‘What about a nice piece of mullet, dear? I’m sure mullet don’t suffer. Or some barboünia – these little whatsits here – heaven when they’re fried.’
I spun around. It was Greta and William, strolling towards me past the trays of fish. But William wasn’t listening to Greta. He was staring at me as if I were a walking corpse. Spiky hair, striped t-shirt. Stunned.
I saw Greta swivel, heard, her exclaim. As if floating on the salty waves of fish-smells, words drifted past me from her mouth: ‘… you’re back … Zoe, why didn’t you … William … Kester’s … ’ But they meant no more to me than the cries of the fishmongers, shouting from beneath their awnings.
‘Thank you for your letter, William,’ I heard myself say eventually.
‘Letter? What letter?’ He still looked shocked, not altogether pleasantly.
‘The letter you left on the desk upstairs,’ I said.
‘Upstairs? Where? I didn’t leave you any letter. I didn’t know you were here.’
What was he playing at? ‘What do you mean? I’ve read it. I’ve missed you, I didn’t know what I was doing … ’ Greta looked sharply away in embarrassment.
‘That was for Kester. He went away before he got my card and I missed him. Is it you staying at his place?’
‘You didn’t know?’
‘How would I have known? All Greta said was —’
‘I gather you boys know each other.’ Greta looked pleased with herself, as if our meeting up like this were just one more in a string of minor miracles she’d been tossing off of late. While she was rattling on about how small the world was, and lunch, and Terpsi, who had had colic and nearly driven poor Celia mad with worry, William and I tussled silently with each other, sparring with our eyes. We looked away at the zoo milling around us in the smelly heat, at the trays of dead fish, at Gretas mouth, the sky, our feet, and back into the eyes again. Who or what was winning, it was impossible to say. Eddying between us were vicious little currents of pain, streaked with anger, blame, guilt and hunger. It was a tug-of-war, with the rush of defeat, as it always is, almost more rapturous than victory.
‘I told Celia she should have her put down,’ I heard Greta say. William winced. ‘I mean, she’s just a bag of skin and bones, a burden to Kester and herself … I think Kester would be secretly relieved. But she’s a Buddhist or something and won’t hear of it. No, wait a minute, Kester’s a Buddhist, she’s something else. A follower of whatshisname, the one who killed Katherine Mansfield. Well, what do you say to the bream?’
In a light haze of sweetbitterness – Sappho knew her stuff – I trailed off after them towards the carpark. I’d been swooped on and snatched up again by a woman with strong wings.
William’s knees were showing, I noticed, when he turned to make sure I was following, through the frayed fabric of his jeans. I have a weakness for knees, ankles and wrists. Elbows are so vulnerable I can’t even bear to look at them.
15
‘So,’ I said, once Greta had left us alone on the terrace to go and grill the fish. I admit to a certain penchant for words which lead nowhere while throwing the door open to a larger space, ‘So’ and ‘Well, then’ were great favourites of my father’s. His whole life, of course, led nowhere.
On dates as a teenager, this was what I wanted more than anything in the world: to be left alone in the dark at the cinema, in the car or in the living-room with whoever I was courting. To have time. When it actually happened, though, this being together with no script, especially if desire was frolicking somewhere in the wings, caused unbearable anxiety. It meant you were face to face with the question: What do you want now? To see this movie to the end? Or listen to music? Talk about the kids in your class? Discuss plans for the next weekend? No, but what? In Daphnis and Chloe, every last apple Daphnis threw at Chloe, every note he plucked on his lyre, every kiss, every touch, every word he spoke, was leading towards the ultimate intimacy, being ‘guided into the passage he had been trying so long to find’. Pirates, kidnappings, snow-drifts, the antics of the gods – nothing could stop the lovers’ progress to the marriage bed. Everything, even attempted rape, was just a delicious apprenticeship for the final loss of innocence. In real life, though, things are less dramatic, and those ancient goat-herds’ innocence a rare commodity. Getting ‘into the passage’ is a very skewed answer to the question of what we want. It’s like saying that what Monet wanted to do when he painted those women on the beach at Trouville was to paint those women on the beach at Trouville.
