The Fog Garden

by Marion Halligan

  Hang on. This is a metaphor. Stock in trade of the writer. Very nice to illustrate, or illuminate. But do you want to live one? Its maybe dismaying implications? You don’t want to live a metaphor, but a life. She’s not a koto, but a woman, and quite capable of playing her own music. She thinks of the pianos in old movies, with their own hands to play them, and giggles. No. Not like that. Like a person who lives in her own body and her own head, and hears her own music, and makes it up and writes it down. As Marcel Schwob said, who listens to herself living, and sings what she hears.

  You’ll soon find another lover, said the man who had been that.

  Maybe she will. Maybe one day he’ll be another narrative.

  The wife, the lover, the mistress, the husband.

  It is time to give up the language of fairy tales. Stop claiming the archetypes, hinting at modish Greenaway mysteries. The lover, the ex-lover, the man who was her lover, its periphrasis is starting to sound portentous. Call him Henry, that’s what she called him when he rang up and it wasn’t private. Hello Henry, she’d say, and he’d know that others were listening. Another game. Henry, the married man. The fairytale is over. She is Clare, and the wife . . . well the wife is not to be named, she is still in her fairy story, has gone off to her happy ever after. Time for Clare to return to the named, the concrete, the particular.

  But she won’t give up the year and a day. Clare can hope its space is magical, she knows it is ceremonious. She will wait and see what other pigeons have come home to roost by then. If not in her life, then her pages.

  When she meets him for coffee one day Henry says to her, I’ve been thinking, and I have to say, I’ve come to the conclusion that, I don’t think, I mean, I’m not too happy about those stories of yours being published.

  Clare is suddenly dazzlingly angry.

  I. I. There is no I about this, she shouts inside her head, but not aloud, she is folding in on herself, like a desert plant, offering no surfaces.

  This is the man who read the stories with small secret smiles, who did not say much but whose eyes shone when he looked up from her words. This is the man who said, when he wanted to run away with her, It’ll be my claim to fame. I like the idea of going down in history as the lover of the famous novelist.

  Oh history, she’d said. Fame.

  Certainly. Both. And me part of it. He’d kissed her as though offering fresh material, that would be beyond any she’d already imagined.

  The thing is, he says now, they’re, well, they’re intimate. I’ve been thinking, would I want my children reading this, knowing these things.

  Clare looks at him with wide hard eyes.

  When he was about twenty, she says, my son went to the coast with his girlfriend, you know how he’s always had exceedingly beautiful girlfriends, and this one was, and it rained all the time, and they were in this tiny tent on the beach, and they spent the time, well, some of it, with him reading my stories aloud to her, it would have been my first collection. He hadn’t read them before either. When he came home he said, Wow Mum.

  Another coffee, asks Henry.

  Mm, she says. He said, Wow Mum, and his eyes were shining. I had to think what was in those stories. They weren’t particularly autobiographical, no more so than anything a writer writes, you know I’ve always said that you write fiction but at the same time it’s not possible not to be autobiographical. But the thing is, he was pleased. He looked at me with—and I thought about this—intrigue, and pleasure, but most particularly with respect. And after all, why not. Why shouldn’t your children see you as human, just like them. As sexy, for god’s sake.

  I just thought, there are some things that should be private. I just think, I know how . . . I think it would be better if they weren’t published.

  I again. The tricky I. The lying I. But still she doesn’t say anything, just looks at him with those wide hard eyes.

  I hope you don’t mind me saying this.

  I’m sorry, Henry, she says, in the voice of one who is not sorry at all, though she is a bit, for him, but he ought to know that the messenger always runs the risk of being shot. He looks like a messenger, no longer the hero, the lover; a middle-aged man, portly, nervous. I’m sorry, Henry, she says. They are my stories. What I do with them, well, I can’t possibly let you tell me.

  Well, yes. It’s just that I . . .

  She wants to say, Shut up, just shut up. She wants to say, You are a shit. She wants to say, Do you know what you are doing here? But she’s not going to be so friendly as any of these protests would sound. Instead, she says in a strangled voice, You disappoint me.

  She stares down at her cup, eyes even wider to stop tears falling out of them. You’ve got to let me have my stories, she said. And stood up and left the cafe, leaving him to pay.

