Peripheral Vision

by Paddy O'Reilly

  For three days in a row Anthony had shared the bath with the old man and watched him leave when his wife came to get him. She arrived each morning at eight fifty-five, according to the misty clock on the wall. She always walked straight up and tried to peer through the one-way glass into the baths, cupping her hands around her face and looming up in front of the two of them like a seal nosing against the glass of an aquarium. The old man would wave back at her, pull himself out of the bath and pad off past the ornamental palm to the men’s changing room.

  On the fourth day Anthony slept in. At lunchtime he was sitting in a nearby cafe when the bather’s wife stepped in through the entrance. She made an exclamation that sounded like a squawk as she surveyed the tables. She’s like an old chook, Anthony thought, but he kept watching her anyway, oddly fascinated. The woman was wearing a large floppy hat of aqua terry towelling that completely covered her hair and partly obscured her face. Her upper torso was quite slim and she swivelled like an office chair on her heavy hips as she looked around until she had found a table to her liking. Then she pointed to the one she had chosen and, still pointing as though her levelled finger would keep the seats in existence until she arrived, pushed her way through and sat down. She had already examined the menu by the time her husband reached his chair.

  ‘You’ll have café au lait?’ she said.

  ‘No, I think I’ll have a beer,’ he answered. He reached over and took the menu from her.

  Anthony, watching surreptitiously, noticed the old man’s hand quiver as he held the cardboard menu. Despite his casual air, the man was quite frail.

  ‘Un café au lait et une bière Kronenbourg, s’il vous plaît,’ the woman said to the waiter. ‘Une bière,’ she repeated after the waiter had walked back to the bar. ‘Une bière, une bière. I’ll never get that “r” sound. Une bière.’

  ‘He understood. I don’t see a problem,’ her husband remarked. He kept perusing the short menu.

  The first time he saw them, Anthony had guessed they were English. It was the man’s long face, and the woman’s hat, and her expression: discomfort or anxiety, the look of a displaced person. He wondered if English people had always looked this way or if it was something that happened when the empire crumbled. From the corner of his eye, he saw that the woman was making her way to his table, carefully arranging the four chairs in her path to form a corridor as wide as her hips. He slid the postcard he had been writing under his book.

  ‘Do you mind?’ she asked as she sat down next to Anthony. ‘I saw the book and I thought, well, he’s either English or speaks English, so we really should introduce ourselves. I’m Alice. That’s my husband, George.’ She beckoned to George, who got up and walked languidly, like a movie star, through the chair corridor toward them.

  ‘We were dying to speak to someone in English,’ Alice said. As she looked around and saw the waiter standing at the table she and George had left, she made the odd, squawking sound again before calling him over, ‘Ici, ici!’

  ‘Anthony.’ Although he wished the couple would leave him alone to his book and his silence, he had never been able to speak rudely to anyone. ‘I’ve seen you over there, looking at that building. And of course,’ he nodded at George, ‘in the bath.’

  ‘Our son designed that building, Anthony. Martin’s an architect. He’s designed buildings all over Europe, hasn’t he, George.’

  George nodded, and shaded his eyes to look across at the building.

  ‘He always makes the doors too narrow, though,’ she went on. ‘You couldn’t fit a pixie through some of Martin’s doors. In his house, it’s a lovely house but— Oh, there’s Madame Larouche.’

  Madame Larouche was a small figure under a white parasol, climbing the steps of the complex across the road.

  ‘She’s French, staying at our hotel, taking the cure. She’s taken a real fancy to me, I can’t say why,’ Alice said.

  George turned his head to gaze at Madame Larouche.

  ‘She’s very kind, does absolutely everything for us. And she lives in Paris. Paris! Yoo-hoo, madame!’ Alice stood up and waved at Madame Larouche, who eventually saw her, waved back, and kept walking.

  ‘Well, what do you think of that! Now she’s ignoring us. She’s on the hot-spring cure for her arthritis. Of course, you’re too young to be on the cure,’ she said, looking directly at Anthony for the first time. Alice’s oversized glasses emphasised the smallness of her features, each delicately in place like petits fours on a plate. Her mouth held the shape of a drawstring purse.

