Читать книгу Unnatural Order - Liz Porter - Страница 7

The great warm bath of Karl’s affection seemed to be having a salutary effect on her character, Caroline noted to herself as she dressed to go out for afternoon tea with Karl’s colleague, Sabine. She felt inexplicably gracious. Tactful. Protective, almost. For once she felt like keeping her harsher observations to herself. It wasn’t that she was afraid of alienating him. She merely felt kind. So she held back her opinion of the way most of his female friends dressed. What a herd of affluent little brown mice they were in their tastefully boring skirts and trousers with suitably matching jumpers. And all of them so clean, it made her yearn for the punks on the Tube.

She laughed when Karl pointed out that people walking past them in the street were staring at her big black shoes, her bright pink socks, her tight black trousers.

In London, she told him, nobody gave her a second glance.

‘Ah, but this isn’t London,’ he said. ‘German women don’t like to dress in such an eye-catching way.’

‘Maybe not in Gellingen,’ she replied. ‘But I bet they do in Berlin.’

‘You’d probably be happier in Berlin,’ he said. Which was her cue to disagree. His love may have made her kinder, but it was yet to make her a liar. Heartlessly, she shrugged.

Sabine opened the front door to reveal a scene that would become familiar over several afternoon teas that week. The four other guests sitting around the tea table were all teachers: the men with neatly trimmed beards and colour-framed glasses, the women fresh-faced and wholesome.’

‘Tee trinken’ was an important ritual here, conducted at a table laid with matching crockery, cloth napkins and two large cakes. Pots of tea and coffee sat on little china stands, each with a small squat candle lit underneath to keep it warm.

Sabine was a gentle mathematics teacher with an uncharacteristically savage haircut. She greeted Caroline with genuine warmth. But a certain proprietary look that she cast at Karl from time to time suggested a greater intimacy than Karl had, as yet, admitted. Caroline’s thoughts drifted as the others compared notes on the timetables they’d been landed with. Sabine and Antje discovered that they both had Friday afternoon off, and started planning a tennis afternoon.

‘Perhaps you would care to join us, Caroline,’ said Antje in her carefully formal English teacher’s English.

Caroline blushed, wrenched back from thoughts of her own life eight years ago in Melbourne. Something about the cakes – but certainly not the table setting – had made her think of the impromptu afternoon tea parties on the floor of Steve and Vicki’s bedroom in the seedy terrace next door to her flat.

How she had loved sitting with her neighbours in a chaos of cake boxes and milk cartons. The teapot was made of battered tin, the cups were chipped and all the teaspoons were bent and burned. But when they had drugs – and she had never been there when they hadn’t – the mood was always festive.

She told herself she didn’t admire them for sneaking around in the middle of the night breaking into chemists’ shops, although she quietly envied them the guts it must have taken to do the break-ins.

She most certainly didn’t covet the customers Vicki picked up on the street and brought back to the small bedroom at the end of the hall. But she respected the black humour with which both of them viewed the world. And she enjoyed the parade of characters that passed through their room, looking for a $30 deal and a place to have it; like Julie, nicknamed “the axe lady” because she was supposed to have armed herself with an axe for a chemist’s shop hold-up once. She used the room by day while Vicki used it by night.

Caroline had also admired their talent for excess. At 32, she’d finally outgrown that emotion, although she hadn’t changed her low opinion of those who had never dreamed of living anything other than an orderly and obedient life. But she cringed at the memory of her 24-year-old self, because that Caroline was as immature as her 16-year-old self with its confused yearnings for Byron and opium dens and its disregard for prefects and other supporters of the status quo.

The contents of the bookshelf she had left behind in her Sydney flat spelt out her fascination with excess, the worn books on Byron lined up with Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the works of the opium-eaters Coleridge and De Quincy, the addict poet Baudelaire and his opiate-inspired colleague Gerard de Nerval. On the bottom shelf, the sexy Restoration Comedies were squashed in with a few set texts from her German courses. The three years she had spent studying drama were a blur of noble generals and virtuous heroines. The only characters that had ever appealed to her were Wedekind’s demonic and sexually voracious Lulu and Brecht’s rebellious, promiscuous Baal. So she kept Pandora’s Box and Brecht’s Collected Plays and threw all the Schiller and Goethe in the bin.

