The Deadly Space Between

by Patricia Duncker

  ‘Guess what, kiddo. I went out and got myself a tattoo. D’you want to look?’

  * * *

  The doorbell rang at five the next day. It was either grasping carol singers or the local Evangelicals bent on explaining the True Meaning of Christmas. We had dealt with both last year. I paused in the hallway and put on the porch light. The bulb was still alive. Through the organic swirls of green and red Victorian glass, I saw a huge dark shape standing just inside the pergola. Roehm. She hadn’t cut back the Virginia creeper, which hung in sad dead strands over the entrance. I saw him framed by dead vegetation as if his presence had caused the world to darken and to die. He knew I was there, watching. I hesitated. He spoke.

  ‘Toby? Open the door.’

  It was the sound of his voice that changed everything; measured, firm, expecting nothing but immediate obedience. It was the implicit acknowledgement and recognition in the way he used my name, which made me catch my breath. You’re here again. You’ve come back for me. I was chosen. Addressed. I flung open the door.

  ‘Why didn’t you ring me? I wanted to see you.’

  He spoke the words. They were burning my mouth. I could never have said them out loud, neither to myself, nor to him.

  ‘I dunno. I should’ve thanked you for dinner. I thought you might come round.’ I faded out. ‘She never told me you were expected. Come in anyway.’

  He was carrying three bags from Safeway. As he stepped past he kissed my cheeks, lightly, in the French way, the way men kiss one another in France, when they are family or when they have always loved each other.

  ‘Your mother invited me to dinner. But you know what she’s like,’ he took off his coat and hung it up as if he had lived in the house all his life, ‘so I went to Safeway on the way here and bought the food. Now we shall cook it together.’

  He lit a cigarette and strolled into the kitchen. I could no longer conceal my pleasure.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come. Do you want a drink?’

  We went through the wines lodged under the stairs. Some were still in the wine rack, but some were piled up on top of her shoes. Roehm disentangled a bottle from a muddy pair of lace-up boots.

  ‘Juilènas. Did she buy that in France?’

  ‘Present from Françoise, I think.’

  ‘Let’s open that. Will she mind?’

  ‘Oh no. She won’t even notice.’

  ‘Don’t underestimate her. She doesn’t miss much.’

  I felt rebuked. He acknowledged this at once.

  ‘She doesn’t always comment on what she sees. And she isn’t always clear. You think she has abandoned you. But nothing could be further from the truth. Toby, if she ever had to choose between us she would choose you.’

  The grey eyes met mine. The extraordinary content of this speech and its inappropriateness in the situation never occurred to me. I felt judged and reassured. It was as if he could not only read my feelings, but control them.

  Roehm began opening the bottle. The corkscrew snapped apart in his hands.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Roehm calmly, ‘it must have had rust fatigue.’

  We began a futile search for another bottle opener. In the end Roehm constructed one from a discarded drill, which we unearthed among the archaeological layers of her painting equipment box, and a piece of driftwood she had used as an object in a nautical still life. I felt odd being near to him in the studio. I backed away from the table under the window. Roehm chuckled to himself, but gave no other sign that he knew what I was remembering. He studied the speckled shells, rounded stones, dried starfish and oysters that were carefully arranged on a ripped piece of canvas.

  ‘She doesn’t paint traditional subjects,’ he said thoughtfully, staring at the beach relics.

  ‘No. But she draws them.’

  I flicked open her sketchbook, which lay upon the table. She drew something every day. Sometimes it was domestic, my foot hanging over the edge of the sofa as I lay watching television, the core of an apple left on the draining board, the handle of the stove just below the radio, a vase with a crack which we no longer used for flowers. But here too were all the elements of the classical still life, fruit in a bowl, a pyramid of flour alongside a breadboard, a rolling pin and a wooden spoon, a peach and a pear assaulted by bees, wilted flowers lolling in a glass. She used pencil, inks, charcoal. Roehm looked at each image carefully as if he were recording them and storing them away.

