The Fog Garden

by Marion Halligan

  Psychiatrist?

  Psychologist, whatever . . . tells them to try the old tricks, have a good dinner, a delicious meal, candles, wine, conversation, music, look into one another’s eyes, the full romantic bit.

  She looks into his, but he is spinning his tale.

  Well, a week later they’re back at the psych’s again. What’s the matter, he asks. We did everything you said, says the wife, great meal, candles, music, the whole thing. And, says the psych, so, what happened?

  There’s a woman several tables away reading a book. She sits tranquilly drinking a cup of coffee, voluptuously—maybe not voluptuously, but why not—turning the pages. Clare wonders what the book is.

  Well, says the wife, it worked, just like you said. Instantly. He grabs me, bends me over the table, the glasses and plates go flying, he fucks me, one of the best fucks we’ve ever had. The psychologist looks at them. So? What’s the problem? The wife hangs her head. Well, don’t you see, we can’t go back to that restaurant ever again.

  The old lover shouts with glee. Clare laughs, a small ha-haing laugh, the best she can manage. She’s never faked an orgasm, but she’s faked a few laughs in her time.

  She looks up Pereire in Le Petit Larousse. It’s the name of two brothers, Jacob and Isaac, who were bankers, parliamentarians, developers of railways. Born at the beginning of the nineteenth century. She wonders which one the boulevard was named after. The rose is Madame Isaac, this gorgeous carmine creature filling a garden with her scent, and you could consider this a kind of immortality. Rather second-hand. If she were Zéphirine, now, Albertine, Cécile, Lorraine Lee; we wouldn’t know any more about her but at least we’d have her own name. Was she beautiful, to have a rose named after her, or was it just because her husband was important? Maybe he bought it for her; the naming of a rose would be a pretty present. Except it’s his own name he’s perpetuated. She is just the wife. The female incarnation of his nominal significance.

  Oliver would be interested in the photographs with the veil of hair. He liked her hair, always wanted her to wear it entirely unconfined. When she was with him he would pull the pins out so it tumbled heavily down. That was another thing that made her shy, because women didn’t, it wasn’t until a year or two later that they started to let their hair flow free. But she could have been ahead of her time. A bit daring. She remembers her mother saying once, sharply, impatiently, Silly thing that I was. As she’d have spoken about somebody else altogether, as though that younger self was not her, and the silliness to be judged harshly. As though she was the mother of that young self, giving herself a little shake, a push, speaking with vehemence. Scolding, even. Kate said, meeting Clare’s mother for the first time when she was over eighty years old, You should feel good, looking at your mother, she’s so pretty in her old age, you can expect to be too. But Clare thought that she hadn’t been as pretty as her mother when she was young, why should she be when she was old? Her mother had been famous for her rose-leaf complexion, which of course meant the flowers, not the spiky green leaves, her skin like rose petals, soft, silky, faintly flushed with colour, unblemished.

  Her mother was vain. At some point, in the fifties, or the sixties, she cut the bottoms off old photos because of the twenties dresses she and her friends and sisters were wearing. Why did you do that, her daughters shrieked. They were terrible, those dresses, she said, they made you look like the side of a house. They were lovely, said her daughters, what you have done is vandalism. Fortunately she missed some, so there is still a record of the small pointed strappy shoes and the straight low-waisted dresses, tucked and flounced and embroidered, and no they don’t look like the sides of houses, though maybe not quite so slender as their bodies were, underneath.

  Clare thinks of vanity and sex. How you dress yourself in silk underwear and lace-topped stockings, in clothes that shape the body, concealing and promising. With necklines that offer glimpses of round breasts, and skirts to slide away across the knees. How you sit and stand and move with grace, hold your head up, your stomach in, shoulders back, how you offer your best angles, most charming lines, all the while doing your best to hide the flaws, the bulges, the blemishes. And then you manage to get alone at last with your lover and you tear your clothes off or he does and you cast vanity aside with them, or maybe it evaporates with the heat of the passion, and you grasp and pull and wrangle, scrunch yourself up, offer all the rawness of your nakedness with perfect trust in the desire of his gaze. Safely knowing that these eyes that devour you, stare avidly into your own, that glitter with the absorption of their own self in the body of you the other and their desiring to possess it, or crinkle in gleeful pleased laughter, because sex is funny, these eyes that lose themselves in yours in a simple wide stare, these eyes do not judge.

