C
lare and I were having our usual coffee yesterday morning at the kitchen table, she reading the newspaper and me staring out the back door at our forlorn garden wondering how I was going to fill my day. Stubby was resting his head against my legs under the table. Every now and then Clare read out some snippet of news, then fell silent again. Out of one of these silences, and without looking up from the newspaper, as if she was reading something, she said, ‘He’s probably working up the courage to ask you to read his novel.’
This is the way we conduct our conversations. It took me a moment to wake up to the fact that she was talking about John. ‘A novel about what?’ I said. ‘John’s not a writer.’
‘Has he told you that? About
them.’
‘John doesn’t write,’ I said.
‘How do you know?’
‘I can tell. Writers know when there’s another writer around.’
‘Like cats, you mean?’ She laughed and gave me a look.
I asked her to pass over the last biscuit if she wasn’t going to eat it.
She said, ‘I’ll go you halves,’ and broke the biscuit into two uneven pieces. She gave me the smaller piece.
‘Yes, just like cats,’ I said. ‘You’re looking very smart, darling. I like that outfit. It suits you.’ I gave my piece of biscuit to Stubby. He looked up at me with gratitude and love in his beautiful eyes.
She said, ‘Thanks, Dad.’
I have a dread. It’s a father’s dread. You can guess what it is. It is an image of Clare after I’m gone, sitting here with the newspaper on Saturday morning reading out snippets of news to Stubby, or his successor. Becoming the solitary old lady in her father’s house. If that happens I will have betrayed Marie; I will have betrayed our covenant of love for our little girl. How could I do that? How could I leave our little girl alone in the world? I wanted to ask her if she’d met someone, but I didn’t dare. She’s been looking very attractive lately. She gets annoyed with me if I say anything.
I watched her spread the newspaper on the table. It’s true. She’s still my little girl. My
child.
My daughter. I owe her everything and she owes me nothing. That’s the way I see it. That’s the way I’ve always thought of it. If you bring a child into the world you owe them everything. I’m haunted by my fear that I have failed her in some way and she will be left alone.
I have a friend. He’s my oldest friend. He has lived alone for more than forty years. He makes the best of it. No one does a better job of living without a companion than he does. He spends a lot of time organising his social life so that he doesn’t eat too many dinners alone, so that he can look forward all day to meeting a friend for dinner in the evening. Even after forty years, he still dreads the business of having to cook something and sit there eating it on his own in the evening, as if he were a character in an Anita Brookner novel. No one gets used to that. The evening coming on and not a soul to have a laugh with or to argue the toss with, hearing your own voice debating the talkback callers on the radio while you fry some eggs in a pan on the gas. Whose idea of fun is that? What dismays this friend of mine is having no choice. I meet him for dinner once every couple of months. He’s my only regular outing of this kind. He insists on it. If I don’t call him, he calls me. He says to me, ‘It’s okay for you, you’ve got
a family.’ I don’t argue. It’s true, I have a daughter. I’m lucky. But it’s not right for Clare to be living here with her dad at thirty-eight. I want her to feel at home here in my house, her parents’ old place—the home she grew up in and will inherit one day—but I don’t want to do anything that will encourage her to stay here permanently. I couldn’t forgive myself for that; beguiling my daughter into being
my
company in my old age. Even doing it inadvertently.
I watched her as she carefully folded the newspaper in half on the table. That’s the way she’s always done things, with care, taking her time. She used to stick her tongue out, concentrating, when she was five. I wished for her sake she would meet someone and go away and make a place of her own. Maybe even have a family. Is that too much to ask? Is it too late for that? Not so that I can have the pleasure of being a grandfather, but so that she can have a bit of reality of her own. A bit of happiness with someone by her side before it’s too late.
‘It’s what they usually turn out to want from you, Dad,’ she said. ‘Sooner or later. Once they know who you are. A free appraisal of their nonsense.’
‘It’s not always nonsense,’ I said. ‘Remember Caroline?’
‘Caroline was the exception.’