  ‘She tells the students to draw something every day. It helps them to see. You have to learn how to see. Observe, observe perpetually.’ I imitated her Do As I Say tones.

  Roehm laughed out loud.

  ‘Let’s cook,’ he said.

  We were having trout. He laid out the pink-speckled fish upon the draining board. There were four. I suggested that we should have one each and lay the other in amongst her oceanic objets trouvés.

  ‘Not a bad idea,’ said Roehm. He washed his hands carefully. ‘The subject of every still life is really eternity, death and immortality. So you wouldn’t be wrong to do that. If you look at the still lives of the great masters they will often contain dead rabbits or a death’s head. But even if you paint the passage of time on the furred nap of a peach your audience will still get the message. All picked fruit rots and dies. It’s possible to paint death, even to paint the moment of death itself, but hard to paint its inevitable approach.’

  He reached for the potato peeler and we set to work. I noticed something strange about the way he moved about the kitchen. He didn’t rummage in drawers or cupboards as guests do when they are trying to help. He didn’t look for herbs or utensils. He already knew where they were. So far as I was aware Roehm had never stayed in our house. He had never been there in the mornings. I began to wonder if I had been ignorant of his passage through the household and imagined a secret conspiracy, complete with priest’s holes and roof-top exits, to disguise his presence and his departures. But it was impossible. I knew every groan and creak of the doors and stairs. I plotted her every movement across the floors. I had a clear view of the front entrance and the porch roof from my attic. I could hear every word spoken three floors down at the bottom of the staircase. He had never worked in the kitchen. He could not have known the kitchen. But he did.

  We peeled the potatoes and lit the gas. Then we made a mousse au chocolat for afters. Roehm used four eggs. She only ever used three. He frowned at the state of the fridge.

  ‘Don’t you ever defrost this thing, Toby? There are living creatures trapped for ever in the ice.’

  I looked at the ice flows, which were now wedged solid either side of the freezer compartment. There was very little space left in the aluminium slot. Ice hung in strange blue folds like double chins beneath an open mouth. There was an odd powder crust of white, sprinkled over the top. Roehm threw out some shrivelled left-over curry and made more space for the mousse. Then he looked into the embedded layers of blue ice.

  ‘Do it soon. Clear out the freezer compartment. Then put bowls of hot water inside the box. Keep renewing them with boiling water. That will loosen these blocks of ice attached to the walls. If you just switch it off and leave the fridge door open it will take for ever.’

  I was astounded, not so much by the domestic advice, but by the fact that Roehm was telling me what to do as if I had been one of his laboratory technicians. He assumed that I was responsible for the well-being of the fridge. He was confident that I would obey him. Yet his manner was neither autocratic nor peremptory. He had the authority of a prince: I have only to speak, and it shall be so. And I in turn had become his willing subject. His power enclosed me, removing all anxiety. I felt at ease and at home and secure.

  ‘You haven’t touched your wine,’ said Roehm and handed me the glass.

  We worked peacefully together in the kitchen, without saying much to one another, as if the rhythm was habitual. My head was warmed by the wine. Roehm cleared up between the different stages of production. I was obsessively aware of every move he made. He was
one of those cooks who worked methodically, avoiding huge piles of vegetable shavings and debris in the sink.

  ‘Here, you can lick the bowl.’ Roehm handed over the chocolate remains with a knowing smile. Then he opened the back door to smoke another cigarette. The cold and the dark rushed past him. He leaned against the doorframe, blocking out the night. I sat in the draught by the door, peeling the chocolate off the bowl with the spoon, just to be close to him.

  ‘Your Aunt Luce isn’t happy about my connection with you, is she?’

  I stopped in mid-stride to the sink. Obviously Iso had spoken to him about the row. But it wasn’t that. It was his use of ‘you’. Was this the plural, you and Iso? Or was he talking about me and me alone? I wanted ‘you’ to mean me, but realized that it couldn’t do. The frozen frame moved on. I opened the taps.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, it’ll blow over.’

