by Alex Miller
She ran more hot water into the bath and washed her hair. She was thinking about Houria taking a tray with two hot meals across the road to Arnoul and his wife in the freezing rain. It wasn’t charity. For years Houria had bought fabric for the café's tablecloths and their kitchen aprons from Arnoul. His cotton was fine old stock of a quality hard to find these days. She and Arnoul and his wife were friends. Houria often sat with Arnoul’s wife and told her the local gossip. And whenever she went to see them she always took pastries or hot meals. ‘I need to try this recipe out on you,’ she would tell them. ‘You are both such fussy eaters. If you approve, the men will love it.’ She had tried to encourage old Arnoul to take his midday meal at the café, but he had never come into Chez Dom—unlike André, their landlord, who needed no encouraging. André often came in and took his midday meal with the men, and quite often he just popped in at odd moments without any warning and sat with John and had a brandy and a cigarette or a coffee. But he always insisted on paying, leaving his money under his plate or his glass, in the old-fashioned way. And before he left he always put his head through the bead curtain and wished Houria and Sabiha a good day.
André usually managed to find something to say about the lack of maintenance around the café. John had been serving him a brandy the day before when André picked a flake of paint from the windowsill.
‘I know,’ John said. ‘Yes, I know. I’m going to repaint in the spring.’
André said gloomily, ‘Once the weather gets into a building, John, you may as well forget it.’ As if his property was going to fall into ruin if John didn’t repaint the windowsill immediately.
After her bath Sabiha went upstairs and sat at Houria’s dressing-table and brushed out her hair. She put on a fresh blouse and went down to the kitchen. It was not long before she heard the noise of the van coming down the lane. She was a little nervous now, anticipating putting her plan into action. She had never tried Houria’s arts of love on John. She had been too shy. And anyway there had been no need. They had soon invented their own language of love. With sex she had never taken the initiative with John, as Houria had advised her to. There had never seemed to be a need for it. She went out into the lane and Tolstoy came out from André's back door and stood beside her, looking along the lane with her. She saw it was one of those days when it was never going to get properly light. John still had the headlight on. She stood in the beam of the headlight waiting for him. When he uncoiled himself from the van she stepped across to him and put her arms around him and kissed him on the mouth. ‘I love you,’ she said and she took his hand and led him through the kitchen and up the stairs to their room. She closed the door and turned to him. ‘Make love to me,’ she said.
They lay in each other’s arms after they had made love. She thought he had gone to sleep and raised herself on her elbow and looked down at him, studying his features in the dim grey light that was being let into the room through the small window behind her. He opened his eyes and looked at her. He put his arms around her and drew her against him.
She pushed back, holding herself away from him, tears in her eyes. ‘Will you promise me, darling? Please? That you’ll never again ask me to go to Australia with you until my father has seen our child?’
John frowned. He hated to see her crying. And he hated this business of their first child having to meet her father. ‘Don’t cry, please. Of course I promise,’ he said. There didn’t seem to be any point arguing. He wondered how long he would have to keep his promise. Supposing they never had a child? What then? He wondered if he would ever get back to Australia.
Chapter Eleven
Marie and I were in El Djem nearly forty years ago. I was there researching a book. We’d driven down to El Djem from Sidi Bou Said, where we were staying, to see the amphitheatre. Clare was conceived during that trip. It’s just possible she was conceived the one night we spent in El Djem. Marie woke me in the middle of the night. It was very hot. There was no fan and no air-conditioning. I was covered in sweat. She was in a panic. She grabbed me and screeched in my ear, ‘There’s an animal on the bedside table!’ It was pitch dark and I imagined a big hairy creature with glistening fangs. I said, ‘Okay! Okay! Let go of me and I’ll put the light on.’ It was a cockroach, not an animal. A big one. It waved its feelers at me like an alien reading my mind. I flattened it with the sole of my shoe. It didn’t see it coming.
