The Light of Amsterdam (27 page)

In the foyer she glanced at the clock and then walked quickly to the hotel entrance. The woman was already there at the top of the steps. She recognised her right away – the photograph hadn't lied – and she shook her hand as she said her name. It seemed important to be formal and business-like. They took each other in as quickly as good manners would allow and then discreetly she gave her the envelope which was equally discreetly slipped into the pocket of a winter coat. Perhaps she was a little older than the photograph but not by much and if anything she was glad of that, just as she was glad that her appearance was not designed to attract attention or cause embarrassment. But suddenly real and in the flesh and no longer an image on a computer that could be closed with a click, the reality of the moment pressed against her with all its rawness. The Japanese couple passed them, their opened map fluttering momentarily in the breeze like a flag. She wavered. The Japanese woman glanced over her shoulder, a tiny shimmer of curiosity in her eyes before she turned again and pressed their map into submission. It was still possible to call the whole thing off and walk away. The money didn't matter. She no longer knew what did and in that moment couldn't be sure whether she moved inside a dream or had crossed over into madness. Perhaps it wasn't Richard who was ill but herself, slowly eaten away by some malevolent and malignant sickness that had marked her out, secretly pursuing her down the road of all her years.

‘Are you sure?' Lastri asked her, laying her hand gently on her forearm.

It was the kindness that convinced her. And perhaps that's what it was – a kindness, a kindness given out of her love – and somehow in that act, she would be able to go on with her life, no longer looking over her shoulder or measuring herself against the mirror of every young woman who crossed their path. Let him have his invitation and let him know that she gave her blessing, gave it fully and with love.

‘I'm sure,' she said as she handed over the room key-card. It, too, discreetly slipped into the pocket of the coat. They moved past each other on the steps. For a second she allowed herself to be pleased with her choice just as he had been pleased with the other gifts she had bought that morning – the thought she had put into the items. She watched as the young woman strode confidently to the hotel entrance, the black glossy fall of her ponytail clapping quick time to the rhythm of her movements.

‘Lastri,' she called. The woman stopped, her outstretched hand frozen on the hotel's revolving door, and turned to look down at her. ‘I never told you his name – his name is Richard and he's a good man.'

Lastri nodded quickly and then she was gone through the door and out of sight. She turned to the city, forcing herself to look it full in the face, and then she started to walk. She wished she was back in her forest early on a Sunday morning when most of the world was still asleep and the new day slowly sprang the scent of the trees into freedom. The previous Sunday there had been a thin mist filtering through the rows like smoke and the branches had been webbed and latticed with what looked like spun lace. Once she saw a fox, its red shiver suddenly slinking out of the long grass at the edge of the plantation. She tried to conjure the scent of the trees and the damp grass, sought to let it wash over her. There would be new planting and seedlings to be ordered. She thought of the tulip bulbs she had bought and wondered if they would really produce those almost-black flowers of the picture on the package. She thought of her daughter Judith and wondered if she would ever find love, or even if it was important for her to do so and if it was possible to construct a life that was happy even though it seemed untouched by it. She thought of anything that screened her from the thoughts she didn't want to have and was so preoccupied that once she almost stepped in front of a bicycle, only brought back to a consciousness of the present by the sharp ringing of its bell.

What did it matter, if it pleased him? What did it matter what other women might think? It would always be their secret and he would respect that silence because he knew how to be kind. And anyway they had no right to judge her because they weren't her and hadn't ever been her, or lived her life. And all that it mattered to her was what she allowed it to and she could control that better than she could control the anxiety, the constant apprehension of something that she couldn't fully define and so could never master. But she knew she would never be on that running machine trying to run towards a fantasy of herself, trying desperately to become someone that could never be realised, and that was a relief to her. She made herself take precise care when crossing roads – it would be such an embarrassing thing to have an accident, particularly if it was a collision with a bicycle. The day they had cycled to the caravan had been one of the happiest days of her life and if she could have stretched out her arms through the years she would have embraced the three girls who shared that adventure and told them what it meant to her. She knew they wouldn't judge her now and when she thought of poor Lillian taken before she even saw any of her three daughters married, she felt a sadness surge through the city streets as people hurried by, their sense of purpose suddenly rendered meaningless by the knowledge of what awaited them all. Lillian who made them all laugh with her funny stories and impersonations, Lillian who sometimes freewheeled her bike with her legs kicked out and angled like the arms of a compass. Lillian who had more life coursing through her than any of them, sunken of cheek and withered like the last leaf of autumn, desperately clinging to something that was being slowly shaken from her grasp. She wanted to claim her, give her back that day when the sun warmed their skin and they high-stepped in the sea, trying to lift their feet out of the broken, breaking waves that splashed white against their legs.

She crossed the bridge and saw the water fired by the red neon sign and then the shadowy people who sat on the terrace protected by smoked glass from the growing cold. It felt as it had done when she had looked down into the square and thought herself separated from the world outside by more than the glass. She thought of taking a canal trip but didn't want to sit amongst families and couples who would only serve to emphasise her solitariness. Once close to the end when she had gone to see Lillian she had been unable to stop herself crying even though she knew it was selfish and so had been comforted by a dying woman who told her that everything would be all right and who told her, too, that she was a terrible worrier. She thought of walking in the park but on impulse headed on, resisting the temptation to glance at her watch or turn back.

