Telescope

by Jonathan Buckley

  By way of an apology, I ask Ellen if her accommodation is to her liking. ‘It is,’ she replies, briskly removing the sheets from the bed. Eye contact so far has been perfunctory. She tells me that she and Janina are going to redecorate the room at the weekend.

  ‘So you’re not planning on leaving before me?’ I ask.

  ‘No,’ she states. ‘I’m not.’

  I ask if the music bothers her.

  ‘Sandra warned me,’ she answers.

  I’d had no idea that she’d been debriefed by her predecessor; I want to know more.

  ‘She said you like to have noise around you,’ says Ellen.

  ‘Noise?’ I roar, faux-furious, but as I’m making the sound I realise that only I can tell it’s fake. ‘It’s Scarlatti, for crying out loud.’ This comes out as gibberish: the ulcers are making a hash of the enunciation.

  ‘What?’ asks Ellen.

  I point to the CD box. ‘What else did Sandra tell you?’

  ‘Nothing much,’ says Ellen.

  This cannot be true. ‘Tell,’ I say.

  ‘She said she could never understand how you could read with a radio on, and another radio blaring next door.’

  I point out that when you walk down the street there’s stuff going on all around you: people talking, music coming out of cars and shops, and while all that’s going on you’re seeing adverts and glimpses of newspapers and magazines and TVs in shop windows. ‘Think of it as an indoor street,’ I tell her.

  It takes a while for me to say this, and Ellen listens attentively, frowning, as if listening to someone to whom English does not come easily. When I’ve finished she says: ‘But you don’t read in the street, do you?’

  ‘OK. But you read in the park, no?’

  ‘Suppose so,’ she says, unpersuaded, smoothing the fresh bedlinen.

  ‘Sandra hated this stuff,’ I tell her. She knows Sandra hated it. ‘What about you?’ I ask.

  ‘Sounds like a mad person throwing cutlery down the stairs,’ she says. ‘I’ll go and get your breakfast.’

  Ambroise Paré on the meaning of dreams: ‘Those who abound with phlegm dream of floods, snows, showers and inundations, and falling from high places … Those who abound in blood dream of marriages, dances, embracings of women, feasts, jests, laughter, or orchards and gardens.’

  The quartet dines together, and Charlie produces a fine bottle of Burgundy to mark the occasion. I dribble profusely; the food – a nice-looking assemblage of chicken fillets and pine nuts and raisins and rice – tastes of oatmeal. Ellen cuts up my portion of meat with the minimum of fuss. Conversation sporadic and unrelaxed; I’d rather be in my room. Charlie is giving Ellen a summary of his day at the office when the doorbell rings. Janina answers, and returns two minutes later, nicely flushed. The caller was some horrible woman who wants to become a local councillor, she says. There’s a rumour that the council is going to be taking a lot of asylum seekers, and this woman thinks our money should be spent on better things – things that benefit us, the community. Janina called her a Nazi and sent her away with a flea in her ear. ‘There are so many people like that around here,’ Janina informs Ellen. ‘They want the government to crack down on the immigrants, but they’re happy to pay a Polish girl a pittance to keep their house spick and span.’ Charles gives her a light slap on the shoulder. ‘That’s my girl,’ he says, pulling a face of comic alarm. ‘My wife likes a scrap,’ he says, ‘but I’ll do anything for a quiet life. Mr Risk-Averse, that’s me.’ Janina says this isn’t true – he’d taken risks with the business, and they’d paid off. A brief passage of affectionate bickering ensues, for Ellen’s benefit.

  Ellen out for an hour in the morning, to meet Roy, the ex-husband. They have one or two things to discuss; nothing major, she says. She suggests that I might like to sit in the garden, as it’s such a nice day. I stay in my room instead, reading in the chair by the window. At twelve I see Ellen at the end of the road; viewed through the telescope, her face suggests that the encounter has not gone well. ‘Everything OK?’ I enquire, when she brings in the lunch.

  ‘Fine,’ she says.

  ‘Not how it looked,’ I say.

  ‘That’s just the way the face hangs,’ she answers. ‘It’s all going south.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘There’s nothing to say.’

  It’s obvious that she and Roy argued. ‘Tell me, please,’ I wheedle. ‘Come on, tell me,’ I go on, irritatingly.

  ‘That’s enough, Daniel,’ says Ellen. ‘Behave.’

