The Point (18 page)
The screen, she says, in a voice that can barely manage a whisper. It’s a hostage too.
Jerome bends his head. He has his arm around her. But then she tenses, a summoning up of muscle, courage, energy, and turns to Joe. What’s happening here? Her voice now sharp.
She frightened them off, says Joe.
Who is this person? Is she a friend of yours?
He’s a good friend, says Gwyneth.
Flora looks at her. The light, one of those that come on automatically, is bright, but the night is large and it quickly loses itself in the inky shadows. Indeed, she says. Joe, it’s time you finished. You can’t stay all night. Off you go, both of you.
Hadn’t we better stay and be witnesses?
That’s a point, says Jerome.
Flora is walking round the screen, trying to see the damage. I don’t think it’s too bad, says Jerome, more hopefully than certainly. One end is battered, twisted, partly uprooted, but the ties are strong, it is still lozenges in a double diamond pattern.
First thing in the morning we’ll get Ted and Julia, he says.
They could be anywhere by now.
Actually, I think … I think it just needs replanting. An ordinary gardener, I think – oh Flora, it’ll be as good as new. Come inside now, it’s cold.
This is when they notice that Gwyneth has disappeared.
Where’s your friend?
Gwyneth? Oh, says Joe. He’s not much of an actor. His exaggerated surprise is of the order of farce.
There’s something going on, says Flora.
The police come and take notes. Joe has to admit he doesn’t actually know Gwyneth at all, he’s just seen her round. In the middle of his statement about Gwyneth’s speed and ferocity at chasing off the marauders the mobile phone of one of the policemen rings. It’s a colleague. They think they’ve got them.
Flora, Jerome and Joe go to the police station. Flora is sure she recognises the boys who muck around on the grassy slope with the baseball bat.
Us, says Chad. Baseball? At this time of night? We’re going clubbing. Night clubbing. Music. Dancing. Rage.
Wouldn’t you be better off home in bed?
You would, maybe. Not us.
Joe thinks the club he saw the attackers using might have been a baseball bat. But in the end it is not possible to identify them. Their parents come, full of distress and anger that anyone could suspect their children. Of course there is a mistake. Julian’s father is a lawyer, and very precise about what can and cannot happen here. The police give the lads a generic warning – if it was you, cut it out, next time you might not be so lucky.
Luck? says Julian’s dad. The only luck here is these poor kids’ bad luck in being wrongfully accused. It is the police who ought to watch out. Wrongful arrest could be the least of it.
Flora questions Joe who admits that he puts food out and that Gwyneth comes and takes it. It’s so good, says Joe, some of it, it seems a wicked waste to throw it away. He tells Flora he thinks Gwyneth is a homeless person.
And what about you, asks Flora. Do you have a home to go to?
Joe is indignant. Of course he does.
Flora and Jerome go back to his place. She sends Joe off in a taxi.
They go to bed and lie close together, warm and gentle. It’s probably illegal, says Flora, to put out food like that, rats and god knows what. God, if an inspector saw. But she doesn’t want to reprimand Joe; he is a good boy. He has a point about the waste of food. Though there is food poisoning. But it must be safer than garbage bins. She is sure he did not take the money. You have to have faith that you can know what people are like. Joe would not do that. Would he.
Neither feels sleepy, they are both jagged and wakeful after the night’s events. Flora tells Jerome one of her favourite horror stories. It’s about restaurants in Paris in the nineteenth century.
You start off with grand dinners, she says, in the most elegant of restaurants, or perhaps palaces. Glorious food for ladies and gentlemen, who only pick at it. Darnes of salmon, milk veal cutlets, fillets of sole
normande
, pheasant breasts, venison, foie gras, quail, puddings and ices and cakes as architecture, all practically intact, barely tasted, the sauces hardly disturbed. Dealers buy up this uneaten food and take it to cheap restaurants, in large baskets covered with a dark cloth that is known in the trade as the black flag. The cheap restaurant shakes some disinfectant over it, trims it up a bit:
voilà
, a classy menu. These places also hire magnificent fruit platters and whole stags and hares to hang in the doorway, but nobody ever gets to eat them, not there. Only second-hand dishes. The places smell of burnt fat, carbolic acid and vinegar – so say contemporary historians.
