The Light of Amsterdam (25 page)

She smiled at his description but it was also true that she had let so many parts of her life be governed, if not by fear, then by apprehension and anxiety. Even that trip to Disney. It was a weight that wearied her and she told herself that after this day she would throw it off and walk lighter, do what had to be done to free the future for them. The shared memory of the children was a tender moment between them and underlying his teasing playfulness was a gentleness that she valued in him. She could never be with anyone who was aggressive or any kind of threat to her or her children. He had been a good father, generous and tolerant, only working up to formal rebukes of his children when she had considered it necessary and not dragging it out, or ever being petty or vindictive. She struggled to remember when he had ever displayed any form of anger to her and couldn't do so and thought that the worst she could say about him was that he was a little stuck in his ways and occasionally capable of being stubborn when he thought he was in the right. Did he desire her? She wasn't sure. The times when he came to her were not predictable or regular and she didn't know if it was less or more than couples who were married as long as they had been. And did he come out of desire or out of simple impersonal need? She wondered if any woman could ever know this, then wondered, too, if it really mattered so long as he came.

As they sat at the window of the café the sun set his face in sharp definition. The grey hairs at his temples were thickening and stretching ever higher, some of the frown lines on his forehead deepening. In places the years of working outdoors had blemished his skin slightly and on his right cheekbone there was a stippled cluster of red dots that she had never noticed before, like dots of rust on the leaf of a plant. The light seemed, too, to drain some of the colour from his eyes so that they were rendered pellucid, strangely lifeless. Suddenly she was struck by the fear that he might be ill and, reaching out her hand between the cups, laid it on the back of his. She was conscious of how little it covered, the broad fingers that outstretched hers.

‘How are you feeling, Richard? You look a little tired. Are you all right? In yourself.'

‘Have you been getting the health insurance policies out? I feel fine.'

‘You'd always tell me if there was anything wrong, wouldn't you?'

‘Of course but there's nothing wrong, Marion. Nothing I know about and it's good to get away like this – a change is as good as a rest. We should try and get away more often.'

‘I'd like that,' she said, taking her hand back again, glad that the sun had weakened and almost faded.

‘But you're not doing my health any good by bringing me in places like this and buying me chocolate cake.'

‘You've some on the corner of your mouth.'

She watched him dab at it with a napkin and then had to direct him by pointing at the place on her own face, nodding when he had succeeded. The moment made him look boyish despite the slant of sun that a few seconds earlier had suddenly and surprisingly etched his age on his face. Was what she was going to do an act of unspeakable foolishness or the thing that would help both of them in their future lives? She had another pulse of doubt and then she remembered the young women in the gym punishing themselves by eternally trying to run towards what they wanted to be. How was this so very different? It seemed a shortcut, the pain not drawn out or even perhaps meaning so much as others might think, and what meaning did it really have except the meaning you chose to give it?

They walked on to Dam Square and later on had lunch in one of the cafés in a shopping precinct that they didn't remember from previous trips, built in the shell of an older building. On their journey back to the hotel they collected the nativity scene and she wondered what it would be like to sell nothing but Christmas goods all year round and wondered also how many of her trees had been bought in her absence. It was complicated to get the figures right, in knowing how to balance out harvesting and planting, how to meet the requirements to qualify for government grants. Sometimes she wondered if the grants were worth the laborious tedium of the paperwork. Before they went home she would tell him about the black Christmas trees. About the black Christmas trees and not going back to the gym. This would be a special Christmas and she looked forward with pleasure to having all her family back home and under one roof. There would be presents for everyone and a cheque for each of their children given inside a card. She, however, had always hated getting money at Christmas, no matter how penurious her finances. There was no mystery, no magic in money. You couldn't unwrap money or weigh it in your hands with touch and anticipation perfectly synchronised and even when that same anticipation proved an anticlimax it couldn't entirely erase the previous pleasure of imagining.

She would set the nativity scene on the hall table where it could also be seen from the living room. Although she wasn't religious she liked the idea of refinding some connection with that part of the celebration. In recent years as the stresses of the event seemed magnified and exacerbated she had begun to wonder if it was all worth it and privately to long for something simpler and more in keeping with the memories she had from the past. Often, too, she felt she was part of that pressure through their business. No one, apart from the fanatics, bought garden plants in December so it was necessary to supplement their normal trade with the sale of trees and Christmas fare but she wished that some of it could be less tacky. She had liked the nativity set because it wasn't over-elaborate and had a plain simplicity in its carved wooden figures, unlike some of the others which in her eyes looked like the garish, grotesque replication of some grotto. The grandchildren could play with the figures, rearrange the scene how they wished and nothing would get broken.

 

 

On their way to the Van Gogh Museum Jack stopped at a shop that sold all sorts of herbal and legal highs and he watched uncomfortably as his son pressed his face against the glass to read the content descriptions and the promised, mostly ecstatic, effects produced. It reminded him of the small amount of cannabis that Susan had found in his bedside table and the late-night phone-call summons to the house where he had found her on the edge of hysteria constructing a future image of their son as a professional smackhead. They had their confrontation with Jack in the kitchen while outside moths pinged themselves against the lighted windows and Jack was initially unrepentant and assumed a favoured default position that everyone did it, just as everyone illegally downloaded music, spent lots of time on their computers and got drunk every now and again. With Susan relentless in her pursuit of supplier and threatening to call the police and everyone just short of the FBI, he had eventually steered them both into a calm-bringing admission that it was really only an experiment and their son didn't have a habit or want to get into it big time. The price his mother had imposed was regular searches under the guise of cleaning and the equally regular leaving of newspaper articles on his desk about the brain-frying dangers of its use. So as Jack actually smudged the glass with his nose he felt an unease stirring and a relief that Susan wasn't there to see their son's interest.