  ‘No. I’m here on the cure, too.’ Anthony shifted in his seat.

  ‘Arthritis? A strong, young man like you? Why, you can’t be over thirty.’ Alice’s eyes scanned what was immediately visible of Anthony’s body, the tanned arms and prominent collarbone.

  ‘Actually, insomnia,’ he answered abruptly, trying to head off more questions.

  The conversation halted. Anthony lifted his empty coffee cup and pretended to drink.

  ‘Your son’s not with you?’ he asked Alice after a few moments.

  ‘Oh no. As if Martin would come anywhere with me. No, we came to see the building and George thought he’d enjoy the baths. We knew he’d have doors like that again, though. His signature doors, they say, don’t they, George. I think it’s because his wife’s so tiny. Even in their magnificent house they only left the external doorways the original size. They built a granny flat for us on the side. Completely separate of course. A young couple need their peace.’ Alice’s lips grew tighter, as if someone had pulled the drawstring.

  ‘Yes, it’s a good house and a lovely flat,’ George said. He smiled at Anthony, but Anthony couldn’t read anything into the smile.

  ‘Should you be drinking coffee if you’re an insomniac?’ Alice said. She reached over and placed her warm hand on Anthony’s knee. ‘Let us buy you a cup of tea.’ She swivelled and called the waiter. ‘Monsieur! Monsieur!’

  ‘No, thank you, really,’ Anthony said. ‘I must—’

  ‘Do you walk, Anthony? George walks. He’s an amateur geologist.’

  ‘Is that right?’ he asked George, then looked behind Alice to where the terrace cafe ended and the mountainside seemed to grow up out of the floor. The tiles of the cafe floor matched the basalt colour of the rocky mountainside, but there was no mistaking where one ended and the other began: up from perfectly even square tiles reared the jagged blocks of stone that characterised the whole mountain range. Every morning an attendant would be out here first thing, sweeping away the soil and rock and leaf matter that had drifted down the night before.

  ‘Yes. Where you find these natural springs in the mountains, you’ll also find some fairly interesting volcanic formations,’ George began. ‘It’s really quite astonishing how you can look at the surface of a piece of land and work out what’s happening underneath. Why, I—’

  ‘George, we’d better let young Anthony get on with his book. You know how bored people get with your rock talk,’ Alice broke in. She had already taken money from her purse. ‘Do let us pay for your coffee, Anthony. It’s been such a pleasure to meet you.’

  Anthony watched her trudge away to negotiate with the waiter, who seemed to be pretending not to understand Alice’s French. After she had paid and started walking with George down the road to the village, Anthony’s shoulders dropped. He slipped the postcard out from under the book and picked up his pen. So far, he had written the date. He scribbled, Dear Mum, today I met someone you might like, then decided to order more coffee.

  The next morning Anthony was stretching out in the warm bath and watching the hairs on his legs drift like seaweed under the water when George slid in beside him.

  ‘Morning, Anthony.’

  ‘George.’

  George rolled his head back against the lip of the bath and sighed.

  From the other rooms of the complex, Anthony heard coughs a
nd wheezes, the thwack of oiled hands against skin in the massage room, a couple of women talking about the hotel where they were staying. The soft splashing of water and the hum of people’s voices carried through every room. Anthony lay with his eyes closed, listening to the surface murmur, and the rumble of the pump machines under the complex. Even when he felt the water curl around his body because George had stood up, he kept his eyes closed. Alice would be outside the window now, trying to peer in. Or she would be clomping up to the front door of the building to wait. She would always be there, Anthony thought. Like that rumbling sound of the pumps under the floor, you would always know she was there.

  The following day Anthony sat hidden in the shade of a cafe awning, watching the passers-by, many of whom had become familiar in this small town of people taking the cure, walking the mountain paths, eating at the same restaurants and hotels. George sauntered past on his own and turned off at a sign that pointed to a hiking track. Half an hour later, Anthony was startled by Alice’s voice.

