Becoming Strangers (4 page)

George was delighted, and stood to pull a chair back for his friend's wife, at the same time nodding at the waiter to come over.

'Drink,' he was saying, making a cup shape with his hand and raising it to his lip, 'thirsty....'

'Campari and soda,' said Annemieke, quick as a flash, resting her face on a manicured hand.

'Now that's a drink,' said George, widening his eyes and nodding at their waiter.

The room was a large clean arena, pillared and marble-floored with heavy round tables, draped with three tablecloths each and large matching napkins.
There were three glasses at each place. The paned glass windows reflected the glare of too many table lamps and hanging chandeliers, but in places there were empty dark spaces where the windows were open. It was to these spaces that one's eyes wandered for comfort. At a table by an open window there was a woman in her sixties, sat opposite a young black man. He wiped his mouth delicately, and his eyes moved like white doves startled by unexpected noise. But she brought them back with her big soft hands moving in the air. The old girl, with badly shaved chins and sagging breasts, was pushing bits and pieces on to his plate with her knife and fork, and shaking her head with insistence. Feeding him up.

The waiter came and indicated the seafood buffet, pink and bulbous, glistening, intermingled with scrunched lettuce offerings on trays of ice cubes scattered with wedges of lemon. George swallowed hard and led the way, applying himself single-mindedly to each silver platter and composing a heap of food on his plate, which he set about as soon as he had placed it on the table. He ate fast and did not speak.

Annemieke sat back from her own plate and waited a moment before raising her glass and saying, 'Santé.' George looked up at her; the few bristles that were his moustache were wet. 'Good health,' he said.

'Eat up, dear,' George placed a hand on Dorothy's elbow. She looked at the plate to which she'd helped herself and turned her fork over on the tablecloth, once or twice.

'The oysters are wonderful, Dorothy, did you have some?' asked Annemieke.

'No.'

'What did you take?'

'I don't know.'

Each of them looked up from their dinner and at her. George said quickly, his voice moving over the rough edge of anger.

''Course you bloody well know what you got.'

'I can't think of it, though, the word. The name,' she said, and her fork was trembling in her hand so much that she put it back down.

'They're prawns, your favourite, what we get down at the seafront, every week,' he sighed loudly and exclaimed, 'Gordon Bennett!'

'I'm getting old.'

Annemieke looked at her husband, but failing to catch his eyes, she dabbed her mouth and said to Dorothy, 'So, this is your first time in the Caribbean?'

'Yes.'

'And for us, no. We have been in the region many times. The Florida Keys, Mexico, and we've been to St Martin and to Trinidad too, before it was so popular, before any of them were, well, what they are now ... package deal places ... we take a long-haul holiday every year, sometimes twice, besides of course the short stays in Europe. But, yes, we like to go to upscale resorts as it's only for a week or so. I think we have deserved those few weeks. I wish we had done so much more, seen more. But Jan's work has taken first place.
He sees himself as contributing to the good of mankind. I say to him, it's car rentals, my dear. My boys have seen the world and I see the difference in them. I think that it is good for one, morally, to travel.'

'How's that?' asked George.

Annemieke paused and took a sip of her wine.

'It expands the senses, the intellect and, well, culturally, borders and so on.'

Jan topped up all of their glasses and nodded.

'I wouldn't know,' said George, 'we're homebodies. I like my own sort as a rule and I think it'd be better for us all if we stayed put, kept to our kind.'

Annemieke looked at her husband again, but Jan, feeling her eyes on him, kept his face lowered and began to chew a new mouthful with steadfast rhythm.

'Mind you,' George went on, 'I had a terrific time in Italy during the war. But that was special circumstances. The usual rules didn't apply.'

'Oh, for a world without usual rules,' said Annemieke.

'There must be rules, dear; even when there aren't rules, there are rules, and then it's just the more confusing. Better to be straight. Honest.'

'There are rules, but you can choose whether you want to follow them or not...' started Dorothy. She was amazed to see that the Belgian woman flushed, her rouged cheeks rose like dough, her mouth fell slack and spare as a large man approached the table and bade her 'Good evening.' He turned to all of them with a nod and a smile.

'Hello there,' said Annemieke, 'nice to see you
again. Jan, this is ... I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name.'