‘Exceptions are always
the exception,’ I said. One thing I knew for certain was that John Patterner was no writer. He had never said anything to me about writing: mine, his own, or anyone else’s. He didn’t talk about the books he was reading. He kept all that to himself. He had never even let on if he’d read any of my books, and I certainly had not asked him—if they’ve read one of your books and liked it they can’t wait to tell you. And you don’t want to hear the other thing. Writers talk about their stuff all the time. You can’t shut them up. It’s all they ever talk about. There had never been one word from John on the subject of writing. John was the quiet type, as all true readers are. Keeping their imaginary worlds to themselves. Except when he was telling me his story. Even then there was something quiet and private in the way he spoke about himself and Sabiha; as if he was telling
himself
the story; going over it to find its meaning for himself. Looking for something he’d missed when it was happening to him.
As he and I sat together at our regular table in the Paradiso on rainy days, or under the plane tree on the footpath when it was fine, or when he could no longer resist having a cigarette—he was still ‘giving them up'—it was often as if I was not there with him. He needed to
know
I was listening to him, but
I
wasn’t
the point of his telling. Which was one good reason why he held my interest the way he did. I often felt I was eavesdropping. Overhearing things I shouldn’t be hearing. I never interrupted him. Never. I never urged him on or put a question to him. I didn’t dare deflect him in case he failed to find his way back to where he’d left off. I feared to miss something. Some bright detail catching the light in the monochrome intricacy of his memory and his imaginings, this thing he was making of his lost years in Paris, the story. He needed me. Of course he needed me; I was his perfect listener, his perfect audience. But he only needed me so that he could
tell
his story. So he could understand it himself and move it on. I had no active part in it. I was not his prompt. It was
his
confession and he didn’t need to be told what to say by me.
When I get home from our sessions I go upstairs to my study and sit at my desk overlooking the park and I write up my notes. I enjoy doing this. I’ve never told him about it. To have my own secret life of his story is part of the pleasure of it for me. I’ve never quite said so, even to myself, but I know what these notes are, these lengthy summaries of my own, these diversions and reflections, into which my own life finds its way—like a cat finding its way into a cupboard and going to sleep there. These secret intrusions into his
story are the assertion of my rights as a listener. My view of this is that when someone tells you a story they give it to you. The story is their gift. It becomes yours. That’s the way I look at it. They place the story in your trust. And they do that because they
need
to do it. They want their story to go out from them and be somewhere else, with their listener. Just as a writer wants to rid himself of his writing and get it to a reader. I am aware that with my notes I am, in my own customary way, making something other of John and Sabiha’s story than the story
they
know. Shaping it, if you like, to my own imagination. I don’t know how
not
to do this.
A writer can’t arbitrarily decide what to write. We can only do what is offered to us. What comes our way. I like to call it a conversation with the unconscious. Following the prompts of the imagination. But these prompts must offer themselves freely. They won’t be forced. That’s the nature of the gift. It’s what we mean when we say some people are gifted. They receive the prompts, and they follow them. Not everyone is so prompted, and not everyone who is so prompted follows them. It can be an arduous journey. But contrary to the common belief, writing is not a solitary pursuit; it is always a conversation.
A story will suddenly
get a grip, and there it is, a deeper resonance, and you wake in the night thinking about it. I hadn’t reached that stage with John’s story, not yet. Perhaps I never would. But it was out there. It was a possibility. It had happened to me before. Perhaps I even
hoped
for it to happen to me this time, so I could come out of my retirement and stop wandering around the house like a ghost, my days full once again with the preoccupations of my craft, gifted once again. Writing and telling are very different fish. My father was a great storyteller who never wrote a word in his life. The writer cruises in the ocean currents, and often comes to grief out there. The writer who loses his way in what Christina Stead called the ocean of story. It happens all the time. We drown out there. We go under. A familiar voice falls silent and is never heard from again. The
Mary Celestes
of the writing world. It’s not something you can calculate. The loss is mysterious and puzzling. The teller, on the other hand, keeps to a familiar stretch of the river and remains safe.
‘Come on,’ I said to Stubby, and I got up from the table. ‘Let’s go and buy some pastries from the beautiful Sabiha.’
Clare said, ‘Is she being nice to you yet?’
‘Sabiha and I have an understanding.’
Clare laughed. ‘You have one maybe, Dad. Get some of those semolina biscuits with the almonds on them.’
I said, ‘I thought I might get some of her fried honey cakes.’
‘Some of them too.’
We looked at each other.
‘What kind of an understanding?’ she said, rather solemn suddenly.
