The Pickup (11 page)

The two don't drink or smoke and they leave early. The empty space they occupied at The Table is a silence; broken: —It's not the end of the world. Our girl's been in love a few times, as we're well aware.—

—This pickup of hers's been a disaster from the beginning.—

—Come on, he's not a bad guy, he just needed a meal ticket. A bed. And he obviously knew how to occupy it.—

—I've never seen her like this. Bad, man.—

A recent addition to The Table passes a hand over his shaven head, staring as if to follow the path The Table's intimate and the foreigner are making through Saturday night partying that buffets them.

—Julie should chill out.—

As there is no longer any sense in playing the grease-monkey he spends these, his last few days, in the cottage. He has no appetite but is constantly thirsty; lies on that bed that has
also outlived its usefulness, with a big plastic container full of cold water on the floor beside him.

So he was there when she came home from her work with the envelope from the travel agency. She handed it to him where he lay. He delayed a moment, reading the name of the agency, with its logo of some great bird in flight, as if to convince himself of its portent. He made a slit in the top of the envelope with his nail and slid a forefinger along to open it. Inside, there were two airline tickets.

She stood before him with her hands linked behind her back, like a schoolgirl.

And now's the time: there has been no description of this Julie, little indication of what she looks like, unless an individual's actions and words conjure a face and body. There is, anyway, no description that is
the
description. Everyone who sees a face sees a different face—her father, Nigel Ackroyd Summers, his wife Danielle, her mother in California, remembering her, her contemporaries of The Table, the old unpublished poet; her lover. The face he sees is the definitive face for the present situation. The two air tickets he holds in his hands, turns over, unfolds, verifies, materialize a face, her face for him, that didn't exist before, the face of what is impossible, can't be. So what she was, and now is—what the woman Julie looks like comes through his eyes.

They always want to be told what is beautiful about them—women, anywhere—but I suppose I never did this because I couldn't consider how I should phrase it as I can think of it in my own language now. We also have our poets she wouldn't have heard of, Imru' al-Qays, Antara. Have to understand now what I'm seeing, when I look at this girl, this woman—how old, twenty-nine, one year older than I am. But it's not the days and years, it's the living that calculates the age! She's a child, they're all children, and what she wants to
do now is not something for her, the living she's totally innocent of, hasn't any real idea of, innocence is ignorance, with them.

She came into the garage like any of their women who have a car husband or father has given them, and the freedom they're not even aware of to go about wherever they please and talk to a strange man, giving orders while I get myself out from under a car and stand up, a dirty fool in those overalls, to follow her through the streets. Does she realize that a girl like her couldn't go out alone, where I'm being sent back to. I don't think I really looked at her. That day. Well: European—but they don't call themselves that, they are not in Europe—they belong here. So—white, young, not smart but dressed in the style they think disguises the difference between rich and poor, the way my overalls outfit was supposed to disguise that I'm an illegal on the run. But she looked at me. I don't know what it was she thought she saw, there was that invitation to take coffee. And there she was in that rowdy café, with a strange man, a nobody she found if not in the street then in a place not much better. I suppose I saw her as a woman, then. She was not a blonde—I was told by my uncle and cousins about how attractive blondes were, for them—hair a no-colour brown, and smooth and straight falling behind the ears. Later, sometimes in bed with her I noticed that the ear close to me on the pillow was small and set flat to the head. Pretty. Eyes water-grey and not large, always looking at me directly. What else; eyebrows much darker than her hair, not plucked to the thin line, like the girls who flirt them at you, lifting, lowering frowning, at my home. Dark paint on the mouth whose muscles always move slightly, unconsciously, while she follows what someone is saying to her. As if she's learning a language. Trying to. As if she knows, all right, she knows nothing.
Nothing!

It's impossible, this idea of hers. What could she do there.
What'm I expected to do with her.
There.
Responsible to her father, she thinks he doesn't matter but he's somebody in this city and I'll be the filthy wicked foreigner who's taken her to a run-down depraved strip of a country Europeans didn't even want to hold on to any longer, were glad to get rid of, even the oil is over the border. Abducted her; that is what it would be called in my country. What use will she be. To herself, to me. She's not for me, can't she realize that? Too indulged and pampered to understand that's what she is, she thinks she can have everything, she doesn't know that the one thing she can't have is to survive what she's decided she wants to do now. Madness. Madness. I thought she was intelligent.
Stupidity.
That's it. That's final.

For the first time since the first cup of coffee together they quarrelled. He who was soft-voiced shouted at her. He who was beautiful became ugly with anger and scorn.

Who asked you to buy two tickets. You said nothing to me. Don't you think you must discuss? No, you are used to making all decisions, you do what you like, no father, no mother, nobody must ever tell you. And me—what am I, don't speak to me, don't ask me—you cannot live in my country, it's not for you, you can't understand what it is to live there, you can wish you were dead, if you have to live there. Can't you understand? I can't be for you—responsible—

She became stiff and clipped with anger.

Nobody has to be responsible for me. I am responsible for myself.

For yourself. Always yourself. You think that is very brave. I must tell you something. You only know how to be responsible for yourself here—this place, your café friends, your country where you have everything. I can't be responsible. I don't want it.

He saw, could not stop himself seeing—everything change in her. All that she had been to him, the physical oneness, the tenderness, the expression of her whole being that had concentrated in the hours with lawyers, the humiliations suffered before the indifference of official communications, the recognition of him as the man he knew himself to be beneath the nobody with a false name—this possessed her face and body in revelation. And his words
I don't want it
struck the staggering blow.

You don't want me.

