Terroir (12 page)

Stella was flying out to spend a few days at the flat with him. So she'd be here for his birthday on the twelfth. Which promised to be less than glorious. He'd better do what he wanted to whilst there was still some vacation to do it in. After all, Stella couldn't help telling him what to do. It was just her way. Like her abrupt laugh, her tangle of auburn hair with its threads of grey, her stout calves and her addiction to Scholl sandals with wooden soles that made her feet look like hooves. She'd never had much use for gratuitous physical exercise and she'd think he was mad, climbing up to the monastery in this heat, in his
condition
. Maybe he was mad. Not bad and dangerous. Just a little
deracinated
. A good word for it.

He'd already been in the village for a few days and got pretty well acclimatised. Each morning he started with a swim in one of the rocky bays around the headland, bobbing out towards the opposite side of the bay and back again. He wasn't a great swimmer, but he loved the astringency of early morning water when a faint mist rose from the calm. Just as the first fishing boats were putting out to sea, before the beaches filled up with scuba divers and tourists. Yesterday a stocky young woman had stripped naked in front of him before pulling on her bikini bottom and lolloping into the sea clutching her breasts. It made him feel old. Wasn't he supposed to look for God's sake? She spent the next twenty minutes pretending to shriek at the cold for her husband's benefit. He was one of those Spanish guys with thick legs, soft brown eyes, a mat of chest hair and a broad, dark jaw. He was fond of her, his idiot wife, and didn't seem the slightest bit put out when she dropped her skirt. Ralph had grabbed his beach things and the novel he'd been trying to read and headed back to a bar for a
cortado
. At times like that he missed Simon. How they'd have laughed, Simon mimicking her cries with cruel accuracy and mocking the he
-
man act.

They'd holidayed in the village every year for the past five. Six? Well, they'd missed last year for obvious reasons, when Ralph had been recovering from the op. So that didn't really count. He felt conspicuous being here alone. Not as conspicuous as at the university, though, which was just another village with its rivalry and gossip and intellectual bitchiness. If
intellectual
was the word. The village here stank of hot stone, cat shit and fish. The university stank of mendacity and ambition. Thank God for Stella with her dirty laugh and her dependable cynicism. Though she'd always managed to do OK, somehow. When the shit hit the fan she never seemed to get spattered.
Finesse
, darling,
finesse
, she'd say to that, showing her wicked back
-
slanting teeth, lighting another cigarette, blowing out phantoms of smoke.

Ralph paused to pull the damp shirt from his back. The path he was walking led to a ruined monastery on the hilltop opposite the town. Each year the builders renewed a tower, patched a wall or fitted windows to the stone slits. There was a museum now and a café. The route started from the neighbouring village, which lay about a mile along the road, past thickets of bamboo that grew in a lagoon of fresh water where a stream met the sea. Then past olive groves and new holiday villas with swimming pools. Then into the twisting cobbled streets of the old village that went up past a tiny chapel and cemetery and eventually became a rocky path. He'd thought about the little cemetery when in hospital. That was the worst time. After the angiogram and the bad news, but before the tests had shown he was
viable
. A lousy word. It had reminded him of university management
-
speak. Undergraduate courses and avenues of research were viable, not people.

Years ago the same village streets had practically flowed with wine. You could still see the oak barrels rotting from their hoops in dark cellars. On their first visit he and Simon had drunk a local vintage in a restaurant that overlooked the village square. It came unlabelled, amber
-
coloured and dry with a hint of sherry, unlike anything in the supermarket and shops. But the terraced hillsides were going back to nature now. There were just a few acres of new vines at low level. Phyloxera had done for them, then war. Then tourism had offered an easier life: jobs on the checkout in the Bonpreau, waiting on in restaurants or behind the bar in the new discotheque deep in the thicket of bamboo that grew near the beach. They'd danced there once, chest
-
deep in pounding bass lines, half
-
blinded by sweat and strobe lights. A Spanish girl with huge dark eyes and short hair cut like a boy's had danced close to them and danced away, then moved inside again, sharing the frisson that ran between them.

The path led past the cemetery where the faces of the dead stared from ceramic plaques on the headstones. Then alongside an electricity sub
-
station that hummed like a wasp's nest in the heat. A line of pylons traversed the hill ridge to his left, but the path veered right, crossing a dry stream
-
bed, entering a grove of dwarf trees that somehow survived by sucking moisture from the friable soil and rock. Higher up, the old vine terraces spiralled, their drystone walls falling away in landslides of dust and rubble. The strata had been warped by volcanic heat and twisted from the earth, leaving awkward ridges and loose rock. It took about an hour and a half to reach the monastery by this route and there was hardly any respite from the climb. The path went up, up, up, zigzagging through the woods, following the terraces with only a few yards of level walking between here and the summit.

In hospital he'd thought about doing this walk again. He'd thought about it through the long nights of pain and hallucination, when he could hardly get out of bed to go to the toilet. He'd thought about it when he came round from the anaesthetic and the pain in his chest was deep, like fear itself. Something you lived at the edge of, each breath taking you closer in. The pain was held back by morphine. But only just. He had a nine
-
inch scar down his chest, still livid through his short
-
sleeved shirt which was unbuttoned as far as he dared.

He'd thought about this walk when Simon was leaving and when he had, finally, left. Then sleeping alone, breakfasting alone or with Stella – which was almost the same thing since she always had a book on the go. Sometimes when driving to work or when he chatted to colleagues by the photocopier. Colleagues who asked him how he was. How he was
doing
. All that time, the mountain drew him. Like a pilgrimage, a vision, a penance. Something he had to prove to himself by going back to … well, maybe. He heard a grasshopper call from the dry plumed grass. It landed on the path in front of him, armoured in dusty green, its wings folded, its head a mask of otherness. Ralph stepped over it, scaring a slim lizard with a long tail and delicate stripes that sprang away then pretended to be a twig.

