Invisible

I almost forget: tomorrow night Monica and her husband Bruno are inviting me to their house to eat with them. I will phone if it is possible, but I think it will be a long evening, because we all like to talk and it is a very long time since I have seen Bruno. But the day after, for sure, we will speak, you and I. But you must tell me the number of the hotel – you forgot to do it.

What other things are happening in Recanati? I have met Pierluigi’s girlfriend, the magical Graziana. She is beautiful. But of course she is. Pierluigi cannot see girls who are not beautiful. Ugly girls are invisible for him. Graziana’s mother is from Finland, so she is tall and blonde, with big blue eyes. And big big breasts. They are really amazing – you could hang an umbrella on them. Two umbrellas. I am sure she did not buy them from a doctor, because they do a little wiggle-wiggle swing when she walks. La Stupenda I call her. Pierluigi is very happy. Now he might not come to the villa. He wants to stay here to play with Graziana and her breasts. I am full of envy. My mother has the widow Pallucchini to make her miserable and I have Graziana’s breasts. Ha ha – I wish. Perhaps you wish too? Goodbye. She has good legs too. Bye bye.

Easing back in the chair, he brings to mind the melodiously deep voice of Claudia’s father, and his study full of books, and he remembers the sweet lemon fume that rose from the pot of tea he had set on the desk. The door had been closed, to shut out the sound of Claudia and her mother, who were talking in the kitchen. ‘We leave the women for a while,’ said her father, leaning forward to touch his wrist. ‘I must read you something,’ he said, taking a book from the desk. ‘Some sentences from Mr Burton. There are some words that escape me. I hope you will know them.’ He read a lengthy paragraph, with quirks of pronunciation and stress that he had passed on to his daughter. ‘It is superb, yes? Superb, sublime.’ It was the day after the visit to the Leopardi house and her father wanted to know if Claudia had told him about the coachman’s daughter? Did she tell him about the Contessa’s religious madness? About the way the great library was assembled? ‘Good, good,’ he commented at each reply, until at last he discovered something that Claudia had failed to mention: the public examinations of Giacomo, Carlo and Paolina, who were obliged by their father, Count Monaldo, to answer in Latin the questions relating to history, Christian doctrine, grammar and rhetoric that were put to them by the eminent citizens of Recanati. And later that day, at supper, Claudia joked to her father that he was as bad as Count Monaldo, and complained about the English exercises he used to make them do, every night, making them learn poems they did not understand.

In reply he writes:

I can think of a couple of anatomical corrections that might indeed be of benefit to us, but breasts like La Stupenda’s are not what I have in mind, however remarkable those protrusions may be. Though I wish your brother great joy with the beautiful big chest, I prefer the dimensions of yourself and Marie Antoinette, whose exquisitely modest bosom was said to be the inspiration, as you might know, for the shape of the champagne glass. But did you know that the breasts of Joan of Aragon – Juana la Loca, the mad mother of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V – were reputed to exude a perfume of ripe peaches? I think we need hear no more of Graziana and her wiggle-wiggles.

Thank you for the story of your parents and the widow Pallucchini. I am pleased that harmony is returning to the home. I have to say that I don’t find your mother’s jealousy at all ridiculous. Envy is something I experience every day, but I have not experienced jealousy and I sometimes wish that I could, because evidently I am missing something. If I could see, then I could be very jealous, I am sure. Seeing the handsome Recanati boys you once kissed – that might make me as jealous as your mother. Is Bruno one of them? As it is, they don’t really exist for me, not substantially enough for retrospective jealousy, though I can envy them for having seen you, and seen themselves being seen by you.

As for my parents, the visit was not a success. I did try not to become irritated with my mother, but I made an insufficient effort, I fear. There’s something in her manner that suggests she regards her son’s misfortune as her fault and/or her burden in life, and the way she fusses around me makes me feel like a perpetual convalescent. I shouldn’t complain about her, I know – it was hard for her, bringing me up, and she did everything possible to make my childhood happy. And it was happy, by and large. I am grateful to her, and I do love her, but an hour of her company makes me want to go out and chop down large trees with a very big axe. With my father, on the other hand, there is no friction. What we have is a guilt-sodden truce. He seems to be afraid of me sometimes, and guilty at being afraid. And I think he doesn’t really like me all that much and feels guilty for that as well, while I feel guilty for whatever it is that he doesn’t like. I wonder sometimes how we came to be like this. My impression is that we moved in symmetry, my father withdrawing as I withdrew into blindness. I seem to remember that we understood each other better when I could see something of him, but this may not be true. I don’t know. I’ve started maundering. To conclude: I was a boorish lump and must go back soon, to make amends.

