Clovis laughs. You mention bliss. I think content is a word I like.
You give nothing away. You are saying, I have nothing, so I have nothing to give, or to lose.
Clovis watches the lake. Entirely useless, you mean.
That’s not true, says Jerome. And in fact my words weren’t either, you do give certain things, words mainly. Ideas. You give one to think.
You’re playing with words, says Clovis. You could say I give, but I do not give away because I keep what I give.
Can I come again, asks Jerome. Have another chat?
To be sure, says Clovis. Feel free.
27
Jerome
I got into the habit of dropping in to see Clovis from time to time. Well, I say habit, it is amazing how quickly some things come to seem habits. A few times, anyway. I’d take a bottle of wine, some decent red, he’d fetch his glasses, two rather smudged and puddled stemless goblets. After the first time I took out a clean handkerchief and polished them. A good idea, said Clovis, in his placid way, neither the laundry nor the dishwashing is of a high standard in this establishment. On the other hand, he said, it is at least glasses, better than it once was, discarded polystyrene coffee cups recycled. Once the girl Gwyneth was there and he and she shared a glass, but I think generally she didn’t come near when she saw me. We drank modestly, there would always be some left over in the bottle. He would taste the wine in a considering manner, I got the impression he knew his wines, but he didn’t say much, he would look at me and show his pleasure in his face. His way of widening his eyes, and his expression settling into calm.
I tried to get him to talk about himself. Why? I was not entirely sure. Did I have a sense that he had something to teach me? Not really. His path, his trajectory perhaps, it was his. It could not be mine, we could not run parallel, so I believed, though we could intersect. I think I had a sense that the scale of things was different, after the visit of Clovis and Gwyneth to the restaurant. That there was a different context to things. But vaguely I felt this, and I wanted to know more precisely, how, what it meant, what his context, what his scale was. You see I was ambitious in those days, knowing was what I wanted, everything. Everything.
I tried wine as a way into him. I said it must pain him to drink cask crap when evidently he had a palate for a decent vintage. Oh, he replied, staring out across that lake of his, it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter. He made me think about that phrase. How often we say it and don’t mean it, we say it to comfort people, to shrug off pain, or anger, to pretend that we don’t care. When Clovis said it doesn’t matter you somehow believed him, that it was truly of no significance.
It’s easy to drink it, he said. It’s easy to drink too much. Maybe you keep having another glass to see if it will get any better. It doesn’t of course. But after a while you don’t notice.
I said he seemed like a man who’d known good wine in his time. Oh yes, he said. More than he deserved probably, and he’d done it and it was done but still there for the recalling and that was okay. I asked him had he been in business, and he said he supposed so, a professional business, and I said, You mean you were a businessman by profession, and he said, Rather a professional man by business, and I thought, he is just teasing me.
One day I felt irritated and I decided, I shall be blunt. Ask a tough question, come out with it. So I said: Did you embezzle? Because it seemed to me that there was some disgrace in his being there, he wasn’t just a drop-out, a layabout, there had been some disaster which was quite likely financial, and this was his way of taking the shame. Embezzle, he repeated, in his considering way. Yes, I suppose that is the word. Not by intention, but yes, in fact. That’s all he’d say, staring at the water, it was grey and choppy that day I remember, with the waves in regular points that looked like waves in a painting, one of those painstaking repetitive depictions of the kind you get in Chinese scrolls. I wondered how he saw them. His eyes were creased up, as usual, when he gazed like that, the corners crinkled with deep lines fanning out from them. I mentioned the spectacles, that I would happily get him some, but he said he was content as he was, and anyway if he did decide he wanted some he could go off and get them, he was not without resources.
I wanted him to ask me about my work. I wanted to say to him, I am devising a complete program for all knowledge, but he did not ask, and I was not able to blurt it out, suddenly, it is a delicate thing one’s life work and must be prepared for, mutually, and he gave no help. I had the sense of offering games he refused to play, and yet for me they were no games. He unsettled me.
