The Light of Amsterdam (43 page)

‘I looked at paintings yesterday in the Rijksmuseum.'

She had pronounced it Rix Museum but he didn't correct her. ‘Did you see things you liked?'

‘Lots of things. There was a picture of a girl reading a letter, a girl in a blue smock-type thing.'

‘By Vermeer?'

‘Yes. I liked it best.'

He asked why she liked it but she was non-committal and he didn't press her. And then she wondered how Jack was and he told her about his performance of the song in the bar and felt a little glow of pride as he recounted it. And he couldn't help himself inflate its significance as he suggested that everything was being turned around and all their problems getting sorted out but then almost immediately felt guilty.

‘You're lucky,' she said, but without any apparent trace of resentment. ‘Things aren't so straightforward with Shannon. She came out with a bit of a surprise herself.'

He waited for her to go on but she sat still and quiet, gently swirling what was left of her coffee. He tried not to stare at her and looked away to where a phalanx of cyclists passed under a canopy of bare branches.

‘She doesn't want to go through with it – she's got cold feet?' he offered.

‘No, she wants to go through with it all right. That's not the problem.'

But what the problem was didn't seem as if it was about to be revealed and as she set down her cup it felt as if he had intruded into something private and he felt clumsy, keen to find a way back out. ‘Perhaps we should be getting back before our sleeping beauties wake up,' he said, tidying his part of the table.

‘How do painters paint light?' she asked, looking at him directly for the first time. ‘In some of the paintings it looked like there was light shining out of them.'

He was about to try and explain, his brain already collating ideas about sources and shadows, about layering and colour, but he stopped himself, aware that to play the expert now would only carry him even further away from her, and so instead he said, ‘It's pretty complicated and sometimes I get it completely wrong. I'm not actually a very good painter, I just have to pretend to the students that I am.'

She smiled for the first time – fleetingly and mostly with her eyes but enough for him to take a chance and try again.

‘So I suppose the wedding is costing you an arm and a leg.'

‘Pretty much but it's all sorted and everything ready to go.'

‘And you like whoever Shannon is marrying?'

‘Wade? He's all right but what we think doesn't matter because they do whatever they want and leave us to pick up the pieces.'

He heard the edge of bitterness in her voice and felt it linger in the silence that settled. From the tennis courts burst a sudden shout of frustration followed by collective laughter.

‘Jack has a girlfriend – she's called Jasmine and she looks like a Goth or something but if you say that to him or even refer to her as his girlfriend he gets annoyed like you've insulted him or you're a complete idiot.' He thought of trying to describe Jasmine's appearance in a way that would be funny but caught the expression on her face and let it go.

‘They break your hearts, don't they?' she said, her voice dropping to not more than a whisper.

‘Yes, they do.'

‘It's the price you pay for loving them so much.'

He nodded, knowing that she was talking to herself and the best thing he could do was to give her the space to say what it was she needed, but there was only a stretching silence while she stared at the table and ran her hand over its surface as if she was reading something in Braille.

 

 

Her whole body was tuned to waking early, an alarm clock that she could no longer turn off, and it was totally indifferent to the fact that she was in a foreign city and in a room with two of Shannon's friends, one of whom snored with a determined insistence that eventually used up all her goodwill and made her want to place a pillow over her face with its open pout of a mouth and her swelling chest that looked like it was rising up and down on a high tide. She couldn't stick it any longer and got washed and dressed, not bothering with make-up or doing much more than pushing a comb through her hair. She would go for a walk and be back before everyone had woken. They half-expected it of her now and she had already got some stick about going to look at paintings, about going to a museum on a hen do, but mostly they trod carefully around her and when they had spoken to her it was to tell her how beautiful the bracelet was and one or two had even offered private sympathy, suggesting that they thought what Shannon had done was out of order. But such sympathy hadn't helped and she felt angry that her daughter hadn't told her in the privacy of home and prevented the whole world from sharing the knowledge of her deceit. Now the gossips would have a field day and every one of them would believe that their relationship wasn't close and whatever happened on the wedding day would be overshadowed by this story.

Remembering the previous night she had put on a T-shirt under her blouse but when she stepped into the quiet street she realised that it wasn't so cold, with pockets of brightness in the sky and no trace of wind or mist. When she passed the spot where she had given Shannon the bracelet she felt the guilt of it – she had never taken anything before that was valuable. So now love had made a fool of her and made a thief out of her as well. She wanted to take it back but knew she couldn't – Shannon had rushed in to show it off to everyone and it was obvious how much she liked it. She was suddenly frightened as she imagined her daughter wanting to wear it on her wedding day and it being visible in the photographs. She didn't know what she should do – she had acted on the impulse of the moment, given it in a pathetic attempt to compete with his splash of money, and in so doing she had made herself bound once more to him.

She looked for the courtyard of old houses but it seemed to have disappeared, almost as if it had never existed, and so she just kept walking and trying to decide what it was she had to do. The city was still half-asleep but there wasn't the thick early-morning greyness that sometimes she believed she could taste in her mouth when she went to work at home. So many things were different here and in a way that she liked, for the first time making her reluctant to go back. Only the street cleaners, with their brushes and whirring machines sweeping away the debris of another Saturday night, echoed her own city. They joked amongst themselves in those thick gargling voices she had become familiar with and their gold neck chains glinted in the light. As she crossed a bridge she stopped to watch a small boat arrow-heading the water with two young children sitting fidgeting excitedly behind their father's standing stillness. She studied the rows of silent houses, waiting until the water calmed itself again.