The night was so hot and we were both too agitated to sleep after this drama. We decided to make love in the bath. It was wonderful. I still remember it. The bath was a magnificent thing. Ancient, possibly Roman, carved from a single massive slab of finely veined white marble. It was the only cool place to be. Sabiha must have been a five-year-old somewhere in that town that very night while Marie and I were making love and creating our daughter. In the morning, on the way back to Sidi Bou, we passed a road gang. The half-dozen men stood aside, shouldering arms with their picks and shovels, as we went by. The white dust of the road was thick on their moustaches. I like to think I saw Sabiha’s father that day, and that our glances met and there was a brief moment of understanding between us. Of course it’s hard to know these days what I remember and what I’m making up. Marie used to accuse me of making everything up and of being inherently incapable of telling the truth. ‘It’s a gene,’ she said. ‘They’ll find it one of these days. The truth gene. I could tell them now, you haven’t got it.’
I’m definitely not making up, however, the fact that our driver had to stop the car later to let a group of Berbers ride their camels across the road in front of us—you couldn’t call it a highway, it was barely wide enough for a single lane in each direction, the edges crumbly and broken. It was lucky for us there wasn’t much traffic. The Berbers rode their camels across the road in front of us at an angle to the direction of the road, as if the road wasn’t there, not looking to left or right, and so completely ignoring us in our car that it felt as if either they weren’t there or we weren’t. The women had refused the veil and gazed straight ahead, looking at their familiar world through the coins and silver pendants jingling from their headgear. Haughty they were. Superior. Travelling some old highway of their own from the ancient days, to which they were connected through their living tissues presumably. They were very impressive and were not of our world. Their sudden presence there in the emptiness of that landscape rendered us and our car, on that narrow strip of bitumen, vulnerable and temporary; and while they passed us in stately progress, we felt just a little ashamed of being who we were. They, the Berbers, found all they required in the empty landscape. The brindle hounds travelling with them looked dangerous and our driver warned us not to get out of the car for photographs.
So I knew something of El Djem. Not much, but at least I’d been there. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t tell John I’d been to Sabiha’s birthplace. He told me he’d never gone.
I hadn’t seen him for three weeks. It was unusual. I went to the pool every Saturday morning and swam my twenty lengths, and I haunted the library during the evenings. But I didn’t see him. Sabiha had a way of making me feel I was intruding if I mentioned John while buying our biscuits and sweet pastries, and I hadn’t the nerve to ask her straight out where her husband was hiding himself these days.
I’d had a bad night. Not nightmares, but waking anxieties. Itchiness across my chest. My legs wanting to twitch and move. Turning over every few minutes. Switching on the light and looking at my watch and finding it was, unbelievably, still only two o’clock. Drinking all the water I’d put out for my pills in the morning. I slept towards dawn and woke with the sun streaming through the blinds. Without John I had nothing to do and was staring at another empty day. I got up and went into the study and looked at my notes. I had found it impossible not to make a few notes. There were things I could have added to his story, but I didn’t want to make it up this time. The truth is, and despite Marie’s insistence that I couldn’t tell the truth, I have never really liked making it up. My imagination, such as i
t is, needs the facts to feed off. I could see directions I might go in with John and Sabiha’s story, but I resisted. I wanted to hear the truth from John. I wanted to know Sabiha’s secret sorrow. I was missing my regular instalment and was annoyed with him for not showing up at any of our usual haunts.
I went downstairs in my dressing-gown. I was feeling grumpy and ready to find fault and I cautioned myself to be careful. Clare was sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading the newspaper as usual at that time of the morning. She was wearing a smart navy business suit that I’d not seen before and was eating one of Sabiha’s sweet pastries, leaning over the table so the crumbs wouldn’t fall into her lap.
