All That Man Is (42 page)

Non-foods is next, and he spends some time fussing with sponges and washing-up liquid.

The stuff in his trolley, the small quantities of everything – he has just taken a shrink-wrapped pack of two sausages from a fridge – suggest a man who is living alone.

And indeed he is here on his own.

He arrived last night at Bologna airport – the late Ryanair flight from Stansted. The taxi through the wintry darkness to the house. The house was cold. Entropic forces were gnawing at it. There were mouse droppings on the floor. Signs of damp, again, in the wall at the foot of the stairs. Still in his coat he sat down on the small sofa in the hall. He felt weak and frozen. His breath hung in the air in front of his mouth as he sat there, with the key still in his hand. He had to start the heating – to struggle with the oil-fired furnace. He had a small glass of grappa. He managed to start the heating.

It is nearly ten when he transfers his shopping from the trolley to his old VW Passat estate, and then wheels the noisily empty trolley back to the mass of others near the entrance. He asks himself whether there is anything else he needs to pick up in Argenta. Nothing much springs to mind, and he wonders, starting the car, whether to stop somewhere for a coffee. The Piazza Garibaldi. There are a few places there where it might be a pleasure to sit in the cold sunlight with a cappuccino and a newspaper for half an hour. He is undecided as he drives back along the canal. What decides it is the lack of parking space in the small piazza. He feels a faint pang of disappointment. It is not worth trying to find somewhere else to park, though, and soon he is out of Argenta again, among fields that stretch to the luminous winter horizon.

*

He thinks about death quite a lot now. It is hard not to think about it. Obviously, he doesn't have that much time left. Ten years? In ten years he will be eighty-three. More than that? Well, probably not. So about ten years. Seen in one way, that is frighteningly little. It is terrible, how little it seems, sometimes. Waking at five a.m. on a December morning, for instance, in the large damp bedroom of the house near Argenta, the turquoise walls still hidden in darkness. The quiet ticking of the clock on the table next to the bed. It is terrible how little it seems. And since the operation two months ago he has understood that even ten years might be optimistic. He has had, since the operation, this strange permanent awareness of his heart and what it is doing, and this fear that it will suddenly stop doing it. He lies there, unpleasantly aware of its working, and of the fact that one day it
will
stop. He feels no more prepared to face death, though, than he ever has.

It is starting to get light in the large turquoise bedroom.

He has been lying there, awake, for two hours, thinking.

It still seems incredible to him that he is actually going to die. That this is just going to stop. This. Him. It still seems like something that happens to other people – and of course friends and acquaintances are already falling. People he has known for decades. A fair few are dead already. He has attended their funerals. The numbers are starting to thin out. And still he finds it hard to understand – to properly
understand
– that he will die as well. That this experience is finite. That one day it will end. That ten years from now, quite probably, he just won't be here.

There is something very strange about trying to imagine the world without him. The strangeness, he thinks, still lying there, is to do with the fact that the only world he knows is the one he perceives himself – and
that
world
will
die with him. That world – that subjective experience of the world – which for him
is
the world – will not in fact outlast him. It is the ending of that stream of perception that seems so strange. So unimaginable. He is staring at the enormous walnut wardrobe that stands on the far wall of the room, and he is aware, in an unusual way, of that stream of perception, of perceiving things. Of the pleasure of perceiving things. Of seeing the light from the window pass through slits in the heavy drapes and in dust-filled shafts find the surface of the wardrobe, the deep, time-darkened varnish.

Of hearing footsteps on the gravel outside.

The footsteps are Claudia's. Claudia, the Romanian daily. His wife, Joanna, must have phoned from England and told her he was there.

‘
Buongiorno
, Claudia,' he says, appearing downstairs in his dressing gown and slippers.

He has lost weight, a lot of weight, since she last saw him in the early part of the summer. Then he looked over-inflated, with a high, unhealthy colour. He doesn't look
healthier
now, particularly. He seems shrunken, diminished. ‘
Buongiorno
, Signor Parson,' she says. She is preparing herself for work. They speak Italian to each other – Claudia knows no English. Her Italian isn't perfect either. It is worse than his. She arrived a few years ago, to join her son, who installs kitchens for IKEA in Bologna. ‘I am sorry,' she says. ‘I don't know you are here.'

‘Did Joanna call you?' he asks.

‘Signora Parson, yes. I am sorry,' she says again.

‘There's nothing to be sorry about,' he tells her. ‘Thank you for coming in. I'm sorry I didn't call you to let you know I was here.'

‘Is okay,' she says.

‘I'm not sure how long I'm going to be here,' he says. They are in the kitchen and he starts to make his coffee, spooning it into the machine. ‘Just a week or two, I think.'

It is unusual for someone to be here at this time, first week of December. Christmas, sometimes, they are here. Not so much any more. In the old days, quite often. When Simon was little, and Joanna's mother was still alive. In the old days. No Claudia then. An Italian lady, they used to have. And she had had to stop working. Some medical issue. What was her name? They stayed in touch for a while. Did they visit her in hospital in Ferrara or somewhere? He might have a memory of that, or he might be mixing it up with something else. Anyway, he has no idea what's happened to her now. All these people you know in a lifetime. What happens to them all?

He is pouring some muesli into a huge mug, pouring skimmed milk over it. The skimmed milk still seems more like water than milk to him.

Claudia is asking what she should start with.

‘Maybe upstairs?' he suggests, wanting to be left in peace in the kitchen for a while.

He sits at the table, eating muesli, hearing her heavy feet making the old steps squeak as she marches upstairs with her things.

