Читать книгу What Poets Need - Finuala Dowling - Страница 10

11.50 pm

The headless nude is gone, sold, but the ghost of you remains. After dropping Sal at Holy Cross I stopped by the Empire café and remembered the day you met me there. You said, tilting towards the painting above us, “I wonder why artists sometimes leave the head off? Do they do that with male subjects too?”

I looked at you and said, because the thought struck me then so forcefully, that you are not just pretty. You have the beauty of culmination, that comes from generation upon generation of fine noses marrying limpid eyes, of luminous skin marrying good cheekbones. You laughed and blushed and then you said, “Other men should come to you for lessons. You could teach other men how to woo.” Then you reached across and grasped my wrist, a rare public moment in an otherwise profoundly secret and often shamefully furtive archive.

Now I have it! “Ways of Keeping” must have an ending that comes back to its beginning. Thus:

Ways of Keeping

I have kept my love for you

like an unloved dog,

chained up in the yard.

You have kept your love for me

pressed between

pages of a well-loved book.

Secretly, with a diamond,

you have etched me into a glass pane,

showing me my hiding place

with a cupped hand.

I could teach the world to woo

but teach me to keep as you do.

In those days, before Theo knew about me, you took more risks. For that hour in the Empire, and for the two hours after that here at the house, in my bed while Sal was at school and Beth on site somewhere, you had to lie. Tell him you were staying after the botanical society sale to have lunch with a schoolfriend who happened to be holidaying in Cape Town.

I didn’t take you straight to my room. I crave romance; I want to seduce you with words first. I love to see your pupils dilate, take more and more of me in as I tell you what you already know. That there is nobody like you, never has been, that you are the revelation of my life, my consolation and respite. That I feel safer now about striking out because I know that if I falter, I only have to turn around to see your reassuring smile. That the year I met you was Year One. That moments before I met you for the first time, I knew I would fall in love with you, and consequently the slight creak of the floorboards as you approached sent me up into the high arc of a swing. I could have carried on, I did wax on, but then you reached across and said, “Could we go now, back to your room?”

We have never kissed in public, barely leant against each other in company. But today I sat under the abstract canvas that has taken the place of the headless nude of which you did not approve, and the ghost of you brushed my wrist.

At a window table overlooking the beach, I saw a group of Holy Cross mothers. One of them, a psychologist called Angie, came over and asked after Beth. “How long will your sister be away?” I heard her boots first. They are very spiky and resoundingly noisy. Beth once told me that Angie is a recovered anorexic who now jogs compulsively to stay slim. She must have some other shoes for jogging in, but I know her in jeans and spiky boots. She is slim and these new low-slung hipsters suit her. Her sexy bottom half doesn’t quite match her severe top half, with its staring, slightly protruding eyes behind glasses. If I were one of her patients I’d feel like a mouse waiting for the wise owl to swoop. Angie’s claws hovered briefly over me as she said that if I need help with Sal I must just call. Then she was back off to her corner with a beating of carnivorous wings.

She must have reported back to the Holy Cross mothers because they immediately all swivelled round on their branch to stare at me. Probably pitying my incompetence in their field of expertise. While I was paying for my cappuccino, another of the group came up and said very shyly and softly that she wanted to organise a play. At first I thought she must be either a mad am-dram or a sotto voce pervert. But then she said, “You know, for Sal to come and play with my daughter Harriet”. Harriet. Of course. Sal talks about her all the time. This was her mother, Hannelie.

Afterwards I stopped by the supermarket for groceries. No Coke, thank goodness, as Sal decided of her own accord to give that up several months ago. When you have to lug shopping up twenty-eight steps you don’t want heavy, nutritionally irrelevant items.

I had a list and my foray went smoothly. I’m familiar with the essentials of how the house is run, though it’s true that Beth has not relied on me. If she says, “We need milk”, or “Pick up some ciabatta on the way home”, then I complete the task. I was a bit nervous the first day she told me to “buy electricity” but the staff at the 7-11 were very helpful.

After I’d unpacked the shopping, I came back here to work. Ryno’s mother knocked and said her computer was playing up again and “Beth usually sorts it out.” You remember Mrs Cloete, who lives in what was once a little holiday cottage at the back of our house? With a bad grace I followed her there and saw she had a game of solitaire going. She’s seventy-six: I don’t know what else I’d expect her to be doing with her computer.

