The Light of Amsterdam (29 page)

Then he was pointing out a place where you could get beautiful cakes and handmade chocolates and soon they were heading down a narrow pedestrianised street lined with shops. There their conversation dried up, hindered by the crowds and the noise, and she was glad not to have to make the effort. She sensed that he was too and wondered whether he regretted offering to show her the way back. After a short while and feeling the pressure of the silence she lied and told him that she thought she recognised where she was and she would be able to find her way.

He looked at her and let the plastic bag swing like a pendulum and she wasn't sure what he was thinking until he said, ‘Can I show you something?' And then he was pointing the way to an arched oak doorway that nestled just off the street and, in a city that seemed to insist that anything might happen if you were prepared to let it, she felt that she had no other option but to follow him. And so in a few seconds she stepped from a modern shopping street into a kind of courtyard, intensely calm and quiet, where ancient houses nestled shoulder to shoulder round a green lawn and trees. It was like a magician's trick where something disappeared to be replaced by something completely different. She smiled and he smiled at her smiling.

‘What is it?' she asked, not taking her eyes from it in case it disappeared.

‘They're seventeenth- and eighteenth-century almshouses, homes which were provided for widows and the needy by the city's rich businessmen who probably thought it bought them a first-class ticket to heaven.'

‘I'd like to live here,' she said. ‘Can we walk round and look?' she asked.

‘We can't go past those barriers – they insist on some privacy – but we can walk this way.' He pointed to what he said was the oldest house in the city.

‘Beats the Housing Executive,' she said, still taking everything in. ‘I wonder how many points you needed to qualify for one.'

‘I don't know. You care for old people, don't you?'

‘Yes, in a care home,' and then she realised that he assumed she was a nurse or someone medically trained and she liked the idea that he thought that. Thought it about her rather than the truth that she was someone who cleaned and made tea, someone who cleared up other people's mess. She was suddenly conscious of music but wasn't sure where it was coming from. He had heard it too. In some of the windows of the houses lights glowed yellow.

‘There's a very old church over here,' he said and she followed as he started to walk towards it.

‘It's like a secret,' she said. ‘A secret world.'

‘The first time I saw it I didn't quite believe it. And so close to the street. I don't think most people even know it's here.'

It was something she would be able to describe to Mrs Hemmings, tell her just before she found her bracelet that must have dropped behind somewhere she hadn't quite decided on. The paintings, the secret square, she'd be able to recount everything and get her commendation for being a good pupil. She told herself that she was capable of knowing things, of learning new things, and as the music grew louder she realised that these were the photographs that could be set on a desk to tell the world that she was someone and to mark the life she had lived.

The door of the church was open and there was a choir inside rehearsing, an elderly white-haired man conducting them, the cuffs of his shirt open and his thin blue-veined wrists swaying back and forward as his hands caressed the air and occasionally pulled the voices to a halt. Then his right hand would peck the air insisting on some improvement. They stood in the doorway until an old woman gestured them inside and pointed to one of the pews. They looked at each other and then she made the decision for both of them and quietly scurried into the back pew of the small church. She hadn't been in a church since Shannon was christened and it felt strange and unsettling as if at any moment an unseen power might pass judgement on her for all her broken promises, or a voice would boom out telling her to leave. But then the singing started and the sound filled the space, pushing against the walls as if trying to break free from these constraints. It was like nothing she had ever heard and it was so real that it frightened her a little and she didn't know at first whether it was beautiful or terrible. She looked at her companion but he stared straight ahead, the white bag held tightly on his lap. He still wore a wedding ring and she wanted to tell him and tell the singers whose faces focused only on the old man conducting that she could have been a nurse. She wanted her voice to be part of theirs and she wanted to say that she could have been a nurse if things had been different. The music rose and fell and it wasn't thin or stretched but settled about her in thick rich layers and she felt swaddled in its folds like a child.

She watched the nurses every day, knew the ones who cared and those who didn't. It didn't look so hard. And once when old Mr Hatton had died she had been the one there at the end, the one holding his hand and telling him everything was going to be all right. She had been the one listening to his laboured breathing, the final struggle and then the sudden slow release into silence. She didn't recognise the music but it felt like a carol and parts of it half-remembered echoes of something that perhaps she had once heard long ago. When the nurse came and took his pulse she had just shaken her head at her and then looked at her as if to say that it was time for her to go and get on with something important like vacuuming the corridors. Afterwards when his daughter had arrived she had kicked up a stink that he hadn't been sent to the hospital and that she hadn't been there at the end, as if the death should have been timetabled to suit her. It wasn't her place to say anything but she wanted to ask why she should think this when she hadn't taken the trouble to visit him more often. Then she had been called to the office for the daughter to ask questions about her father's final moments and all she could think of but had no words to explain was the quiet in the room that seemed to make the struggle of his breathing louder and then how there was no more struggle and only the silence. A silence that even now spread inside her head despite the clamour of the music and then she looked at her companion again and saw that he was crying and so she took his hand just as she had taken the hand of that dying man.

 

 

The music was very beautiful. He had lost his father without ever expressing his love or even gratitude, a gratitude that only now pressed against his consciousness as he remembered how his father, out of a labourer's wages, had provided for them and taken nothing for himself from the weekly pay packet except the few coins necessary to buy a paper and a bar of chocolate. No he hadn't even taken them but had handed over the little brown envelope every Friday night and got his meagre pocket money in return. This was the second time he had cried recently and it didn't feel any better than the first. There was too much of it that felt like sentimentality, a nostalgia for something he wasn't even sure had ever existed, so he wiped the few tears away and tried to stop. But the music continued to course through him and he sought to protect himself by insisting that his father hadn't tried hard enough to understand him, to understand that he was different and wanted to live in a different world. That was his punishment of course, the punishment to come to every son, as he became the father whose own son now turned his face away. There was no music, however beautiful, that could wipe away the bitterness of that.