  She doesn’t let the tears fall. She walks around the square and across the road to her car. That Geoffrey bought so they could go travelling. She says to herself, He doesn’t even know he is breaking my heart. And she resolves that she must never let him do that again. She presses a button, and the voice of Elisabeth Schwartzkopf singing the second of Richard Strauss’s four last songs fills the car. The garden is in mourning . . . This is what matters. Art not quite making sense of life, but offering its heart-stopping beauty.

  She knows that conclusions aren’t come to just once. They have to be come to over and over again.

  her own mistress

  WHEN CLARE TOLD ELVIRA SHE was going overseas for a month, to England and France, Elvira said, Oh good. I’ll tell you my cure for jet lag.

  Nunc est bibendum? says Clare. The Widow, again?

  That too, in moderation. But mainly water, for drinking. Buckets, really buckets. But that’s prevention, not cure. No. This is cure, and brilliant. Sex. You get off one of those damn dawn flights into Heathrow, straight into the arms of your lover, who whips you off to an okay hotel—the Hilton will do, he can push your luggage on a trolley through one of those endless walkways, it’s quite easy—and you fall on the bed for a good fuck, and I mean good, a lovely how-wonderful-to-see-you-after-all-this-time fuck, and then a nice cuddle. After that a shower, fresh clothes, and a car into town, and you can be in Harrods when it opens at ten. Or the merchant bank of your choice. Fresh as the proverbial daisy.

  Mm, said Clare. What if you take your lover along with you?

  Nah, said Elvira, doesn’t work. He has to be there, waiting. It’s the circadian rhythms, you see, he’s there, he’s in harmony, and you catch the rhythm from him. Fucking a local makes you a local.

  Rubbish, said Clare, looking at Elvira to see how straight a face she was keeping. Elvira stared back with limpid serious eyes.

  You reckon it works?

  Absolutely. Every time.

  How many times?

  Now Elvira’s face did crack a little. Every time I’ve tried it. It’s a controlled experiment, you see. Sometimes I’ve done it, sometimes not, and I tell you, there’s no comparison.

  Well, said Clare, and she heard her voice sound waspish, maybe there’s a nice little business opening. Lovers waiting at major airports to cure jet lag. People could book them at the travel agent, along with their tickets. You choose your agent not because they’re good at travel bookings but by the sexiness of their clients. Businessmen can make it a tax deduction.

  Clare! That’s prostitution. Do you see me as the madam of an international string of brothels? Her face cracked again. Don’t think I haven’t thought of it. But I reckon it’s got to be a real lover. Not a commercial transaction. You’ve got to arrive dizzy with lust for a special person, as well as jet lag. That’s what spins the circadian rhythms round.

  Honestly, said Clare.

  And it’s such fun. Such an achievement. Getting yourself all beautifully washed and perfumed and clean-knickered in one of those tiny little aeroplane lavs. Gives you something to do, which is after all the problem of long-distance travel. I tell you, I recommend it.

  Thanks, says Clare. Okay for you bus
iness-class travellers. But it evidently wouldn’t work in economy: even tinier lavs.

  Not really. You’d be surprised at how similar they are. Both absolutely exiguous. No, it’s a matter of will, that’s all.

  The trouble with Elvira is that she’s nearly always right. Whenever Clare has been able to check. And the other trouble, much more serious, is that she’s easier to admire than to emulate.

  There’s a nice irony here, which is that she is meeting a lover. In a way. Oliver her first ever lover and perfectly ardent correspondent, who has been emailing her all year, from whom she has a volume of correspondence larger than an epistolary novel. An epistolary novel in four volumes, she said to him, not entirely a joke. She’s thought of publishing it. It would need a lot of editing, of course. It could be a joint project, going through this mass of paper (she has kept it all on paper, he on disc), deciding what to put in, not censoring, anything but that (though maybe some of her more malicious remarks about the living would have to go) but some are more quotidian and dull (not of course to the correspondents, but to a public reader) than others. What fun they could have. She’s even mentioned publishing to him, quite seriously, a bit nervously, but more brazenly offering him everything about her, including this writerly cannibalism that sees the narrative value in private letters. He wasn’t fazed, he liked the idea. They’d start with the very first, on paper and posted, letter, that he’d described as a belated love letter, delayed was the word he used, remembering, she thinks not quite accurately, telling her father he wanted to marry her, and her letter written back—she’d kept a copy of it—a calm letter, even a little cool, with her version of her father’s response. Geoffrey was well then. She hadn’t told him about the letter coming from Oliver, or her writing back.