How old is she? he wonders. Not young. Her son must be thirty. A handsome man. He has met him a few times – he picks her up, occasionally, in his IKEA van.

When he has finished his muesli, he settles in the wing chair in the sitting room – an old one, in need of restuffing – tapping at his iPad. It was a present from Cordelia, while he was in hospital after the heart op. He has always been a technophile, what is now known as an ‘early adopter' – he was the first among his friends, in about 1979, to own a video, a VHS player. He learned how to use the iPad in a day or two.

He taps at it.

Tap.

Tap.

Emails. Not many. Not as many as there used to be. He has had to stop doing most of the things he used to do – his post-retirement portfolio of interests. Down to nothing now, nearly. There is an email from Cordelia, which always pleases him. She talks about this and that. Asks how he is feeling. She says that Simon – her son, his grandson – has had a poem published in some magazine. Just a university magazine probably, though she doesn't say so – she wants to make it sound as impressive as possible. Simon is in his first year at Oxford. She has attached the poem to the email and he looks at it while Claudia stomps about overhead, making the little glass pieces of the chandelier tinkle. (The chandelier was there when they bought the house – very valuable, they were assured.) The poem seems to be inspired by the famous miniature of Sultan Mehmet II in which he is shown smelling a flower.

Not terrible, he thinks. Some nice phrases.
The engrossing necessities of money and war
. Yes, that was nice. (He still misses them, after nearly ten years, those engrossing necessities, waiting for him at the end of the Tube journey to Whitehall, still feels that without them he is not properly
living
.) Yes, it was a nice way of putting it. And then there was … Where was it? Yes –

The words had made him think of the way he spent a minute or two, earlier that morning, staring at the wardrobe upstairs. The sense he had had then of losing himself in the act of perception. A moment's immersion in the texture of existence – the
texture
of it. Yes. Well done, Simon. He will write him an email, he thinks. He will praise the poem – not too much, just enough to encourage him, and with qualifications. Cordelia has a tendency to praise her son unqualifiedly, which isn't healthy. Simon is, it has to be said, just a little odd. He was there, in Argenta, that spring, with a friend. They were travelling around Europe and had stayed for a day or two. The friend – what was his name? – had been a lively fellow. Fun to have about the place. Simon, as usual, solemn and withdrawn. Less so towards the end. They had had some nice talks, the three of them, about serious subjects – literature, history, the state of Europe.

Claudia is at the door.

She wants to know if it's okay to start on the kitchen.

When she has left, he showers and dresses, and makes himself lunch. He sets a place at the table in the kitchen – the dining room seems too formal a setting in which to eat a two-egg omelette, alone. He wonders whether to have a glass of wine with his omelette and salad. In the end he has two, which means he will not be able to drive anywhere for a few hours. He had thought he might drive somewhere. To the Valli di Argenta, perhaps, and walk there for half an hour – he is supposed to walk a few miles a day, and today the weather is dry and mild.

The afternoon seems to stretch out interminably in front of him. He tidies up a few drawers that haven't been attended to for years – loses himself for a while in looking at old opera tickets and tourist maps and invoices for things he has long forgotten paying for. He sits at the piano and tries to play – it is terribly out of tune, and his fingers also soon start to hurt. They won't do what he tells them to do. He keeps making mistakes and stops in frustration. He still feels strangely depressed about the trip to Ravenna yesterday. He went to Ravenna yesterday – just on a whim, he had nothing else to do – and got into difficulties with the traffic. He got lost and flustered, and ended up driving the wrong way down a narrow one-way street. He didn't know what he had done until he met a van halfway down, its lights flashing irritably, and without space to do anything else, he had to reverse out the way he had arrived, looking over his shoulder, squinting with stress and an increasing sense of isolation. The street was straight; it shouldn't have been a problem. Somehow, though, he kept losing the line. He kept having to stop and start again. He was holding the wheel tightly as if it was something preventing him from drowning. The driver of the van was shouting inaudibly like someone in a silent film.

He thinks of the faces of the people on the pavement, witnessing the scene, laughing, pointing to show him his mistake, smiling at him. Not unsympathetically, some of them. In a way that just made it worse. It was obvious from their expressions that what they were seeing was something pitiful – an old man, out of his depth, making a mess of things.

That was what their faces said they were seeing.

And it was a shock.

That wasn't how he thought of himself at all.

Afterwards, when he had finally found somewhere to park, he walked the streets for a while, feeling absurdly shaken, and found himself, eventually, outside Sant' Apollinare Nuovo.

It was hardly warmer inside than it was outside.

There were a few people there, not many, milling about, looking at the mosaics, those echoes of Byzantium. He himself had seen them many times – the long frontal lines of white-toga'd figures, white on gold. He has never been a Christian. Of course he was brought up in the vaguely or vestigially Christian setting of England in the 1940s and '50s, but even in his earliest years he had not believed in God, in Jesus, or any of that. They had always been just words to him. Just stories, like other stories. That was not particularly unusual, he thought, for someone of his generation. He stood there, looking up at the impassive, pink-cheeked faces. In lines like a school photo. And then that extraordinary image, at the end, of the curtains opening, as if to show us something – only there's nothing there, just a flat gold space, a surprising area of plain golden tiles. A pigeon had got in and was fluttering about up there.

He stayed for a few more minutes and then went out and looked at the outside of the basilica. The campanile, standing against the grey sky. He knew the history, sort of. Theoderic the Ostrogoth etc. Murdered his predecessor with his own hands – invited him for dinner apparently and personally murdered him. They were fighting over Italy. The Western Empire was falling apart.