Cold Light (86 page)

At the exhibition she told him a story she knew about Max Ernst. ‘Ernst’s father – also an artist – painted a picture of his garden and left out the bough of a tree, which he considered spoiled the symmetry of his painting. When he completed the painting, he went and cut the bough from the tree to make the garden conform to the painting.’

He laughed.

She said that Max Ernst’s paintings struck terror in her. ‘Too many bad dreams in his paintings.’

He said that Ernst used what he called ‘optical provocateurs’ to produce his visions.

‘Oh?’

‘Ernst manipulated his eyesight and field of vision to cause new images to appear to him.’

‘I should have thought the world strange enough as it is without resorting to distortion.’

‘. . . by fortunate accident. I found it at the airport. I too am an Australian, which makes it all the more remarkable.’ She thought to herself that this all sounded highly improbable. She told the person in Adelaide that she was at present on government business in Vienna, to reassure them. ‘Instead of taking it to the consulate I thought I would make direct contact. Your name and number are in the back of the passport as next of kin.’

He sat there in her bedroom, listening to her call to the family of his girlfriend, if indeed she were his girlfriend. She could be committing a crime, aiding an older man to pursue a much younger woman.

‘Yes, in the ladies’ room at the airport. Very fortunate. Yes.’

On a sheet of hotel stationery, Edith wrote down an address and telephone number in the UK, and he silently clapped his hands.

She read it back to them as a check.

She finished the call and turned to him, handing him the sheet of paper. ‘I spoke with her brother. I don’t mind saying that I feel guilty about having done this. I don’t feel good about it at all. And they will eventually find you out. And me. Obviously, the girl does not want to communicate with you and perhaps you should respect that. But I suppose it is all too late now.’

He stared at the address and number.

She said, ‘It was probably easier because the brother answered. The parents would have been more cautious.’

‘Thank you, Edith. You’re a good sport. A messenger of Eros.’ He leaned over and kissed her cheek. ‘You may recall from your youth that pursuit and hiding and being found are part of the sport of love.’

She made a dismissive noise, but was pleased with herself. ‘I can only hope that it brings you joy.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘I’m so glad that all this sort of thing is behind me.’

He looked up from the address. ‘Is it really – all behind you?’

He seemed to be enquiring in a genuine way.

‘Almost,’ she said, coyly. ‘Almost. But not yet. Allow me some illusions.’ She wondered if his question was also an attempt to elicit some evidence of her potential for passion. Which may involve him.

He veered away. ‘I thought that now, at forty, I wouldn’t be vulnerable. But I am. Very vulnerable.’

‘Oh, the forties. They are the desperate years.’

That was not right. They were the years when you knew what you could do and how to do it, and you knew that while everything was not possible, most things still were – at least for a man.

She went to the window with her back to him and watched the passing parade of strolling people in Stephansplatz. It seemed to be her past in procession. She had then a strange sensation that she was wearing a favourite and flattering dress from many years back, in a slimmer and seductive younger figure, and had to glance down, hoping for an instant that she was in that dress. She wasn’t.

Without looking back at him, she said, ‘Oh, such things are still glimpsed, but at least the exhausting ardour is gone.’ Would she still wish to put up with that exhausting ardour? Perhaps. But she could not put up with the haunting, insecure fear that the love, once gained, would disintegrate, decay. Rot.

She turned. ‘I do hope that it brings you some joy.’ Her voice quavered.

She moved from the window and sat at her writing table. She put on her reading glasses and began to fiddle with papers as a way of ending his visit.

‘You are a splendid consort and travelling companion, Edith.’

She didn’t say anything at first, staring down at her papers, but she coloured a little and then looked up at him and said, ‘Thank you. Now be off, you silly boy, and play your games.’ She waved him away. She felt like weeping, but instead, looking back to her papers and in a controlled voice, she reminded him of the time difference between London and Vienna.

After he closed the door behind him, she found herself awash with envy that he should still have the powerful energy for these games of the heart. She wanted something like that in her life, but she could not quite imagine the softer passion that, at her age, she knew it would have to be.

Was there such a thing as a softer passion?

Next day, the envy had subsided and she was tickled with curiosity about his call to his girlfriend, though she pointlessly, cruelly half-wished that the girl had spurned him. She waited as long as she could at breakfast before asking him how his call had gone. There was another converse feeling – a vicarious wish for him to succeed with the girl. She pictured them together. Then, like a dazzle ball, the image turned, and now
she
was the girl. It turned again and she wanted to be him; then wanted to be the lover of either of them; then wanted to steal their youth or to be joined to their youth in some three-way coupling.

‘She’s involved with another man. A Parisian.’

‘It’s honourable enough to lose out to a Parisian,’ she said, hoping that the pointless relief did not show in her voice. ‘Anyhow, what you had with her sounded very much like a middle-age crisis – one of those sorts of love affairs.’

A dramatic life-phase change like that had landed her in her current marriage. But no, she did not want to dismiss what he was doing as foolishness, and it should never be dismissed as foolishness if both of those involved were willing – as long as you accepted the less than perfect result, even the devastation of it. Ah, the devastation. The laying waste of the spirit. All its dangerous pain. No, these affairs between people of very different ages were never foolishness, except, she supposed, if one of those involved was doing it for money. Amelia had taken the risk at the age of forty-four with her twenty-year-old carpenter – had the sweetness and suffered.