While I’m thinking of it, I think your French phrase is esprit de l’escalier.

And what of life at the Oak? I’m still rattling around in it like one of the last biscuits in the barrel, yet Mr Caldecott, the manager, seems to be permanently on duty: he was at the desk when I first arrived, when I went downstairs to dinner in the evening and when Charlotte picked me up yesterday morning, and he was still around when I came back. I went for a wander in the garden before breakfast this morning and lo! – he’s there again. I can’t imagine what’s keeping him busy. Perhaps an inundation of coach parties is imminent, but I rather doubt it. We had a talk, the manager and I, after Charlotte had deposited me back here. A brief but pleasant chat, out in the garden, from which I learned that Mr Caldecott is a divorced hotelier with a preference for the rural life. I like him. His jib is a pleasing jib, you might say. I have also conversed, in a desultory fashion, with a member of Mr Caldecott’s staff. Her name is Eloni, she’s from northern Greece and that’s about all I know. She’s not the most voluble character, which is a pity because she has a fine voice: low and laryngitic, like a 100-a-day smoker.

No time for Leopardi yesterday, but I feel that work will go well today. Your message has gingered me up for a long stretch at the desk. Speak soon?

He adds the phone number of the Oak, and as soon as his reply has gone he resumes the translation of Leopardi. At four o’clock he rings reception to ask if he might order a plate of sandwiches and a pot of lemon tea. It is the manager himself who takes the call and who ten minutes later brings the tray, and places it on a table to the side of the bureau, and then departs, having made his presence as unobtrusive as possible.

Back in his office, Malcolm continues to leaf through the bills and memoranda and other ephemera from the time of Croombe’s ownership: receipts for quantities of insulating cork, bolts of damask, crates of Bordeaux wine, chairs to be supplied by Maple & Company of Tottenham Court Road. Annotations by Croombe appear in the margins of advertisements and brochures issued by fine hotels in Paris, in German spas, in Swiss resorts, in New York. ‘Flowers in every room, replaced daily,’ he has written beneath a view of the river frontage of the Savoy; ‘140 rooms!’ he exclaims on the back of a print depicting the Baur-en-Ville in Zürich; the single word ‘Cost?’ appears above an engraving of Stockholm’s Grand Hotel, connected by a loop of faded ink to a line announcing M. Cadier’s installation of steam-powered lifts. But the most charismatic of these items are the notebooks, small black leather notebooks with marbled endpapers and finely lined pages that have become as fragile as dead leaves, in which Croombe records his impressions of the building site on the Boulevard des Capucines, his introduction to the ‘captivating and capricious’ Sandrine Koechlin and, in 1872, the week that he and Sandrine spent at the Hôtel Splendide. Every meal that he and his wife ate in the hotel is recorded in detail, with observations on the appointments of their suite and the dining room, and then, halfway through the week, there is a conversation with the maître d’hôtel, a young Swiss by the name of César Ritz. ‘In equal proportion he possesses both ambition and discretion, and he displays a purposefulness that is quite remarkable in –’ he is reading when the phone rings and a woman’s voice says, ‘It’s me.’

They have not spoken to each other for months, but she speaks as if continuing an argument that had been interrupted earlier that day. ‘Hello, Kate,’ he replies. ‘How are you?’

‘What’s this all about, Malcolm?’

‘What’s what all about?’

‘You know perfectly well. This letter to Stephanie,’ she says crisply. ‘What do you think you’re playing at? Going behind my back.’

‘I was not going behind your back.’

‘You didn’t tell me. I’d say that’s going behind my back.’

‘Kate, I was not going behind your back.’

‘So why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Because she asked me not to.’

‘She asked you.’

‘Yes, she asked me not to tell you yet, so I didn’t.’

‘So why do you think she asked you to do that?’

‘Because she didn’t want you to know yet, clearly.’

‘And you think that’s OK? She says “Let’s not tell Mum, eh?” and you just go along with it.’

‘No, I don’t just go along with it. Why don’t you ask her to read you what I wrote –’

‘I’ve read what you wrote.’

‘I see.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘That I’m surprised you open her mail.’

‘I found it in her room.’

