When I had had breakfast in the hotel, I went out into the town of Megève for a walk. There were ponies hoofing the cobbles, their traps filled with rugs and furs; the pale church had a tower with a small dome in its spire speared like a cocktail onion. Women in long coats and boots gossiped outside the shops; among them were people in shiny jackets with skis on their shoulders, laboring up the steps to the cable car. I was reluctant to leave the bright sunlight. Since I was wearing walking boots and a thick coat, there was nothing to stop me taking the lift up into the mountain. At the ticket office a clerk assured me that many people went up just for lunch; she recommended a dish called boudin avec ses deux pommes in the restaurant at the top. She smiled toothlessly as she handed me a ticket. “Bon appétit, monsieur!”
We rose above the lower pistes, then over an alley of fir trees whose arms hung limp at their sides. After a second lift I reached the wooden restaurant, where I sat outside, drinking beer, watching the skiers snake down from the different faces of the mountain. At the end of the run they stepped out of their skis, stuck them together, and jammed the blunt ends into the snow; then they climbed up to the wide terrace and heel-and-toed their way over in hard boots, wiping gloves across their noses, breathing clouds into the air from their red faces as they boasted and puffed and called out their orders.
The boudin arrived, a black-pudding sausage; its deux pommes were purees of apple and potato. Here was the sunlight on airborne frost crystals, the grandeur of the mountain, and the peppery taste of the boudin. I glanced down into the valley and wondered which of the tiny roofs was on Luisa’s hotel. All my life seemed spread out in the glittering air above the prehistoric rocks thrust up out of the earth. Beneath the railing I saw a hare limp through the snow and disappear, the heart beating a life-and-death rhythm beneath its winter coat.
The sun had gone off the mountain by the time I was back in town. I studied the map in my pocket and decided I might as well go and see how long it would take to walk to Luisa’s hotel. The nursery slopes, which twenty minutes earlier had been a sunny playground, had taken on a menacing chill as mothers called to their children in the dusk.
It took fifteen minutes to walk there, a little longer than I’d thought. The tips of my fingers were cold inside their gloves as I stopped outside the chalet-hotel. There were drifts of snow either side of the cleared path leading to the door, where wide shovels stood in the porch; there were three wood-clad storeys, red gingham curtains, and smoke coming from the stone chimneys.
At the window of a second-floor bedroom I saw a dark-haired woman stand for a moment, looking out over the town, as though searching with her eyes. She pulled the curtains, and there was just the blank of the material and the light behind it.
I walked up the path to the front door and went into the lobby with its fierce central heating and dried flowers.
“Je cherche Madame…” I could barely bring myself to spit out the name. “… Shorter,” I said to the woman at the desk.
There was some puzzled flicking through a ledger whose pages, curled under ballpoint pressure, rustled and snapped between her fingers.
“Ou peut-être,” I said when it was starting to become awkward, “Madame Neri.” For all I knew she might have reverted to her first husband’s name, but I didn’t know what it was.
“Ah, oui, monsieur, tout à fait. Madame Neri. Un moment, s’il vous plaît.”
There followed a telephone conversation in which I could hear only the receptionist. Putting her hand over the mouthpiece, she said, “Et vous êtes Monsieur…?”
“Hendricks.”
After another short exchange, she put down the receiver and told me to come back in one hour’s time, when Madame Neri would see me.
To keep warm, I walked quickly back into town and ordered tea in a café. I pictured Luisa in her bedroom. She would be having a bath, blow-drying her hair, carefully making up and choosing her clothes. She wasn’t vain, but she was fastidious. At any rate, she used to be … Who was I to say what she was like now? She would be more than sixty years old, twice a widow. Really, I couldn’t go and rip the scars off those wounds.
No. Leaving the café, I began to walk back to my own hotel. It was beginning to snow, small flakes in flurries under the streetlights. Back in my room, I would be out of danger. So would she. That was the best thing to do.
Then I stopped and looked up into the whirling night. Oh dear God, help me.
For the last time, I turned on my heel; I went back to the café, drank two cognacs, and headed west. I was going to be a few minutes early, but she would have to manage that.
In the lobby I brushed the snow from my head and stamped my feet. The receptionist looked at me pityingly over the desk but dialed the number. I didn’t listen to what she said, because I needed all my concentration not to turn and run.
“Vous pouvez monter, monsieur. Chambre numéro vingt-sept. L’ascenseur…”
But I had already spotted the lift and was jabbing the button. I caught sight of myself in the mirrored wall as it went up: broken-veined, bedraggled, but still recognizably the same creature that had walked home after school over Pocock’s fifty-acre field. The lift lurched and stopped. It took a long time for the doors to separate and let me out. I stood on the landing, looking this way and that. A door opened, some light fell into the corridor, and a voice said, “Robert?”
