But here they are, at the cottage already. She puts the key in the lock and opens the door. He goes upstairs, to her room, where he sits on the edge of the bed in the dark and stares straight ahead.
The remarkable thing is, before they left he wrote a poem describing an extrapolation from the situation in which he finds himself now.
The situation in which he finds himself now. That is: hungry for love.
In his monthly letter to his father, blithely freewheeling in sunny Florida, he wrote that he was so busy he wouldn’t be able to come, not this summer. He received a postcard in reply, one of those big floppy American sheets of card with poison-blue waves, and on it: ‘OK.’ Anyone else would have thought that single word masked a clamour of disappointment. He knew better. The family he came from was like a book of etiquette. A bunch of handshaking, crystal-knife-rest-arranging diplomats, whose surprise was detectable only to those trained in reading the English stiff upper lip.
Father, my house has burned down, my wife has run off with a lesbian lion tamer and the manuscript of my research on the north-eastern Lower Rhine Prudentius annotations has been swept away in a flood.
How annoying, how unpleasant.
The circumlocutions of civility.
Would a different son, from a different family, have written to his father that he wasn’t coming to Florida because he preferred to roam around England with a strapping theologian than spend a month among blue-rinsed old biddies?
His ‘prophetic’ poem, if he adapts it (the rain, the cottage), is a fairly accurate description of what would happen if they were to …
The Bridal Suite
In the room with the low roof, ceiling
of wood, floor of wood, all the walls
wood, the glass of happiness breaks.
Naked on the bed she turns round.
He smiles in the soft half-light
and thinks: this was the signal to start.
He walks to the window, looks
at the hotel, a mountain
that shines in the evening rain,
and thinks of their reception,
the cause of all this:
‘The cottage, the bridal suite,
the only room free.’
Behind him he hears the rustle
of linen. She leaves the bed.
From the sound of running water
and the shifting of a few
little things he can tell
that she is preparing a bath.
Once, he thinks, long ago, this was happiness:
a wooden room, low light, me,
and in audible proximity she, a woman,
languidly preparing a bath as a prelude
to the things that are yet to come.
Never been happy with women, he thinks, standing next to the bed, bare feet, bare legs, and he wonders how he’ll ever get to sleep at such an impossibly early hour. He shrugs, walks around the room and tries to distract himself with memories of past affairs. He goes to stand at the window again and looks at the hotel through a gap in the curtains. A mountain that shines in the evening rain. Then he shakes his head, grabs his trousers, shirt, socks, jacket and gets dressed again. Holding his shoes, he creeps outside, Old Shatterhand in England.
Hands in his pockets, collar up, he walks along the dark road to the village. Between the high-tension wires, sparks still fly.
A very serious young woman, said Johannsen (On literary formalism in Aquinas’ Summa Theologica). They were sitting on the ground against the glass back wall of the squash court, panting, dripping with sweat. Four white legs side by side on the shiny wooden floor, the smell of tennis shoes and wet chalk.
They got to their feet, slowly, with effort, and flipped a racket. He won. As he kneaded the ball in his hand he asked: Serious in what sense? He served low, just over the line, slightly off-centre. The ball passed close to the wall near Johannsen, who took a swipe and hit the wall with his racket.
Are we bullshitting or playing? Johannsen asked.
They played.
In the changing room, under the shower, he repeated his question.
Not really a great academic talent, Johannsen replied, not a strong researcher, but very serious.
In what sense?
They got out of the shower and dried themselves, skip-hopping.
Difficult, Johannsen said. Difficult to say. I think she’s one of the few – if not the only – truly religious student I have.
She was in a convent, he answered.
Johannsen shrugged: six months or so.
All the same.
Then Johannsen looked at him. He rubbed his red beard thoughtfully with a towel and said: Why the interest?
She’s rather mysterious.
Johannsen nodded.
A remarkable young lady.
Johannsen nodded again.
