‘I know, I know,’ and Celia was laughing. ‘Oh dear, you’ll think I’m an ingrate; I’ve had a sort of charmed life when you look at it. Yet it seems I haven’t had a serious calling like you.’ She paused for breath. ‘And can only love people in a cerebral way; in fact I only ever really wanted to be with you. But you were with Mickey.’
‘Who wanted you in the circle, but you would have none of it.’ Marcia looked out of the window. ‘Oh, Cele. Each of us had our own demons. There was nothing posh about what I did. A jobbing actor, on the road, in squalid digs a lot of the time. Mickey was going from one thing to another; just when he seemed to be making his way as a director it seemed he couldn’t bear to have any success and would go on a binge. I didn’t know what was the matter with him. And I don’t know about you, I’m not asking, but as I think I hinted once, the sex with him wasn’t exactly great. And I did have some expectations.’ At this her face changed from wry calm to something like distaste. For herself, Celia thought.
‘You were knowing, as you said to me that day in Calabria.’ But they were looking at each other with sympathy.
Marcia was shaking her head more as if she couldn’t understand the past, rather than that she was denying it:
‘You were always analysing everything, asking questions, and it was infectious. I started looking at every part of my life, going over the past … disturbing, knowing I wasn’t the person inside that I presented to the world.’
Here they were then, eating together again, after being separated for so much time. They talked long into the evening while Celia recounted to her old friend her setting off on a new path, how the long sojourn had happened while she wasn’t looking. She talked about poetry, investigating new possibilities, and Marcia nodded, alert as a bird waiting for the next morsel. Celia tried to explain how she missed the house they’d shared, the way people do – always thinking that what had gone before was better than the present.
‘But I realised that time in Daglish was a happy time, all in all. And I never stopped thinking about you.’
‘And Mickey?’
Mickey, she reported, had said a couple of shrewd or funny things about their whole arrangement, three grown-up people living together, when she found him again, but he had worn himself down so that he was by then getting beyond prolonged rational talk; perhaps fewer affectations than before, more of an air of lumpen misfortune hanging about him.
‘Funnily enough, when I was happier, younger, I didn’t have much creative push,’ Celia said. ‘The years in Daglish, we used to fool around a lot and get about often to see other people’s art, do you remember. Perth is said to be Dullesville, I even called it that, but there was always an exhibition or a concert or something we had to see! It was later, when I felt loneliest, that I was able to get the poetry going. Does that make sense?’
‘Oh yes.’
The radio which had been playing softly in the background gave out the tenor and baritone duet from Bohème and they turned it up, sitting together, listening in silence, at one.
Marcia noticed that her friend’s face formerly of a rare kind of severe beauty now had an offset aspect to it, a tired softness, no doubt wrought by years of striving, and possibly an edge of emotional deprivation.
The music finished and the conversation turned to old friends.
‘And what about James?’ Marcia said. ‘I’ve had him here a couple of times. He’s past entertaining, I think. Doing it, that is.’
‘Yes,’ said Celia, ‘oh, he’s still the same, don’t you agree – more or less? We went to a concert recently. But he likes his solitude, even though he complains that nobody rings him. He hasn’t been so well, lately.’ She went silent, thinking briefly of their old friend’s respiratory problems, of his unrealised hopes, settling for teaching and not performing, of how he reinvested his own potential into Jeremy.
‘And Jeremy,’ Marcia continued. ‘Well I heard that Jeremy died some time ago. And I haven’t seen James though I rang him when I heard. But he didn’t have much to say on the subject. Give it time. More wine? No, water, yes, let’s hit the water. We’ve had enough tea.’
Celia did a mock gesture with her arms and face: ‘Richer Lanka Tea!’ and Marcia tilted her head and winked. She drew the blinds. They settled onto sofas. ‘It’s late – we’ve been talking for hours. We should have a snack. Do you want to stay over, Cele? There’s a spare bed over there.’