  And then after all that you put your clothes on again and smooth them down and stand stretching tall and offer your most elegant and fetching angle to the eyes of the lover, like a mannequin in a shop window, seeming to forget what folds and crevices and deep slitted passages have opened and been penetrated, have been touched and tasted and flowed with juices.

  And maybe it is a kind of madness, this desire to possess and be possessed, which makes two usually self-possessed smoothly ironed thoughtfully turned-out people fall on one another and tear the clothes off and invade and open their bodies to invasion with a kind of holy delight. Violating one another with complete trust. Maybe that is why you need to see it as the effects of a philtre, even though readers or listeners would always have known that Tristan and Iseut could fall in love all by themselves and that the philtre was a slyly ironic metaphor. Oh yes, we can all blame passion on this utterly random external agency, but our hearts know we do it all ourselves. We may lay our sins on this scapegoat the magicking drink, but we understand that it is a metaphor that compels our belief even while we know that it isn’t true.

  It would be interesting to write a new version of the story of Tristan and Iseut. Classical procedure, each generation writes the old stories for itself. In this one they don’t get to drink the potion. The lady-in-waiting brings them some cool spring water instead. The philtre is safe, Mark and Iseut drink it on their wedding night. So then what happens?

  Ah, that’s the game the novelist plays with herself. There are all sorts of possibilities, you’d think. But consider: the most likely narrative is the exact same one. After all, King Mark got interested in Iseut because Tristan was keen on her, described her so enthusiastically. (Foolish boy.) Tristan wasn’t a king, but he was a hero. Mark was a wimp and a coward, so the stories have it. The men of Cornwall were like that, the Newfies, the Belgians, the Tasmanians of their day. Famous for cowardice. Perhaps unfairly, but not in Mark’s case. Tristan was always fighting his battles for him, Mark ran away, or waited at home. Iseut fancying Tristan knew what she was about.

  Of course, the philtre might have been a placebo. (Leaving aside any scepticism about its potency anyway.) Designed to have a psychological effect, to make those who drink it believe they are in love.

  I doubt it would have worked for Iseut and Mark. She had gazed on Tristan, she had nursed his lovely body back to health, her blood had learned what her eyes and fingers had taught her. Their passion might have had its mindless moments, but in the mind it began. They knew one another, not in the biblical sense, as people so pruriently say, but in the mental sense, which is so much more devastating. As lovers they were fated to love one another, and if this also doomed them, they had their moments, such moments.

  And if immortality is being thought about by other people, that they have.

  Love Potion is producing a profusion of blooms that begin crimson and fade to purplish pink and fill the brain with their dusky scent. Smell, says Clare to the former lover when he brings her back some books. Mmm, very nice, he says.

  She picks a couple to put in a small glass beside the Katoomba photograph. The bottle of sparkling rhinegold, the possible sundaes, and she’s often thought thank god she wasn’t pretend
ing to wear a wedding ring as sometimes she did; her finger is appropriately bare. She is glad Love Potion bloomed before Geoffrey died. She remembers giving a flower to him, and his smile as he breathed it in; she did not need to say, it smells of desire. They smiled with dreamy lips, long-learnt smiles of promise and expectation. Their gazes hooked together, and they knew. The flowers perfumed their blood, as Shakespeare said of wine, not roses.

  her silken layer

  AFTER GEOFFREY DIED CLARE lost weight. In his last year she had prepared food to please him, which he ate delicately, and she enthusiastically, because she ran around a lot and was always hungry. Then when he died she found herself often not hungry, or if she had any appetite it was for crisp raw foods, salads, vegetables.

  Her friends said, You’ve lost weight. You look wonderful. How do you do it? She replied: Grief.

  Like a lot of truths, it was part.

  Her friend Kate said, Why does that work for you. It doesn’t for me. When I’m unhappy I eat. I get piggier and piggier. The way I eat, the way I look.

  Well, said Clare. Grief can take away your appetite. And then there’s anxiety. I think that changes your metabolism.

