There in the daytime it was like a labyrinth of the night. There were many large young people with backpacks as big as steamer trunks and many old people with trolley bags. I already had my ticket and seat reservation, so I went to Platform 13 where I found the 12.34 to Marseille and Saint-Charles. This train would stop at Chagny, from where a bus would take me to Autun just as it had taken the two of us long ago.
I boarded the second-class coach and went to my seat. Soon an old lady was ushered in by a young man who kissed her and left. The old lady smiled and sat down opposite me. She settled back with closed eyes for a moment, then took a computer game out of her handbag and began to play. Only one other passenger came into the compartment, a very abled-looking young man, powerfully built. He took a DISABLED seat by the window and peeled an orange.
I closed my eyes and gave myself to the journey. I had no wish to relive old times; I wanted to stay in the present October to receive what new thoughts might come to me.
I opened my travel book: Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey, an English edition. Closing my eyes again I saw the rustlers’ cavern behind the waterfall and I saw Bern Venters shoot the Masked Rider, who turned out to be a beautiful girl. He tended her wound and took her to his hidden valley. ‘“I’ll try — to live,” she said. The broken whisper just reached his ears. “Do what — you want — with me.”’
The train was moving. We glided under gantries and wires, past coloured lights and signals of various kinds. Through zones of bleakness we passed, then through human habitations. Sometimes files of poplars marched rearward beyond the gantries and the wires while TGV trains shot by us like thunderbolts. Strange towers and stretches of flatness appeared and disappeared; haggard landscapes, rivers and canals. Graffiti on walls, bridges, and power stations offered illegible messages, some perhaps for me.
Were there so many electrical towers nineteen years ago? Birches, poplars, and willows tried to remember Claude as they struck wistful poses: ‘Was it like this?’ they said. ‘Was it like that?’ The paper sign on the outside of the window said MARSEILLE backwards over sky, trees, hills, valleys, farms, rivers, boats and bridges. At Sens there were little trees on the platform with straight trunks and round leafy tops that might have been done by the Douanier Rousseau.
As we travelled on I found myself looking within more than without. Père Lachaise Cemetery appeared on the screen of my memory in the October of four years ago with the yellow leaves of autumn scattered among the tombs. Women sort themselves according to the famous dead they visit; I recall a lady I met at the tomb of Seurat: she was dotty but nice. And of course always at the supine statue of Victor Noir there are those who rub themselves against him and easily transfer their attentions from a bronze member to a live one. The dead are never lonely in Père Lachaise and the living need not be.
At the time I speak of I was without a long-term female friend, and being a romantic I craved the company of a like-minded person. I went to where Chopin lies, a little south of Bellini and east of Cherubini, near the Carrefour du Grand Rond. The paving stones glistened from the soft rain that had fallen a little while ago; the sky was grey and gentle, the trees sympathetic; almost I could hear a shadowy mazurka as I approached.
I stopped about three metres from the tomb to watch a young woman who was standing before it. She was looking at the marble muse who sits grieving for the departed composer. At the muse’s feet were fresh flowers. Below her, in an oval inset on the plinth, is a relief profile of Chopin.
The woman was wearing jeans, black boots, a yellow wind-breaker, and a black baseball cap with the insignia of the New York Yankees. She had a large shoulder bag. She was short and plump, with a round face and short straight blonde hair. She shook her head sadly and put her bag on the ground, then she took a half-bottle of champagne and two glasses out of it. I was not close enough to read the label on the champagne. She popped the cork which flew straight up, then fell at my feet; she filled the glasses. She raised one to the marble muse, then poured it over the flowers. The second glass she raised to Chopin’s profile, then drank.
Again she shook her head, took a paper bag out of the shoulder bag, put the two glasses in it, placed the bag on the ground and stamped on it. I moved towards her. ‘End of a romance?’ I said.
She turned to me with tears running down her face. I held out my arms and she moved into them. That was how I met Victoria Fawles. The champagne was Pol Roger; I have kept the bottle.
The next stop was Laroche-Migennes; after that came Tonnerre. Sometimes the window filled up with sky, leaving only a thin residue of earth at the bottom of the glass as we continued in a southeasterly direction. Montbard came next. The old woman and the young man had left the train at Tonnerre and there were other people in the compartment now but my mind and my vision did not focus on them. Superimposed on the wall opposite me was the mental image of the tympanum of the west portal of St Lazare. Although Christ is the judge he seems to be pinned there like a butterfly with outspread wings. If there were a God, might He have punished His only son in this way? Might He have said to Christ, ‘You and your big ideas! You took it on yourself to be a ransom for the many; now the many are your problem, and you can judge them through all eternity.’ What a thought.
Sometimes there were hills. It became sunny and we were at Dijon. Here the train stood for a long time while backpackers drank mineral water and Coke and bought things at the vending machine while their shadows did the same. Does Solange remember when we shared an orange at Dijon? I licked the juice that ran down her chin.
