My Other Life (46 page)

He lost his smile. There was nothing for a moment—just a blankness in his eyes, and then his whole face seemed to tighten with reluctance.

"I must tell you one thing. When I was your age I was on good terms with the world. Perhaps for too long. It ended suddenly, and I became lost, more unhappy than I have ever been in my life. I consoled myself by saying it was for the best, and perhaps it was necessary."

This made me feel very sorry, and I knew the feeling would stay with me and become sorrow, like an illness I would have to learn to live with.

"Worse than that, after some years—and I am not speaking of any war—I had personal reasons to be convinced of the existence of evil."

That shocked me: just the word "evil" was enough. But as he said it, he turned and hurried up the path, as though to emphasize that he did not wish to answer any more questions. I followed at a distance, and within a few minutes we were at the top of the hill. Just past the gorse bushes that densely covered its crest there was a strong wind blowing from the west. I was almost knocked down by it, and then I looked back at Swanston in the valley below. Andreas Vorlaufer had been right: it was a lovely walk.

"You know this place," I said. "You've been here before."

"Once. I was thinking of writing a piece about Stevenson," he said. He pointed to the small village in the valley. "I went to that manor house."

I stared at the house, the front door I had knocked upon an hour before.

"I never finished the piece," he said. "I was forty-nine. I met a man." He was still peering down, into the valley, and his smile was grim. "It's a strange story. You would never believe it."

S
OMETIMES YOU HEAR
a strange name, one you have never heard before, and soon after you keep hearing it; and everywhere you turn you see it. It was that way with Andreas Vorlaufer. As soon as I got back to London I saw a piece about him in the
Times Literary Supplement.
He was alluded to in another book review, he was mentioned in the preface of a collection of Dürrenmatt's short novels that I happened to pick up, and there was a quotation from him on a calendar that was sent to me, something about travel being "the saddest of life's pleasures." Like the details of his life and work that Vorlaufer had told me, that quote too sounded familiar.

Some months later, feeling a loneliness that kept me from writing, I took to walking in the afternoons, waiting for the pubs to open. Passing a secondhand shop on Lavender Hill, I saw in the box of battered books out front a volume of short stories about London, all written by foreigners. One of them, translated from German, was entitled "Champagne." The author was Andreas Vorlaufer.

"How much is this one?"

"One book for fifty p. Three for a pound," the junk dealer said.

It seemed less like a business transaction than a ritual, buying a book from a man with dirty hands. And reading the story seemed like part of the same dark ritual.

This is what I read.

***

I
HAD ALREADY
opened the bottle of champagne, but out of courtesy had not formally drunk any. I had sneaked half a glass, because I was still a little nervous. I was about to sneak another when I heard her.

There are announcing sounds of approach that only spouses or the dearest companions make, like friendly signals that mean, It's only me. The sounds are slight yet so distinct that they create the sense of a loved one's arrival like instant premonition. I heard no more than the vibration of a latchkey, and then the lisp of a raincoat passing a doorjamb, and the footsteps—those particular shoes; and not a sigh, but just an audible breath like a low, murmured word of yearning. All of these; and so I called, "I'm in here!"

"So it's going to be a celebration, then?" she said as she entered the warm room.

Her eyes were glazed from the freezing air and the darkness, her pale face seeming apprehensive, as though seeing something pleasant that might turn out to be an apparition and trick her; all that—uncertainty, anxiety, happiness, fear—flickered in her expression, until I kissed her lips that were still cool from the night air. I clasped her hand and was surprised and even shocked by how cold her fingers were.

"My tiny hand is frozen." And she laughed. "I feel like the little match girl."

"I think you're confusing your heroines. Here, this will bring color to your cheeks."

"Lovely," she said, seeing that I had filled the glasses. "I won't say no. Is it champers? Crikey!"