Apart from in Rome, William and I had never really sat in a puddle of unmapped time before, waiting to see what happened next. After the fiasco with the Golden Guru, our paths had hardly crossed until the night of the final dress-rehearsal of Three Sisters.
We were all in high spirits that night – ‘knackered’, as Leila put it, and tetchy with one another, at the end of our tethers, but in a weary kind of way elated. We knew it was good. We’d found the transfiguring ‘truth’ of it, as Clive would say. Not that Clive had any time for method acting – he never had us standing around finding our psychic centres or radiating our essences through our chins, as some directors do – but somehow or other he knew how to get us to say Chekhov’s impossible lines (‘It’s exactly a year since father died’ and ‘Our sufferings will bring happiness to those who come after us’) in ways that were believable. And Williams set-design was brilliant – light, impressionistic, leaving the play’s centre of gravity with the actors.
When the lights went down on the final scene at that last rehearsal (‘Ta-ra-ra-boomdeeay … None of it matters! It just doesn’t matter!’ – that’s the old doctor holding forth, and then Olga says: ‘If only we knew, if only we knew!’ – CURTAIN), there was a burst of applause. Thin, but loud. A rousing staccato. The lights came up and, smiling broadly some rows back, were Clive, William and (I’d have known that skull anywhere) the Foreign Legionnaire.
‘What the fuck is he doing here?’ I hissed at Alex.
‘Max? He’s been helping Will knock the set together – he’s got a couple of weeks’ leave.’
‘But … ’ But what? Anyway, Alex was already halfway down the steps into the hall. A fetching trio: red-haired Alex, purring, Max, looking like a pirate with his Captain Kidd bandanna, and William in an army great-coat, hand on Alex’s arm. He looked up and flashed me a smile. Right, I thought. This time, my friend, I really am coming to get you.
So, when everyone started drifting off into the rain, I put my hand on William’s shoulder and said: ‘Look, can we talk?’ And he said: ‘Sure!’ in that maddeningly accepting way he had, as if the unexpected were just what he’d been waiting for. He waved to Alex and Max to go on without him – ‘I’ll catch you up in a minute,’ he called – and I said: ‘No, not in a minute, William, I want to talk,’ to which he said: ‘Why don’t you come with us?’ ‘Because I want to talk to you, I said, ‘I don’t want —’, but he broke in with: ‘I really don’t think you know what it is you want.’ And it was true.
‘Come on,’ he said, putting up his rainbow-striped umbrella, you’re getting wet. I’ll walk you to the station.’
We sloshed along in silence for a moment. ‘The trouble is that I don’t know what you want, William,’ I said, treading carefully. ‘You said that if I saw you with someone else, I should “come and get you” – but in the end you always go off with the others. I don’t know what you want.’
‘I went to France with you.’
‘And look what happened.’
‘What happened? I thought we were having a great time until you threw that tantrum and stormed off. What were you expecting to happen?’
The short answer seemed obvious. ‘I suppose I was expecting to find out what sort of relationship …’ I couldn’t finish the sentence – the word ‘relationship’ always makes my mind go blank, I heard it once too often in the seventies.
‘Me, too,’ he said, without a hint of rancour. We’d come to the first lighted shop-windows on the Hol
loway Road. Retro furniture, second-hand clothes. Just ahead of us, Alex and the pirate were dawdling, glancing back to see where we were. The streetlamp, shining through the coloured panels of his umbrella, was bathing William in a strawberry light.
‘Well, what I think,’ he said, quite softly so the others couldn’t hear him, ‘is that until you know what you want to be, you won’t know what you want me to be. When you work that one out, we might be in business. I can wait.’
‘You’re sounding a bit like a self-help manual. Or your friend Seb. Is that one of the Golden Guru’s little gems?’
He twirled his umbrella and went blue-green. ‘The others are waiting. Sure you won’t come?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘See you tomorrow then. The big day.’
‘There’s just one other thing,’ I said, suddenly emboldened. ‘Are you sleeping with the Legionnaire? Or Alex? Or both?’
He laughed, twirled again, went purple and said: ‘None of that matters! It just doesn’t matter! Isn’t that what the good doctor would say?’