Wouldn’t they have just loved microwaves?
But, Flora goes on, it doesn’t stop there. The remains of these remains are sold in the open-air markets. All quite legally, they’ve been inspected. The name for this stuff is
le bijou.
The gem. And that’s still not the end of it. The leftovers of these leftovers of leftovers are also sold. No longer really legally, though. Fish heads, lamb bones, chewed ends of chicken, fragments of cakes and tarts. All mixed together, with all their different sauces, mayonnaise and madeira, anchovy and chocolate, custard and capers, mustard and raspberries.
Just like
nouvelle cuisine
, says Jerome.
Less fresh. Not entirely rotten yet, about five days old. Pretty high. This is called the harlequin.
Sounds like Barry Humphries’ technicolour yawn.
And, we’re not finished yet. The remains of this, the stuff not sold at the stalls, is peddled through the streets of Paris by con men, called coal miners.
Houilliers
. They come up to you furtively in dark alleys and offer you game which they say is wrapped only so it won’t attract the attention of the police. The price is low, you’re tempted, you think it’s so cheap because it’s been poached, and then, when you get it home … eughhh.
At least Joe is only taking it one step, and that for charity.
Jerome laughs, happier than he can ever remember being in his life. They make love, sweetly, and sleep.
Flora did not have any pets. Once I said to her, You should get a dog. (I think I mentioned an Italian greyhound, lean and delicate and fine as herself.) Not altogether seriously, an idea for her to try out. She replied, But what if it died?
When I saw her stricken face gazing at the willow sculpture on the night of the attack it was that fear I saw, though I did not then quite understand the real terror in it. I said, We can get a gardener, and first thing next morning I rang and found a man who would come straightaway. He was a good man who was entranced by the beauty of the willow working and angry that anybody should try to damage it. He thought that he could replant it and that it would most likely grow as planned. Its fineness was its strength, he said, the great number of knots and grafts meant that it was not easily pulled apart. If they’d used a knife, now, he said, and slashed through it, that would have been your true disaster.
But under the brutal clumsy onslaught it had bowed and bent in its whippy willowy fashion and could be put to rights. Flexibility is the secret, he said. He was sure he could save it. Flora said she would ring Ted just to check.
I think your hostage is safe this time, I said, and she gave me a weak smile. I thought to myself: a willow screen is not a child, it can be neither so beloved nor so entirely irreplaceable. I put my arms around her and said, I want to look after you, I want to keep you safe, and she gazed at me with her golden brown eyes that seemed at this moment especially large in her small velvety skull. It was only later that I realised the problem. If she accepted my love and my care for her, and then I betrayed her or she by whatever means lost me, then she would be so much more desolate than if she had never allowed herself to depend on me, or feel fond of me.
This was still before I knew about the baby who died and Vic her husband who could not comfort her in their loss. Later, when she told me this piteous history and I said, I would not be like that, I would never abandon you, she said, That is what Vic thought.
I did do a clever thing, though, at the time of the attack on the screen. I did not ask her to marry me. I was frightened of her saying no, which could be an irrevocable thing between us. I thought I would make myself necessary to her, and then ask. I simply kept saying, I want to look after you, and her gaze shifted sideways, and I thought, I shall show you.
On Sunday she said, I want you to come for dinner, I am making cassoulet. It is early stages yet, but it will be all right.
I did not have the heart to say I disliked beans, that I had resolved never to eat them again, and moreover that I did not care much for duck, and it was lucky I mentioned neither thing, since these beans were unlike any I had ever tasted, light, creamy, sweetly garlicky, and the duck crisp and not at all greasy as is so often the disappointing case with this bird.
I have eaten cassoulet in Carcassonne and it could not hold a candle to this, I said.