Very odd.
So you have a bit of a weakness for icy frumps from the north, Johannsen had said.
There’s a pub, somewhere round behind the church, but the door is locked. He moves the door handle up and down a couple of times, then just stands there for a moment, thinking. Strange English closing times. But then comes the sound of a key in a lock, the door opens slightly and a surprised face looks out through a gap the breadth of a hand.
‘Yes?’
Apologies, he’d forgotten that pubs closed so early in this country. He didn’t mean to disturb.
‘Not at all, not at all.’
The head sticks out through the door a little, looking to left and right.
‘Come in.’
He follows, eyebrows raised. A friendly, greyish man looks at him with a smile as he stands in some kind of narrow hallway, offering his apologies again. They walk on, across a courtyard and into a kitchen. Laughter breaks out when he stares open-mouthed at the gathering inside. About fifteen or twenty people are standing and sitting in the large kitchen. Candles are burning, there are pints of beer on a wooden table and someone is pouring whisky into wine glasses.
They’re having a party. The landlord’s birthday. It’s after closing time, so they’ve moved to the kitchen. What would he like to drink?
‘I didn’t mean to break in on a private party.’
No, no, the more the merrier.
He orders a pint of lager, introduces himself, wishes Morris, the landlord, many happy returns and is swallowed up by the party. There’s singing, someone recites a poem, he gets chatting with the teacher at the village school and talks about the purpose of his trip. Half an hour later, for want of repertoire, he sings ‘Egidius, Where Art Thou?’. At five in the morning he dances his Russian squat dance on the kitchen table.
When he wakes he feels as never before, strong, healthy, cheerful. He takes a hot bath, shaves, gets dressed. Then he knocks on the door to her room, twice, three times. After a moment’s hesitation he opens the door and sees the yellow sun shining across the freshly made bed.
In the breakfast room he eats his French rolls. There’s even instant coffee. The hotelkeeper tells him that ‘Miss Ven Kronning has gone for a walk’.
An hour later he strolls down the country road to the village. The rain has made the grass fresh and green. Birds warble in the hedgerows. An English summer.
He wanders through the village, not spotting her anywhere. When he eventually gets to the church, which looks old enough to be interesting, he decides to make a half-hearted attempt to find her in there.
It’s a church like all others, cold, damp, dimly lit, the same dull pews, worn gravestones under moth-eaten rugs, glum-looking saints, their bodies impaled. He walks around for a while, shivering in his jacket, then feels a gentle tap on his shoulder.
Behind him is a small man wearing slippers.
Is he a visitor or …?
A visitor.
And what do you think of our church?
A bit cold, but otherwise …
‘Ah, let me offer you a nice strong cup of tea.’
He begins a sta
mmered series of self-effacing objections, aware they’ll be to no avail. English hospitality demands fulfilment of the holy task of pouring tea for every wanderer, even for those who’d prefer coffee. So he follows the shuffling verger in his green cardigan and threadbare trousers across the rugs and the worn gravestones to a door behind the altar, along a corridor, into a kitchen. There a middle-aged woman (My Wife) with the look of a matron, arms folded over her bosom, stands and looks at them.
When they’re sitting at the big kitchen table drinking tea from big mugs and talking about the Battle of Arnhem (I was there. Near Amsterdam), he asks whether anyone has perhaps seen a young woman, also Dutch. They haven’t seen her. And the vicar, then, might he have …?’
‘But I am the vicar.’
‘You … Excuse me, I …’
He invents an excuse. He thought this was a Catholic church, and seeing as you’re married …
A broad smile breaks through.
The dean of the faculty hadn’t thought much of his plan.
‘Source text, source text. You don’t go looking for things like that, you come upon them.’
A powerful argument. He defended himself by pointing out that a) he was doing the research in his free time and b) it couldn’t hurt to go and take a look. It wasn’t as if the institute carried out all that much archival research.
The dean raised his eyebrows.