  Tanizaki writes that the Japanese sensibility prefers tarnished silver to polished, the shadowy lustre of jade to the crass glitter of precious stones. The gold decoration of Japanese lacquer-work, he says, must be seen in candlelight, not in the glare of electricity.

  Ellen is drying my back and I notice, reflected in the window, her gaze slipping over the skin. A wince of pity, and I can almost hear the question being whispered: ‘I wonder who you’d be if you didn’t look like this?’ Answer: ‘Well, I wouldn’t exist, would I?’

  I tell her about the count and countess, a long time ago in Italy, who had a daughter who was a dwarf. They raised her in a house in which all the staff were dwarves, and never allowed her out, so she grew up thinking that her parents were giants. Not sure if I’ve read this story or made it up. The former, I think.

  A call from Celia, with some good material. Two weeks ago, coming out of a café, she encountered one of her former students, who told her that he had just seen the worst painting in Italy, maybe in the whole world. It was on show in a church not far from where they were standing; the next day, Celia dropped in to take a look. The painting was astonishing: displayed under a spotlight in a room off the sacristy, it showed a life-sized, blue-eyed and rather sexy Mary in a clinging blue robe, with masses of lustrous hair in a style reminiscent of Rita Hayworth in Gilda. She was holding the baby Jesus away from her body in a manner that probably was meant to signify that the Holy Mother was surrendering her beloved Son for the sake of humanity’s salvation. Instead it made her look like a young woman who didn’t much care for kids and was passing him back to his mum. On her way into the church Celia had passed a man who was sweeping the steps; she noted the shabbiness of his outfit – a red jacket with a rip in one shoulder, loose black jeans that ended an inch or two short of elastic-sided boots, one of which was losing its sole. When she left he was still there, and now she noticed the tin on the top step. A card, resting against the tin, advertised the man’s availability for work and the hardships of his family. Hearing the rattle of the coins, the man stopped sweeping, smiled widely (exposing some horrendous dentition; he was about forty, she reckoned, but his teeth – or the minority that remained in situ – looked like things an archaeologist might dig up), and shouted at her: ‘You like this?’ Having no idea what was meant, Celia smiled. The clarification was almost immediate: ‘This church? It is beautiful?’ he proposed, jabbing his broom in the direction of the doorway.

  ‘Yes,’ Celia lied.

  ‘English?’ the man loudly enquired, with another smashed smile.

  ‘Yes,’ said Celia, becoming a little disconcerted by the man’s eyes, which were flickering about as if distracted by an insect.

  ‘Vivien Leigh,’ he announced. ‘Beautiful.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘English.’

  For a moment he seemed to be hoping that Celia would have something to add on the subject of Vivien Leigh, but he swiftly moved on. ‘Margaret Thatch. What you think of her?’

  ‘Ghastly.’

  ‘What?’ he shouted, not with incredulity, but as if they were talking on a bad phone line.

  ‘I don’t like her.’

  He nodded; it appeared that Celia was scoring satisfactorily. After the eyes had performed a few more high-speed manoeuvres he enquired, with another capacious smile: ‘London?’

  ‘I am from London, yes. But I live here.’

  This last item of information seemed to strike him as an irreleva
nce. ‘Craiova,’ he responded, jabbing a thumb into his chest.

  ‘Your name?’ Celia ventured.

  As if both wounded and perplexed by this reply, he blinked at her for a few seconds, then bawled: ‘From Craiova. I am from Craiova. You don’t know Craiova?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Sorry.’

  He gazed at the head of the broom, as if to say that he’d become accustomed to the ignorance of people in this city but had imagined that Celia would prove to be a better class of person.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Celia, putting out a hand, ‘but I have to go.’

  ‘You live here?’ he asked.

  It took several more minutes to get away, but yesterday, being in the vicinity of the church, she found herself taking a detour and there he was again, sweeping the litter-free steps, in the same clothes as before.

  As Celia deposited her coins he raised his broom in salute. ‘Thank you,’ he yelled. As before, he presented a broad and hideous smile, but in his eyes there was not the slightest sign of recognition. The ensuing exchange seemed to prove that he had no memory of her – it didn’t simply follow the same format as on the previous occasion, it followed a script that was almost identical. Again he told her where he was from. Celia now knew the name of Craiova, but he registered no surprise or pleasure at her familiarity with it. Expectantly he squinted at her, as though to say that he had done his part in carrying the conversation this far, and now it was her turn to take the lead. A question came to mind – ‘What is your name?’ – but Celia didn’t ask it: his eyes, now fixed on her, were desperate and dim-witted. Wanting to get away, immobilised by guilt, she returned his smile. ‘I have to get back to work,’ she said.