My feet stayed where they were. I tried to move, but there was no response from my legs. When activity returned, it was so slow that I felt I might never reach that light.
A figure was coming to meet me in the gloom, a walk I recognized, the bustling movement from the hips that had made the hem of her cotton dress swirl round her knees as we set off from the Galleria for the Via Forcella in Naples.
And then she was on me. And then she was in my arms.
I held her against my chest, and every single hour of every wasted year fell away into nothingness as time closed over us.
* * *
LUISA’S ROOM HAD a single armchair and a hard seat at the dressing table. It was difficult to know where to sit, so we remained standing. There was a table lamp and a reading light next to the large wooden-ended bed; the room was in shadow, though some warmth came off the reddish curtains and soft furnishings.
“Let me look at you,” I said.
She shook her head in reluctance and her eyes said, “Please don’t,” but she met my gaze as we stood holding both each other’s hands out in front of us, as though about to start some country dance.
Time had dragged its fingers down her face, leaving clefts and folds, tracks and pouches where once there had been flat planes and clean edges. There was a furrow between her eyes; on one side a vertical line ran through the eyebrow to the lid. Her black hair was cut shorter and striped with untouched gray. At her waist, beneath the fawn sweater, there was a suggestion of plumpness, and her breasts looked weightier, motherly.
How many tens of thousands of lost hours it must have taken to bring about these slow changes.
The shape of her eyes was as I remembered, but from what I could see in that dim light they held a self-protective glaze. Of all the damage time had done to her, this was the one that pressed my heart most. Luisa without her reckless joy was not the Luisa I had known.
Yet her small hand was the same in mine.
I tried to speak again. Eventually I managed to smile and coughed up, “Your little hand.”
“Yes. Not frozen.” She squeezed mine.
Then we sat next to one another on the end of the bed. Her feet didn’t quite reach the floor.
“Now you look at me, Robert.”
I turned to face her. She smiled and nodded, like a mother approving her child, as she ran the back of her hand over my face and then the palm of it down my arm. She held my hand again. She said almost inaudibly, “Carissimo.”
We were facing forwards again, side by side.
“One thing you mustn’t say.”
“What?” said Luisa.
br />
“Sorry. There is no sorry. There is only what happened.” I was speaking into a void. The pain was greater than anything I had imagined; among its symptoms was a contraction of my chest that made breathing possible only in gasps.
Luisa rose to her feet; there was still lightness in that movement at least. She stood with her back to the fireplace and breathed in deeply; something about her stance was also unaltered. I could see the girl in the tilt of her hip, the gently rotating movement of the back of her right hand as she began to speak.
“One day I was walking on the sand with my sister. I saw two men. You were both wounded. You stood almost naked in your swimming costumes, young and full of laughter and friendship between the two of you, but I could see the scar on your shoulder and the way you held your arm. And your friend too, the way he stood, it wasn’t natural. Though he did his best not to let it show. And you had done this for my country. For me. Then you swam out to meet us. You were beautiful. You know that. Your friend was charming, but you … you were beautiful. But I didn’t fall in love with you then. No, I managed to hold on. It was only when I saw the depth of your pain. It was a day or two later, when I saw that even your friend, who was so close to you, who had been through this hell with you that made you so close, I saw that even he didn’t understand you. I saw there was so much more to you and only I could understand it. That was when I fell in love with you.”
Neither of us spoke for a long time. The air in the room seemed too heavy to move with words.
As I began to try to say something, Luisa held up her hand. I had forgotten how commanding she could be.
The back of her hand began to turn again in that movement of hers I loved, the movement that said, Listen, this is important.
She said, “I’ve dreamed about you, Robert, almost every night. For nearly forty years. Many times I’ve woken with tears on my face. Sometimes I woke up my husband by calling out. Every night has been a version of the same story: The garden in my little lodgings by the sea. You are there, but I can’t get in. I am exiled. There were times when it was better, when my children were small and I could lose myself in their lives. I could put you out of my mind when I was awake and looking after them. But not when I slept. We traveled for my husband’s work. I’ve lived in Malaysia, South America—and it was worse when I was in these far-off places with their palm trees and fans and bamboo furniture. That was when my dreams tortured me the most. And the parties, the embassies, the days—I’ve counted off the days of my life and thrown them away.”
She swallowed and stopped speaking.
“You could have come for me,” I said.
“I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t know if you were alive. And it was not my place to come and find you. Not after what I had done.”
Her head hung down.
“My poor Luisa. And all these years, all these nights, and … Did you look back on that day you three decided to go to the beach and swim in the sea? Did you look back and curse the day?”
Luisa raised her head. “Not once,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, though the years of sadness are far greater than the few weeks of happiness. It was my life.”
