The Point (25 page)

At the time it was Flora that I could not bear it for. For Terry Feldman too, of course, but he was past fear by then. He had been her customer, her guest, he was there for her food. What ought to have nurtured him ended in his death. It isn’t your fault, I said. You can’t blame yourself. You mustn’t feel guilt over what happened.

I know you’re right, she said, of course you are. I know nobody blames me. I know I shouldn’t blame myself.

All of this meant that knowing she shouldn’t didn’t mean she didn’t. She became paler and thinner even than she had been. When I put my arms around her I could feel her thin bones in their frail envelope of skin. She cooked harder than ever.

The legal proceedings took an age and were a travesty. The good lawyer, father of Julian who was one of the boys involved on this occasion too, argued and queried and cast doubt. A baseball bat? Why not? They play the game. In a car, at night? Lazy boys, never put things away. Where’s the ball? Lost, lost balls are such a hazard. Somebody hit it extra hard and it flew into the lake. Forensic evidence? Wool fibres on the shaft? So? They wear overcoats, carry it under their arms.

So unctuous the performance. So inexorable. Contradictions emerged. No responsibility, diminished responsibility, youth, the corruption of peers, the whole thing eddied and muddied. Evidence? Evidence was drowned deeper than the lake, held down by the barbs of clever lawyers until there was no life in it. I was reminded of some primeval segmented creature writhing in a swamp. Finally the jury could not be certain. And the boys, all of good family, of good character, if a little wild. Like their clever lawyer fathers.

Not that justice would have helped Terry. He was still dead. I still can hear him, so cheerful, his boomy voice prattling on about the blackness of water, how river water damned up to make a lake has a quality of velvety deep blackness that absorbs, while water in the sea is never quite so dense, so dark, it always glitters, as though the salt in it sparkles in a kind of marine starlight. I didn’t listen, I was bored, I did not engage in this theory-playing of his. Now, well, who knows, maybe he is right. I’ve often thought of his words. Blackness is not simple.

25

Clovis was watching the sky above the lake. The water jet was spraying high into the air as is its habit. The sky was full of clouds moving in billowing masses. The wind blew the water of the jet sideways so that instead of spurting up it turned into clouds of water that billowed into the real clouds; it looked as though the water jet was producing these roiling masses that filled the sky. Clovis was thinking: roiling, moiling. Wondering if moiling was a mixture of milling and boiling. And roiling of rolling and boiling. That fitted these clouds. The blowing of the water through the air: he thought, plume, spume, fume. The words a pleasure to sound in his head. Was this how poetry began? Words colliding. And colluding. Plume spume fume, he said aloud. That would make comic verse. This needs something noble.

Water, wind, air, clouds. It’s a display, a performance. He can stand and watch it. It goes on and on. Never repeating itself, and yet the elements always the same. Its scale grand enough for him to see quite easily. The grey air has a cold watery smell. The waves slap softly, one of those natural sounds that are part of silence. Sight, smell, sound: these are what there is. He is understanding: these are what there is.

The lake, not deep or rough, is deadly. But only when humans make it so, not left to itself.

He hears a light footfall behind him, and turns, to see a small person, in black check trousers and a white top. He would have expected Gwyneth, but sees quickly that it isn’t her.

Hello, she says. I’m Flora Mount. From the restaurant.

He knows that. Good afternoon, he says.

I wanted to come and thank you. For saving Jerome.

Oh, he says, and shakes his head. He thinks of saying, it wasn’t anything, but doesn’t want to, it isn’t true, he knows he made the louts run away and if he hadn’t the second man, this Jerome, wouldn’t be alive. You don’t need to thank me, he says.

I want to, says Flora. You were very brave.

Yes, I was. Because I was very scared. I thought they’d turn and attack me, why not? Throw me in too.

Flora looks at him. That’s supposed to be true bravery, isn’t it. To understand the danger, and still do it.

And I should be grateful for the opportunity to find myself so, don’t you think? I should thank you.

