Portobello Notebook (3 page)

SHE WAS GOING
into her house as he passed by, so he called her name. But instead of just saying Hello, she said, ‘Are you coming in for a cup of tea?’

‘I won’t, thanks.’

‘Come on. I want to show you my new work.’

No escape. He followed her upstairs. ‘How’s Raymond?’

She shrugged her back, turned a Chubb key in the door. ‘He’s gone.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

She turned a Yale key, stepped into her flat, turned on the light. Her hair was dull. There were the first signs of crimp lines in her upper lip. She was like a daffodil a few days after its bloom. She dropped her coat on a chair, sat on it and said suddenly, ‘I’m fucked.’

‘No you’re not.’

‘You don’t know what it’s like out there.’

As he listened, he was working out her age. She had been twenty when he’d first met her … she’d be forty-two or three now. She breathed out an air of failure, which bored him. She was looking at him as he talked, so he couldn’t look at his watch. He looked about the room, as if admiring her paintings. No clock.

She followed his look. ‘What do you think?’

‘Are they new?’

She got up, and he glanced at his watch. Ten. He’d have to stay at least half an hour.

‘These ones are.’

He stood behind her and looked down at the grey roots in her hair.

‘What do you think?’

He looked at the pictures. They were almost good. ‘They’re different,’ he said. But he wasn’t getting away that easily.

She said, ‘I like this one.’

He looked at it. She couldn’t draw. She just laid on the paint and hoped it would obey her feelings. He said, ‘Where’s that? It looks familiar.’

As she told him where, he looked at the pretty little things decorating her room. An old silver inkwell. A da Vinci cherub. That was her idea of art, of life. On the table was a sewing box, and a length of silk she was turning into an arty dress. She loved art; she loved men.

‘What did Raymond think of them?’

‘He liked these sky studies best.’ She moved to another wall and he followed. She stood looking at the pictures, waiting for him to speak. It was the pretentiousness he disliked most, her refusal to simply look at the sky and try to put it down on paper. But she was simple-minded too – she thought art must be different, special, removed from vulgar life. So she chose men who were different,
special, removed from vulgar life. But at forty, that type of single man was a drifter. And they left. She turned to him. He looked at one of the pictures. ‘I like that cloud.’

‘Do you? That’s the one he preferred.’

‘And still he left.’

‘And still he left.’ She smiled. ‘The bastard.’

‘Still, you were together a good while.’

‘Only a year.’

‘Maybe it was enough.’

‘It’s not. I can’t stand living on my own. You go loopy. You dry up when you’re living alone. I need somebody.’

How could she imagine these affairs would last? But her idea remained the same: part-time waitress work in little restaurants, painting in her free time, making nice dinners in the evening,
chatting
with Raymond about art while she ran up a bolero jacket from a remnant of black satin, then going to bed and making love.

Raymond had run off with a woman who liked watching TV soaps, who didn’t object to white sliced bread, who had no fucking sewing box.

‘There’ll be another. There always has been, hasn’t there?’

‘It’s getting harder.’ She led the way to the two armchairs by the fireplace. Her voice wasn’t as fey as it once had been. She was becoming what she had despised: ordinary. Her voice was tougher, she spoke naturally, as if simply saying aloud what she thought as she sat alone in this flat at night. ‘I’m too soft with my men. I see other women – they nail the guy down, they get pregnant, they take out a mortgage, stop them from drifting off …’ Half joking, but half serious.

He smiled. ‘Why not try that next time?’

They had been lovers once, so long ago that the memories had detached. It seemed to him now that it was someone else who
had longed for her, waited for her, watched her flirt with smarter boys. She was still the bourgeois bohemian, he thought, her feet planted on the ground, reaching up for the high fruit – drinking with the musician after the concert, going backstage after the play. He wanted to say, ‘You’re not a painter, forget art, get a guy who has a good job, watch TV together in the evening …’ He didn’t, he knew she couldn’t change now. She had grown into an idea of herself. Some deep want of confidence, some sense just as deep of being special had turned her into this tight-skinned, thin, lonely woman staring straight ahead at middle age.

