by Joseph Hone
Which we did: I held three balloons just over my head, and we walked to the basin with two English families, chatting with them, children trailing behind, all of us weighted down with bags of food and drink. Ben turned and said to a little girl, ‘If you like, I’ll carry that bag for you.’
‘No thank you,’ she said primly. ‘Mummy told me never to talk to strange men.’
Her mother scolded her. ‘Don’t be rude, Sophie! He’s not a strange man – not when you’re with us.’
Sophie started to cry. It was very hot; I didn’t blame her. Ben took her bag and gave me his, and picked Sophie up, put her on his shoulders with her balloons, and bounced along towards the basin, singing ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. She stopped crying.
We left the basin at once, into the first lock, then along the canal. Ben was relaxed at wheel. The canal was straight and narrower than the river and the barges coming towards us, when they did, were much smaller. Safer travelling, but now there was another worry, if not a real danger.
‘Look … don’t you think … who were those two people?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
‘Come on, Ben! You’re supposed to be the bright one in all this. The woman told me we had to deliver something to them, which we didn’t do. Something important, since she had a gun.’
‘Must be the Modi nude. What else could it be?’
‘No, she said the “stuff ”. And that we’d been paid half the agreed price for it.’
‘Maybe they paid your father for some items in the past and now they’re after the rest of the art loot.’
‘So they must be with the guys in the Turkish baths, but there’s no chance that any of them could have known we – that I was going to be walking about the middle of Vitry this afternoon.’
‘No. Pure chance, but then that’s exactly how you met me in the supermarket. So much is just pure chance.’
‘How did they come to be in Vitry in the first place? No one knew we were headed in this direction, or that we were going to stop in Vitry.’
‘I don’t know, but they must be looking for the paintings in my father’s inventory, maybe somehow involved with O’Higgins and the Modi. They were following us in Paris, they saw us leave in the barge, and followed us in another boat. And followed you off our boat into Vitry to get you alone.’
‘So, if you’re right that means they know the boat we’re on and they’ll still be following us.’ I looked behind. There was a smaller cruiser a hundred yards away, but it was one of the English families.
‘Not at once they won’t. Seems you gave that woman a real bash with that sword. She may be in hospital now. And her gun! The cops may have found that, and if they have, she’ll be held on a charge. In any case we have a good head start on them.’ As if to underline what he said, he moved the throttle forward a bit. I was encouraged. We must have been doing all of five miles an hour.
We were soon out in the country, a small breeze in through the open windscreen, the evening sun slanting behind us, a long row of poplar trees on the bank casting their shadows away into cornfields dotted with poppies.
‘What made you think I’d come back?’ I said. ‘I certainly wasn’t going to.’
‘I thought you’d be a fool to give all this up – the poplars and poppies, high summer on a French canal, Pont-L’Evêque and a fine claret – for a slice of cheesecake in sweaty New York.’ He rolled a cigarette. ‘Oh, and the steak,’ he added. ‘You might consider showing your paces with it tonight? I threw away the pike.’
‘How insouciant you are.’
‘Thanks. I speak French, too, and I’m not unconcerned. You are. That’s why you want to do a runner back to New York.’
‘Touché. Though all the same, if you thought I’d come back why didn’t you wait for me where we’d moored on the river back there? You couldn’t have thought we’d bump into each other in the supermarket.’
‘All right – I hoped you’d come back, let’s put it that way.’
‘I know you did.’
‘Oh? How on earth did you ever guess that?’
Here was my opportunity, and I might as well take it. ‘Because I look just like Katie, your dead girlfriend – that’s why.’ He didn’t bat an eyelid. Hand on the wheel, gazing into the middle distance, frozen. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t tell you before. When I found the journal on the Sorrento in Paris I glanced inside and saw it was Katie’s, saw the drawing you’d made of her, how it was just like me.’
He turned to me. ‘The drawing?’