  ‘George is out on a walk. I can’t make it up those hills with my hips. Rheumatism, you know. How are you feeling, Anthony?’

  ‘Fine, thank you.’ He flipped over the postcard his pen had been poised above‚ the same postcard he had been trying to write for days. The picture showed a deep chasm that ran the length of the mountain range. Anthony had taken a bus tour along a road that wound along the top of the mountains, directly above the chasm. At a photo stop, while the other tourists lined up for pictures and broke out crackers and fruit from their travel bags, he had stood at the far barrier of the carpark and stared down at the fast-flowing river that churned and eddied at the bottom of the chasm. He had imagined himself in the water, being thrown about, dashed against rocks, tossed up and sucked down again like a leaf. He had felt the same sensation people feel at the edge of a sheer cliff – that momentary desire to let go and fall away.

  ‘I must admit my hips are aching right now. It’s the damp,’ Alice said.

  Anthony closed his book as Alice sat down. He slipped in the postcard to mark the page.

  ‘Reading again, Anthony? I don’t like Agatha Christie but it’s all they’ve got in English at the hotel. My son reads a lot. He and George often talk about books. Of course, Martin never mentions what he’s reading to his mother.’ She picked up the menu, glanced at it, then put it down. ‘Still, he’s a grown man.’

  Alice’s sly complaints made him want to shout, to start up from his chair and stand over her, to smack her‚ all things he would never do. She made his head ache as though all the words he wanted to shout were dammed up in there. He thought of her husband, the silent partner. Did George have the same feeling when Alice prattled on like this?

  ‘It’s your first time here, Anthony?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ours too, but I don’t think we’ll be coming back. It’s quite a tiny town. If you’re not taking the cure there isn’t much to do, is there? George has worn his own personal path over the hills. I’d like to go with him if it wasn’t for my hips.’

  ‘Perhaps you should take the cure,’ Anthony said. Not that it was working for him. As if a warm bath could cure anything. As if travel could take you away from the persistence of memory.

  ‘Oh no, not me. No, absolutely not me. Madame Larouche from our hotel is taking it. A lovely woman. Quite taken with me, I can’t imagine why. Now, I wonder if George is back at the hotel yet. He might be waiting for me. Yes. I’d better go. Anyway, Anthony, you must have dinner with us tomorrow night. We’ve found an excellent restaurant and we’ll be leaving the next day. It’s the Le Clos. We can meet you there at eight.’

  Anthony declined. Alice insisted. When he finally accepted, she laughed with delight and told him how pleased George would be to have a proper, manly conversation.

  ‘We’ve had Madame Larouche and a Spanish woman following us around everywhere, but George is tired of them. He needs a man to talk to. And I can see you’re lonely.’

  After another restless night and a day spent avoiding the places where he thought he might run into the couple, Anthony arrived at the restaurant to find them already seated.

  ‘My hair,’ Alice moaned, fingering the drab frizz that had previously been neat, artificial curls. ‘It’s the humidity. I was almost too embarrassed to come out and see you tonight, Anthony, but we were so looking forward to it.’

  ‘I won’t take a photo then,’ Anthony said. He feigned a gesture of putting away a camera, and in the pocket his fingers brushed the dog-eared corners of the postcard he had been trying to write to his mother.

  George began to smile at the camera joke, then slowly leaned way back in his chair and performed a long, almost soundless, wide-mouthed laugh.

  ‘We’ll have some wine,’ Alice went on. ‘That’ll help you sleep, Anthony. It’s shocking a young man like you having trouble sleeping. I’ve been worrying about you. Oh, here’s the madame who owns the restaurant. We met her last week. She loves the English.’

  Anthony’s teeth were clenched. When he tried to smile a greeting at the owner of the restaurant, his face grimaced. He was longing for the food to arrive so that his mouth could open and busy itself with chewing, then this night would be over, and these people would be gone. George sat in the chair across from him, admiring a photograph in an ornate gold frame on the wall behind Anthony, although his eyes kept straying to Anthony’s face. Anthony was beginning to despise the way George stayed mute under the incessant, appalling chatter of his wife.

