Inglorious

by Joanna Kavenna

  ‘But you know, these bars, you can always find another terrible bar to work in. Although I am sentimental about this bar, because it’s where we met.’ And he patted her hand, laughing.

  ‘That’s true, how could you leave it?’ she said, awkwardly, and thought Now what? But now he was giving her a plate of something he had cooked, which tasted of cheese and spinach and grease. ‘You know, I should have cooked something better,’ he said, shrugging at the mass of cheese he had created.

  ‘It’s great,’ she said. ‘Delicious.’

  ‘You’re lying, and you can’t even do it well,’ he said. He smiled. ‘You are such an honest person, to see you struggling to praise my food is moving. Really, it’s moving.’

  ‘I’m not lying,’ she said. They smiled at each other. That was easy enough, and then there was a pause. They brushed each other’s hands, claimed it as an intimate moment. They paused again then Rosa told him she was going away. ‘Tomorrow, for a few days,’ she said. ‘But only for a few days.’ Then I will need a place to stay. But how about it, Andreas? For a week, or so? The problem was she hardly knew him. This banter, and the way they stuck to facts, concrete statements about family history and observable qualities, meant they never really progressed. They talked like friendly strangers, for the most part. It unnerved her. It seemed to be what he wanted. And she, perhaps she had also insisted upon this careful talk, because it allowed her to conceal her thoughts. Much of what she thought she couldn’t say to him, aware that he would believe her arrogant or a fool. And what would she say? Andreas, you’re a great guy, better than I deserve. It’s a failure of mine that I can’t respond to your overtures of kindness. But thanks for the melted cheese. She would hardly be saying that to him. So she put her head down to the trough and ate.

  ‘Lucky you, to go away,’ said Andreas. He took her hand and brought the fork to her mouth. Then he smiled and made to wipe her lips. She shook him off, but gently.

  ‘Where are you going anyway?’ he said, leaning back in his chair again.

  ‘Oh, friends of mine. They have a house in the Lake District. It’s very beautiful.’

  ‘Why are you going away, when you could hang around with me and be fed with a fork?’

  She laughed and said, ‘I know, it’s crazy.’ But he seemed serious. ‘Really, don’t go away,’ he said. ‘Or come away with me in a couple of weeks. When I get paid I’ll take you away.’ Now he took her hand. ‘You know you want to.’ He looked directly at her, and this made her embarrassed. She held his gaze for a brief moment, then dropped her eyes. She was trying to think of something light to say. ‘I’d love to,’ she said, looking down at her plate. ‘The thing is, I’ve been promising these friends of mine for months that I would go to see them.’

  ‘Aren’t you worried about how it looks?’ he said. She looked up at him, and saw he was quite relaxed, his legs slung over the arm of a chair, his hair falling onto his fine face. He lifted a hand and seized his glass. He drank, staring at her over the brim.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s looks as if you are running away because you can’t control yourself with me,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said. She always entered into his badinage, though she sometimes cringed a little as she did it. ‘I’m hot-footing away from my powerful feelings.’

  But that was close to the bone, if not the bone of their relationship – dalliance, friendship, however she was naming it – then certainly it was quite close to the raw and ragged existential bone, and Rosa stopped. She even blushed, which confused him, and he leant across the table and kissed her on the cheek. Really, Andreas was like a symbol of simplicity – dark eyes and hair, white shirt, crisp clothes. This is how it might be, he was saying, if you just relax. She dropped her fork on the plate and sat back. ‘Still, I tell you, you are a little too thin,’ said Andreas. ‘You need much more cheese in your food.’

  ‘It’s delicious, thanks.’

  ‘So how was your day?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, busy,’ she said.

  There was much Andreas didn’t know, and at present he thought she was between contracts, looking for something truly fine with a decent offer already in hand. He thought that because she had told him and he seemed to believe her. She wasn’t sure why. It only made things more complicated. Instead of telling him about Brazier and the agony of the shoes, she had to summon an altogether different day, invent and galvanise. ‘How’s your search for the perfect job going?’ he asked. He spooned her out some more food.

