The Shelter of Neighbours (5 page)

Li had not heard of them.

‘Lots of rich people have houses in this neighbourhood,' he said. ‘It's probably some family from the city, on holiday here.'

‘They live year round. The girl doesn't even go to college.'

‘I'll ask around.' He stirred the pan, full of chopped vegetables and herbs and emitting an intoxicating smell. ‘I'll ask Kim.'

Kim was the director of the programme, who called to see us twice a week and brought provisions from the town.

The following evening I headed towards the trail at about six o'clock. The sun was still warm on my bare arms, but the countryside was changing gear. The hummingbirds had gone to wherever hummingbirds go – their nests, presumably. One or two sudden flashes of blue indicated that some jays were still about, and their sharp squawks occasionally darted from the branches. The rabbits were out in force, eating the grass as if they were starving, and in our garden two small deer chomped doggedly at a hydrangea shrub, systematically denuding it of all its flowers and leaves.

The forest was cold and shadowy. Every moment the undergrowth rustled and the branches whispered. White owls hooted; animals cried. The walk to the picnic ground took an eternity. I considered turning back, and I do not know why I did not. Because I had promised to come to dinner? It was not that – Isabel and Ramalina and Marcus would wait, perhaps. Soon they would realise something had happened, and they would dine, shrugging. Perhaps they had already forgotten that they had invited me. That was very likely. The invitation had been warm, but abrupt, perhaps whimsical. No doubt Ramalina was always issuing such invitations, knowing that many of them would never be taken up.

It was not fear of disappointing them that kept my feet on that forest path; it was my own fear. I did not want to give in to cowardice. On and on I went, my heart in my mouth, the primeval screams of the forest in my ears. We have always feared the forest, I told myself, for it holds in its heart the wild creations of our nightmares, the flipside of our daylight selves, the threat of unimaginable madnesses. Our instinct is to overcome that threat and that fear, to tame or kill it. Karen Blixen, walking around her manor house at the foot of the Ngong Hills, did not worry about prowling leopards. Even when she did not have her gun, she did not fear them. So why would I run in terror from a harmless forest, where a lion had probably not attacked a human being in hundreds of years, not since these valleys were the preserve of some indigenous tribe whose very name was forgotten.

Finally, I reached the house. And although it was still light, the shadows cast by the trees made the roof dark, and in its windows lights fluttered. No one was on the lawn or the porch or by the pool, which had that lonely, tearful look swimming pools get at night, when the revels of the day are over. I walked up the wooden steps to the front door. It was half open, so I knocked and then stepped in.

The hall was dappled with puddles of coloured light, deep red, ochre, flowing through a stained-glass window on the landing above. A table made of polished applewood leaned against the panelled wall, and on it, a glass vase filled with fat, pink roses, whose fragrance filled the room. Through an open door the sound of piano music filtered. I followed it and there in the drawing room Ramalina and Isabel sat in the French window, listening while Marcus played. I did not recognise the piece and it was mesmerising, and his playing seemed as good as that of the most professional pianists.

As soon as I entered the room Ramalina stood up and came to greet me with a warm embrace. Isabel did not get up from her rattan chair, but she smiled and said hello, and her smile seemed full of genuine welcome. Marcus stopped playing and turned to grin at me.

‘It's so great that you could make it!' Ramalina said.

She was wearing a white blouse again, a high-necked, Victorian one, and a long skirt of old gold silk which almost swept the floor. Isabel's black hair was piled on her head, and she was wearing a black cocktail dress, short and girlish, showing off her long, tanned legs. It looked good on her. Since I'd been walking in the woods, where snakes and ticks abounded, I was in my jeans and hiking boots. I had put on one of my nicer tops, in honour of the occasion, but I felt clumsy and rough around the edges, like a workman who finds himself in the drawing room to collect his wages after repairing the plumbing. Even Marcus was wearing a white shirt, and pale chinos, looking every inch the lord of the manor at rest.