  After he died she wanted to tell Oliver about it, not from any particular expectations but because she had to find things to do with herself that involved writing down what had happened to her, so she wrote and they have corresponded ever since. Writing to him makes her consider what her life is about, in the passing present moments but also in all the years of her marriage when they had no contact. She likes his idea of love, that once it has been it goes on, however circumstances change. He is married again now, and happily, and one of their main conversations is about beloved spouses, but the fact that they were lovers once is something that is still happening. Being in love with somebody once is something that can last forever.

  She has talked to him about whether it is a good idea to meet. There’s an Elizabeth Taylor short story, about a middle-aged woman meeting a writer she has corresponded with for years, beginning with a small note of admiration, and developing into, for her, a significant part of her life. She invites him for lunch, and it’s all a disaster. She buys lobsters, but the cat gets them, it’s hot, she’s flustered, the wine’s not cold, the food is a failure, and so is the conversation, with none of the delicate wit that illuminated their letters, they find no charm at all in one another and he leaves with their both knowing that they will never have anything to do with one another again. She has lost this most precious thing.

  We are not characters in an Elizabeth Taylor story, she wrote to Oliver. Are we?

  They both believe not. They are under no illusions about the passing of a lifetime since they saw one another. She is not a tremulous spinster. They have communicated with utter frankness nearly every day and several times some days for nearly a year. Nevertheless there are moments in the long dreary flight when she wonders if this is a dangerous enterprise, if there is not something which might be lost.

  She is not seeing him until some days after her arrival. They don’t have the sort of relationship that will pluck her off the plane for a fuck. Nevertheless she doesn’t suffer at all from jet lag. Maybe it was all the water she drank. Neither have her ankles swollen. They are comfortingly narrow above her soft black boots. In which she walks all about London. Down Piccadilly. Across St James Park in all its frigid midwinter beauty. Herself happily warmly dressed against this second winter, coat and scarves and the silk-lined leather gloves Geoffrey bought her years ago at Monoprix in Paris. Through the squares of Bloomsbury. Around Regent’s Park and into Camden Town. Trafalgar Square, Shaftesbury Avenue, Jermyn Street. On a boat down the river to Greenwich, past the London Eye as big as a sixteen-storey building overpowering the skyline, and the Millennium Dome belying its name with ugly ladders of scaffolding puncturing its mighty curve. Through the great galleries: Van Dyck at the Royal Academy, Bloomsbury at the Courtauld and the Tate, and Tracy Emin’s bed, recreated as witness of a disturbed period in her life (a disappointment this, not nearly grotty enough, the dirty tissues and condoms and rusty knickers, the vodka bottle, all too neat, too lined up, somehow, even the sheets with their skidmarks too tidily grubby, Clare thinks she could do a better disaster bed than this). Botticelli’s mystic nativity at the National Gallery catching the heart, and all the old favourites like the Van Eyck Arnolfini wedding. And plays.

  Interesting, these plays, in their references to herself, her preoccupations, in the things she can learn and use from them. The Lady in the Van, with its two Alan Bennetts arguing over art and life and how they should relate and where the writer’s responsibility lies. It’s a brilliant device this, to have the author as two characters in his play, especially one where the plot has no surprises: the cranky old lady who parks her van in his front yard for fifteen years is a narrative that Bennett has been telling for nearly as long. Clare’s been wondering how he would make it work, since anybody who is interested in his writing knows the story, and it isn’t a dramatic one: the old lady parks the van, lives in it, stinks, is grumpy, demanding, a complete pain in the neck, mad, she dies, he can get rid of it. As a narrative it’s plain enough, as a piece for the stage, what can it offer? But having himself in it twice, played by two different actors who both look amazingly like him but also quite different from one another, so that he can argue with himself over whether it is timidity that leaves her there, or squeamishness, or kindness, or the desire of the artist for material, that secret terrifying cannibalism that all writers recognise in themselves sooner or later, and how significant is it for his relationship with his mother, turns it into riveting theatre.

