The Night Stages (27 page)

How lonely it had all been, she thinks now, this inexplicable attachment based on little encouragement from the object of her loyalty, and next to no information about how he himself might have explained his own entry into her arms. Yes, practically everything about his need for her, if that’s what it was, was left up to wild conjecture, or to a state of dismal rumination in which she interpreted him over and over. She had developed narrative after narrative during the time when they were not together, which was, she had to admit, most of the time. Even his character underwent transformative scrutiny: he was a philanderer, he was distancing himself from the passion he had for his wife, he knew about the bolter in her, Tam, and the athlete in him was challenged by the game of
making her want to stay. He was using her to put his marriage at risk so that he himself would value this marriage more and want to remain in it. He was weak; not strong enough to take the action necessary to achieve what he really wanted, which was her. Yes, on occasion, she had been vain enough to believe he was in love with her, though her own suspicions in the face of all the alternative explanations she invented frequently overrode that belief. He was too Irish to leave his marriage. He was too Irish to remain faithful in his marriage. She was an escape for him, a pleasant recreational activity, one he was unlikely to have to take responsibility for.

Still, the way he had, almost seamlessly, entered her life, bringing the bicycle right inside her door that next weekend so that no one would know where he was, the vulnerability of his expression, and his voice saying the word
please
when he reached for her, the fact that she had known he would return, had shaken her in a way that nothing had in the past. Everyone she had ever been had been available to him; the small girl under the stairs, the young woman in the cockpit with Orion above the propeller, the woman with one sugar bowl rescued from rubble in her hands, the unhappy wife, the reasonable and in truth vaguely happy partner of the innocent Teddy. And then there was the woman she became when Niall himself had begun to come to her door, a woman no longer fully young, no longer a prey to expectations, and then suddenly filled with a crippling sort of passion combined with an uneasy, ceaseless longing. Nothing in her wanted to withdraw as she had always wanted to withdraw. Some other self
was born, one she did not fully approve of but was powerless to keep at bay. She wanted him. She wanted much more of him. He took her breath away.

Yes, he had taken her breath away until all the selves she delivered into his embrace had in the end greyed, disintegrated, and become unreachable. In no time at all her world had narrowed to such an extent that everything in her small house was associated only with him; the table where he had taken a brief meal with her, the bed where they had lain together, the floorboards that had felt his step, the now dreadful telephone.

She would force herself to stop waiting. She had had a belly full of it: that, and the awful realization that if she stopped waiting she would be accepting the full knowledge of abandonment. Because not for one moment did she believe that in spite of her sudden departure from Ireland, it was he, not she, who had been abandoned.

In the shadowy areas of the mural there were small, muted figures of indeterminate sex, ones who seemed bewildered by their own lack of importance. They were darkened by foliage or dwarfed by large central characters bent on forward momentum, change and achievement. And yet, it was one of these lesser beings, on the far right, who was the only player in the scene examining the sky, engaged, it seemed to her, in the science of prediction. Like Niall, she decided. Always awake to the circumstances of weather, perhaps wisely knowing that no one could control anything, really. He had no expectations in that regard, no sense that things might be managed differently.

“This could be so destructive,” he had told her more than once. “And I’ve already caused too much damage.”

That photograph of a grinning boy astride a bicycle. That darkened profile of the woman in the Vauxhall.

What time was it there exactly? she wonders, shifting her gaze from one international clock to another. Two a.m., she sees, noticing the time in London. He would be sleeping, sleeping it off, whatever it was. She wishes it were morning there instead, because she always knew, without being told, that the beginning of the day was when he thought of her. He would open his eyes and she would fall into his mind. She was sure of this. Later, events that had nothing to do with her would demand his attention and cancel her out. How childish she had been, wanting him to think of her. How ridiculous and painful.

