Spring (3 page)

‘He’s some sort of pap. She hasn’t told you this?’ he said, surprised.

‘No.’

‘She’s not mentioned him?’

‘No.’

James thought, and then said that the only hint he had had of it was that nestling in the mess on the little night-­table next to her bed—­among the tumblers of stale water and screwed-­up tissues—­he had noticed a watch. A man’s watch. It looked like a pilot’s watch or something. A very macho watch. He had of course wondered who its owner was.

‘Probably Fraser’s,’ Toby offered. An overweight City lawyer, tanned from his Indian Ocean honeymoon and still in the suit he wore to the office, he was jiggling his portly knees and looking wistfully towards the door. They were in a pub and he wanted to smoke. ‘Sounds like the sort of watch he would have.’

‘Did you ever meet him?’

‘A few times.’

‘What was he like?’

Toby shrugged. ‘He was okay,’ he said, putting the emphasis on okay so as to make it vaguely praiseful.

‘She’s said some things…’ James said, thinking aloud.

‘What?’

‘Things about the past. I don’t know. That she still has ties to the past or something. Nothing specific. That must be what she meant…’

‘Probably. Mind if I step outside for a minute?’

They went and stood in front of the pub. It was on a quiet, pristine Chelsea street—­Toby’s local. In summer it looked like it was made of flowers, and even now it was festooned with elegant wintergreens. Toby sucked hungrily on a duty-­free Marlboro Light in the sharp, smoke-­blue evening air. ‘So how’s it going, generally?’ he said.

James told him it was going fine.

What he did not tell him was how on Saturday night after supper, though she had with some solemnity invited his hand into her unbuttoned jeans to feel how wet she was—­very wet—­she would not let him fuck her. He was left pleading there, literally kneeling on her living-­room floor (Summer was away for the weekend again) while he unknowingly paraphrased Marvell.

He had not in fact actually fucked her since the night of the fiasco. She had not let him. In that sense the fiasco was very much ongoing—­the latest thing was that she had started to talk of wanting to get him looked over by a doctor. ‘I don’t know where you’ve been,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’ve been doing.’ He promised her that he had no diseases. They were at that point in bed and he finally turned over and sulked.

No, he did not tell Toby these things.

‘Are you married?’ he said.

What followed—­they were having a late supper in the trattoria with the plastic plants next to Russell Square tube—­was surprisingly short and simple.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Separated.’

She was obviously prepared for this.

‘Were you planning to tell me?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know I should have told you already. It doesn’t make any difference, though. I haven’t seen him for more than a year.’

He was full of questions he wanted to ask her. He had imagined that they would spend the whole evening on the subject. In the end, however—­it was obvious that she did not want to talk about it—­he just said, ‘Is that his watch by your bed?’

And she said—­‘Yes.’

(And the next time he looked, the watch was no longer there.)

So that was that. Except that that night, for the first time since the fiasco, she took the erection which was pressing fervently into the small of her back and pulled it into her. She immediately started to sob. In the very faint light that leaked in from the street he saw her scrumpled face, the shine in the tiny valleys to the sides of her eyes. ‘It’s okay,’ she whispered, worried that he might not understand her tears. ‘It’s okay.’ She smiled tearfully. ‘It’s okay.’

*

Things must have been okay then, in mid-­February—­there was a minibreak. In the monochrome interior of the Eurostar as it flew through the Kentish twilight, she laid out the key facts—­a medieval port, the largest in northern Europe, a sort of doublet-­and-­hose Hong Kong or Singapore. Then the Scheldt silted up and stopped the opening to the sea (a poor fate for a port), leaving it, for the last four hundred years, an exquisite fossil.

She had a list of things she wanted to see, and he tried to keep her warm—­they would have needed a polar explorer’s microfibres to do the job properly—­as she led them to grey-­skinned emaciated Christs, and many quiet vistas of narrow little houses with their feet in the water. It was the water that made the strongest impression on him. The very sight of it, its black viscosity, made him shudder. In the morning, seen from the hotel window, steam stood thickly on its still, house-­edged surface. At the end of each afternoon the sun shone on it, a strange cold yellow. It was heavy and heatless. He pitied the fish in it, and wondered why it wasn’t frozen. The streets were frost-­scoured, and the tourist-­trade horses—­he pitied them too—­steamed with their dung in the stone squares.