I said, ‘You’ve already been out then?’ She didn’t reply, but went on eating and reading the paper. I poured myself a cup of coffee, took one of the pastries and sat at the opposite end of the table and looked past Clare and out the back door into our narrow strip of garden. We had one tree, a silver birch Marie and I planted more than twenty years ago. I noticed the drought was beginning to have an effect on it. It was developing dieback at the tips. Marie had held the little sapling upright while I tamped the earth around it. We were new here then. Clare was in her last year at high school. I looked at Clare now. She was making little sounds of surprise and disgust with this or that piece of news as she read it. Suddenly, and without looking up, she said in a calm, matter-of-fact voice, ‘Did you ever cheat on Mum?’
I said, ‘What’s brought that on?’ I took a drink of coffee. ‘It’s none of your business.’
She put the paper down and licked the honey from her fingers. She met my eyes. ‘That sounds like a yes to me, Dad.’
‘Well it’s not a yes. I never cheated on your mother.’
‘Never? Not even once? Are you sure? Come on, Dad. You’re a man, men cheat.’
I said, ‘If they do, they cheat with a woman. So there must be as many women cheating with men as there are men cheating with women.’
She gave me a conspiratorial smile that said it was safe for me to confide my stolen pleasures to her if I wanted to.
‘Not once,’ I said firmly. I bit into the biscuit. ‘The pair of us are going to get fat if Sabiha has her way.’
She said, ‘Mum could be a handful.’
I was surprised to hear this from Clare. Despite their fierce fighting during her teenage years, Clare worshipped the memory of her mother. I’d never heard a hint of criticism of Marie from her.
‘Your mother was a strong woman,’ I said. ‘She knew how to get what she wanted.’
‘She gave you hell sometimes.’
I said, ‘And you.’ I was thinking of Marie having one of her strong moments with us. ‘Your mother gave everyone hell sometimes.’
Marie was a social worker when we married. She made friends of her patients and suffered with them and it drove her to the edge of a breakdown. She didn’t believe in professional detachment. She scoffed at the idea, and whenever it was raised said with contempt, ‘It’s just a way of refusing to feel.’ Years later she quit her job without warning one day and began drawing and painting. To everyone’s surprise she stuck to it and eventually became good at it. Our house was full of her shadowy tonal doorways and deserted streetscapes, and those terrible naked self-portraits she made when she was dying and the flesh had gone from her bones; charcoal figures of her wretched wasted body scratched onto the paper like Giacometti’s last portraits. It was all she could manage by then. There was a truth about them; in the eyes. As well as the ones we’ve framed, there are several dozen of these last drawings in a folder in my desk. Whenever I look at them I remember Marie’s courage, her will to keep going to the very end; not as if there was not going to be an end, but as if every moment had something to reveal to her, and it mattered. That impressed me. I doubt if I’ll manage it. Marie stayed true to her art till the last hour of her life. There were a sketchpad and broken pieces of charcoal beside her bed the afternoon she died.
She was only interested in the truth as she saw it. But she wasn’t precious about it. ‘It’s only my truth,’ she used to say. ‘No one else need worry about it.’ That was another thing she scoffed at, the idea of there being such a thing as universal truth. And she never signed anything. An artist friend, a very successful man, said to me one day, ‘Marie’s very good, but she’s got the woman’s problem.’ I took him to mean Marie was too modest for her own good. But he was wrong. It only looked that way from the outside. Marie didn’t want a career out of art. Her art was a private conversation to keep herself sane. She and I knew this. I respected it and never urged her to show her work. I’ve got drawers full of her drawings upstairs and we must have a hundred oils, gouaches, and charcoal and ink drawings hanging on our walls here. Each one of them is like a short poem in a long linked sequence of poems. Who has done something like that, I wonder? Perhaps a Chinese poet.
Marie was a very intense woman. A very private woman. And in the early days she was a very beautiful woman. When I first met her she had a lot of lovers, one after the other. We used to joke about it. She was a friend then. In those early years every man she met had to submit to her charms. Then it suddenly stopped, as if she’d become bored with sex, or bored with men, or with herself. In the end she stayed with me.
