The Point (27 page)

Perhaps if he could have bought such a mirror for Lindi she might have been happier.

It is a failure to pay attention, he says to himself, that we so lack words for things. And finding comparisons to describe them is all very well, but a bit arty. Precious. Probably in both senses, but the sneering one the dangerous. It should be possible to have simple ordinary words, and when you said them to people they would know exactly what you meant. Of what use is the idea of a bronze Egyptian mirror to an Inuit? Or to Gwyneth.

When Gwyneth comes and sits beside him he says, Do you know that the people of Greenland have forty-seven different words for snow? And we have only one for lake?

Though he doesn’t know whether it is Greenlanders or the Inuit. Or that it is forty-seven, only that it is a lot.

Snow, says Gwyneth. I’ve never even seen any.

What about Mount Franklin in the middle of winter?

Where’s that?

He raises his arm to point, but she isn’t looking. She’s busy eating, using two fingers neatly like a person brought up without forks. It is one of Joe’s offerings. It seems to be fish, in a furl like a turban, white and lemon yellow and coral-coloured, with a pale-green sauce.

This is much nicer here than in the restaurant, she says.

I don’t think so…

Yes it is. I’m telling you.

Clovis shakes his head. What you mean is, you like it better here than in the restaurant.

Yeah, fuck, that’s what I mean. It tastes better.

No. It doesn’t, you know. It tastes better freshly cooked in the restaurant, served on a plate, not scraped off into the next best thing to a garbage bin. You mean you enjoy the food here, for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with its taste.

Gwyneth shrugs, and rolls her eyes. She keeps on eating. It tastes better, she says.

You like it better. Words have meanings, Gwyneth.

My words have the meaning I want.

To you. And to me, because I know you. But not absolutely. Language only works because everybody agrees.

So. Do you want some?

Please.

He scoops up slices of kidney that taste slightly mustardy and are, cold, a bit rubbery, the rare insides like congealed blood. He tries to match the pointed neat action of her fingers. Food isn’t just its taste, he says. It’s who you eat it with, and where. It’s in the Bible. Better a dinner of herbs where love is …

Than what?

I dunno. Roast beef and caviar with people you hate. Or who bore you. Or something.

Herbs don’t sound like much to eat.

No. Well, I suppose it would mean something like greens. Spinach. Lettuce. That kind of thing. A salad.

Hungry food.

Yes, but you’ve got love to fill you up, remember. Suddenly Clovis sings: Yummy yummy yummy I’ve got love in my tummy.

Gwyneth laughs. What the fuck’s that?

Dunno. Some funny old song.

Clovis once read that a computer disk doesn’t store its information in any sequential way, that it sticks bits of the same thing all over the place, and when it needs them pulls them together from all their different little slots. He thinks that his mind is a bit like that, except that some of the slots are deteriorated, silverfish have got in, damp, dust, mould, light, so the bits are fragmenting, they can’t make up wholes any more. The signals are incomplete. Worse than codes.

Yummy yummy yummy I’ve got love in my tummy, sings Gwyneth in a small strident pop-singer’s voice, holding a lamb cutlet like a microphone. Sing some more.

That’s the trouble. I don’t know any more.

He can’t even recall whether it’s a children’s song, or some adult hit, or even an advertising jingle. Is it 1930s, or even ’20s, or post war? If I were the survivor of my civilisation, he thinks, if there had been some absolute catastrophe and nothing remained, no book or disk or record of any kind, and I had my whole life to write this civilisation down, it would be … it would be like the National Library burning to the ground and all that remained of all its collections was a few scorched and torn and water-stained pages scattered by the wind in the mud and dust of an empty landscape. But then he thinks, if I were the last who would I be writing it down for? What would be the point? Better a dinner of herbs where love is …

There are some peas and lettuce cooked in butter with tiny white onions, the butter sticking in small congealed shreds of delicious fat to the vegetables. I think you could call this a dish of herbs, he says.

Cooked lettuce, yuk, says Gwyneth.

Have you tried it?

She scoops some up in her grubby fine fingers. Yeah, it’s okay, I suppose.

