Out of Mind (13 page)

I watch a game with a lot of laughing people in a hall and constantly changing numbers at the bottom of the screen. Although I don't understand the game very well, I am clearly so engrossed in it that I haven't heard Vera come in. Maybe she walked on tiptoe because she thought I had fallen asleep in front of the television. She sits down beside me on the settee and asks if I had a good walk with Phil. So she knows more about this.

'How do you know her?'

'Through Dr Eardly. She's come to stay with us for a while.'

'I thought she was a friend of Kitty's. She's so young still.'

'She'll stay with us for a while. So I can take it a bit easier.'

'Have you been to the library?'

'No, I was with Ellen Robbins.'

'Your hair looks different. Have you been to the hairdresser?'

'No, no. I've had it like this for ages.'

I do not reply. This kind of floundering conversation is on the increase. I keep missing links. When you pay close attention and listen carefully, a fair amount can be reconstructed, enough to keep up the appearance to the outside world that you understand everything, but sometimes there are such large gaps that you can fill them only by remaining silent, by pretending you haven't heard.

Vera gets up and goes to the kitchen. So she's called Phil, that blonde girl, Phil.

It is three degrees on Pop's outdoor Heidensieck thermometer. Sparrows are scratching among crisp curly brown leaves underneath the bare shrubs along the drive. In the bend of Field Road the mustard-coloured school bus from Gloucester comes chuntering along. Behind the misty windows children are hitting one another with schoolbags. They shriek and shout, they thump on the glass with their hands, chase one another down the aisle. I can see them but not hear them.

The bus drops them at the stop, and then returns empty by way of Eastern Point to Atlantic Road, to the municipal parking lot by the harbour. I watch the children clambering out of the bus - Tom's little Richard is last - and running away in all directions like colourful blobs among the tree trunks. Richard. In his dark blue striped woolly hat he looks down the road. Then he lets the bag slide from his back, holds it in his right hand and walks, limping slightly, into the wood. At each step the outspread peacock tail on his back moves. With his free hand he knocks snow from the branches, the last snow of the winter. If he were to turn his head this way he would be able to see me. Then he disappears from my field of vision.

Here in Gloucester the school is modern, with large windows through which the children can look out over the bay with its fishing boats or at the mist banks rolling across the sea, swallowing up everything except the flickering lamp of the automatic beacon on the low, rocky islet in the middle of the bay, Ten Pound Island. My own grade school looked more like a brick fortress with tall narrow windows. Class by class you were marched in from the school yard through the solid oak door, up the stairs that smelt of soft soap, and into the classroom with its odour of chalk and old floorcloths, and in winter of wet clothes and briquettes. When I look back on my grade-school days it is as if I were invisible for six years somewhere at the back of the class. Invisible as I listened to the screeching of the chalk on the grey blackboard. Pop sometimes went to the school to ask how I was getting on because I never said anything. I remember he came home in a rage one day because the teacher could form no picture of anyone of my name. It was not until I started studying law that I became a little less invisible, started to talk and very occasionally, at beery debating club evenings, to argue. That was how I came to be invited to join Jan Tholen and Paul Verdaasdonk at a party by one of the canals. There, I met Vera.

I was slightly tipsy, only very slightly, but just enough to give a lengthy account of a play I had seen,
The Seagull
I think it was. She was sitting on a pouffe with her knees together, her hands clasped over her narrow kneecaps. She was wearing a tight grey skirt and a black sweater. From somewhere in a corner of the room, lamplight fell on the side of her jaw. Strange that of those first moments I remember mostly her kneecaps and her chin, the bony parts. She only listened. She listened while looking at me without interruption. For the first time in my life I was not shy. I returned her gaze. I don't know whether the others in the room noticed. The room, the others, I have completely forgotten them. Left in my memory are Vera and I, looking at each other, until long after I had finished talking. There was something quite shameless and exciting about it. We penetrated each other's eyes. Love at first sight. That is the phrase. But actually we wanted to know, in one look, each other's past life, down to the smallest detail. The fact that before this meeting she had not known me, had been ignorant of my existence, seemed at once unbearable to me. She was no longer allowed to have anyone else. Her father, her mother, any brothers or sisters she might have, her bosom friends, I effaced them from her life with my gaze and gave her a new name. Later I took her on my bike to the house of an aunt in the eastern part of the city where she was staying. For half an hour we stood pressed against each other in a cold stone doorway. The following afternoon I received a telegram from Alkmaar. 'Come at once.' Like the urgent call of someone dying. That night I slept with her in the room of a friend of hers. We mated, that is the only word, fiercely, as if our lives depended on it. Now life has begun, I thought, now a life has begun of which you had no inkling. Three months later we were married. I had to convince my parents it was not a shotgun wedding.

