‘You are the devil, tempting me with the riches of this world,’ said Esther.
‘No,’ said Robert, a little sadly. ‘Claudio is the devil. I am just a salesman trying to sell you a new ideology, but I don’t expect you to buy.’
‘Why are you trying so hard? To convince yourself?’
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’ He sipped his Punt e Mes. ‘My great-grandfather was a collector, you know. Not a bad collection, as English collections go. We’ve had to part with quite a lot of it.’
‘If one lived here – ’she gestured up the street, at the façades, the balconies, the red blinds, the crumbling glories ‘– one wouldn’t need to collect it, it would be on one’s own doorstep to walk through, every day.’
‘Ah, but who built it, that we tiny creatures can walk in its arcades, we afterthoughts, we puny little men?’
She could see that this notion moved him. It had never occurred to her to think personally in quite such terms before. She told him this.
‘I must thank you,’ she said, ‘for a new perspective.’
‘Red Bologna,’ he said reflectively. ‘A Communist city. A well-run city. A civilized city. Well, I must be getting back to my lonely hotel.’
‘Poor Robert,’ she said. ‘I liked your book on Signorelli.’
‘Too kind,’ he said. ‘Hardly a monumental work, but my own, my own.’
‘I don’t see what’s wrong with being a dilettante,’ said Esther, vaguely, as she rose. Her thoughts had turned to Elena, and the evening ahead. ‘It doesn’t harm anybody, does it?’
‘That’s rather a negative aspiration,’ said Robert Oxenholme, following her out on to the pavement. A light rain had begun to fall. ‘Not to do harm.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Esther, her concentration span over, suddenly eager to be rid of him. ‘One could aim for worse.’
She thanked him, shook his hand.
He stood on the pavement, irresolute. Esther walked briskly away from the temptation that he had offered. Whatever it was, she said to herself, it had come too late.
‘Why don’t you come and live here with me?’ Elena asked Esther, later that night.
‘Because it would be too pleasant. Because it is too beautiful. Because you are too beautiful,’ said Esther.
‘Think about it,’ said Elena.
There was a little lizard in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting in Sala XIV. Blood from Christ’s feet dripped into a skull, but the little lizard paid no attention. It sat, sunning itself. Esther stared. She stared so hard that she fancied she saw it move, but of course it did not move: it was merely the shadow of Robert Oxenholme that moved, as he silently approached her, and stood behind her. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘I thought I’d find you here.’
That night they had dinner.
The next day, Esther met Claudio’s wile Roberta. She was a short, square woman, with straight white hair, and a brown face, and very blue eyes, and a practical, almost bluff manner: very unchic, very unItalian, thought Esther, as they robustly shook hands in a comradely manner, in the hospital corridor. Anyone less like a hypochondriac it would be hard to imagine. She had a manner of great sweetness and motherliness: she treated Esther as though she were a child, warmly, impersonally, protectively. ‘Cara,’ she called her, from this their first meeting, and was to continue so to address her, for the years to come. Esther felt instantly safe with Roberta. A good woman, a worn and weathered woman, an outdoor woman. Her lace was brown from the sun, her eyes were blue like flowers.
Claudio died three weeks later, a fortnight after Esther’s return to Ladbroke Grove. Esther did not go to the funeral: she decided she could not afford the fare. She had wasted enough of her slender resources on Claudio Volpe. But she read the obituaries, which were handsome and lengthy. A great man, Claudio, as Robert Oxenholme had said. A great man, with an international reputation. Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise, That last infirmity of noble minds, To scorn delights and live laborious days. . . . She pondered the lesson of Claudio Volpe. He had achieved greatness through the intensity of his commitment to his own folly. Where reasonable men failed, Claudio had succeeded. He had seventy-seven lines of obituary in the London Times. She counted them. In the Italian papers, of course, the tributes were even more fulsome. One of them claimed that he had died in the arms of a Dominican priest: a more sensational journal counter-claimed that he had requested that a stake be driven through his heart. Poor Signora Volpe, was Esther’s only response to this bit of malicious embroidery. One of the papers showed a photograph of Elena and Roberta arm-in-arm at the funeral. His mistress and his widow, the paper suggested, salaciously, and, Esther hoped, inaccurately.