Why had she clung to something that was both so tormenting and so unchangeable when any other woman, even the women she had been in the past, would have ended it years ago and gotten on with life? She was, she had been, an adapter: there was never a situation so surprising or demanding that she couldn’t adjust to it in an even-minded way. She had, after all, flown forty-seven different kinds of aircraft during the war, as she had constantly reminded him. There was always a first time and, now and then, an only time. She recalls standing in the grass looking up at a twin-engine Hudson towering above her, monstrous really, like a large grey whale eager to return to an ocean of air. She had never
even been near anything of this size, and yet the confidence was so deep in her then, the question of whether or not she could pilot it never entered her mind. She had been filled, instead, with a pure delight in the face of an overwhelming and new piece of machinery. In the cockpit she had opened the instruction manual and read a few pages. Then she had fired up the engine and taken off, sitting on her parachute in order to have a better view through the windscreen. The next day there would have been a Bristol Blenheim or an Avro Anson. Sometimes Spits or Hurricanes. She remembers flying as if in formation on one occasion, moving together like the migrating birds she sees now in the painting, toward a common destination. But there is no information on this wall about where the destination was, what it looked like. How could she, one of those previously forceful birds, find herself so essentially adrift?

ONCE, IN THE MIDST OF HIS TRAVELS, KENNETH
found himself in an Italian border town, which, like Koblenz, sat at the site of the confluence of two rivers, but unlike Koblenz was positioned at the centre of the seven surrounding valleys that flung themselves out from the centre of town as if they were the wings of an enormous pinwheel. The train that Kenneth travelled on had plunged into these valleys and eventually straight through the heart of one of the mountains that stood on either side of them, taking him to a place he had not intended to visit.

Boarding a train in Switzerland, he had asked in French for a ticket to Siena. Either because of his lack of skill with the language or perhaps because of the ticket clerk’s wandering attention, his fare, he discovered, once he had taken a seat, would take him only as far as an Italian border town at the end of a long tunnel. He had been bewildered by the tunnel, and began almost immediately to feel claustrophobic. The rough blackened rock that hurtled by, the faintly lit acid yellow of the interior lights of the carriage, had him thinking that this might be how a passage to the underworld would unfold – without warning, fed by speed and noise, and disturbingly man-made.

After that clanking half-hour in the company of moist, hard darkness, the industrial town where the porter insisted he disembark surprised him with such brisk vitality and piercing, slippery light that it was difficult to believe that, in spite of its obvious age, the place had been constructed with anything other than metal. Scissors and knives were evidently manufactured here, judging by the contents of the shop windows, along with an array of gleaming, sharp objects that could only have been surgical or dental in nature. There were windows filled with mirrors as well, which added to the glare, and shop fronts that displayed stainless-steel cooking utensils. One store he would always remember sold nothing but tongs (some suspiciously forceps-like) and what he eventually decided were clappers for a variety of bells. Eye glasses were also apparently a feature of the economy, and they filled the windows of several stores, standing row on row on their own delicate silvered frames, staring out like a flock of bewitched birds. The refracted luminosity of the various objects was such that Kenneth was blinded by after-images as he walked away and moved through the shining streets, as if these metal objects were flying before him, as if they were
all
birds of some sort.

A café in such surroundings was difficult to find, but eventually he came across what appeared to be a sort of ice-cream parlour, where the cacophony of spoons assaulting glass was like a badly organized symphony of xylophones. Still, he decided to sit for a while in order to get his bearings. He ordered a lemon sorbetto, and while he was sampling it, he became aware of the couple next to him. Quiet, and absorbed by each
other, they were speaking, when they spoke, in English. The girl talked more than the young man she was addressing, and looked with great intensity at her companion’s profile. He, for his part, remained, were it not for the anxiety that was evident in his posture, almost aloof, turning to her only briefly, in order to monosyllabically answer the questions she might have put to him. Kenneth could catch only the odd word but felt instinctively that the two had chosen this unlikely town as a destination where they could meet privately and unobserved.

The girl had long, straight reddish hair that fell over her forehead, and nervous hands, one of which moved toward the young man’s sleeve as she spoke. He kept looking anxiously toward the crowds passing on the street, as if expecting at any moment to glimpse a posse bent on pursuing him. After a few moments, the girl fell back in her seat and lowered her eyes. She did not look up when the waiter appeared with the bill, nor when, after paying, her companion rose to leave. The young man walked then to the other side of the table and placed his hand quite gently on her shoulder, and she stood and walked away with him.

