The Shelter of Neighbours (10 page)

But he turned out to be foreign, like her, not authentic at all. Of course, a real local would never wear a waistcoat like that, off the stage, an outfit redolent of peasants and opera and folk dances, which probably real peasants had never worn. (They'd never have managed to get the shirts white enough, would they? Without extra strong detergent and top-of-the-range washing machines. Peasants washing in wooden peasant tubs, by peasant mountain streams.) He came from Italy; he had come up for the weekend.

Italy. Sara is no racist. But she knows what Italian men can be like when they come across a single woman; she'd been to Italy more than once. She smiled tightly, she tightened the muscles in her legs, she crossed her arms across her breasts, squashing them.

He didn't notice. He often came to this city, he was telling her, as if she'd asked. He loved it here.

‘And how about you?' he asked. What was she doing?

Sara made up a story. She said she was attending a conference of writers; that she was a writer of detective novels. In the nick of time, she prevented herself from saying she was going to give a reading later on that afternoon – he might want to come and hear her. So she said she had a meeting in half an hour and had just slipped out for a quick bite to eat.

He nodded and she could tell he didn't believe her.

Her glass of wine came and he looked at it slowly. If you drink wine, they assume you're up for anything; it gives some sort of message, like red trainers (though what message, precisely, they give, she isn't sure – she just knows it's safest to avoid wearing them). Hump him, she thought, taking a large gulp. It was cold and dry and fruity, and there was about half a pint of it in her glass. They served wine as if it was lemonade here.

Her food arrived.

An enormous boiled sausage, pink and fleshy, draped itself over a mountain of pickled cabbage. They both stared at it, speechless. Obscene. Grotesque. Pornographic. These were a few of the adjectives it triggered, in Sara's mind. He returned to his stew, which had looked repulsive but now moved down several notches on the disgust register – his bowl of brown mess was positively prim by comparison with Sara's plate. She glanced around at the nearby tables to see if everyone was staring at her lunch in shock. But no, most heads were bent over their own plates, most mouths were masticating energetically. And she saw that most of the food looked nearly as disturbing as hers. The tables were crowded with oversized sausages, shanks of bloody lamb, robust bony ribs. A big grey fish with its head still on stared wildly up from the silver plate where it waited to be eaten, like a witch waiting for the torch to light the faggots.

No attempt had been made to disguise the food, to make meat look like chocolate buttons or vegetables like garden flowers. It all looked like what it was, which was something you might give to a not very fussy cat.

Sara sliced a bit off her sausage and told the woodcutter that she was married. She isn't married, since Thomas doesn't approve of it (any more – he has one wife already, anyway). But, what matter, she might as well be. The woodcutter was married, too, he is quick to assure her. And, better than that, he has a daughter aged twenty and a son aged twenty-two. To cap these impeccable credentials, he mentioned that he was a medical doctor; he named the city where he lived, in northern Italy – a serious, respectable, working city, not an operatic set of a place, a tourist postcard, not Venice or Florence. He went on and on, entertaining her with the details of his autobiography in broken but exceedingly fluent English. (Can it be both broken and fluent? Ungrammatical, she means. Lack of grammar seldom stops anyone who knows enough words to tell their story.) She began to dig into her sausage. It tasted much better than it looked. It tasted great, in fact, and so did the cabbage. Sara launched a serious assault on both. She realised that she hadn't had any real vegetables for days – just the odd lettuce leaf, or half tomato sculpted to the shape of a red star, decorations rather than food. Now she really appreciates this cabbage patch on a plate, which this interesting restaurant had provided her with. Her body was screaming for iron and, needless to say, she was constipated, as she always was, at conferences.

The woodcutter ordered a bottle of wine, for both of them. Sara shook her head; he was going much too far. But he wouldn't take no for an answer. The waiter colluded with him, filling her glass against her wishes. Of course, once it was there, she drank it. Who cares? she thought. I'm practically an alcoholic, anyway, and here I am in a restaurant that looks like an opium den, surrounded by fifty people stuffing themselves with schnitzel and strudel.

