Portobello Notebook (8 page)

Shaking his head, smiling again, Alex stood up. ‘I’ll get more wine.’ He stopped at the door. ‘Would you like some chocolate?’

Maybe the chocolate remark did it. As the front door closed, she pulled her dress open. ‘What do you think?’ Desire didn’t come into it, I knew. It was a last spit in the face of the past.

She had found her limits, he had found his way home. They faded into the general scene like other neighbours, like other wrongs done. Standing at the window one day, looking out at a downpour blister the pavement white, gush from drainpipes and flow in shining sheets across the street, I thought of old neighbours who had passed on. I had come to know others, but not so well, and hardly noticed when they too passed out of sight – the small blonde woman no longer cycled by with the fat boy on the back carrier – but when I did notice, I missed them all the more. I was
part of this place. When Alex approached one morning, he put a hand on mine as he spoke.

‘Triona’s not well. If you want to see her, you should call soon.’ He said the word, ‘cancer’. When I had finished work that evening I went over with some flowers.

The way he first took them into the kitchen and put them in water reminded me of that long-ago orderly world. The door of memory opened, it wouldn’t close. As we went upstairs to a large bright bedroom, I remembered that it had once been her
workroom
. The bed was luxuriously double, with white soft pillows, white starched sheets. She was lying on it like a queen, the cover thrown back, her knees up, watching a bedside TV. She wore pearl-grey silk pyjamas. Her hair was cut short, which suited her. Her face had the yellow of an expensive suntan. Her eyes were bright, from morphine.

‘Triona.’ I said. ‘You look great.’

‘I sleep all day. You came at just the right time.’ She put her arms behind her head, rested one leg sideways on a knee. Evening sunlight came in the window. There was a roof garden outside, a patch of gravel with a small olive tree in a big earthen pot.

‘You’ve done a lot with it.’

‘Alex is good like that.’ She wriggled her toes in the gold beam of sun.

I knew that I wouldn’t see her again, but I said it again. ‘You look great.’

‘Better light a candle anyway,’ Alex murmured as we went downstairs.

‘Who’s her favourite saint?’

‘Augustine? Remember his remark?’ He gave a smile, keeping the good side out. ‘Chastity, God, but not yet.’

I COULDN’T
mention it then. It wasn’t the right time. There never would be a right time, I knew. It will be always between us. I could feel it like the night air as we left the bar and crossed the car park and walked along the canal lit bright by traffic crawling bumper to bumper into town.

I WENT UP
to the club on Sunday evening and watched the end of a game. Jack was there, and Eddie, and afterwards we sat in the bar. Jack told us about his son. Eddie went on about his wife. Then Rogers joined us – I hardly know him but he included me in a round. Soon we were on that magical drink when everything grows clear and warm. He began to talk.

HE DEALT
in dreams with lonely women. They had the dream already; all he had to do was listen. All the dreams were the same: love.

He met her at a party. Her name was Madeleine. She was French. She wore a white silk scarf; a thin cream pullover scarcely tautened by her breasts. Her hair was short, tinted. She was in her forties, he guessed. She danced badly, but at his age it was a relief not to dance, so they stood against the wall and talked. She had been living in the west of Ireland; she was interested in folklore.
He was tortured by beautiful women squeezing past.

Around midnight the older guests began to leave, the younger ones turned up the music and serious dancing began. Now it was too noisy to talk. He said he was going, and asked if she was going too. Her eyes were blank as she agreed. He felt sad as she appeared down the stairs wearing a wheat-coloured woollen poncho and a large white knitted peaked cap.

They walked through the dark cold streets to where she lived. There was something wrong about her, a stiff unease, but when she smiled her face was natural for a moment, like the glimpse of throat above her silk scarf. She talked of Sheela-na-gigs, pagan rites suppressed by the Catholic Church, feminine wisdom passed on by old women, and other things he had no interest in.
Stragglers
from an English hen party passed by: drunken girls in
miniskirts
and wedding veils, one of them waving a phallus-shaped balloon. Through their laughter, the clatter of their high heels on the cobblestones, Madeleine described a stone cross carved with dolphins she had seen in the west of Ireland. She was interested in writing about these symbols from ancient mythology taken over by the Church. At last, in a street running down to the river, she stopped outside a Georgian house. He wasn’t disappointed when she didn’t ask him in. He kissed her cheek, said they must meet someday.

‘When?’ Her face was bright.

‘Some day I’m passing, I’ll knock on your door.’

She didn’t like that Irish casual habit. She preferred a phone call, even half an hour before. It was only good manners. She wrote her number down.

He still had dreams of fleshy, handsome, peaceful women. But he hadn’t found any. He had some revenge in disappointing other women’s dreams of love. He phoned, a couple of weeks later, one
long afternoon. She invited him to her flat the next Saturday at 11 am. He couldn’t remember when he’d had a date in the morning.