South of Dijon we passed vineyards. Next came Beaune, then Chagny, a peaceful little station where I and several others left the train for the 16.43 bus for Autun. Our driver was a short sturdy woman who conversed non-stop with a friend in the first seat while smoothly passing oncoming traffic in streets only wide enough for one car. Then up and down on winding roads through vineyards we went, through Nolay, Epinac, Sully and many smaller towns and villages to arrive at Autun at 18.06.
Through the October darkness I walked slowly up the hill to the Hôtel de la Tête Noir, putting my feet into the footsteps of nineteen years before. Almost I expected to smell the fragrance of Solange’s hair if I turned my head. I registered at the hotel and was given, as I had requested, the key to Room 309, attached by a ring to its miniature bottle. I bought a half-bottle of Pinot Noir, then went up to the room where Solange and I had lain in each other’s arms, had slept and awakened together. I had told myself that I was not going to relive the past but of course this is not possible: what we call the present is only the accumulated past.
I went to the window and raised my glass to the lights of the Champ de Mars and the Mairie. When I had finished the wine I went out and walked to St Lazare past the same dim cafés and ancient houses as before while cars and mopeds passed me going up the hill. At the cathedral I stood with my back to Le Petit Rolin and looked up at the tympanum that Solange and I had looked at together. ‘Speak to me,’ I said to Christ. ‘Speak to me as the son of God. Tell me something.’
‘I have nothing to say,’ said Christ. ‘This is all there is.’
‘But meaning,’ I said, ‘there must be meaning.’
‘Reality has no meaning,’ said Christ, ‘it is only itself. I am only myself; I am an image carved in stone. Gislebertus hoc fecit.’
‘That is not a good enough answer,’ I said. ‘You’re being evasive. Ideas are part of reality. There came to me the idea to travel here to see you and it meant something to me.’
‘What?’ said Christ.
‘I don’t know. That’s what I’m asking you.’
‘I don’t know what this idea meant; sometimes people say they’ve come to see me when they really want to see someone or something else. Maybe God knows.’
‘Are you saying there is a God?’
No answer.
I begin to be tired of talking about this. The next day I looked at the tympanum by daylight and still Christ said nothing
. As I turned to start down the hill the bells shouted, ‘There is a God! Believe us!’ I waved goodbye without turning around, and walked down to the Hôtel de France where I had coffee and Poire William. Then I took the bus to Le Creusot where I got the TGV train to the Gare de Lyon; from there the RER to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and from there I walked home. No longer was I looking for meaning but still I wanted something and I had no idea what it might be.
15
Roswell Clark
Last night I dreamt that Jennifer and I were with some kind of tour group; I don’t know where we’d come from or where we were going. We’d had to move out of one hotel into another and we were worried about flight connections. A bellhop in a red jacket with brass buttons said, ‘Would you like to upgrade your menu?’ and gave us two very large shiny menus with illustrations in colour. We couldn’t make out what the pictures were and there were only a few words in English, randomly jumbled together with several other languages. It was a sickening sort of dream, and when I woke up out of it I fell back into it.
It’s true that I’m not sure where I’m coming from and I don’t know where I’m going. I’ve had to move out of what was before and I don’t know how to make the connection to whatever’s coming next; I’ve no idea what’s on the menu although I’d like something better than what I’ve had on my plate since Jennifer’s death.
About six months after the crash I went to see a Dr Wakem. He was Martin Gold’s therapist and Martin swore by him. ‘A no-bullshit kind of guy’ was how he described him.
‘Depression,’ said Dr Wakem to me, ‘is anger turned against the self.’
‘It’s more than anger,’ I said. ‘I hate myself.’
Dr Wakem was a stocky man with close-cropped sandy hair and a bullet head that looked as if he could knock down walls with it. His blue eyes also seemed very hard. He fixed me with a cold stare, then lowered his bullet head as if he might butt me through the wall behind me. ‘Why do you hate yourself?’ he said.
‘I killed my wife by drinking too much and driving without due care. That reason enough?’
‘Definitely.’ He nodded in a satisfied way, like the man who comes down the ladder to tell you that you need a whole new roof. ‘How long ago was this?’
‘A little over six months.’
‘What actually happened?’
‘Another car hit us on the passenger side. It was at night, raining, very dark. I never saw that car until it hit us. The driver just backed up and took off, I didn’t get his number. Or hers, if it was a woman.’
‘Could it have been the other driver’s fault?’
‘When the paramedics breathalysed me I was well over the limit and I couldn’t walk in a straight line. Maybe the other guy was in the same kind of shape, I don’t know. If I’d been sober I’d have approached that intersection more cautiously. The police thought it was worth a one-year ban but that doesn’t matter because I won’t be driving any more.’
‘Your wife died instantly?’
‘Yes.’ His question made me see Jennifer as she looked after it happened, her face turned towards me, her eyes closed, her mouth open. Why did he need to know how long it took her to die?
‘And now you see her face as she died and you’re haunted by it?’ he continued.
‘Yes.’ I considered planting my fist in his face; if he lowered his head I’d probably break my hand.
‘And you wake up in the morning hating yourself?’
‘I go to bed hating myself and I get up hating myself, and I hate myself in between, OK?’