‘Yes, the drawing. So that I knew then why you’d been so startled to see me at the funeral party in Dublin.’
‘Well now you know, there’s another reason for you to run, isn’t it? Who wants to be liked – loved – just because they look like someone else?’
‘Why not? It must be quite a thrill, except I can only look like her surely? I can’t actually be like her. Must be different in every other way.’
‘No, you’re like her in other ways, too. All her better ways.’
Silence again, until I finally said, ‘Well, there’s nothing to be mournful about. I’m not like her in one way. I’m alive – that’s the big difference.’
‘That’s exactly what I thought.’
‘It’s lucky you don’t look like Martha. I think I’d have run a mile from you if you had, or done something stupid.’
‘Was it that bad?’
‘Wasn’t it for you? Must have been worse: Katie killed herself, Martha just went off to write smart-ass novels.’
‘I think it was so bad with Katie because it never had to happen.’
‘That’s usually why the worst things happen. They have to happen.’
He perked up at this. ‘You mean – fate?’
‘No, some people just attract trouble. Like we said that day on the boat out from Killiney. They set themselves a lousy script – then they have to produce it, won’t be denied. Even kill themselves, rather than see they’re wrong and chuck the script.’
‘Seems that’s just what Katie did. You can see it happening in her script. Here.’ He leant forward, took the journal from the shelf beneath the wheel, thumbed through it, stopped near the end, offered it to me. ‘I’ve been reading it – but only bits of it.’
‘No, it’s private.’
‘Please, I’d like you to.’
I took it from him and read the passage, several pages from the end of the journal.
Now that I’m going to lose him – why not go back to the beginning? That first time, before we even met. One of my riders, Monika – Monika, who does watercolours – she said one Sunday, five years ago, did I know the painter Ben Contini? That he lived not far away. I said no, and that I’d never heard of him. Then she came out with it. They wanted a portrait of me, to mark my twenty years of running the riding school. I said no, it was nonsense. Then, for no good reason, I repeated his name. Ben Contini, and I had a fluttery feeling. Can one fall in love with just a name? I must have done. Two or three weeks before I met you, and it was this that made me agree to the portrait, as an introduction.
I was already making a date with you before I met you, but I was losing myself, making a commitment I sensed I couldn’t fulfil. And so, when it came to it, as it has – it has to be either me or you. One of us has to go. And it won’t be you, I know. Fidelity is your strongest card. How hard you tried not to lose me, and the more you tried, the more you loved me – the more I couldn’t face your love.
So, a portrait of me? You painted so many. Of the woman you wanted me to be – but never the woman I was, someone who couldn’t live with you.
But when you came to the riding school that first time, out of your old Bentley with your paints and canvas in the back seat, and said brightly ‘Have I come to the right place?’ – both of us full of conventional smiles – I knew I was suddenly living again, after years of nothing that way, that I wanted you already. Just looking at you, that windy March day, your head to
one side, ruffling your hair. You made me, that instant, know what a very forward person I could be – how I wanted to be painted by you, wanted to seduce you, and wanted to spend the rest of my life with you, too. But I couldn’t.
I’ll go and see you this afternoon, and make love with you in the flax field, or your old barn, the doves warbling above us, on the great tatty divan. Warm against the huge fire in winter, or bright with the ‘Larks in the spring air’ as you once said. But even then I was already going away from you. Leaving such happiness.
I looked up at Ben. ‘It’s painful. I don’t understand her. It’s all about her being no good, not you, and she gives no reason for wanting to leave you. Was she in love with someone else?’
‘Her father, I think, when he came back home after years of womanizing.’ And I told Elsa all that I knew of Katie and her relationship with her father.
‘Well – they both sound kind of mad.’
‘That’s what I’ve thought. But was she really … disturbed?’
‘I don’t know. But whatever, she doesn’t like herself. And it seems she’s trying to justify this by chucking you, and that’s pretty twisted.’