He rang the bell, her voice answered at once, and the street door was buzzed open. Inside, a woman was cleaning the hall. The lift smelled of lilac air freshener, its bright mirror walls reflected every failing in his face. From the top corridor windows there was a view across rooftops to the sunlit gentle shapes of the Dublin hills.

In daylight her brushed short hair seemed smooth as lacquer, her make-up was delicate and pale as the silk scarf about her throat. He stepped onto a carpet the colour of magnolia, so clean he felt he should take off his shoes. But he wasn’t sure about his socks, so he sat at once on the couch, a taut white oblong. There were paintings on the walls that seemed good enough to be in public galleries. He admired a cubist nude, saying it had a look of Braque, and she said that an uncle had left it to her in his will. There was an air of money, and inherited good manners. She gave him a
coffee-table
book while she went to the kitchen – a galley of light wood and steel. The book was on pagan religions; he was admiring a bare-breasted Bacchante when she returned with a tray. He shut the book and helped her to set china on a small glass table. He felt a tension when she sat beside him on the couch.

She talked, he listened. Her mother had reared her in Paris; her parents had divorced when she was a child. Her mother still had love affairs, dramatic, like opera. Madeleine had worked as a model, then as a dress designer for a fashion house. She had lived with a man for years, then it had ended, everything of her old life had ended in a car crash. She had almost died. After that year in hospital, her life had changed from a physical to a spiritual one. That was why she had come to live in the west of Ireland. She rested her back against the couch.

Now he had to reply – nothing committal, but not too detached
either. Her story wasn’t the sort he was used to. He settled for banality with an intimate smile. ‘How did you like the west?’

‘The people seemed friendly at first, when you met them in pubs. But behind that I found them cold. You got so far, then that was the end of it. They never invited you to their homes.’

He agreed, saying that country people lived with their families. She said that Dublin seemed to be the same. He said the young were different, but at this age in life – he smiled again – most people had settled down in pairs. She talked of other cities she had lived in, where adults didn’t just live between home and pubs. He wondered why she had left those cities, if her life had been any different before the crash. He said Dublin was partly a city and partly a provincial town.

The phone rang. She went to answer. He understood now the reason for her stiff-backed walk. She spoke in the same distant friendly tone she had used with him. Sitting down again she explained that a priest she knew was coming to visit. She went to Mass in his church. She pointed to a kitsch picture of the Virgin Mary he had given her. The doorbell rang, and she introduced a Father Declan. After ten minutes’ chat with the smiling homely priest, he made some excuse and escaped.

He thought of her sometimes in the following weeks: her mended body, the loneliness that drove her from that elegant flat to sitting in churches and making friends with priests. He rang again, one wet summer evening, and as they talked she mentioned that she was writing a book. She asked if he would look at it, correct the English? Again he made an appointment to see her, this time in the afternoon.

She wore sleek black trousers, a silk white blouse with the top button open, without a scarf, and he noticed red marks like eczema on her neck. She sat beside him on the couch, at the glass
coffee table, and they looked at her script. It was about mermaids, a hundred pages of handwriting in turquoise ink. There were a few references to learned sources on the last page. It looked like a schoolgirl’s project.

‘Have you been working at it long?’

‘For years.’ She explained that the mermaid was an image of sea water, of womankind, of life. She mentioned the myth of the lady and unicorn, then talked about mermaids again. They were all images of spiritual life, of nature and rebirth …

It was a way of spending her lonely time. He pointed out a few small mistakes of idiom. As she smiled and her face grew bright, he sensed an energy in the tense body beside him; but he hesitated to put his hand on hers. He didn’t know where it would lead. She was fragile. He felt that her whole body was raw-sensitive, that even a touch of his finger would leave a mark like the red eczema on her neck. He said goodbye to the quick fling he had been reaching for. He sat back and listened patiently.

She talked of the big world of fashion and money. She knew how that world worked. If she could get backing, her book about mermaids might make a good film. She had known film-makers in Milan, New York … He knew she wouldn’t get anywhere.

In the following weeks, when she phoned him or he phoned her, he heard of the latest hurt. She had met some film-makers, they had asked her to give them a storyboard. And she had. But nothing had happened. It was typical of Ireland. In Paris, if someone said he would call you, then he called …

Wandering around town one day he came across a copy of Andersen’s mermaid tale, and he sent it to her by post. She rang to thank him, then in the same distant friendly tone mentioned that she was leaving Dublin. He felt a small surprise at her independence. She had been to the country, to take photos of some stone carving
of a mermaid, and had seen a cottage to let. It was a sign. She began talking of astrology, the stars that linked us to the universe …

He felt relieved that she was leaving, and he rang more often to ask how things were. It was only right. She was having trouble with the removal firm, she was busy seeing her things packed in crates. He smiled at her carefulness. She answered stiffly, ‘Things ought to be treated with the respect they deserve.’