I mentioned Gwyneth, but he said he knew very little about her. Somehow, he said, in this context, and he gestured vaguely at the lawn, the library, the lake, somehow curiosity seems improper. You have to just be, and let people be.
I took this as a rebuke, and did not press him. I poured more wine in our glasses. He held his up to the light, and murmured: Doesn’t the Bible say something about looking not on the wine when it is red? He took a mouthful. I think it is the best thing there is, he said. It’s possible to let slip most desires, but wine, I can think of nothing more harmless, or useful.
That was the closest I came to him at that time. This little opening of himself, to say that he so liked drinking wine. I said, Wine that maketh glad the heart of man.
Oh yes, he said. That’s a good one. And I replied, cynically I suppose, but my history has led me there, Well, you can find quotations in the Bible for and against most things, you know. He said, So, we can choose.
A pelican came cruising in and landed with a heavy skidding thump in the water just in front of us. Look, he said, don’t pelicans remind you of those Catalina flying-boats they had in the Second World War? I said I didn’t know much about them. He told me there were dumps of them – well, two or three, anyway – in the bush round the lake where he grew up, he could play in them, all the instruments were there, the dials and the controls, of course nothing worked. He got a book out of the library so he could find out about them. It seemed dreadful, those huge intricate things, just rotting away in the bush. But what a plaything for kids.
The pelican sailed about for a bit then took off even more clumsily than it had landed, its wings beating furiously, its frantic feet seeming to run across the water, until it heaved itself airborne, and then could cruise in the air with its own weighty grace. Catalina flying-boats, said Clovis again. Dumpy clumsy things, but then they flew. And isn’t it the case that flight is always graceful.
What did I want of Clovis? Maybe I wanted to understand why he was a happy man. Though he denied this. Contentment was as much as he allowed himself. And maybe, he reckoned, that was no more than time passing without disaster. Bliss made him nervous. Is it ever in the present, he asked, or is it always recollected.
I wanted to say, When I am with Flora it is bliss. But it’s not the kind of thing you say. And anyway, was it.
Clovis said, And maybe even remembered bliss is ambiguous, a product of all sorts of things, nostalgia, loss, present misery. I think that bliss is not for me. It sits too closely with anguish.
Thinking of him squinting across his lake, it suddenly occurs to me as I write this down in this gloomy bushfire summer: maybe he was seeing glory. As I did, when I was a child, before anybody diagnosed my dreadfully short sight. I thought then that the shifting shimmering dazzling nearly featureless light I saw was angels, that they were always with me. Until I got my spectacles, and saw clearly. There were no angels, no tremulous dazzling unknowable glory, but I gladly traded that for the real, the sharp outlines of things. Maybe Clovis had rediscovered glory. Abstract, undemanding, simply there. No wonder he didn’t want to give it up. But I knew I couldn’t afford to live in such a fool’s paradise. I needed to see.
That night I got the first of the series of curious emails that perhaps I ought to have seen as a warning of disaster, but only with hindsight is that at all clear. Ah, if hindsight were instant, how we could save ourselves
from error. It came on the private mail, which I always check before sitting down to my own work; the business ones I generally leave to the lads. At first I thought it was from Clovis, and I was furious that he could have so tricked me. There I was, thinking he was a genuine vagabond, genuinely a free spirit, and he had access to emails, he was as wired to the world of technology as I. How he must be laughing at me, at our plodding conversations concerning contentment and bliss, at my simpleminded equations of vagabondage with happiness. Not that the message announced itself as coming from him, it was some quite anonymous nickname from a public mail address, and when later I tried to communicate with it my missives bounced back. But well before this I had decided that the whole pelican thing was simply the idlest of coincidences. After all, life is full of such odd connections. It is art that needs to be rational. When I look back over the events that brought me to this plain little room, the randomness of them, the malicious randomness I sometimes think, I realise that in a work of fiction one could not get away with such scraping and grinding of events against one another. Readers would say, Aw, come on, do you expect us to believe that?