Just when, hand on the doorknob, he was about to leave the room, he heard his name.
‘It says here,’ said the dean, waving his application, which was written in triplicate, ‘that you intend to take an assistant with you?’
He nodded.
‘And who would that be, then?’
He’d been thinking about one of his doctoral students.
The dean looked at him with pursed lips, then raised his eyebrows again.
‘Van Groningen. Theology. She’s researching the religious implications of courtly culture. A sort of reception theory,’ he lied.
‘Is this the lady Johannsen was talking about?’
‘I don’t know who Johannsen has been talking about,’ was his stiff reply.
The dean had rubbed his brow. Then his eyes cleared. ‘Yes, that’s the one. The ice queen from the north. I say, you’ve got it bad all right.’
He didn’t have the feeling he’d got anything, good or bad.
He finds her in the canopied rose arbour in Constable’s garden. She’s sitting on a stone seat, sunlight blotching her blue sweater.
‘I lost you,’ he says.
She doesn’t look up, doesn’t answer.
‘Hello,’ he says. ‘I’m Dutch too.’
‘You weren’t there, last night.’
He opens and closes his mouth without any words coming out.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he says eventually.
She nods.
He argues furiously in his head. How can she know I wasn’t there last night? She came to my room. No. She heard me on the stairs. No, she didn’t hear me. But she can’t have come to my room either. Why not? Because she wouldn’t do a thing like that! But it’s a logical supposition. Yes, it’s a logical supposition. He has to admit: it’s a terribly logical supposition.
‘There was a party,’ he says. He tells her.
She continues to stare straight ahead, through the portal of rose bushes that gives onto the slowly passing Stour, the river John Constable had to thank for his entire oeuvre.
‘And now?’ she says, when he’s finished talking. ‘Now that we’ve seen East Bergholt, what now?’
As if nothing remains to us in this world, he thinks.
He stands up and beckons her. Together they walk around the garden. They admire the beds of rhododendrons, the trimmed conifers, the huge oak standing next to a pond with aquatic plants and reeds, leaning slightly out over the water. Then it starts to rain. Suddenly, without any real beginning. Water patters down on the leaves of the oak. They stand under the crown of the tree and look at the garden, grey beneath a cross-hatching of raindrops. The pond bubbles and splashes. He feels clammy cold penetrate his clothes. He takes off his jacket and lays it around her shoulders and thinks: The longer I’m in England the more English I become. She stands next to him, slightly bowed, shoulders hunched, her clouds of hair dark with the wet. Drips glisten on her skin.
He’d like to fall to his knees and kiss her shoes, her soaked, blessed, sacrosanct penny loafers.
The evening before his departure he’d gone to dinner with his mother and her new boyfriend, Alexander. The new boyfriend had walked back and forth between the table and the sound system. There were Bach fugues with the chervil soup; Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder with the main course. The dessert was zabaglione, prepared by Alexander to the accompaniment of an old Miles Davis record. As he stood in the kitchen whisking, his mother looked at him with amusement.
‘In bed he’s just like he is in the kitchen,’ she said.
He’d stared at her in shock.
She shook her head. ‘What a prudish boy you are. Sometimes I think you were brought up by someone else.’
He could imagine. His father had got rich on a rather simple invention and as soon as the money began to pour in he’d bought himself out of the bosom of the family, without divorcing. He rang his wife once a fortnight, transferred a generous sum to her account every month and beyond that fulfilled his mission in life in the beds of women half his age. His mother, from a family where money was never a problem and divorce more the rule than the exception, had accepted her new marital status with mild contentment. She’d remained alone for years, aside from the occasional companion, and at last she’d permitted herself the luxury of a new partner in life. ‘I don’t care what you think of him,’ she’d said, ‘as long as you don’t say a word.’
But he did like Alexander, a lover of music, a good-natured type, the kind of man who makes desserts.