It is a high blue winter day. The sky the colour of the Virgin’s robe – what salted-away broken-off bit of information made him think of that? – and the twiggy branches making sharp black patterns against it. Sharp: he knows they are, though he can only see the nearest, and that hazily, farther off they are a smudge. The lake today is like steel, the sharp bluish-grey of toothed cogwheels.

Do you know about love, asks Gwyneth.

He looks at her, and for a moment is filled with desolation.

I mustn’t, must I. Else I wouldn’t be sleeping on the hot air vents of the National Library.

He feels his nose run. He wipes it with his fingers, and leans to rinse them in the freezing water. The cold air attacks the rubbed damp skin of his nose. His eyes are watering too. These he rubs on his sleeve.

What about you, he says.

She shrugs, and doesn’t answer. After a while she says, Roast beef and caviar. What are they like?

I saw a movie once. There was a little kid who ate some caviar, he said it was fishberry jam.

Yeah?

Well, it’s eggs, fish eggs, tiny soft things, and they stick together. So, fishberry jam.

Does it taste like jam, or fish?

Oh, fish. Delicious fish. And all the little berries burst in your mouth.

What was the movie?

I believe it was
Auntie Mame
.

Oh.

A musical. And roast beef, well, you cook a big piece of meat, rare. So it is crusty and caramelised on the outside and the inside is quite red, and it’s tender and delicious.

Red. You mean raw?

Rare. Rare isn’t raw. It’s warm.

Gwyneth doesn’t say yuk. I suppose eating in restaurants is something you learn to do, she says.

Well, isn’t everything, says Clovis. But we did pretty well, for a first time, don’t you think?

You did. You were okay, you’ve done it before. But I hurled. So uncool.

I thought you did it very elegantly. Discreetly, in the loo.

But vomiting. In a restaurant. All that food.

Exactly. All that food. Far too rich. You would not be the first.

Do other people do that?

Of course. The Romans did it on purpose. With special feathers, they’d tickle their throats so they could get rid of the load of food they’d just eaten and start on the next lot. Even had a special room to do it in. Called a vomitorium.

Gwyneth turns her head away so she is looking at him out of the corners of her eyes. You’re making that up, she says.

I swear I’m not. I always wondered how they could go back to eating after vomiting, but apparently they could. I suppose it was mechanical, not really being sick. And they ate huge quantities of frightfully expensive things. Like larks’ tongues and the livers of rare fish. They’d catch this amazing scarce fish, very beautiful, all reddish-gold, I think, and throw it all away, except this tiny portion of liver.

Why didn’t they give the ordinary fish part to the poor?

Why indeed. People don’t. And then somebody had the idea of just eating the gills; imagine how many of this fantastically expensive fish you’d need to get enough gills to eat.

Why?

People used to say it was the decadence of the Roman empire. Needing more and more sensations. Oh, he says, now I remember; the fish, the red mullet, they used to cook them at the table, really slowly, under glass, and the fun of that was watching them dying in agony.

Gwyneth turns pale. Oh, she says, oh, I wish you hadn’t told me that.

I’m sorry, says Clovis, I wish I hadn’t remembered it. I suppose the good thing about that is that we are not quite so bad as that, yet. Our society, I mean.

Gwyneth slowly asks: Do you think I could learn to eat in restaurants?

Of course. You already like the food, remember. And don’t forget, that was a banquet. You can eat just a little. Order what you want. A cutlet, and some peas and lettuce.

Clovis of a sudden picks up her hand and kisses it. And remember, you looked beautiful, he says.

She turns her head again with that look at him sideways through the corners of her eyes, then downwards at the ground. Her lids are domed and oval over her eyes, luminous white-veined blue like the smooth secret insides of her thighs might be, she sits still and he thinks this pure shape of eyelids over eyes is one of the simple beautiful parts of the human body.

When I came to live here, he says, I decided I would only ever tell the truth. Things tell the truth, they don’t lie.

Things, says Gwyneth. I don’t know about things. People lie. All the time.

She has a crumb of butter melting in the corner of her lip. He brushes it off.

Not me, he says. Beautiful I said, beautiful I meant.

Anyway, things do lie. The lake lies. Look how calm and nice it looks. Yet you say if I fall in I’ll be dead of cold in a few minutes. Like that poor guy and the monster kids.

