by Ian Wedde
Now I’m understanding that this is really the grandchildren story against a historical backdrop, as well as a performance about a marriage filled with small restraining gestures.
‘But then you came here why?’ I feel as though I’m reading one of those autocue things.
‘So, George was born in Lebanon in 1962, me a little later.’ She smiles, modestly. ‘I was younger.’ The eyelashes. ‘A girl.’
‘In Bekaa,’ says George. ‘Both families.’ Now she’s covered George’s hand on her cheek with hers. I seem to be perving on a secret story told by their little physical intimacies. ‘Where the wine is.’
‘Yes, in Bekaa,’ says Ruth. They’re both looking at me while their intimate little hand-play continues. I’ve heard of Bekaa and its wine, but that’s not what the hands are telling me about.
‘George’s family comes to New Zealand when he is two, a baby. When he is twenty-two, his father sends him back to Lebanon.’ Again, the modest smile.
‘And the rest is history, as they say’—I say—but like my earlier quip about inheritance this one doesn’t get much purchase.
‘Her father is my father’s oldest friend,’ says George. ‘I have to bring his daughter away from the civil war. Unfortunately, she is very beautiful. It’s a disaster!’
‘He was my hero,’ says Ruth. She takes George’s hand from her cheek and returns it gently to his lap.
‘And then I am her husband, a little later.’ George seems to be hurrying the story along. ‘We had three kids, girls. The first grandson four years ago. Two more two years ago, a boy and a girl. Three this year, girls.’ He’s taking little glances at Ruth. ‘The invasion!’
The gap opened by his wife’s silence isn’t hard to find.
‘And your family?’ I ask her.
Her gaze is simple and straightforward, though one eye has a very slight cast in it, so that she seems to be looking both at me and past me.
‘They were killed,’ she says, ‘in the Bekaa. In the war.’ And before I can butt in with an ‘I’m so sorry,’ or something, she puts one hand on her husband’s arm—these little gestures they have—and raises her glass. ‘So . . .’
I pick up my cue.
‘Here’s to the grandchildren,’ I say. And add, ‘The invasion.’ It seems a bit much to add the great-grandchild.
‘The grandchildren,’ we say in a ragged unison. George tops us up, and we clink glasses again and drink. The wine’s not bad, southern Rhoneish style, a bit thin at the end. Now doesn’t seem like the right moment to comment on it. There’s still two or three glasses left in the bottle, but George and his wife get up from the table. Again, that look both direct and askance, and the kisses on both cheeks that are both polite and with feeling. Then Ruth walks back around the counter to the kitchen, stooping again by the time she goes in there.
‘That must have been terrible,’ I say to George. ‘I mean, your wife’s family. Ruth’s family.’
‘Terrible, yes,’ he says. ‘Her three brothers. That’s why we had three. But they are daughters.’ He’s standing with two empty glasses and the quarter-full bottle in his hands. He shrugs, lifting the bottle and glasses. ‘But . . .’
‘Life goes on,’ I say, feeling as if I’ve been prompted again. Then I sit looking out the window with a mouthful of the wine left in my glass. I can hear Ruth and George busy in the kitchen, and their voices, not loud, but firm with each other, speaking in what I guess must be Arabic, not disagreeing, but discussing. Then George comes back and reverses the ‘closed’ sign on the door.
‘Life goes on, as you see,’ he says, with his front-of-house smile back.
I should get going, but I don’t. I don’t quite know why I should, or where to. Someone puts on Middle Eastern music in the kitchen. No more customers come in. After a little while, George brings me a small gritty coffee, a piece of sweet baklava and an arak, ‘on the house’. The arak turns white when he adds water, and tastes like cough medicine, and it’s only after I’ve knocked it back that I realise how strong it is.
When I get to the waterfront, the sea has that chalky blue colour that I’ve often thought was just right for the town’s best plastered façades, a limey kind of turquoise. Now I couldn’t give a shit what it might be good for except waves. It’s just lovely, it’s a smooth, calm kind of sound. That’s all I need at the moment. Little pale-blue whispers of waves.
What in God’s name was I thinking, ‘Here’s to the invasion!’ Stupid cow that I am. It reminds me of when Dad would stare down any attempt to do the family history thing.