Things had been going wrong for a long time before he was ill. Rows, silences, a mutual sarcasm. At least Simon had had the decency to hang on for a few weeks, to make sure he was OK. Then he'd moved in with his secret lover. That rising star of Sociology, Paul Kretzinski. Twenty years younger, already a Professor. A Californian boy with a chromed motorcycle, floppy dark hair and a predatory innocence. In twenty years at the university Ralph had never made it past Senior Lecturer. He'd tried for a Readership twice but those bastards on the Faculty promotions panel had passed him over. Twice. He didn't have the guts or the heart to go for it again. Fuck it. Fuck them.
Fucked over
. That's what he'd said when he was still high on morphine, with Stella and Simon sitting anxiously beside the bed, when he'd looked down his tee shirt. Not that he remembered any of that. It had started there, the myth of his indomitable spirit. It was all bullshit. He'd felt more like Orpheus, so close to death, to the myth that would become of him.

Ralph filled his water bottle at the fountain in the village, then walked up through the last houses to the church. The oak door was locked and the rattle of the catch echoed inside. In the whitewashed porch the statue of Jesus with his crown of thorns was tilting on its pedestal. Someone had touched up his mouth with lipstick. The cemetery had a wire fence like a municipal tennis court. There was no shelter in it. Not for the living. No yew trees to offer shade like an English churchyard. Just tightly packed headstones, most bearing a ceramic disk with a photograph of the deceased. He stood by a grave where a man and wife were still dressed in the stiff clothes of the eighteen
-
nineties: dark cloth and winged collars and a starched white bodice. Their plump pasty faces were still alive back then, staring into the future they could never know, remnants of another age. Ralph thought of all the history that was absent from their minds. There seemed so much less to know back then, or maybe history simply seeped away into the soil.

He thought of the couple making love, their bodies still warm and moist, alive with veins and glands and pumping organs. He thought of their children fed into the new century like so much unsuspecting meat. Then he thought of the blond hairs on Simon's neck, the curve of his chest, his shoulders, the way his buttocks met his upper thighs in a crease of smooth skin. The way he tanned so easily. His slightly crooked teeth bared in a grin. The turquoise
-
blue eyes that became paler as his skin darkened. And his smell, indescribably intimate and sweet, its salty tang rising after squash or tennis.

That was all too easy to imagine. Ralph stooped to tie his bootlaces, feeling that crease of pain down his chest. A reminder. A reprimand. There were still little areas without feeling where nerves had been severed. He pressed a finger to his wrist and felt the rapid pulse of his heart, blood spurting across bone. When he'd first got home his heart had beaten so hard it shook the bed and his breath had come fast and shallow. After ten days he'd made love with Simon. In retrospect that was probably some kind of betrayal on Simon's part. Taking pity. It had been gentle and loving and he'd felt healed. Blood had seeped out afterwards, where the catheter had hurt him inside.

He'd wanted to cry then. For the first time he felt sorry for himself, for his helplessness, for not being able to put on his own slippers or dress himself. It was only when he went back for a check
-
up that the consultant showed him an x
-
ray of his collapsed lung. No one had told him and it explained a lot. He'd lain awake hallucinating from the painkillers, watching smoke billow across the bedroom ceiling, trying to catch his breath, watching Simon being caring, Stella matter
-
of
-
fact. She never minded the bodily stuff; it just had to be done. But Simon made too much of a show of it. He moved in for the first three weeks or so, then went back to his own flat when Ralph could manage things better. The worst things had been trivial: chronic constipation; seeing how thin his legs were; the support stockings that constantly fell down. Mere indignities, maybe, but they reduced him. Whereas the pain was dependable. There was dignity in pain, in withstanding it. Stella must have known that Simon was seeing someone. Ralph could understand why she hadn't told him. Just about. It rankled. Hurt even, but life was too short to fall out with Stella.

Ralph crossed a band of exposed rock, clambering upwards. He took a swig of water, putting the bottle back in his shoulder bag. He'd bought it as a camera bag years ago. Now it was in style as a fashion accessory. Not that he gave a shit about style any more. A partridge emerged from the undergrowth to watch him, then flew off in alarm as he moved. His leather watchstrap was dark with sweat. The scar on his left leg felt tight where they'd stripped out the vein to repair his blocked coronary vessels. At least, that was the theory. Even when he went in for the angiogram he had a secret feeling that it would all be shown up as a mistake, or at the worst they'd fit a stent. Such stupid, self
-
serving vanity. Odd that he wasn't at all vain about his appearance but he was about his health. He'd lain there during the procedure with the catheter bumping inside his chest, feeling the hot flush of dye, hanging on as the x
-
rays were taken. It was the weirdest feeling, impossible to describe. Not painful exactly, more like an apple core bobbing inside him, but bad enough. And he was helpless. He'd lost control. He should have known then that it was serious. The doctor had shaken his head.

– I'm sorry, there's nothing we can do for you. You're going to need surgery.

– Surgery?

The knife. As simple as that.
Fuck
.

– A bypass. One artery is ninety percent blocked.

There'd been nothing to say to that. The doctor smiled and touched his arm.

– Don't worry, you'll be playing cricket again next year.

He was Indian, dapper and dark
-
skinned, his hand cool on Ralph's arm. Ralph thought of his grandmother, the silver bangles her father had made and that
his
mother had kept in her chest of drawers. Surgery. So that was it – the thing he had to face – and for the first time in his life. He'd never even been in hospital before.