Inglorious (9 page)

‘Gosh, Daddy,’ said Rosa. ‘Are you sure you shouldn’t take it easy?’

‘Yes, I’m quite sure. I feel better by the day,’ said her father. ‘Now, let’s see, I have to come to London tomorrow, to see a friend who is emigrating to America. You know, at my age, you have to mark these partings. So why don’t we have lunch? You can tell me all about the job.’

‘Let’s,’ said Rosa. ‘Thanks for the invitation.’

‘If you want to come for the weekend some time, do come down and stay with us,’ he said.

She said, ‘Thanks, thanks so much.’ Us meant him and Sarah. Sarah was new, improbable, but there was no point getting into a funeral-baked-meats frenzy about it all. She didn’t want to think about Sarah, she didn’t want to stand on the parapet mouthing
Oh that this too too solid flesh would melt
so she had been avoiding her father. That was unkind, when the man was like a mummy, dried out and shrivelled and really not looking his best. She ought to have been glad he had Sarah. When you were seventy you had to get along as best you could. Really, Rosa understood that. She didn’t judge him. She just found it hard to talk to him. She understood what he was doing. If he could sling it all off, mourn and then displace his wife, then she admired him. It was just Sarah’s lisp and her wide-eyed benevolence that made Rosa want to wander away yelping like an injured dog.

But now she wondered if she should just go home after all. Get a job in Bristol, and live with her father. She thought of going back to that tall cold house and imposing on his privacy, disrupting the delicate balance he had established for himself. He and Sarah in their last-stop love nest – it would hardly improve her mood. Rosa wandering down to breakfast, into their cloud of amiable grey. It was regression, or worse, but
she was tempted by it nonetheless. They fixed a time and Rosa’s father said, ‘Don’t forget like last time and don’t be late,’ and then they said goodbye.

The last she could do, or at least she could certainly go to see Andreas. It was a quick walk to the corner, and at the corner she saw pink and blue walls and signs on the guttering and she heard the planes whining their descent and the trilling choirs of birds. An immaculate day stretched out before her, around her, and Rosa was walking past the lines of cars and the ragged thin-stripped trees, laughing quietly to herself. ‘Ridiculous,’ she said. She was leaning back now, finding that her head was sore. She was aware of a vague smell of sweat and dust. Her mouth was dry and she wanted something to drink. She saw the roads winding along the canal, and the concrete skeleton of a new block of flats. There was a church and a matted line of old houses. She saw everything in monochrome, because she had screwed up her eyes. The light made her head pound, but really, the doctor had misdiagnosed her. It was perhaps not significant, but she had a prince. It was uncertain what they were to each other, but he was called Andreas and he was a fine man, presiding over a few feet of space by another stretch of railway tracks. Had she been less distracted she might have fallen in love with him. But love was quite impossible, given the conditions. With things as fleeting as they were you couldn’t risk it. Instead she turned up at his flat and they slithered in the darkness. He was young – perhaps too young, at twenty-five – but he was beautiful, with his brown hair, brown eyes, long limbs. He was German and he wanted to be an actor. Beauty hadn’t yet propelled him onwards, so he waited on tables and taught German. They had little in common, and they couldn’t express themselves together. Nonetheless she liked talking to him.

She could see a slanted forest of cranes in the distance. They were angled over a building site on the horizon, suspending cables. She turned left and saw a pub. Thin black doors, a big Victorian advertisement on the upper wall:
The PARROT. A
Fine Victorian Pub. Original features. Fine Ales. Good food.
She had always liked the atmosphere of pubs. That was because her parents often ate in pubs: at the weekends, on holidays,
they went for pub lunches, and so, perversely enough, she associated pubs with her childhood. She had played in the gardens of a hundred pubs, pawing the grass with other infants, as if the grass was a lost continent a thousand miles wide. She remembered the pub they went to on Sundays – a big Georgian hotel on a long winding street – had a donkey in the garden. It was roped to a fence, and it groaned and shrieked as she played. And there was another pub her father liked, with a view of the Avon Gorge. She remembered playing on the patio there, the paving stones stern in the dusk. At the edge was a deep drop to the muddy estuary beneath, and upstream was the inverted arch of the Suspension Bridge. In the summer months she liked to stand by the wall watching the light shining on the muddy water, though her mother always summoned her back from the edge. The gorge was vast and green, its slopes full of slanted trees.

As she walked, hands in her pockets, chin lifted, quite alert and aware of the seeping colours of the sky and the progress of the cars, she was thinking that Andreas had appeared to her one night in a bar. That was a few weeks ago, when she had been sitting on her own drinking wine. She had taken herself out because Jess had told her she was having a dinner party. ‘Friends for supper. Will you be here?’ which meant ‘Can you not be here?’ She had been in the bar for a while, picking at the complimentary nuts and writing in her notebook, when Andreas came over and asked if she was waiting for someone. She wasn’t sure what to say, and then she held up her hands and confessed, ‘No no, I’m not. No I always come here and drink alone. Pretty much every night.’ She thought she might have blushed.

‘That’s not true,’ he laughed. ‘I work here pretty much every night.’

She was apprehensive, monosyllabic at first, but they drank a glass of wine together. They could hardly hear each other, and he kept putting his lips close to her ear, and she discovered
he told plausible jokes. At one point she laughed, genuinely and without strain. When they had shouted for a while, he said: ‘Shall we get out of here?’ and she said ‘Yes.’ Her friends would have told her not to bother, had they been there. But they weren’t. Rosa was really alone and the thought of walking back to Jess’s flat and twisting the key in the door, nodding her way through the living room and retreating to her bed, made her take his hand on the corner. This was how she got to know him, through lust and a fear of solitude. Still, they scuffed along the streets, suddenly self-conscious, and he said, ‘Do you like jazz?’ and Rosa said, ‘No, I detest jazz.’ And he laughed. ‘I was about to say,’ he said, ‘that there’s a fantastic jazz club which I go to. But I suppose that’s not of interest any more.’