  Grief meaning you don’t eat a lot, but anxiety meaning that the little is all gobbled up by this incubus with the voracious appetite to feed its nervous energy. The heart beats faster, it falls in the body, there are obstacles in the windpipe so that air has to be sucked in violent sighs, it is impossible to be still, the mind won’t let the body rest but makes it jump up and bustle about the next thing. You sit in a chair, lean back, relax, cross your legs, but before many seconds have passed you are jumping up, after the next thing to be done.

  Her friends say, You’ve lost weight, it suits you, you look good.

  Grief, she says, anguish, anxiety.

  All truths, but still part.

  She noticed her appetite had shrunk, that she didn’t care for rich and meaty foods, and cultivated this distaste. Chose not to, made such fat and greasy heavy edibles not an option. Trained herself to follow her desire for the fresh, crisp, light, for vegetables and fruit. Hardly ever cheese, though it used to be one of the delights of her life. Their life.

  I don’t know why I’m so hefty, says Janet. I go to the gym all the time, I walk every day, take the dog up the mountain, but I can see I’ll never be as slim as I was, not even ten years ago, when I thought I was fat.

  Why should you be, says Clare. You’re a mature woman, aren’t we allowed to look like mature women?

  I think my husband would like me to be slimmer.

  How do you know?

  Oh, you know these things.

  He doesn’t say so.

  No.

  I think he likes you as you are. I’ve seen him nestle his hand in your neck. You’re happy, that’s what counts. Your figure is comfortable with it.

  Clare wonders what Geoffrey would have made of this slenderer self. He would have liked it, of course. She’s thought like Janet in the past. My husband would prefer me to be slimmer. Not that he ever said so, didn’t even hint. Clare herself was very brave about not bothering. One has to be true to oneself, she said. If one is fat, one is. But she would have liked not to be. Slimmer equals sexier, not in the eyes of the world, necessarily, but in the way you feel about yourself, in the clothes you wear, the way you walk, the way your body bends.

  And here is yet another irony this widowed state throws up at her (lucky she is a connoisseur of irony): the person who would most have enjoyed the fact that his dying has turned her back into a more slender creature is the one person who can’t know. At least, that is what you believed, she says to Geoffrey. Maybe you are wrong, maybe you do know, are somewhere chuckling. Nibbling on this tasty morsel irony.

  No wonder people believe in life after death. You can’t bear to think that there’ll be no more conversations. You can’t bear to think you’ll never be able to share the jokes.

  She realises she can look at food so coolly as she does, so unseduced by its charms, because it was so much part of her life with Geoffrey. Even before they were married. Their first date was her inviting him to a meal—was it, can that be true? Truly the first, or nearly. He came in the bus and was annoyed with himself for not bringing wine; she had most of a bottle of cooking wine and they drank that. It cost 4/6 a bottle, appallingly dear for something calling itself Cooking Wine. Very rough white it was, by Penfolds. And when they got married she had a vision of a lifetime of meals, one or two or maybe three a day, all cooked by her, as was the case with wives in those days, and she understood that meals had to be interesting, had to be an idea, have some mental as well as physical substance, otherwise they’d be a chore. Looking back she thinks she can say that they didn’t eat many bad meals, and most of those accidental. The meals were often simple ones, basic even, bread and cheese, pâté on toast, rare grilled lamb chops with mint and garlic, onion sandwiches for supper when they played 500 with her parents, but always she paid attention, good ingredients, real bread, tomatoey tomatoes. Meals were rituals, sometimes simple, sometimes complicated, but always having a meaning. They were part of being married, and now she isn’t any more.

  You’re so much thinner, say her acquaintances.

  It is because I have given up conjugal eating, she says.

  Once when they were living in Paris she went to a conference in Bergen. She’d never been to a place where food was so absent. You could walk down streets, into cafes and hotels and shopping centres, and never see any. There didn’t seem to be any shops selling it, no fruit to be seen, or meat. The woman organising the conference made them a meal which was important, and grand, of reindeer, and a dessert of cloudberries, that her family had climbed a mountain to pick at just the moment they were ripe. A rare and splendid meal. The lunches were sandwiches of donkey salami, or some pale cheese, and there seemed to be a lot of blandly sauced fish. Though breakfasts were copious, and they all got into the habit of eating them as if they didn’t know where their next meal would be coming from.

