The Point (20 page)

Gwyneth said, What are you going to do, Clovis? You can’t stay here forever.

Clovis was shocked. He thought it a question he could ask, that did not apply to him.

I’m living, he said. I’m being alive. I am content. I’ll know when it’s time to do something. In the meantime, I’m living. You don’t get bored with that, not like lying low, which is a distinctly low-level activity. What I am is free. You’re not free when you’re lying low. It’s somebody else’s agenda. What about you?

Gwyneth squinted away across the lake. She shrugged. Clovis was about to say, You’re a fugitive. On the run. You can’t hide forever, you’ve got to make some decisions, maybe you should face the music, get it over and done with. All these clichés ran through his head, so that he thought, that’s Dutch uncle talk, whatever that means, while Gwyneth squinted across the lake. Do I want to talk like a Dutch uncle? Do I need to? What is a Dutch uncle, anyway.

Suddenly she said, Let’s cut some willow wands. Got a knife?

Clovis did, a French folding knife with a handle of ebony and brass, his precious Laguiole, bought for a great deal of money in Paris, and wasn’t sure that he wanted to cut willow wands with it. Gwyneth was pulling at him, so he ended up standing under the weeping branches of the willow. This one, she said, this, this, swiftly choosing them all of a thickness, showing him what length to cut, and then pulling at the thin fronds to use for knots. The Laguiole was a peasant knife, with a spike for letting the gas out of bloated animals; he hoped it could cope with willow wands.

Oh, she said. I dunno the knots, do you know the knots?

No, said Clovis, but we can experiment.

They stuck the branches in the damp soil by the edge of the lake, pushing them deeply in.

What pattern, asked Gwyneth.

Basic?

No. Complicated.

How?

We’ll just make it up.

They worked until the sun went and the cold seeped up out of the ground. Clovis tried out knots to hold them and ended up with reef knots with little bow-like ends protruding. Gwyneth proved deft and wove the willow in arching patterns from side to side. Clovis said it might not be very strong without grafts; Gwyneth thought that using a lot of knots would be just about as good. And no shitheads to knock it down. Not bad, she said. Not very good, yet, but not bad.

They didn’t go all the way back together. The wine bladder was empty, so Clovis went to the wine shop while Gwyneth flitted through empty bureaucratic spaces to the warm vents of the library. The Point shone with a clear faint light. It was calm, no police, no kids, only, eventually, the arrival of customers, to the muted expensive thud of car doors closing. A powerfully excluding sound, even when the owners of the cars were on the outside, too. But then, what was on the inside might be what you were glad to be excluded from. Had worked at not being included in. It made Clovis think of the policeman’s hand on the head, maybe protecting you from bumping it on the frame of the car door, more likely shoving you in, certainly shutting you away. He was glad the lying low was over, and he was back to the chosen rhythm of his days, but that was no help to Gwyneth, she was always lying low, and the policeman’s hand hovering, ready to put her away.

20

Jerome

One dark winter morning when I had got up late from Flora’s bed I thought I saw Anabel windsurfing on the lake. A gorgeously fat woman in a purple wetsuit that corseted but didn’t conceal her outrageous curves, indeed delineated them against the grey waters. Her shape and the long black plait down her back made me believe she was Anabel. Could there be two such windsurfers on this lake? She skimmed across the water, darting, turning, with nonchalant monumental skill. It was as if the figurehead of a ship had grown legs and taken sail, to disport at this skimming speed before the wind.

There’s a story I read when I was a boy. I think it might have been R.L. Stevenson. About an immensely fat man who wants to lose weight, Pyecraft I recall his name was. He tries all sorts of means, none of them work. Then he’s offered some nostrum (my details are vague, but it is something he swallows) and this is successful. He loses weight. Loses a lot of weight. But alas he does not lose size. He remains an immensely fat man who weighs nothing, who hovers at ceiling level inside his house and dares not go out in case he floats away. Maybe he has to be tethered to the furniture in order to get around. Is that the end of the story? I’m not sure. It is the interesting bit.