Yes, but that was the kids, the lake didn’t reach out and grab him. And anyway I think it looks quite dangerous: steely blue and implacable. It doesn’t fool me.

Oh shit, she says. She yawns; her teeth aren’t good and her lips are chapped and sore, but the domes of her eyelids are still beautiful. I’ve had enough. You finish the food. I’m off.

Thank you.

There are three exquisite tiny cakes in one of the plastic boxes. A bit naughty of Joe, they aren’t exactly leftovers. Clovis puts one in his mouth as he looks at the blue sky he so surprisingly saw as the colour of Mary’s robe. Traipsing through the Louvre, his feet hurting, suffering from museum back and too much lunch, his wife watchdogging him through culture, or does he mean sheepdogging, watchdogging would be keeping him out, and him thinking, not another bloody Madonna, you can have too much of a good thing. But there is the pure dazzling blue of the dresses of all these girls, ordinary women, painters’ wives, or mistresses often, or else models quite likely moonlighting as whores, yet for these moments and as long as the paintings last they are the Queen of Heaven in gowns the colour of heaven, this blue that has stayed in his mind, and he imagines painters looking at the sky and back at their palettes trying to mix the exact right colour.

Hello.

Clovis turns, startled. It’s Jerome.

Hello. Would you like a petit four?

Jerome in his turn is startled. He looks at the tiny cakes. Why not, he says.

The rubbish, says Clovis. The rejects. But wholesome.

Oh yes.

There’s a pause. Jerome eats the cake. May I join you for a moment, he asks.

Clovis thinks, if I were not a homeless person, he would not ask that. He considers himself to be visiting my place.

By all means. I was looking at the sky.

It’s amazing, this winter blue.

I was thinking it’s like Mary’s robe. In a painting. Yes, I know, how odd that I should think that. But there, I did.

It’s right, of course. Our Lady’s gown is often that very colour.

I suppose one might expect to think the other way. Her robe the colour of the sky. Not the sky the colour of the dress.

Yes.

There’s silence. Clovis has no more to say.

One of your swans, says Jerome. Two.

Bit far away for me.

Jerome turns to look at Clovis’s stretched out squinting eyes.

Are you ... ?

Short-sighted? Yes.

But you have spectacles.

Did have. They broke.

My God. But you can’t … Can I … I could organise …

No. I am happy. Once, a long time ago, I read a book about glasses, and how they pervert the natural sight that God gave us. I didn’t ever expect to try the truth of it.

I’ve read that kind of book. I don’t believe them. Surely the point of spectacles is that they correct sight, restore it, to a state of perfect vision, which is natural and God-given.

That’s the view of our time and place. But spectacles were often thought to be works of the devil. Which homogenise the sight and shackle the spirit. Cézanne wouldn’t have a bar of them. Neither would Monet. He’s supposed to have said, Good god, if I wore glasses I’d see like Bougerau – he was some sort of conventional naturalistic painter Monet despised. Bougerau. You don’t need to know anything about him to hear the scorn in that name. How could he ever have hoped to become a great painter, with a name like that?

Jerome laughs. You’ve got a good memory, he says.

Intermittently. Bougerau’s easy. Think Bugger-all.

With a Liverpool accent.

Whereas Rembrandt was long-sighted, this book reckons. That’s why he painted close-ups so muzzily.

Do you really think that? That glasses are bad?

Necessity has its virtues.

Surely it isn’t necessity, though. Not now. I would … I’m still grateful, you know.

I enjoy seeing things with my own eyes.

The idea fills me with horror, says Jerome. I couldn’t bear not to see. I have six pairs of spectacles, just in case. Always a spare pair in my pocket.

Try without them, for a moment.

Jerome with his fingertip pulls his glasses down his nose, his eyelids wincing, but after only a few seconds he pushes them back up. Oh no, he says, it’s all so hazy, fuzzy, unclear, I hate that.

And yet, it’s beautiful.

You can’t see the swans.

I know they’re there. I see them when they come close. I am in no hurry.

No. Jerome is vehement. I like to see. If I rubbed a bottle and a genie came out I’d wish for perfect sight, always and in all circumstances. Reading and distance. Darkness and light. However old I got.

Yes, says Clovis. Well, I’ve learned to live with my sight. It’s mine, I like it.