The Closed Circle (5 page)

I know that I'm right. I know that what I'm thinking about Benjamin and
Emily is true. I see it in her eyes, later that evening.

The gig (is that the word? It's a word I can never take seriously) goes well. I
remember hearing this band play a few times back in the 1980s, and thinking
how out of date they sounded. They were doing these long, funky instrumentals,
but this was a few years before somebody coined the phrase “acid jazz,” and that
kind of thing became fashionable again. Back then, what they were doing just
seemed perverse and anachronistic. But tonight it goes down a treat. Great
rhythm section: I think the drummer used to work with Benjamin in a bank or
something, that's how the whole thing got started. Anyway, he knows what he's
doing, and so does the bass player: and over this solid foundation Benjamin and the
guitarist and the sax player weave sweet, slightly wistful melodies (Benjamin's
touch there, I reckon) and improvise cleanly and cleverly: no over-indulgent solos,
no blowing endlessly over the same two chords while the audience gives up and
drifts back to the bar. After the first two or three numbers, in fact, people have
stopped tapping their toes self-consciously and jiggling up and down on the spot.
They're dancing! Actually dancing! Even Philip, who may be a beacon of niceness
and decency in some ways but is certainly no Travolta in the moves department.
Emily's really going for it, too. She's surprisingly nifty on her feet. Really getting
down and enjoying herself. She seems to have come along with a whole crowd of
friends (“church people,” Phil tells me) and in the middle of one piece, after it's
reached its first climax and gone quiet again and there's already a smattering of
applause and cheering, she turns to one of these people—a tall, narrow-hipped,
good-looking guy—and he leans down towards her and puts his hand on her shoulders and she shouts, “I told you they were good, didn't I? I told you they'd be
brilliant.”

She looks so happy.

Me, I can't quite bring myself to join in. I don't know why. Maybe because
the last few days have been so strange and the last few months have taken me on
such a long and tiring emotional journey and tonight I can feel the whole weight
of that pressing down on me. Anyway. Nothing, nothing on earth is going to get
me on to that dance floor. I stand on the edge of the crowd and lean against the
wall watching, and after a while I go to the bar and buy myself a pack of Marlboro
lights. That shows how bad things are. I haven't had a cigarette for weeks: only
took up smoking again when the Stefano business started to get me down, as
well—before that I'd been clean for about four or five years. I'm not ready to
light one up just yet, but it's nice to have the feel of the pack in my pocket, nice
to know it's there. Sooner or later I'm going to want one. I can feel the need
coming on.

About half an hour later, the atmosphere changes, and that's when I know it's
time to go.

It happens like this. A bright, up-tempo song finishes with a flourish of cymbals and a crashing major chord, and then three of the band members put their
instruments down and withdraw to the back of the stage. There are just two of
them left—Benjamin and the guitarist—and the guitarist announces the next
piece which he says is going to be a duet. He says that it's written by Benjamin and
it's called
Seascape No. 4
. Then the two of them start playing and the mood
changes completely. It's a delicate, sad little tune—almost dangerously fragile—
and Benjamin's whole face is transformed when he starts playing it. He's looking
down at his keyboard, hunched over it suddenly, tense and introverted, and his eyes
are half closed. Although the piece is quite complicated, he doesn't have to concentrate hard on his fingering because you can tell he knows these chords, these patterns, off by heart—they're stamped on his memory like the contours of a love
a fair that you never forget—so he's free to think about other things, free to fix his
gaze somewhere else: backwards, back in time, back to the experience that inspired
this heartbroken music, whatever it was. And of course, some of us in this room
know what inspired it.
Who
inspired it, rather. And realizing this, I glance across
at Emily to see how she's responding to the music; how she's dealing with the
change in tone, the change in her husband. And her demeanour has changed, as
well. She's no longer staring up at the stage, adoringly. She's looking at the floor.
There's a smile on her face, yes, but what a smile! It's the ruin of a smile, a fossilized remnant left over from the exhilaration of the last few numbers; frozen
into place now, lifeless and unmoving, a kind of rictus that only spotlights the
terrible sadness the rest of her face is betraying. And I can see, with that one glance
in her direction, that Benjamin may have had his heart broken, once, many years
ago, by the woman commemorated in this music, but Emily's has been fractured a
hundred times, a thousand times over in the years she's been married to him, by
the knowledge that he has never got over that brief, ridiculous, devastating
teenage love a fair. Never
tried
to get over it, I would guess: that's the really
bruising, the really unforgiveable thing. He has no interest in forgetting her. No
interest in making Emily feel anything other than second best. The one he never
really wanted. A consolation prize for the inconsolable.

I look around at the unreadable expressions of the other people in the audience,
and ask myself: don't they know what they are witnessing here, what they are
listening to? Can't they hear it? Can't they see it in the stricken pallor that
Emily's face has been washed in, since this music began?

No. I don't think they get it, to be honest. There's only one other person in the
room who seems lost in this music, taken over by it, who seems to know anything
about the depths from which Benjamin must once have dragged it: and that,
remarkably, seems to be Malvina. She's got her eyes fixed on Benjamin and
her
demeanour has changed, too: she's wired, alert. She's been sitting on the sidelines
until now, not taking part, observing everything coolly, but I can tell that something about
this
piece of music touches her. She's involved, for the first time this
evening—passionately involved.

