A Natural Curiosity (24 page)

Charles drinks his beer, finishes his cold French fries, belches, gets himself another whisky to settle his stomach. The evening wears on. The walls of the room are pastel, the bed is pastel quilted, the prints are bland. A mild, repetitive geometry prevails.

Charles can no longer pay attention to one source of information at a time. He is Modern Man, programmed to take in several story lines, several plots at once. He cannot quite unravel them, but he cannot do without the conflicting impulses, the disparate stimuli. Perhaps he hopes the alcohol will simplify them, will stick them together and fuse them all into one consecutive narrative. The narrative of his own life, of his place in the history and geography of the world.

By one in the morning he has had enough of the machinery and of the reassuring decor, and is forced to contemplate his fate. Muslim extremists, the Koran, hostages, armaments. He knows fuck all about it.

All the programmes he’s seen, all the reports he’s read, have explained nothing. They are all biased, inevitably misinformed. How can one know what’s going on in the mind of another culture? Perhaps his contact, the abandoned young diplomat Nigel Bicester, will explain Baldai to him. Perhaps not.

Charles prepares for bed, stumbling around a little in the unfamiliar room, barking his shins on unfamiliar corners. He settles, then reaches into the drawer of his bedside table for the Gideon Bible. Yes, it is there. Charles has resolved, once more, to play the
sortes Vergilianae
. They had done him proud last time. He shuts his eyes, lets the page fall open, and stabs. He does not cheat, although he hopes that if any travellers have ever before picked up this book, they will have given it a merciful bias towards the New Testament.

And it appears that they have. Fate, Chance or Custom has chosen him a fine text. Charles stares at it in wonder. Mark 8: 34, 35. ‘Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.’

These words had been covered by his broad stab of his middle finger. But Charles reads on. Legitimately, he considers.

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

Or what shall a man give, in exchange for his soul?

Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.

Charles stares, ponders. This does seem meant for him. He is, after all, supremely, of the adulterous and sinful generation. He acknowledges this, across the centuries. ‘What shall a man give, in exchange for his soul?’ Thoughtfully, Charles stumbles out of bed, clutching the Bible. He packs it in his hand luggage. Is it a crime, to steal a hotel Bible? Surely not. His need is greater. Maybe, he thinks, as he collapses between the sheets, there is even some absolving message in the volume, for those Bible thieves compelled by the spirit to read on. He will look, in the morning. He is too tired to look now. His eyes shut. Within seconds, he is asleep.

At two in the morning, the hotel fire alarm begins to shriek and wail. Charles wakes, from dreams of fish and rivers. He lies there, listening to the alarm. He can hear doors banging, along the corridor. He decides it is a false alarm. If there were a real fire, there would be more noise. Calmly he goes back to sleep.

Shirley Harper and Robert Holland are standing, arm in arm, in the foresting
fin de siècle
statuary of the Musée d’Orsay. Lithe bronze boys gambol above their heads, placid white marble matrons pluck classical musical instruments before them, voluptuous asp-bitten nudes writhe and recline to the left of them, stone lions prowl to the right of them. Shirley is leaning slightly upon Robert, partly through devotion, partly through shock. The recent shock to her system has been intense. After ten years of intermittent love-making and several years of none, she has rediscovered the body which she had thought for ever lost, her own body, in which she now hazily, drooping, staggering, stands. It is more of a surprise to her than Robert’s. Indeed, Robert’s solid, fleshly, comfortable self seems in a way no more than a projection of her own body, of her own desires. This does not mean that he is not important to her, for he is: he is a miracle, an intervention, a salvation, she is obsessed by his presence. But only in so far as it relates to her, serves her, delivers her. There he is, a solid person, more solid than bronze or marble or travertine. She leans on him. She needs him, for her own purposes.