You could do that by coming to the restaurant for dinner.

You want me to be even braver?

Flora smiles. Clovis looks at her intently.

All right, he says. May I bring a friend?

When he sees Gwyneth he tells her the time for scrubbing up is at hand. We will go to Mancare, he says, and buy ourselves clothes for dining in.

I’m not going, says Gwyneth. I don’t know how to eat in grand restaurants.

You’re scared. I’m scared too. That’s why we have to do it. And I can teach you.

I won’t know what cuttle-ery to use.

Say cutlery, and then it will be easier. And remember, be neat, be fastidious, smile your sweet smile, and you’ll get away with murder.

No, I can’t come, what if I’m recognised? They’ll send for the police and arrest me.

Not in this context they won’t. Nobody will guess you’re Gwyneth Whatever, runaway felon, wanted on seven continents. Not in this classy establishment.

It’s not a fucking joke.

No. It’s serious, and you’ll be perfectly safe.

Flora asks Elinor and Ivan to come too.

Is it a good idea, says Ivan to Elinor. Tramps for dinner, in the restaurant? Won’t it embarrass them?

I don’t know, says Elinor. Flora says she decided to ask him on the spur of the moment, because she liked his conversation. And besides, it’s the first time she’s ever invited us to the restaurant. I think she’s doing some sort of banquet.

Oh of course we’ll go. It’s her restaurant, she can ask whom she likes. Ivan is silent for a moment. I hope she doesn’t mean this tramp’s conversation was interesting because it was crude and vulgar and oh so cute.

Oh come on, Ivan, that doesn’t sound like Flora.

True. Flora’s far too fierce to find that kind of behaviour cute.

When Gwyneth with Laurel’s help slides out of her large and matlike cardigan she is wearing a long silvery-grey dress of some silky fabric that hangs in flutings, like a column, a most elegant dress, cleverly cut, narrow, and a surprising thing to find at a Salvation Army op shop, you might suppose, until you thought of a wealthy woman getting too fat for its slenderness and stuffing it in a charity bin in a fit of denial. For it is a cruel dress, unforgiving of any bulges or even much in the way of curves. Her hair is clean, hanging straight and fluid, the tidemark of its blonde dye lower down now, and above such a dress the striped effect is interesting, not messy; it has the charm of intention. The sleeves are long, the neckline skims her shoulder blades, and something about its colour or maybe it is the shadow of her falling hair sculpts her cheekbones and makes her eyes cavernous and dark-shadowed in a way that is beautiful rather than desperate. It isn’t make-up, that was too hard, she isn’t wearing any. Clovis reckoned she doesn’t need it.

Heroin chic, wouldn’t you say, mutters Kate to Martin, and then is horrified to realise from Laurel’s frozen face that she has heard. It’s the look of a lot of supermodels these days, she prattles. They make themselves up like that.

Clovis on the other hand knows he will be wearing the suit of a dead man. The widow hastily bundling up his clothes and sending them off to the Sallies. A man slightly more portly than he, but it is fine wool and double-breasted and drapes in a pleasant way across his lean stomach. He’s wearing a black tee-shirt, not a look he favours, but one he can manage. He feels like someone in advertising. His beard fills in a fair bit of the space at his neck, which shows brown and corded above the collar of the suit.

Laurel seats them at a round table not far from the fire. It is quite black outside, nothing can be seen of the hills or the city on their rim. The dark windows reflect them, the guests, the firelight, the glasses and cutlery darkly gleaming. We are in the lantern, says Clovis to himself. Now we are the light, and the darkness outside is entirely mysterious to us. He sees himself hand Gwyneth to her chair, sees the reflection in the mirror but also from himself as observer. He doesn’t remember feeling detached like this in the days when visiting restaurants was a habit. He stands to greet the others. Gwyneth is too tremulous to smile much, which makes her even more elegant. Elinor rushes into hectic speech about the taxi failing to come which made them late. Laurel brings champagne. Jerome proposes Clovis’s health.