‘No, I’ll get going soon. The cat frets if I stay away the whole night.’
‘How do you know that?’
Celia grinned: ‘I don’t. I imagine she does. Also I love my own bed, thanks. Anyway, yes, Jeremy: James loved him, as we all know, from the time he was a child, coming with his mother for the weekly piano tuition.’
‘A teacher’s dream. Who wouldn’t have loved him.’
‘Immigrant grandparents from China, wanting their grandson to have an English name.’
Marcia gestured she had noticed this. ‘Funny that. What’s in a name?’
‘Well everything, to some. It says We’re of this place now.’
‘You’re right of course.’
‘James did tell me that the last time he saw Jeremy in hospital he was thin to the point of emaciation,’ Celia went on, ‘could hardly talk, let alone walk. But calm, and ‘‘tamed’’, James said. On medication, as it’s now called. I think that was the last time they saw each other.’
They said nothing for a while, each focused on Jeremy.
‘I’ll never forget the way he was at that party, do you remember?’ Celia said.
‘Which one? There were several. At the first, soon after we arrived, we were invited to see and hear Jeremy who was the star; at the last – well.’
‘Ah yes of course. I was thinking of the first one. He was so gentle, Jeremy, and shy with all that talent.’
They gave themselves up to the memory of it, the old familiarity established between them; not exactly as though it had never been broken, but enough health in it to have become restored. What a boon, thought Celia, reclaiming a long-ago covenant.
20
Perth, 2000
It was early morning, only days after her meeting with Marcia, and she was walking to one of her favourite spots, the reserve by the river. She wasn’t going to force more meetings between them – they would happen naturally, spontaneously. The important steps had been taken.
Would you look at the height of those gum trees! And the winter sun just coming up, low but gaining, craftily edging its way through the eucalypt under-branches.
‘You don’t know you’re alive,’ people often said. But Celia knew: if you were not fully functioning how else could you feel the sudden shaft of joy that was in the habit of catching in her throat; or the glimpse of a magic sickle moon through the trees. The swings and roundabouts of everything. But better than being emotionally dead, like some erstwhile workmates she could think of who were still actually sitting at their desks, in a state of languor, incurious about nature, dull-eyed. She’d had, she reminded herself, quite a bit of experience in her life at being alone in company. Once people realise this and seek freedom, she believes, they find that solitude can be far more entertaining.
In the distance she saw the house overlooking the reserve, where the clinging vine, getting its boost for the coming season, was gushing through the white picket fence, the vine with a soapy scent that bespeaks spring. That’s right, bespeaks, with a nod towards John Keats in this happy-in-nature state of mind. The soon-to-be resurrected gasworks, down here by the river, long since abandoned, its chimneys intact, was earmarked, as the real estate salesmen and developers liked to say, for restoration. A moment of genius for the State government, formerly so ready to bring in the bulldozers.
Back home a quick go on the computer to catch some emails and then a cup of tea before the full works of bath and beauty treatment, to get ready for the afternoon, a movie with Sally. One does one’s best. She turned off her old computer that made a sound somewh
ere between a sigh and a snort. Sometimes it gave a little gulp which she figured out was giving her a reminder.
Something was bothering her, a stone-in-the-shoe niggle. It was something to do with the visit to see Marcia. After all their talk she realised that she had left her friend without asking about her health – almost the whole purpose of the meeting. Marcia had made her forget about it. Other talk and music had pushed aside the obvious question. It was as though they had to get this top layer seen to: the bringing up to date and clearing of misunderstandings; the new-found exchange of confidences and general re-establishment of the old bond, before they could go deeper into the unknown. She had noticed that her friend was thinner, and she, Celia, managed a question about that, fishing for a confiding response, but Marcia’s face was wonderfully alive, talking the way she once did, using her eyes and mouth – the natural actress and teacher. There had been phone calls between them since the visit and still Celia hadn’t been able to pursue it, due to Marcia’s gift for turning conversations around:
‘Marcia, how are you?’