  It made her remember Ford Maddox Ford writing that civilisation begins where garlic starts, somewhere south of Paris. Fortunately missionary fervour has spread garlic further these days. Not quite to Norway, it seemed. Norway made her think about Paris, of shopping twice a day, and going into the bakery to get the bread, and spread before you the great displays of cakes and tarts and confectioneries and chocolate, the charcuteries and the vegetable markets, all the different kinds of mushroom and potato and lettuce, the yellow chickens and tiny long-necked quail, the slithering slopes of fish, and she thought, the satisfaction of this is a lot to do with visual pleasure and a kind of intellectual awareness of it, as well as trust in its being there tomorrow, you see it but you don’t have to buy it, you know it is available so you don’t need to choose it, this moment, this day. She never bought cakes, perhaps twice in a stay of six months, three times perhaps, but she loved looking at them, choosing them with her eyes but not her words. She thought that you could become very greedy in a place like Bergen, entirely preoccupied with finding food, so fearful of its absence. But in Paris the eyes are dazzled by the perpetual feast, the senses can graze upon such wonders that actually ingesting them isn’t so important.

  Of course, you eat. You have a Bresse chicken, or a black pudding, some girolles with a bit of veal, a little pâté de campagne, some medium-sized oysters, brandade de morue from the good place. Comfortably and sparingly you work your way through your list of favourites. Keeping a sharp eye on the seasons, of course. Saying to Geoffrey, Shall we have a little pork roast today (that being the cheapest) and when will we have some foie gras, and let’s go over to the Auvergnat shop and get some fresh Cantal, tome de Cantal, and make an aligot . . . asking for the right kind of mashing potatoes, with cream and olive oil and a great deal of garlic. Paris the most truly thrifty place she knows. No need to buy too much, to stock it up and throw it away. Buy what you feel like and eat it now.

  Now she eats a pot of low-fat yo
ghurt for lunch, and an apple. She can’t even remember her hunger for strong savoury foods in the middle of the day. At night she has some appetite, uncorks a bottle of wine, makes a salad, maybe cooks a cutlet, or a potato, slices onions, chops garlic, cuts up tomatoes. Oliver asks can she make a successful omelette with olive oil. You’re not supposed to, but he’d like to, and seems to fail. Oh, I think I can, she says, and gets out Geoffrey’s solid little metal pan, he was the omelette maker in their household, he’d learnt in France as a student, but she watched him often enough, he taught, explained about sliding the cooked egg back so the surface liquid runs under and is in turn cooked. You put chives in, or mushrooms, a little tomato perhaps, turn it over and out it slides, its middle still runny, self-saucing is a way to describe it. You never wash the pan, just wipe it out with paper towels.

  I have made omelettes with olive oil, she writes. But these days I put in a knob of butter as well.

  She falls in love with omelettes all over again. Maybe it is the pleasure of using Geoffrey’s pan, his method. One day she made one with six eggs, to be eaten in the garden at a small marble table, with sour dough toast. Elizabeth David was right, she said, you should make two omelettes, two of three eggs, six is too many, but she wanted them both to eat together. It worked well enough, though she waited a minute too long to cut it in halves and serve it, there was not much runny sauce. But it was moist and tender, the coffee was strong, the garden was admired: A charming wilderness. A bit chilly, perhaps.

  One day in the middle of winter Clare went to Miriam’s for lunch. She was feeling very strange, shouldn’t have gone, not ill so much as remote, choked up, closed down, as though her body didn’t function any more, her brain numb as well, but thinking maybe lunch out would make her feel better. But she couldn’t really eat any, not David’s green chicken curry or the salmon mousse that came before it, until the dessert. Miriam had made mango ice-cream from fruit she’d puréed and frozen in the summer, when there was a glut of them. It was a faintly creamy cool light essence of the fruit, and eaten with a small flat silver spoon it slipped across the tongue and down the throat in a self-contained comforting refreshing way. And that wasn’t all. Miriam had made two desserts. The other was mandarins segmented but still in their shapes and caramelised, which meant covered with a melting toffee, and decorated with strips of candied orange peel. Its tart slightly crackled sweetness was wonderful.