I imagined Anabel as weightless as Pyecraft, in her airy skimming across the choppy grey waters. Flora on the other hand, so slight, so lean, seemed dense and full of weight; Anabel all feathers, Flora not lead, but something precious and heavy. Not gold, not Flora worth her weight in gold, but maybe mercury, heavy, fluid, with its own mind. Difficult to grasp.

Of course it might not have been Anabel at all. But somehow, on this cold winter day, the sun shining but the lake grey and the wind sharp as blades against the skin, it seemed just the sort of thing she would do. Possible, difficult, odd. Anabel exploring new experiences. A pneumatic woman in a purple wetsuit having fun, against the odds. Although you might wonder, what was the point of it?

I wished her no harm. Well, I never had, but I could think of her benignly, and comically, zooming into and so cleverly exploiting the bitter wind. While I was warm from Flora.

I got to work late and found my three lads clustered round the table, the one surface in my Augustinian study where I allow no computers, nothing electronic. They were looking at a pencil sketch on a piece of paper. Unusual for them, to be paying attention to a piece of paper, and one not generated by a computer. They were as outlandishly and as carefully dressed as usual, in shirts that hung straight outside their trousers. Novica’s seemed to have fluorescent piping on it, I gathered it glowed in the dark. Clement had a World War II type long leather coat on, not vintage, imitation, very glossy and black. Jake had his jeans tucked into high brown boots. Their clothes were an education for me, but not one that I could do anything with. The three heads, the blond curls, the bleached spikes, the dark cropped with beard, all leaning together; they looked like a painting, or a performance, something structured by a discerning eye.

They were giggling a bit, in a bemused way, and not furtive about my looking, they seemed to want me to see. In fact to be a kind of tableau, inviting my attention. The sketch was of a circle, about the size of a fifty-cent coin, with a dot in the middle, and two sets of parallel and intersecting lines drawn across it; imagine a noughts-and-crosses diagram, on top of the circle. I supposed it to be a game.

It’s Clement’s brother, said Jake.

Curious-looking lad.

Well, it’s part of him, said Novica.

His penis, said Jake. If you see the circle as the head of it, then those lines are the four cuts he’s had made across it, so when it’s erect it blossoms like a flower.

Good heavens, I said. They were looking at me to see how I would react. I felt quite squeamish. My own penis was shrinking up inside itself. Didn’t it hurt, I asked.

Clement shrugged. His leather coat creaked when he moved.

Have you seen it, asked Novica.

Oh yes, likely. My big brother’s always waving his hard-ons in my face.

He might have given you a demo, said Novica. Quite scientific.

After all, said Jake, he’s the clever one, he should be interested in the experiment.

Well, he’s not a scientist, really.

I recognised a sibling dismissiveness in Clement’s voice.

He’s got a PhD.

Yes, but not in science, said Clement.

Well, he could show a scholarly interest, said Novica.

Scholarship is scholarship.

Why don’t we all ask for a demo, said Jake. I’d like to see a dick blossoming like a flower.

It makes for mad sex.

If it doesn’t get poisoned and drop off.

Where does this sort of thing get done, I asked.

In Laos. This one did.

Ah, I thought, it’s still with us, the mysterious East, where strange and wonderful things happen, to make us shiver and admire. Covet yet fear. Though these days it’s almost entirely to do with sex.

There’s this guy Brent, said Clement, Clay Brent, he runs tours. Travelations he calls his company. George’s been working for him. Discovery tours. George is on the language side of things.

What do they discover? (This of course was a disingenuous question; I had a pretty good idea. But wanted to see what they said.)

Whatever there is, I suppose. The country, customs, food, that kind of thing. It’s awesome, George says. In fact he was saying that Brent might be keen to become a client, get us to sort his business for him. It’s quite big.