Alix and Liz Headleand commiserated. Neither of them had ever met the wicked Claudio, and Alix could not think of much to say, but Liz, remembering the conversation on the canal bank about monomania, was more forthcoming. Mad, yes, she agreed with Esther, mad he had probably been, but only, as it were, north-north-west. Usefully mad, manipulatively mad. Esther described Signora Volpe. Liz listened with professional interest. As a matter of fact, Liz said, Charles has gone mad too. He imagines he hears voices in the sky. He imagines the sky is full of voices.
She laughed, Esther laughed.
The dish receiver had driven Charles mad, said Liz, with relish.
Claudio died, but Liz Headleand’s mother began to recover. Nobody was very pleased about this: she was not very pleased about it herself, or so it seemed. But slowly, inexorably, she improved. Why, Liz wanted to shout, as Shirley described this unfortunate process over the telephone. Why? Oh, all right, said Liz, barely bothering to disguise her irritation, I’ll come up and have a look at her.
And off she went, in the summer of ‘84, cancelling a few meetings, a few appointments, driving up the M1, fiddling with the knob of her radio, trying to avoid what seemed to be a seamless, circular, continuous, endlessly repetitive discussion of the miners’ strike, and settling at last for a Norwegian song cycle of the late nineteenth century. She had a new car and wasn’t quite sure how to tune in: where, for example, was the World Service? Had it vanished, overnight, amidst the threatened cuts? Had it been sold to Albania? Liz thought of Alix Bowen and the old Renault 4. She had thought of trying to sell her old car at a giveaway price to Brian and Alix, but had been unable to find an appropriate formula for her offer.
She had booked herself into the Open Hearth Hotel. She didn’t want to stay with Shirley, and was sure Shirley wouldn’t wish to have her. Abercorn Avenue, as Shirley had pointed out, stood empty, but nobody in her right mind could want to sleep in Abercorn Avenue. Supposing Rita Ablewhite recovered, and wanted to go home? The thought appalled Liz, appalled Shirley.
Liz hung her clothes in the hotel wardrobe. She had booked in for two nights, and already was wondering if she need stay so long. Time dragged, faltered, stopped.
Liz stood by her mother’s bedside. Yes, it was true, she was recovering. She appeared to know Liz. A kind of distant recognition animated her semi-paralysed features, and she almost appeared to be trying to smile. This so shocked Liz that she sat down smartly. Then she proceeded to speak, as she had done for years, over the telephone. She told her mother about her new car and her new car radio. She told her about the endless reporting of the miners’ strike and about the Norwegian song cycle: did she detect a faint sympathetic tremor of distaste at the mention of this item? Liz ploughed on, moving on to the affairs of her stepsons and her daughters, on to the projects of Charles. The old woman had probably forgotten that she and Charles were divorced, and anyway, at this point, what did it matter, what difference did it make? For three quarters of an hour, she talked. For fifty minutes. The academic hour. Enough, enough. She gathered her bag, her Northam evening paper, and took her leave. Her mother lay in a long pale ward, with old ladies on either side of her, and a neat locker by her head. Liz had brought no flowers. The next day, she would bring flowers.
Liz walked the streets of Northam
, in the light summer night. A knot of men stood on Hag Bank Corner with placards and buckets, collecting for the miners. An out-of-date boy skateboarded elegantly down a wheelchair ramp. A group of girls in mini-skirts and plastic sandals giggled in an alley. She gazed into shop windows: modern shops, chain stores, high-street shops, the same as any city. Where was the Regent Café, where mothers and bored daughters had sat long over coffee and cakes? The waitresses in black with white aprons had smelled human, of heat and sweat. Everybody had smelled more, in the old days. Only deep poverty and eccentricity smell, these days. Was this improvement, Liz wondered.
Rumour had it that Brian Bowen had been offered a job in Northam, was thinking of accepting it. As the rumour came direct from Alix Bowen, it was probably authentic.
Northam is a small city, and Liz in a quarter of an hour had wandered from the shopping centre into the old industrial district. For Sale, To Let, read posters. She had heard of this, but had not seen it with her own eyes. Willow herb and buddleia grew, as they had grown in the aftermath of the Second World War, in the bomb craters of Liz’s childhood. She stood and stared. The canal was green with weed. An old man walked his dog. No, there was nothing here for her, nothing at all.