And now, having heard of his defeat, she was still inclined to play with the fantasy of a shipboard romance with him here at the conference. She could, perhaps, play the role of the older lover with a younger man. Buy him gifts. Become – what was the term? – a ‘sugar daddy’. She could become his ‘sugar mam’. Was there such a term? She could buy him an expensive watch. Or a rare volume of one of the Faust stories. Perfect. She did not know upon which laws of eroticism or psychological theory this romance between them could rest. Perhaps it was one of those murky reversals of nature, which carried with it some perverse, scandalous resemblance to passion; some warped erotic asymmetry – she being so much older – while he was pining for someone so much younger. Perhaps she could find and bring into play this erotic chemistry, if it existed; cause it to explode within him. Even if – and she permitted herself to consider this idea for the first time – she came to play the role of the consoling older maternal woman or, maybe, the mother. This was a role that had never entered her erotic experience with any man. Now might be the time to let loose its dark madness, its alchemy.

She would have to find the words and poetry, the
mise-en-scène
and ambience that would make such a perverse passion appealing and accomplishable. The right spell.

She was pulled from her sexual witchcraft by him saying, ‘I don’t see myself as “middle-aged”.’ He was hurt. ‘I don’t think that description has any meaning anymore, and certainly doesn’t carry a programme of behaviour to which we all have to adhere.’

‘I didn’t mean to offend. And I agree with you, I was thinking the same thing.’

So he, too, was trying to trick age. But if he was seeing himself as somewhat younger than he in fact was, then that would put him even further out of reach. Or would it add yet another perverse piquancy?

He was so right. She had never believed in that age-determined fixed programme of behaviour. Especially in matters of the bed.

He became self-pitying, returning again to the girl. ‘I wanted to do a pilgrimage to the Spanish civil war sites with her. And to visit anarchist places. I wanted to fit it in after you and I finished up here. We’d planned it for some time.’

She ate her cheese and cold cuts, wary of speaking.

He said, ‘Have you seen the film
The Passenger
?’

She shook her head.

‘The Antonioni film?’

She shook her head again. ‘Why?’

‘It’s about a reporter, played by Jack Nicholson, who’s turning forty and who takes on the identity of a casual acquaintance after the acquaintance dies while they’re together in a remote hotel in North Africa. Nicholson decides to abandon his own life and live out the other man’s diary appointments. In Barcelona, Nicholson meets a young student – Maria Schneider – who involves herself with him on his drive along the Spanish coast from Barcelona through Almeria and Algeciras.’

‘And?’

‘He keeps the final appointment in the Hotel de la Gloria and meets the other man’s destiny – he’s shot dead in that hotel by the man’s enemies.’

‘I don’t follow?’

He moved about in his chair, ill-at-ease.

‘The film’s special for me because I was approaching forty when I met this girl.’

‘The girl in London?’

‘She was seventeen years old. I’d been sent to visit the weapons-testing facility at Salisbury. You know it.’

‘The longest rocket range in the Western world.’ She knew it. She had been there.

He nodded. ‘I was dreadfully attracted to her. And she to me.’ He became silent, as if the story of the girl put him in a bad light with her. Or maybe there was genuine pain. She remained silent.

He then went on, ‘I had an impulse and asked her to drive with me to Darwin – five thousand kilometres clean across the continent and back again. She said yes. Without hesitation. And we did it. It changed my life forever.’

She did not mock him for saying ‘changed my life forever’.

He pushed his breakfast platter across to her. ‘You have that. I’ll just have coffee.’ He said that he had an indifferent appetite.

She smiled at his little affectation. ‘Thank you, but I couldn’t eat it.’ She examined what he had left, and thought she would probably pick at it.

She made a move, saying, ‘I’d love to see Spain again. I was there a few years back – well, just before the civil war. I’d like to see Spain again. I knew Ascaso, one of the brilliant minds on the anarchist side. I knew him well.’

Very well indeed. Ascaso was by far the most dangerous man she had ever slept with, as she had once told Janice. Where was Janice?

She would steal the trip to Spain from the young girl.

He seemed to light up, but left her remark about Ascaso untouched. He said, ‘Did you know Durruti, then?’

‘I would have liked to have known him, but no.’

She began to eat his breakfast leftovers, now aware that she had impressed him. She could impress him more if she felt like playing all her cards about Spain. She could show him a great, secret Spain. She could show him where she had watched Ascaso and others dig up buried grenades and pistols. She, in her hooded Spanish cape – a
capucha
– and her black leather knee boots had observed the digging. She had not helped. She had been, after all, a neutral officer of the League. Daresay, there were still weapons buried at that spot. She could dig up a Russian automatic pistol for him wrapped in its brown waxed paper and oilskin. That might cheer him up; win his love.

She decided not to tell him that the dint in her flask was made by Ascaso. Ascaso had asked her where she had got her flask and she had told him about Jerome. He had been jealous and taken the flask and bitten it. ‘Now you will remember me – not him.’

‘I’ve abandoned the Spanish plans,’ he said, a little irritated. ‘Anyhow, it was sentimental anarchism, a hangover from another part of my life.’