Oh yes, I said. Remembering my conversation with Flora, on the picnic. And I realised: serving him your food in a restaurant is one thing, it’s quite detached, a commercial transaction, with no obligation of judgement on the part of the provider. As Flora said, you can’t stop a serial murderer reading your novels. But having him on your books as a client, with all that implies of care and promotion and acting for, and we do look after our clients very well, it seemed to me a very different thing. Well, we’ll play it by ear, I said, when the time comes. Right now, isn’t it time you chaps did a bit of work? That stuff from Treasury, has it come in yet? I reckon they’re going to be outsourcing quite a bit, let’s make sure it comes our way, hmm?

George called in to the house a couple of days later. A good-looking lad, like his brother, but in a quite different style, a little taller than Clement, his hair longer, in a shapely cut with a lock that fell over one side of his face. He reminded me of an Englishman in a drawing room comedy. His clothes fitted that image too, a pale-coloured suit, exquisitely rumpled, a silk shirt open at the neck: maybe the play was set in a Raffles type of hotel, in the last days of Empire. Naturally I wondered about his penis, opening like a flower when it was erect, and now, how would it be, would he be aware of it? Would it be somehow consciously in bud, waiting to bloom? I have heard of women wearing certain underclothes that rub or pull in particular ways and constantly arouse them, which I have always thought counter-productive; isn’t the point of arousal that sometimes you are not? And the delight of it, moving from one state to the other, with satisfaction at least in the offing? I was also a bit irritated at being given to think of another man’s penis, it’s not a habit of mine.

What a charming room, said George. Is it, do I detect a Venetian influence?

Ah. I did have in mind a Carpaccio painting …

Of course, the study of St Augustine, yes, I see.

I had to respect him, he was indeed clever, and sharp with it. I said, Not a copy, of course.

No, indeed not. An influence.

Is this your field of study? The early Renaissance?

Oh no. And yet, yes, of course, as it must be for any educated person. But it’s not, for my sins, what I wrote my thesis on.

He told me what that was, and I almost immediately forgot it. There was a catchy beginning to its title, a normal English phrase, and I do remember that:
Damned to Hell
. But that doesn’t tell you a lot. I think
linguistic intimations
, or were they
images
, came into it somewhere, and so did
salvation
, and
post-medieval
, or maybe that was later. It struck me at the time as a fine example of post-modern jargon, and I did not even try to remember it.

I said, So, that would be religious studies?

Fuck, no. Language. Japanese is my particular area of interest, which is why my present job. But the thesis was a comparative thing, that’s where post-medieval Europe came in. Of course you should be careful how you talk about Japan in this particular context. That could straightaway label you as Eurocentric.

I see.

But a Phid is about precise distinctions, in a way that everyday conversation isn’t.

Of course, I said. And now you work for Travelations.

Like they say, an education takes you places.

I sent George off to the lads. A very clever young man, indeed. And charming, so far as he could help it. And yet … I berated myself. It was his connection with Brent that made me doubtful. I was guilty of supposing he must be somehow tainted by his employer. Then again … I found myself thinking quite fondly of Clement’s culturally innocent expertise. I suspected that there might be a whiff of ancient cultivated corruption about George. Rather unfairly, really, since my main grounds for this was his knowing what I know. George would have understood my remark about summoning up Helen of Troy.

I dismissed all that when I took a good look at Clay Brent. He did get in touch with me, about taking him on as a client. I have to say, the man fascinated me. Words like
plump
,
beringed
,
curled
came to my mind. His flesh was considerable, but there was something massaged, something tight about it, as though his skin and muscle were a corset holding in an even greater bulk. And his yellow curls, corkscrewing and greasy. I am sure his hair was not unwashed, nobody’s is these days, he must have put something on it. That would be part of the heavy perfume that hung in the room after he had gone, like an oily residue. He wore a lot of gold, a watch on to which worms and grubs of the metal had been extruded, a heavy linked bracelet, a huge embossed ring waiting to seal the fate of nations.