The zabaglione was fantastic. He looked across the table at his mother and caught her exaggerated smile.
Over coffee she’d asked him what he’d be doing in England. He explained, fire inside him taking hold. That evening the Utrecht Baptismal Vow seemed to him the highest achievable ambition in his boring life. He accepted Alexander’s cognac, absent-mindedly emptied his glass and told them, as Alexander poured him another, about the beauty of those ancient half-Dutch, half-Latin sentences, the sing-song rhythm, the overwhelming impression the Vow must have made on the man or woman who recited it when joining the church.
‘Yes, yes,’ his mother said and she nodded and then asked whether he might be in love, he was speaking so passionately.
He choked on his cognac and had to walk gagging to the kitchen, where a concerned Alexander came over to slap him on the back and give him some water. He took the glass and looked at the manicured hands of his mother’s new boyfriend, pink nails with neat white cuticles, a modest steel watch on a black leather strap round his wrist. He drank and went on observing him, the V-necked sweater, the white shirt with open collar, the corduroy trousers, the hand-made moccasins. A meticulous lover, he thought, without knowing exactly what he meant by that.
When they came back into the room, his mother was smoking a cigarette. He sat down and asked her for one. She pointed to the pack and as soon as he’d lit up she said: ‘Alexander, would you pour us another?’ He wanted to refuse, but his mother looked at him, eyebrows raised. They drank a toast, to his research. And slowly he got drunk, politely, without becoming loud, without throwing up on the designer sofa, but drunk. Drunk enough at any rate to kiss the cheek his mother proffered to him as he left and suddenly say that he was indeed in love, God-awfully in love, with a student, but that he didn’t know what to do and was afraid it would go wrong and … God, so awfully in love.
At home he sat at his desk for a long time, smoking a cigarette cadged from his mother. In front of his gritty eyes floated the image of her creamy body.
As the shower of rain subsides, they walk back. The same old path. She shiv
ers, still in his jacket. He feels the cold sink into his chest. In the cottage he takes his jacket and goes to his room. He removes his wet shoes and socks and decides not to put on fresh clothes. A hot bath, that’s what he needs. He undresses and wraps a towel around him.
When he opens the bathroom door, clouds of steam pour out. Before he can turn round, he sees her leaning over the bath. Her long legs are just as he imagined, her buttocks firm, not too big. He feels a rising erection press against the towel round his waist. Oh God, he thinks. Out. Out. As he turns he catches sight of her stirring the hot bathwater. In his room, seated on the edge of the bed, he walks over to her and lays a hand on her naked back. She bends down over the warm bath and he fucks her and thinks of the stanza by Hadewijch, the stanza he looked up after they first met.
Ah! However I cry out and lament my woe,
Love may do with me what she pleases
I want to give her all my days
Praise and honour.
Ah! Love, if only you had eyes for my faithfulness.
I am heartened, however, when I relate
That first towards your high levels
Your balm attracted me.
Later, in the bath, as his thoughts wander across the wooden bathroom, he recalls a number by The Beatles. A very fitting number, he thinks, and he sings it softly. ‘Norwegian Wood’, it’s called. About a girl who lived in a wood-panelled room.
The rest of the day is taken up with lunch and an afternoon walk. Somewhere outside the village they walk side by side in silence. In front of them is a hill. As they climb he watches the sun go down. He points and follows her unmoved gaze.
‘Let’s run to the top,’ he says. ‘Then we’ll just be able to see the sunset.’
They start walking more quickly; the sun sinks faster and faster. They step up their pace and reach the top out of breath, half laughing. The sun glows on the horizon. Panting, they stand and watch.
On the way back they drink a glass of earthy-tasting beer in a small pub at the roadside in the middle of nowhere. The landlord himself pulls the pints. They stand in the bare space, on the worn wooden floor, exchanging pleasantries with him. It is indeed a very nice day.
The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories (Penguin Modern Classics) Page 52