Yes, but as the old maid Olga replied: If only I knew.
Psycho-babble infuriates me. I did all that in Adelaide in my teens. Until you know what you want to be, you won’t know who you want me to be. I could just see Seb in his caftan, piercing William with his violet eyes and then leaning forwards to murmur this sort of tosh into his ear. For twenty pounds an hour, no doubt.
Oddly enough, though, William’s words kept buzzing inside my head. Sitting on the Underground or making toast, walking in the park or shopping for groceries, I’d find myself mulling them over. It was much easier, for instance, to think about what I wanted to have than what I wanted to be, to rehearse in my mind what I lacked and what I needed to fill the blank spaces. Was I a Daphnis without a Chloe, for example, I thought to myself after seeing the ballet that winter. Or a Chloe waiting for a Daphnis? Was I wooing or being wooed? Perhaps what I really needed was a close friend. Perhaps I was an Achilles without a Patroclus. But I had friends – well, people I liked, anyway, people I could call up and go out with if I was at a loose end. Nobody transfiguring, it’s true – Leila was sweet, in her fashion, as was Rupert, who did all our lighting and liked to go to a movie with me occasionally, but neither of them stood as mirrors to my soul, neither of them made me feel the world was new each time we met, as Emerson’s friends made him feel – or so he claimed. Emerson was right about one thing, I couldn’t help thinking: that kind of friendship, like the immortality of the soul, was simply too good to be true. When it announced itself, you didn’t believe it and laughed in its face.
Everything in between Daphnis’ limb-loosening passion for Chloe on the one hand (or Sappho’s love-sickness – scorched, shuddering, sweating; she thought she was dying) and the ‘perfect union’ of hearts and minds all those high-minded philosophers enjoyed with their friends on the other – everything in between seemed so prosaic, dull and unfulfilling, yet it was the stuff of daily life. I’d look around the carriage in the Underground and wonder if the man in the fawn jumper opposite, say, or the punk reading some lurid tabloid next to him, knew what it might mean for a friend’s absence to turn the world into a wilderness, or if the young girls chatting by the door knew what it felt like to want some tender sapling of a boy at the office until fire ran through their flesh and the rest of the world was just a mindless hum? And did any of them know both? And was everything else just a grey kind of waiting?
In sloppy March – it was a foul day like any other, with no signs or portents that I noticed – I ran for a train at Victoria and just missed it. Bad busking echoed round the station. I started to read the hoardings. To my astonishment, when I got to the lethally clever Silk Cut advertisement, there was William, standing right in front of it. Army great-coat, beanie, boots, delectable. And utterly ordinary. It was the sudden ordinariness that made the heart leap.
‘I’m thinking of going home,’ I said, once we’d squeezed aboard a train.
‘Really? Back to Adelaide?’ He looked at me intently. The tender skin around his eyes was bluish.
‘Why not? I’m sick of pulling rabbits out of hats for brats in Hampstead.’
‘I thought you were making piles of loot teaching English to Swedes.’
‘Norwegians. I’m sick of them as well. In any case, most of them speak better English than I do.’
‘But why Adelaide? You always said how boring it was, how you’d rather live in New Zealand than Adelaide.’
‘I’m starring to think it was me I found boring.’
‘Why would it be any different this time around?’
‘It mightn’t be. I’m just starting to feel that I want to go home. I want to start again. And that’s where I need to do it.’
‘Now who’s sounding like a self-help book?’
‘Besides, if I don’t go soon, it won’t be home any more.’
‘When will you go?’
‘I don’t know – soon.’
I knew what he was going to say next before he said it. ‘How about I come with you?’
Just six words, all commonplace. They were a cluster-bomb.
Two weeks later we said goodbye at Charing Cross, I went to Italy, with William to follow when he’d finished a job he had to do in Brighton.
Now, on Greta’s terrace, while she fried the bream, I knew William was waiting for me to find the words to explain why I had left him in that yellow and purple hotel room in Rome. I said: ‘How is it you know Kester?’
‘How is it you know Kester?’