There was something almost hallucinatory about the place. The tangle of streets, squares and waterways. Everything was extremely small in the Middle Ages—­that was very evident. For instance, the tavern they stooped into one twilight. It occupied the lower floor of a tiny house which teetered forward into its alley. There were only two tables, space for no more than a dozen people. The whole interior was made of wood, and smelled of warm smoke from the fireplace. They stayed there for an hour or two, the evening thickening in the quarrels of the windows, while she told him about John of Gaunt—­that is, John of
Ghent
—­son of Edward III and Chaucer’s friend and patron, who was born in the Flemish city in 1340 while his parents attended a summit meeting that went on for more than a year. Time, she thought, was different then. Partly for technological reasons. Partly because of the presence of a living idea of eternity. Look at Jan van Eyck’s
The Madonna and Joris van der Paele.
(They did look at it, in the Groeninge Museum.) The living presence of eternity—­a painter striving to paint it. Who would try to paint such a thing now? And why?

Later they hurried through silent streets laughing at the sheer shocking lowness of the temperature, every last joule having seemingly evaporated into the yawning interstellar spaces overhead. For a moment she stopped and looked up at the mess of stars and thought tipsily—­
The living presence of eternity
… Tight-­jawed, he hurried her on through the stinging air, towards the lobby of the hotel.

He has often wondered how small birds, stuck outside in them, survive nights like that. Walking Hugo on winter mornings when the puddles are ice and hearing, in the leafless park, their pathetically subdued tweeting always touches him with pity, and a sort of wonder that they are able to survive the subzero night, to make it through to the morning to whistle with such touching fortitude—­though weakly—­as he walks by swaddled and scarfed up to the eyeballs, and
still
shivering, still stamping his feet in a struggle to keep the numbness from them. How do they survive?

She shrugged. ‘Don’t know,’ she said.

The question did not seem to interest her.

‘You’ve never thought about it?’

She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said.

They were on the train to Ghent. Outside the windows the Netherlandish banality of the landscape was mitigated by a frost so thick it looked like snow and sparkled in the flooding sunlight.

He said, ‘Am I just being sentimental?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe anthropo… whatever.’

‘What?’

‘Anthropocentric? Is that the word?’

There was something about the way she said,
Is that the word?
Without the slightest fear of seeming stupid or ignorant. She just
knew
she wasn’t stupid or ignorant. It was something that secretly impressed and intimidated him, which took him uneasily back to the times he used to sit with Miriam and her friends on his Islington terrace. In the presence of those men—­and they were invariably men—­James the estate agent would tend not to have much to say for himself, especially when the talk turned intellectual. And the talk was often oppressively intellectual when Miriam’s visitors were there, sitting on his terrace, with the faint odour of vegetation floating up from the water, supping his champagne. Magnus. Karlheinz. And Linhardt. Linhardt. He was the worst. That French twat, with his high forehead and serial killer’s blue eyes…

‘The famous are part of us,’ he is saying, when James steps onto the terrace with the second bottle of Veuve Clicquot, ‘of our identity. That is why they are so fascinating to us, why we feel strange when we see them, why we have even a sense of awe. You can say they are half-­abstract beings, ideas, belonging to the world of the mind…’

‘Who’s your favourite celebrity?’ Miriam says.

Linhardt ignores her. ‘I make visible these ideas,’ he says, looking at James, ‘which I think is completely consistent with the definition of art…’

James nods, pours…

Linhardt. The thought of him still makes James want to kick something. Then, he took it out on the towpath—­pounding it all the way to Victoria Park, under the low bridges, through the spaces laced with moving light when the sun was shining on the water.