Which leaves me wondering, again, the thing I've been wondering a lot over
the last few days: what
is
going on between those two, exactly?

I glance at them both again, the two women that Benjamin (obliviously, I'm
sure) has started to torment with this music, and I know that I have to get out of
this pub right now. I find Patrick and tug on his arm, and when he turns to me I
cup my hand around his ear and tell him that I'm leaving, and we make an
arrangement that we'll see each other tomorrow in his school lunch hour. Then
I'm gone.

I stand by the side of the canal, a few minutes later. Frost is already spreading
along the towpath, and the black water ripples sometimes, mysteriously, with the
reflections of pale lights splintered into dancing fragments. The smoke from my
cigarette coils in the air, and the rough taste of it at the back of my throat is bitter,
hot and cleansing.

It feels, now, as if I know everything there is to know about what's happened
between Benjamin and Emily in the years I've been away. How easy it is, after all,
to read the history of a lifetime in one single unguarded moment. You just have to
be looking in the right direction; in the right place at the right time. But I knew
that before, if I'm honest with myself. I found it out just a few weeks ago, in
Lucca. Not in a pub. Not at a reunion of old jazzers. I was in the local
gastronomia
at the time. It was early evening, and I was by myself, and that was when I
spotted Stefano and his daughter Annamaria trying to choose between two
different  kinds of olive.

Such a banal incident, when you think about it. Nothing unusual about it at
all. Of course, my first impulse was to approach him. Why not? There would have
been no awkwardness about it. We were supposed to be meeting for lunch in two
days' time. I hadn't been introduced to Annamaria before, but it wasn't this that
held me back. All that held me back, at first, was my noticing that he was in the
middle of trying to call someone on his mobile. I decided to let him finish, before
stepping forward, before saying hello.

The relationship between us (right word, again? I don't think there is one,
to cover this strange situation) had been going on for three months, by then.
Stefano's wife, despite her promises, was still being unfaithful to him. He kept
saying that he was going to leave her. Whenever we talked about this, I refrained from giving any advice. I could not trust myself to be impartial. It was
in my interest that he left her. No—I'll put that less coldly. I was desperate for
him to leave her. I was willing it with every muscle in my heart. But I never
said anything. Falsely, our situation had cast me in the role of friend, and the
only thing I could do, in that capacity, was remain silent. So we persisted with
our lunches, and drinks, and our unspoken desires and the decorous, passionless
kisses that marked the beginning and the end of our meetings. And as for the
feelings that were giving me such grief, such unassuageable pain, I tried to pretend that they didn't even exist. I tried to be a heroine. Which was stupid of
me, really, although I suppose that underneath it all I was kept going by the
thought that one day, in the tolerably near future, my patience would miraculously pay off.

The person he was trying to call didn't answer. I heard him say to
Annamaria, “No, she isn't there.” And Annamaria said to him, “Can't you
remember, Papa, which one she likes?” They were looking at two bowls of plump
green olives, laid out on a self-service counter, and he was hesitating between
them. But this was no ordinary hesitation. Not at all. No—it was really,
really
important to him that he bought his wife exactly the olives that she liked best. And
I could see at once that it was on little, everyday choices like this that the whole
happiness of their shared life was founded. Which means that in that hesitation—
at that moment—with sickening clarity, I glimpsed it: the unquenchable love that
he felt for this woman, that he continued to feel for her despite all her betrayals,
the love I had chosen to hope, in the leaden weeks building up to this moment, that
he would one day transfer to me. That hope withered and died in a flicker, in the
tiniest fragment of time. One second it was there, the next second it was gone. And
its leaving felled me. I turned away from Stefano and his daughter, a different 
person—unrecognizably
different  from the one who had only just rounded the aisle
of the
gastronomia
so carelessly and been on the point of greeting them. My identity had crumbled and dissolved in that moment. That's what it did to me, that
sudden, terrible gift of certainty: the certain knowledge that Stefano would never
leave his wife. Never, for as long as they both lived.

Olives. Who would have thought it. I wonder which sort he chose, in the end.

Oh well.

The cigarette burns out and I toss it into the marble blackness of the canal.
The cold is creeping into my bones and I know it's time to go indoors, back to
warmth and comfort.

Enough of thinking, already.

Sitting here at my leather-topped desk on the twenty-third floor of the
Regency Hyatt—the last and best of my vantage points!—looking down on the
scattered lights of this newly vibrant city which is so busy rebuilding itself, rein-venting itself, I'm glad that I went to hear Benjamin play tonight. Do you know
why? Because I learned in a priceless instant that he is still lost, still in thrall to the
past, and I saw the pain that he's causing because of it, and I realized that I cannot
possibly live my own life that way. I'm not talking about Stefano, I'm talking—
regrettably, my much-loved sister—about you. You have been my silent companion
all these years and somehow throughout that time I have clung to the fantasy that
my words might somehow be reaching you, and I feel now that the time has come
to let that fantasy go. Tomorrow I shall check out of this hotel and move on to
another town and tonight I shall reach the end of this letter, at last—this long,
long letter that I will never send because I have no one real to send it to—and
when that's done I shall close the Venetian notebook in which I've written it and
put it away somewhere safe. Maybe someone else will read it one day. I so wish it
could have been you. But that's the very wish, I see tonight, that's been holding me
back. My wish that you could hear me. My wish that you could read me. My wish
that you were still alive.