The Gloaming (15 page)

I see a pair of feet in sandals scuffing the sand. I realize they are mine.

Down steps, a long flight of stone steps. Familiar, but I'm not sure.

A little girl in a red dress swoops down, as if on a swing. I see bouquets of flowers on her dress. Her mouth in a little ‘O' as if in song.

Now I'm sitting.

A man says, ‘It's the heat.'

There's a cold glass of water in my hand.

Wa—wa—

The thirst I felt in hospital, waking up. Months ago, years ago, in another person's life.

‘Come on, love, drink up, you'll be fine.'

He's smiling. His teeth are terrible, he's missing half of them.

‘Slowly now,' he says. ‘You're Gloria's new friend.'

The water is sharp, too cold against my teeth, so I press the glass to my cheek.

‘Thank you.'

He puts his hand on my forehead. ‘Burning up. Are you taking anything for malaria?'

I shake my head.

‘That's a bit daft, then. It's bad here, especially this time of year.'

‘It's not malaria,' I say. It's a boy, a small boy on my lap, the weight of him and smell of him. Not a story, not words: but a child of marrow and blood. How does a child cease to be?

‘Let's get you something to eat. And keep drinking that water.' He shouts out to the barman, instructions in Swahili. I look past him, out at the sea. I know where I am now.

‘Harry,' he says. ‘That's my name.'

‘Hello, Harry.'

He hands me a plate of greasy chapatti. Where has this come from? ‘Best food in the world,' he says. ‘That and a Coke.' And like a magician he pulls a Coke from the air. And a beer for himself.

The chair I'm in is comfortable, and the fan turns slowly overhead. I take a bite of the chapatti and a sip of the Coke: it is the best food in the world. He's sitting opposite me, leaning forward, his elbows braced on his knees.

Bit by bit the world puts itself back together, like a Lego house. The sea, the clubhouse, the gathering dusk, the somnolent town on the edge of a continent. And Harry, grinning.

‘Better now?'

‘Yes, much.'

‘I once had a spell like that in Bujumbura. Heatstroke. Out for days. This very nice Indian fellow kept visiting me. He brought the latest
TIME
and a basket of fruit, took excellent care of me. And then he jumped out the window, I saw him go right off the balcony. A few days later, when I was feeling better, I asked the nurse about him, what a tragedy, I said, such a nice chap. What Indian? she wanted to know. No one's jumped out the window.'

It turns out that Harry has lived all over Africa. In 1973, for instance, he drove a bulldozer all the way from Khartoum to Kampala. ‘I was contracted to make a road but there was a war. I made the road anyway. There's always a bloody war.' He smuggled khat into Somalia when the government decided to make it illegal in the 1980s. ‘The ban only lasted six months, but it was good money while it lasted.' He flew over the Congo, low on fuel, searching for a missionary's airstrip, the details of which he'd written on a bar napkin. ‘It was like looking down on broccoli. Goddamned broccoli as far as you could see. Four hours, five hours, six hours. I'm watching the fuel gauge going down, down, down.'

He's a drunk now, he laughs. Fixed almost permanently to the bar stool. No one else sits on his stool, and if a stray yachtee or tourist tries to, the old boys warn them off. ‘I should be holding it down right now,' Harry says, looking over his shoulder with mock concern at the empty stool and the two other old boys on theirs. ‘They'll be worried about me.' But he settles in the chair, tells me he almost died eight times. ‘Three plane crashes, a puff adder bite, a car crash, cerebral malaria twice. Oh, and some woman stabbed me.'

‘Some woman?' I say.

‘Wife.'

‘How many wives have you had?'

‘My own? Or other men's?' He gives me a wolfish grin. ‘Eight. Eight wives. Of my own. Two more than Henry the Eighth and I didn't kill even one.'

I imagine the young incarnation of Harry—the other face he once had. The blackberry-dark eyes and straight nose, even if he wasn't handsome, he'd have been a buccaneer.

He's studying me right back. ‘What an arsehole,' he says.

‘Who?'

‘The arsehole who left you.'

I sip the Coke. ‘How do you know he left me?'

‘Gloria mentioned you were divorced,' he winks. ‘With a certain relish.'

‘Why do you assume he's an arsehole?'