‘Is there another sort of music you enjoy?’ asked Rosa.

‘No, only jazz,’ he said. They were standing outside a large church, a grey spire behind them. The sky was thick with clouds and she could hear the leaves swirling along the pavement. It was quite cold.

‘Well, that’s a shame,’ she said. ‘For you, anyway.’

‘I feel a great sense of sorrow,’ he said.

They stood stock still, and he seemed embarrassed. They were smiling at each other. He was tall, statuesque, and when he turned his head to look at the street she saw he had a stark profile, a long nose, an overhanging brow. His features were unsubtle in their handsomeness; it was hard to tell what age would do to them, whether it would refine them or blunt them altogether. She caught herself looking at his lips, which were bright red against a surrounding shadow of stubble.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Here we are.’

‘Here we are,’ she said. Inevitably, they kissed. He smelt strongly of aftershave and more remotely of smoke. It was curious but far from seedy; she was surprised how glad she was to kiss him.

They spent a weekend in his flat on Tavistock Crescent. It
was part of a modern development, handy for the shops of Portobello Road, set back from the terrorist safe house nearby. After that weekend she had seen him a dozen times perhaps. She found him relaxing company. He expected very little of her. He seemed to understand that she was not quite herself. He told her that she was a beautiful woman, but sad and grave. He explained to her that they transcended the boundaries of youth and age. In this equation, she suspected she was age. He enjoyed being naked, he explained. He wanted to worship her body, and he announced that he loved her thighs. ‘And the curve of your back, and the muscles on your arms, long thin muscles,’ he said. ‘You’re very graceful.’ That should have been a sop for her ego, but she couldn’t absorb it. When they lay in bed listening to the trains hammering past and the usual grinding of the Westway, he said, ‘I would like to take you on holiday. You seem tired.’

‘No, no, I couldn’t possibly be tired,’ said Rosa, reclining into a pile of pillows. He had dark hair and alabaster skin. It was a good contrast, and she admired his youth. It gave her an illusion that she might also be twenty-five, poised on the brink of everything. At twenty-five she had been naive and driven. More naive, less driven than him. She had been resolutely, devoutly fashionable; it amused her to remember her faithful adherence to fleeting trends. She had spent so much time trying to enjoy herself in the usual ways – clubbing, drinking, dying her hair. Her bathroom had been full of balms and ointments. Now, at the stage when she was meant to be plastering herself in unguents, she had thrown that stuff away. At twenty-five she had felt that there was time, that life was long. Now, the years since then had been soft sift in an hourglass, they had poured through so quickly. She wanted to tell this to Andreas, but there was little she could offer him. Compared with Rosa at twenty-five, Andreas was distinct and resolute. He told her she was going through a bad patch. It sounded reassuring that way, as if it was all just as fleeting as a fever. He understood, but he wanted her to
know that he found her fascinating, he said. ‘Your eyes, your dark wit, some days you are pained, others quite childlike and funny. I like your range. I think you must always have been like this. I have no depth at all, but I admire it in others,’ he said. When he talked like that she lapped it up, her with her dented self. She enjoyed it, and didn’t care if he was filling time. He had that sort of carelessness. Sometimes she knew he was talking for the hell of it, to stop a gap, stuff a bung in a silence.

He had photographs of his parents on the table by his bed. His mother looked beautiful in a high-cheekboned way. His father was tall and thin, bent slightly. Andreas polished the frames, laughing at his reverence. He slung his legs out of the bed and offered to bring her coffee.

‘My mother’, he said, when he came back with a tray, ‘always told me I should learn how to wait on women. She says it is an important skill, perhaps the most important.’

‘It is a skill,’ said Rosa. ‘Knowing when to serve and when to command.’

‘I can do either,’ he said. Their repartee was a little forced. But his eyes shone when she kissed him. He listened well, laughed in the right places, generously plied her with questions. Still, the balance between them kept slipping. Within a few days, he was offering her advice.

‘You need to get a sense of what you want to do,’ he kept saying. ‘You have to do something. We all, we all have to do something. I feel I can help, at least with this.’

‘I just need to get back into the Polis,’ she said.

‘The Polis,’ he said. He sounded tired. They were wrapped in sheets. Theirs was a bed-bound romance. It did best at night. But now it was early morning, and they were both hung-over.

‘It’s hard to get back in,’ she said. ‘Once you fall out.’

He stayed silent, looking at her. Then he rolled over and folded his arms around her. She was pressed into his wide
chest. He seemed to be smiling. He kissed the back of her neck.

I just wonder what it means, she wanted to say. Us, here, in this tentative version of romance, and before, Liam and I. These entanglements. All of us with our bare bones of knowledge. Not knowing what we are. The birth of tragedy. This smallness I feel deep inside myself. The Birth of Smallness. Yes, yes, after the Egyptians, the Greeks with their fetish for dying beauty, doomed greatness, comes the birth of smallness, the soaring rise of the insignificant.
Here I am,
thought Rosa,
the
living embodiment of the new age of minutiae.
She understood it clearly. Gradually everything had been taken over by people like Rosa. In general, her kind were doing very well. She had been given a generous slice of the pie; it was just that she couldn’t quite eat it.