Limestone

by Fiona Farrell

  She has never done this before: headed off without making bookings. She usually plans for holidays as meticulously as Paul preparing for one of his climbing trips. It was a quality they shared. For weeks before he headed off to India or Peru, the living room in his flat would be a scramble of ropes and carabiniers and lightweight clothing and the latest in dinky high-altitude cookers. For weeks before she went on holiday, she scanned the internet for hotels, checking for location, price, a pool perhaps, a view of the ocean, a balcony. She examined guide books, ticking restaurants with a recommended menu and a terrace overlooking a river. She compiled lists of what to take, and packed and repacked to make sure everything would fit and everything was necessary. They laughed about their preparations with friends.

  ‘For a couple of compulsive obsessives,’ she’d say, ‘planning is one of the best bits.’ And if their friends hinted that they thought them a little odd in their determination to take separate holidays — further evidence of the general oddity of their entire relationship with its separate flats and prolonged detachment — she countered with, ‘But I’d hate climbing. It’d be cold, I get vertigo, I hate damp sleeping bags and I’m not that keen on the idea of plunging to certain death in a crevasse. And Paul finds cafés and galleries boring. So — it makes sense to us.’

  She had gone with him once to India. He loved the place, perhaps because of all that childhood exposure to the artefacts of empire crammed into his parents’ home in Nelson: the brass tables over which everyone tripped, the teak chests and the little wax model of the Taj Mahal which he had destroyed in one ecstatic act of childhood arson by lighting the candles that stood in for the minarets either side of the mausoleum. It had gone up in seconds, leaving a charred scar on the living-room wallpaper and stalactites of melted wax dripping from the mantle. He was reverent before the moonlit reality, just as he was enraptured by the Red Fort and Varanasi, while Clare hung back, appalled at the stink of shit, the blackened corpses, the little beggar children besieging her on all sides.

  ‘Why do they let this happen?’ she’d yelled, surrounded by clamorous hands and a few hideous amputated stumps. ‘It’s a rich country! How can they let people live like this! Why don’t they get themselves organised and distribute the wealth more evenly? China managed a revolution! Why can’t they do it here?’

  Paul scattered a handful of coins to draw the children off, as if he were tossing wheat to a flock of chickens. He shrugged. ‘It’s the way it is,’ he said. ‘They believe they’ll do better in the next life.’

  ‘What total utter bullshit,’ raged Clare, too hot, too dirty, too frantic to care any more that a broken-down taxi was tooting at her back and people were looking round with mild curiosity to watch another mad foreign woman lose control. ‘Fucking religion!’ she yelled at the broken stinking street, the scrambling urchins, the reeking, rackety, technicolor mayhem of an Indian city. ‘It’s all crap! Do you hear? There’s nothing coming after! This is it!’

  Paul took her hand. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You’re not about to start the reformation here, you know. No one is going to join your revolution. Come and have a cup of tea.’

  His answer to everything. A nice cup of tea. He was suited to India. Back home, he did yoga every morning, intently saluting the sun from the bedroom carpet, and attending weekly classes where he twisted his long skinny legs into the dog and the cobra amid a crowd of devotees in a room above a lighting showroom on Manchester Street. Clare had gone along once too, but the room filled with twisted bodies made her feel claustrophobic. She had caught a glimpse of herself in one of the floor-length mirrors, for the room was also used by ballet classes for little girls in leotards and pink crossover cardigans. She had seen herself mid-archer, her arms outstretched, her hips swivelled as instructed. She looked ridiculous.

  ‘I don’t think I’m cut out for India,’ she said to Paul. ‘I like tandoori chicken and naan bread, but that’s about it.’

  Paul felt the same about her caves and goddesses. He went along on one of her trips, the first to the temple sites in Malta and Sardinia. The hypogeum at Hal Saflieni left him unmoved, while she stood in wonder at the strange underground temple carved from solid limestone to duplicate the laminated slabs of surface structures with its curved ceiling ornamented with the crimson tracery of the placental veins that so closely resemble the trunk and tendrils of a spreading vine. He loathed it from the instant they passed through the ordinary front door on a suburban street that led to the subterranean chambers where ancient bones had been deposited in the stone womb presided over by that little sleeping goddess. They had visited in early spring, when few tourists were about. The chambers were uncrowded, but Paul could hardly bear to remain below ground. He bolted for the open air and a bar and a beer and everyday reality, while Clare lingered, enchanted by the little figurine who had lain there for five thousand years, plump and peaceful on her palliasse of woven rushes, one hand beneath her head, the other resting on the curve of her ample hip. She thought her beautiful, with her tiny feet, her ornately pleated skirt.