Katherine’s lack of interest in the travails of little birds should not have surprised him. A week or so earlier, he had told her the story of the hatchling thrush—­another one set on the terrace of his old Islington flat. One spring morning he had looked out through the French windows and seen a dead hatchling thrush on the decking. It must have fallen from a nest somewhere higher up. That in itself was sad, but what made it so memorably so—­what in fact pierced him with a sorrow he has never been able to forget—­was the way its parents spent the whole morning offering it worms. With worms in their beaks, its mother and father would frequently land next to it, where it lay lifelessly still on the decking, and wait there for a few moments, turning their heads in the way birds do, unable to understand why it wasn’t taking them.

She said, ‘Aaww.’

Though she was trying to sound sad, she didn’t. It was obvious, anyway, that she was not being pierced by a sorrow she would never be able to forget.

He was irritated that the story had flopped. He wondered, in his irritation, if this meant that she was just not a very nice person.
Was she just not a very nice person?
Was that it?

No, she was just not as sentimental as he was. He was sentimental. She made him feel sentimental.

The train pulled into Ghent station at noon. They had lunch, then walked to Sint Baaf’s cathedral to see van Eyck’s altarpiece. That was why they were in Ghent. That was what she wanted to see. One of the Masterpieces of Western Art. It was a strange image. In the middle, an important-­looking sheep stood on a table with blood flowing in a neat stream from a hole in its front into a metal cup. The sheep did not seem to be in pain, or even to have noticed what was happening. There was a subtly painted suggestion, too, that it was shining with light. In the field around it were lots of expensively dressed people, mostly men, some with wings… Yes, it was very strange. He knew that the sheep was a symbol of Jesus Christ—­he knew about the angels and saints. He was familiar with the iconography. What made it
seem
strange, and this was what she was explaining to him as they perambulated around the altarpiece in its perspex house, was the way it was painted. The familiar symbols of medieval art had been painted as if they were real things.
That
was what made them seem strange. The sheep looked like a real sheep, like a photo of a sheep. That was what was strange. And she drew his attention to the swallows or swifts flitting about in the luminous evening sky near some palm trees—­very small, to indicate their distance from the spectator—­and not one of them the same as the others, each painted in a specific position in flight, obviously observed from nature—­one swooping, another soaring, another spiralling—­escapees from a world of symbolic and stylised art.

When they had seen the masterpiece she said, ‘Should we get totally pissed?’ They were leaving Sint Baaf’s. It was not something he normally did. Pensively, he stroked his jaw. Then he said, ‘Yeah, okay,’ and they went and drank a lot of Duvel, and Westmalle Tripel, and Piraat, and Sint Bernardus Abt 12, with its laughing monk on the label. It was still just about light when they stumbled out into the Grote Markt several hours later, and presumably freezing though they were insensible to it now. Looking for the station, they quickly found themselves lost in the streets of a disappointingly twenty-­first-­century town—­plastic trams,
ATM
s… A taxi… A stiflingly overheated Merc. When James addressed the driver in slurred French, the man answered in unfriendly English. The fare for the two-­minute drive was €6. At the station, they struggled with the question of which platform to wait on. A well-­insulated local told them to take the next train to Zeebrugge.

And Zeebrugge, very tediously, was where they woke up. They spent two whole minutes on the platform there in a knifelike wind that whipped in off the North Sea, then took another taxi—­another overheated Merc—­all the way to their hotel (the fare was €80), where they went straight upstairs and fell asleep.

The next morning, their final morning in Flanders, hungover and eating hot
frites
from a paper cone, she snuggled into him as they walked under the frozen copper-­sulphate sky and said, ‘I feel nice with you.’ Things seemed okay then.

*

On Friday, towards the end of the afternoon, he takes Hugo for a walk. The St Bernard dislikes the subterranean flat. He usually spends the day lethargically filling the sofa, or when James is sitting on the sofa, the whole vestibule—­a huge, sad-­eyed harlequin.

Under the sky-­scraping London planes of Russell Square, which are just starting to venture forth their leaves, James throws a tennis ball for him; and if he is throwing it with more than usual vigour it may be an effect of what she said to him on the phone as he walked to the square from Mecklenburgh Street. She said she was tired. She did not want to meet tonight. Someone was off sick, she said, and she had to work an extra-­long shift. Then, perhaps hearing the disappointment in his voice, she said, ‘Let’s do something tomorrow.’