That night after Jack had received their admonition and what they believed was wise parental counsel and skulked off to his bedroom with the body language of the aggrieved party, Susan had cried a little and thanked him for coming over. She had made them coffee and as of old they had sat at the kitchen table over which so much of the conversation of their lives had crossed. He had reached out a consoling hand to rest on her shoulder and she had patted the back of his hand and for a second he dared to hope but almost immediately she had stood up, excused by the need of a tissue.

‘The drugs don't work, Jack,' he said lightly as he, too, examined the window's content, wondering if the promised highs were merely the product of imagination but momentarily admiring the caption writer's ability to euphemistically capture the supposed pleasure-enhancing qualities of the goods.

‘What's that?' Jack asked, indicating something which took a few seconds of further pointing to locate.

‘It's some kind of mushroom extract.'

‘Weird.'

He didn't know whether Jack's ‘weird' was a good or a bad thing but he deliberately glanced at his watch to try and register his desire to move on while privately wondering what psychoactives were.

‘Probably mushes up your brain into a kind of fungus. I'd stick to mushroom soup out of a tin.'

‘What's that?' This time he was pointing to some complex piece of piping that looked like it should belong in a science laboratory.

‘I don't know, Jack, I really don't know.'

‘Look – they have hemp lollipops,' he said, giggling, with his bobbing head in danger of bumping the glass.

He didn't know what to say so he repeated lifelessly, ‘The drugs don't work.' Then as an afterthought, ‘Life's got enough crazy things of its own to screw your head up without helping it.'

Jack turned and looked at him, his reflection angled on the glass in the winter sun so for a second it appeared as if there were two of him.

‘You must have tried stuff when you came here. When you were young.'

‘No I didn't and I suppose that makes me even more boring. I was never interested in any of this stuff; it just never appealed to me,' he answered, unsure if his son believed him and secretly wondering if his advice might have had greater resonance if it sprang from the well of experience, instead of, as he suspected, making him look like a dried-up puritan.

‘All hippies smoked dope,' Jack said, stepping away from his reflection until he cancelled out his other self.

‘I was a hippy only in my head and anyway I came at the end of all that stuff so I wasn't actually part of it.'

Jack's phone beeped a text message and for the next few minutes his thumb was the hammer on a rapidly firing gun. As he stood and watched he thought about how often his son was in remote but intimate communication with someone and couldn't decide whether it was a good or a bad thing. Then memories of how often at the same age he had felt cut off from others crowded in, and of the long slow nights in a box bedroom listening to singer-songwriter angst which had only served to intensify his own. When he had come the first time to Amsterdam there had been young people with guitars in Vondelpark playing Neil Young songs and crazy guys with bongo drums beating out endless rhythms. Jack's head was bent over the phone and his total concentration allowed him to look at his son unseen. The paleness of his skin against the forced blackness of his hair once again struck him as did his son's thinness and the delicacy of his hands. His own were clumpy, thick in the fingers, the tips almost square like chisels. He was also increasingly aware that his son seemed to suffer from occasional twitches and tics, inexplicable little physical stutters that came and went in the blink of an eye.

They walked on and as they headed back towards the Leidseplein he forced himself to concede that he probably was still a bit of an abstainer. And although he no longer cherished a religious faith perhaps it was the legacy of his childhood and all those years sitting looking at the text that spoke of the beauty of holiness and never being sure what was holy and what wasn't. So whether Jack believed him or not it was the truth and although he really wanted to, he knew he couldn't start to expound on all the things that gave him a high. Music, books, films and art in all its forms. That's what did it for him. And women of course although this was an area in which he would have been more than willing to be less abstemious if the opportunities had only presented themselves. There had been a girl of course – an American student from Chicago – with whom he had spent some time in exploring the city but it hadn't amounted to much more than two slightly nervous young people chastely clinging to each other momentarily in the face of the unfamiliar.

But as he turned away from Jack to afford him some privacy he still wondered what messages shot back and forth across the ether. Then it came back to him, the night as a small boy when he had arranged to signal with torches to his friend who lived in the next street and whose bedroom was just visible. At precisely eleven o'clock when they were supposed to be fast asleep they had flashed their torches in the darkness, thrilled briefly by the returning signals and transported for a little while to the world of the Famous Five or stories about spies, but then both realised that they had no code, no way of actually talking to each other and after a few minutes they had given up as the excitement slowly drained away. Still, there was something touchingly sentimental and poignant about the memory, the image of the torches flashing secretly and mysteriously through the darkness, across the sleeping gardens and the deserted streets.

‘Is it much further?' Jack asked in a little boy's voice after they had walked on for a while in the face of a wind that was strengthening and becoming sharp-edged.

‘About five minutes. Why don't you put your jacket on – it's getting chilly.'

‘I'm all right,' he said, shrugging his shoulders as if to brush off the intimate touch of the cold. But the wind tousled his hair and flipped strands across one of his eyes.

And so they trudged on towards the open, windblown spaces of the Museumplein where a small demonstration of some sort was taking place with an assortment of streaming banners and flags and huddled groups of mostly young people. Close to the Van Gogh Museum there was a group of five men in ponchos playing ‘Quanta La Mera' on pan pipes and a large sombrero on the ground to collect donations. It must have been an unsuccessful afternoon because the wind was able to move it before the restraining foot of one of the players trapped it in place. It was the first time he'd managed to enter the museum without having to join a queue but going through the doors he promised Jack that they wouldn't spend too long before moving on.