  When Clare emerged at last, she found Paul seated in the sun at the bar on the corner, flicking through an old copy of the Observer and eager to leave, to head off on a boat trip he’d seen advertised to one of the other islands. He leapt up as she crossed the road.

  ‘God!’ he said. ‘What took you so long?’

  Some of the underground calm and dark clung to Clare. He seemed, by contrast, all brightly lit and loud and brash and external.

  ‘It was amazing,’ she said. ‘That little goddess figure. Did you see her?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Too bloody spooky if you ask me.’

  As if the place was no more than a ride on a Ghost Train, all squeals and cheap thrills. She hated him at that second for dismissing so readily something that had moved her deeply. She sulked for the rest of the day, refused to go on the boat trip, told him to go ahead. He did. He went snorkelling and returned to their hotel room happy and keen to take her to bed, but she said she didn’t feel like it, so they both sulked for a few hours.

  The next morning it had seemed less important. They had their holiday, but they never again tried to travel together, at least not to the places that mattered most to them. When she went off in pursuit of limestone, she went alone.

  Alone she visited the caves that are strung like white beads along the black thread of the Northern Hemisphere’s 45th parallel. Alone she joined the tour groups to look at the ponies heavy-bellied with foal at the Font de Gaume. Alone she squeezed along the narrow zigzag course of Les Combarelles to see with her own eyes the pacing lioness and the etched silhouettes of the reclining women. Alone she took the little train that carries the tourists to view the mammoths painted on the limestone in the depths of Rouffignac. She loved the solitude of small hotels, a meal in a restaurant where she could sit in a corner near a window and order duck breast and foie gras and read her guide book undisturbed. Alone, the year that Paul went off to climb Shivling, she visited Niaux.

  Its great arch opened above the usual village cluster of school and church, bar-restaurant, and toytown mairie decked out that year in smiling men and women urging a vote for Le Pen. Le Pen and a glorious, racially pure and therefore peaceful society. Humanity was once more trying to plan an ideal community, and as usual the ideal would be partly new — a future as rational and novel as the cityscape at La Défense — and partly a recreation of some fictional past Elysium of consensus and genetic coherence. Under the new regime, the posters suggested, all citizens would smile and be attired in suits of superbly elegant cut.

  Clare sat alone among French families earnestly engaged in the business of eating Sunday lunch with only her guide book for company. It lay, small and authoritative, next to her salade aux gésiers, open at a brief description of this cave, this ‘Citadel of Palaeolithic art’. When Clare looked up from her reading, she could see the cave entrance from which protruded the visitors’ centre — the work, according to the guide book, o
f Fuksas, the futuristic Italian architect who has famously averred that ‘The past no longer exists.’ At Niaux, he has, at the instigation of the Département of the Ariège, designed a masterwork of corten steel intended to recall the wings of some prehistoric dragon emerging from the depths of time.

  Behind it, through a tiny door let into the hillside, lay a dark landscape of caverns, lakes and streams. A kilometre below ground, where the turmoil of some ancient river had formed a smooth apse in the stone, images had been drawn on limestone twenty thousand years ago. Bison, mammoth, horses with spiky manes — female animals for the most part, plump and pregnant. There were handprints too, outlined in red ochre and strange claviform marks which might indicate the phases of the moon, the female menstrual cycle, or simply point the way through the labyrinth. She knew all about this from months of reading. ‘Enigmatic,’ the guide book said. ‘Remarkable.’

  She was prepared. She had booked her accommodation, loving the moment when the phone was lifted from its cradle half a world away. ‘Allô?’ said the French voice, and Clare was forced to rearrange her face to pronounce the words of reply, lips in full Bardot pout as if she were about to land a kiss. Une chambre, she said. Une personne. Une nuit, imagining, as she always imagined, some whitewashed room with petunias in a window box and a view of the Med. And as usual she found herself on her first night in France in Room 102 in a holiday complex called Maeva, one of a chain with branches in Tahiti, Mexico, Spain, each with an impossibly blue swimming pool and rows of white sun loungers and a bedside brochure informing her that Maeva is the Tahitian word for Welcome and also one of the most popular names for contemporary French babies. Thousands of babies are named, presumably, for the place of their conception: a room exactly like this one in a flimsy block called Bali.