‘Addressed to Stephanie.’

‘That’s not the point. The point is –’

‘The point is that you read it.’

‘Yes, I read it. I’m not going to apologise for finding out what you wrote to our daughter.’

‘And you think that’s permissible? Reading something addressed to her, a private correspondence.’

‘The point is, Malcolm, that I have a right to know about this. I have a right to know what’s going on.’

‘Well, that was my point exactly. As you know, having read my letter.’

Her breathing becomes quieter, as if she is holding the phone away from her mouth, and then she resumes, at the same pitch as her first words, ‘So she wrote to you? Out of the blue, just like that, she wrote to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You didn’t start it?’

‘No, Kate, I didn’t start it. I’ve thought about it, I’ve wanted to do it, I don’t think any court would have convicted me if I had done it, but no, I didn’t.’

‘One day, after all these years, she gets it into her head to write to you.’

‘Apparently.’

‘This is a girl who hasn’t mentioned your name since God knows when. So why does she suddenly get this notion to send you a letter?’

‘Ask her, Kate. I don’t know. I was as surprised as you. You’ll have to talk to her.’

‘I will, don’t worry,’ she says.

In the pause he hears a tapping, perhaps of a pen on a table-top. ‘Kate?’ he asks. ‘Why are you so agitated about this?’

‘I’m not agitated,’ she retorts. ‘I’m livid. Absolutely bloody livid.’

‘But why?’

‘That’s a really dim question.’

‘Then tell me. I know this is confusing. It’s confusing for both of us. But why are you so angry that Stephanie wants to see me?’

‘What I’m angry about is you two scheming behind my back.’

‘We’re not scheming. I’ve explained.’

‘Malcolm, even if you’re not scheming, she is.’

‘That’s not how I’d put it.’

‘It’s how I’d put it.’

‘I’m sure she has good reasons for going about it this way.’

‘Do you now?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘And what do you imagine these good reasons would be?’

‘I don’t know, Kate, do I? You tell me.’

‘Good reasons,’ she repeats, and he hears her whisper: ‘Jesus Christ.’

This curse, uttered wearily, as though to herself, sets off an echo in his mind, an echo of conversations he does not want to recall. ‘I can’t very easily –’ he begins.

‘I don’t need this, Malcolm,’ she goes on. ‘I really don’t need this.’

‘Don’t need what? Talking to me?’

‘Oh Christ,’ she sighs again. ‘I tell you what: I don’t even think she does want to see you. And that’s the truth. I think she’s doing this to get at me.’

‘But a minute ago you were complaining that she didn’t want you to know.’

‘I’d have known sooner or later.’

‘Kate, what is going on there? I should know. Has something happened?’

‘Nothing’s happened. Life’s lumbering on. She’s a nightmare to live with, and I’m fed up with it.’

‘I think we should discuss this.’

‘No, we don’t need to discuss it. It’s not your problem. It’s mine. Robert’s and mine.’

‘She’s my daughter.’

‘Not any more. You don’t know her now.’

‘Well, that’s about to change.’

‘Might be.’

‘No, Kate. Is. Is about to change.’

‘I don’t want to talk about this any more. I have to think. I’ll call you back.’

‘When?’

‘I’ll call you back. Soon.’

‘Call me at the weekend.’

‘Yes.’

‘Before Monday, OK?’

‘Yes. OK,’ she exhales.

‘Talk to her, Kate.’

‘Yes, Malcolm. I don’t need your advice.’

‘Talk to her and let me know what’s happening.’

‘Yes,’ she says, and puts the phone down.