‘I don’t. I’m just renting his house for a couple of months. But I know you know him – I’ve seen the photograph of the two of you. Naked on that rock. So obviously you know each other very well.’
He wasn’t exactly sulky, but he was quiet, wary, hurt. How to reel him in?
‘You know your trouble?’ he said, fixing me with those bruised eyes of his. ‘You want to pull everything apart all the time to see how it works. You’re like those teachers we had at school who pulled poems and plays apart until they were dead. You murder everything, did you know that? Why can’t you just let things be what they are?’
‘Because I want to know what they are. That’s the way I am.’
‘Am I fucking Max? What’s going on with Alex? Do I know what my tattoo means? And now you want to know if I’ve been having it off with Kester Berwick! He’s eighty-five years old, for God’s sake. It’s a photo of two guys sitting in the sun, it doesn’t mean anything.’
‘Nothing seems to “mean anything” to you, William. What do you think life is? One great shopping mall you can just drift about in, listening to the muzak? Pick up a bit of reincarnation here, grab a bonk there – Chekhov, Cher, the Rolling Stones, Beirut, it’s all the same to you, it’s just background noise.’
‘That’s crap. It’s not like that at all.’
‘So where did he pick you up?’
‘Who?’
‘Kester Berwick. In some bar on Cromwell Road?’ ‘Is that all you can think about? What if he did? As a matter of fact, I met Kester in Adelaide years ago – I’d just left school. I’m not telling you how because you’ll only sneer.’
‘Try me.’
‘OK, it was at a lecture on TM.’
‘The Maharishi whatsit?’
‘See? I knew you’d sneer. You’re so closed-off.’
‘If I’m so closed-off, so boringly conventional, why did you make me feel I was special in some way? And you did, you singled me out, you made me feel…’
Greta darted out of the french windows towards us, a tray of plates and glasses in her hands.
‘Because,’ William said, just as she reached the table, not lowering his voice in the slightest, ‘I thought I could love you.’
Greta gave a jerk and let the tray slip clattering onto the table. ‘Love’ – how I loathed that spongy, sickly-sweet word, especially after Three Sisters. It’s a voodoo word, a meaningless incantation, mumbo jumbo like Seb’s spurious spells
. I stood up and pushed back my chair. It fell over.
‘I’m going to take a walk,’ I said.
‘Why don’t you stay and finish this?’ William said.
‘Yes, and what about the fish?’ said Greta.
Rounding the courtyard wall, I glanced up at the window where I’d seen the figure in the crimson dressing-gown at the Easter party. I gave a start: it was there again, leering down at me.
‘Why don’t you fuck off?’ it roared at me again, waving a bottle of Glenfiddich out the window.
”Why don’t you fuck off yourself, you drunken old bastard?’ I called back and kept going, round to the back of the house, round to the shimmering quiet of the lawn fringed with cyclamens, right over to the myrtles in the corner. I hate scenes. Faintly on the breeze I heard the old man call after me: ‘Who said I was drunk?’
When I turned round, it need hardly be said, William was standing right behind me. Neither of us spoke. I could hear bees humming in the cyclamens.
‘Well?’ he said after a longish pause, still nettled, but with a softer, huskier edge to his voice. When I said nothing, he sat down cross-legged on the grass to wait, his t-shirt hanging open at the neck. Just below his collar-bone I caught a glimpse of the Horus-eye again, staring up at me. This time there was no escape.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It was an unforgivable thing to do.’
‘Why did you do it?’
‘I panicked.’ And there was that stomach-turning yellow and purple room, too, I thought of adding, but wisely didn’t. Just picturing it made me queasy.
‘I thought something terrible had happened to you.’
‘I’m sorry.’ I ground a violet or two into the grass with the ball of my foot. ‘All of a sudden it just hit me, when you got out of the train: I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with you.’
‘I hadn’t asked you to.’
That was true, he hadn’t. All I wanted from you (I should have said to him then) was what we had: the swerving towards and pulling back, the whirling, the breathless tumbling, the stumbling, the jabbing pain, the solace, the sport – not life. Departures, not arrivals, in other words. And as for love – I still didn’t have the faintest notion of what people meant by ‘love’.
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