He looked at his watch – only a quarter past – as she got up again, to make tea, to prolong his stay. She set out a dainty cream china teapot in the shape of a seashell, a Georgian sugar spoon. The wind rattled the window. Absently, she took an old, stained tea cloth and twisted it roughly like a rope, then wedged it between the upper and lower window sashes to keep out the draught. Looking at her pursed lips, he could imagine her talking to herself when she was alone. The phone rang.

‘Hello … no. Just a friend …’ She turned her back to him.

He looked out at the moon cutting through grey cloud.

‘… OK.’ She put down the phone. ‘That’s him.’

‘Raymond?’

‘He wanted to know was I alone. He wants to call around.’

‘Where’s his new woman?’

‘She’s away. He said he’s lonely. He wants to talk.’

He stood up. The sadness of it wiped out his relief to be escaping.

‘There’s no rush.’ She sat down. ‘Take your tea.’

He played his part, sat talking for half an hour, to make Raymond a little jealous. Her face took on colour. When he kissed her cheek goodbye her eyes were bright. Down in the street, he
looked up at her flat, and saw a light come on in the bedroom. She would be tying some piece of rose silk about her neck, preparing for battle. Then he thought of the stained, twisted tea cloth, her pursed lips as she wedged it down between the sashes – the first crude, real and simple thing he had ever seen her do.

She might win yet. Anything was possible. He looked up at the moon, sailing free across the sky, and felt suddenly jealous as he walked home.

AS HIS MOTHER
grew old she went out less often. She took a taxi to the doctor, the hairdresser, the chiropodist. On Saturday evenings he drove her to Mass. When he had told her, twenty-five years ago, that he no longer went to Mass, she had cried as she had cried when her own mother was dying; helpless tears. Now she accepted it as a cranky form of independence, as she accepted her swollen knuckles, living alone, or the tablets she had to take for her heart.

He reached into the back seat for the rug, the old plaid they had used to sit on at picnics, and she laid it on her knees. She noticed a darn in it, and he explained that his wife had mended a tear their children had made. She rubbed the darn with the backs of her fingers, making it woolly so it blended with the rest, and said her mother had taught her that. What once might have bored or irritated him brought peaceful warm conversation now. Since her husband had died she had found her own little ways of
independence. She didn’t go out because she didn’t want to. She wore what was comfortable – a man’s quilted green jacket over her cardigan this evening, and a threadbare bit of silk to hide her withered neck. Once so timid and genteel, a countrywoman uneasy in this bourgeois suburb, now she spoke her mind more easily, said what was spontaneous.

‘Look.’ She nodded at the two old bachelor brothers out walking their Scottie dog.

‘Look at them talking. You’d think they hadn’t met for years.’

‘The heavenly twins,’ he said, and she laughed.

He drove down the wide road between the lime and chestnut trees, turned right at the traffic lights. She looked in the gourmet grocery shop window at the checkout girls.

‘Can you see Pauline?’

‘There, at the end.’

‘I see her, the blonde mop. We’ll stop on the way home. Remind me to get the
Guide
.’

Her routine of Mass and shopping no longer smothered him; approaching death had set it in a wider frame. He drove under the black-stone railway bridge, turned right again up the narrow road of red-brick houses between cars parked bonnet to boot on either side. He had to stop in the middle of the road. ‘I’ll be back in a hour.’

‘Do you know what you could do – go up to the park and get me a few sticks for the fire. I love the smell of them.’ She folded the rug and put it on the back seat, then she put her feet out awkwardly on the road, muttering, ‘I’m like a giraffe.’ The way she walked slowly to the porch, dipped her bent fingers in the holy water and blessed herself made even the big crude granite church seem
beautiful
. It made him want to park the car and follow her inside. But he had tried that, and found it still led back to the enclosed world
he had escaped. He had to forage for scraps outside. He took short cuts up the familiar old roads, past the park – that cranky
independence
– down to where the river flowed between a playing field and a steep wooded slope.

