Terroir (13 page)

They kept him in and operated six days later. In many ways he'd been lucky. If they'd sent him home he'd have been walking around like a time bomb. It was bad luck/he was lucky. Which? He'd always exercised plenty, eaten properly, was only maybe half a stone too heavy. His own father had lived to be ninety
-
two and his mother eighty
-
seven. But then they'd been looking in the wrong place for a long time. Denial wasn't just a river in Egypt, as Simon used to say.

Ralph took off his bush hat and wiped his forehead. The brim was soaked and dusky with sweat. There were white rings of salt where his sweat had dried, the tidemark of earlier walks. He was wearing shorts and hiking boots. There was the purple scar down his leg, there the scar on his chest where he was wired together with titanium. Nine months after the op, stitches still made their way to the surface and he pulled them out like stray hairs.

The path forked in front of him: the left
-
hand side veering over open hillside, the right
-
hand side entering a shady gully. He kept to the right watching blue and yellow butterflies and dark moths scatter up from pink flowers that grew beside the path. He didn't know the names of the flowers or the butterflies. They would have names in Catalan, names in Castilian, names in French and Basque. That was how the human tongue played over things, defining them until language itself died. He couldn't decide if it was good to be alive or not. Being close to death had brought him face to face with a vast ignorance. All the things he couldn't name and didn't know. The university was like that, too. What he didn't know seemed so much bigger than what he did, which at times merely seemed a lot about a little. Contemporary literature and theory. Saying that he was a doctor
but not a real doctor
had been a joke. It didn't feel like that now. Not after the real doctors had put him under the anaesthetic and renewed his heart and woken him back to life. He'd visited the underworld and returned,
knocked on the downstairs door
, as his friend Tariq had put it, translating from Urdu. Even his surgeon had been Greek, leading him on that journey through dark rivers where his blood pulsed and roared like a bull's in cavernous dreams.

Somehow Simon and Stella had got him through, even though they pretty much hated each other by then. After all, Simon had put her in an impossible position. He'd given her a secret that she didn't want and couldn't keep. She'd told Ralph one evening, on one of the rare occasions they had dinner together. Just six months after the op and he'd been about to return to work, part
-
time. Simon couldn't make it and Stella had cooked an Indian meal, which was surprisingly good. Ralph had got her to shave his head. She said he looked like Mahatma Gandhi. He'd quipped that he looked as if he'd had chemotherapy, not heart surgery. Cooking always took Stella hours and, unlike Ralph, she made meticulous reference to recipes, wore an apron that had arrived free with a case of wine, and used the kitchen scales to make exact measurements. Lamb cutlets with spiced rice and okra. Afterwards, she'd dabbed her mouth on a napkin and lit a cigarette, blowing smoke away from him.

– You know he's gone don't you.

– You mean to the conference?

– Don't be stupid, Ralph.

He had known. It was true. It was like pain arriving. First it circled and then it cut you in half.

– How long have you known?

– Not known, not really. Suspected.

– How long have you
suspected
?

– About as long as you have.

She pulled on the cigarette.

– Don't pretend it's all my fault.'

She was right, she was only telling him what he knew in sheepish glances, cancelled evenings out, Simon's hurry always to be somewhere that was somewhere else.

– I'm sorry.

She stubbed the cigarette out on a plate. A habit she knew Ralph hated.

– Shit! Now I'm really sorry.

She wiped away the ash with her finger.

– Forgot. Again…

Then, somehow they were smiling at each other. Ralph never knew how Simon found out he knew. It wasn't easy in the Department, but the place was deserted half the time anyway with central timetabling and colleagues on sabbatical. They'd never advertised that they were an item and they never told anyone it was over. Ralph met Stella a few times more than he usually did for lunch, usually in one of the bars around the campus, but that was all. Apart from pain of a different kind that kept him awake at night now. When he went back to work there had been a colossal sense of hurt. Visceral. As if work had hurt him. The first staff meeting had been difficult, when they'd ended up sitting almost side by side, looking up from the agenda and minutes to exchange wry glances. Ralph had felt naked then. But then it became easier. It became a fact of life, a
fait accomplit
.

The path left the trees now and reared up into a left
-
hand curve where the old vine terraces began. The low walls that kept back the hillside had collapsed and he had to pick his way over scree. In a few places prickly pears had colonised the land and he scratched his leg trying to negotiate them. A trickle of bright blood ran down his right calf. He dabbed it with a tissue, but the blood kept coming. Ever since the op he'd been taking low dose aspirin to prevent clotting. But if he cut himself the blood flowed. After the angiogram a big Nigerian nurse had leaned on the wound in his femoral artery when the cannula had gone in, pressing until the bleeding stopped, telling him about her kids back in Abuja.

After the first game of tennis they'd played together, when it had all been new, Simon had licked the sweat off his chest in the shower. There seemed no going back on each other then. He had the gentlest hands of any lover Ralph had known, man or woman. Not that there had been many women. Though Stella had sometimes been a convenient front for them both. She lectured in Gothic literature and wore trademark black polo neck sweaters and slacks. On one arm she had a tattoo of a snake eating its tail in a figure of eight. That was considered pretty racy in academia, though Ralph often thought it was an image
of
academia. She was a Reader now, as from the last appointments round. He'd had the grace to feel glad for her. Her new book on the Bront
ë
s had been well reviewed. His own, one and only, book on the sonnet form and its links to Renaissance music had sunk like a stone into the usual dismal university libraries. No one else would want to read that. He'd be lucky to collect half a dozen citations. The Dean was already hassling about the next research excellence thing.
Exercise? Framework?
He couldn't remember. Bullshit, anyway.

