The Point (34 page)

Shall we be seeing salt on the menu in the restaurant, asked George. Flora looked at him.

Altogether it was a good night, exciting, uncomfortable, giving to think. I hadn’t been particularly familiar with Marlowe’s play, and I found myself dwelling on his Doctor Faustus in the way you do when something has made an impression on you, not deliberately but finding it constantly coming to mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about how he had been cheated, he wanted to know things, and had been fobbed off with tricks. Of course, I suppose you should expect that of the devil; what in the world would make you think he would behave honourably?

Were there to be a reader of these pages, he would be way ahead of me at this point. The desire to know: the last great Faustian temptation. Age old, age old. The oldest. Eve in the garden succumbed to it. The fruit the serpent offered her was the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. An apple, we call it. It did not occur to me at the time that the means of my temptation was called an Apple too, the very same name, for god’s sake, the device which offers us knowledge. Maybe the temptation is the belief that it can be done.

Now I have given up computers. I write by hand. My pen traces the words in black ink across the page. When I cross something out it remains, there still, legible, despite the line through it, endeavouring to cancel it. Reminding us that perfection is not after all easy, showing the mistakes that are made in the pursuit of it. Not the anodyne ironing out of all flaw or error that the computer produces.

The temptation of the snake: take the Apple and you will know everything. Good and evil. And – but you don’t know this at the time – you will be expelled from the garden.

After the party we went home to our separate places. Flora’s idea, not mine, I would sleep with her whenever I could. I brought up again the question of our getting married, living together. I know we hadn’t known each other long, but I had such a sense of time passing, I felt myself nearly gibbering with urgency. I knew, and thought she did too, that this was our great chance. She didn’t actually say no, but there was no yes either; she needed time to think. I am not a good person to be married to, she said, but I replied that I had quite other views. I have to be in my own space, she said. I have to work. I replied that I would give her all the space she needed. That’s the trouble, she said, it should not be you giving.

I say now, and I thought then, I am not happy with these expressions. One’s own space. Needing time. They are the jargon of contemporary relationships, and we should mistrust jargon. It blinds us, confuses us, leads us astray. It would have been more honest of her to say, No, I don’t want to, or I don’t want to, yet. I think, looking back, that she did not love me as I loved her. I want to believe that she loved me, I do believe that, but I know it was not so much. The death of the child had damaged her. She was like a ship that had run into a reef, and torn great holes in her side, she could close off the wounded parts with solid watertight bulkheads and still function after a fashion, but in a fragile way. Limping back into port would be the best to hope for. I would have been that port, but she stayed out in her own high sea. Pride: maybe it was that kept her there, but more likely fear; it pains me that she should have been more afraid of my safe haven than some vast ocean. Can I keep the metaphor going and say that she was adrift? Not really: she knew where she was going. I suppose that is the thing, she had her own idea of the harbour she was making for, and it wasn’t me.

I know these thoughts are profitless, but I don’t care. They are what I have.

I slept fitfully, and late. The boys were at work when I came in. I said to Clement, Well, your idea of Helen as a hologram, it turned out it fitted rather well, didn’t it. She wasn’t much more.

Clement looked startled for a moment, and I had to remind him of our earlier conversation. Yeah, he said. She was pretty substantial, though.

Still a kind of phantom, I said.

Jake sniggered: The wrong sort of substantial. Not nice to go to bed with.

In what way, asked Clement. As phantom, or poof?

She was a pun on Elizabethan theatrical practice, I said. You didn’t get women on the stage, their parts were always played by boys.

That’s why Shakespeare’s girls are always dressing up as boys, said Novica, surprising me with this mild erudition.

Yeah, but I bet the devils weren’t usually girls, said Clement.

Well, I said, it was all tricks and phantoms. That’s Faustus’s tragedy, isn’t it. It’s all fake, none of it’s really there, his power, his glory, his knowledge. Mephistophilis cheats him in every possible way.

Just virtual reality, really, said Novica, which brought me up with a slight start; maybe the Elizabethans knew all about virtual reality before we thought we invented it.

Clement tossed his head back and haw-hawed with mock laughter, which was his way of indicating he thought the remark quite funny. It occurred to me that he resembled the stage images I know of Mephistophilis, quite sturdy and compact, with bright eyes, a nimble capering person, but of course it was the little topiary beard, so black, so carefully shaped, that clinched the resemblance. And his eyes, gleaming, rather slow, even sly, their sideways glance telling you they were full of consciousness. Whereas Novica had the blond curls of an angel, at any rate an angel of stereotype, which of course immediately makes you think, be wary of such judgements, for neither as I could see was more devilish or more angelic than the other.

That night … ah, looking back, there were so many that nights.

That night, when the louts nearly killed me … That night, when we danced on the terrace … That night, when Flora first took me to her bed … That night … I walked to the restaurant as was my wont and the sunset filled the sky with long streaks of red. The clouds were a dark purplish-blue, a gloomy colour, no colour at all, colour’s absence, and the crimson light was so intense it stained the world around me.
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the
firmament.

I was not comfortable to be seeing through the words of Faust. What had Christ’s blood to say to me?

What soul was it that I sold?

I held out my hand, palm turned upward. The red light was so intense that my skin was stained by it, I seemed to hold it cupped in my hand. Then suddenly the light faded to that gloomy absence of colour. Ashen, the red glow lost even to memory. The loss seemed bitter.

And now, sitting here, my pen pictures the words for me: a man, once a Franciscan, though maybe not holy enough for a devil, who believed that God is love and souls are not for sale, quickening his steps through the gloomy twilight beside a grey lake. Quickly, to the warm yellow light of the restaurant on the point. If his heart is the seat of his soul he can feel it sitting heavy in his chest.