Every word of hers was her own, and I saw that there was no one like her in the world, and that we had a special language of precious clichés, like trusty artifacts and baggage, a whole culture of two people, with its own rituals and humor and habits, that had taken a whole long marriage to make. Happy people were able to talk this way, in their own private expressions and words, which had a meaning for them alone, and were untranslatable.

I handed her the more graceful glass of the two, and said, "To us."

Only then did she hesitate, her lips regretful, her eyes losing their light, a sadness in her jaw.

"Please," I said, and managed to tap her glass with my own.

"Is this a mistake?" she asked. Her spirit was receding swiftly, the champagne flute was limp in her fingers, about to spill.

"No, of course not," I said. "This was the whole idea. Please drink up."

"Oh, all right," she said, and sipped and smiled and got brave in that same instant.

She went to the window, which the night had made into a mirror, and she said, "I look like a little old lady," and she began to look uncertain and a bit tearful again.

"You look fantastic," I said. "Sit down—let's punish this bottle."

She was dressed in her tweed skirt and thick sweater, her boots wet from her walk from the station; and her fatigue made her seem lovelier, a look of bored and weary dignity that gave her loftiness and grace.

"Did you make a booking?" she asked.

"Yes. At the Orangery."

"So it's going to be a slap-up, then?" she said approvingly, in the language we shared.

"With all the trimmings."

"Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?" Jutta asked, as she did before she lit up in the house or the car ever since I had given up smoking eight years before. I was struck this time by her politeness in always asking.

"No, go ahead," I said. I refilled our glasses and we drank again.

"We mustn't get tipsy or we won't appreciate our food," she said in her mocking nanny tone, and she sipped her champagne and smoked and regained her look of serenity.

"I've had such a busy day," I said. "Last-minute things."

Jutta's expression said nothing and seemed composed, but I knew what a tumult it masked.

"I managed most of them, but when I tried to call Wolfie on that Trinity phone number there was no answer." I drank some more champagne while at the same time feeling deceitful that I had sneaked half a glass and feeling that this cheating had nullified our toast. "In Germany some students have phones in their rooms."

"Life is ever so much better in Germany," Jutta said. "And there's our poor little Wolfie stuck at Cambridge."

People like us, intimate and loving, were seldom literal, and spoke in code, and so the simplest, lamest ironies were fond and funny.

She drew her glass away when I swung up the bottle to fill it again.

"Don't. If we haven't drunk it all, we'll have some for later."

I did not protest that it would be flat by then. I was reassured by the hope in her using the word "later."

"And I know when I've had enough," she said, and laughed
as she always did when she was consciously quoting one of her mother's nagging mottoes. "Let's be off."

She then got a slender knife from the drawer and stuck it into the bottle of champagne, its blade just penetrating the wine.

"That'll keep it fizzy."

I helped her on with her raincoat that was still damp from her walk from the station, and I got a pang when I saw the worn patch at the edge of the collar—the seriousness of work clothes, her stoicism, it was all so solemn; and nothing made me sadder than her frugality, because it seemed so brave and futile.

So I hugged her, to console myself, and she accepted the embrace at first, then resisted—stiffened, almost fending me off.

"That's enough of that."

She led the way through the foyer, and passing the chair next to the telephone on its small table, the stack of envelopes, she said, "What's that?"

"Christmas cards."

"Of course," she said, her voice going small.

I went to kiss her cheek in the doorway, and she drew away, lifted her cheek to deflect the kiss, making my kiss seem like something insincere, almost a betrayal. I thought she was going to cry again, but instead she snorted and clapped her gloved hands.

"I hate January," she said.

There was no snow, only the cold rain that had fallen on the city, giving it the pasty gleam of boot polish, and a clear sky, tattered clouds rushing under the stars, and above it all a blackness. The wind harried the branches of the leafless plane trees at the edge of the common, and for once I regretted the cold and the blackness and the damp streets and the foretaste of frost in the air.

"What is it?" Jutta asked. She always knew when I had something on my mind.

"I was thinking: bad weather in a place always makes me remember."