The waiter smiled triumphantly whenever he passed their table, keeping an eye on the wineglasses, planning to refill them the second it was needed. He looked pleased with himself, smug in the knowledge that he had brought two lonely people together, got a little
je ne sais quoi
started in his section of the restaurant. Maybe he was some sort of matchmaker, on the side?

Mr Riding Hood was separated from his wife. Sara presumed this was true. On the other hand, if you're chatting up a woman, presumably you don't tell her you are happily married. She was beginning to find it difficult to grasp exactly what he was saying. His English deteriorated as the meal continued and the level in the wine bottle sank. That's how it is as often as not when you're speaking a foreign language. It's great for the first five or ten minutes and then you get tired and it's downhill all the way. He knew no German and Sara had only a few words of Italian, so English it had to be. He stumbled now when he came to a preposition; he tripped over certain phonemes and floundered in tenses. But the words kept coming, a jumble of episodes and characters and feelings. She let herself drift away. She hadn't asked him to talk to her, why should she exert herself? His voice, and the German sounds all around her, the clatter of cutlery and china, floated into her ears like a bizarre concerto, played by characters clustered in some quirky corner of a painting by Brueghel. She closed her eyes momentarily, to let the music blend.

When she opened them, the waiter was removing her plate – empty. She ordered coffee.

His wife threw him out. It wasn't clear if this had happened yesterday or at some other time in the distant past. He was now reduced to one tense, the present. ‘I try to love her, and I love life,' he was saying. Or, actually, ‘Wine, life, I love. Women!' He mentioned Homer and added that he was reading the
Odyssey
at the moment. Sara presumed he said this to impress her, thinking she was the kind of person who would appreciate an
Odyssey
reader. She had read it once but didn't remember most of it. Circe, he was thinking of, perhaps. Penelope at home, weaving and waiting. The subtext was that he had been unfaithful to his wife, who did not wait but who tossed him out, and now he was here trying to get over it, flirting with strangers whom he encountered. Adventure.

‘Oh dear,' said Sara. He looked woebegone. She started to comfort him, in case the story was true, and he had been recently thrown out of home. ‘Can't you phone her?'

‘I phone. I write letters. I write my daughter a long letter saying I am sorry, I love her …'

Then he revealed Exhibit A. The letter. It was long, several pages long. So it was true. True that he had been writing a letter, anyway. She took a good look at it. Handwriting on pale blue paper, certainly a personal letter, not something he had written to the tax commissioners or somebody.

‘It's going to be
ok
.' She remembered the words on Thomas's T-shirts. ‘Everything will be
ok
. Your daughter is twenty. She knows you love her.'

He looked puzzled, and then stared into Sara's eyes – he was very skilled at eye contact. It was not clear to Sara that he understood exactly what her words meant, but he understood that there was something new in the air over the table: the soft air of goodwill replaced the sharp scepticism that had filled the space between them before.

‘My daughter I love,' he said, and she suppressed the urge to correct the word order. Wouldn't it be as easy to say ‘I love my daughter'? But, on the other hand, why should he?

‘And she loves you,' she said gently.

It was undoubtedly true. Their fathers they usually love, daughters, and he looked like a nice one. Sara began to wish he was her father. That would have made her Red Riding Hood, but no matter. Her own father had been more like the wolf. But he was dead, she didn't have to worry about him any more.

‘You think?'

He was sincere now, and vulnerable. Sara could appreciate how beautiful he was. He could have anyone. She imagined his wife: one of those polished marble women, smooth as moonlight – beige cashmere, fine leather boots, chunks of gold here and there. One of the Paolas or Claudias you see gliding along the street in Florence or Rome, looking like visitors from another, more finished, planet than ours. Why would the husband of a woman like that flirt with a woman like Sara? She was never any beauty, and now she's fat. Or fattish. At best she must look like a woman of substance, togged out in her conference gear: the black suit, diamond earrings, good leather bag. She probably looked … mature. And sometimes a man finds that appealing – especially just after he's been kicked out by a woman who does not look mature, who looks like a sophisticated princess. At times like that, a man likes a woman who does not remind him of his daughter. Sara wasn't old enough to be his mother; he was older than her, in fact. (He'd told her his age – there wasn't much he hadn't told her at this stage.)