Her pace quickened as she returned, up the hill, to her new Japanese car in the hospital car park.
Watching television late that night, alone in her hotel room, Liz noted that a group of British television journalists had been captured and taken hostage in the Middle East. One of the group was Dirk Davis, who had once, long ago, been a friend and colleague of Charles. A friend, and then an enemy. She resisted the temptation to ring Charles in his Kentish Town flat. Charles would know this bad news. Charles knew everything, and anyway, the mention of the very name of Dirk Davis for some reason filled him with ungovernable rage. But Liz had shared many a bowl of spaghetti, many a plateful of chop suey with Dirk Davis in the old days, and she did not like to think of him bound, blindfolded, threatened. Buckets, gags, guns. No, she did not like it.
Shirley and Liz sat at the kitchen table in Abercorn Avenue, drinking mugs of instant coffee. ‘This could go on for ever,’ said Shirley, glumly, gesturing vaguely at the silent room.
They spoke of power of attorney, of selling the house. But they knew that they would do nothing. Nothing at all.
‘I think,’ said Shirley ‘that she’s trying to communicate something.’
The two sisters looked at one another, with wild surmise, appalled.
‘Oh God,’ said Liz.
She drove home that night, and was cautioned for speeding on the stretch between Northampton and Milton Keynes.
Shirley sat by her mother’s bedside, holding up pieces of white card with the letters of the alphabet clearly printed upon them in large, bold script. C-A-T, she spelled. Her mother, imperceptibly, nodded, D-O-G, she tried. Another semi-nod. Shirley’s imagination staggered. C-E-L-I-A, she tried, and was sure she was met with blankness. M-U-M received, perhaps, faint recognition. So that was it, begin again at the beginning. What did that mean? Was it worth it? Well, it was better than sitting there knitting, anyway. Shirley persevered.
Otto Werner rang Alix Bowen and asked her out to lunch. This was an unprecedented invitation. They never met, alone, the two of them. Alix did not lunch, except occasionally with Polly Piper, with whom she liked to keep in touch. She suspected that Otto did not lunch much either. Her suspicion was confirmed by his uncertainty of where to propose for this rendezvous. ‘But where will you be at that time of day?’ he repeated, plaintively, to which she kept saying, in the end rather irritably, ‘I won’t be anywhere, I’ll come to where you say.’
‘Oh, all right,’ said Otto, and suggested an Italian restaurant off Kingsway where he had once been taken by an historian from Aberdeen.
He sat there impatiently, waiting for Alix: he arrived twenty minutes early, through anxiety, and was too worried to concentrate on his copy of the New Statesman, which he had begun to annotate, as was his habit, for Alan Headleand. The waiters pestered him with offers of drinks, and in the end to keep them off he ordered a tomato juice: he was sipping it cautiously when, at last, she arrived. It was raining: she was wearing a pale-blue raincoat with a hood. The waiters wrested it from her in the narrow hall. She stood there, blinking, wiping her glasses, adjusting to the indoor light, as the waiters attempted to jostle her in his direction. She took her time. Oh God, thought Otto, looking at her: oh God. Otto loved her. Though that was not why he was here. Not quite. She was clutching a briefcase, bulging with papers. She refused to let the waiters have it. What he loved about her, one of the many, many things he loved about her, was the look of puzzled certainty, as she held on, obstinately. She held on.
‘Otto,’ she advanced upon him. The table was so cramped he could not get up to greet her. She squeezed his hand, sat. ‘It’s wet,’ she said, superfluously, shaking her wild grey hair.
‘Alix.’ He gazed at her. This at least he was allowed to do. The waiters hovered, flocked, pestered, offered drinks.
‘I’ll have what you’re having,’ said Alix. ‘Is that a Bloody Mary?’
‘Yes,’ said Otto.
‘On second thoughts,’ said Alix, ‘perhaps I’ll just have a tomato juice. With a lot of Worcester Sauce.’
Outwitted, Otto smiled at her, a little blindly. She was wearing a blue jersey. Her eyes were a very interesting deep grey blue. Dazzled, he stared.
‘What’s news, then?’ asked Alix, gaily eating a piece of roll. They incompetently ordered a meal. I wanted to talk to you about Brian, said Otto, eventually. Well, what I mean is, I wanted to ask you about Brian. About what I should say to Brian. I don’t know how to put this. Alix, I’m putting it very badly.