Marie and I never had a passionate love affair, but we always got along okay, and gradually it dawned on us that we were pretty good mates. Love didn’t bowl us over, but over time it grew on us, and then, when we did finally fall in love, we stayed in love. To the end. Which was the best of it. It was only I who could still see her beauty at the end. Marie’s soft grey eyes remained beautiful, her sardonic humour, her determined candour, and her belief. These things stayed with her. I miss her terribly some days. If she were here now she would scoff at my so-called retirement. It would madden her. I can hear her shouting down the stairs, ‘That’s bullshit! Writers don’t retire!’ Perhaps she’s right. Who knows? We’ll see.
I looked up at Clare. Her mother is in her eyes and her hands. ‘What made you ask me that?’ I said. ‘Are you having an affair with a married man?’
Clare said, ‘Jesus, Dad, you’re a bastard.’
‘So that’s a yes, is it?’
She folded the newspaper and came over, leaned down and kissed my cheek. ‘You’re a bastard, Dad,’ she said fondly, then she turned and went out the door. ‘See you later,’ she called back.
‘See you, darling,’ I called.
So was it a business meeting or a businessman she was wearing the suit for?
Later I went down the street and called in at the Paradiso. John was sitting on his own at the back of the café. He was reading a book. I was glad to see him, but I was a bit uncertain of my reception, not sure if he was keeping out of my way. I said hello and he looked up. Then he smiled and said g’day and closed his book.
‘So how are things, John?’ I said.
He said, ‘My father died. I took a couple of weeks off. I’ve been up in Moruya with Mum and Kathy.’ He motioned to the spare chair. ‘Don’t stand there like that.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘I wasn’t hiding from you. I’ve given up smoking. We don’t have to sit outside anymore.’
I pulled out the chair and sat. ‘I’m very sorry about your father,’ I said.
‘It’s okay.’
‘I know you loved your father.’ I was feeling the helpless stupidity of confronting a friend’s bereavement. A friend? Well, yes, I suppose he was becoming a friend. He was making light of his father’s death but I felt he was deeply affected by it. When my own father died I was John’s age. I wept after I got the phone call, surprised by the force of my grief. A week later I’d forgiven him everything. It was a relief. A surprise bonus. And within a month I was repacking him in my memory according to my own version of our story. My father was a gentler man for me once he was dead. I was freer to love him than I had been when he was alive and had felt himself called on to compete with me and to deny my successes.
The waitress came ove
r and I ordered a skinny latte.
John and I sat without speaking for a good minute after the waitress had gone. The café was busy, noisy with clatter and loud talk. Mostly young people. I often seem to be the only old person in these places. I reached for John’s book and turned it to see the title. It was an old Penguin Classics edition of Homer’s The Iliad. The E.V. Rieu translation that my generation had been familiar with. I hadn’t read it for forty years—more, probably. There were yellow post-it notes sticking out of it.
John said, ‘I’m doing it with the kids.’ He pushed at the book. ‘Not the whole thing. Just sections. They like the bloodshed.’
The waitress brought my coffee and I thanked her.
I stirred sugar into my coffee. ‘I’ve missed our sessions,’ I said.
He nodded.
‘No school today?’
‘Curriculum day.’
We fell silent again. It was not an uncomfortable silence exactly, but I did begin to realise how little I knew him, despite his private disclosures. I felt I knew his wife better than I knew him. He’d been giving me all these intimate details of their married life and in the process had revealed very little about himself. I could not have imagined right at that moment, for example, what he was thinking. Was he thinking about teaching Homer’s Iliad to his second-language students? Or was he thinking about his dead father? He hadn’t exactly given himself the starring role in his story. In many ways he had done a pretty good job of effacing himself. I watched him sitting there slumped back in his chair, the fingers of his left hand playing with the book, and I could not begin to imagine what he was going to say next. Perhaps he was just trying not to think about having a cigarette.