In the Museumplein she looked at the poorly decorated Christmas tree and then went to the temporary skating rink. She paused to watch the skaters score their movements in the ice. Some young girls had red plastic ice-hockey sticks and scooted a puck back and forwards trying to avoid the feet of those all around them. Parents held the hands of young children who took tentative steps as if learning to walk again. From where she stood it seemed as if the ice stretched almost into the museum itself. And at intervals the eye caught the weaving balletic movements of the experts, sometimes young, sometimes surprisingly old, who glided through the slow and the unskilled like ghosts in the winter sun, their motion formed by fragmenting particles of light. She wanted to join them, move amidst them on some volition other than that of her will, but she hadn't skated since the children were teenagers and even then she had never been more than mediocre. Judith had taken to it so easily that she put the boys' noses out of joint as they struggled to emulate her balanced confidence and Richard had to tell her off when she had started to tease them about their lack of speed. As she watched similar families on the ice she tried to call back into freshness the memory of her own family outings. And above all she wanted to be light, untrammelled with the weight of worries that tried to cling to her like a coat sodden with rain. A young child skated backwards, the proud turn of her head disdainful of obstacles, then spun in ever-diminishing circles of herself until she was a trembling blur of light. An elderly woman dressed all in black with a pinned-up cascade of white hair did slow elegant laps of the rink, her hands clasped behind her back as if ordered to be at ease. A younger man skated with one arm behind him, the other sawing the air into speed. She saw how everyone was occupied only with themselves, how their concentration preoccupied them, and that like everything in this city the only distinctions were the ones made by their own desires.

She felt reckless – she had come this far so why should she limit herself? And as her heart beat faster and everything in her head seemed to have loosened into a freefall of memories and impulse, she hired her skates from a young girl who helped her and seemed to think her desire to be on the ice was the most normal thing in the world, handing her the skates and taking her shoes as if she was serving her coffee or providing some other service characterised only by its normality.

Then for some reason she didn't understand she was thinking of Lillian and it felt as if she was watching her and with that knowledge she turned to the ice and pushed herself off. Nervous at first but then bolder, she glanced at the purple-pleated sky and told herself that she was skating, moving across the ice, and that she could do it and she could do it and not worry. There was no need to worry. Faster skaters shot past her but it didn't matter and she settled into a rhythm that felt as if it was enough to take her where she wanted and there was no need to look anywhere but forward.

 

 

‘We could get bikes and ride in the park,' he said as they stood at the entrance gates.

‘Dad, I'm not a child. I don't want to ride a bike. And I don't know why we have to come in here to talk.'

‘Jack, this isn't easy for me and we can talk as we walk. I used to come here a lot. Only in those days I was desperate for someone to talk to because I was always on my own. But if we're going to talk then you need to walk beside me, not three steps behind.'

He kept his head looking in front but felt Jack draw level with him. And so they walked on as a phalanx of cyclists and solitary joggers flowed past them. The trees had lost their leaves and the buildings along the side of the park were starkly visible. He didn't know how to start and so he kept walking, waiting for the words to form inside his head. They passed close to the film museum where rollerbladers were slaloming in and out of plastic cones. He watched the seamless smoothness of their glides and felt his own stuttering awkwardness.

‘I screwed up, Jack,' was how he started. He had already used the same words and in some way he wished they were enough, that they could encompass everything that needed to be said. Perhaps he could even add that he had screwed up but everyone did it, in the knowledge that in Jack's world this seemed to carry an all-encompassing potential for pardon, for excuse. But as he looked at the tightening face of his son and his narrowed laser eyes that seemed to want to see right through him, he knew instantly that pardon was to be withheld.

‘I screwed up and I wish I hadn't. I'm sorry that everyone got hurt.'

‘So if you're sorry why don't you tell Mum that and get back together like the way it was before? And then I wouldn't be looking at a dickhead like Gordon for a stepfather and having to go and live in some dosshouse in Spain.'

So it was the personal collateral damage that Jack was angry about, and to emphasise the depth of his feelings he threw an arm rigidly in the air as if he was chasing away some wild animal. They were standing in the middle of the road with joggers and cyclists streaming past on either side. As an overweight runner in a baggy tracksuit laboured by leaning increasingly and precariously forward he heard the broken struggle of his breathing. The jogger wore a black plastic armband that presumably held his phone or music but which looked like he was in mourning for his lost youth.

‘It's not so simple as that, Jack,' he said, momentarily shocked by the intensity of his son's expression and voice, something he hadn't witnessed in a long while. ‘Your mother and I had been drifting apart for some time – it wasn't anybody's fault, it was just one of those things that happens to people. And if you ask me why I can't give you an answer. I don't know. Sometimes stuff just happens. You must understand that as well as anyone.'

‘I don't understand,' Jack insisted. ‘Why did you not think of Mum or Caroline or me before you had it off with some slag you were only supposed to be teaching who was half your age?'

What could be worse in the world than to have the moral condemnation of your child? To be condemned without understanding or sympathy, to be condemned with no regard for hypocrisy or irony by a son who was speaking to him from a seemingly bottomless well of selfishness. He was truly lost for words and so in response he merely opened his arms in a gesture of surrender. But even that brought no respite.

‘So you never once thought of Mum or us or anybody other than yourself?'

That's right, Jack, that's exactly how it happened. You come to a point in your life when you're weary of thinking of others and when for the very first time you can't think of anyone other than yourself and suddenly you want to refind who that self is, in the hope that it's a better, happier self than the one you find yourself with now. So yes, Jack, that's how it happened. Thinking of no one but myself. But he didn't know what to say and he knew already that the truth was not going to fix this broken thing so he simply held his arms further out from his side as if he was ready to take his son's best shot.