T
uesday morning and it was just breaking day, a thin cold light rimming the curtains. She was lying awake beside John, watching the slow dawn and wondering if Bruno was going to bring their order and stay for his midday meal as usual, or whether he would keep away from Chez Dom. She hadn’t seen him since Friday and was dreading the thought of having to face him. But she also wanted to see him. It was true. She wanted to see him not in the real world, but in some kind of ideal place, where they would be accountable only to each other. But where was that? If he was going to sit there in his regular place in the dining room today, giving Nejib and his grim companion a hard time of it as usual … She couldn’t think about it. And when he walked into the kitchen holding a box of Grosse Lisse against his chest, how was she going to meet his eyes?
Her thoughts were in a mess. Hopefully Bruno would be too ashamed to show up. He might even be so ashamed of what they’d done that he would
never
show up again; his disappearance from their lives a puzzle for everyone but herself. Was it just possible she and John might sail on peacefully together with the child now? Her child and her husband unsuspecting as the years went by? Like an episode out of one of the novels John forever had his nose in. But there was still Bruno on his knees weeping.
That
was surely a portent of something terrible. A big strong man like Bruno brought to his knees. She couldn’t shake the image from her mind. She wasn’t in control of her thoughts. Since last Friday she had been living inside the mind of a frantic stranger, desperately looking around for something solid to grab onto, something to steady herself with.
John drew in his breath sharply and made a noise in his throat. She turned her head on the pillow and looked at him in the dim light. She loved his profile, the reassuring and familiar intimacy of him, his beautiful strong nose. John was her man. As they’d lain in each other’s arms on the bank of the river at Chartres that day he had whispered to her,
You and I are like the two wings of a butterfly.
She had cherished his image as a token of their enduring love. She had soon discovered that John was a gentle and romantic
man. An old-fashioned man, she thought him. But she had never really understood what he thought of his own life and had often imagined him living his real life in the secret world of his reading; shy, thoughtful, saving the best of himself from the ordinary world of cheating wine merchants and butchers. Men whose language he would never learn to speak, not in
any
language.
She turned over and closed her eyes. Had she betrayed John’s delicate image of the butterfly wings? She didn’t know whether she had done absolutely the wrong thing or absolutely the right thing. Thinking about it exhausted her. There was no one she could talk to. No one to confess her story to. She was on her own with it … Except for Bruno, who would understand what she was going through? He would not be man enough to listen to her quietly and make sense of it with her. The weeping man!
She opened her eyes. She hadn’t
seen
him in the darkness of his van, but had felt the touch of his hands on her naked thighs. Despite herself, despite everything, the touch of his hands on her nakedness had aroused her. Coupling with him she might have been a blind woman. There was something exciting, something of fantasy, in this thought that blindness must intensify the mysterious pleasure of sex. Pleasure
wasn’t the word for it. She knew that. There was another, bigger word.
The blind woman and the stranger.
She wanted to say it out loud—to hear it and know its meaning. The stranger’s naked manliness as the blind woman takes him into her body, strong and gentle, giving pain and pleasure, a pleasure beyond words, her strong hands holding him, possessing him with her strength, gripping him! A small sob escaped Sabiha.
Surely the old gods had her now? Would she ever be free of them? Would she ever again be a woman with a quiet mind?
She got out of bed and put on her slippers and her dressing-gown. Her throat was dry and burning. John turned over and murmured something into his pillow. She looked back at him from the door and went down the stairs. In the kitchen she bent to the tap over the sink and drank the cold water greedily, letting it run down her throat and into her nightdress, its cool fingers between her breasts. She stood and wiped her mouth and lit the gas under the milk. John must never suspect. He must never know. John was too gentle, too trusting, too quiet in his nature to defend himself against despair. There was something intractably innocent, something deeply vulnerable, in John’s nature. She had seen it from the beginning. That first day when he came into the café out of the rain and
looked up at her from his book, his gaze was without calculation. No man had ever looked at her that way before. This shy unknowingness in the stranger had attracted her to him immediately, and she had wanted to be with him, to be protected within the charmed circle of his masculine innocence. Of all the possible kinds of innocence, and she knew there must be a great many, John’s was the innocence of
hoping for the best from everyone.
It was this she had sensed in him that first day, and she had trusted him at once.
She poured the coffee and carried their bowls upstairs. On the third step from the top she stumbled. Coffee spilled from the bowls onto her hands, scalding her, and she cried out with the pain.