Not for her to speak those words; he heard them as she had heard them. Nothing for her to say; she knows
nothing.
That is true but he sees, feels, has revealed to him something he does not know: this foreign girl has for him—there are beautiful words for it coming to him in his mother tongue— devotion. How could anyone, man or woman, not want that? Devotion. Is it not natural to be loved? To accept a blessing. She knows
something.
Even if it comes out of ignorance, innocence of reality.

The capacity returned to him, for this foreigner makes him whole. That night he made love to her with the reciprocal tenderness—call it whatever old name you like—that he had guarded against—with a few lapses—couldn't afford its commitment, in his situation, must be able to take whatever the next foothold might offer. That night they made love, the kind of love-making that is another country, a country of its own, not yours or mine.

With the acceptance of love there comes the authority to impose conditions. They have never said the worn old words to one another, for her they are bourgeois clichés left behind; or perhaps it is because each would need a different vocabulary in their two languages. But there is a consequence common to both: if you love me you will want to do as I say, or at least make concessions to please me. It was right that she must inform her father of her decision. The idea filled her with dismay. He insisted. She lived through the whole scene in advance, and the actuality bore this out: she went alone and sat on the terrace where the Sunday lunches were held and the intention she announced gained preposterousness by nature of the setting in which it was heard.
You have always lived your own life and in my love for you I have respected this although at times it has caused me concern—and hurt, yes hurt. You lack consideration for what you do, indirectly, to your family, I suppose I've spoilt you, this happens with one parent or other when there's a divorce. My fault. Be that as it may. Many times I have had to stand by, ready to support you, catch you when you crash, and breathed again only when you've recovered your senses. I've
never thought the people you mix with worthy of you—don't smile, that's not to do with money or class—but I've always thought as you grew older you'd find that out for yourself. Make something of your life and all the advantages you've had—including your freedom. You're nearly thirty. And now you come here without any warning and simply tell us you are leaving in a week's time for one of the worst, poorest and most backward of Third World countries, following a man who's been living here illegally, getting yourself deported— yes—from your own country, thrown out along with him, someone no-one knows anything at all about, someone from God knows what kind of background. Who is he where he comes from? What does he do there? What kind of family does he belong to? What we do know, everyone knows, is that the place is dangerous, a country of gangster political rivals, abominable lack of health standards—and as for women: you, you to whom independence, freedom, mean so much, eh, there women are treated like slaves. It's the culture, religion. You are out of your mind. What more can I say. You choose to go to hell in your own way.

And now he suddenly looks old, her father, helpless in place of anger, it's a tactic he's used before, but she's thankful her lover isn't with her to see this.

The encounter was almost but not quite as bad as she had prepared herself to meet with the unchallengeable confirmation of the two air tickets—no authority remains in the father's love to cancel those—because it seems there is another crisis in the family, one she had not heard of until now.

—My daughter and my brother … What more could hit us. Both in danger. You've always been attached to your uncle, he's the one you went to over this whole business of yours, I believe, didn't you. Do you know what's happening to him, do you? But you're turning your back on all that consists of your life.—

When she quickly demands: —Archie—Archie ill?—her father gestures to his wife. —Danielle had better tell you, it's better explained by a woman, you know more about the background to these things.—

After Danielle has said what she was deputed to say, and the daughter had left with an awkward embrace barely accepted by her father, Danielle went over to him and from behind his chair substituted her own embrace about his shoulders. —What did you expect. The kind of people she's always been mixed up with. That Sunday when she brought him, I sensed trouble. This one's not like the others.—

Dr Archibald Charles Summers has been in medical practice for the best part of half a century.

After 41 years your professional ethics are immutable, like love; you've always lived by them.

For 41 years the boundless opportunities of the gynaecologist were there, his harem of beauties passed literally through his hands. That afternoon as every afternoon in consulting hours the anteroom where they waited on his summons was full. His girls. On this day one or two among them were new acquisitions, no doubt brought there by the faith of others in the understanding and healing powers of their ‘Archie'. The newcomers were identifiable because they were busy under instruction from the serene and elegant Farida at Reception, filling in forms with personal details. Farida remembers well—trust her efficiency—the two women, one the kind coming along with a first pregnancy, and the other, age on her form set down as 35, a youthful-looking woman— well-endowed in every sense (Farida's image of her, later), expensive clothes and rings, breasts soft as marshmallows falling together in the scoop neck of her dress as she leaned to write. Her appointment was early on the list and she did not
have to wait long. Farida knows all kinds: this was one of those who feign not to be aware that there is anyone else, any woman other than herself, in the space around that self. She had not brought a book with her, as the intellectuals do, nor did she delve into her handbag or pick up and toss aside one magazine after another, as others do. One of the tense and haughty ones, plenty on their minds.

When shown into the doctors room she greeted him as with relief at getting away to find herself with an equal. She sat back confidently in the chair across from his desk furnished with friendly tokens of patients' gratitude, malachite paperweight, embossed diary, clutch of gilt and silver pens, miniature calculator, two statuettes, copies of some god and goddess—he was at once interrupted by an urgent phone call, and she picked up one of the sacred objects and turned it, smiling. As he ended the call with a gesture of apology, she replaced the god. —Like the good Doctor Freud you enjoy having ancient art around you.—

—They are nice, aren't they. The Greek period in Egypt, I'm told.—

—Well, I'm sure they're a necessary change from the present with the troubles of people like me.—

He recognized then, at once, that she was not a woman who must be approached with small talk. —Now let's hear what the trouble is.— He was also smiling slightly as he glanced through the form bearing her statistics and medical history.