  Outside her window, the palms about the lagoon rattled in a chilly wind. It was too early yet for the crowds who were massing in a great grey flock to the north. In a few weeks, they would descend. They would windsurf on the lagoon and sunbathe on nests of dry seaweed on the shingle at the beach. For a month they would perch here before winging their way back to the concrete cliffs of offices and apartment blocks which were their customary habitat. For now, there was just Clare, lying in her twin bed feeling sudden doubt. Why was she here?

  What was it she spent her life seeking? Beauty? Authenticity? Other people had such specific goals: Paul wished to climb some impossible col. Her colleagues were equally certain: Elizabeth from the office next door ate her way around Italy, keeping a food diary recording every single meal she and Roderick consumed, and where possible cross-questioning the unfortunate chefs with the object of duplicating their menus on her return to Merivale. David cycled across China in form-hugging lycra. Saskia refused to leave New Zealand, saying there was more than enough here to keep her interested for a lifetime. She drove about the country in her Kombi van, photographing Invercargill on a winter evening and kids in a Gisborne video parlour and a bare gravel riverbed with the shot-out carcass of a Subaru where once there had been mountain water and eels and the flicker of brown trout. The country rendered in sharply focused black and white. Max, on the other hand, journeyed to the opera houses of the world in his capacity as gentleman traveller, while Hugh visited cathedrals. When she mentioned that she was going to visit the Pyrenees, he presumed the Voie Sacrée. The relics of St James the Greater in the gilded sanctuary, the botafumeiro, fifty kilos of solid silver, swinging through the transepts at Compostela trailing clouds of scented blessing.

  ‘No,’ said Clare. ‘I’m not going there.’

  Hugh had walked the route from Le Puy. Blistered heels, and nights spent in dormitories where seventy pilgrims crammed together, farting and snoring. He had met this American woman, what’s her name now, who wrote a book.

  ‘Shirley Maclaine?’ said Clare. ‘Did you actually meet Shirley Maclaine?’

  ‘She was some sort of actress,’ said Hugh, who really did not like the contemporary world, and lived in conditions of monastic austerity in a small flat in Ilam, with plainsong on the stereo and an image of St Sebastian above his bare table.

  ‘Yes,’ said Clare. ‘She is. She appears quite frequently in the moving pictures. Honestly, Hugh, where have you been for the past century?’

  Whatever she was looking for, it definitely was not faith. She had once stood in a French cathedral watching a child crawling beneath the tomb of a mummified saint, nudged on by her mother, a plump woman in a print frock, with doleful, spongey ankles.

  ‘Go on,’ said the mother. ‘Vite! Vite! Kiss the stone!’

  The child looked doubtful. The saint in her glass coffin looked like a raisin. The child, the mother, the saint repelled Clare as much as the indifference and sanctioned chaos of the Indian street. The taste of disbelief still clung, chilly and metallic, to her tongue. Long ago, kneeling by her bed in her nightie, praying earnestly for her father’s return, she had known it was all a bitter lie. No God, no Gentle Jesus, no one there to forgive, no one there to answer.

  ‘No,’ she said to Hugh. ‘I’m not going on any bloody pilgrimage. I’m going to visit a cave.’

  Hugh said, without much conviction, ‘That sounds nice.’

  And Paul said, ‘Great!’ though his attention was clearly directed totally to that perennial question: crampons inside the body of the pack or stuffed in the external pockets, or bubblewrapped and tied to the frame?

  She liked his lack of interest. It felt like freedom. She defended it, as she defended her own indifference to climbing. They were marks of their mutual independence. Their friends’ relationships with their stifling coupledom seemed boring by comparison. Not to mention doomed. She had sat at dinner, toying with a beef fillet so rare it required anticoagulants, listening to Elizabeth describing the appalling moment in Roma when they had been walking back to their hotel after dinner at ten thirty one night and this girl had snatched her bag, just ridden up onto the footpath and …

  ‘Eleven thirty,’ said Roderick, helping himself to green beans.

  ‘What?’ said Elizabeth, momentarily distracted.