Her suitcase was open on a chair; I could see the sweaters, the underwear, a book, the life I should have shared. I said, “And did you think about—”
“I didn’t think. I did what was unavoidable.”
“And your husband? When we met. Your first—”
“I loved him, but it was nothing at all to do with him.”
At the end of another long silence, I said, “I understand.”
She breathed in slowly, then murmured, “I’ve waited almost all my life to hear you say that.”
I stood up and put my arms round her. She cried then, of course she did, but I held myself back from the well of her grief, because it would serve no purpose for me to descend with her.
As she calmed down and we separated, I said, “Tell me, are you ill? The man I met—Shorter—said you’re not well.”
Reaching for a tissue, she blew her nose and wiped her eyes, banal motions at such a time. “I’m afraid so. It may be a few weeks, maybe a year. But not more.”
I went to comfort her again, but she held up her hand. “No, no, my love. It’s quite all right. I don’t mind dying. I don’t mind it at all. Everything is all right, Robert.”
“I’m glad.”
“Now that I’ve seen you again, everything is all right.”
FIFTEEN
There was a bulky letter from Alexander Pereira waiting for me on my return to London, but I put off opening it till I had collected Max from Mrs. Gomez’s house.
Being back in my own flat felt strange. The place didn’t seem to belong to me. Although I remembered where everything was kept and was able to operate the answering machine without a problem, I felt as though I was impersonating myself.
I presumed this sense of dislocation arose from having seen Luisa again. I was trying to “come to terms,” as we therapists say, with the fact that for thirty-seven years I had lived the wrong life.
In moments of extreme stress, the brain engages a useful little mechanism, a circuit that has proved successful in our evolution: we detach. It feels unreal. We look at ourselves in the mirror as though at someone else; we speak out loud, such stuff as “I don’t believe this is happening.” A version of this was clearly what I was experiencing now.
When I was writing The Chosen Few, heating up the contents of tins from Jacob’s delicatessen on the gas ring, I’d finally accepted that in the end everything might not be all right. Rather older than most people, I suppose, I’d come to admit that no supple pattern would be revealed to me; my life would not acquire the gracious and redemptive shape of art. It would instead be a sequence of non sequiturs reeling and bumping into one another until the last one was aborted and torn off.
From childhood I’d feared that I was no more than a mass of molecules in random agitation, but since parting from Luisa I’d seen that it was something worse than that. This idea of loving the one other: it bears down on you with all the force of social approval, history, and art … For me it had proved not just unattainable but destructive. My feeling for Luisa had broken my own life and rendered hers empty. Thank God that—foolhardy to the last—I had had the nerve to go up and see her. And so I had been able to give her some remission at the end.
For all the other decades this “love” had been a disaster. I knew that now. I knew too that I was damned, because in some unregenerate part of me, I would never, even under torture, forsake it.
We’d agreed to keep in touch by letter and telephone; she was to tell me how her illness progressed, send a photograph of her children. She asked for a copy of The Chosen Few, but I told her I was too ashamed of it. We agreed that I should visit her in Italy at some time to be agreed, and she promised to be well enough to entertain me.
And what if she had not been mortally ill? Would I have invited her to come and live in my flat in Kensal Green, underneath Mrs. Kaczmarek? Or would she have installed me in her parents’ old house near La Spezia, which now served as the home to her and three children in their twenties?
We would never have met again had it not been for her illness. Without that, and the death of her second husband, she wouldn’t have tried to reach me. There was an irony there, but it was too black to contemplate … We had decided to salvage what we could, and as long as she breathed, a dream of a life with her one day, somehow, would live on in me too.
* * *
IN THINKING ABOUT Luisa, I had forgotten about the letter from Pereira, and it was a couple of days before I came across it again.
Dear Dr. Hendricks,
I am writing in haste to say that I shall be away for a couple of weeks, but I wondered whether you would care to come down at the beginning of March. With any luck the spring will be on its way.
Your visits have brought me great pleasure. I had not foreseen that we would
get on so well … Céline called you “charmant,” and although the poor girl is as mad as a hummingbird I think she really meant it.
I know you were here quite recently, but I have something of very considerable interest to show you. To be truthful, I have had it all along, but I was not sure you were ready to see it. In the course of knowing you, however, I have been impressed by your resilience.
Do come. I know the girls—Paulette and Céline—would be delighted. And so would I.
Your friend,
Alexander Pereira
At the moment I felt I might at last be reaching a place of grudging acceptance with regard to Luisa, I was filled with nervous, urgent curiosity. I needed to get down to the island as soon as possible, and it was cruel of Pereira to give me all of February to get through. I doubted whether he was actually going to be absent; he was too frail to travel much, for a start. It was more likely that the old rogue wanted me to sweat on what he’d promised, to contemplate the “function of memory” in some new way. I didn’t care about any of that. I wanted to hear about my father.