The Point (43 page)

This was Clement, who did not know where to look at topless waitresses! What did you think your girlfriend would make of all this, I asked, but he just shrugged. What did you make of it? He said in a mutinous glum voice, I didn’t look at them really. It was just a job.

Just a job. Indeed.

I think you are even more corrupt than George, I said. At least he seems to find child porn interesting. For you it’s just money.

The hacking was different. George blackmailed him into it. Using the pornography. As Clement saw it, he had no choice. Either he introduced the virus that destroyed all our files, or George would destroy him. It sounded so pitiful and grubby in court. I looked at the two handsome boys. Why couldn’t Clement say, I cannot do that, you are my brother and I believe you will not make me do it.

Clement said, It wasn’t as if they were destroyed forever, I knew we could get them up again.

Spoken like a true and faithful servant, said the judge.

They got gaol sentences. My innocence was finally established, maybe not entirely believed but at least agreed to. But my business was gone. A service such as mine which depends on trust cannot survive months in court. The only consolation was that Brent’s business went too. Not him, of course, they didn’t get him, him and his millions safe somewhere offshore, and doubtless starting up afresh.

There were other fish caught in the net. The Costellos turned out to have connections with Clay Brent, not just in the pornography trade. The vague import–export business, with its teak furniture and celadon china, was also about drugs. The pink and gilt palace where Gwyneth was raped featured in the newspapers as the castle that cocaine built. I thought she’d be delighted to hear of their fall, and so she was, but not surprised. I knew they wouldn’t last, she said, it’s only a matter of time, those people always get caught.

All those diamonds on Mrs Costello’s fingers. The rocks of heroin, was the newspapers’ name for them. Not much good to her now, said Gwyneth with great glee. The come-uppance of the Costellos and her delight in it was the most fun I had in that sorry time.

I dismantled my Venetian study, sold my house. Now I live in one of those lots of battery housing, down near where the old drive-in used to be. I walk to Dickson sometimes and eat a meal in the friendly white-lit Vietnamese restaurant with its Buddhist shrine on the wall garishly and lovingly decorated with votive offerings. It is easy to read there, in the shadowless light holding the book in one hand while I eat with chopsticks.

I am choosing to end my story here, or perhaps you could say stop, you could understand it as a cutting off, a slicing through, sharply and cleanly. You could examine it in a scientific way, as a cross-section, each life in its place marbled in amongst the others. At this slice some people are in happy moments, some not. I could have cut through at other instances in time. Flora and me waking up, making love, all our intoxicating musky scents, an occasion of bliss that not even a fairy story could manage. I tell myself, those other moments are there, I can slice through at any time and observe them.

But it is this later time. Flora is dead, I am ruined. As much by her death as the collapse of my business. This slice is marked by the rich dark marbling of her absence, not her presence.

Gwyneth miscarried. The shock of the accident, presumably delayed. The doctor told her she should never grieve too much when a baby miscarries, it most likely knows what it is doing. She wept and said she would never have a chance again, and the doctor said nonsense, she was a healthy girl, remarkably so, all things considered, and when she sorted out some of her problems she would be in a much better state to go getting pregnant. Joe, weeping with her, said this next baby would have him for a father from the very start, not just a few months in, and that would be good for all of them.

I remarked at the beginning that there would be no more children. But of course somewhere there must be. Somewhere there must.

Clovis took me to see the willow sculpture that he and Gwyneth had made, a warby skewiff affair leaning all over the place, with long whippy canes out the top. Of course it’s been neglected, he murmured. I nearly said, Hmm, don’t give up your day job, eh? and then thought, that’s a bit cruel, and how lucky I did because he said he liked the idea of becoming a willow sculptor, he thought he could be good at that, and he preferred being outside these days. But first he had to sort out Gwyneth, the business of the broken parole, she had been shockingly treated by the authorities given the nature of her problems.

I suppose a good lawyer would help, I said, wondering where the money would come from.

She’s got a good lawyer, said Clovis. Me. I’m all right to practise, now. And then, willow sculpting. I could hear anticipation in his voice. He stared out over the lake, his eyes narrowing out of habit. It was a brilliant blue day, the lake silver-coloured and sparkling. Merry, it seemed.

A myriad tiny points of light, said Clovis. Millions of sharp little sparkles – they’re like happiness. Tiny tiny points and all so precise. And swans, he said, pointing to two black dots in the distance.