He thought of his daughter Caroline who was training to survive the joys and terrors of the classroom and hoped that some at least of the thousands of children she would meet over the course of her career would be kind to her. He thought of Susan at this moment in a strange country contemplating the possibility of a new life and if he could say only one thing to her it would be that he wished with all his heart that she would find a life in which she could be happy and happier than he had ever been able to make her. And Jack, Jack for whom he was responsible – where was he now? In a foreign city where he didn't know a single soul with only his misery for company and he needed to go and find him. Find him just as soon as the music stopped. Find him as soon as he was sure he wasn't crying. He thought that if he were American he would return home and go into therapy, spill it all out in front of some stranger with a sincere face and ask them to put it all back together for him. Put it all back neatly in the box, shipshape and sorted. But he lived in Belfast so it was a question of catching himself on, pulling himself together and taking up a socially approved therapy such as drinking too much or trying desperately to have meaningless sex with people he didn't like but who were available for general medical care like first-aid boxes in public places.

The music slowly unpicked the stitching of memory and need and then he thought again of the painting of the old man crying. The blue clothes, the yellow chair, the bare floorboards, and he felt the fear of what he could become. He had reached an age when everything should be laid out in front of him with the only uncertainties those of health, the threescore and whatever, but now even his job in the college felt shadowed and precarious and he knew that if he didn't toe whatever was the currently fashionable line they would edge him out, or shunt him into some siding where he would be the first casualty of rationalisation in the next wave of cutbacks. He had to get his life back on track. Find Jack. Get his life back on track. Stop crying and get it back on track. And then the woman who sat beside him and whose name he wasn't quite sure he had remembered correctly was holding his hand. He stared straight ahead and wondered if she was frightened of churches as well as planes.

 

 

The journey back to the hotel was fraught and uncertain and if she hadn't been so cold she would have postponed it even longer. The warmth generated by the skating had long since dissipated. Everyone she passed seemed to have added a spring to their step in their desire to reach their destination but their pace only served to accentuate her reluctance to go back. Sometimes she met the eyes of women she passed and in every gaze she imagined she could see their judgement. Had she betrayed them, betrayed herself? She didn't know but told herself that she didn't care because what she had done was a secret between man and wife that was not to be the concern of anyone but them. She could never run fast enough to reach that perfect image of herself in the mirror – it wasn't going to happen and she didn't care about it any more. They would move on and never talk about this thing, and what was its meaning anyway? There was nothing in it, no betrayal, because she had made it happen and no hurt to her because whatever it was she felt now it was without any sense of loss or shock.

Only going on mattered now, pushing on like she had been able to do in the skating and finding a new balance that would carry them both over the surface of their lives. She had sold her last black Christmas tree, sold her last piece of tat, run her last mile on the treadmill. When she got home she would investigate the possibility of expanding the plantation, perhaps even explore what grants were available for growing other types of trees. She had read somewhere that willow was increasingly used for a range of ecological purposes. There were lots of possibilities forming in her head. Future plans to be made, internet searches to be carried out. And when she was home she would lay out the nativity scene on the hall table, carefully set each person and creature in place. Arrange it all just like it must have happened in the story. And perhaps if she could find the right supplier that was the type of thing they could sell next Christmas and, if it wasn't too fanciful, turn the shop into something that had style and dignity with every piece of junk banished for ever. Somewhere mothers and fathers would bring their children and feel better even for a little while for having come.

As she drew closer to the hotel with its splashes of light she wished she could be home without the intervening night and the Sunday flight. She didn't know what would fill those hours and it made her nervous. In the square the linked lights seemed to tighten then lift a little like a necklace on a dancer. She soothed some calmness into her hair and smoothed her coat as she entered the foyer where the heat and noise confronted her suddenly and more forcefully than she had expected. An elderly couple was booking in and the wife kept turning round to glance at their luggage as if to ensure that no one was about to make off with it. The Japanese couple were perusing some tourist leaflets and coming out of the lifts were two young women dressed formally in black suits and carrying violin cases. The Japanese woman smiled at her and gave a slight bow. There was always something private and unspoken that passed between women that was unhindered by differences in age or nationality and for a second she was grateful that it still existed and that she still was part of it. She hesitated for a moment, pretending that she too would look at the leaflets, but then opening the top button of her coat she stepped into the waiting lift.

Eleven

He deliberately didn't take the lift but slowly climbed the stairs hoping that the extra time this afforded would grant some greater certainty about what it was he should say. He was increasingly hopeful that Jack would be in the room but less sure about what state he would be in. The one thing he couldn't bear to anticipate was a continuation of what had gone before and that apprehension slowed his walk even more, so he was glad when on reaching their floor he had to momentarily stand aside to let a young woman pass him with her trolley of bed linen and towels. There were cleaning materials clumped in a plastic container clipped to the front and as she smiled the smile that staff give to guests he wondered how he was to clean up this mess. What was it he could do or say that would ever make it better? Opening the door with his card he was glad that already he could hear the sound of music and when he entered the room, dark apart from the television light, Jack was curled on the bed watching what looked like
MTV
.