The Point (4 page)
When she told me she was pregnant I was full of joy. I imagined our baby held safe within the great cave of her hips, nourished and beloved, and with what tenderness I would lay my cheek to the dome of her belly and listen to him growing there. I thought she would make a good mother, because she had a good mother shape, nature being trustworthy in these things. That there would be a simple single-minded concentration on the task in hand.
A week later she came back from a business trip and after the dinner I’d cooked, a special one to celebrate her return even though the absence was only two days, worth a bottle of better wine than usual, she sat at the table and looked at me with a kind of speculation, so it seemed when I thought about it, over and over I thought about it. She took my hand and turned the wedding ring round on my finger, the wide white gold band that matched hers, though she did not always wear it, it marked her finger, she said. She turned the ring and fixed her eyes on me. I have had an abortion, she said.
I didn’t say anything, or do anything. Inside me I screamed, but my body sat, and recognised grief. It was as though grief was a person she had brought in and introduced to me, a person I ought to have been expecting to meet and could never afterwards claim not to know. And there I was, acquainted with grief. Somebody else’s words again, you see. Acquainted with grief, and never afterwards able to refuse the acquaintance. Grief my guest often after that, and perhaps you’ll say that the only surprising thing was that I should have lived so long without getting to know him. And perhaps that’s why I needed to leave the Franciscans.
I wasn’t ready, said Anabel. It’s a big step, and it’s too soon for me.
Anabel had her own words, well, they weren’t her own, they were as second-hand as mine, only clichés not poetry, but she chose them, she clothed her thoughts in the current phrases of her day, and never seemed to notice how scuffed and worn they were.
You didn’t think of saying something to me, I said. As I spoke I saw how a person could say something
dumbly
. I knew I was speaking dumbly.
I knew you’d try and talk me out of it, she said. And I had to admit the logic of this.
I wish you’d given me the chance, I said.
But Anabel looked at me with surprise. Why take that risk, her expression said.
It was my child too, I said.
She shook her head, a vehement action. It’s my body. A woman owns her body.
There will be no children, said a voice in my head.
There’s plenty of time, we’re not in a hurry. I’m only twenty-six, in a few years the time will be ripe, it’ll be the right moment. People have children later these days.
Yes, I said, that’s true.
Within a year she had left me. To explore alternative relationships, she said. She said she needed to find herself. She had to have her own space.
I could help, I told her, but she said no, it was something she had to do on her own, but of course she didn’t, quite soon there was a man called Nigel, a market gardener who was keen on windsurfing. I saw her once, skimming over the lake, she seemed quite skilful, turning the sail to catch the breeze, immensely statuesque, but graceful, she always was graceful. She married Nigel, but I have not heard that they have had children.
And after that my slender brown Burmese Leonie died, and I wrapped her in a piece of cloth and buried her in the garden, under violets. Don’t for a moment suppose I think a cat is a substitute for a child, they may be the same size at certain moments of their lives but that is the only resemblance. As I said, cats enter into no bargains. There are no pacts where cats are concerned.
I knew I would have another cat, in the fullness of time. The fullness of time: that is God sending his son. But he can send a cat as well, as doubtless he did the lion to my namesake.
I saw a notice on the board at the local shops.
2 cats 18 months
need home
owner dead
There was a telephone number. When I rang there was only one cat, the other had run away. The voice at the other end had no energy for worrying about a runaway cat. And so I have my pretty tabby; the dead owner would have been good to her, and loved her, she is a cat who is trained to being loved.
Flora was never one for cats. She would have liked a dog. I suggested an Italian greyhound, an elegant creature out of a medieval painting, it would suit her, as dogs ought. But it would be cruel for someone of her way of life to have a dog, she said, once. But really she was afraid. It would be another hostage to fortune. Another, I asked, but she simply shivered. When I retire, she said. But I doubted she would. Flora is an Italian greyhound herself, slender, lean, shaped by muscle. That is enough. But I don’t say this. Morgan le Fay, my greyhound. The words locked in my head.
Maybe I was wrong about the no-pockets. Maybe they were not to prevent wanking, maybe they were a visible sign of our oath of poverty. Nowhere to carry money. But I had given up poverty too. Latin and bookkeeping: I taught myself to be very clever with computers. I made my own business. I thought of calling it Exegesis, after St Jerome. But contented myself with my own name: Jerome Glancy.
The man who sleeps in the shelter at the ferry stop, where no ferry ever does stop, though he imagines one day a barge resplendent with crimson banners pulling in and an important person disembarking – for the shelter’s seat is cold and hard and the mind needs something to do – imagines a queen with leopards and lilies on a flag or at least a prime minister … this man can see The Point from his sleeping place. See its tall oblong arched windows hanging in the darkness of the night like a lantern. Or if his head is muzzy with the drink the structure may begin to turn, a carousel, a hurdygurdy, with gaudy music spinning through the night faster and faster, its people flying out and round it like a razzle-dazzle. A merry-go-round. The merry-go-round on the point, he says to himself when he wakes up and sees it sitting solid and grey-paned in the morning light.