"Yes. Whenever I think of Singapore I remember the flooded culvert on Bukit Timah Road," she said. "Or the way that sun faded everything we owned."

"We were so poor," I said.

"What did it matter?"

"I hated it. Taking the bus. Being frugal. Feeling like a victim."

"God, you sound so pathetic!"

She punched my shoulder and I laughed, and we held hands and walked across the common, stepping around the puddles, passing under the tall iron lampposts, and the skeletal hawthorns, and a wooden-slatted bench that had been wrecked by vandals. The restaurant, the Orangery, was on the south side of the common, and on this weekday night in January it was less than half full. Steam had condensed on the plate-glass windows and it was drafty, a chill in the air, the way all large rooms seemed to me in the winter in London.

"Would it be all right if we sat over there near the radiator?"

"Absolutely."

"Nice to see you again, sir," the waiter said to me, showing us to the table I had indicated.

He left us with a menu and the wine list, and after he had gone, I said, "When I worked at a restaurant, that was something we were taught not to say. 'Don't recognize the man. Don't say his name if he's with a woman. Maybe he told her his name was Smith, and you just called him Jones. Maybe he's with his wife tonight and told her he'd never been here before.'"

"That's paranoia."

"It's politeness. And it's saved some marriages."

Jutta looked rueful, she went quiet. Then she said sharply, "Have you ever been here with anyone else?"

"No."

"You can tell me the truth, Andreas. What difference can it make now?"

"That's the truth," I said.

It was, and it bothered me that it did not matter anymore to her. A stranger would have guessed that she was looking at the wine list. I knew that she was not reading anything, not looking at it, just brooding in a sudden mood of gloom.

"I hate it when you say my name like that. It sounds so hostile."

"More paranoia," she said.

The waiter had appeared behind me, making me glad that I had not said anything awkward. I was thinking: I don't want to remember everything, especially of this, and I realized, while I was regretting that we were here at this meal, she was regretting it too, and that was what she was thinking when she seemed to be staring at the wine list.

"Something to drink?" the waiter asked.

"A bottle of champagne," I said. "The Veuve Clicquot will be fine. Number twenty-two."

Jutta said, "Are you sure you want a whole bottle? They have halves of the Laurent-Perrier."

"I'm sure," I said, not to her but to the waiter, who hurried away mumbling with insincere servility that came out sounding pompous.

"You'll have to drink the lion's share."

"As the only lion here, that is the most natural thing for me to do."

The waiter brought the bucket first and then the bottle, and he made a production of wrapping it in a napkin and
easing out the cork with his thumbs. All of it was meaningless ritual after that—the pouring of a mouthful, the tasting, my saying, "Fine."

"Celebrating?" he said, as he filled the glasses.

"Yes," I said.

"No," Jutta said.

Smiling in confusion, he went away without taking our orders, and a moment later reappeared, apologizing, and recited the night's specials.

"How do you know that sticking a knife into a bottle of champagne keeps it fizzy?" I asked her.

"Stabbing anything keeps it fizzy," she said. "You of all people should know that."

I said, "How about splitting the bouillabaisse?"

On the menu it said:
For two persons.

"I'd rather not," Jutta said, and it sounded as if she were reproaching me by asserting her independence.

"Leek soup and quail for me," I said to the waiter.

"I'll have the kipper pâté and the eggplant."

I said, "When it comes you can say, 'I'm the stuffed eggplant.'"

She smiled a little but became serious again and said, "So what are we celebrating?"

She seemed angry, and I began to regret that I had urged her to drink champagne at home, fearful that she might cry, or even shout. I shook my head so as not to excite her. Anything I said in reply might be regarded as a provocation.

"Those weren't Christmas cards," she said. "I know what they were. Change-of-address cards. I'm right, aren't I?"

"Please," I said, to calm her, and then: "Let's talk about something else."

"There is nothing else. I hated those cards."

"There's nothing odd about moving, darling."