In the beginning perhaps they had been drawn together by her discontent. He can still see her, in the dining room of the Zetland, standing amid a group of aunts and uncles, her eyes desperate and her smile frozen with boredom. A man with a bright red jacket and a paisley tie put his arm round her waist, and her neck stiffened as he kissed her on the cheek. She would have been fourteen then, or fifteen. He had often seen her walking with her friends, a demure little entourage that moved undisturbed through the mêlée of children around the gates, more like a gang of precocious office workers than schoolgirls. Waiting for the bus, she always stood extraordinarily straight, like a dancer, and she was standing that way at the Zetland, blinking at the cigar smoke that was being blown across her face. She turned and tapped his arm to ask if she could get a glass of water, then followed him to the kitchen. When she took the glass from him and sat down in the kitchen, her hair hid her face from him in a way that made her look more sophisticated than any of the adults. Lifting her head, she put a hand flat against her brow and sighed: ‘Jesus Christ, get me out of here.’ She’d drunk a glass of gin. She was three-quarters drunk, and she really didn’t like it, she said, looking at him, with her head resting on her arms. He told her she should eat something, and made an omelette for her, which she ate in about half a minute. His father called him back out to the party, and when he returned to the kitchen she had washed the plate and pan, and made two cups of coffee. And somehow, before the party was over, they came to be climbing up the spiral staircase to the roof of the turret. The weathervane creaked above their heads as they looked out at the sea, standing side by side, so close that her dress kept brushing the back of his legs. Kate surveyed the whole town in one continuous sweep. ‘What a dump,’ she said. ‘Just look at it. Death.’ She removed the pin that held the paper orchid to her dress and flung the flower upward. They watched it fly over the sea-coloured roofs and fall into the street. The skin on her arms had tightened with the cold. He took off his jacket and offered it to her, but she would not take it.

Years later she finally escaped, with him, and they had lived abroad and been happy. For a long time they had been happy, most of the time. He knows this to be true, but at this moment, in the grey wake of their conversation, no instance of their happiness shows itself. What impresses itself upon him is that often, even during their first months in Amsterdam, he would see on Kate’s face a look like the expression he had seen that night in the Zetland, and it seems to him now that their marriage was like a path laid upon a marsh, and that the frigid ooze of boredom would well up through it, more and more frequently as the years passed. And boredom became bitterness, became something like contempt. He remembers one afternoon, on a bridge by a bookshop, when he explained why it would be best to stay a little longer in Amsterdam, as Mr Rijsbergen’s assistant. Just three or four months more, then they could go back to England. She listened, watching a police boat moving slowly down the canal. At last she spoke. ‘Whatever you say,’ she said, nothing more, tightening the straps on Stephanie’s pushchair. She walked off without saying another word, and that night, when he came home, he found in the kitchen bin a sheet of the hotel’s writing paper, on which she had written, in lipstick: ‘bored bored bored bored’. He remembers crushing the piece of paper into an empty tin and sitting in Stephanie’s room to watch his daughter while she slept. He fell asleep on the floor beside the cot. When he woke up he went into their bedroom. Kate lay curled on her side, with one hand under her cheek. He was no longer annoyed by the childish message she had left for him to find. Looking at her as she lay in their bed, turned away from him in sleep, in the shadows that the curtains cast like raindrops across the room, he felt something akin to the misery of bereavement, a misery that now, summoned by Kate’s voice, is returning to him, like an amnesiac’s interlude of clarity.

He rummages through the relics on his desk, with no purpose other than to divert himself from the memory of Amsterdam. Taking up a sheaf of menus, he begins to plan the final night of the Oak. He makes notes on dishes that were prepared in Croombe’s kitchen, and drafts a letter to be sent to his most loyal guests, telling them of the special supper with which the Oak will be ending. He settles some bills, takes a call from Giles Harbison, goes down to the basement to check the gauges in the pump room. He continues down the passageway to the pool, but even the sight of the radiant blue walls, of the burnished pipes and the blooms of electric light within the water cannot bring him wholly into the present. As he stands by the water, breathing the sweetly stagnant air, it is as though he had recently arrived at the Oak, and Kate and Stephanie had departed merely weeks ago.

Going home, he drives down the High Street instead of taking his customary route. It occurs to him, as he waits for the traffic lights to change, that he needs some cash for the morning. He parks outside the bank. Something here is unusual tonight, he is aware, as he jabs at the keyboard of the cash machine, but precisely what is unusual he does not know. The drums and cogs inside the machine start to turn; he puts out his hand to take the notes, glances to right and left, and then notices that several street lights in a row have failed. A pallid light lies over the dark bricks of the bank’s façade. The road has a complexion of indigo and the clouds around the moon are bordered with dark lavender. At a shriek of laughter he looks to his left. Three teenaged girls are sitting on the steps of the library, passing a cigarette around. They sprawl on the steps, one with a foot resting on another’s knee, the third girl sitting apart, higher up the steps, ruffling her tightly curled hair. The two girls sitting together turn to look at their friend. Taking a drag of the cigarette, she makes a remark, a sardonic aside that makes the other two howl and throw their arms round each other. This is what Stephanie will be like, he thinks, and finally, in the delight of the idea of his daughter, the mood of the afternoon is obliterated.

