Where There's Smoke (7 page)

‘Before you tell me your answer to the question, Mother, shall I tell you mine? Because I think I know what you are going to say. You are going to say that beauty has done you no good that you can see, that one of these days you are going to find yourself at heaven's gate with your hands empty and a big question mark over your head. It would be entirely in character for you, that is to say for Elizabeth Costello, to say so. And to believe so.

‘The answer you will not give – because it would be out of character for Elizabeth Costello – is that what you have produced as a writer not only has a beauty of its own – a limited beauty, granted, it is not poetry, but beauty nevertheless, shapeliness, clarity, economy – but has also changed the lives of others, made them better human beings, or slightly better human beings. It is not just I who say so. Other people say so too, strangers. To me, to my face. Not because what you write contains lessons but because it
is
a lesson.'

‘Like the water skater, you mean.'

‘I don't know who the water skater is.'

‘The water skater or long-legged fly. An insect. The water skater thinks it is just hunting for food, whereas in fact its movements trace on the surface of the pond, over and over, the most beautiful of all words, the name of God. The movements of the pen on the page trace the name of God, as you, watching from a remove, can see but I cannot.'

‘Yes, if you like. But more than that. You teach people how to feel. By dint of grace. The grace of the pen as it follows the movements of thought.'

It sounds to her rather old-fashioned, this aesthetic theory that her daughter is expounding, rather Aristotelian. Has Helen worked it out by herself or just read it somewhere? And how does it apply to the art of painting? If the rhythm of the pen is the rhythm of thought, what is the rhythm of the brush? And what of paintings made with a spray-can? How do such paintings teach us to be better people?

She sighs. ‘It is sweet of you to say so, Helen, sweet of you to reassure me. Not a life wasted after all. Of course I am not convinced. As you say, if I could be convinced I would not be myself. But that is no consolation. I am not in a happy mood, as you can see. In my present mood, the life I have followed looks misconceived from beginning to end, and not in a particularly interesting way either. If one truly wants to be a better person, it now seems to me, there must be less roundabout ways of getting there than by darkening thousands of pages with prose.'

‘Ways such as?'

‘Helen, this is not an interesting conversation. Gloomy states of mind do not yield interesting thoughts, at least not in my experience.'

‘Must we not talk then?'

‘Yes, let us not talk. Let us do something really old-fashioned instead. Let us sit here quietly and listen to the cuckoo.'

For there is indeed a cuckoo calling, from the copse behind the restaurant. If they open the window just a crack the sound comes quite clearly on the wind: a two-note motif, high-low, repeated time after time.
Redolent
, she thinks – Keatsian word – redolent of summertime and summer ease. A nasty bird, but what a singer, what a priest!
Cucu
, the name of God in cuckoo tongue. A world of symbols.

*

They are doing something they have not done together since the children were children. Sitting on the balcony of Helen's apartment in the suave warmth of the Mediterranean night, they are playing cards. They play three-handed bridge, they play the game they used to call Sevens, called in France Rami, according to Helen/Hélène.

The idea of an evening of cards is Helen's. It seemed an odd idea at first, artificial; but once they are into the swing of it she is pleased. How intuitive of Helen: she would not have suspected Helen of intuitiveness.

What strikes her now is how easily they slip into the card-playing personalities of thirty years ago, personalities she would have thought they had shed forever once they escaped from one another: Helen reckless and scatty, John a trifle dour, a trifle predictable, and herself surprisingly competitive, considering that these are her own flesh and blood, considering that the pelican will tear open its breast to feed its young. If they were playing for stakes, she would be sweeping in their money by the veritable armful. What does that say about her? What does it say about all of them? Does it say that character is immutable, intractable; or does it merely say that families, happy families, are held together by a repertoire of games played from behind masks?

‘It would seem that my powers have not waned,' she remarks after yet another win. ‘Forgive me. How embarrassing.' Which is a lie, of course. She is not embarrassed, not at all. She is triumphant. ‘Curious which powers one retains over the years and which one begins to lose.'