  Roehm had put the rusty garlic crusher, which he had clearly decided was a health hazard, into the dustbin and begun chopping the stripped cloves into a fine, dense mass. His shirtsleeves were turned back. I stared at the weight of his white arms.

  ‘I think that you’re understating the opposition, Toby, to spare my feelings.’

  I thought about the drive back from the airport. Luce sat silent, chain-smoking. Iso drove like an underpaid gangster in charge of the getaway car, blank-eyed, tight-lipped and treacherous. Liberty and I chattered away in the back and she demonstrated her latest toy, a Psion Revo palmtop, which could access her email in any country. She and Luce were email junkies who gossiped at odd moments during the day; both of them had a flashing envelope in the bottom right-hand corner of their screens, which lit up and beeped when anything arrived. We kept the show going in the back seat, but no one said anything in the front.

  ‘Well, it’s just . . . actually I think Luce reckons you’re too old for Iso.’

  Roehm laughed and prodded all the onions in the basket looking for one that wasn’t sprouting or blackened. He threw the rest out.

  ‘She’s right there. I’m far too old. Thousands and thousands of years too old. Luce imagines a beautiful young woman with an old man.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  Roehm laughed again. He had a strange warm laugh, a laugh that was deeper than his voice, as if it came from somewhere else.

  ‘Old enough to be your grandfather. I’m even older than I look, Toby. My work takes me to so many countries. I’m worn out with travelling. I cross time zones and date lines. It adds years to your life.’

  He sighed. He seemed suddenly vulnerable to me. I handed him a bunch of fresh chives. As he took them our fingers touched. I put my arms around him.

  ‘We don’t care that you’re old. We want you. I want you.’

  He returned my hug. The cold grey eyes were terribly close. I had overstepped the mark. Alarm rushed through me like an erupting geyser. But I was also embarrassed by the impertinence of my own gesture, the risk I had taken. I pulled back.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Roehm, gently, ‘I love to hold you.’

  But I was again a little afraid of him. His directness did nothing to dismantle his ambiguity. I wanted to retrieve the earlier moment, recover the easy intimacy of cooking, doing something together. I realized that I was unsteady on my feet, as if I had just stepped back from the rim of a precipice. I began to grope for excuses.

  ‘Shall I chop the chives?’ I said. He let me go.

  ‘No. I’ll do it. I’ve got the only sharp knife your mother appears to possess.’

  ‘There was another one, but she used it in the studio and now it’s caked with paint.’

  Roehm washed the chives, put them down on the chopping board, then set about scrubbing the sink. I smiled at his huge bent shoulders. He did all the things I usually did in the house, without asking or being told. It was both comforting and strange. I liked the confirmation that my hygiene obsessions were both justified and shared and that my clean-food fetishism was not an indication of old-maidishness. But I did not like the uneasy sensation that he was occupying my place.

  And yet I was delighted that he had come. His presence changed everything. The kitchen was transformed from a scruffy comfortable room into a vital centre of operations. Simple objects, which I saw every day, became charged, exciting. My own perceptions, sensations, intensified. I saw things more clearly, smelt the sizzling garlic as if it was already in my mouth. Roehm lit candles in the windows and on the table. The drawn blinds were no longer spotted with paint and weather stains, but decorated with leaping shadows. Her cacti on the window sill appeared larger, animate, intelligent. The wine loosened my tongue. I began to talk to him as if he had always been there, part of us.

  Roehm looked inside the oven and stood up, shaking his head.

  ‘The sanitary inspectors would have closed this kitchen down, Toby. Look. She appears to have been cooking her paints.’

  He retrieved one of Iso’s palettes from underneath the grill. We both laughed at the cracked glass and hardened spots of paint.

  ‘That wasn’t there yesterday. We can’t cook the fish in there until I’ve cleaned it.’ I snatched up the Brillo pad.