Sara was draining her coffee.

A surprising thing happened.

The woodcutter started to cry.

Sara was startled. Very. So, of course, she again grasped at her usual philosophical resource in times of acute need: Thomas's T-shirt. ‘Everything will be
ok
!' She read the useful slogan off the picture of his yellow chest – in her mind – doing a simultaneous translation as she uttered the timeless, consoling words. Then she paraphrased them in a few different ways. ‘Everything will be all right. Don't worry, it's going to be fine.'

But he went on crying. Tears poured down his lovely bronze cheeks, plopping into his wineglass, where they splashed,
plip !
, raindrops falling into a pond.

She reached across the table and ruffled his hair. It was very soft and not as thick as it looked from her side of the table. She repeated the mantra: ‘Everything will be
ok
!' She gave it another good ruffle. ‘Just telephone your daughter. She will understand. And you will see her on Monday.'

He began to dry his eyes with his table napkin. ‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I do not know why …'

Words failed him and a few more tears fell into the glass.

‘It's fine,' said Sara. ‘A good cry does you a power of good.'

Her mother used to say that, back in Dunroon, when Sara was a child. She had not heard the phrase in about thirty years.

The woodcutter smiled and dried his eyes. He poured more wine for both of them – he'd somehow ordered a second bottle when she wasn't looking, the sneaky devil. But now she didn't even make a token protest.

‘It is a miracle.' He was quite composed now, his old self and more.

Sara just drank her wine.

‘In all this huge city, I meet you.' He looked at her with admiration.

‘Well,' said Sara modestly. She didn't know what to say.

‘How many people in this city?'

She hadn't a clue. But he did.

‘About two million,' he said. ‘One million, two million.' So he didn't really know. But, lots. ‘And I sit here and you come here and you are the one person in this city of two million people I can talk to! Yes, it is a miracle!'

He threw up his hands to emphasise the wonder of it all. She smiled in spite of herself. She had been called various quite nice things in her life, but never before described as a miracle. It was nice. Very nice.

His English had picked up again. The crying had empowered it, as it does – it gave him an injection of renewed linguistic vigour. And other vigour.

He pushed his card into her hand.

‘Please meet me for a glass of champagne later,' he said. He mentioned a wine bar which she had heard of, because it was famous. ‘That is what we drink here, for an apéritif.'

‘I'll be at the conference,' said Sara. ‘I can't really meet you.'

He ignored her.

‘Six o'clock,' he said. ‘Just a nice glass of champagne.'

Sara laughed.

‘I won't be there!' she said, getting up and leaving the table.

He was laughing, too. Either he didn't hear her, or he didn't believe her, or he didn't care one way or the other. All of these possibilities existed.

They told her at the desk that he had paid for her lunch, and she had to put up with that. She didn't want to go back to protest. She wanted to get out of the restaurant as fast as she could, and back to her hotel, and she didn't want him to follow her and find out where the hotel was. As soon as the thick door closed behind her she ran as fast as her legs would carry her and did not stop until she was in the lobby of her own hotel, under the portrait of Kafka. Even there, the receptionist smiled in a knowing way and she felt mistrustful of him and of the entire staff of the hotel.

And from then on everyone in the city seemed to look at her in an odd way. She got knowing glances when she was sitting alone in one of the coffee houses, drinking a tiny cup of coffee and eating rich cake and cream. Women, perched at tiny delicate tables, would look at her and then at one another, and smile, as if sharing a joke, or a secret. It happened when she was walking around the cathedral square, a tourist among many. One of the natives – you could tell them, they often wore little green hunting caps, with a feather in the brim – stared questioningly at her. It could hardly be the colour of her skin, she thought – they had plenty of dark-skinned women here. Was there something about her clothes?