Katie,’ she answers. She keeps her face angled into the light, as if the sun’s rays were a medical treatment and she is under instruction not to move until told to do so.

  Kate sits on the bench, and her mother puts a hand on her arm. There is strength in the fingers, and no tremor that Kate can feel. ‘How are you today?’ Kate asks.

  ‘Well,’ she replies. ‘Very well.’ She closes her eyes and restores the smile.

  ‘You look it,’ says Kate. Her mother’s hand tightens for a moment, but the eyes stay closed and the smile does not change. ‘You’ve had your hair done,’ she says.

  ‘Thank you. The German girl did it.’

  ‘A professional job,’ Kate tells her. ‘Which German girl?’

  Her mother opens her eyes to search the garden. ‘Her,’ she says, pointing towards the ramp that leads up to the conservatory; on the ramp, a nurse is steering a wheelchair; her name is Kornelia and she’s Polish; and she must be at least thirty-five. The wheelchair is occupied by a tiny woman, swaddled in many blankets; she looks like a chrysalis.

  Leonor surveys the garden with a benign gaze. ‘A beautiful day,’ she remarks. She strokes a sleeve of Kate’s jacket. ‘This is pretty,’ she says. ‘Is it new?’

  ‘Fairly,’ Kate answers; it’s a couple of years old, and she’s worn it to The Willowes several times.

  ‘I thought so,’ her mother says, gratified. ‘A pretty colour. Petrol blue,’ she remarks, then she recalls the pullover of the same colour that Kate had worn when she was a teenager; she recalls which Christmas it was bought for, and what Naomi received that year – an encyclopaedia of wildlife that had a fold-out panorama of an African rainforest, which Naomi had copied in crayon. ‘It took her months,’ her mother reminisces.

  Kate remembers it: Naomi at the table every evening, proceeding inch by inch across the scroll of paper, matching every strand of fur, every leaf-vein; she can see the armoury of pencils, aligned in a spectrum along the table’s edge; she has a glimpse of young Naomi, with her face close to the paper, concentrating like a lacemake
r. Her mother, prompted by Kate, recalls the discipline with which Naomi went about the task: the ordering of the pencils; the sharpening of each one after use; the care taken not to crease or smudge the paper.

  ‘You could see every single scale on that snake,’ says her mother, with pride and wonder.

  The drawing was remarkable, Kate agrees. But what’s more remarkable is her mother’s state of mind today. It’s months since she was last so voluble, so cogent.

  Kornelia and the tiny woman are passing. The tiny woman grins at them, as if this excursion were a treat that she is enjoying immensely.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Grunberg,’ Kate’s mother says, like a grand chatelaine to a fee-paying visitor. Miss Grunberg chuckles, as if at a sly joke; the sound she makes is like the clicking of a plastic door catch.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Staunton,’ says Kornelia; the greeting, Kate is pleased to observe, is suggestive of respectful affection.

  ‘This is my daughter,’ answers her mother, placing a hand on her daughter’s arm; and Kornelia plays her part perfectly, smiling at Kate as one would smile at a first introduction.

  Miss Grunberg and Kornelia continue down the path, watched by Kate’s mother, who watches them until they have turned out of sight, behind the laurel hedge. ‘A good girl,’ she remarks. ‘Kornelia. A handsome name. It suits her,’ she says, as though to herself, and she raises her face into the sunlight again, closing her eyes. ‘Talk to me, Katie,’ she murmurs. ‘Are you writing a book?’

  ‘Just starting one, I hope.’

  ‘You don’t know if you’re starting one?’

  ‘Early days,’ Kate explains. ‘It’s like being pregnant. Things often go wrong in the first few weeks.’

  Her mother’s laugh is barely audible. ‘What’s it about?’ she asks, smiling into the warmth of the sunlight.

  ‘A woman called Dorota,’ Kate replies; she recounts as much of the story as there is to tell.

  Under the eyelids her mother’s eyes are moving, as if scanning the figure of Dorota. ‘People like ghost stories,’ she says.

  ‘They do.’

  ‘But why not set it in London?’

  ‘Prague just seemed the right place,’ says Kate. It’s like picking the location for a film, she explains.

  ‘But have you ever been there?’ her mother asks.