by Michael Pye
The boat turned a little, uneasy on the change of the tide. The lines looked likely to snag, and I started sorting them, pulling one in, straightening another, like someone tidying a room.
After a while, I said, “I don’t understand.”
“I’m going home. To Portugal.”
“You always said England was your home.”
“I said a lot of things,” my father said. “We’re not going to catch anything out here at midday.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You and Anna must come and see me, when I’m settled. Meanwhile, I’m putting the rest of the money in a Portuguese bank. Sixteen percent interest. Can’t get that here.” He always was concerned with money, not skilled at it but interested. He once asked if he could make money buying and selling the kind of paintings I know about.
“You’re sure—”
He stood up in the boat. If he’d slipped, moved suddenly, moved in anger, he’d have tipped the boat to one side and the dark river water would have soaked into our clothes and tangled us in long, green weeds. I wanted him to be calm.
He stretched himself, arms high behind his neck, and let his knees sag for a moment to stretch out his hamstrings.
“Surprised you, didn’t I?” He was grinning.
I took the oars this time, and I took us back into shore so fast the water sounded against the bows. He’d said nothing about this, nothing about a house in Portugal, or wanting to go back, or about selling the house in Stockwell where he had lived so long with my mother, and with me, in the smell of bay leaves, coffee, and pine disinfectant. It was shocking how little he had ever said.
The boat beached under us. “Steady,” my father said. “Steady.” He looked into the pale sky and said, “There’s rain coming.”
Anna came into the room after me and lay down on the bed. I could tell she was making a point by not touching.
“He never said anything,” I said. “He must have been thinking about this for months, years maybe. It takes time to sell a house. It takes time to build one, for Christ’s sake.” He wasn’t settled, after all; he was thinking of, maybe longing for Portugal, planning a house there with particular rooms and doors and gables. “He never said anything. He never even wanted to travel. Remember when I wanted to take him to—”
Her stillness interrupted me. It was louder than words.
“You bother me,” I said.
And she did: caught my eye, caught my breath at the most unexpected moments, broke into my planning and reading and left me smiling. I always had to wonder how long she could hold on. She hadn’t asked any questions, which was a bad sign. She’d been once to the bathroom, for medicine for her head.
“Maybe I should go with him,” I said.
“You’re the one who wanted him to be so independent. You’re proud of him, really.”
So it was going to be a lucky morning, calm as milk. At least she could engage with what I said.
It was not always like this. I had got into the messy habit of loving her totally and always being wary, both in parallel, alert for the moment when the pain in her head came back and temper broke up talk and words flew out sharply and the pain was present in the room like some wrecked ex-rival who now felt entitled to demand kind and polite attention.
I lay down beside her. I felt at home there, but I knew I couldn’t touch her because touch was one feeling too many for her.
She’d go for a walk. I’d go for a walk. We’d manage, somehow.
That same day, according to Mrs. Arkenhout’s diary, which she gave to the police, Hart went home.
I can’t imagine he decided where he was going. He’d have taken trains, got off too soon, waited for the next train all along the line—in hamlets, in art deco stations all gray and yellow and tiled, and on bleakly open halts. He liked coffee. I can guess he drank coffee, then another coffee.
He reached the town where he grew up. It’s a half-hour’s walk from the station to the Arkenhouts’ house, so he must have arrived at about four in the afternoon: the time when the domestic world would be drawing Mrs. Arkenhout again, time to get dinner ready, to finish the ironing, to water the garden, to be at all costs ready.
He didn’t need to find the way. He’d be halfway there before he even looked around. The houses were like a set of bright toys from a model railway, as clean, matched, colored, and artificial, and this fanatic neatness stood on land that was just as artificial, stolen from the sea. It was all so engineered and unlikely: a clean frame for growing up.
I know he remembered getting on his bicycle and riding over green polder land and still being always in sight between the flat, rectangular fields, behind the tall trunks of poplars. I know this because he told me, but he said it all happened in England. He rode down to the dunes and the sea, stripped off so nobody would know him by his clothes. He would walk about a soft, hilly sandscape, thinking he was alone for a moment, and a head, two known heads would appear over the next dune and trap him again in himself. Already, he didn’t just want to be alone. He wanted to be someone else.
When he could see the house, anyone in the house could see him. The garden still had that awkward quality: a garden that was required by the unwritten civic rulebook, but not loved.
Out here, there couldn’t be any question about it. He was Martin Arkenhout again, the child demanded by his parents’ marriage, proof there was nothing defective about them. He was Martin when he played here, schemed here, did homework, tried to get off with girls. The place remembered him and took him back—as if he could ever get away.
He must have been shocked by all this: the ease with which he slipped back past all the identities he had stolen, into the one he had so effortfully escaped.
He was a few hundred meters from the house and there were only three more buildings before the road gave up at a gate. For the moment, he might still be visiting the Boerrigters, or the Fields, if they never did manage to go home to the Malvern Hills, their dream of heights. Once he’d passed all their houses, he could only be Martin Arkenhout going home.