  With a grimace, as if rummaging in a basket of barbed wire, the man thrust a hand into a pocket of his jacket, from which he took an envelope. He withdrew a photograph of a woman and two small children sitting at a table in front of a curtainless and greasy window. ‘Mine,’ said the man, presenting the photograph for five seconds. The woman and the children all had short, straight and very dark hair, and they sat as though posing for a photograph that might be produced to persuade a possible benefactor of their good character. ‘I need work,’ stated the man, putting the picture away. ‘Where is there work? I do all things.’ Celia suggested that restaurants often needed help in the kitchens; she named three or four that came to mind. ‘Where are they?’ he asked. She tore off the margin of her newspaper and wrote the addresses. He scrutinised the list; his eyes almost disappeared under the buckled brow; the lower lip jutted upwards, covering the upper. ‘They need people?’ he asked. An unequivocal guarantee seemed to be required, but Celia could say no more than that it was possible. This answer elicited a long stare, within which, momentarily, there rose an angry and obtuse puzzlement as to why she should be fobbing him off with something that fell so far short of adequacy. ‘I’ll try to think of some more,’ she said. Giving the top step a perfunctory sweep, he nodded, as if to say he didn’t believe her. ‘I have to go,’ she told him, ashamed and annoyed at feeling ashamed. At last the man said: ‘For sure.’ He resumed his sweeping.

  Now Celia can’t get his face out of her mind, and she has nightmares in which he’s following her, unhurriedly, implacably, all over the city and out into the hills.

  The city of Craiova occupies the site of the Dacian and Roman city of Pelendava. Formerly the capital of Little Wallachia (Oltenia), it is now the capital of the county of Dolj. Its population has increased more than fivefold in the last eighty years, to around 320,000 inhabitants. Besides historic sights, there are architectural and art monuments that lure the tourist to Dolj. A stroll through the Romanescu Park becomes compulsory, it says here.

  Ellen tells me that she didn’t know there was a sister until yesterday, when she rang. She reads what I’ve written. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting her,’ says Ellen. ‘Janina says she’s quite a character.’

  ‘I bet she does,’ I answer. To the quizzical look I respond with a promise to tell her more. ‘I’ll write you the life of Celia. Edited highlights. And in exchange—’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell that you don’t already know from Charles,’ she says, and with the next beat she changes the subject. ‘Why don’t you come out into the garden? The only way the neighbours could get a peep is if you’re lying in the middle of the lawn. Even then they’d have to hang out of an upstairs window.’

  ‘I’ll consider it.’

  ‘That’s what you always say,’ she says, picking up my stick. ‘Today’s the day. Let’s move.’

  ‘Carpe diem, eh?’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, Daniel, but you can explain outside,’ she says, offering me a forearm to grasp. She’s very strong. Grabbing the bar of a ski-lift, I imagine, is a similar experience.

  Janina awaits on the terrace, with a jug of home-made lemonade and three beakers. She is, it has to be said, looking lovely. The hair is gathered back in a crimson scarf, so the neat little ears are on show, and she’s wearing a thin black roll-neck top with a pair of black jeans that are nicely tight around the thighs. Espadrilles, black, round off the outfit. This is how Janina dresses for the garden. Some women go to the opera looking more slovenly. The exposed areas of foot and ankle are smooth and shapely and a shade more tanned than I think could be attributed to late-spring sunlight. I suspect some sunbedding goes on, after the gym. Does Janina have too much time on her hands? Five half-days of admin work at the college are perhaps not enough.

  She tells a nice story. An eight-year-old girl – the daughter of a colleague – comes home from school last week and tells her mother that they’d had a very odd supply teacher that day. She’d asked the class how many bedrooms they had at home. One kid wasn’t certain if it was eight or nine. Another wasn’t sure how to count the rooms, because sometimes daddy sleeps with mummy, sometimes he sleeps in a room downstairs, and sometimes he sleeps with Milva, the lady who lives with them and picks her up from school.

  A parcel arrives. When Ellen brings me my tea I am in my chair, with the new book on my knees. I turn the pages: a photo of clouds; a photo of a street scene; a photo of a couple on a beach; two boys standing in the middle of a road; flowers; a boy and a girl on a path; a naked young woman, bound and gagged, in a car; a naked young woman holding a stuffed lizard to her chest; a naked young woman, bound with rough rope, seated on rough matting. I linger on the last; Ellen observes.