Literature had given Caroline extra evidence for a world view that she had developed at 16. Her reading merely helped order it around two mutually antagonistic poles: Goethe’s icy cold, ethical North and light-hearted warm and aesthetic South; Apollonian strivings for order and restraint and the Dionysian drive towards orgiastic abandonment. For her, sitting up reading in her narrow bed, it all seemed very simple. The bourgeois was opposed to the artistic; the law-abiding to the criminal. She had already pounced upon a book called Opium and the Romantic Imagination, hoping to find within it some sort of endorsement of the creative powers of opium. All she needed was to read Jean Genet, with his visions of the artistic and criminal outsider, and she was ready to meet Steve and Vicki and to fall under their spell.

Fortunately for her sake, none of the junkies she met at Steve and Vicki’s were artistic. In fact the majority were more like Julie, whose hard grey eyes took her measure and clearly found her wanting.

Caroline squirmed just thinking about it. How out of place she must have looked with her fashionably eccentric clothes and her “nice girl” job, teaching ex-prisoners English. Not to mention her clean complexion, unspoilt by the pimples and spots that all the junkies seemed to have. She could comfort herself with only one detail. At least they hadn’t known all the nonsense she’d been thinking.

Years later, when Caroline was visiting from Sydney, she discovered that the house had been replaced by an ice-cream parlour. She also found out that Steve had died, Julie was in jail and Vicki had straightened out, gone back to school and then to uni.

That evening, when Karl asked what Caroline had thought of the afternoon, she didn’t say she found his friends boring. But she was rude enough to say that the afternoon tea had made her nostalgic for people like Steve and Vicki.

She didn’t attempt to explain that she had left university determined to collect as many experiences as possible; good and bad. A mixture of caution and cowardice had kept her from allowing Steve or Vicki to stick one of their well-used syringes into her arm, although she had eagerly swallowed the many pills they offered her. It wasn’t until she became a journalist that she realised there was a safe vicarious alternative to trying every possible experience yourself.

After three days in Gellingen she still hadn’t written a word in her diary, although she had managed to get some time alone.

Karl had two school meetings on successive mornings, so Caroline decided to visit the local pool. It was, as he had told her proudly, Olympic-size, outdoor, set in parkland and heated. She walked there and back, breathing deeply as she strolled along a tree-lined path that hugged the river and trying not to make comparisons with the way she got her exercise in London: the walk through polluted air across crowded Waterloo Bridge and along the Strand to Covent Garden; the overcrowded dressing room; the exercise class in an overcrowded gym; the rush for the queue for showers; and the dash to a crowded Tube back to the office.

At the swimming pool itself, spacious, state-of-the-art and spotless, she thought of the smell of mould that pervaded the local baths in Holloway, only 25 metres long so you had reached the other end before you had a chance to think.

In the long, empty lanes of the Gellingen Freibad there was too much opportunity to think. Too many ideas floated into her brain, unsought, as she swam up and down, watching the black lane-lines slip past below and repeating to herself, mantra-like, the number of laps she’d swum.

Mostly she thought of Karl and how much more appealing he seemed now. Was it only that he was more confident on his own home ground? She was still at a loss to explain the speed with which he claimed to have fallen in love with her. But she had started to accept it, even to respect his honesty.

Before, she had taken his premature talk of love and relationships as a sign of weakness or desperation. Now that she had had a chance to see how he lived, it was clear that he had not turned to her out of loneliness. There were women queuing up to visit him. And there’d be no shortage of tea and sympathy for him when she went back to London.

But what did that mean? Did the existence of competition make the prize more worthy? Did his popularity mean he was any less neurotic?

She could identify one sensible reason behind her change of heart? Her knowledge that Karl had a good life in Germany had made her respect him more. In Portugal she could only assess him in terms of his relationship with her. Now she could see him with others and he seemed to be both kind and easy-going.

The day before Caroline was due to fly back, Karl insisted on showing her around Stuttgart. He carefully avoided mentioning future plans as he showed her galleries, bookshops and theatres. He didn’t need to. Everywhere they went Caroline tried to imagine herself as a local, and was shocked to find herself enjoying the game.

Life with Karl would be comfortable, she thought, as they drank coffee at an outside table on the paved mall of the Konigstrasse. It would provide the intimacy and home life that, for years, she had envied from the outside looking in. But what about friends? What would she do without Anna? And Jane? All Karl’s neighbours appeared to be old. There would be nobody to nip downstairs and have a quick coffee with.

Of course there would be Karl. But only Karl. Yet how long, as Karl had asked the night before, would she have Jane?

He certainly had a knack for homing in on her vulnerabilities, and for plying her with enough wine to make her talk about them.