The smell of half-dead water and the damp sandy clay brought memories. As he walked upstream, he remembered the children from the flats swimming in their mothers’ saggy bloomers in summer time; a day he and his brother had invited them home, and his vague uneasy feeling that something was wrong as the children had trooped upstairs. He stood to watch a heron in the shallows. The memories flowed past like the river. He looked at the heron’s grey shoulders and yellow-streaked breast, the water sliding by its long pale-brown legs, the purplish alder and light-green willow trees reflected in the surface, all as still as the pale-blue evening sky. It was like a glass pane. On the other side, in death, he would be there. He felt no fear, instead a peaceful joy. Breathing in the feeling, reverent as his mother returning from Communion, he walked back slowly to his car.

THERE WAS
a cheer from the playing field. A soccer match had ended. Two teams of middle-aged men were making for the ship’s container used as a changing room. The few people along the touch lines were straggling away. He glanced at one of them – head hunched, hands cupped, taking a light for a cigarette from another. He hesitated, but then Tom glanced up and saw him, and he crossed the rough wet grass.

‘Tom. Where did you spring from?’ It came out wrong, the wrong tone in his voice. Quickly he held out his hand.

‘I saw you passing – I was thinking it was you.’ Deliberately slowly, Tom put his cigarette between his lips, then shook hands. His face opened, then it was cold again. He turned to the man
beside him and said, ‘I’ll see you,’ and the man walked away.

‘A long time.’ He got the sweet smell of beer from Tom’s breath. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Thailand. Did I not send you a card?’

‘When did you get back?’

‘There a few months ago.’

‘And where are you staying?’ Already he was watchful.

‘In a hostel.’

He didn’t reply. Tom picked up his unease, and as if well used to that he withdrew into silence. Together they walked down to the river and stood looking at its silent swift flow. An electric-blue flash, a kingfisher, flew upstream.

‘You always see something if you stand still.’

‘I do plenty of that.’ His Munster accent rippled through the standard tone.

How had he become a drifter? How had someone with the pick of beautiful girls when he was young ended up alone? At a distance, he knew the answer. At odds with his father, Tom had left home as a boy, and now his parents were dead he drifted like the twigs and leaves on the river. It was still in his face: the
unforgiving
look of someone who had known narrow country ways. But as always when he was with him, that answer failed. It was more than that. Tom was as determined in his own way as he. Drifted, maybe, but so had the bog-water trickles and mountain streams that formed this river. He was a man in his own right.

‘Which way are you going?’

‘I have to collect my mother from Mass.’

‘Have you time for a drink?’ Tensed like a cat, ready to go at the first hint.

‘Just a quick one.’ He looked at the thin yellow face, the dark hollows under his eyes, the thin-rimmed glasses, the grey hair
sleeked and slightly too long at the back, the beautiful hands. His fingertips moved all the time against his thumb, as if cleaning them. The sleeves of his jacket were too long.

They walked together up to the road, then down to join the riverbank again. In the calm taut water above the fall, a cormorant surfaced, its bill tilted like a bayonet, its black back shining like oil.

‘Look at him.’

‘I saw him earlier, with an eel as big as himself.’

‘I bet you it didn’t get away.’

Tom smiled. ‘It didn’t.’

‘Do you ever see any of the old crowd now?’

‘Strange, I ran into Terry Hunt. He asked me to dinner.’

‘I heard he was home. Nice place?’

‘I never got there. He had some appointment.’ Watching the cormorant sail high in the water, Tom added – that smile again,

‘We had a burger in McDonald’s.’

He led and Tom followed without question down the path to the foot of the fall, where they watched the foaming water settle and run smooth.

‘What’s the hostel like?’

‘OK. You have your own room.’

‘No girlfriend?’

‘Here? Are you joking?’

‘Any jobs coming up?’

‘I don’t want one. I’m tired of it.’ Tom’s eyes fixed on the river, following its flow down to a bed of gravel, where it broke into rough white again.