I should think not. Cassoulet in Carcassonne is lowest common denominator. It’s for tourists. There are real ones to be had, if you know where to look. This isn’t really a real one, not the peasant dish, it is a different kind of transformation. And I think you will find the beans will not be so windy as sometimes they are.
I told her about my namesake Jerome the exegete, who forbade his nuns to eat beans because the resulting farts might tickle their genitals and give rise to impure thoughts.
Flora laughed at that. I hope these beans give rise to farting after all, she said, so that I can try it out for myself.
I made some remarks, like if they failed offering to do it for her, and such, the idle dirty talk of lovers that so amuses them.
She told me about some little French biscuits called
pets-denonne
, nun’s farts. Because they are so delicate and whisper light, she said.
I am sure St Jerome was closer to the truth, I said. Why wouldn’t nun’s farts be as vigorous and hearty as anyone else’s? Given their diet. Else why would they tickle so lasciviously?
And smelly, said Flora. Not an attractive thing in a biscuit. Or maybe a sign of holiness is odourless farts.
What fun we had. How we delighted in one another’s words. Sitting in front of this page, writing down the words that so bound us, so enchanted us, I cannot decide quite how I feel: is there more pleasure in recalling them, and the old happy times they embody, than misery in recording their loss? If I could live in that past, in my head, I could be a soberly contented man. But you cannot control what you think, and though so far it is the happy times I am transcribing here, in my head they are inextricably bound with grief.
Leonie is not sitting on my page today. She is asleep by the window. A champion sleeper is my tubby little cat. There is a patch of sun on the floor and she has found it. That is one of her gifts. To find sun. Even when it is not cold, like today’s high summer, she finds the sun.
For in her morning orisons she loves the sun and the sun loves her.
For she is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.
Dear Christopher Smart. I love his mysterious utterance.
This script is fading, because my pen is running out of ink. I keep the bottle tightly closed against the ink monkey. A little creature smaller than a hand, with fur that is black and silky and soft as down. Its eyes are scarlet. The ink monkey is fond of ink. It sits with its forepaws crossed waiting while you write. When you have finished it drinks what is left of the ink and then sits back, happy and quiet.
But this is older technology even than mine, with my fountain pen. It needs an inkwell and a dipping pen, possibly a quill, or perhaps a brush. I remember the inkwells at school when I was a small boy, the little bluish china pots each sunk into its hole at the right-hand top of the desks (who knows about inkwells any more, who is not as old as me?) and how there never was any ink left when you came back after a short absence; the ink monkey must have flourished there. The ink monitors had to get the big bottle of ink out of the press and refill them.
Perhaps I should leave the cap of the ink bottle unscrewed, so the ink monkey could drink his fill. He comes from China, from the north, and my report of him is dated 1791.
I should be sad to lose this pen. The writing it does for me is small and well formed, quite round. I have another which writes large and scrawly, with blots, and does not please at all. And another with upstrokes and downstrokes, quite calligraphic, that I use for notes, the polite kind. Now Leonie is awake and comes stalking across the desk. She bats at my pen, which she knows I wind across the page purely for her entertainment. Why else would I make such intoxicating curves. Silly girl, you have blotted your own name, it would be illegible did I not know it was itself. It is necessary to stop before all the words smudge out of existence. I pick up a toy I keep for her, a little Russian painted carving of an axeman and a chicken, fastened with string to a wooden ball. When you manipulate it so that the ball rotates the chicken pecks, up, down, the axe rises, falls, and you think that you will be able to organise it so that the axe beheads the chicken but you can’t, when the chicken pecks down the axe is up. It’s inexorable. Down comes the axe, up goes the chicken. Forever safe. Leonie watches with her yellow eyes, mesmerised it seems, then leans in to bat. But she cannot change the fate, of the chicken to survive, of the axeman to fail. When she gets bored she puts her head against my forehead and gently butts it, purring, and breathes on me with her fishy breath.