‘I’m well, darling. But I wanted to ask you about James.’ And on it would go to other things.
And so Celia didn’t probe, out of the old Anglo respect for privacy, she supposed. Only Marcia knew the extent of Celia’s diffidence. People coming towards Celia would say to themselves: Now, here is someone you don’t tangle with. Indeed a woman said to her recently: ‘Oh, you’re walking with such a purposeful air!’ It was meant and taken humorously and gave her an idea of the way she appeared to strangers. Oh wad some power the giftie gie us/ to see oursels as others see us! – as Robert Burns would have wound his tongue around it. No, she wasn’t one to give a good first impression. When younger it could have been put down to an unthinking gaucherie, a lack of experience. She knew her place, and it was in the best chair, with the smartest people. Now that life had belted her about quite a bit she knew that her place was in her own heart and she didn’t have to or even want to be on view with anyone for anything. At times she found herself being inordinately happy sitting by herself simply listening to Brahms or Donizetti; at times she heard herself singing for the joy of hearing her own voice. And she knew that she had no intention of ceasing to dance around the kitchen simply because she didn’t have a partner.
Time passed, the way it does, slowly yet fast. However today she was going to a wedding – the first she had been to in about twenty-five years (bar one in Sanlorenzo), since she made a point of not accepting invitations to them. But go she would to this one, as she was fond of the couple, and intended to look terrific, smell like an angel. You look gorgeous in that, said the woman in the boutique, admiring the get-up she’d chosen. She hauled out of the dark wardrobe her Chanel No 5, the famous fragrance she’d personally never set much store by, considering it pretty overrated. But this was a gift, if you could call it that – something the world knew was expensive and which had been rather carelessly passed on to her by Sally, who’d received it with the compliments of the cosmetics company she worked for, and who had a talent for giving the unwanted present. Celia tried a squirt of it again with the thought that at last she was old enough for it. In earlier times this scent had seemed altogether cloying, loaded with responsibilities. Now she could probably carry it off with the insouciance it merited. She intended to dance at this wedding – it was going to be a big affair and the bride, a great girl, had delivered her a personal invitation.
The rituals go on. Weddings, funerals, christenings, giving birth, twenty-first birthday parties, life and death and the myriad of others not mentioned, our first this (and our last that). People will still keep going through the whole cycle of it. At least for another million years or something like that, before we burn ourselves out. Mm – these trousers are a most elegant cut. Must show them to Marse.
Marcia lay awake. It was only 2.30 a.m. and her mind was wandering about. The magpies were making noises, not chirping or whistling, the things they did close on daybreak – which surely was more than two hours away? They were up to something and their soft cooing or whatever it was had roused her.
She put the radio on and got, of all things, a gentle guitar version of My Sarie Marais – the South African song reminded her of a short tour of North Africa by herself, from London. It must have been the year after her trip to stay with Celia in Calabria. She’d felt lonely after being with Cele for all those weeks, so the following year, with Celia still in Italy she had set off on a cheap deal, staying in pensioni and youth hostels. Mickey was in Wales and Marcia had never thought it important to mention her little trip to anyone. In two of these pensioni she met a young woman – was her name Monica? – who seemed to be travelling the same route, always with a guitar on her back. She knew every song, it seemed, this Monica, and played all the popular and national songs of every country they could think of; it was truly a youthful meeting of the nations, with nothing but goodwill and optimism. Every song the girl was asked to play and sing she knew. Marcia wondered how that girl of long ago was growing older. What politics did she have now? Those characters of our earlier years of course always remain young, as they should. Monica had dispelled much of the anger towards South Africa felt by Marcia and other travellers of that time, young idealists or even revolutionaries some of them, back in Britain. They had not talked politics, thankfully, and it was clear that Monica loved old Africa, as she called it, like no other country.