He knew that life; he had tasted it once when they had worked together abroad. The novelty-excitement energy, endless as the river – teaching English all day, drinking and talking all night – art, politics, religion, sex – until his throat was raw. He had come
home, refreshed; Tom had gone on – Bahrain, Bangkok, always further east. He had rung late one night a few years ago, drunk: ‘I’m in bed with a beautiful girl. Her name’s Nag. Do you want to talk to her?’ There was rustling, sighing, and then a sleepy girl’s voice had said, ‘Hello.’ Since then there had been silence.

‘And what’ll you do?’

Tom shrugged. In his silence he could hear the cry: Take me home. They stood to watch the cormorant bob past on the fast water and vanish under the bridge. Together they walked along the path to the pub’s car park.

Tom led the way inside, as easy as the cormorant in the river – and as alert. He glanced down the counter, saw the man he had been with at the football match, and coldly turned away.

‘What’ll you have?’

‘Just a glass.’

‘That’d only bother you.’ Tom called for two pints. His beer went down as always in half a dozen swallows.

‘Why not do one last stint abroad? A few years in Saudi, and you’d have enough for the deposit on a flat.’

‘I can’t stand Saudi.’

‘Were you there? You didn’t save?’

‘I used to go to Thailand for the holidays.’ The line, deep as a weal on either side of his mouth, tightened about his smile.
Aloneness
surrounded him, like the static light when you pull off a shirt in the dark.

So long he had been doing it, so long. The drive always longer than expected, from the airport to the new school. The bare newly cleaned apartment. The first-night drink. Then the first classes, the front-row pupils well reared and ambitious. The troublemakers sat in the middle, yawning. The slow ones sat at the back, smiling and hiding from the light. The weak were nice, the strong were not
– life was so simple a child could understand it. Then suddenly it was the end of term: parties, students queuing to take his photo and ask for his address. And never writing. And the faces he had grown used to fading, and in a month forgotten. And then Tom was home to Ireland, where he had no home, which drove him abroad again.

He glanced at his watch as he raised his glass, preparing his escape. Tom saw the look and reached into his pocket again. ‘One more.’ He stood an inch too close.

He could feel his loneliness, like the chill when you open a fridge door. ‘I can’t, Tom. My mother will be waiting.’

‘Won’t she be lighting candles for a while?’

‘Here.’ He put some money on the counter. As he left, he saw the man at the end of the counter glide down to sit beside Tom. His guilt cleared. He knew they would be there till closing time. Who cared about art, politics, religion, sex? Any talk would do, talk and drink, until they were on the warm wave, drifting away from it all. Tom would drink until he was speechless and could only gesture, and then even his hands would be still.

Outside it was almost dark. He made his way along the path by the murmuring river and up by the waterfall’s roar – then he stopped. He couldn’t leave him like that. Say he brought him back to his mother’s for an hour? He could see it through Tom’s eyes: helping with the shopping of an old woman who was taking him home. Home: a place where a fire was kept alight always, a place where you could be tender, off guard. She would sit him at the fire, built up before Mass and burning bright now. No, he wouldn’t take a drink. Would he like tea? And a boiled egg? How did he like it? And the face, hardened by years in foreign-teacher compounds, by mean jobs and cheap affairs, would open into a boy’s smile and say, ‘Just getting firm, thanks.’ He would look up at her as she poured
the tea, look at everything – the holy pictures and photos on the mantelpiece, the pink knitted egg cosy and the striped knitted tea cosy, the small buttered slices of homemade bread, the little knife with the blackened bone handle and the tea spoon she had taken from the Great Southern Hotel – like a stranger in a foreign land.

He couldn’t – if he did that, Tom would never go. He couldn’t – any more than he could go with his mother to Mass. He went on walking up the muddy path. Startled, the heron rose from the shadows, flapping its big grey silent wings, its long legs trailing as if broken, giving its cranking cry as it glided through the yellow light spilling from the pub windows, and dropped out of sight again. As suddenly he saw the evening ahead: leaving his mother at the gate, sitting for a minute in the car until she was inside, and then driving away. As he went he gathered dead sticks, a withered bough of ivy that would burn with sweet smoke for her that night.