Telescope

by Jonathan Buckley

  But however awkward the introduction of Valerie might have been, there are several other reasons for Freddie’s apparent reluctance to come down here. He is a very busy lad – it’s a competitive business that he’s involved in, and mere nine-to-fivers soon go to the wall. Valerie is very busy too – the magazine is doing well, and deadlines are deadlines. Their weekends, when there’s no work to be done, are packed with action. Furthermore, there’s the fact that Freddie thinks this corner of England is (and here I quote him exactly) ‘the land of the unburied dead.’ (Peter, on the other hand, thinks it’s OK. Almost everywhere is OK with Peter – his immediate environment has never been of overwhelming importance to him. A room with a door and a desk is all that Peter needs.) And of course there is one other factor to consider: the sight of me makes Freddie feel a little queasy.

  In order to enhance the commercial potential of my memoirs, I explain to Charlie, I may have to exaggerate a little: I was kept in a cage and fed on fish-heads for ten years, that sort of thing. I have a title: Is There Life Before Death? ‘I’m sure it’ll do well,’ says Charlie. Pause. Then: ‘But seriously, is that what you’re doing?’ The dominant tone is one of encouragement, but there’s a small measure of unease in the mix. ‘No,’ I tell him. ‘I’m just keeping myself entertained. Whistling in the dark.’

  Celia is due in forty-eight hours, ETA 6 p.m., but she will certainly be late, as Janina tells Ellen, making the sister-in-law’s unpunctuality sound like a personal slight. I explain to Ellen that Celia believes that she’s doomed to be unpunctual. Mishaps happen to her in a way they don’t happen to other people: keys suddenly, at the worst possible moment, become jammed in the lock; traffic jams materialise around her as if her car were a magnet. She was once late in joining a group of friends because of a signal failure on the Swiss rail network. How many times does that happen? It’s fate.

  A morning in eighteenth-century pastoral mode: washes of pale yellow light on the grass; sheep perched on the tips of forty-foot shadows; a lethargic stampede of clouds; thin dressing of mist about the trees. From the shadows of the houses I guess it’s approximately 6.20. I check the clock: it’s 6.23. I have become a country boy already; the sun is my chronometer. The day disappoints, however. By noon the sky has decayed to the colour of exhausted denim, and that’s how it stays throughout the afternoon.

  3

  ‘I’m sorry. Sorry sorry sorry,’ Celia begins, with an eye-roll of self-exasperation. The intention had been to take the train down, but her friend Christine had insisted that she borrow her car – the lesser of the household’s vehicles (a two-year-old Audi), but still more luxurious than anything Celia has been driving recently. So Celia readily acquiesced to the proposal and took the opportunity to stop somewhere along the way, or more or less along the way, to see some garden that’s open to the public for one week of the year only. And, having seen the garden, she took a shortcut that turned out not to be a shortcut because a road was being dug up and she had to take a detour which worked out longer than the original route would have been. One of the tyres looked soggy as well, so she stopped to put some air in it, but the pump at the garage where she noticed the problem wasn’t working properly, and she had to find another one, and so on and so on. Bemused by the volume and pace of the performance, Ellen can do nothing but smile. Celia is already getting on her nerves.

  The occasion calls for something special, says Charlie, who has decanted a couple of dusty bottles; with no satirical intent, I think, Celia copies him in raising her glass to peer through the wine before tasting it. ‘Sensational,’ is her judgement, and Charlie accepts the compliment with a faux-smug nod. This get-together, says Celia, is the most exciting evening she’s had for ages. She explains to Ellen that she’s teaching English to groups of businesspeople, and most days she isn’t out of the school before ten o’clock, so her social life is in tatters. One of her pupils, Mr Orlandi, who is something fairly big in radiators and lives with his wife and four teenaged children in an apartment across the street from his mother, had let it be known that he’d not be averse to some after-hours activity, but hanky-panky with Mr Orlandi is not her idea of fun. ‘Holding on to the last shreds of self-respect,’ she says, smiling at Janina, whose laugh doesn’t spread to her eyes. Mr Mascarucci has phoned his brother from Tunisia, promising to come back soon, she informs us; Mr Mascarucci, she explains to Ellen, ruined her previous place of employment by siphoning the school’s cash into bank accounts as yet untraced; ‘the effing finance director – can you believe it?’ A wince-smile from Janina.

  Under questioning from Celia, Ellen summarises her employment record in the fewest words compatible with politeness; ditto her personal history – Roy’s name is not mentioned. Janina shares a few items of local news, with emphasis on the asylum-seekers issue; Celia, providing the Italian angle, talks about the gypsies in Florence (no mention of her sweeper), then excuses herself – she needs a fag. ‘Trying to give up,’ she tells Ellen. ‘Tried nicotine gum, nicotine patches, hypnosis, acupuncture, yoga, alcohol. Last year I tried willpower. Three days that lasted. Hopeless,’ she says, with a shrug for Janina.