  ‘Nervous energy,’ she said. ‘That’s the thinness.’

  ‘Yes, but you could plump up and no one would mind,’ he said. ‘I’d enjoy it.’

  ‘The job hunt is fine,’ she said. ‘Just as usual.’

  ‘I’m glad you came,’ he said, kissing on the cheek again. ‘I was having a really boring evening.’

  ‘I wanted to see you,’ she said. ‘Of course, that’s why I came.’

  In fact I wanted to ask you. Could I come and stay? Just for a few days? The weekend and then a few days beyond. Just while I look for somewhere else and find a job? She was very hungry, so she thought she would eat a little more and then ask. When she had finished she ran her fingers across the plate and licked them. A neon light spluttered above their heads; behind the smell of soap was a background trace of detergent. Andreas passed her a glass of wine and said, ‘Better?’

  ‘Much better,’ she said, cracking him a smile. He took her hand and kissed it.

  *

  Later they were sitting in his small living room, where the furniture was old and matted with dust. There was a jaundiced collection of newspapers on an oak table. ‘My cuttings,’ he had explained, when she asked. A spotlight was angled from the mantelpiece, beaming at the fireplace. He had stacked a series of plants by the window, set off against thick green curtains. The effect was determinedly theatrical. There was a piano, its keys chipped at the ends. On the piano was a portrait of Andreas, in theatrical mode, lit carefully, the shadows making him more chiselled than he was. But he looked more beautiful in the flesh, she thought, turning towards his wide, solid back and the slender lines of his hips. Their talk kept drying up, like a stream in a drought, but they battled on, determined to wring out every last word they could think of. That was part of the problem, these heavy pauses they sustained. She felt them like a kick to her stomach; they made her hunch up. He was more relaxed than she was, and didn’t seem to mind. He could sit cracking his knuckles, smiling at her. As if it didn’t matter at all! Several times, Rosa asked Andreas about the other actors in his play. Several times he replied. It was a conspiracy between them, to pretend each time was the first. And when he talked he moved his hands, and his hands were elegant, good to watch. He had a wide jaw like a dog. This suited him and made his hair curl up at the ends. It was all delightful, this vision of youth was quite the consolation she required, and for a few moments she thought that instead of going north she would settle herself in Andreas’s flat and stay there, until he noticed that she did nothing and asked her to leave.

  ‘Can I help you with your lines?’ she said.

  ‘Which lines? Oh those. Yes, well, I have managed to commit them all to memory. It’s been a long day. But you are a sort of highlight.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Then Andreas said, carelessly, ‘Are you going to stay up in the country and become a lass?’

  ‘A lass?’ she said.

  ‘You know, a wench. These are archaic words I was definitely taught when I studied Chaucer.’

  ‘You studied Chaucer?’

  ‘Yes, they let me do it, even a person as idiotic as me,’ said Andreas. He smiled, but she thought he was offended.

  ‘No, no, I meant, I’m surprised, in all your international schools and so on, that they bothered with medieval English.’

  He thrust out his lower lip and looked more boyish than before. ‘Well, they had to teach us something. So are you?’

  ‘Stay
ing in the countryside? Of course not,’ she said. ‘My invitation is for a few days only.’

  ‘Well, make sure you come back,’ he said. And there was a subtle shift to his expression; she noticed he looked briefly embarrassed.

  ‘So tell me something else about your play,’ she said, quickly.

  ‘Rosa, there’s nothing more to tell.’ He took her hand again.

  *

  ‘Job interview,’ she said, to change the subject. He hardly knew the half of it. ‘I had an interview with a company in Hoxton,’ she said, dimly remembering a scenario from some weeks before. Then she really had an interview, had really worn a suit and tried to impress some kids of thirty who were wearing spotted ties and handkerchiefs in their breast pockets. They claimed to be a ‘media consortium’. She claimed to be a ‘top arts correspondent for a leading newspaper, enjoying a career break while I reprioritise’. They were all on the same page for a good twenty minutes and then Rosa was aware that she had fallen silent a while ago and so had they. Perhaps it was round about then that they looked her up and down and wondered why her suit was frayed and what she had done to her hand – earlier that day she had shut her hand in a door in a mistaken moment, and had really ripped it apart. Her hand was black with bruises. She couldn’t do it, and after a decent interval they thanked her and said they would call her. That was a resounding lie, and she never heard from them again. The doors of their office were swing doors, like a cowboy saloon, and once she swung them open she trotted out of their particular town and never went back. She was telling this to Andreas, cutting out some of the details, and he was laughing at the image of the kids and the cowboy door. ‘Kids?’ he said. ‘How old?’ Five years older than you, she didn’t say, and laughed and said, ‘Kids in mind, of course.’