She does not really see the statues, the paintings, the vast well-displayed canvas of decadent Rome, the huge arched ceiling of solid rosettes, the walkways, the Parisian crowds. She sees and does not see. She has never frequented galleries and museums, it is surely too late to learn now. She is here because Robert wished to come here. She has no wishes of her own. She drifts. It is Thursday evening, the museum’s late night. She has spent the day, while Robert was at work, pottering around the neighbourhood, looking at the cafes, the bundles of brown rags in the gutters, the crawling spined crabs of the fishmonger, the arrays of vegetables, the children on their way to and from school. It is a homely district: the fifteenth
arrondissement
, Robert tells her, but that does not mean much to her. It could be anywhere, north, south, east or west.

She has had an unsatisfactory but friendly encounter with Madame Lambert, the concierge, who wears a flowered apron such as women used to wear in Northam once, in Shirley’s girlhood. She has tried to take a bath, and failed, for even by daylight the attachments are serpentine, unmanageable, the bath too narrow even for her slim hips. She has glimpsed, from afar, the Eiffel Tower. And now she is in the Musée d’Orsay, which Robert tells her is new, a newly opened renovation of an old railway station. Some of the paintings are famous. Even Shirley recognizes them. Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Monet. She stands now in front of an unfamiliar Bonnard nude. The nude is lying flat on her back on an unmade bed, her legs spread, her hair dishevelled. Shirley shifts her weight from foot to foot. Her feet are killing her. And she is numbly sore, within, from the two nights and one evening of sexual intercourse. There is a dull ache in her lower back. A voluptuous, pleasant, womanly ache.

Is Shirley shocked by her own behaviour, is she surprised to find herself making love to a stranger in a strange city, less than a fortnight after her husband’s death? She is not quite sure. On balance, she thinks not. Shirley’s life may have seemed orderly, over the last twenty years, but it has not been quite as orderly as it has appeared. For example, Shirley, unlike Susie Enderby, has committed adultery several times, has earned her credentials as a member of the sinful and adulterous generation. It has nearly always been with the same man, it is true, but that does not make it more acceptable: in fact, as the man in question is her brother-in-law Steve, it makes it considerably less so. Steve, as a boy, had always fancied Shirley and she herself had been undecided: there had been times when it had not been clear which of the brothers she would eventually favour. Her choice, over the years, had seemed to her increasingly arbitrary. Why Cliff, why not Steve? Steve himself had put this question to her one afternoon in the 1960s, at a cousin’s wedding reception, inspired by champagne, and Shirley had found her heart beating, her lightly rouged cheeks burning, her whole body suddenly throbbing and melting under her new wide white-collared prim revealing low-cut floral summer dress: Steve had leant forward, touched her bare neck gently with his fingers, and they had wandered off together under the trees, away from the marquee and the wedding guests, had kissed and embraced, then had driven off recklessly to the old quarry, and spent twenty minutes fucking under the hot sun. ‘I’ve wanted to fuck you for years, Shirley,’ Steve had said, astonishingly, as he struggled with her tights and clutched at her bare buttocks, ‘I’ve thought about fucking you for years.’ Shirley had never heard this word used in earnest, and it thrilled her far more than Steve’s revelation of persistence of amorous intent. It thrilled her so unmistakably that Steve got the message at once, and repeated it more and more insistently in her ear until he breathlessly collapsed on top of her. It was a word that reminded Shirley of the bad girl she had wanted to be, had believed herself to be, before she grew up and became a housewife and mother of two. Cliff’s two. Did it remind Steve, too, of another self? Surely so, surely. They returned to the wedding party, wordless, before anyone had noticed they had gone, Shirley’s stiff glazed cotton dress a little crumpled, but her hair demurely combed, her face retouched, relipsticked: Steve also a little crumpled, his tie loosened from the heat, but nobody saw save Shirley, for everybody was overheated, tipsy, merry, Bacchanalian, ungartered. (Well, almost everybody: Mrs Harper had been closely observant, but luckily Cliff, Steve and Shirley had not observed her observance.)