Elinor is wearing red silk, crimson-coloured, with a swirling skirt and a draped top, and her hair quite wildly curling about her face. Clovis likes looking from one to another. The red and swirling, the silvery slender; like the sun and moon he thinks, in the fanciful way that comes quite naturally, these days.

Afterwards, each person wonders: was the dinner a success? Jerome looks back on it as like a dance, a ritual dance of separate but not necessarily unfriendly tribes circling, observing, taking one another’s measure. The conversation is slow to flow. They talk about names, to begin with, Jerome’s idea, it should be safe. Clovis, he says, a fine name, the name of French kings. Clovis smiles faintly, bows his head. You are lucky, Jerome says, to have such imaginative parents. His name, Jerome, is from the great exegete. He smiles at Gwyneth’s frightened face. It means a person who explains, he says. He explained the Bible. And the patron saint of translators. Maybe of dictionary makers too, says Elinor. She believes hers belonged to a French queen, or not French exactly, from Aquitaine, who went to England and spent a lot of time in prison. And Gwyneth, she says, such a pretty name, and you hardly ever hear it these days, except for Gwyneth Paltrow.

So? says Gwyneth, in a sharp voice, and everybody watches her flush an angry purple colour. I think it’s lovely having an unusual name, Elinor says. She doesn’t ask where it comes from. Clovis takes a certain wry pleasure in watching Elinor; he believes he sees her thinking up a series of conversational gambits and rejecting them all. After a while, when enough wine has been drunk to make him dare to try some meatier topics, he remarks that it is interesting, when you come to think of it, how much conversation between polite adults depends on what they do: asking one another what it is, discussing it, explaining it, using it to place fellow guests, even to decide whether they will be worth talking to. When that is removed, what is there to say?

Nobody does say anything for a few seconds, then Jerome speaks in a certain grave and courteous way he has. And if I were to ask you, what do you do?

You know I’m a homeless person, says Clovis. I don’t have a job. A vagrant, a tramp, a vagabond.

But I could still ask you what you do.

Oh Jerome, says Elinor, do you think … But Ivan takes her hand and surprised she stops talking.

I look at the world, as far as I can see it, which is perhaps a help, that I cannot see too well, and I think about it.

And then what? Jerome’s question is intense.

That’s it. So far. I have not got to the end of the looking, and certainly not the thinking.

Gwyneth says, I’m on the run, and everybody laughs, as though she has made a joke, though they suspect she hasn’t.

Flora had decided not to offer menus. I shall make a meal that will be their hearts’ desire, she said. How will you know, asked Jerome. I will manage it, a number of small fine things. So that they will have come not knowing what their hearts’ desire is, and finding it here.

Gwyneth tastes her first morsel, a tiny one-bite tart with furls of salmon garnished with salmon roe. I’ve had this, she says. It’s evil.

There’s a stiffening around the table.

Do you not care for fish, asks Jerome.

No, says Elinor, evil means good. Very nice. Like wicked.

Good god, says Jerome.

So, you’ve eaten here before, says Ivan.

Oh no, not in the restaurant, just the rubbish. I mean, it’s not real rubbish, not out of the bin. Joe puts it out for me.

Clovis has promised himself that he won’t let himself feel like that chap in
My Fair Lady
, the professor. Responsible. Nervous. Gwyneth is not his creation. Not his creature. Though he hasn’t done a bad job with the cutlery. Considering the amount needed for all these little courses. She doesn’t hold her knife like a pen, and she cleverly mimics Elinor’s manners, which means a certain amount of fastidious finger-eating.

When she takes her first mouthful of red wine she says to Clovis, You’re right. This is better wine out of bottles. Let’s always have it.

Would that we could, he replies. But the logistics.

What?

The Château Cardboard is more convenient, my dear. Don’t need a corkscrew, for a start. And the bottles. They’re so heavy.

I hear you can get quite good wine in casks these days, says Ivan.

Not really, says Clovis. It’s crap. But you get used to it.