  ‘Rather than kids in station, like me,’ he said. That was another of their clunky bits of repartee, and she laughed and allowed him to stroke her hand. If there had been an audience she would have cared more. Still, she had to drink a jar just to get over the embarrassment of watching herself tapping her hand on her knee as he played her a song he liked. All this furniture, she thought, suggested permanence. It was clear that Andreas had affluent parents, because there was no way he could have bought all of this from his bar tips. It evoked a large parental house, rooms full of superfluous objects, shipped out to their son as he struggled in London. It was a touching idea, these comfortable generous parents. For a moment she admired the leather of the chairs and then she wondered what she was doing here, smiling and talking very loud, lying mostly. It was a good question, one she consistently failed to answer. It was solitude she craved and feared, attracted to its possibilities and then repulsed again when she glimpsed them. So she came round here and said her nothings to Andreas. She was a metic, she thought. But perhaps they were all metics, after all, waiting patiently for keys to the city.

  Andreas leapt at the shelves with enthusiasm, and brought back a CD. It was traumatised guitar music, he said. ‘It has a veneer of angst. Musical Weltschmerz. I picked it out thinking of you.’ That was another joke and she laughed. This mess we’re in, went the song. The city sun sets over me. And I have seen the sun rise over the river … This mess we’re in. This sort of music was familiar to her. As a teenager she had consoled herself to the sound of countless guitar bands. Like millions of others, she sat in her room with the curtains drawn, headphones on. It irritated her mother, who thought she was wasting her time. She was indiscriminate – miserablism to the sound of a guitar was fine enough. The Smiths, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Field Mice, The Breeders, Babes in Toyland, The Sugarcubes, The Pixies. A dreaded sunny day so let’s go where we’re happy and I’ll meet you at the cemetery gates. Keats and Yeats are on your side … they were born and then they lived and then they died. Seems so unfair, I want to cry. She had listened to The Pixies at the age of sixteen, touting around in second-hand shops for bargain bohemian cut-offs, wearing grandad coats and black plimsolls. Andreas had been six at the time, though perhaps that didn’t matter. She had always liked guitar music. But she was quite eclectic, even as a kid. Opera, classical orchestral, plainsong. La Traviata, Bruckner, Mozart, Carmen, Schoenberg, Tallis, Schubert, Cage, Glass, anything, almost anything, except jazz. We sit in silence you look me in the eye directly sang Thom Yorke in a falsetto. Rosa tapped her foot. She had recently stopped listening to music, because she had sold her stereo and all her CDs. Of course, this is youth, she remembered. Not so much has changed.

  ‘I was thinking about you the other day,’ said Andreas. He put his arms around her. It was a clumsy gesture, but they sustained it.

  ‘And what were you thinking?’

  ‘I was wondering if you would like this band I was listening to. They’re called The Kills.’

  ‘Love is a Deserter,’ said Rosa promptly, thinking of the signs she had read.

  ‘Very good. And there’s another song I’ve been listening to, I’ll play it,’ said Andreas. There was a static pause while he stood and switched the CDs over. Then she heard a guitar and a voice and the lyric was ‘Hey Lyla, a star’s about to fall.’

  ‘Very interesting,’ said Rosa.