By now she understood the basic layout of the city centre and there were signs at intervals pointing out the things that a stranger like her might want to find. She wondered if there would still be ice-skating in the square close to the museum but on the way there she ventured into the park to find what seemed like half the city engaged in physical activity. If she stood out it was only because she didn't obviously share their seriousness of purpose, or didn't have a small child to wheel, or a dog on a lead, and so she walked a little faster and tried to assume some of that same purpose because she wanted to fit in, to be an anonymous part of the whole. It felt like these people all around her owned this place whereas at home, and she didn't think it was just about the absence of money, she always felt as if she was an admitted visitor.

At intervals the sun broke through and she felt it however weakly on her skin as she took a path round a lake, carefully keeping to the side to avoid cyclists and the faster runners. A few of the trees still had a smattering of stubborn leaves but most were blown bare with what had been discarded forming a thick mulch between the evergreen shrubs. She walked on and with each step she pondered what it was she was going to do about the wedding. All around her stretched the freedom of space but her head felt as if it was tightening and constricting round this single decision and in that concentration she didn't notice him until he was speaking to her, and then it was too late to walk in a different direction or pretend she hadn't seen him. When he spoke and asked her questions she found it difficult to reply at first as she was suddenly and unexpectedly pulled from the thoughts that seemed so strong that it felt as if they must be printed on her face. He offered her a coffee. Why? What did he want? She thought of Marty's request for one and wondered if the offer was all about something else. She knew already by the way he spoke and the way he dressed that he belonged to a different class and that made her feel vulnerable and think that if he had any interest in her other than as people from the same city meeting in a foreign one, then it was wrapped up in motives that she didn't trust and she wasn't some creature in a zoo to satisfy whatever passing curiosity he had. So she hesitated at first, sidestepping him with a vague refusal, but he didn't try to persuade her and then she remembered him crying in the church and she stared at him again and something told her that this was someone who wasn't good at hiding things, who wouldn't be good at disguising his intentions, and so if she needed to shut the door she would have plenty of time and warning.

‘
OK
,' she said with a deliberate edge of non-commitment, looking over his shoulder to check if she was about to enter somewhere that would make her nervous, but there were simple tables and chairs, some of them close to the water's edge where ducks circled aimlessly, dipping their heads below the surface as they moved. He refused her money for the coffee and it made her feel as if there was something wrong with it, as if it wasn't as good as his. When he walked away she tried to gauge his age and watched him as he put up a hand to trace the circumference of his baldness. Somewhere in his early fifties perhaps. Soft hands that said he was a stranger to physical work. Divorced. She wondered if she should ask about the light in the paintings. There were lots of questions she wanted to ask about the paintings but was frightened to reveal how many things she didn't know and then she was angry with herself for caring and wasn't going to endure the misery of pretending. In that instant she decided that if he were interested in her it would have to be as she really was and not as he imagined, so when he returned with the coffees and asked her if she was a nurse she told him the truth and was glad.

For a second when he asked her if she liked her work she was tempted to tell him about some of the things she had to do, what exactly she had to clean, about the residents who had to be helped in the toilet, about the scraping of the plates after meals. Tell him in a way that would let him understand and see how long he thought he should be sitting in Amsterdam with her on a winter's morning drinking coffee. See how long that held some sense of charm for him. And she didn't believe him about Jack all being sorted – she had seen enough and understood enough about her own child to grasp that there was no magic wand to make everything all right. He would find that out for himself soon if he didn't already know it.

He asked her about the paintings and she told him about the girl reading the letter. Perhaps she could use him to tell her things but when she asked about painting light he didn't give her a proper answer and she assumed that it was because he didn't think she was bright enough to understand it. And he was looking at her, not in a rude way but looking at her closely, and suddenly she remembered that she hadn't any make-up on. Lifting the cup of coffee in both hands she used it to screen her face. He asked her about the wedding and for a moment she thought of telling him, thinking that the sympathy of even a stranger would comfort, but then measured it against the sense of shame she would feel about revealing her daughter's deception and knew it would be a poor exchange. But she was grateful that he didn't press and seemed to know when to let things go and she looked at him again and thought it might just have been possible if he had lived in her world – been the doorman of the offices where she cleaned, or the person who drove their taxi home – it might just have been possible for her to like him. She wasn't sure. He spoke about his son, trying to amuse her, and the fact that he did that made her grateful.

‘They break your hearts, don't they?' she said, surprised at the pain the words brought.

‘Yes, they do,' he agreed and in the way he spoke she knew that he had understood what it meant for her to say it.

‘It's the price you pay for loving them so much.'

He sat in silence. She stared at their empty cups for a long time, felt the cold surface of the table with her fingers and then she told him everything.

Sixteen

The landscape unfolding on the way to the airport held little echo of the city's heart as they passed through anonymous suburbs, then areas of light industry and commercial operations which shared the same sense of impersonal dislocation that the view from airport trains helps to generate. Even his son, who always insisted on the window seat as if still the natural right of the child, looked bored, with his head skewered into the corner of the seat and his eyes partly screened from the light. Jack had packed the leather jacket in his bag and reverted to just his black hoodie and he wondered whether the prospect of returning home had prompted him to bunker down in familiar defences. And perhaps it was that prospect, and whatever feelings it kickstarted, that had sent him retreating into what he now thought of as his son's default mode, so he had withdrawn into a non-communicative blankness where his father's emotional Geiger counter registered nothing at all.