'Bill Moloney.' The man extended a hand to Jan and raised it next in a salute to both George and Dorothy. 'Well, I'll not hold you up,' he added.

He sat at a single table, at a remove from them, and signalled his salute again as Annemieke looked over, then later, catching Annemieke's awkward glance, he raised his glass and in a loud voice said, 'Your health!'

The men responded eagerly.

'It's his own he ought to worry about. I met him at reception. Remember I mentioned him to you, Jan? I think he's interested in me. Sorry,' she said with a small shrug.

'Sex. All about you. It's the sex,' said Dorothy, mumbling, but loud enough for them all to hear. Jan stared at her, his mouth open for just a moment, his fork poised to enter it. George cleared his throat and drank noisily from his glass.

'We came here on account of our granddaughter giving us the tickets as a present. Took us by surprise. We've never been on this sort of a caper. You can't complain, though,' he said, rearing a little with the gas in his system.

'By us it is also the case,' said Jan, 'a gift to come here. From our sons.'

'But we could have come all the same, Jan!' Annemieke reproached him, 'this kind of holiday is normal for us. But our oldest son, he is doing so well with his business. He has bought a big townhouse in Brussels; it
was something like one point two million euros. A friend of ours, a stockbroker, he tells us it is a very good investment. He likes to spoil his mother; he spends too much on me. But then, this is a special case, you see. A last holiday. My husband is very ill. With cancer.'

Jan laid his knife and fork side by side on his plate and closed his eyes momentarily.

Dorothy wished she had a dustpan and brush to sweep up after the Belgian woman. She noticed that the woman was dropping little bits and pieces of bread as she twisted the bread roll in her hands, turning in her seat, looking over her shoulder at Mr Moloney and then looking back at her husband and at them.

J
AN HAD HAD PLENTY TO DRINK
at the bar with George that night, the women left them to it, but still sleep eluded him. It was the drugs.

Night after night, he lay awake, plucking his past. The bald facts were what remained. His business partner, his one-time friend, André De Vries had cheated on Jan in these last years, when Jan was forced into retirement through his illness, divesting him of the profitable parts of their company—and also his wife and children. Off they went for trips here and there, sunshine days in the rain, while he sat inside, sheltered.

'He likes to laugh. I like to laugh. The children, they must also laugh,' Annemieke said in explanation, the
first time she and the boys had gone off with him for a Sunday lunch in Brugge. She wore a multi-coloured sweater, tight over her bust, and a long military-style skirt with straps. He had grabbed her by the arm.

'This is the man that has stolen from me, and from me means from us, Annemieke.'

'He has an explanation. I wish you'd listen to him. He means to capitalize on, well, what is it, the capital, the liquid assets, that's it, the cash and then he will turn them into assets, property and so forth, he will expand the franchise and then, he will give us our share and in this way you need not work, Jan. You must see it is the best thing. Don't be paranoid. We all care about you. You need to rest.' All of this she had delivered at pace. He had wondered whether she had done so from emotion or because they were running late. She had not been at all concerned about his hand around her upper arm. 'I must go, Jan. You will not listen to him, will you, you won't give him a chance? It's not Andrés fault that you have cancer. You have a persecution complex.'

'You look cheap,' he had told her. 'You are cheap.'

'Stop it,' she said, 'stop it. You are demeaning yourself.' Her reply, delivered calmly, had caused him to let her arm drop instantly. To them, he must look like a fool, to his sons. They thought he was going mad; perhaps it was true. Perhaps he misunderstood De Vries. They had worked together for years, been friends.

Then one of the boys had knocked on the door to the study. 'Mother?' he'd said without coming in and she had left. When he heard the kitchen door close, he
called out, in a cowardly sort of way, 'Your mother's a whore and yet you love her.' Then he called out, 'What about me?' and was so ashamed of himself he lay on the sofa and wept.

Often, when he was finally about to go to sleep, he saw the optimistic set of De Vries's eyebrows hunching over immediate and easy ambitions. He had a horrible feeling that when he was dying, this man's face was what he would see. He'd have to make an effort to push him aside, to see behind him, further back, the happiest time of his life; his childhood, modest and rural, as bland and good as rice pudding, milk-fat and rain-fed. Days of comfort, meadows baking under a soft light, a mother warm and tender, ready with his clothes warm from the stand in front of the fire, the smell of cow shit, long walks and a father dead in the war. What boy could have asked for more? Her to protect him and he her.