‘The way you are.'

‘And how am I?'

‘Scooped out.'

I'm very careful not to look at him but out at the evening, the swifts in the sky, the dark mass of the sea.

Harry, however, continues to look at me.

‘I never left a woman,' he says, and this return to jauntiness is for me, I sense, to bring me back. Whatever his physical disrepair, Harry is a sensitive man.

‘Eight wives and you didn't leave one of them?' I say, jaunty too.

‘Oh, I made it impossible for them to stay.'

‘How?'

‘Drinking, whoring, wandering.'

‘Why did you keep getting married?'

‘I loved the words. The promise, the hope. That I could be a husband.'

‘And what is a husband?'

Harry takes his beer. ‘We're going to drink properly, then?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Drink, talk about love.'

‘Is that the proper way?'

‘What else do you talk about when you drink? Politics?' He offers me his hand.

Insects swarm under the security lights outside the club. We get in his old Land Cruiser with one very weak headlight. There are rust holes in the floor. ‘Watch your foot.'

He drives into town, the main road above the port, parks on the street, and leads me into Le Club Casa Chica.

It is very dark and loud in here, so I feel muffled and semi-blind, and I think this is the purpose of a nightclub, to hobble senses: to obscure, to mute, to subdue, render hostage the self that discerns.

People know Harry, wave their arms, call out his name. I can't hear, but I see their lips move. Harry old friend; Harry, me matie. I notice the women in here are exceptionally sylphlike, narrow-hipped and long-limbed. Harry slides into a booth, taps the space beside him and I think this is for me. But a slinky, bony girl materializes in seconds, melting over him. I sit opposite. A waitress with shining red lips brings drinks with paper umbrellas.

‘Sugar,' Harry puts his arm around the girl. ‘This is my friend, Pilgrim.'

I extend a hand, and as Sugar takes it I notice her exquisite, impractical manicure and the hugeness of her hands. Sugar is, of course, a man. They are all men. Harry winks, holds up his drink.

‘I assume the arsehole wears suits.'

‘What?' I say as if I can't hear him, but I can, I'm just not sure I want this to go any further. He leans in, repeats, ‘The ex wears suits.'

‘Very nice suits.'

‘He's a lawyer.'

I'm taken aback. ‘How did you know?'

He laughs, ‘I have many years of experience with a wide variety of arseholes. The suit narrows the field to professional arseholes. I think to myself: an arsehole who wears a suit; so not a pilot or a doctor, both really very chronic arseholes. The suits are nice, you said. A successful arsehole. An arsehole who dumps his beautiful wife in a crummy way; therefore an arrogant, self-righteous, selfish arsehole. A born arsehole, not a circumstantial arsehole. Because, let's face it, we can all be arseholes if we get stuck at Customs, if another man is fucking our wife. An investment banker? Real estate tycoon? No, not quite right. Something he represented, something you were looking for. You liked his goodness, what he stood for. Conclusion: had to be a lawyer. Probably a defence lawyer, death penalty cases something like that.'

Sugar makes a sad, sympathetic face, though her makeup looks like a Kabuki mask. ‘Men. Why we always choose the ones who are shits?'

‘But he's someone else's arsehole now,' Harry says, leaning across the table. ‘You see that, don't you, pet?' Then he shifts back, lets Sugar take his hand in her large, decorative paw and lead him to the dance floor. I order another cocktail, sweet and overbearing like comfort food, and watch them, Sugar oozing and gyrating and Harry surprisingly able to follow the beat.

Harry's got it a little bit wrong: I didn't fall in love with Tom because of his goodness. I never examined him, never drew the chart of Tom. Shoulder of goodness, hock of deceit, the fine brain. I saw the brilliant whole, without considering the parts, the atoms, that made Tom, Tom.

Under the spinning disco ball, I realize his otherness was absolute. On that summer day on the edge of Lac Léman, I see myself letting go of his hand. And Elise stepping up to him. He looked at me across the distance, asking me to come back. He didn't want to talk to her. But I turned and kept walking, and maybe what he was seeing was not Elise staying, but me walking away.

 

The Rue Saint-Léger was a street of children. Families burst out of high wooden doors, prams, dogs, nannies, children whirling like pinwheels. I waited at a discreet distance, pretending to do the
International Herald Tribune
crossword. I looked as if I belonged.