So what’s the problem, I asked her.

She said: “It’s clearly missing the jack of diamonds.”

I paused for a while before I asked: What does Beth do when this happens?

“She usually finds it,” said Mrs Cloete.

I sat down and took over the game. The jack of diamonds stayed stubbornly uncovered. I clicked on New Game and the bugger popped up obligingly in the third row.

I have to go work now, I told her. I have a deadline.

She said: “There’s something I forgot to tell you. I’m always forgetting things these days. Ryno phoned from the Transkei. The line was very bad. But he says you must fetch Sir Nicholas from the kennels. They won’t have him any more, they say his temperament is not suited to a solitary existence. He tried to dig himself out.”

So Ryno’s dog has been expelled, I said. Where must I take him to?

“You’ll have to bring him here,” said Mrs Cloete. “You can make him a cosy little bed in the shed.”

Sal was delighted when she heard. You’d swear we’d bought her a new puppy and not just offered board and lodging to an old mutt. “Let me sleep with him!” she said. “I can wake up smelling of dog!”

I asked her, as a matter of interest, when she took a bath. Suddenly I couldn’t remember Beth’s routine, or if there’d been one.

“Rarely,” replied Sal, and grinned.

I’ve always marvelled at my niece’s propensity for joy. She wakes up happy, exclaiming about something funny she read or saw the day before. She laughs a fat, full laugh at the nonsense she and her mother talk in bed at night, at her friends, teachers, dogs and cats of her acquaintance, everything. She’s quiet sometimes, but a happy quiet, absorbed in long games and books, books, books. Other times she’s less studious, gets on a pair of Beth’s high heels and pushes a little pink pram around, pretending to chew gum and talk “gam”. She worries about a naughty boy in her class called Noah. Last year she wrote him a letter promising him ten rand if he would just stop “throughing paper balls at the teacher’s back”.

At bedtime tonight she was less upbeat. I asked her whether she’d finished her homework, and she listed all the tasks she’d completed. Then: “There’s just one more thing: I have to examine my conscience,” she said. She sat silently, bolt upright for a while. I sat next to her, as perplexed and wistful as only a lapsed Catholic can be.

I read to her. When I thought she was asleep, I started to creep away from the bed. I felt a steely grip on my arm. I understood that I should lie next to her until her breathing was deep and even, past the first light phase, the one that ends with an inexplicable shudder, or jerk, past the false start that precedes true dreaming.

All I could think about was how I really wanted to be on my own, reading my own book in my own bed. I have no gift for this. I’ve met nurturers before; never imagined I’d have to be one.

Monica used to complain that I never looked after her, never tucked her into bed when she was sick, never took her car to the mechanic when it needed fixing. How do I want to defend myself against these accusations? Firstly, Monica was always in charge, always announcing how things would be and then monitoring them so that they met with her blueprint. Secondly, I frankly don’t remember her ever being sick. She was frighteningly robust. I was attracted to her strength, which seemed a good foil for my passivity.

My passivity, yes. As you get older, you grow accustomed to yourself. What I mean is that as a child, I kept expecting to turn into someone else – a rugby player, an academic achiever, someone who copes easily. It never occurred to me that I couldn’t become those things, that they required internal and external qualities I didn’t have. It took ages for me to cotton on that my interior life was in fact different from that of my friends. Only gradually did I apprehend that I was experiencing the world differently from other people.

Commonplace objects are for me like old books I have read before, and in which I have left a distinctive bookmark, an envelope, postcard, bill, ticket, shopping list, letter, or photograph that forever reminds me of the circumstances in which I first turned those pages. I move slowly through a world that is bookmarked with meaning. I can’t get ahead, as other people do. The others have gone on ahead, are waving at me from their established careers, while I linger here, thinking about the broken handle of the handsome old Monarch fridge that once graced our kitchen. I feel there is something about that fridge and its absent handle that needs commemoration. The way the fridge only admitted those who knew the secret curved finger hook that opened its mechanism. I’m using the fridge as an example, you understand. I’m reluctant to instigate new experiences because I have a backlog of old fridges to process.

Poor Monica. Just as I, in our early cohabitation, thought I might still metamorphose into someone else, she too doubtless hoped I would change. Happy are those who fall in love at fifty, after all this fruitlessness.