  ‘No, don’t bother. We’ll cook the fish outside over an open fire. Do you have any barbecue coals?’

  Miraculously, we had. But the barbecue, a £10 contraption on special offer from Great Mills, had rusted and listed over to one side and was now a potential fire risk.

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Roehm, ‘all we need are four bricks.’

  I retrieved these from the archaeological remains of the rotted shed and we built a little furnace in the still damp night. The outside light had gone, but if we left the kitchen door open we could see what we were doing in the long shaft of light. The sticks and coals were damp, but they flared up at the first touch of flame from Roehm’s lighter. It was like a magician’s trick. I stared as the flames began to guzzle the sticks. It was as if he had given them a sign, a command.

  ‘How did you do that?’ I asked, wondering.

  ‘I learned how to make fires in the army,’ said Roehm calmly. ‘Scrub the grill, Toby, and find some Bacofoil. I’m going to wrap up the fish.’

  We stood outside, watching over the silver packets of fish in the flickering glare of the coals. As usual, Roehm was smoking. I saw his face illuminated from beneath, heavy, unsmiling and powerful, but softened in the gusting flame. He looked down at me intently as I crouched over the fire and said, ‘This can’t make up for all the times I haven’t been with you. There are too many missing years. But if I begin now we can go a little of the way.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I heard the crash of the front door. And her voice calling, ‘Toby? Roehm?’

  She yelled out our names in the certainty of finding us together. Then there she stood, still wearing her jacket and scarf, outlined in the back doorway. She took in the scene before her, the two of us around the fire and the smell of fish cooking on the coals. Roehm waited for a moment, unmoving, and they smiled at one another. Then, so slowly that it began to seem a little strange that he should wait so long before moving towards her, he took her in his arms and kissed her. It was not a gentle kiss to welcome her home. He kissed her as if I was not there. He kissed her in the way a man kisses a woman whose entire body is known and possessed. He kissed her as if he owned her. I looked away, frightened and humiliated. Roehm had withdrawn to a great distance, dragging her apart from me. A crevasse opened up between us. I hated him for being there. Then just as suddenly as he had withdrawn, he was beside me again, pulling me to my feet. He looked at Isobel, amused, and offered proof that we were complicit in the enterprise of dinner.

  ‘You’re just in time to help us lay the table,’ said Roehm.

  * * *

  A few days later I found a brown envelope on the mat when I came home from school. It was addressed to Toby and Iso in an odd script which I did not recognize. I opened it at once. There were three tickets folded inside a single sheet of paper.
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  Would you like to come to the opera with me as a Christmas treat?

  Roehm

  The tickets had cost £150 each. I studied his handwriting. It was curiously old-fashioned and written in ink, the kind of careful legible script which suggested that he had been taught to write from a copybook, duplicating line after line, following a printed model. The question was at odds with the tickets. How could we refuse? The opera was Weber’s Der Freischütz. We had never been to the opera. I had never heard of either Weber or the Freischütz. Was it a castle? Or a nobleman? Like the Prussian Junkers? Or some kind of huntsman? Iso was as startled by the price of the tickets as I had been.

  ‘God! Isn’t he extravagant? He’s already booked seats. We’ll have to go.’

  She stood there in the hallway, without removing her coat, transfixed by the cost.

  ‘What’s a Freischütz, Toby?

  ‘Dunno. I haven’t looked it up yet.’

  ‘Find out. You’re the one with the Deutsch.’

  Luce rang up to invite us out to dinner. The gesture was intended as a peace offering. But she had asked us for the same night as the opera. Iso refused and told Luce what we were doing. She was haughty in her tone and there was a frosty exchange down the line. When I looked at Iso as she put the phone down I saw that she had two grim red spots high up on her cheekbones. The price of her estrangement from Luce was more costly than anything Roehm could ever have bought for her. She was desolate and empty-handed. But she would not give him up. Nor would she ever submit to Luce’s angry blackmail.