The power she retains, the power she is exercising at this moment, is one of visualisation. Without the slightest mental effort she can see the cards in her children's hands, each single one. She can see into their hands; she can see into their hearts.

‘Which powers do you feel you are losing, Mother?' asks her son cautiously.

‘I am losing,' she says gaily, ‘the power of desire.' In for a penny, in for a pound.

‘I would not have said desire had power,' responds John gamely, picking up the baton. ‘Intensity perhaps. Voltage. But not power, horsepower. Desire may make you want to climb a mountain but it won't get you to the top.'

‘What will get you to the top?'

‘Energy. Fuel. What you have stored up in preparation.'

‘Energy. Do you want to know my theory of energy, the energetics of an old person? Don't get anxious, nothing personal in it to embarrass you, and no metaphysics either, not a drop. As material a theory as can be. Here it is. As we age, every part of the body deteriorates or suffers entropy, down to the very cells. That what ageing means, from a material point of view. Even in cases when they are still healthy, old cells are touched with the colours of autumn (a metaphor, I concede, but a dash of metaphor here and there does not add up to metaphysics). This goes for the many, many cells of the brain too.

‘Just as spring is the season that looks forward to summer, so autumn is the season that looks back. The desires conceived by autumnal brain cells are autumnal desires, nostalgic, layered in memory. They no longer have the heat of summer; what intensity they have is multivalent, complex, turned more toward the past than toward the future.

‘There, that is the core of it, my contribution to brain science. What do you think?'

‘A contribution, I would say,' says her diplomatic son, ‘less to brain science than to philosophy of mind, to the speculative branch of that philosophy. Why not just say that you feel in an autumnal mood and leave it at that?'

‘Because if it were just a mood it would change, as moods do. The sun would come out, my mood would grow sunnier. But there are states of the soul deeper than moods.
Nostalgie de la boue
, for instance, is not a mood but a state of being. The question I ask is, Does the
nostalgie
in
nostalgie de la boue
belong to the mind or to the brain? My answer is, The brain. The brain whose origin lies not in the realm of forms but in dirt, in mud, in the primal slime to which, as it runs down, it longs to return. A material longing emanating from the very cells themselves. A death drive deeper than thought.'

It sounds fine, it sounds like exactly what it is, chatter, it does not sound mad at all. But that is not what she is thinking. What she is thinking is:
Who speaks like this to her children, children she may not see again?
What she is also thinking is:
Just the kind of thought that would come to a woman in her autumn. Everything I see, everything I say, is touched with the backward look. What is left for me? I am the one who cries
.

‘Is that what you are occupying yourself with nowadays – brain science?' says Helen. ‘Is that what you are writing about?'

Strange question; intrusive. Helen never talks to her about her work. Not exactly a taboo subject between them, but off bounds certainly.

‘No,' she says. ‘I still confine myself to fiction, you will be relieved to hear. I have not yet descended to hawking my opinions around.
The Opinions of Elizabeth Costello
, revised edition.'

‘A new novel?'

‘Not a novel. Stories. Do you want to hear one of them?'

‘Yes, I do. It is a long while since you last told us a story.'

‘Very well, a bedtime story. Once upon a time, but our times, not olden times, there is a man, and he travels to a strange city for a job interview. From his hotel room, feeling restless, feeling in the mood for adventure, feeling who knows what, he telephones for a call girl. A girl arrives and spends time with him. He is free with her as he is not free with his wife; he makes certain demands on her.

‘The interview next day goes well. He is offered the job and accepts and in due course, in the story, moves to this city. Among the people in his new office, working as a secretary or a clerk or a telephonist, he recognises the same girl, the call girl, and she recognises him.'

‘And?'

‘And I cannot tell you more.'

‘But that is not a story, that it is just the groundwork for a story. You have not told a story until you say what happens next.'