Elise came out of No. 41, the baby in a harness across her chest. Her hair was tied up carelessly, her face bare. She wore sloppy jeans and a man's sweater—one of Tom's, a gift I'd given him years ago. She crossed the street, into the park.

The trees were lovely, the buds just emerging: an entire summer compressed like silk scarves in a magician's pocket. It was a warm day, though the sun was dulled by the muslin of high clouds. Elise walked toward the pond, and from the bag over her shoulder, pulled out a loaf of bread to feed the ducks. Perhaps she might fling the baby into the water, perhaps she was a lunatic. But she simply fed the ducks and kissed her baby's head.

‘Pilgrim?'

I turned.

‘What are you doing here?'

He was standing on the path, having come into the park behind me. He was carrying a box from a bakery, containing, I supposed, sandwiches for him and Elise.

I looked away, my face scalded.

He took my arm. ‘Come, come with me.' He glanced toward Elise, but she hadn't seen us. Once outside the park, he led me into a café. In his impeccable French he ordered two coffees.

For a long time I kept my gaze down. When I did look up I saw Tom, my husband, and it was everything I could do not to reach across the table and touch him.

‘Why,' he said, quite gently. ‘That's what you want to know.'

The waiter brought the coffees and shared a joke with Tom. Oh, everyone loved Tom.

‘Mrs Gassner told me you didn't buy the land.'

He pressed his lips together. Something I'd never seen before: Tom at a loss for words. Finally, he managed only, ‘Elise.' Whatever he intended to say next, he abandoned.

I began to laugh. It seemed better than the alternative, the great hard sobs lodged in my throat and the ugly tears that would stain my face and redden my nose. I giggled. Tom stared.

‘Are you all right?'

‘Tom. Tom, Tom, Tom.' I tapped my fingers on the table, a little drum, the background music of my life. Tom-tomtom-tom.

I stopped, and we sat in silence.

At last, he said, ‘I don't know how it happened, I can't even remember how.'

‘Really? You can't remember cheating on your wife? Did you do it all the time, is that why. I just didn't know?'

‘No.' He shook his head vigorously. ‘It was after work, and we went out for a drink. I wasn't even drunk.'

‘But you found her attractive, you couldn't resist her.'

Again, he pursed his lips. ‘I won't do it, Pilgrim. I'm not going to betray her.'

‘But you betrayed me.'

‘There's a difference. I didn't intend to betray you.'

‘This is about intention? Oh, Tom, such a lawyer. It's about what you
did.'

He wasn't looking at me, he was playing with a little sugar packet.

‘You left one Sunday evening,' I said. ‘And you didn't come back.'

When he turned his gaze to me, I saw his eyes were red and damp. I did what I'd seen him do to hostile witnesses on the stand, soldiers who'd put children in churches and burned them to the ground: I waited. Because it's a human need: to justify.

‘I can't explain Elise.'

‘Then explain me.'

He deliberated, he wanted to get it right. ‘The world is so broken. And I would come home and all I wanted was for you to be there, clean and smelling so wonderful, and I could wash myself in you.'

‘We could have had a child.'

Strangely, he regarded me. I had confused him. ‘But you never said so. You never said.'

‘I didn't think. I mean, I did. I thought we had time.'

‘We didn't.'

‘
Quelque chose encore?
' The waiter was standing there with his white apron and benign smile.

‘No,' said Tom. ‘
Merci, mais non
.'

No, there will be nothing more.

We walked outside, and I wondered what we should do—a quick, chaste embrace?
Des bisous?
Three or two?

‘I heard the inquest is over.'

‘Yes.'

‘How are you?'

‘It's all right, Tom.'

He took my face in his hand and kissed me, the hungry Tom kisses, this act of open mouths and tongues, two humans inside each other. When it was over, I lightly touched his shoulder with my hand and walked away. He was watching me go, I knew. But I didn't turn around. I took the train back to Thun and the bus up to Arnau.

My stomach tightened like a fist as I walked from the bus stop, up through the
malkerai
, toward the flat. I saw the downstairs curtains twitching. Mrs Gassner's face appeared.