  When the cuckoo clock rapped out midnight, Andreas moved her on to the sofa, told her to lie back and relax. ‘Let’s stay up really late,’ said Andreas. ‘You only have to travel and travelling when you’re tired dulls the boredom and I have, as I said already, almost nothing to do.’ He always spoke in this precise way. He was careful with English, concerned to keep himself accurate. For him it was definitely a game. The idea made her more comfortable, and she tried to relax into it, watching his back while he went to find another CD. He flicked his hair from his face, showing a fine stretch of cheekbone. His shirt was still creaseless. At 1 a.m., with empty bottles lined up on the table, she said, ‘Andreas, do you believe in providence? Or in something else? Do you believe in God? Or in Osiris, Shiva, Buddha, Viracocha, Yabalon, Allah, any of the rest?’ He shook his head. She wasn’t sure if he meant he didn’t believe in any of them or he didn’t see the point of talking about it. Always he was more decisive. He stopped drinking. Batting away another enquiry, he undid his shirt. She was tired; her vision was no longer clear. She saw him as if from far away, bringing his mouth towards hers. Automatically, she received his kisses. He was moving her towards the bedroom and she allowed him to lead her. She watched him undressing, smoothing out his trousers and putting them on a chair. She allowed him to take off her clothes. She saw the smoothness of his skin, the strong contours of his thighs.

  *

  At 3 a.m. she was watching the time flashing on a radio alarm clock. Andreas was lying with his head in his arms. She turned towards him, thinking why not just say it all, when she heard the regular sound of his breathing and saw his eyes were shut. She stared at the gaps in the curtains, where the streetlights flickered across the darkness. She saw Andreas’s shirt, hung neatly on his cupboard door. She fell into a doze which continually threatened to become wakefulness, coasting uneasily through the dark hours, lying half-conscious with the day breaking around her.

  Get a job.

  Read the The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

  Read History of Western Philosophy

  FIND A PLACE to live

  ASK ANDREAS

  Read Francis Yates on Giordano Bruno

  Explain everything to Andreas

  Wash your clothes

  Clean the kitchen.

  Phone Liam and ask about the furniture.

  Go to the bank and beg them for an extension – more money, more time to pay back the rest of your debt.

  Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities.

  Read The Golden Bough, The Nag-Hammadi Gospels, The Upanishads, The Koran, The Bible, The Tao, the complete works of E. A. Wallis Budge

  Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierke
gaard, Nietzsche, and the rest

  Unearth the TEMP

  Distinguish the various philosophies of the way

  WALPURGIS NIGHT

  She heard the storm rattling the window when she woke. She lay on her side and stared at the room. In the distance, she could hear the humming of the fridge. Every so often the pitch rose, the fridge shuddered and there was a pause. Then it started up again. It was constant in its inconstancy, like the interrupted trilling of the birds. She heard Andreas breathing beside her. The place smelt of him, a musty smell of aftershave and warm skin. There was a high whine in the walls, sharp and penetrating. She didn’t mind it. She liked the mingled sounds. Now she could hear a noise in the pipes, like the beating of a distant drum. There was a clock somewhere in the room, scraping out seconds. She heard the city opening itself up to the morning. Cars and a low murmur of lorries. An engine moving up the gears. A few drills hammering into concrete, industrial arpeggios. Now a bird sang a soprano solo. She heard a train honking through a tunnel, the noise muffled, and the grinding of wheels on tracks.

  Things to pack, she thought. She went on weighing things up with her head in the consoling softness of the pillow. A warm pair of shoes. A jumper. Your jeans. Socks and other small items. A shirt. Buy them some presents. Take a newspaper. Ask Andreas. But she thought she would phone him from the Lakes. She would try her father first, over lunch, and then she would go away and phone Andreas with the soothing distance of a few hundred miles between them. Through the window she saw it was a tempestuous day. The night had blasted at the clouds, tearing them into vapour rags. Everything was ragged, the trees were bowed. Rain was falling in thick lines and leaves were gusting along the pavement. She turned to Andreas and kissed his head. He moved slightly and said, ‘Was? What?’ She kissed him again, and he settled. She gathered herself in the half-light, reaching for her watch, twisting it onto her wrist. There was a plant on the table, something like an orchid, deep red. Behind it she saw faint rows of books. It was too dark to see the titles on the spines. She heard someone walking along the corridor outside; she listened to their footsteps on the stairs.