‘Maybe you could say she blamed herself because her father left home when she was a child, and she left me because when he returned she felt he had forgiven her.’
‘Sounds even more twisted. Who’s to know the truth about her?’
He looked at me, as if he was trying to corner me now, instead of his dead mistress. ‘Ben, I have to – we have to – get off this boat and get back to our own lives. We could take a slow boat to China and I’d still not love you.’
‘Okay. Except for one thing. If you really wanted out so badly why didn’t you run straight for the train station in Vitry when you left the boat instead of coming back to the boat?’
‘I …’ I hesitated.
‘You were running back into the fire when you could have been in Paris by now.’
I remembered why. ‘Better the devil you know …’
‘Thanks.’
‘I was frightened.’
‘So we must count for something together.’
‘I suppose so. Yes, we must.’
I wasn’t certain exactly what. So I let the issue drop, went away and made us mugs of tea. Later I went down to the galley and started to prepare supper. I got the pots and pans organized and rummaged through the two shopping bags. The steaks looked reasonable. Thickish centre cut. There was fruit, salad and bread, and lemons, as well as a sealed pack of Alaskan smoked salmon. And more olives: big, green, herby Provençal ones. I opened the jar, ate one, then two, and took a hunk off the baguette. I was hungry. And that key opened a door, fiddling about with food again, the smells and the tinkering, and fingers getting moist with juices. Living again.
The best foil against evil and folly was to get involved with food. Preparing, cooking, eating it. I’d known this for years, of course, which was why I was in the business, but I’d forgotten how you could cock a snook at evil in a kitchen. I got out the steaks. Not the best. They’d need a bit of whacking and marinading. I cut a lemon, squeezed half of it onto a plate with a thin film of olive oil, then ground black pepper into the mix, and some grain mustard. There was a string of garlic, and butter. I opened the pack of sliced smoked salmon. An oaky smell of the sea. Nibbled a bit. And another bit. Ate another olive, unwrapped the Pont-L’Evêque, to air, and opened one of his friend’s bottles of claret to air as well, and tasted it. The wine was good, a big nose. Then I looked for something to soften the steaks with. I opened the cupboard beneath the sink. There was nothing, just some cloths and, surprisingly, since there was no washing machine on the boat, six jumbo packs of Persil washing powder. I finally used a tin of tomatoes to beat the steaks, put them in the marinade and ate another olive.
Returning to the wheelhouse I was back in a less happy reality, before it struck me. I said to Ben, ‘We can hardly stop and eat supper if we’re supposedly on the run from all these people?’
‘We’ll have to stop. All the lock-keepers on this canal go off duty at seven.’ We’ll be in time for the next two locks, here at Adecourt and Brusson, but not the one after that at Ponthion.’
‘But those two monsters back at Vitry – they’ll know about the locks closing as well. Don’t even have to follow us by boat. They can come along the old towpath there.’
‘Possibly.’
‘In which case?’
He got out the map again. ‘Look, there’s a small basin, here, just before the lock at Ponthion. There’ll be other boats moored there for the night, because they won’t get beyond the Ponthion lock tonight either. We’ll moor right alongside one of them, away from the bank. They’re not going to start gunning for us in the middle of a flotilla of tourist boats.’
‘Gunning for us?’
‘You said she had a gun.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I have one, too.’
‘Come on – these people are professionals, Ben. Killers. You’re not going to …’
‘“This dog is dangerous. He defends himself when attacked”.’
‘I see.’
We got to the Ponthion basin just after seven. The lock was closed, and there were five or six boats moored there, as Ben had forecast. No space by the bank. We asked one of the English families if we could tie up alongside them. That was no problem.
I started to cook the steaks beneath the gas grill.
‘We can eat up in the wheelhouse. Keep an eye out.’
And so we ate in the gathering twilight, lights in the village coming on ahead of us, dappling the water with streaks of yellow, midges annoying us. ‘Rub some lemon juice round your face and your ankles. They always seem to fancy your ankles most.’