Ralph was panting now. His hips and legs ached with the effort of constantly climbing. He could feel the steady bumping of his heart. There were a few yards of flat path as his route ran parallel to the hillside before climbing again. He came to a flat rock jutting out from the slope and sat down to rest. The sea seemed a vertical plane, a blue
-
grey veil. The town was fainter, the church a pointillist's dab of white. Scrubby trees spread out below him, khaki green. A pigeon or dove broke from cover and crossed the valley frantically, as if a predator was patrolling the tree line. He'd seen a sparrow hawk take a blackbird like that once, almost in front of his face on the south campus. So close he'd ducked. One minute gliding from the trees, the next an airburst of feathers. Then the hawk sculling away with the dead songbird in its claws. Oddly enough he'd found that invigorating, as if he walked on into the day more alive. When in fact he was on his way to the Emily Dickinson lecture theatre to enlighten Part II students about modern forms of the sonnet. All those bleak, hungover faces lined up in semi
-
circles.

Ralph felt in his shoulder bag for the bottle of water. He took a long swig, spraying the last of the mouthful into the dust. A libation. Droplets sparkled, then darkened like old blood. He set off again, already scanning ahead for the next resting place, feeling balls of sweat trickle down his sides under the shirt. He remembered Simon's tongue lapping at him the way a cat lapped a saucer of milk. For a theorist he was amazingly … well,
immediate
. For someone who spent his time with Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, he knew the secrets of touch.
In theory, theories exist. In practice they don't.
Who was that? Latour? Ralph halted where the path widened a little, breaking some dried leaves from a sage bush and smelling his fingers. The herb was as pungent as wood smoke. He flexed his left leg and rubbed the scar where it ran deepest behind his knee. He had a little birthmark there that looked like a rabbit. Funny how those things stayed with you all your life, like having green eyes or the way your fingernails grew or the hair on your chest tapered. His chest had been parted with a saw, shaved, cranked open and then wired back together. Before the op, he'd asked the surgeon –
the Greek
– what the procedure would be like.
Invasive
, he said. Then, later with a smile:
It'll be
traumatic, but don't worry, eh? You're going to be OK
. He was right, it was like being invaded.

He hadn't wanted anyone around when he went to the theatre. The anesthetist had been an Irishman, about his own age. Jovial. He'd had the pre
-
med, then waited as time dissolved around him. He'd slipped away from consciousness and they put him under and started work. Diverting his blood supply, cutting away diseased vessels, grafting new ones. Like the way they'd tended the vines he was walking through. Six hours of surgery. Death and resurrection. When he came to, it was evening. He'd been worried that he'd wake up shouting obscenities under the effects of the anaesthetic. But he felt at peace, and was being washed by a beautiful Malaysian nurse who had gold hoops in her ears. She was smiling at him, teeth glinting, eyes dark as occlusions in honey. His body, still painted with iodine, looked radiant, as if he'd been coated with gold leaf. His chest was seared with a bloody line and his pubic hair gleamed like copper wire. He had the sensation of floating in warm water, of a wide dark river with fire playing over the surface. A small apocalypse in which he felt like a river god with his bride, her hands light as tender flames across his body.

It must have been hours later when he woke again and Stella and Simon were sitting beside the bed. He didn't remember this, but they said he'd been in
good form
. Pleased to see them, genial, peeping down his tee shirt, smiling sardonically, babbling. That would be the legend back in the Department. He hadn't feared pain or death, but the end of life: the axe, not its shadow. He'd waited for days before the op to have the tests that would confirm him as viable. He'd had lung capacity tests and more x
-
rays. Thank God he'd never smoked. Then the surgeon had appeared early one evening, flipping through Ralph's notes to pronounce him an excellent candidate before rattling through his survival rates.

After the op and that visit from Simon and Stella, he'd been alone in the ward. Not alone in fact, but alone in some profound sense with his hurt. He'd remembered Raleigh's words to the executioner as he examined the axe:
Let me see it. Do you think I'm afraid of it? This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases.
And he'd realised that he wasn't really viable, after all. That sharp medicine had done its worst. He was stranded with his wound, his constant need of care. He was dependent. The hours had passed in a slow ache of realisation. Morphine had reduced the tangible to phantasmagorical shadows. The pain was coming closer; something stalking him, something he already knew. He asked the sister for some painkillers and he saw her approaching the consultant who was making a ward round. He'd stopped to fuss with Ralph's drip and reassure him about the operation. He'd done a quadruple bypass in the end,
the Greek.
When the ache began he felt as he'd been sawn in half, which he had. He saw the surgeon turn away from the nurse before she even asked her question. It was three hours later when the pain was rasping along his sternum that the ward sister came by with some tablets.

The first signs had first come on five years ago when he'd been playing cricket for the university. The senior team, that is. He'd bowled twelve consecutive overs: five maidens, twenty
-
seven for none because he'd been dropped five times. It was probably his best ever spell, the ball swinging away late, pitching just short of a length outside off stump and then seaming towards first slip. He'd crafted each over, swinging the odd ball in, getting some to lift from a length, even making some cut into the stumps. The batsman was an old adversary, a Professor of Music, and they'd been able to share a joke between overs. Then he'd stood under the trees on the boundary with an ache spreading from chest to shoulder. It came back when he was playing tennis, then cycling. He'd gone to his GP and been referred to cardiology and had the treadmill test. He didn't believe that there was anything seriously wrong with him. Re
-
reading
Lolita
he found that Nabakov's Humbert Humbert had suffered from intercostal neuralgia and he'd Googled it out of curiosity. It was a condition of the intercostal muscles that mimicked angina. Perfect. When the young cardiologist had told him – categorically – that there was nothing wrong with his heart he'd tried that bit of theory out on her. She'd smiled. No, she hadn't read Nabakov. Yes, it was possible.