Once he wore spectacles to see with but put them in his pocket for safekeeping and rolled on them. Now he does without and sees the world as God meant him to. This is not his idea, he read it in a book once, lucky he read so many books once to furnish his mind like a dog’s backyard with odd useful ideas to dig up and gnaw on. The book was about Cézanne, how he became short-sighted but refused to wear glasses, and of course that explains a lot. Or, he 24 suspects, nothing much at all. Certainly not how a man becomes a genius. But now he himself sees the world in simple blocks of colour and light, strong solid shapes that suddenly shift and mist and fuse. The nights are crowded with pinpoints of light that become enormous and starry, that haze and blaze, and shrink when he squints at them. Sees well enough not to get run over, so far. To find the paths that cross the vast deliberate spaces of the planned city. The places where the warm air is vented from the library and the art gallery, though they are a matter of learning too, and the noise the ugly price to pay for warmth. The great lit windows of the restaurant show blurred shapes, and just as well. He isn’t keen to see the fortunate in detail, to look at their faces and wonder, what did you sell to buy all this?
Mostly he gives the restaurant a wide berth, plodding from the library down to the phantom ferry wharf and back up to the gallery, a trajectory like an arrowhead, a broad arrowhead with its point at the ferry wharf. It’s quite elaborate, this landing stage, with a pontoon that floats and is slapped by choppy grey waves. On this winter day he imagines a barge, royal, with liveried rowers and canopies of cloth of gold gliding round from under the bridge, with a Cleopatra on cushions, dissolving a pearl in wine to make her lover a priceless drink. Or even a poisoned one, as another story has it. Since no boat, not a tourist ferry or a police launch or even a dodgy windsurfer, ever stops here he might as well imagine Cleopatra as Princess Diana, though she of course is dead, so can’t be rowed across this lake with her dubious gallant sucking her toes. Or is that the other one, the ginger-headed blowsy girl. Cleopatra is easier to get right.
Walking in the dusk past the restaurant and up toward the gallery he turns to look back at the lake, its broad blocks of silver and the indigo of the sky with great purple shapes of cloud lit from underneath by a cold bright fire. A grand romantic scene to his eyes. Like the etchings that provided promising sinister landscapes for benighted travellers in the old books of his childhood. The restaurant from this angle a dark shape against the light. Until his squinting eye discerns the stirring of a small shape, huddled against the wall, a blank back wall that he supposes belongs to the kitchen. He peers closer. There’s a faint hum in the air, coming through narrow louvres just above ground level. The refrigerators, venting hot air. Welcome enough on this chilly evening, a clever place for a newcomer to have found. He knows she’s a newcomer, and a female; blurry though she is to him, he can tell both those things. He would not settle down so early to sleep, not so close to human entertainment as this. Ah, but it is not his business. He continues on his way.
Laurel liked to get to work early, before any one else was there. Well, the kitchen staff were in, and flat out, but none of the waiters, and she could imagine the restaurant was hers, as it was in a way, except when Flora zipped out with some idea or other. She checked all the tables, that the white cloths were as fresh as expensive laundering ought to be, the napkins stiff and precisely folded, the glassware and cutlery polished. There were only these necessities, no candles, no flowers. Not on the tables. Someone came every few days and constructed amazing floral arrangements in various places in the room, almost surrealist they were, or anyway abstract, like paintings or sculptures. Laurel always wondered how anybody could imagine such fantastic displays. A young woman dressed in black tights and tee-shirt and wearing neat little plimsolls came with dust sheets and strange assortments of plants and deftly put them together. But no flowers on the table, no distractions, only the food, and the necessities of eating it. Even pepper and salt were not provided, though you could ask for them.
There were lanterns hanging from the high sloping ceilings, lanterns which glowed but weren’t what really lit the room. There were certain low lamps, but mostly it was concealed lights that gave the right level of brightness for eating. It’s the detail, said Flora, when she was employing Laurel to look after the restaurant, be the manager, the hostess, the
maitresse d’
– here Flora pulled a face – there wasn’t really a decent word for what she was. It’s the detail, said Flora, in the food of course, but in everything else as well, that’s what makes a great restaurant.
It was the detail that Laurel came in early to check, and yes, to admire. She stood and looked out of the window, across the small terrace that spread to the edge of the promontory, to the lake surrounding it. She opened the doors on the cool winter evening and went out on to the terrace, paved in semi-circles of old Canberra bricks, a faded bluish-rose colour, and edged with round river stones like cobbles. You couldn’t eat outside, it wasn’t serious enough, but you could wander about and have a drink. When she turned and looked back into the restaurant the dim lanterns repeated the shape of the building, the metal octagon with austere leadlight windows. On the rare occasions when the lake was still its reflection trembled upon the water, so there was the lantern repeated, beckoning its welcome, to those who could afford to pay.
I think it’s the loveliest space that Marion Mahony ever did, Flora said, and when Laurel looked puzzled she said, The wife of Burley Griffin, you know, the architect who won the competition to design Canberra. His wife did the buildings, all those lovely things with slender lines and domes and cupolas like breasts. And all the water, that’s her idea. Look – and Flora fetched a large book with pictures of the buildings, done on gold silk with beautiful fine black ink lines. Look carefully and there is the restaurant, its reflection drawn in dotted lines