‘Yes, I know.’ I was on edge. ‘Doesn’t look like you’re going to get any painting done. These villages aren’t likely to have any art shops.’
‘No, but I could get some paper and sketch you for a later masterwork.’
‘Like that sketch in the scrapbook?’
‘Yes.’ He looked at me, like he’d looked at me at the funeral reception in Dublin. Appraising me, without clothes. It was hot in the wheelhouse. I was wearing all I had to wear: shorts and a billowy, thin cotton blouse.
‘Well, you said I could paint you any way I wanted that day out on the boat.’
‘But it’s not quite the same now, knowing you’d really be painting Katie.’
‘Not now, I wouldn’t.’ He turned away, sipped his wine.
‘Listen, even if I didn’t look like Katie, you’d have no future that way with me.’
I told him about Curtis and the hardcore porn novel he’d secretly written about us back in Virginia.
‘I’m sorry – that’s tough.’ Then he added in a brighter tone, ‘Though at least it shows you weren’t always into women.’
‘Right, but I’m not likely to revert to men.’
‘And not likely to find another woman just like Martha. I was lucky in finding you.’
‘You’re right. You found a nice symmetry: with me, though not quite the same.’
‘That’s what attracted me. The same, but not the same.’
‘But that’s your real problem: you’re still looking for that dead woman, and as long as you’re doing that you’re sort of dead, too. You said I was avoiding the issue in all this art-looting business, but you’re avoiding something more serious: your life. And you’re not going to find your life in me, no more than you did with Katie. So forget her and get back home.’
‘Just what Harry said. You Americans, so keen on swapping love for work. The old puritan ethic, I suppose. But why should I swap love for work?’ He was in his fierce mode again.
‘Okay, I agree. I suppose it was the same with Martha.’
We’d finished dinner. He was eating a last wedge of Pont-L’Evêque, drained his wine glass. Preoccupied, he was silent at last. He looked over at me quickly, concentrating his gaze for a moment, then turned away, half-
closing his eyes, as if what he saw in my face was a sun, too bright to look at.
What happened in that moment for me? I don’t know. There was sympathy and liking for him already. Now there was something else. It wasn’t hunger for him, or love, but it was something just as overwhelming. I felt irradiated, cut to the quick by warmth and joy, and the need to give this to him in some way.
I got up. His hand was on the table. Without looking at him, I took it and rubbed it, put it to my cheek, kissed it. Then rubbed it hard again, as if this way I could rub out all his pain.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘And for supper. You’re a damn good cook. Hey, I tell you what …’ He stood up, went over to the wheel, folded back a blank sheet of Geoff’s log book, found a pencil, came back to the table, and sketched me very quickly. He handed me the drawing. It was good, and with something of the warmth and joy I’d just felt for him in my face.
‘See. It’s you,’ he said. ‘Not Katie.’
‘Yes. It’s very much me, for you.’
We took the dirty plates and cutlery down to the galley and I started the washing up. We’d run out of washing-up liquid. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘There’s loads of washing powder under here. That’ll do.’ I opened the cupboard and got out one of the jumbo Persil cartons. Opened it, sprinkled some over the dirty plates, then a flow of tepid water from the tap. No suds. The water didn’t even go milky. The powder just dropped to the bottom of the sink.
‘That’s strange. Must be past its sell-by date.’ I peered into the carton, put my nose to it. ‘Sort of sweetish smell. Quite pleasant. What’s wrong with it?’
Ben took the carton, smelt it, then dipped his finger in the powder, licked it, tasted it. ‘Nothing wrong with it – as heroin. It’s pure heroin. Very pleasant.’
‘Six jumbo cartons of raw heroin don’t have a lot to do with theatricals – so we won’t be spoiling Geoff’s livelihood by dumping the barge before we get to Bar-le-Duc.’