  ‘Are you trying to embarrass me?’ she asks.

  ‘Not at all,’ I answer. Were my face more mobile, it would have betrayed me; I think Ellen doesn’t believe me anyway.

  ‘So what else did Sandra say about me?’ I ask.

  ‘That you were a difficult sod, and you were forever playing music she didn’t like,’ she answers.

  ‘I’ll turn it off,’ I offer.

  ‘I’m getting used to it.’

  ‘I’m going to tell you all about me and Sandra,’ I say.

  ‘OK,’ says Ellen, as if I’d said something like ‘I’m going to read the newspaper.’ She picks up the packaging from the floor, where I’d dropped it. ‘Where do you want your tea?’ she asks.

  Beneath the Lenin mausoleum there was once a laboratory in which a hundred embalmers worked on perfecting their craft. To each was assigned a corpse, and every corpse had its own rubber bath. Imagine it: dozens of dead men bobbing about underneath Red Square.

  Before she came to look after me, Sandra’s last salaried job had been in an old people’s home, a bad one. ‘The people who ran it, it was just a business to them,’ as she told Charlie. ‘They didn’t care about the old ones. It was like we was just keeping them in storage until it was time to bury them. But do as you would be done by, Mr Brennan, that’s what I’ve always said. We all get old. It’s a bad thing, but it’s going to happen. The alternative is a whole lot worse, that’s what I say.’ The reason she couldn’t produce references, she informed Charlie, was that she’d been forced to leave. Some of the staff used to treat
the old people harshly, and Sandra had put a few backs up when she argued about it. Then she saw one of the supervisors giving a lady a plate of leftovers to eat. ‘She’s a hundred years old, for fuck’s sake. She can’t tell the difference,’ said the supervisor, so Sandra reported her and the next thing she knew she was being given a bollocking for not being a team player and she was telling them where they could stick their job. Sandra’s straight talking made a good impression on Charlie, as did her honesty when shown the portrait: ‘That’s a shock, Mr Brennan. I’ve seen some things, but nothing like that. I’m a bit at a loss, to be perfectly frank.’ This was one of Sandra’s favourite phrases: ‘This stuff’s overpriced, to be perfectly frank’; ‘I’m feeling a bit under the weather today, to be perfectly frank’. From time to time it could get on one’s nerves, to be perfectly frank.

  (Honesty was not one of the virtues of Sandra’s predecessor (name withheld). Small fluctuations in the household outgoings made me suspect that when she was shopping for me she would pick up a few items for herself and add the costs to my bill. Once, the week’s expenditure was so much higher than normal, and so implausibly explained, that I took a look in her bag and found half a dozen unopened packets of cigarettes; when I asked for the receipt (it had mysteriously vanished), she wanted to know what I was implying. It wasn’t worth the fuss of an accusation, but now she knew I didn’t trust her. In the following weeks she would sometimes leave receipts for inspection on the kitchen table; she regularly hinted that she would be leaving me some time soon. And she did leave soon, and abruptly, after an incident that occurred on a hot day in July. She had returned from the shops sweating so heavily that her T-shirt was piebald and her sandals squeaked. ‘My hair looks like seaweed,’ she said. ‘I can’t walk around looking like this.’ Because she was meeting her sister later she’d bought herself a new T-shirt while she was out; she took herself off to the bathroom to change. Passing the bathroom on my way to the adjoining toilet, I gave the door the gentlest of pushes and it opened an inch or two, disclosing my helper, towelling a foot on the edge of the bath. My appearance was unnoticed for a fraction of a second, and it’s remarkable how much information the eye can process in so brief an interval: the triangle of springy black hair, beaded with water; the soft triple fold of the belly; the little dimples on the inside of a thigh, as if the flesh bore the light imprint of fingers; the shimmer of hairs on the edge of an arm; a breast, long and pale, dented against a knee. Conditions were perfect for the presentation of the female form unclothed: bright sunlight through stippled glass; the merest tint of green imparted by the foliage of the chestnut tress in the courtyard; the enamelled surfaces animated by leaf-shadows. Seeing me, observing the avid nippleward gaze, she straightened up, furious, pulling the towel to her neck. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ she yelled. My apologies, when she emerged, were profuse. Seeing the door ajar, I told her, I’d assumed she wasn’t in there. ‘And where exactly did you imagine I was? I’m either in here or out there with you, aren’t I?’ She had a point, of course.)