This is the email:
The Story of the Pelican
The mother pelican loves her baby birds so much she strokes them with her beak and claws but she gets a bit carried away, actually she’s quite violent and next thing they’re dead. So the father comes home and he’s pretty unhappy to see the little birds perished so he rips open his own breast with his beak. Then his blood runs out and all over the baby birds and they come back to life.
Except that St Jerome reckons that it is not the mother that kills the babies but a serpent who comes into the nest and bites them, though it is still the father that brings them back from the dead.
It is pretty obvious that this is a Christian story. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) when he wrote his book The Divine Comedy called Jesus ‘our pelican’ because he shed his blood to save humankind. ‘He is called pelican because he opened his side for our salvation, like the pelican that revives its dead brood with the blood of its breast.’
In another version of the fable the pelican rips open its breast to feed its kids with its heart’s blood. Probably because people didn’t look very carefully at the real bird and see that it was actually getting food out of the pouch in its great big beak, not out of its chest. The true legend is that the young are dead, killed, and that their father bathes them in his blood and brings them back to life.
This was accompanied by a picture, looking as if it came out of a medieval bestiary, a wonderful affair of vermilion and gold and turquoise, for all the world like a small masterpiece of the illuminator’s art. Except of course that it could move. The pelican, a melancholy and most beautifully linear bird, tears at his breast. Quite soon, the blood begins to drip, and then to flow, until it bathes the corpses of the baby birds. Finally the blood suffuses the screen, and seconds before the image is completely obscured by it the little ones stretch and sit up and open their beaks beseechingly.
I was charmed by this scene, and watched it enact itself several times. I was most grateful to have the fable to add to my collection of St Jerome lore, which though considerable did not include this little gem, and I stored it away in the appropriate file. I knew the story of the bird ripping its breast to feed its young, but not the version that it is actually resurrecting them. And certainly if you have to make a choice it is more comfortable to think of them being killed by a serpent than an over-loving mother. I am with St Jerome on that.
28
The willow sculpture was putting out leaves. Clovis walked past it in the late afternoon, going close up in this deserted time of day so he could see how it was going. The damage the boys with their bat had done to it was hardly evident, a slight unevenness at the side when you looked for it. The pattern was leafing up; he wondered how much it would be obscured by the new growth. Or whether the bones would still be quite clear. Maybe somebody would come along and trim it back. He wondered if that couple who created it made regular calls to keep their sculptures in good shape, or did they train somebody local to do it. At the moment it was very beautiful. He stood and gazed at it, the deft intricate repeating pattern of the basic structure and then the leaves putting forth, being all these things, deft, intricate, repetitive, but in their own wayward habit.
He bought fish and chips for dinner and walked back picking chips out of a hole in the wrapping while they were hot. He’d got enough for Gwyneth to have some and bought a cask of red wine as well, the usual four litres. Gwyneth wasn’t anywhere about. He ate his share, savouring the saltiness of the food that made drinking the wine after it such a pleasure, and then since Gwyneth still hadn’t come, and after all why should she, quite likely there was food from Joe for her to feed on, he finished her portion too, and then felt full so he had some more of the wine because wine is the best way to cut salty greasy food that threatens to bloat in the belly. He thought about Gwyneth because of her not being there, thought, of course it isn’t surprising that I should miss her a bit. He thought of her brown hair and the blonde tidemark that was retreating. You could measure the time she had been here by that tidemark, the number of centimetres her hair had grown, the space between it and the centre parting. He began to think of a time when she wouldn’t be here, which he had resolved not to do, what might happen was not something to be given head room. Ideas, words, the lake, these were things to be considered, but not the chance offerings of fate, the idle games-like events he had no power to influence, these were not to be thought of. He drank some more of the wine. Jerome was wrong, it wasn’t crap; it wasn’t very good but it was an excellent thing to drink.