Ramalina sensed my unease, with her natural tact and thoughtfulness, and offered me some house slippers, which I accepted. I thought they would be the big, flat, shapeless, fit-all-sizes slippers that some people have in a basket at their front door, but they were not. Silently, with a downcast look, Isabel handed me a pair of red moccasins, beautifully embroidered.

I slipped them on.

‘They fit!' I said.

‘Yes, I thought this would be your size,' said Ramalina, and she smiled.

Isabel and Marcus at that moment exchanged the most fleeting of glances, and for the only time that evening I felt a prick of unease, although my feet had never felt so comfortable.

We ate immediately, in a dining room at the other side of the hall, a room of perfect proportions, beautiful furniture. On the wall hung a painting of a woman reading a letter, her face, circled by a white linen hood, the pale porcelain of the pictures by Vermeer. So quiet she was, so absorbed in her reading, a reading that had happened hundreds of years ago and was still happening, here. Although the back of the white page was all the artist let us see, a hint of a red seal, there was no other clue to the content except the gentleness of her eyelids. Beside her stood another woman, with a grey bucket under her oxter, exactly like a bucket I had at home. She also held a letter, or perhaps an envelope, in her free hand. A small dog looked on, as often in a Chekhov story.

‘What is it called?' I asked.

‘
The Letter
,' Ramalina answered. ‘It's anonymous.'

‘Dutch?' I ventured, although I am often wrong about these things.

‘Yes. From the golden age of Dutch painting.'

I nodded, pretending to know when that was, not sure about the dates. Seventeenth century, probably. That is a century that I always feel is out of reach. That rich stillness of the uncluttered interiors. The durability of the clothes – ermine, velvet, linen. The strange porcelain complexions, skin the colour of bone. The eighteenth century I can grasp – we have the houses, and the sense of humour is familiar. The nineteenth seems like yesterday, and the Middle Ages like my schooldays. But the seventeenth is another country and this reader of letters, this bearer of buckets, belonged there. In their clarity, quite foreign.

The table was laid with silver and white linen napkins, two silver vases of lily of the valley, my favourite flower, decanters of white wine and red wine and iced water. Food waited on the sideboard in crockery bowls – salads, rice, vegetables, spiced chicken and lamb rolls. Fresh home-made bread, herbal, was beside it. The food was warm and seemed to have been placed on the sideboard just moments before we entered the dining room, but there was no evidence of other people in the house, no cook or servant. Nor were they referred to. The food must have been prepared in advance, by Ramalina, I thought, but she did not claim credit for it. In a way it seemed to have appeared without agency, although this could not have been the case. Of course, it was delicious, and the wine was smooth and lovely, from a local vineyard.

We talked about the area and the artists' centre where I was staying, about what I was working on – a novel. (I was told once to always give that answer to the question ‘What are you working on?' and I always do. It is what people want to hear.) They asked me about my life at home and I told them what I wanted to reveal. That I taught literature sometimes, and lived in a house in the country, and would publish my novel next year if I finished it. I did not tell them I was married, or that I had two children, aged fifteen and seventeen, who wondered why I had left them for the summer, again, or that last year I had spent two months in a psychiatric hospital, recovering from depression. And they did not ask any prying questions, but accepted what I told them as if it were the only thing in the world they wanted to hear and accepted it as if it were the complete truth.

When dinner was over, Ramalina and Isabel cleared the table and told me to sit in the front room with Marcus, and relax with a liqueur or a cup of coffee. Although Ramalina delivered this instruction in her usual warm and soft purr, it was an order; I would have liked to help with the washing up – I would have liked to have seen the kitchen – but I followed Marcus back to the drawing room, where a small log fire was now burning in the grate. Darkness had fallen; the big windows were black pools; branches and shrubs shuddered against them. The owl was hooting, a siren of loneliness, and in the distance an animal growled. Marcus went around and pulled silk curtains across the windows, shutting out the wilderness. He poured coffee and drinks and we sat by the fire and talked.

He told me about his music. He played the piano and the saxophone and the organ, and composed for all three. Sometimes he left the house and performed at concert halls in the city and all across the country, and he had been to Germany and England and France and Sweden and other places far away.