‘She does not have to be a secretary. The man is offered the job and accepts and moves to this new city and in due course pays a visit to relatives, to a cousin he has not seen since they were children, or a cousin of his wife's. The cousin's daughter walks into the room, and behold, it is the girl from the hotel.'

‘Go on. What happens next?'

‘It depends. Perhaps nothing more happens. Perhaps it is the kind of story that just stops.'

‘Nonsense. It depends on what?'

Now John speaks. ‘It depends on what passed between them in the hotel room. Depends on the demands you say he made. Do you spell out, Mother, what demands he made?'

‘Yes, I do.'

Now they are silent, all of them. What the man with the new job will do, or what the girl with the sideline in prostitution will do, recedes into insignificance. The real story is out on the balcony, where two middle-aged children face a mother whose capacity to disturb and dismay them is not yet exhausted.
I am the one who cries.

‘Are you going to tell us what those demands were?' asks Helen grimly, since there is nothing else to ask.

It is late but not too late. They are not children, none of them. For good or ill they are all together now in the same leaky boat called life, adrift without saving illusions in a sea of indifferent darkness (what metaphors she comes up with tonight!). Can they learn to live together without eating one another?

‘Demands a man can make upon a woman that I would find shocking. But perhaps you would not find them shocking, coming from a different generation. Perhaps the world has sailed on in that respect and left me behind on the shore, deploring. Perhaps that is what turns out to be the nub of the story: that while the man, the senior man, blushes when he faces the girl, to the girl what happened in the hotel room is just part of her trade, part of the way things are, part of life. “Mr Jones … Uncle Harry … How do you do?”‘

The two children who are not children anymore exchange glances.
Is that all?
they seem to be saying.
Not much of a story
.

‘The girl in the story is very beautiful,' she says. ‘A veritable flower. I can reveal that to you. Mr Jones, Uncle Harry, has never involved himself in something like this before, the humiliating of beauty, the bringing down of it. That was not his plan when he made the telephone call. He would not have guessed he had it in him. It became his plan only when the girl herself appeared and he saw she was, as I say, a flower. It seemed an affront to him that all his life he should have missed it, beauty, and would probably miss it from here onward too.
A universe without justice!
he would have cried inwardly, and proceeded from there in his bitter way. Not a nice man, on the whole.'

‘I thought, Mother,' says Helen, ‘that you had doubts about beauty, about its importance. A sideshow, you called it.'

‘Did I?'

‘More or less.'

John reaches out and lays a hand on his sister's arm. ‘The man in the story,' he says, ‘Uncle Harry, Mr Jones – he still believes in beauty. He is under its spell. That is why he hates it and fights against it.'

‘Is that what you mean, Mother?' says Helen.

‘I don't know what I mean. The story is not written yet. Usually I resist the temptation to talk about stories before they are fully out of the bottle. Now I know why.' Though the night is warm, she shivers lightly. ‘I get too much interference.'

‘The bottle,' says Helen.

‘Never mind.'

‘This is not interference,' says Helen. ‘From other people it might be interference. But we are with you. Surely you know that.'

With you?
What nonsense. Children are against their parents, not with them. But this is a special evening in a special week. Very likely they will not come together again, all three of them, not in this life. Perhaps, this once, they should rise above themselves. Perhaps her daughter's words come from the heart, the true heart, not the false one.
We are with you.
And her own impulse to embrace those words – perhaps it comes from the true heart too.

‘Then tell me what to say next,' she says.

‘Embrace her,' says Helen. ‘In front of the whole family let him take the girl in his arms and embrace her. No matter how odd it looks. “Forgive me for what I put you through,” let him say. Have him go down on his knees before her. “In you let me worship again the beauty of the world.” Or words to that effect.'

‘Very Irish Twilight,' she murmurs. ‘Very Dostoevskian. I am not sure I have it in my repertoire.'