I suppose he was just trying on the possibility of going back. After all, he didn’t have the history for it anymore.
To fill in Martin Arkenhout he’d have to write himself a kind of novel to fill in the past ten years. Martin slouches through college. Martin drops out and gets back on the tracks, Martin in plaid pants, smoking dope, dreams of fulfillment and applies, when the dope wears off, to a bank, a firm of accountants, a cultural foundation. College stops, so Martin stops reading. Martin gets on a job like a railway train that’s carrying him somewhere someone else has decided. Martin lives with a girl in an apartment in Utrecht because they can’t afford Amsterdam; hey, Mum, look at me, I’m a commuter. Martin’s girl has an abortion. Martin leaves his girl. Martin fucks up. Martin takes Prozac. Martin would not have been good as Martin.
He’d burned this house down in his head, buried it in sand.
He stopped in the lane. He couldn’t afford to be seen, to start more people asking questions, but he could hardly be more conspicuous: a stick figure against flat land.
He saw his mother at a window. She couldn’t truly see his face, of course. She’d see a tall stick of a man out walking, an outline against a sky pale with heat; like a picture, she could make up the meaning later.
Mrs. Arkenhout let the newly washed curtains twitch into place; I can see her doing it.
There was a man out there walking along the road. He was coming this way, but he’d stopped short. You had to keep an eye out nowadays, neighbors looking after neighbors. But perhaps he was going to see the Boerrigters. Perhaps he was just going for a walk now the sun was less ferocious.
Then again, perhaps it really was Martin. She told herself not to think this; it wasn’t useful or proper. She suspected herself now of conjuring him back because it seemed even more impossible that he’d gone, so abruptly, so meanly: a statistic from some Southern state she’d always imagined as hot, dangerous, not very clean.
The man didn’t turn at the Boerrigters’. He had nowhere left to go except their house. If he came, he might kiss her or he might kill her. He might tell her things she didn’t want to know.
She must call the police; that was the proper, citizenly thing to do. But they already thought her peculiar, even mad: a woman who sees visions.
Out on the road, the man kicked a stone for a moment, stood aside for a passing car that must have been lost, and then stretched hugely.
Mrs. Arkenhout pulled the lace curtains shut. She watched him in the mirror above the fire until he walked briskly away. She put all this in her diary.
My father wanted coffee while the movers worked, but he truly wanted the coffee he could make for himself. This pale, milky stuff in a café cup had been an insult at first; now it was the perfect reason for leaving England. He drank it and didn’t need to say a word.
We could watch the house through the plate-glass window of the cafe. Old oak chairs came out, then cheap sofas. There was a big, obvious brass bed and even a hatstand. The men strained under the heavy stuff of a life. I didn’t like to ask what he was taking with him because that would tell me what objects—a table where I used to write, my mother’s boxes from her dressing table, mugs we each used—were being abandoned.
“You’ve got everything you need in Portugal? Already?”
He said, “I bought Portuguese things.”
“I don’t see why you want to leave all your life in London. I don’t get it.”
“I’m going because I can go.”
“You could always have gone back. But you didn’t.”
He said, “I can go back now.”
He left the sense of a story on the air, something he was not going to tell, but he didn’t make sense. I’d always imagined him as some kind of hero, a man who got away from the endless rule of the dictator Salazar; and it hardly mattered if he was really chasing work instead of liberty, since he had the courage to go.
But he could have gone back when Portugal turned into a democracy in the 1970s. Instead, he waited tables and he stayed in London.
He said, “Don’t ask questions.”
“Fine,” I said.
He stood up suddenly, went for change, and pulled his trouser pocket inside out with a rain of little coins. He scrambled to pick them up, then set a pile on the table to pay for the coffees; he didn’t need to ask the price after so many years.
I said, “Is there anything I can do?”
He glared at me, and he stiffened his back and walked to the house. I’d have known he was scared if he had been anyone but my father.
He went inside to check they’d taken everything, he said. I stood by the road and watched the last pallets and pieces of felt packed in the back of the van until one of the movers snapped out some sarcasm, and I walked back to the Underground station.
I had grown so safe I was boxed. I didn’t even know how little I knew. I had become ordinarily English, busied myself with career and marriage, and I never saw any need to help pull my father into his adopted country. I had always assumed my father was naturalized and settled like me.
I went to my mother’s grave, a marble rectangle topped with marble chips, under a tangle of old trees. I didn’t know quite what to do. I knelt and brushed the seeds and leaves away, cleared some bird droppings from the marble letters. I felt I should be able to explain things.
I said out loud, “He’s gone.” The words were stifled by the soft, cold air.
It was decided by a consensus, not by any colleagues with names and faces, in one of those discreet Museum committees for which I did not quite qualify, that I should go to Holland and find Christopher Hart. He would not refuse to see me if I arrived suddenly in town; he might not be quite clear what I wanted, but it would be wise not to give him any notice, just in case.
I packed methodically, Anna keeping out of the way: trousers folded over sweaters so they held their creases; jackets inside out, the sleeve seams exposed and rough; shoes in their sleeves.