'Maarten. Don't you feel anything?'

She points at the scorch patches on my knees. Now that she has mentioned it I can smell it, but I still don't feel anything. The fact that you can stand for so long with your legs against a radiator without feeling the heat cannot, of course, be explained by my reply that I was wrapped in thought. Can you be so deeply wrapped in thought that it makes you numb? It is an annoying incident, especially because I can't think for the life of me what I was thinking about. I promise her to change my pants at once.

I undress and crawl between the cold sheets. I lie absolutely still with my knees drawn up until I am completely warm. Only then do I turn over on my side. Just when I am lying comfortably Vera comes to wake me. Is it morning? Why all this hurry? And since when don't I put my clothes on by myself? She kneels in front of me and ties my shoelaces.

'Get up.'

'You're just like my mother when we used to go into town once a year to buy clothes.'

'I'm not your mother.'

As if I didn't know. What's the matter with her this morning?

Roast beef for breakfast? And who is that girl at the table? From her conduct I gather she knows who I am. Better wait and see. Maybe Vera will mention her name or she might make some remark that gives me a clue as to her identity. The Simic method makes no provision for this. It serves only to make you invisible. I have to yawn heartily a couple of times. I apologize but they pretend they haven't noticed. (That is very kind of those two women.)

I am not very hungry, but then, who would ever think of serving roast beef for breakfast? There, they are talking now, a conversation has started up between those two!

'Would you like some salad with it, Phil?'

Good, so that young one is called Phil. Join in straight away now.

'Don't you feel rather hot in that woollen sweater, Phil?' I say to the blonde girl.

She shakes her head, she has her pretty mouth full just now. Pity, I wouldn't have minded seeing her breasts. Vera used to have such beautiful ones, too, when she was young. And even now I still love to put my face between them.

They carry on eating and say nothing more. Every now and again they look at me as if expecting something of me. Vera gives the blonde girl another slice of roast beef. Well prepared, blood-red in the middle, that's how it should be. You can leave that to Vera.

'I've made a room ready for you upstairs,' she says to the girl, so I gather she is staying the night. Maybe she is a friend of Kitty's who has called in unexpectedly, thinking Kitty would be in. She is attractive. Full lips, the upper lip with a classical curve, and a high, slightly bulbous forehead. She reminds me of someone. Blue eyes, bright blue. Usually blue eyes are pale, mixed with a little grey, like mine, but not these ones. They look and they see. I would dare to speak to her, but as I don't know her name I say nothing.

She knows me, though. I can tell from her whole behaviour. Stalemate. I wait for a breakthrough. That is what is so annoying. More and more often I have to wait, be on the alert. What used to be self-evident (at least I have to assume it was) has now become enigmatic. And I don't want to keep asking questions all the time. So I wait, meanwhile slowly and painstakingly chewing a piece of meat.

Suddenly they have finished eating and immediately afterwards (the ladies seem to be quickening their tempo) there is coffee. I am given something with my coffee, a green capsule, or is it candy?

'Swallow it in one go, Maarten, don't bite on it.'

If Vera says so it must be all right.

'I thought it was candy,' I say by way of excuse.

The girl examines her nails. She seems to be bored. Whatever is she doing here, having coffee with two old people?

'You can turn the television on if you like,' I say to her.

She does so at once, and this makes me feel content. I have been able to please her in a small way. She sits down on the settee, arms spread out wide along the back, her legs crossed. She is wearing green knitted slippers on her feet. That surprises me, at this time of year.