  ‘Eleven thirty,’ said Roderick. ‘Not ten thirty.’

  Elizabeth looked puzzled. ‘No. It was ten thirty. We’d just had dinner at that gorgeous little trattoria off the Via Borgogna …’ She rolls each ‘r’ and gives the words full Italian throttle. ‘Remember? That awful waiter …’

  And the story wandered off down some cul-de-sac of a waiter so rude they had left before dessert, remember? So it was early: only ten thirty. No, insisted Roderick: eleven thirty. And away went the story, morphing into an increasingly heated argument about timing while everyone else at the table sat waiting for plot and character, because Elizabeth’s story had really been intended to be about the bagsnatcher and how young she was, seated on a moped like some Bellini angel, just exquisite, and how Elizabeth had clung to her bag, passport, cell phone, lira, and how the bag had somehow got tangled round both their arms, so that the moped had wobbled and run into a wall and how they’d found themselves, Elizabeth and the angel, bound together by her shoulder bag, wrestling on the footpath like Tobias in the painting, and how Roderick had made a valiant attempt to drag the girl off and how …

  Clare did not envy Elizabeth her coupledom at such moments. Roderick may have called her ‘Darling’ in public. He may have organised a surprise birthday for her fiftieth with a jazz band and dinner for twenty. He may have stood beside her on the drive afterwards, farewelling their departing guests, waving and calling, ‘Drive safely now!’ He may have put his arm about her shoulders as they retreated through the front door to coupledom. But what was the point of coupledom, if you could not sit at your own dinner table and tell a story without the threat of resentful subversion and those pinprick hints of cordial dislike?

  Nor did Clare envy coupledom at that moment when the party had wound down to the stayers, when those few who were left had gravitated to the comfy chairs and sofas to sprawl at last, after hours of standing propped aga
inst the bookshelves in fashionable but deadly high heels, juggling a wine glass and a piece of sushi, yelling at strangers, though there really wasn’t much point in attempting to talk at all because someone had insisted on turning up the stereo and they were dancing in the hallway. Hits of the eighties! We’re on the Road to Nowhere! JUMP (For My Love)! And the floor of ancient worm-eaten totara was shuddering beneath their feet.

  But finally the dancers had left, off to pay the babysitter. And the fitness fanatics who must run twenty-five kilometres in the morning in searing heat. And the ones who hated parties and sat all night in the kitchen, drinking steadily and talking about the melting of the icecaps and how they gave the human species another fifty years, tops.

  Anyway, they’ve all gone, staggered off morosely into the night, and the stayers remain. A gentle warmth unites them. Someone has put something soft and unstructured on the stereo. Someone has put a log on the fire, someone has brought in coffee and a plate of chocolate truffles that had been forgotten in the fridge.

  The best part of any party, when you know you should head home but you like the others so much: the ones you’ve known for years and the ones you’ve only just met. You kick off the uncomfortable shoes, you settle to some real conversation at last. And the only one who doesn’t want to be here is Terry who is married to Jenny the departmental secretary. All night he has been watching Jenny laughing with a friend of the host’s who is visiting from Sydney. The friend is short and bald but funny, and Jenny has been standing close to talk to him because you had to really — everyone had to stand close because of the noise in the room. Terry has stood by the hall door, drinking and laughing in that dreadful mirthless way of his, because Terry is completely devoid of a sense of humour. He tells jokes instead: jokes he has heard or read somewhere and repeats slowly, demanding undivided attention from the entire assembly so that all the little conversations are forced to stand aside and wait for the joke to pass, like a goods train at a level crossing, as slowly, inevitably the joke chunters to its punch line. Then everyone at last can groan and say, ‘Oh, Terry!’ and they are released from stasis to animation. But tonight Jenny is across the room, laughing easily and without effort at the man from Sydney who is funny without trying. He doesn’t even seem to know that there should be a punch line. So when the stayers assemble around the fire Terry does not want to stay. He says his lower back is playing up. He needs to go home. Jenny does not want to leave. She wants to stay seated on the carpet by the fire, with her shoes kicked off, laughing as she hasn’t laughed in ages. But Terry won’t leave alone. A taxi from St Albans to Diamond Harbour? My god, it would cost a fortune! He stands, clinking the car keys until Jenny has no option but to get up and go.