In the alley opposite the library, Eloni drops a bag of stale buns into the bin. The pubs will be emptying soon, and the day’s last customers will arrive, some of them so drunk that they will vomit onto the pavement outside, and it will be her job to clear up the mess they make. She goes to the end of the alley; if nobody is coming she can stay outside for some fresh air. Three shrieking girls are walking down the street, veering across the pavement arm in arm. By the bank a man is getting into his car, and as they pass behind him one of them makes a remark that makes him turn and smile at them. Recognising Mr Caldecott, she steps back to avoid being seen, even though he knows she works here. In the shadows of the alley she watches his car go by, and her heart seems to clench, as though he had gone for ever and suddenly she is friendless and in danger. She returns to the kitchen. From the grills she scrapes the gritty pellets of meat and the slivers of onion that have shrivelled and hardened so they look like clippings from animals’ claws. She drains the dirty oil into a cut-down pop bottle. Out front, Charlie yells an order. She splays the grainy discs of meat onto the grill, and all the time the heavy small thing is tumbling in her chest.

four

At a quarter past one, hearing the front door close, Stephanie gets up from her bed to make sure that her mother is leaving. Pushing a hand into the slats of the blind, she sees her mother reach into her handbag for her sunglasses. It’s the round black-rimmed shades today, the Jackie Onassis pair. Post-workout chic is this afternoon’s look: strappy sandals to make the most of the coral-pink toenails; freshly laundered skinny jeans; and the tight white T-shirt that Robert brought back from New York, which cost a sexily ludicrous amount of money and shows off the high-toned, caramel-coloured arms. It’s the look that suits her best and it’s obvious from her walk that she knows it, just as you can see in the springy movement of her wrist the pleasure she gets when she aims the key fob at the car and all the locks spring up obediently, like tiny servants standing to attention. With poise she steps up into the car, turning at the waist, twisting her hips, dipping her head, reaching for the door in one fluid sequence, like a piece of action that’s been rehearsed and rehearsed until it’s become instinctive. One peep in the mirror and the Jackies are raised upright and jammed into the hairband position. And then we’re off, off to the shops once again, to buy whatever’s needed for this evening’s meal and a bottle or two of whatever wine was the top tip in last Sunday’s supplement. After that, it’ll be a drive halfway across London to see Susie, who will tend her hair for the twentieth time this year. At five o’clock, if the traffic’s not too bad, she will be back, with an immaculate bob from which every strand of grey will have been eliminated by a dye the colour of plastic oak veneer, and an impulse buy on the passenger seat, a scented candle or an exquisite belt, in a tiny carrier bag that’s almost too nice to throw away.

She turns off the radio and wanders across the landing. From the doorway she surveys her parents’ bedroom. The bed has been tightly made and the pillows heaped in two pairs of three, all perfectly aligned and perfectly white. The net curtains hang in waves as regular as corrugated fibreglass. The red digits of the alarm clock blink beside the white plastic lamp and a book from which a green leather bookmark protrudes. And on Robert’s side, underneath the matching white plastic lamp, lies a book with a red leather bookmark. On the dressing table, to the side of the mirror, half a dozen perfume bottles stand on a circle of white lace, none of them touching, all as shiny as new. There’s not a fingermark, not a grain of dust to mar the gleam of the mirror. She looks around, seeking a blemish, an irregularity, but there’s none: not one stray sock, a single dropped coin, a mislaid hair-clip, nothing. She opens her mother’s wardrobe, and it’s like opening the storeroom of a clothes shop. Packed closely on the rail, the dresses and jackets and shirts hang in sheaths of plastic and white paper above a low wall of shoe boxes. In the centre of the rail there’s a small gap between the hangers, where a fat grey satin pouch of pot-pourri dangles on a blue satin ribbon, like the body of a dead bird tangled in a branch. Indifferently, going through the motions of searching the room, she opens the drawers of the pine chest: the deepest is full of jeans, all as clean as the day they were bought, folded in two piles, one for him, one for her; another contains nothing but white shirts and white tops; the top drawer is a fragrant nest of underwear, bras to the left side, knickers to the right, with subtle hues of cream and pink amid the undimmed whiteness. She shoves a hand into a wad of silk, striking the packets of pills that are hidden underneath. If she were to throw the packets away, or just mess things up a bit, it would be no worse than opening the letter, she thinks, and then the notion vanishes, and she feels tired again, that’s all.