If only his memory could rest easy, but no, it paced up and down, goose-stepping into the near-past, seizing at the photographic images of the holidays they had taken before he was ill. The four of them; André and he and the wives, in expensive white places with cheap black labour; the Maldives, Mauritius, holidays which had started when the children were at boarding school, about ten years before. Their second wind, supposedly. Annemieke, discovering sex again, but not with him, bartering for wood carvings as if she were bartering for life itself, triumphant over pennies, rubbing anti-cellulite lotions into her body with the door to the bathroom locked. He recalled too André's wife, Lucie, sat at dinner
table after dinner table with nothing to say, her eyes occasionally meeting his as they let the other two have their sway. Together, they conjugated the drinking. I drink. You drink. He, she and it drinks. We all drink. After the diagnosis, he stopped drinking for a while, when he was a believer in the medical establishment. They said his body needed to be given a chance. He was to find other ways to relax. He thought it would make him less bitter, but it made him worse, being both sober and resentful. It was the resentment he had to kick, not the drinking. This was why he couldn't sleep.

When he lay awake with all of this in his mind, he went back further to find better things. The children. Two boys, growing up with the purpose of becoming strong of mind and body but then suddenly a new regime adhered to, one prescribed by their friends. The speedy loss of moral weight. The loss of opinion or conviction. They both found cynicism an easy way out. A generation thing he was told. Sitting in their rooms with headphones on and feet up on the wall. Euphoric briefly when they returned with a new pair of sneakers from Brugge. Doors shut. To everything they said, 'I don't give a shit.' How can you argue with that? He couldn't. He was envious of them.

He had to hold firm, to go back further. As little kids they had thrilled him. Tired him out at weekends and after work and thrilled him. The euphoria of falling in love, daily. At times he came close to crying with thanks for the chance to look at the world through their eyes. Ben in the car, four years old or so, listing the reasons he was happy that day. Marcus, so mischievous, making Papa hide under the bed and Jan staying there unaware the boy was having his supper downstairs. Those boys, they could have been ... he didn't know what. He used to nod quick and hard at them when he said good night, to get out of the bedroom fast so as to avoid being run down by the feelings he had for them.

Before that there was Annemieke. But she became a prisoner of his faults, according to her. She was a professional hostage. She grew up in Antwerp after the war—with her mother's self-aggrandising stories, tales of the Jewish community being dragged away despite her noble efforts. Her mother told her that they themselves had some Jewish blood. It could have been them on the trains! She said it was a miracle they were alive. The father denied this. 'You exaggerate,' he said every time that Jan saw them together. His wife's earliest memories, she told him once, were of night-time stories that drifted into unwarranted confessions and secrets. (Her mother told her that she despised the father, that her life was over the day they got married.) 'What use is a life without love?' she had moaned. 'God forbid that you should suffer such a thing. Love is everything,' she had impressed upon her daughter.

Jan thought as little of the mother as she did of him. Sunday afternoon visits, once a month, were odious to him. The father spent the time in his greenhouses, leaving Annemieke, Jan and the children to listen to the mad old woman hold forth on the latest roundup of nonsense she had read the week before in
the newspapers and magazines that printed the bad news. The mother was the sort of person who read enough to be a menace. She had scientific terminology to excuse each one of her hatreds. Jan wished she'd knit instead. When the father was dead and buried, the old woman moved into a retirement complex up on the coast, just thirty kilometres away. It soon became every Sunday afternoon that the two women sat in the old woman's seaside apartment, the children drinking fizzy drinks, and discussed the 'emotional climate' of Annemieke's childhood home as if this was all that endured. Jan watched them from the balcony, overlooking the sea, where he went to smoke a cigar. He was a non-smoker at the time, but a cigar took time and he persuaded himself that this was some sort of compensation for the visit. With books and tapes passing between them every weekend, the mother supplied Annemieke's growing attachment to various self-help fads. Their ideas fed a nostalgia for an imagined brutality, they spoke of bruises and scars with conspiratorial smiles and sighs.