When she was safely gone, he wrote to her. She replied soon after, with a photograph of her new home. As he had expected, it was no cottage: he glimpsed a peacock, a lawn running down to a river. She invited him to visit for the weekend.

She deserved to be treated with respect, he told himself as he drove down one autumn Friday evening. Wind was blowing through old trees along a lane that led to what looked like an
eighteenth-century
farmhouse. They sat in a big kitchen floored with varnished flagstones, warmed by a range, while outside the wind blew louder, and rain ran down small-paned windows set in thick walls.

She was happy there. It was the house she had always wanted. There were civilized neighbours who had already invited her to their homes … As she talked, she showed him through big square rooms with low ceilings, and he admired her cubist nude, felt a shock again before the kitsch Virgin Mary. Her study was upstairs, the desk neatly filled by those turquoise handwritten pages, pasted with photos and photocopied pictures of mermaids holding mirrors, combing their hair, reclining on their scaled fish tails. She went on talking as she prepared the dinner. She had been back to Paris. Her mother wasn’t well. Her sister was abroad, married to a diplomat. Their father didn’t keep in touch. She lit a candle on the table, and they sat down.

She wore a patchwork jacket, beautifully stitched squares of red, yellow, green. There was a buttercup leaf on the butter, a basil
leaf in the tomato soup … every detail was just right. He felt her waiting for some remark or sign that would show as precisely what his intentions were with her. He had no intentions. There were only so many times you could fall in love before the heart said
Lies
and refused to play the game any more. But when she looked at him across the candle flame, he smiled.

‘You’re good at living alone.’

‘It’s an acquired taste.’ Her smile opened a little, like a door, revealing a little of the loneliness inside.

Gently leaning forward, he asked if she had met any Irishmen she liked. Yes, she had met someone, but he had been so vague. The last time she had seen him he was still aimless, drifting about. She took a single glass of wine from the bottle he had brought. From that and the candle and the intimacy of their talk, her face took on colour and grew bright. He leaned a little closer, but her voice began to rise. Her book on mermaids could have made a good film for television. And that man she had met, who hesitated about everything – what was wrong with him? What was wrong with Irishmen? Were they afraid of their priests? Of their mothers? Of themselves? Had they any minds of their own? All her French friends here said the same. You got so far, then the Irish withdrew …

He sat back from the table as her voice rose higher still. It was almost a cry. ‘I haven’t felt like a woman since I came here. In Paris, when a man asked me out, he made me feel … like a woman!’

She stopped, as if suddenly aware of her outburst. The wind was still blowing; he heard a peacock’s scream. He offered to help with the washing up, and then with the drying. He glanced at an old timber-cased kitchen clock, and said casually, ‘Is it that time?’ She showed him to a guest room, on the ground floor.

There was delicate scented soap in a china dish, a white fleecy towel, even a bedside book. He turned out the light. All he wanted
was the peaceful dark. But as he lay in bed he heard her moving about upstairs. Her room was above his. He heard her bed creak, then heard her get out and walk the floor again. She was upset? Her damaged back was hurting her? Or was she trying to tell him that she was awake, waiting for him? The pacing and creaking went on for almost an hour. At last there was silence. Exhausted, he fell asleep.

The wind had gone next morning, and the rain. She said she was going into town, shopping, but didn’t invite him to come. She was still embarrassed by the previous night’s outburst, he thought. He said he’d enjoy a stroll about the place. He felt pure relief as her car wheels cut through pools of rainwater down the lane. Walking about the yard, he saw her attempt at gardening: a bed of cream and dark-blue pansies beaten to the clay by the storm. Ripe apples rotted amongst nettles growing tall under a tree. The sun came out, and following the sound of a river he walked along the lane.

An old woman sitting outside a cottage greeted him
Good-morning
, and he stood for a moment to chat. He said he was staying with Madeleine, but the old woman didn’t seem to know who he meant. She patted the bench, inviting him to sit. From her voice, she wasn’t local. No, she was from Eastern Europe, she said. She talked about her life’s adventures, the suffering she had seen in the war, how she had met her husband, the paths that had led to their coming together, and to settling in this corner of Ireland at last. In easy silence then they watched a spider appear in a web strung between two Michaelmas daisies growing by the porch. They smiled together as the little white daisy flowers trembled with the spider’s movement. When he looked at his watch, he saw that two hours had passed, but he sat there enjoying the autumn sun and this spirited old woman’s company.

It was afternoon when Madeleine appeared, walking stiffly down the lane. When she saw him, she stopped. He saw confusion,
and anger in her face as she came up the cottage path. Ignoring the old woman, she stood before him and said – almost cried – ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you!’