Anna said, “You must have something to eat.”
I couldn’t think about anything except going, and Anna knew it. “Or some coffee?” she said. Each of us hated to have the other distracted.
She said, “I wish I could come with you. We could go to Leiden together. I love the gardens in Leiden.”
She didn’t mean it. She was letting me go as she always did, entirely concerned with me but not holding me.
“I’ll only be a couple of days,” I said. “I left the hotel numbers for you, and the flight numbers.”
I tugged the zip around the garment bag. I held her for a moment, her warmth and my warmth making a kind, closed zone, like lovers.
“I don’t think Fred is very well,” she said, meaning the cat, a checkerboard veteran who had been feisty in his time. “I’ll take him to the vet.”
We both knew this was something we always did together.
“You’ll need a taxi,” Anna said. “I’ll book a taxi.”
“I could drink some coffee,” I said.
Anna led me by the hand into the kitchen. She’d put out cereal and yogurt, of course; she would feed me if she could. She had already made coffee. It had not been a good night; I could tell by the marks under her eyes. I was overwhelmed by her kindness for the moment, and the sheer peculiarity of her: fine, sharp-faced, the memorable legs that were perfect and too short all at once, like a sample.
“The taxi’s coming,” she said. She didn’t like good-byes.
The next day, according to the police file, Sergeant Visser decided to find Christopher Hart. He pulled the hotel registration forms and the computer records. He found one Christopher Hart, British passport, registered at a cheap hotel on Rozengracht. Since Hart had checked in the night before, his passport was still with the hotel clerk, who handed it to the police for copying.
So they had a picture of Christopher Hart they could show to the Arkenhouts.
When the sergeant went back to the hotel, scenting a crime but still unable to name it, Hart had already left. It seems he’d returned from morning coffee, morning paper, morning walk, climbed the stairs, and found the clerk waiting for him. I can see the man now: his shoulders tense with righteousness.
“The police came. Wanted to see your passport.”
Arkenhout said, “They didn’t say why?”
“They never say anything. If there’s any trouble, maybe you’d better find another hotel. In fact, I think you’d better find another hotel.”
He said, “Yes.”
He didn’t know what else to say. He’d never been the one the police come after; his name was always on the body left behind. He just knew he couldn’t be found, not yet.
I suppose he packed his bag, collected his passport, settled the bill, that the clerk stared at Hart’s credit card as though there had to be some conspiracy coded in the hologram and was distinctly put out when authorization came chattering down the line.
“You want a cab?” the clerk said. “To the airport?”
“No.”
“I thought you’d want to get away.”
He said, “Why should I?”
The clerk remembered everything he said for the police, down to “Have a nice day.”
He was out on the streets, no fixed abode, no fixed name, known as Martin Arkenhout and as Christopher Hart, which was at least one name too many. The police file says nothing about the next twenty-four hours.
But imagine: this man lived by forms, address, occupation, nationality, write in the squares, sign below, all anybody notices. He once talked to me about Tinkerbelle, the machines that capture every transatlantic phone call, more in an hour than anyone could transcribe and read in a working lifetime; he said the point was that nothing went unobserved. Your every move is conditional. And all these years, he had used that fact, tricked with forms and cards and passes and papers, and the bureaucratic reflex they produced; he was shocked to discover the bureaucrats could use the papers too
.
He had never truly had to bluff before, because there had been nobody to challenge him; he took a new name and he immediately moved on. But now he had to be perfectly Christopher Hart, whoever that was: professor, scholar, writer, and whatever else. He owed the dead man a kind of debt, and all because of one stupid answer to one sudden question on a tram.
Also, he had to act a character. He couldn’t just continue himself under another name.
He couldn’t get his head around this notion. He said—he said it about another time, but I’m sure he meant this time—he saw the city like filing boxes, people shut away by firm and occupation, going deliberately from one place to another by arrangement. Even the loungers in the sun were tourists, day-trippers, time wasters deliberately aware of their designated gap in the organized day; they knew their place.
He had become the anomaly, expecting to be singled out. He couldn’t stand at a tram stop with conviction; no destination. There was no particular reason for him to be in any street at any time. Passersby, the ones with even the slightest purpose, had the advantage: a net of obligations and appointments and habits and other people’s expectations to hold them in place. But he’d done his peculiar work, stolen a life; and now he was too fraught to live it.
He couldn’t think straight, so he tried going out of his mind: space-cake, a couple of beers, some sinister peppermint schnapps.
But he could still see only through his own eyes. He looked at the high gables of the houses, the shifting trees, the low light breaking up in the canal water, a big moon hanging in the blue and neon sky, and he went out of time. He wasn’t held to any particular name, or personality, to being a person, not even to being in that present moment. He wasn’t a serial killer, orderly and regular; he was a willful consumer of lives.
Restaurants closed down, dim lights at the back, naked tables, stacked chairs. A few people were belched out by the pubs on a breath of smoke and beer. I imagine him panicking. It wasn’t chemical panic; it came from the heart. The disconnection with the city became the city shutting him out. It was a still summer night, but it seemed very cold.