*
They spent a weekend in his flat on Tavistock Crescent. It was part of a modern development, handy for the shops of Portobello Road, set back from the terrorist safe house nearby. After that weekend she had seen him a dozen times perhaps. She found him relaxing company. He expected very little of her. He seemed to understand that she was not quite herself. He told her that she was a beautiful woman, but sad and grave. He explained to her that they transcended the boundaries of youth and age. In this equation, she suspected she was age. He enjoyed being naked, he explained. He wanted to worship her body, and he announced that he loved her thighs. ‘And the curve of your back, and the muscles on your arms, long thin muscles,’ he said. ‘You’re very graceful.’ That should have been a sop for her ego, but she couldn’t absorb it. When they lay in bed listening to the trains hammering past and the usual grinding of the Westway, he said, ‘I would like to take you on holiday. You seem tired.’
‘No, no, I couldn’t possibly be tired,’ said Rosa, reclining into a pile of pillows. He had dark hair and alabaster skin. It was a good contrast, and she admired his youth. It gave her an illusion that she might also be twenty-five, poised on the brink of everything. At twenty-five she had been naive and driven. More naive, less driven than him. She had been resolutely, devoutly fashionable; it amused her to remember her faithful adherence to fleeting trends. She had spent so much time trying to enjoy herself in the usual ways — clubbing, drinking, dying her hair. Her bathroom had been full of balms and ointments. Now, at the stage when she was meant to be plastering herself in unguents, she had thrown that stuff away. At twenty-five she had felt that there was time, that life was long. Now, the years since then had been soft sift in an hourglass, they had poured through so quickly. She wanted to tell this to Andreas, but there was little she could offer him. Compared with Rosa at twenty-five, Andreas was distinct and resolute. He told her she was going through a bad patch. It sounded reassuring that way, as if it was all just as fleeting as a fever. He understood, but he wanted her to know that he found her fascinating, he said. ‘Your eyes, your dark wit, some days you are pained, others quite childlike and funny. I like your range. I think you must always have been like this. I have no depth at all, but I admire it in others,’ he said. When he talked like that she lapped it up, her with her dented self. She enjoyed it, and didn’t care if he was filling time. He had that sort of carelessness. Sometimes she knew he was talking for the hell of it, to stop a gap, stuff a bung in a silence.
*
He had photographs of his parents on the table by his bed. His mother looked beautiful in a high-cheekboned way. His father was tall and thin, bent slightly. Andreas polished the frames, laughing at his reverence. He slung his legs out of the bed and offered to bring her coffee.
‘My mother’, he said, when he came back with a tray, ‘always told me I should learn how to wait on women. She says it is an important skill, perhaps the most important.’
‘It is a skill,’ said Rosa. ‘Knowing when to serve and when to command.’
‘I can do either,’ he said. Their repartee was a little forced. But his eyes shone when she kissed him. He listened well, laughed in the right places, generously plied her with questions. Still, the balance between them kept slipping. Within a few days, he was offering her advice.
‘You need to get a sense of what you want to do,’ he kept saying. ‘You have to do something. We all, we all have to do something. I feel I can help, at least with this.’
‘I just need to get back into the Polis,’ she said.
‘The Polis,’ he said. He sounded tired. They were wrapped in sheets. Theirs was a bed-bound romance. It did best at night. But now it was early morning, and they were both hung-over.
‘It’s hard to get back in,’ she said. ‘Once you fall out.’
He stayed silent, looking at her. Then he rolled over and folded his arms around her. She was pressed into his wide chest. He seemed to be smiling. He kissed the back of her neck.
I just wonder what it means, she wanted to say. Us, here, in this tentative version of romance, and before, Liam and I. These entanglements. All of us with our bare bones of knowledge. Not knowing what we are. The birth of tragedy. This smallness I feel deep inside myself. The Birth of Smallness. Yes, yes, after the Egyptians, the Greeks with their fetish for dying beauty, doomed greatness, comes the birth of smallness, the soaring rise of the insignificant. Here I am, thought Rosa, the living embodiment of the new age of minutiae. She understood it clearly. Gradually everything had been taken over by people like Rosa. In general, her kind were doing very well. She had been given a generous slice of the pie; it was just that she couldn’t quite eat it.
Andreas was explaining that he was naturally idle. It was only by an effort of will that he made himself do things. The key was to set yourself small goals, he said.
‘So there’s one thing we must establish — what are your small goals?’ he asked.
‘Oh, nothing much. Avoid the onslaught. Stay out of trouble.’
‘Well, that’s not quite what I meant. As goals, I am not sure they work. Because eventually something will come to you, debt or death, or something anyway. This onslaught, you can’t really avoid it.’
‘Why?’ she said.
‘Why can’t you avoid death? I don’t know, for pity’s sake,’ he said. He raised a long, thick arm and slapped his hand on his forehead.
‘No, I mean the everlasting why,’ said Rosa. He yawned, and turned onto his front. He crossed his hands above his head, defensively.
‘I thought it was an everlasting yes,’ he said into the pillow.
‘No, that must be something else.’
‘Anyway it’s not a goal.’ He scratched his arm. He had a hand on her back, she could feel the warmth and pressure of his hand.
‘Why?’
‘Let’s not go round again.’
‘No, I mean why is “why” not a goal?’
Now his head was buried in the pillow. His voice was muffled. ‘In the name of God,’ he said, ‘in the name of God in Heaven, “why” is a question, not a goal. It’s a goddamn question!’
‘Huh, profound,’ she said, but it wasn’t fair to mock him. Now he sat up and took her hand.
‘You say you are tired. Well, give yourself a few weeks, and then really get cracking.’
‘Get cracking?’ she said.
‘Is it not a contemporary phrase?’
‘No, it’s perfect,’ said Rosa. ‘It’s just the right phrase.’ And she kissed him, though she knew she was wasting his time.
*
He was vain, and his motions were sometimes contrived, the studied flick of his head, the way he moved his hands. She could see his health was immanent. She was sure any woman would like him. Because they saw each other so seldom, she was convinced he must have another lover, a batch of them. This made her distant and sometimes preoccupied. It wasn’t jealousy she felt. It was a relief, if anything, that he wasn’t hanging around expecting love. Still, in a few weeks she knew a lot about him. He filled her in on the basics, meticulously, sparing her none of the details. He came from Berlin. His father had been a diplomat, and had been posted to China and Morocco when Andreas was a child. So by the age of seven he spoke German, English, French and a little Mandarin Chinese. His English was grammatically impeccable, but his idiom was inconsistent. It was a sort of cinema slang, derived from English-language films. He was tall and pale, with a smooth, line-free face. His hair was slightly curly and he wore it long. He had fine muscular legs; he liked to run. He walked with great confidence; he stood upright with his hands resting in his pockets. He was rarely pensive or demoralised, as far as Rosa could see. In fact he seemed to possess a blissful sense of optimism that Rosa dimly remembered, and felt was bound up with youth. He always dressed well, in smart, freshly ironed clothes, and his underwear was striped. He had a slight accent, but it was not immediately possible to place him. Initially she had thought he might be American.