‘But I prefer to compose here; here, I work best. I can't create music anywhere else. The walls of the house inspire me.'

He laughed at his own pomposity, but it was clear that he was speaking the truth.

Now that we were alone together, I could see that he was forty, at least. Could he be Isabel's brother? Ramalina's son? She looked about fifty, too young to have mothered this man. But she had introduced him as her son.

In this room, sipping the Cointreau, smelling the roses and the pine wood in the fire, it seemed vulgar and inquisitive to ask such questions, even in one's own head. The atmosphere was so harmonious, so perfect, why try to disturb it with requests for facts and information? Anyway, Li was going to make those enquiries. Back at the lodge, inquisitiveness would not be out of place. It would be natural there, in that world of rougher edges, less fine sensibilities.

Ramalina and Isabel spent a long time clearing up after dinner, an hour at least, which passed easily in Marcus's company. He told me that music was the most important thing in the world, and he was happy with his compositions so far, but he knew his best work was yet to come.

‘I don't know exactly what it will be,' he said. ‘But I'll know it when I make it. And it will be very new and very beautiful, which is saying a lot, in the context of contemporary classical music.'

We discussed, then, interesting questions that had been bothering me for many months. I wondered if it was possible to make new fiction, by which I meant, find a new template, a new mould, and also a new subject, and still create something that was, to use his word, beautiful. Post-modernism had failed, I said to him. The idea of the fragmented universe, mirrored in the fractured novel or work of art, was interesting, valid at the level of thought, but it had failed artistically because a fractured narrative is not enjoyable – it just does not work. But what is the point of continuing to write using the pre-modern template? And what subject can the new novel deal with? Traditionally, the stories were about the conflict between the desire of the individual and the rules of the society. But does that sort of society exist, in our world, the Western world, the only one we can honestly or usefully write about? Divorce is not a social disaster; homosexuality is legal and accepted. Nobody is forced to marry for money or to please their parents. There are taboos, but not so many, and there must be a limit to the number of explorations of paedophilia or psychopathic crime that the world can endure. So one is left to write only what has been written – in a slightly different way – a million times already.

Marcus believed that in the perfect setting, by which he meant this house, his mother's house, the answer to this problem could be revealed, but he did not explain how.

‘You talk as if the place were magical,' I said.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘It is the right atmosphere for the creation of great art. But still I will have to work, and try to make that good art myself.'

This led, naturally, to the questions: What is music for? What is writing for? What is life for? But before we could discuss these things the washing-up was finished and Ramalina and Isabel returned, padding so silently into the room that I wondered if they had been in a corner, listening to us, unobserved, for some time. The conversation moved off in a different direction.

When I looked at my watch, it was midnight.

Seeing my glance, Ramalina said, ‘Why don't you stay here and go back in the morning?'

‘I would rather go home,' I said, almost involuntarily.

I did not like the idea of the track through the woods, the hoot of the night owl, the distant rumble of hidden animals. But I felt the strongest resistance to staying in this house. I never liked overnighting anywhere, abruptly, in this way, so my resistance was automatic.

‘Can I call a taxi?'

‘You can call, but it won't come,' Marcus said. ‘They never come out here, they get lost, and if they do promise to come, it costs not a small fortune but a large fortune.'

In his drawl, this sounded funny, for half a second.

There was a pause, during which they all waited for me to do the reasonable, civilised thing, and change my mind. But I did not speak.

Eventually, Ramalina said, in a voice that was more chirpy and sharp than usual, ‘Marcus will drive you home.'

He'd drunk half a bottle of wine and two Cointreaus, but I said, ‘Thank you. Sorry to put you to this trouble.'

A four-wheel drive, which I had not previously seen, was parked in front of the porch. We got in and drove through the forest, along a track, also new to me. Marcus did not speak and neither did I. The car rattled occasionally against the bumpy road but otherwise the silence was dense and complete; it was like being at the bottom of the ocean.