  Then there’s Noel Coward’s A Song at Twilight, about what’s publishable and what isn’t, or shouldn’t be, and truth and biography and what matters in a writer’s life, and what connections there are between a writer’s nature and personality and his work. Coward’s last play, written in 1966 and not performed since, quite different from what people think of as vintage Coward. It should come back into the repertoire, it has powerful things to say.

  Even Alan Ayckbourn’s Comic Potential which is mainly very funny, she and her companion clutch one another and laugh all the way through, is about love and art and the nature of humanness, and gives you seriously to think even while you’re laughing your head off.

  When the immigration officer at Heathrow asked her the purpose of her visit she said, vaguely, because she hadn’t prepared an answer, oh, seeing friends, going to some plays, and galleries. And that is exactly what she’s been doing.

  She bought a postcard, or rather two because it’s a very wide picture, of Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, from an exhibition at the National Gallery of not just painting but furniture, ceramics, objects generally, from one decade in fifteenth-century Florence. It’s awe-inspiring to see what was produced in that short period in that small town, in the space of the 1470s. In this painting Mars, on the right, a young man with a lovely body, lies sleeping, entirely relaxed, abandoned even, mouth open, head fallen back, utterly asleep. Small chubby satyrs climb around him, playing with his armour; one holds a conch shell to Mars’ ear. Venus is ostensibly reclining, but in fact is sitting sharply upright and has a look on her face that speaks volumes, if you give it careful reading. A complex expression: a little disappointed, perhaps, slightly critical, deeply thoughtful. Thinking a complexity of thoughts that could include:
Is this all? Tired already? Better make the most of it, I’ll have you awake in a moment. Certainly nothing languid about her, or satisfied, none of the small secret smiles of a woman who’s been satisfactorily fucked. The conch may be her doing, in a moment the satyr will blow a blast in Mars’ ear. And he will wake to its battle call, and see Venus with her enigmatic smile, which maybe he will know how to read.

  Back at the apartment Clare writes some notes on her torn-up quarters of paper. The counter narrative of these has changed hemispheres, and may make another set of puzzles for the literary anthropologist: a fragment about a conference at the Tate on Bloomsbury and Modernism, in which Heroism and Housework is one of the topics; price lists from Fortnum and Mason, Salmon Dressed with Quails’ Eggs, Beef Wellington (fancy that still going), Traditional Fish Pie with King Prawns, from a flyer picked up because everything was so wonderfully expensive, but now torn up you get either dishes or prices, not both; some information about Provincial Booksellers’ Fairs. She looks at Venus’s cool gaze at sleeping Mars, and writes:

  One thing about sleeping by yourself is that there are no expectations to be disappointed. He is not sleeping peacefully while she lies awake, wanting the day to begin. Or sleeping noisily, while she lies awake, wishing she were asleep. Is not jumping up for a pee and a shower while she wants to lie and be cuddled.

  In a love affair, there is one person who sleeps and one who is slept at. Even Venus couldn’t manage any better, says Botticelli.

  In a marriage—maybe that is the definition of a good marriage, that you sleep together.

  Otherwise, you might as well sleep on your own. Wake in the morning, stretch, stroke your own breasts. Your own mistress.

  The Botticelli offers its enchanting images on the postcards before her. There are other ways of looking at it. She’s been reading Alec Hope’s poetry again. There was a time when he would take her out to lunch and at the top of his voice tell her tales of copulation. He was very deaf and she had to talk in a loud voice too. The whole restaurant would turn fascinated and sometimes appalled faces to them. She enjoyed it a lot. Though it didn’t make for very subtle conversation. He was quite elderly at this time and talking about fucking to a much younger woman seemed important to him. She didn’t mind, she’d been a fan of his poetry since she was a girl. Knew it well, which was a reason for revisiting it. It had been important to her when she was young because of the sex, the engagement of his intellect in it, and the physicality, it made her body open up in hollows and hot places she hadn’t suspected were there. This was a long time ago, when girls could not easily come by vicarious experiences of sex.