'How are you feeling now, Maarten?'

'I couldn't tell you. Honestly, I'm sorry. I really don't know.'

'Try to say what you are thinking.'

'Everything happens in jolts and jerks. There is no flowing movement any longer, as there used to be. Nowhere. The day is full of cracks and holes. So to speak. No, really, honestly. It's no good any longer.' (Who or what forms these creaking sentences, which I try to utter - by means of interjections and insertions - more or less casually?)

'Who's that strange girl there?'

'But Phil isn't a stranger. You went for a walk with her this afternoon.'

'Oh yes, of course. So it is evening now. That's a stroke of luck, isn't it!' (Perhaps I pat her on the shoulder a bit too hard, sometimes I am not in full control of that either, dividing my strength among various activities; taking hold of a glass much too gently so it smashes to pieces, grabbing a towel as though it weighed twenty kilos.)

'Tomorrow is another day!' (This kind of sentence presents the least difficulty; proverbs, set phrases pop out all by themselves, with them my speech comes closest to normal talking.)

I get up and wave to a blonde girl who cheerfully waves back from the settee without moving her wrist.

Suddenly my body reels with sleep. I don't even bother to clean my teeth.

I wake up with a feeling as though I had drunk large quantities of beer. I go to the toilet but only a hesitant, thin hot trickle comes out. I shuffle back on bare feet through the dark passage. At the top of the stairs I see light burning under Kitty's door. Softly I climb the stairs, seeking support from the banisters.

Father and daughter, that is a very different bond from the one you have with a son. With Fred my contact is more choppy, but I like talking to Kitty.

When I enter her room she slaps her hands on her bare breasts in alarm. I smile and sit down on the edge of her bed. 'It's only your father,' I say.

She slides out of the bed on the other side, in her slip, snatches a blue T-shirt from the chair on which she has hung her clothes and quickly puts it on. (And suddenly, in a flash; this is the last time you will see this - how Kitty with her breasts jutting out and a hollow back pulls down a T-shirt tightly to below her darkly caving navel.)

'Yes,' I say resignedly, 'there comes a time when daughters don't want to be bare any more in front of their own father.'

From the corner of the room, beside the chair, she looks at me thoughtfully, holding her head at a slant. A strand of her blonde hair falls past her left shoulder across the T-shirt. On the pillow lies an open book which she has been reading.
The Heart of the Matter
by Graham Greene.

She walks around the bed and pulls me up with gentle force. 'Come,' she says in English. 'It's the middle of the night. You must go to sleep.'

'Oh, is it as late as that?'

Arm in arm we walk down the stairs. There is something stately, something solemn about it, as if I am going to give this girl, whom I do not know, in marriage to an as yet unknown bridegroom. Vera wakes up when the girl switches on the light in the bedroom. She talks to Vera as if I were a stranger.

'He was wandering around,' she says, again in English. The way your parents used to speak when they didn't want you to know about something.

Together they tuck me up in bed. I am not sick, but I let them do as they please. Behind my closed eyelids I see the light go out again. I am lying on my back. Beside me Vera turns over on to her side. At first I don't hear her breathing, but then she suddenly sighs profoundly a couple of times and I hear the deep, regular breathing of a sleeping person.

Nearly fifty years we have been lying side by side like this. It is almost impossible to comprehend what that means. The feeling of being two communicating vessels. Her moods, her thoughts; I can almost read them in her face, like Pop read the temperature on his thermometer. A graph of my love for Vera? An idea that Pop would not have understood. Once he spoke of his love for Mama, whom he always called 'wife'. That was when they had been married for forty years and he gave an after-dinner speech, a glass of red wine in his hand. He compared Mama to a piece of music, to the adagio from Mozart's fourteenth piano sonata. 'Just as clear, bright and unfathomable.' That was what he said. And after that I played the adagio on our out-of-tune black piano and the tears came to Mama's eyes, Pop told me, for I couldn't see it myself. I can't sleep because I need to pee. Then it's no use remaining in bed, I know that from experience.