The night before, over a beautifully cooked meal of veal with mushrooms, she had been in tears describing her street in London and how depressed she felt sometimes as she walked past her neighbours’ lit windows and saw vignette after vignette of family life. Bookshelves bulging with happy domestic clutter; a plump infant sitting in a highchair waving a spoon in the air while a six-year-old practised piano. Miseries and frustrations also lurked behind these tableaux vivants, but she couldn’t see them from the street. All she could feel was a sense of shared warmth – of meals cooked together or for one another. Of cups of tea in bed.

‘You could have all that here,’ Karl had said. She knew. But what else would she have?

On the plane back to London, she finally opened her diary. But by then so much had happened she didn’t know where to start.

August 7. Am I making a big mistake? she wrote in large letters on a new page.

It had to be a mistake, she told herself, as the plane bumped down at Heathrow. And none of it would have happened if she hadn’t been so damned open with him.

Why on earth had she ever told him that she envied Anna and the security of her life with Christopher? Or that the selfish, rotten part of her (or was that her entire personality?) would be devastated if Jane fell in love with someone because then she’d have no-one to stay home and watch Katharine Hepburn movies with. Or that there were really only two things she loved about her job: her colleagues and the unlimited access to private movie previews, and that what she wanted was to stay home and write fiction.

She had made it so easy for Karl. She had said she wanted to settle down, and that she envied her married friends their loving partners. So there he was, offering her an opportunity to settle down and be constantly adored. He said she didn’t have to work if she didn’t want to.

‘Just stay home and write short stories, write novels, write kids’ books. Whatever makes you happy,’ he had said.

The evening TV news had been on as they were talking. They had both looked up as an item came on about a woman arrested for the murder of her own small son. The woman, a slight figure with long unkempt blond hair and huge red-rimmed eyes, was being led away in handcuffs while a small crowd of onlookers jeered. The voice-over had been too fast for Caroline to catch all the facts, but there was plenty of editorial detail in the movement of the camera as it lingered on the woman’s tear-stained face and then panned across the vindictive expressions to be seen in the crowd around the police car.

‘First they arrested the husband, now they’ve let him go and they say she did it,’ Karl translated.

‘Couldn’t you write a story about her?’ he asked, when the segment was over.

‘Probably not,’ she had replied, suddenly irritated by the fact that she had to explain that English papers and magazines were far too parochial to care about a murder in another country unless there were some absolutely extraordinary circumstance – and, ideally, a British citizen involved.

Non-journalists never had the slightest idea about the themes that made saleable magazine articles and Karl was no exception to the rule. He missed the terseness in her tone. He was too preoccupied with a small piece of paper on which he’d been doing a series of calculations.

Not to bore her with details, he continued, but he had worked out exactly how much he had left from his salary after expenses. His conclusion was that he could definitely afford to support her while she wrote, although he wasn’t sure if he could manage to keep her in that beautiful Dior talcum powder that she always spilt on the floor after her bath.

Had there been anything he hadn’t thought of, thought Caroline, absent-mindedly signalling the steward for another glass of wine. Why hadn’t she simply said, ‘It’s so lovely of you to ask, but it’s completely out of the question.’ How could she possibly have found herself saying that they could talk about it again if he came to England? And why had she been so agreeable when he said he couldn’t come because he had school on Saturday mornings, and no free weekend for two months? She had suggested that he just take a sickie but he looked at her as if she were recommending that he mug old ladies to get the money for his fare.

How could she have let him pressure her into agreeing to come back to Gellingen for a weekend at the beginning of September, which was his birthday? Not just to celebrate but to talk again about his plan?

Caroline closed the diary and leaned back in her seat. The young man in the seat next to her was reading a book called How to Own Your Own Life. She probably should have been reading that, not the German feminist magazine she had bought at the airport. Some of the language was a little too difficult for her, but she enjoyed contrasting the themes of articles in a serious women’s publication with those in London Woman. There was a polemic arguing that women boycott all male service providers: dentists, doctors, carpenters and plumbers; a piece on the role of Aboriginal women in the battle to stop alcohol ravaging Australia’s indigenous communities; and an article recommending the unionisation of cleaning women. Did they ever do anything just for laughs, these women? Presumably they joked and moaned about their partners and their sex lives at their weekly editorial conferences. But the only evidence of that was in an excellent comic strip. She flipped through once more, searching for a piece of fiction. In vain. Jesus Christ they were a serious bunch. She settled in to read the story about Aboriginal women.