  I take her arm and we go out into the garden. ‘So, how are things?’ I ask her. Lips compressed, she considers how frank an assessment of her current situation she should give, then answers: ‘Broke. Well, not exactly broke. Next to nothing in the way of liquid assets. Day-to-day revenue unhealthy. And I don’t know what I’m doing. Middle-aged, semi-employed and semi-skint,’ she sings and she smacks her thigh, marvelling at her achievement of such comprehensive failure. She may have to think about coming back to England, she says, as if this would be tantamount to giving up on life. Before that, however, she’s going to try starting her own school, probably with Elisabetta, possibly with another friend who might be able to stump up some cash. They’ve found premises near the university: good-sized rooms, in need of refurbishment, but perfectly located. ‘Snag is, start-up costs. Deficiency of funds on my side,’ she laments, hands upturned, as though inviting a downpour of money. Even if she empties her account, and Elisabetta is on board, and the unnamed third party as well, she’s still going to be a few thousand quid short. She’s going to have to have a word with Charlie. ‘Perhaps he’d be interested?’ she suggests. ‘Could earn a nice return on his investment. He wouldn’t notice it, would he? Ten grand. He can afford it. Fifteen, tops. He’d hardly miss it,’ she says, but already the credibility of the plan is beginning to dwindle. ‘What do you think? Not a hope, is there?’ she asks, as Janina announces that coffee is ready.

  Developments with the step-sweeper. Two days ago Celia took him the list she’d promised. It was briefly encouraging that he remembered who she was: as she came up the steps he stopped what he was doing and raised a hand to her. ‘How are you?’ he asked her, grinning. She knew this was going to be a tricky encounter, however, when he pulled from his pocket – as if it were an abusive letter he suspected her of having sent – the tissue on which she’d previously written the names for him.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ she replied.

  His brisk nod quite clearly said that it didn’t surprise him to learn that she was fine. He came immediately to the point: ‘These are no good,’ he told her, opening out the tissue to display her list. ‘All of these I try and they are all not good. This one’ – pointing to the map she had sketched – ‘is not here.’

  Celia apologised for the inaccuracy of her drawing, though she knew the restaurant in question was still in business, in the street she’d named. ‘You didn’t find it?’ she asked.

  ‘All are no good,’ he said, stuffing the tissue back into his pocket. He folded his arms and regarded her in fierce and doleful accusation.

  At this point, Celia admits, she was tempted to get away promptly. The reason she didn’t, or so she says, is that it seemed possible he might clout her with the broom if she tried to retreat. ‘I have some more,’ she said, passing the second list to him, plus a map from the tourist office, on
which she’d highlighted the relevant streets. He took it sullenly. ‘I know it’s difficult,’ she said to him, while he scanned the new list. She heard herself: a duchess commiserating with a peasant at the failure of the harvest.

  ‘This is why I ask you,’ he responded, as if he believed her to be – or had believed her to be – as influential as the head of a masonic lodge. He worked through the names, checking each against the map, and when he was done he folded each piece of paper neatly, unzipped his jacket (the same jacket as before) and posted them into the inner pocket. He glanced at her, and the brevity of the glance seemed to signify that they both knew that this was a waste of his time, but then he reached into another pocket and took out the envelope, from which the photograph was again removed. ‘Ilinca,’ he said, putting a finger to the woman’s face. The fingernail was the colour of urine, tipped with a thick arc of black. ‘Mircea. Constantin,’ he said, touching the children. ‘Petru,’ he named himself, jabbing a thumb onto his chest with such force that a tiny boom came off the breastbone. ‘Your name?’ he demanded.

  ‘Meredith’, Celia found herself replying. She has long-standing friends who are unaware that this is her middle name.

  ‘Meredit,’ he repeated.

  ‘Meredith.’

  ‘Petru.’ The exchange of names felt like a contractual transaction. ‘Next week you have more names,’ he said, and it had the intonation of a statement rather than a question.

  Celia told him, more apologetically than she had intended, that next week she would be in England.

  ‘OK. In England,’ he said, nodding, and for a second or two he smiled and looked steadily at her, with a gaze of stupid and judgemental certainty. Giving the broom-head a kick to set it moving, he resumed his sweeping.

  Having stopped herself from protesting that what she’d said was true, Celia wished him good luck and put a couple of coins in the tin. ‘Thank you,’ he muttered, grasping the broom to his side in what might have been a mock salute.

  ‘Bloody typical,’ says C. ‘Got myself obligated to a loon.’ She’s standing by the telescope, but only now does she appear to notice it. ‘What’s with the equipment?’ she asks, and I point to Peter’s bird book.

  As she’s leafing through it I ask her if she can remember the morning we saw the hoopoe in Devon. ‘Vaguely,’ she answers, turning the pages. I remind her of some salient details: the early hour, the saturated grass. ‘I remember a bird, but I couldn’t tell you what it was,’ she says, not looking up from the book, then she says she’d better go downstairs and be sociable.