A small, quite ordinary drama, but one that resonated with Kenneth, who had been more than once ill at ease when he was with a woman he was particularly drawn to. Sometimes the shyness he felt was so extreme he had found himself wanting to escape from a liaison he himself had gone to some lengths to arrange. He put a handful of coins on the table, and dived into the crowd, using the distant flame of the girl’s hair as a guide. He could not have said why he was following this couple, not
yet knowing that prurience was present in his character. When, a few blocks later, the couple disappeared into a small hotel called La Vetreria, Kenneth also entered the establishment and walked up to the front desk to ask for a room.

He did not see the couple again that day, but later the next afternoon, when he was out walking through the streets, he spotted them across the way. The electricity that had been such a part of the young man’s demeanour seemed now to have bled into the crowd. The streets were filled with other young men talking animatedly in groups, some of them carrying pennants, all of them walking quickly in the direction of the stadium walls that were visible above the shops of town. Kenneth gradually understood that some kind of significant game was about to take place.

He returned to the hotel and ate alone in the surprisingly empty dining room, climbing the stairs to his room after the three waiters went to gather around a small radio at the end of the hall. He could hear the semi-hysterical Italian sportscaster and the noise of the crowd as he climbed the stairs.

Past midnight he was awakened by the sound of cheering and the singing of songs and he rummaged for his binoculars in his bag. Then he walked to the window and watched the action in the streets. Men were embracing and gesturing, then bursting into song. He had never seen or heard such collective joy, and it moved him enough that he felt tears sting his eyes. Then his lens picked up one dark-haired man standing, apparently unnoticed by the throng, with a flag larger than himself, swinging the cloth from side to side over his head,
his whole body moving with the fabric. Kenneth decided that this was the young man from the café, though he couldn’t be sure. Was it that he wanted to be free of the tyranny of the relationship and had left his girl alone in their room? Kenneth did not question why he needed to believe this, but all night long he dreamt that he could hear the red-haired woman weeping, alone in a distant room, and that the sound of this was a long, smoke-coloured ribbon winding down the hall and slipping under his door.

The next morning he walked past the glittering shop windows to the train station – an imposing building built of stone – to buy a ticket to Siena and its feast of art. After he had paid his fare and scrutinized the ticket to ensure that the correct destination was printed on it, he turned, just in time to see the couple from the café walk through one of the arches of the entrance. They were heading for the Hall of Departures and he again followed them. The young man had a light blue canvas bag, likely belonging to the girl, slung over his shoulder, and when he paused to look at the boards on which the trains were listed, she once again reached for his sleeve. He swung toward her then, saying something sharp that caused her to withdraw. She walked behind him, head down, as they approached the quays.

On the platform the young man jerked his head in the direction of a particular coach, and after the girl had climbed the metal steps, he lifted the bag up to her. She smiled but his expression remained impassive. She spoke, but as far as Kenneth could tell the young man did not reply. He spun
around instead, as if impatient to be elsewhere, and began to move hurriedly away. It was pity that Kenneth felt for the girl then, and a sudden urge to console her.

But he returned to the Hall of Departures, bought a cappuccino at a kiosk, and sat down on a bench, wondering about the girl’s journey, whether it would take her through the same dank and raucous obscurity that had preceded his own arrival and whether, if this were so, she would be able to bear it, having been so coldly dismissed. He recalled girls he no longer walked with or, from this distance, wrote to, and felt suddenly ashamed. There could be a kind of cruelty about departure, he thought, but as he had recently learned, there could also be blindness and confusion connected to arrival. He put the paper cup on the floor beside him and looked across the room. On a bench near the wall sat the young man. He was leaning forward with his arms resting on his thighs and his hands gathered together in one tight fist in front of his knees. His expression was open, torn – almost desperate. It was as if, Kenneth thought, he was astonished by his own grief.