But then, maybe it didn’t matter. In the bigger scheme of things. And George said it first.
The park bench isn’t all that comfortable. If you sit right back in it the edge cuts into your thighs, and if you sit forward you get a crick in your back. Someone’s idea of traditional. I sit right back, since I won’t be staying long. My knees are squarish in my jeans, and I don’t have the elongated thighs I could tell were under Ruth’s dress. Mum, though quite petite, had the long thighs, and Dad’s were like furry beanpoles. Mine must be a throwback to something or other. Someone or other. Between them I can line up an organised view across a strip of scruffy beige grass, the worn asphalt footpath, the grey pebbly beach, the whiteness of the gently dropping little waves, the soupy turquoise of the sea, and then a shining stretch-marked expanse of blue-grey water out to the horizon. Above that it’s too bright, like light reflected off tinfoil, and I feel a headache coming on.
It’s not exactly warm, but I sit there anyway, paralysing my short thighs, to clear my head before picking up the car from the office. Thinking about Plan A+. Plan A+, the new one that has a great-grandchild in it. Then I push myself up off the awkward bench.
Why don’t you use a cellphone, Pete’s always wanting to know. Along with Frankie and my own daughter. Because that’s why we’re paying Frankie to sit behind a desk with a phone on it during working hours. And because I hate them. And here’s another reason: the answerphone at home’s blinking madly, and the caller numbers are all the same. Sandy’s. There’s only one reason I can think of, and it’s that he’s finally decided to throw himself under the wheels of a student young enough to be his granddaughter. Under the thighs of.
There are signs of a scrupulous clean-up in the kitchen, dishes all put away, and there are fresh flowers in a vase, white and yellow chrysanthemums from the corner dairy—I noticed a black plastic bucket of them outside there on the way into town—and next to them a message from Pete on the Bay Tours jotter pad.
‘I’ve booked us dinner at the Mission. Don’t make plans! X Peter’
Peter, mind you.
Plans.
And besides which, are you going to charge it to the company?
There’s still sunlight in the sunporch and plenty of light from the sea view out to the east, but it won’t be long, couple of hours at the most, before that strange light-change happens out there, when the sun gets low in the west and a kind of reflection warms the eastern sea horizon for a little while before evening. Nigel ribs me about living up on the hill with ‘the rich pricks’, fat chance, but most of the garden’s his idea, completely seasonal, lots of perennials and a succession of changing annual colours. Our chrysanthemums are the tough little perennial sub-shrubs—Nigel considers the florists’ versions to be vulgar, the old snob. They’re what Pete’s bought from the dairy, as if he hadn’t noticed what was before his eyes in the garden.
But anyway.
When I wake up again I know I’ve had a dream about Ulrich, but all I remember is that he was seconded to the European Institute of Design in Venice, which almost certainly wasn’t in the dream anyway, but which was how our careful conversation started in the hotel bar. He could well have been one of the most boring people I ever met, and he could have made a habit of picking up single foreign women in bars. But my dream isn’t telling me anything now it’s over. I’ve got some dried spit on my cheek, and a taste of aniseed in my mouth from the arak ba
ck at the Nablus. It’s getting twilighty, that little reflected flush of sunset across at the horizon has gone, the porch is chilly, and I walk through the unlit house along a track that’s in my brain, not on the floor, whose creaks seem to follow me.
I go past the phone with its blinking lights and upstairs for a shower. I’ll have a listen to the last message when I go back down. Pete comes in whistling in that aimless, meandering way men do when they’re feeling vulnerable—sometimes the older ones do it while they’re waiting for attention at the Bay Tours counter.
The older ones.
The whistling stops when I turn the shower on, but Pete doesn’t come upstairs to say hello through the steam. I let the shampoo run over me until all the bright, winking bubbles have stopped swirling around my feet. Then I get out and stand in front of the full-length mirror.
