We had all grown quieter, almost formal. Chris asked remarkably few questions. Whatever had flared between us had gone. I caught Isaac looking at his watch. The blonde Swiss children had all gone home.
I sat almost serene, sipping my coffee, considering the problem in its abstract form. One thing was clear, to me but not Isaac; we wouldn’t go home, I was sure of that. It was too late in the day for me to face Susy. Facing up to Isaac had aged me ten years…
But soon he would be gone. We could lie together and comfort each other in the velvety dark of our hotel room. We could try for a baby again. Our own child, our new beginning…
Then Chris astonished me. ‘I’ll go back tomorrow,’ he said slowly to Isaac. Then he turned to me, his eyes met mine, perhaps asking me to understand, and he instantly jerked his head away, a movement of hopeless irritation, as if I had never understood a thing, and I suddenly felt he must be right, for this was unheard of, astonishing; the world rolled over and tipped me off. This was the great betrayal — we had promised each other… we had vowed to each other… and I had just given up Stuart for ever… At that moment I wasn’t sure what we had promised. I sat there, listening to distant voices, and didn’t say a word. I could feel a pointless, untethered smile floating across my face, and dying.
Something very odd had happened to me. I have never been able to control myself; I see no point in controlling myself. Yet when we were finally alone I hardly said a word to Chris. We were drunk and exhausted, but it wasn’t that. I felt stunned, wounded, beyond saying anything. We took off our clothes like zombies.
That night as Chris lay in bed and snored I stood by the window in our hotel bedroom, naked in centrally heated darkness, touching the glass, which was icy cold, looking across at the vanished peaks and the random pinpricks of hard white stars. Night was out there, and emptiness. And the snows, where no one talked, or suffered, where everything slept in frozen silence, and we wouldn’t have to keep moving on. Maybe the edges were melting; the hotels were worried; the newspapers fretted; but the snowy heartlands were still there. They waited there, enormous, beyond the glossy little town, the expensive shops, the chic hotels, the ski-lodges and glow-worm trains which edged across the precipice.
There should have been a moon, three-quarters full. It was cloudless, and the moon had been big last night. I peered round the edge of the window-frame. I found myself praying it would be there; it would mean good luck, it would be a sign. If it wasn’t there now it must rise soon. I stayed there hoping and growing colder.
I smoked one of Chris’s cigarettes, though I hadn’t had a smoke for many years. I did it to see the red glow in the dark, I did it because I craved nicotine. I did it because Chris had fallen dead asleep and I desperately needed something alive. I did it to make the moon appear. I felt I could draw down the moon with my breath, dragging in deeper, more desperately, reduced to stupid magic.
But the moon had already come and gone. I couldn’t accept it; I stood and grieved. You need a man to have a baby. I couldn’t have a baby on my own. How could he leave when I needed him?
By the time Chris woke, slurred ‘Come to bed,’ and fell heavily asleep again, I was shivering in violent spasms.
But I don’t believe in suffering. I went and lay down.
And now I see that none of it mattered. We were never meant to have a child. My child was waiting somewhere here, in the teeming cities or the tiny villages, somewhere on the vast subcontinent, wriggling, waving, crawling towards me.
For everything has changed in the space of a morning. Benjamin is back, bringing good news.
I hardly dare hope after all the disappointment, but Benjamin thinks — Benjamin belives –
The signs are good. The signs are good! Movement at last after this terrible paralysis. Benjamin’s so cheerful, a different man, sober, tender, making jokes again.
This time perhaps — this time I know –
We’re due to meet her tomorrow.
16. Christopher: Venice, 2005
Too many acqua altas this week. Can’t be bothered to decline it right. Duckboards in use day after day. The steps are a nightmare of slithering weed. Fogs like blankets; you can’t see your ankles.
Acqua alta. It quacks and gurgles. Acquae altae? Decline, decline… Everything declining, settling lower. Surely this year will see us subside at last into our wrecked foundations.
I don’t want to die. I’m not ready yet. You don’t have to tire of life in your seventies. But damp and darkness infect my bones. I shall have to fly to the sun again.
Maybe I should go home.
An odd little voice, not really mine, for I have no home to go to… but you see, it never used to feel like that. Every hotel in the world was our home. Wherever Alex was was home for me –
Quick, the whisky. Pour it down. I shall not think of her again.
The house in Islington still stands. Susy lives there. We aren’t in touch. Last time she wrote was a year ago to ask for money to spend on the garden. And she was thinking of taking a tenant; the rent would ‘help’, she said. Any other news was confined to a postscript. ‘Have job, am managing. Hope you are too.’ A postcard seemed on the terse side, considering how much money she wanted. Of course I said fine, and do take a tenant — no God squad though; perhaps a nice friend? Frankly I envisaged disaster — she would let it to criminals or hopeless cases, people who would never pay rent… But the house was far too large for her. It must have rattled round her ears. It must have been full of emptiness.
I know all about that, of course. My two lofty floors hang above the black waters, and on days like this is seems the emptiness sucks in the sour green smell of the canals and exaggerates the echoes of each small sound, so a cat tips a pebble with one cold paw and I hear things falling from great heights and drowning. Inside the house. Inside me.
When we were all at home in the house in Islington everything was so different. We felt we could hardly move without tripping over an adolescent limb. Kids start small, but they’re soon too big. And Alexandra needed space. She had tremendous physical energy, whereas I’ve always been a bit lazy. She loved to dance, and run. Running upstairs, dancing down the hall, when there was room to dance down the hall… She hated clutter, it got in her way, and other people sometimes seemed like clutter, to her… she sat in strange, elaborate positions which gave her physical pleasure, stretched like a cat, flexing and turning, moving from one chair to another on incredibly light feet. You could never hear her in the house unless she was wearing high heels, which was only on high days and holidays, wasn’t it, my cat-like darling, so lithe, so swift, so silent that you might still be here, prowling the marble above my head…
Of course she had to travel. She couldn’t stay still.
I’m through with travelling now. Most of us are through with travelling now. Most of us accept that there’s nowhere left to go. I’ve holed up here in this city of water because it’s tired and old like me, with no painful dreams of paradise. There’s beauty here, but it’s in the past, it settles deeper but it can’t disappear; having once existed it will always have existed. Whereas hope for the future can shrink to nothing.
These thoughts possess me on days of fog when life contracts to a nugget of ice, when the acqua alta outside the walls swirls with human cries and bones, a tide of lost people sweeping past the window, all the people we failed to notice…