Alix drank a spoonful of straciatella.
Otto cleared his throat.
‘Brian tells me he’s been offered this job in Northam.’
‘Yes,’ said Alix.
‘He asked me what I thought.’
‘Yes,’ said Alix.
‘So I’m asking you what you think, in order to know what I think. If you see what I mean.’
‘I see.’
‘Do tell me, Alix.’
Alix laid down her spoon. ‘Eat your spaghetti, Otto, it will go cold, she said, firmly. Then she told him what she thought about the job that Brian had been offered.
‘Of course, on paper, it’s just the kind of thing Brian can do,’ she said. ‘It’s just the kind of thing he ought to be doing. A community programme, good public money, left-wing council, a lot of support. It was Perry Blinkhorn that thought of Brian. Do you know Perry? And there’d be a real social mix in the classes, not the kind of self-selecting bunch Brian’s been teaching at the college for the last few years . . .’
Her voice trailed away, miserably.
‘So what are the snags?’ asked Otto.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Alix, suddenly forceful. ‘It seems disloyal to mention them, but I’m going to. Well, for one thing, I don’t trust Perry Blinkhorn, and I don’t trust the back-up. I think they might put the money in for a year, and if it didn’t work out, they’d scrap it. I don’t like the look of the contract they’ve offered him. And of course none of that would matter, I mean I’d be in favour of Brian taking a gamble on it, if it were really the kind of thing he wanted to do. But I don’t know that he does. Brian’s a good straight orthodox teacher, you know, he wants to teach great literature, he doesn’t want to spend his time transcribing the reminiscences of the unemployed and trying to publish them in a cooperative magazine, He may think he does, but he doesn’t. I’m better at that kind of thing than he is. Oddly enough I’ve got more patience with people than Brian has. One of the reasons why he’s a good straight teacher is that he gets the best out of people, he makes them work, he insists on proper work, whereas I just let people chat along. . . . Oh, I know there’s room for both, I know I’m useful in my own way – or I have been, in my time – but I can’t really see Brian fitting into this cooperative, c
ommunity set-up, can you? His standards are too high.’ She laughed, and continued. ‘Yes, his standards are too high. He’ll annoy them, and they’ll annoy him. But even that wouldn’t matter, if I myself had more faith in the whole thing. Look, Otto,’ – and she dived under the table, into her briefcase, and produced a brochure, and thrust it at him, over the chicken and rosemary and sauté potatoes – ‘look, this is the kind of stuff the council promotes. This is what it puts its money into.’ Otto turned the pages of the Northam Directory of Worker Cooperatives. His eyes fell on the smiling faces of young vegetarians promoting ethnic restaurants, on the dashingly dreadlocked intense stares of Rastamen promoting Afro-Caribbean sound (‘our stocks include reggae, soca, funk, soul . . .’), on smart young women offering secretarial services to small businesses, on brawny young men offering panel-beating at record prices, on the inventor of a mechanical implement for cleaning top-floor windows, on street theatre groups and children’s play-centre carers, on gravestone-restorers and conference promotion material designers, on home knitwear and home computer groups, on an actors’ cooperative agency, on the editors of an alternative newspaper and the manufacturers of experimental High Flavour Foods for the Elderly: his eyes fell on a desolate advertisement for a Sport and Social Centre which economically and perhaps ironically portrayed an empty table, two empty chairs, an empty beer mug, and a single cigarette burning in an ashtray.
‘Yes,’ said Otto, and would have smiled, had it not been for Alix’s expression. She took the brochure from him, turned the pages, and drew his attention to another advertisement: two youths, one white, one black, smiling with the greatest possible charm and diffident optimism at the camera, with a touch of nonchalance and a touch of anxious appeal: the caption proclaimed that they were experts on the rearing of rabbits, hamsters, gerbils, guinea-pigs, and other small mammals, that they would advise on breeding, diseases, hutch-building, diet and all relating matters. The last sentence read ‘At the time of going to press our premises are not yet finalized.’ A harmless hamster nibbled in the foreground, as they leaned across a table towards the lens. At the sight of them, Alix’s eyes filled with tears.
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