Shirley had never regretted this experiment, this recalling of a lost option. She and Steve had repeated it several times, when opportunity and mood coincided. It had not affected their social relations, or Shirley’s respect for Steve’s plain wife Dora, to whom, she was certain, Steve never used bad language, body language. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything, it was neither right nor wrong, it had been what it was, a celebration of what might have been. It wasn’t even an affair, and when it was over Shirley blotted it from her memory completely, and hoped Steve had too. It came to an end, an unspoken but recognized end, when Shirley decided to have another baby: she threw away her diaphragm, coerced her husband Cliff, went off to Paris on a Weekend Special, became pregnant with Celia, and announced her pregnancy to the world. Steve listened, as a member of that world, offered congratulations, and reverted to his old role of brother-in-law, friend, do-it-yourself adviser. He and Shirley continued to meet, frequently, at family events, in one another’s houses. No
frisson
had passed between them for many years, but a fondness, perhaps, remained. Shirley, when she thought about it at all, hoped so. Steve was a decent chap, a kind man. She sometimes asked herself, a little jealously, if he had found another woman, into whose hot ear he could whisper bad words. Maybe he had: he looked reasonably content, more content than Cliff. Cliff had never known about her and Steve. Or so Steve and Shirley assumed. Although now, standing in the Museum, as shadowy remembrances of her past sexual self, her now resurrected self, flickered through Shirley’s wheeling mind, she wondered, for a moment. Had Cliff known, all along? Known, and kept his mouth shut, and died silently? Had he smelled strange body odours, overseen illicit glances?

She dismisses these doubts, these questions from the past, and returns to the dizzy present.

And dizzy is the word for it. She is feeling odd, odder than she has felt since she first ran away from home. Insistent sexual activity (for Robert never seems to tire), unaccustomed food, and far more drink than usual have made her weightless, airy, wild: her eyes cannot focus on the statues, the paintings. Everything is at once heightened and fuzzy, bright and soft and explosive. She sails on a high erotic dream.

It is all magic. Robert has cast a spell upon her, or so she tells him. A spell would, excuse all bad behaviour, condone all licence. The night before, she had felt slightly faint in the street, as they walked towards the little brasserie for their unassuming dinner: she had stumbled, and nearly fallen, and recovered herself, and had to stand and lean against the wall to catch her breath. Robert, all solicitude (for this was his role) had marched her into the pharmacy on the corner, and demanded a potion, a restorative potion, from the
pharmacien
. And the tall, thin, grey goat-bearded magician had gone off and mixed a pale green-grey chalky draught in a little conical medicine glass. ‘What
is
it?’ Shirley had wanted to know, giggling a little hysterically as it was pressed upon her. ‘It’s a French medicine. Never you mind what it is. It will do you good. Knock it back,’ said Robert.

And Shirley had knocked it back. It was bitter, digestive, comforting. ‘What on earth
was
it?’ she asked again, as they wandered out to the street and on to their café.

‘It was an aphrodisiac, of course,’ said Robert. ‘What else would you expect, from a man like that, in Paris?’

And they had both laughed, and staggered on, to their little Parisian supper of
jambon de Paris, salade de tomates et frites
, to Robert’s friend Stukeley, who had become a regular in their lives—Neighbourhood Character, Witness, Wedding Guest.

And now here she was in the Musée d’Orsay, staring at Bonnard’s
Femme assoupie
, and thinking of sex. It would be difficult to think about anything else in front of so blatantly erotic a painting. She wonders if she is ‘in love’ with Robert, or he with her. Probably not. No, he is using her as a bizarre revenge, to bury the corpse of Amélie, as she is using him to bury Cliff. Cliff and Amélie had been the prime movers in this affair, they had taken the initiative, and Shirley and Robert were obediently, helplessly potion-charmed, irresponsible, drifting and surging, directionless, in their wake.

The woman lies, exhausted, satisfied, her legs spread wide, one knee bent, forming a triangle, a theorem, a proposition. The dishevelled bed is like a map of the whole world.

Shirley experimentally takes off her shoes, and stands in stockinged feet on the cool flat rosy slabs. The sensation is delicious.

‘Tired?’ asks Robert. No, no, says Shirley, although she is, and he knows that she is. They move on, paying scanter attention to the paintings that solicit them, and descend through the lower galleries. And at the entrance to the Moreau room, Shirley sees someone that she knows. She turns away quickly, thinking she has not been seen.