I look at my body. It’s misty, or rather the mirror is. Some little rivulets run down the mirror over the tummy-fold that’s there now, under which he carefully inserted his art conservator’s fingers twenty-six years ago when it wasn’t. After the cigars there was another smell, it was on his body not his breath, it was like overlays of old-fashioned men’s cologne and the hot, starchy hotel laundry service, and under that, which was good for a start, a simple animal smell, warm skin, a day’s work, a few whiskeys, whatever was trapped in his big deep armpits, around the creases where his black pubic hair shaded off into a pale furze across his thighs, and around his ears, where there was a slight sweetness, as if he’d been rubbing his thoughtful temples with fingers scented by beeswax.
He didn’t mind that I didn’t have long thighs, like beautiful tired Ruth at the Nablus, or probably like the student Sandy’s panting after. No, he liked Veronica Dartsworth—or Veronica Klepka, the untraceable name I gave him—just the way she was, cuddly, with big tits he pushed his face into. He pushed his face into the pillow next to my head when he came for the last time, and let go of my wrists, and cursed in German. Scheisse! I knew it was cursing, because after a while he apologised, I’m so sorry, I don’t want it to be finished, aber das ist Alles.
Scheisse!
There’s no more.
And then it was the next morning.
Solemn wee Sophie and I went for ages on the vaporetto around all the stops on the way to the airport, which was besieged by tourists going in both directions. Mum’s funeral in Wellington felt like an extension of that. Swarms of people were arriving and leaving at the house. Nasty little rain squalls were chasing sunshine across Dad’s famous windows. Mick’s eyes had disappeared into his head, and Sandy had a flash new suit one size too small. Mick got completely pissed and wandered off into the rain, and Sandy made a rather good speech of thanks. Then the red house emptied. There was a ringing sound in it, as if the walls were vibrating. There was furniture everywhere, but all the drapes had been replaced by wooden venetian blinds that clattered in the wind because Sandy insisted on ‘letting some air in’, a chattering that went on after dark when everyone had left. Sophie took me by the hand, and we went upstairs and slept together through most of the next day in my old room—she took up so little space I needed to find her sometimes and feel her breath on my neck again. Pete was staying in a hotel. The only impression I had of him after we got back from Venice was the uncertain tremor of his smile and the banal smell of his aftershave. By the time I saw him again late on the day after the funeral, the sweet smell of beeswax around Ulrich’s ears had gone down into the place where it’s remained now for twenty-six years.
I sit on the side of our bed to strap my watch on, holding it against my knee, something I’ll do most days, often more than once, same old watch, different time, but now it feels strange, as if I’m seeing myself do something new and unusual. The time feels strange too, getting on for six in the evening, when I’d often enough be sitting where I am now, ‘on my side of the bed’, putting my watch on again after a shower, hearing Pete downstairs switching on the six o’clock news, yelling up to me, ‘Want to see all the shitty stuff that’s happening?’
Only he’s not yelling out tonight, though I can hear him moving around down there, and ‘my side of the bed’ has been all there is for a while. I’ve hardly even noticed how often Pete’s been using the one in the spare room. There’s a book on the/my bedside table—it’s Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories with the private investigator Jackson Brodie—and my spare reading glasses. I’ve been quite enjoying it. I like the sense I get of the writer—she must be fun, it seems to me, as a person. Though she’s a bit Englishy, and I don’t imagine she’d have any difficulty making her thoughts move swiftly into words and then into interesting conversation.
I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m about to do it.
My brain shifts down a gear, and I think, I don’t imagine Kate Atkinson has this kind of difficulty.
Anyway.
Pete does an exaggerated double-take when I come into the living room in my jeans and a sweater. He’s got his nice Donegal jacket on and looks a lot better than he did this morning—for example, shaved and combed, his shirt freshly pressed from the dry-cleaners.
‘So, casual attire this evening, is it?’ For a moment it looks as though he’s going to close the gap between us and give me a hug, but then he stops. ‘Oh, come on, Ver,’ he says. Must be my expression or something. ‘Come on, sweetie, let’s just go out and have a nice meal, then we can talk things over.’
‘I’d rather do it now, if you don’t mind, Pete,’ I say, and hear myself sounding like a crabby old bitch, so I add, ‘but thanks for the flowers.’
Shouldn’t that have been, ‘And thanks for the flowers?’