32

Flora takes Elinor into her office at the back of the kitchen and brings coffee. The room has a narrow window looking out on the willow screen, with its complicated intertwined tracery of new growth. The screen fills the space of the window, so it recalls a painting hanging on the wall.

I believed you when you said it would be beautiful, says Elinor. But I didn’t realise how beautiful.

It’s racing away, says Flora. We might not think the weather’s very spring-like, but willow does. Ted’s going to come and show me how to prune it. It’s terribly important not to let it get out of hand.

I can imagine, says Elinor. You’ll wake up one day like Sleeping Beauty, imprisoned behind a tall hedge.

She didn’t wake up, she was woken. She just lay there asleep waiting for her prince to come.

Well, none of us do that any more. Unless maybe that’s what Clovis is doing.

Waiting for a princess to come and kiss away the enchantment?

You think I’m offering to do the job?

Flora poured out more coffee, passed a plate of Kate’s little cakes. She didn’t say anything. Flora had a potent way of not saying things; her non-answers could hang heavily in the air of a conversation.

What about Gwyneth, asks Elinor. Is she waiting? What princes are there for a girl like that?

What princes are there for any of us?

Haven’t they already come? Hasn’t yours? Jerome is very princely.

What about yours? Flora’s reply flashes back. Wasn’t Ivan your prince?

Oh yes. And still is, I suppose. But if it’s going to work as a fairytale the story has to end with the coming of the prince, and the trouble is, ours don’t. They just begin there, and the problems that follow, well, hundred-year-old thorny hedges are nothing. Nothing. But that doesn’t stop us expecting things of princes. Even when we think we don’t.

Elinor bites into a miniature éclair, with a sigh for the deliciousness of it and the intractability of human expectations. The good word
intractability
that Clovis has reminded her of. We should pay attention, she says, to the fact that the narrative of the hero and the heroine ends with falling in love. No clue as to how long it will last. How sour it will turn. Or not. And when we do see older married lovers, well, queens die and leave their precious little daughters to wicked stepmothers. Which widower kings invariably choose – couldn’t there have been just once a good stepmother?

When I was little I thought there was some inherent wickedness in the word
step
, says Flora.

Me too. Maybe Gwyneth is a princess escaping a stepmonster, says Elinor.

Stepmonster! That’s good.

Blanche’s best friend had a stepmonster.

Was she?

Fairly much, I gather.

You don’t hear much of wicked stepfathers in fairy stories, says Flora, whereas these days they seem to be a pretty nasty problem. Has the world changed, or is it that word gets about more? She shrugs. Clovis and Gwyneth, they aren’t really any of our business. Are they? Maybe Clovis has a king’s name, and Gwyneth’s is the contemporary equivalent, celebrity being mostly all we’ve got, even royalty is only interesting when it intersects with celebrity. But so what. We’re not fairy godmothers, and I doubt they’re under any enchantment we can break. Flora gulps some coffee, which she’s made ferociously strong. Blanche was wonderful the other night, she says.

She was good, wasn’t she. I was quite thrilled. I mean, I knew she wanted to act, and I thought she had the talent, I hoped she could make it work. But you’re never sure. You may be looking with the eyes of love, and all awry. But she did make it work, didn’t she.

She did, wonderfully.

Yes. She showed us she can do it. Whether she will … it’s a difficult business. Talent isn’t anywhere near enough. There’s will, and luck …

Talent’s a good start. In fact, both your daughters, they’re okay. That’s something.

Well, Isabel’s got the job she wants. Or is starting to. But …

But?

Her private life … Elinor pauses. She’s mixed up with this chap, and, well, he’s married.

Mixed up.

Flora. You know what I mean. Having an affair with, then. In love with, she’d say. He says he’s going to leave his wife, he wants to be with Isabel, she’s the one for him, he says he’s going to marry her.

As they do, says Flora.

Exactly. As they do. When his child goes to school or leaves it or some other such vaguery. But in the meantime or more likely in the long run, indeed altogether, it seems to me she’s in a kind of limbo. And you know how it is, women in situations like that, they waste the best years of their lives, waiting for something that never happens.

The best years of their lives … what are they? … what are the best years of our lives?

Elinor is about to say, when I was young and my children were young and I was thoughtlessly in love with them and their father, when possibilities were endless and life seemed so full of hope, before I was obliged to look at it and say, yes, this is what there is, and I doubt the best is yet to come … but realises this is not a sympathetic thing to say to Flora.

The thing is, she says, we want our children to be happy but we can’t do it for them, we’re powerless, we can only watch.

I suppose our parents wanted the same for us. Happiness. What would they think, now? That we are? Do you think you are?

Oh. To an extent. When I look at your willow sculpture, for instance. I get on. I enjoy myself. I have a good time.

But are you happy?

Oh, all right. It seems too big a claim to make. There are too many compromises, too much making do … but it’s okay.

Yet you want your children to be happy.

Of course. I want things to be better for them than they are for me.

Why should they be?

Flora, are you playing devil’s advocate with me?

Maybe the thing to be grateful for is that they aren’t worse. After all, it’s a pretty mad idea that we should get happier generation by generation. A terribly parental idea.

Elinor can’t stop thinking of Flora’s dead child. Of the guilt she feels, the complicity, coming illogically but ruthlessly from the dream of the baby wrapped in plastic film. She can see his tiny desiccated wrinkled face, feel the limpness of his arms and legs. She shakes her head, trying to shake the images away.