  ‘Seen any interesting rock formations?’ he asked George while Alice ordered the prix fixe menu for the three of them.

  ‘Actually, I was walking along the peak, where the path to the cemetery goes, and I spotted an outcrop that looked rather interesting a short way down the south side of the hill. You’ll never guess what I found.’

  Anthony nodded to encourage him. Alice had finished ordering and was listening.

  ‘Coming out of the rocks, up there where no one goes, was a natural hot spring. Of course, this is a volcanic area, quite volatile under the surface, so these things are common, but I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been tapped, not in a tourist area like this. There it was, trickling from a cleft in the rock, still warm.’

  ‘He was so excited about it when he came back to the hotel. I’d been waiting for hours and I hadn’t eaten since breakfast …’

  ‘I didn’t say I’d be back early,’ George said quickly.

  ‘Yes, but you didn’t say you’d be late either. I thought you might come back for lunch so I—’

  ‘I did not say I would be back for lunch.’

  Alice tossed her head, then smiled at Anthony.

  ‘I’m so hungry,’ she said. She patted her hair again and tried to plump some curl back into it. ‘Do your parents live in Australia, Anthony? Are they well?’

  The waiter arrived with their bowls of soup and a plate of bread.

  ‘Did you drink the water, George?’ Anthony said, after a mouthful of the potato soup. He sometimes wondered if the cafes in Llo kept aside their blandest dishes to serve up to the English.

  ‘It had a strong taste, earthy, plenty of minerals. Not hot, but warm. I wanted to put some in a container and bring it back for Alice to taste. Unfortunately I had nothing suitable with me.’

  ‘I couldn’t have drunk it,’ Alice said. She slid her spoon into her soup plate and pushed both away from her. ‘Something warm that bubbles up out of the ground? No, I couldn’t drink it.’

  ‘Why not?’ Anthony asked, genuinely curious.

  Alice pushed her plate further into the middle of the table, plumped her hair, shook some pepper into the discarded soup, then into George’s soup, which he was still eating.

  ‘It terrifies me to think that hot liquid is seething and bubbling right under our feet,’ she said in a quavering voice. ‘That the ground under us is just a thin crust. Those terr
ible earthquakes where people fall into great cracks that have opened up in the earth! I can’t understand why George is interested in those things.’

  ‘It’s my hobby,’ George said, and he stretched back in his chair for another eerie, silent laugh.

  ‘I’m glad there’s no mirror here. I’d hate to see my hair.’ This time Alice plunged her hands into her ragged hair and dragged them through, pulling out strands caught between her fingers. She stared down at the hairs tangled around her fingers, then looked up and around the room.

  ‘What a lovely dress the madame has. So French. So …’

  Alice gazed down at the table again, at her hands and the hairs twined loosely around them.

  ‘The main course is taking so long, and George is tired from his walk. Of course, there isn’t really much else to do here.’

  Her eyes had widened behind her big glasses, and now she glanced at George. He reached over and patted her hand, and when he pulled his hand back to lift his spoon, a single grey hair lingered on. Once more he looked up, past Anthony, at the aerial photograph of the mountains around Llo that showed clearly where once, long ago, the crust of the earth had torn open and spewed molten lava across the plains.

  ‘Alice has trouble sleeping too,’ he said. ‘And Martin, our son. He can’t sleep either.’

  Anthony lifted a mouthful of the floury soup to his lips. The warm metal of the spoon clicked against his teeth and he shuddered. Was it the taste of the soup, he wondered, or the click of metal against his teeth that had given him deja vu? He knew Alice was about to speak. He almost knew what she would say. Or perhaps he didn’t. The feeling was gone before he could test the truth of it. Even while he was thinking about the deja vu, it had fallen away. Always, that sensation. The falling away. The possibility of falling away.