He’s not putting on an act when he holds his head in his hands and lets out a growl. ‘Okay,’ he says, and sits at the dining table. ‘Where do you want to start? My drinking problem, the fucked business or the fact that the place needs new wallpaper again?’ I still love the man, but it’s wearing thin when he adds, ‘Or is there something else?’ in his best sarcastic tone.
‘Angie’s pregnant,’ I say. Knowing the moment I open my mouth to say it that Ulrich may have to stay where he’s been all this time.
Pete’s jaw drops, he jumps up, knocking the chair away, his face goes red, and I see him battle to get a word in ahead of his stutter—he chokes on the sound of rage or pain that had just started to come out.
‘I had lunch with Soph,’ I say. ‘It’s okay—the poor kid wasn’t raped or anything, you don’t have to go tearing around somewhere and knock the boy’s teeth in.’
Plan B+.
It’s pathetic, but I feel a great thump of disappointment, of anticlimax, land on me heavily, sadly, knocking the breath out of me.
So this is what I’m going to do.
Pete sits down again and gets his faculties under control.
‘She’s a kid,’ he says. ‘Wee Ange. She’s s-s-s-seventeen!’ He’s not going to be able to manage it, the speech thing. His eyes have filled up with tears.
‘Yes, seventeen,’ I say. ‘So not really a kid. She’s going to have to think about it. But she’ll probably do it. She’ll be needing us.’
There’s a squeal of brakes and a car horn held down for too long out in the street, and some teenage macho shouting, and Pete startles as if he’s had an electric shock. He’s blinking at his tears, but I see the thought She’ll be needing us go into his system like a calming drug, so that he smiles next, that lovely straight smile across his face that makes his cheeks crinkle.
‘She’ll be needing us,’ he says without difficulty. The smile stays there. ‘Yes. So who is the lucky little prick?’
‘It’s a forty-year-old Frenchman,’ I say. ‘He sells wine barrels.’
‘You’re kidding.’ Pete’s smile twitches back and forth between amusement and horror.
‘No I’m not,’ I say, knowing I’m going to play the good-humour card next, and hating myself for it. ‘And vibrating sorting tables.’
‘And what?’
‘Vibrating
sorting tables. Tools of the trade, apparently.’ I feel a bit sick, all at once, with the horrible dishonesty of it, and Pete’s face is struggling to work out what to do about all this. Am I taking the piss out of him? (Well, am I?)
The man I’ve loved one way or another for ten years longer than I’ve kept the German’s beeswaxy aroma to myself doesn’t really have secrets, or the ability to keep them. He gives things his best shot, which isn’t always too accurate, it’s true. He’s a likes-a-laugh fellow who’s most at ease with a drink in his hand, in the company of other men, telling blokey fibs. Or playing with his daughter and then his granddaughter at the beach, tripping up first one and then, twenty-something years later, the other, chucking first one and then the other into the little turquoise waves, first when he had the hard body of a not-bad number eleven with a wicked sidestep, next when his body was a bit stringy, though with a wee drinker’s paunch. But always laughing while doing the chucking or tripping-up, the laugh that could outsmart his stutter better than anything else, the laugh that could sidestep the traps in his life.
Haven’t heard the Pete laugh for a while.
‘Well, fuck me,’ he says, and he’s laughing now. ‘A Froggie great-grandchild. What would the odds be.’ A few months back, before the balance sheet started leaning the wrong way, he’d have considered this a good enough reason to pour us a drink. Not tonight. ‘Life,’ he says. ‘What a bitch.’
I’d laugh too, it seems the best thing to do under the circumstances, but I can’t. It rises up again, There’s something I need to tell you, but I can’t do that either. It’s well and truly gone now.
‘So,’ I say. ‘Plan B time, probably.’
But not that one.
‘Guess so,’ Pete says, with his eyebrows up, and the fact that he doesn’t ask what Plan A might have consisted of suggests rather strongly that he thinks it would have involved recapitalising Bay Tours with Klepka Trust funds. The laughter, Pete’s laughter, is winding down into a silence which he swerves past, or sidesteps, let’s say, with some of the grace and flair of old when he stands up in his nice speckled grey Donegal jacket, still a tall, handsome man, with that straight-line grin on his face, and says, ‘Come on, Ver, let’s . . .’—as the phone rings.