Marcia had just managed to free herself once and for all from the neighbour Mrs Thompson, that interfering woman, and felt nothing but relief. Once she would have felt guilty about bidding a quick hello and determinedly passing on to her next chore. But now she thought she just didn’t have time for some people. Relieved of the regular listening to whingeing gossip, her heart was doing handsprings. She was better off with herself and a smaller circle around her – barely a circle at all. Mrs Thompson had never been a friend anyhow – and now there was Celia in her life again. Celia, who said to her at their last meeting: ‘Friendship is a tricky thing, don’t you think? We think it’s robust. No, we don’t even think about preserving it at all; it’s supposed to look after itself. Someone I used to like very much has gone to ground – as she always did now and then, as a matter of fact – but this time for good, I think, and for a reason I know nothing about. She passed me in her car recently, almost stopped then started up again as though she had just remembered we were no longer on speaking terms. What do you make of that? People are vile.’
‘Celia! You always exaggerate.’
‘Listen: Marcia – you know how I’ve told you about that woman, how much I listened to her bloody woes. And that flaky new-age dreck she’d go on with.’
‘That’s true. But we can’t afford to expect any quid pro quo in matters of love and friendship. Such an expectation leads inevitably to disenchantment.’
Celia fingered the pendant around her neck for a while. ‘You’re probably right. Expecting gratitude or even recognition is loving someone for the wrong reasons; emotional insurance of a kind. And I reckon the old philosophers were right: when we search for someone to love we’re really trying to love ourselves. Remember all that stuff of La Rochefoucauld Mickey used to talk about? Apparently La Roche was a mate of Madame de Lafayette and Madame de Sévigné and they’d all meet in her salon on a daily basis, in her boudoir, and talk.’
‘Yes, what an excellent thing. He was a pessimist of course,’ said Marcia slowly, gathering together her old knowledge, ‘but he said that if we were aware of our self-regard we would do something to remedy it.’
‘An excess of self-regard, he must have meant. We do need some. Nevertheless, to get back to my former mate, I’m not going to forget it quickly, what a shabby gesture on her part! Deciding from one day to the next to pass an old friend by.’ And Celia lifted her head in thought: ‘It occurs to me however, she probably decided on it long before she gave me the flick, so it wasn’t from one day to the next at all. The human race is beyond hope, don’t you thi
nk? I wonder if I can even trust myself with anything.’
Marcia, alone, smiled in the darkness, remembering the circular nature of this conversation in its entirety. It seemed akin to the long talks (like La Roche and his two lady friends) they used to have years ago, when Celia would twirl the drink around in her glass and say: ‘I’d like to know when my death is going to be so I can make a programme.’ To Marcia that was an extraordinary thing for a youngish woman to say, even considering death at all. And Mickey would say: ‘You should live every day as if it were your last.’
Marcia considered that many people, especially those with particularly delicate sensibilities, were not equipped for close society. More people, not fewer, should live alone, to learn how to do it.
The cause of our unhappiness is, according to Pascal, man’s inability to sit quietly in his room. But Marcia disagreed with quite a bit of Pascal, since each of his famous thoughts was based on the premise that you believed in God. And she thinks now that the cause of our unhappiness is our inability to admit that we are, in essence, entirely alone. There is not necessarily a soulmate there. If you can’t live inside your head there is no hope for you. There.
A journalist on the radio the other day asked a celebrity – who was either a scientist or a philosopher – a question on, now what was it? Yes. When human beings become extinct, having had their time on this planet and faded away, when we are no longer here, will there be any meaning to life on earth?
The interviewee replied that yes, there would still be a point to it. The world will still exist for the so-called lower orders of life. He went on to say that although we didn’t attach too much value to these lesser creatures and their experiences, they certainly had times of, for example, real happiness: you only had to observe them to know this. Oh yes, there was certainly a meaning to the world as we know it, that is, this planet. What he was saying also, quite cheerfully, was that human beings are not the centre of meaning in this world, as we all fondly imagine. We are not enormously significant in the grand scheme. All of this she supposed must be the essence of solipsism. She must remember to run it by Celia.
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