  The hoopoe. It was very early: I wiped the water off the windowpane and saw the sky tinged with yellow at the top of the valley. Celia and I were in the same room; I woke her up and we walked down the slope, leaving long black footprints in the tin-coloured dew. The sea was grey and silent, and the trees were motionless. We crossed a field that had some cows in it; from a hundred yards off we could hear the grass being ripped in their jaws. The track down to the beach went across a golf course. The smooth damp sand in one of the bunkers was irresistible: we stopped to draw in it with sticks, and it was then that we saw the bird to the side of the flag – peach and cinnamon, with black and white markings on its back and dashes of black on its crest, probing the turf with its thin arc of a beak.

  Ellen and I are in the garden when Celia emerges from the house, carrying a pair of well-worn hiking boots. She’s going to have to take herself off for a while. She hopes we will understand.

  When Celia has gone, Ellen says that she wouldn’t have thought of her as a hiker.

  ‘You don’t like her, do you?’ I ask, and Ellen replies that she doesn’t know her so she can’t possibly not like her.

  ‘She has a good hairdresser,’ she says, ‘and she knows what suits her.’ Ellen is greatly taken with the grey cashmere top.

  ‘OK, but you don’t like her.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ she says. Eventually she tells me that there was a woman who worked in Roy’s office once, who – as Roy put it – never dipped her headlights. That’s what she feels about Celia, sort of; but she likes her. Janina, apparently, says that Celia should be on TV. I point out that there are several ways of taking this, but Ellen assures me that it was meant nicely.

  ‘Celia’s taken a liking to you,’ I tell her. ‘But don’t get carried away. Celia usually takes a liking to people when she meets them. This was one of her big problems.’ I explain that she tends to arrive at an opinion within thirty seconds of meeting someone, and to stick to that opinion way past the point at which the evidence proves she’s wrong. And she’s often wrong.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ says Ellen.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ say I.

  Voices raised last night and high tension in the air this morning: Janina and Celia staying out of each other’s way as much as possible. Celia goes for a walk immediately after breakfast. I ask Ellen if she has any idea what’s going on; she says not.

  Celia reappears at noon, and comes up to my room after showering. Things started to go wrong during the news, she reports. George Bush appeared, uttered the word ‘freedom’, and Celia – she admits – jumped up on her soapbox. It was an outrage, she said, that these people carry on as if words can be made to mean whatever they want them to mean, and that the British public seems happy to let the lies wash over them. Charlie asked if she really meant to suggest that the world would be a better place if Saddam Hussein were still around, to which Celia replied that only an idiot couldn’t comprehend what was wrong with the US government paying their cronies billions of dollars to rebuild what the US government had destroyed using weapons supplied by other cronies at vast profit, all in the interests of future vast profits. Whereupon Janina joined in, incredulous that these wretched people weren’t more grateful that the Americans are prepared to spend billions and billions of dollars on a country whose population kept trying to kill them. That’s where the shouting started.

  Before going to bed, Celia apologised to Charlie for losing her temper. (Janina had already withdrawn, with the air of a woman who expected to be receiving expressions of regret in the morning.) She was on edge at the moment, she told him. Her situation was a bit worse than she’d let on – well, more than a bit: quite a lot. But rather than linger on her woes, she moved on quickly to the good news about the Celia Brennan Language Institute. She did her best to make it sound like a sure-fire money-spinner. ‘What happened to the money from the will?’ asked Charlie. She told him she’d sunk it into the flat, most of it. Charlie went through the motions of pondering, before announcing that he was not at this moment in time inclined to favour the idea of a loan, on principle. ‘What principle would that be?’ Celia inquired. Answer: ‘The principle that I’m not a bank.’ Charlie expects to have rows with Celia every time he sees her. The rows don’t bother him, because he knows he’s in the right. But he cannot pardon her rudeness to his wife.

  This morning Celia apologised again, at length. Charlie’s response was that he hasn’t yet mentioned it to Janina, but that, as far as he’s concerned, a loan of some sort might not be totally out of the question (i.e. she can forget about fifteen thousand or anything near it). But he would need to see some figures, he informed her – as if he is indeed a bank and she’s Mrs Random Fuckwit who’s just dropped in off the street. She impressed upon him that she would sell the flat to pay him back if things went pear-shaped – to which Charlie rejoined that he didn’t want to be in any way responsible for her losing the roof over her head. Celia thinks that the stuff about the business plan is a red herring: she could come up with figures that would satisfy the International Monetary Fund but Charlie still wouldn’t be happy, because the figures themselves aren’t really the problem – the problem is that the figures are hers.

  An hour later, Charlie’s view – Celia’s latest outburst is conclusive proof that she’s getting crankier as she gets older. Details missing from Celia’s version of events are now provided. For instance, demanding of Jani
na, in reaction to a perfectly reasonable observation on the situation in Iraq: ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Another instance: telling Janina that her opinions were ‘utter bullshit.’ Janina thinks Celia is having a severe midlife crisis and needs help. She could suggest the name of a good man she knows, a therapist who’s the husband of the woman who runs her yoga group, but she’s afraid that Celia in her present state might bite her head off for suggesting it. This is true. Celia in any state would bite her head off for suggesting it, because Celia knows that in Janina’s world it’s only the inadequate who have need of a therapist.