Gwyneth’s hair reminded him of Lindi. He wondered if she was still blonde. Of course. Empires would come and go, and husbands, but she would remain blonde. There would be no poignant tidemark as in Gwyneth’s hair. Though he could not forget the thin line of dull roots, that anti-halo he’d suddenly observed, the moment of disillusion. He took some more mouthfuls of the red. Come to think of it, it wasn’t that long since he’d seen her. His present life seemed to stretch far back into the past. The same with his children, he’d been supposing them growing older, getting to the stage where they had not just stopped growing up but were decaying into time-marked survivors, but of course that wouldn’t be the case. The grandchildren, they might be different, difference comes so suddenly to the very young, but his own children could hardly have changed. He should not be imagining them as other than they were when he last saw them. Did he miss them? His heart felt sore in his body; red wine is soothing to sore hearts as to tight bellies. He was not sure whether he was more sad at missing them or at the fact that they did not seem to miss him. Or care whether he was alive or dead. Did they even know? He supposed they knew where he was, and that he still was, from the record of automatic teller withdrawals on his account, the paltry sums he took out to keep himself going, in fish and chips and this wine, and the nearly new trainers from Mancare, quite likely they were dead man’s shoes and this pleased him as once it would have spooked him. There was thriftiness, and something inherited, some story of another life, in these nicely fitting shoes, but you could never know what. Maybe he should be for once extravagant, buy some good bottles of wine like those Gwyneth had so much enjoyed at The Point. This red was perfectly all right normally, but perhaps a little party? Just the two of them and good wine for a change. That fellow Jerome wondered how he could cope with the cask crap; you should try it, old boy, he addressed him, raising his polystyrene cup in a toast to absent friends. It’s not really too bad. The polystyrene cup had its uses, you could put it down, it could be a bore having to hold a stemless glass, and make sure the absence of stem did not cut your fingers.
There was a light in the ferry terminal which made it slightly more cheerful than it might have been, or perhaps it was less, the feebleness of the harsh fluorescent tube bringing out the cheerlessness of the place on a dark winter night. And even though he sat hunch
ed in a corner with his feet up on the seat the wind got under the wall where it did not meet the ground and funnelled up and around in sneaky cold ways. The wine was pretty cold too but it still warmed. Once the cup fell over, he thought it might have blown over in one of the eddying currents of wind, or maybe he hadn’t put it down carefully enough. It didn’t have much in it, fortunately, which was probably why it had blown over, he filled it quite full so it would be safer, being heavier, and held it carefully in his hands, as though it might warm him which it never could, even if the contents were hot, not through the squeaking impervious polystyrene whose whole point was to be heatproof. But still he cupped it in his hands and felt the comfort of it which came from the gesture itself but also the fact that it had wine in it and he was drinking it.
Jerome of course had no children. You could wonder about the choices involved, if it was accident, being a Franciscan and then not having a wife, or if he had never wanted any. Clovis felt as an ache in his chest how much he had wanted children. Now he had them, and realised that childless he could never have imagined what pain they could cause, present or absent. He remembered his father saying, Sharper than a serpent’s child is a thankless tooth, and how it seemed a perfectly proper thing to say, it was years before he realised his old man had reversed the words. A serpent’s tooth it was, a thankless child. Four of them. He remembered the excitement of their births. He hadn’t actually been there because there was a problem, they’d all had to be caesareans, and he was rather sorry about that, he’d have liked to see a child born, his son come into the world, but anyway he’d celebrated. Champagne, days of it. The corks had popped their little cries of joy for weeks, months even. Two sons and then with delight a daughter. Two daughters. He couldn’t with the red wine in his mouth remember what drinking champagne felt like. Though he could suddenly smell the sweet stuffiness of Lindi’s room at the hospital filled with flowers. A bower of flowers. He heard her say a number of times, in that slightly fretful way she had, Such a chore, all I did in hospital was arrange my flowers. He remembered he’d felt invincible. Four children. Beautiful. Strong. This was him in the world, these four children, he was safe. Some core of him, some essential part, was safe forever in these children and their children’s children.
The Point Page 21