Clovis drove me round the lake – yes, he had a car, along with his spectacles, an ancient thumping Holden within memory of fins – past the ruin of the restaurant. The rubble and that curious surreal scattering of copper pots and sinks, a lavatory, broken tables, wooden spoons and whisks and scrambled sooty piles of white tablecloths, as well as the unrecognisable detritus that the explosion had spread far around itself, all that had been cleared up, but the wreck of the building was still there, a mound of rubble from which rose up twisted shapes of metal against the blue sky. Mary’s–robe blue, serene and smiling. There were still bars of metal enclosing light, holding it in lozenge shapes, but chaotic and formless, or maybe it was a form of anarchy. It hurt my heart to see the old grace and symmetry all lost in jumbled jagged metal.

Do you think they’ll ever rebuild it, asked Clovis.

Doubt it. It’d cost a fortune. That workmanship. All that delicate, but really when you look at it massive, steel tracery – I doubt they’d spend the money to do it these days.

I expect you’re right. And anyway it wouldn’t be the original.

There’d be something false about it.

Maybe they’ll leave it as it is, a kind of memorial.

As I said this, I was thinking of Flora as well as the restaurant, but of course she would not be their intention.

Would you like that?

I don’t know. Might be better than clearing everything away as though it had never been.

We drove for a bit in glum silence, apart from the racket of the car. Clovis is probably a good driver, a bit rusty, inclined to stamp on the brakes.

Do you believe in … he paused, looking for words, in … life after death, eternal life, that sort of thing, at all?

You mean God’s been so bloody horrible to us in this world that there has to be another one where he can be nice to us?

Clovis smiled faintly. Well, you know, a bit more spiritual than that.

Will I ever see Flora again, you mean.

Sort of. In some form, I don’t mean another life like this, this flesh. Some soul, some spirit, that doesn’t die.

I don’t know.

I’d like to think so, said Clovis. But then I also think the desire to believe in the immortality of the soul is a noble wish. We desire it, and so we believe.

More wish than noble, I reckon.

I don’t think so. A noble wish. A noble need. It comes, after all, from love. Love transcending death.

Suddenly that huge vaporous inert part of me started to come alive again, was pierced through and through with sharp sensations like those we call pins and needles, only this wasn’t blood flowing painfully back but feeling. All of me, not just the small busy bit which could put it aside on the grounds of too much to do, was invaded by piercing needles of grief. I hunched over with the pain and burst into tears. I sat in the front of Clovis’s car and howled. If I hadn’t let her stay. If I had made her come with me. If I’d loved her enough. If I’d made her love me enough. It could have been all right. If I’d stayed and helped her. I wouldn’t have let her put the stone in the flame like that, I could have told her river stones explode with heat. If, if … those minuscule tiny differences that avert fate. How inexorable they are. I can’t bear it.

It was a kind of breakdown. I was glad of it. I needed to grieve with all of me for Flora. My state had been unnatural. I still do grieve, it is how she is still with me. While I feel the pain of her loss she is not entirely lost to me.

Elinor invites me to lunch from time to time and I talk about Flora with her. She tells me how she met her, in the French village, by the postcard stand in the newsagent, we tell our stories to one another and always find something new amid the comforting old narratives.

I suppose we overweened. Is there such a verb? Flora and I, and our desires to do and to know. But at what point does ambition become hubris? And what’s hubris anyway? The Greeks and their sins against the gods. The bloody Greeks, I want to say, nothing to do with me. I wish. They gave me the word, and the idea, nothing I can do to forget it. I can try to say, it was luck, just luck, bad luck, or no luck. I was lucky I was not at The Point when it blew up – but was that luck good or bad? You tell me.

The even more bloody Christians, with their God and their devil pretty as a goldfish kissing the air.

I think I have finished recounting my life. I’ve lived it, too many adventures, despite what Sartre says about living or telling, not both, and now I am recounting. Making an account. Counting again and again. Like an accountant. Like a miser. I think of all the metaphors I have made in this telling, all those connections between idea and thing, between one thing and another. You and your words, said Flora. Your gaudy silk scarves. I suppose the enchanter never enchants himself, he knows how it’s done. I can’t say I do. Pull out the bright scarves, hoist them to the tip of my pen. Flags against despair. Banners of defiance. Beware of metaphors, I believe I said, some time back, metaphor cannot save us. But maybe, if you can find the right ones, it can comfort us.

It’s just about time to bunch these pages together, tie them up with string, put them in a box, and … what? Burn them. Or weight them with a stone and throw them in the lake.

Later. I have had enough of stones and fire for now.

Acknowledgements

To the Literature Board, whose support over the years has given me time to write, and for the Senior Fellowship which began this book.

Thanks to Margaret Connolly, dear friend as well as good agent. To Sue Hines, a publisher of vision. To Rachel Lawson, my editor. To Clive Hart. To John Stokes. And to my children, Lucy and James.