‘But it was an accident, right?’
‘It was an accident but I made it happen.’
‘How did you make it happen?’
‘I told you: by drinking too much.’
‘Did you know that you were going to be driving?’
‘Yes.’
‘So then why did you drink too much?’
‘Lots of people do.’
‘That’s not a good enough answer. Did you know that drinking would impair your judgement and your reflexes when driving?’
‘Sometimes I drive better when I’m a little over the limit.’
‘That’s what I mean by impaired judgement. Let me put it another way: if you were driving when you had too much to drink, was it really an accident?’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘There aren’t really that many accidents, are there? If you do Thing A that makes Thing B happen, there’s no reason to be surprised, is there?’
‘Are you saying that I wanted to kill my wife?’
‘I’m saying we need to look at what came before the accident.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like how were things between you and your wife.’
‘Is this how you get your jollies or what?’
‘This is how we find out what makes things happen.’
‘Right. Well, Doc, I think your time is up. Bye bye.’ I got up and walked out. Looking back on it later I understood that I didn’t really want to know all there was to know about the accident. After a while I got used to my guilt.
Nonetheless I was hoping, with time, to get her death off my back, but it was behind me whichever way I turned. At first I’d been like a parent to it but gradually it became the parent and I the child. When would I grow up and move out of its house? I rubbed my bat tattoo and remembered with embarrassment that I had done it in the expectation that my life was going to change. So far the only change was that I felt more confused than before.
More and more I found myself at the Church of St John’s in the North End Road. That smooth fibreglass Jesus had begun to pull me; the idea of someone’s dying for our sins was much in my mind. What a lot of big and little sins there were to die for! How could one man handle all of them? But of course that was his thing, that was what made him special. I wished it were a system I could believe in.
It was a damp and foggy November morning with a chill in the air. The fog made everything more personal, as if it were taking me aside to tell me a secret. I was leaning on the church railings and looking at Christ when the John Smith drinker who’d asked me what I wanted from Jesus appeared. I wondered what my answer would be if he asked the same thing again.
‘Getting any messages?’ he said.
‘Not so far. The last time we spoke you quoted Psalm 137.’
‘I remember.’
‘You said there was a lot of Babylon around here but what Zion do you remember? If you don’t mind my asking.’
He shook his head. ‘Right now that remembered Zion is all I’ve got and it isn’t something I show around. Haven’t you got one of your own?’
Again the smells of oil and metal, cigarette smoke and Jack Daniel’s came to me with my father at his work-bench under the light of the green-shaded bulb. Is that my Zion? I thought. Is that all there is? Nothing since my boyhood? I tried to see Jennifer’s face and couldn’t. The John Smith man was watching me with his head cocked to one side. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ve got one. My name’s Roswell Clark. What’s yours?’
‘Abraham Selby.’ We shook hands. ‘Zion is what you think there’s no end of when you have it, then all of a sudden it’s gone and there wasn’t really that much of it.’
‘Can I quote you?’
‘Any time. Now I need to think about what I just said. I’ll see you.’ He went back to the low-budget drinking community and found himself a place to sit on the low wall around the trees. He couldn’t be too badly off, I reflected, if he found it worthwhile to think about what he said.
I stood there silent in Babylon while the fog kept me private. There was in the damp chill a smell of freshness and change. The Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor came into my head and of course it brought with it the gorilla and the woman I’d made for Adelbert Delarue. I moved my mind away a little and let images without words come to me. I saw my hand making sketches but I couldn’t see what the sketches were. I saw the tools on my workbench; I saw the sheds at Moss & Co, the measured
forests of timber, the baulks of lime. I heard the whispering silence.
16
Sarah Varley
That hand would not let go of me. That a remnant of a masterfully carved crucifixion should be among the rubbish in that box was unsettling; this fractional representation of real suffering had some importance and it laid on me the responsibility to do the right thing by it. How many miles and how many years had it travelled to get to me?
There’s a fair amount of ignorance among market traders; most of us know a little and a few of us know a lot but Dermot and Vernon at the Jubilee Market were the only ones who I thought might have a clue as to the provenance of this fragment. Dermot thought it was Italian; Vernon thought it was German; both of them guessed seventeenth century or earlier.
Sometimes I have little premonitions: I expect to see someone and they appear. Roswell Clark was a woodcarver and I thought he might turn up and shed some light on the crucified wooden hand. About half-past ten suddenly there he was. ‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Hi.’ He looked haggard and preoccupied.
‘How’s it going?’
He shrugged. ‘Hard to say.’
‘Anything wrong? Bad news of some kind?’
‘Oh, no, nothing like that. Nothing especially wrong and no news of any kind.’ He looked as if he hoped there’d be no more questions. ‘How’ve you been?’ he said.
‘Much the same. I’ve got a recent acquisition I’d like to show you.’ I took the hand out of the box under my table and held it out to him. He stepped back, folded his right forearm over his stomach, leant his left elbow on the back of his right hand, and rubbed his chin thoughtfully with his left hand while regarding me suspiciously.
‘Was it something I said?’ I asked him.