All That Man Is (46 page)

For a moment he had felt it, and it had helped.

*

Cordelia arrives at four o'clock, just as it is getting dark. She is forty-three now. It seems incredible. ‘Hello, Dad,' she says, when she has dismissed the taxi. He is waiting in the doorway, waiting to help her with her suitcase, which she does not let him do. In the sitting room they drink wine. He wishes now that he'd saved the fine Barbaresco to share with her. He tells her about the accident, what he can remember, that he was at Pomposa abbey. He thanks her, again, for coming to stay.

When he thanks her she just smiles, and stands up and looks at the books on the shelves. She is tall like her mother. ‘I'm reading Clark's
Sleepwalkers
,' he tells her, from the wing chair.

‘Oh, yeah? Interesting?'

‘Very,' he says.

‘Tell me about it.'

He tries to explain, what he understands of it – how Europe stumbled into this near-death experience – and then says, when it's obvious he isn't making much sense, ‘I haven't finished it, of course. I'm less than halfway through.'

‘M-hm.'

With donnish interest, he asks, ‘What are
you
reading?'

‘
Bring Up the Bodies
,' she says. ‘Finally.'

‘She's good on the politics,' he tells her, like someone who would know.

‘I'm enjoying it,' she says.

Then she starts to talk about something else: ‘How was it with Mum?'

The question is just perceptibly loaded.

‘Fine,' he says vaguely. And then, with more emphasis, ‘It was very sweet of her to come. She was supposed to be in New York or something.'

‘I know.'

Somehow too solemnly, he says, ‘And thank
you
, Cordelia, as well. I know how much you've got on …'

‘That's about the fourth time you've thanked me,' she says. She is smiling. ‘You can stop now. I feel fully thanked.'

‘Okay,' he laughs, as always hugely enjoying her manner.

He is somewhat in awe of her.

‘So it was fine with Mum?' she asks, pressing on with that.

Joanna must have spoken to her, he thinks, phoned her from the airport and told her something.

‘It was fine,' he says. And then again, trying not to sound so threatened, ‘It was fine.'

There is a short silence.

To end it, he asks after Simon. Says he read the poem she sent.

‘And?' she wants to know. ‘What did you think?'

‘I was impressed,' he says, and Cordelia looks pleased. That was his aim – to please her. He says, ‘He and his friend were out here in the spring, of course.'

‘Yes,' Cordelia says, ‘I know.'

‘What was his friend's name again?'

‘Ferdinand.'

‘That's it. A very entertaining young man.'

‘Yes.' The proposition seems to make her uneasy, slightly. ‘I suppose.'

‘I liked him.' He is sort of staring off into the middle distance when he says that. ‘We had some very nice talks,' he says, smiling at her.

‘You and Ferdinand?'

‘And Simon, of course.'

He asks, after a few moments, ‘Is, er,
Ferdinand
up at Oxford too?' There is something strange and deliberate, she thinks, about the way he says the name. And, actually, about the way he keeps talking about Ferdinand.

‘Yes, he is,' she says.

‘Same college? As Simon.'

‘No, I don't think so.'

‘Simon's at St John's, isn't he?'

‘That's right.'

‘Well,' he says, a little wistfully. ‘It was fun to have them here for a few days. What do you want to do for dinner?' he asks.

‘I thought we might go out.'

‘Now that's an idea. Where?'

‘That place in Argenta?'

He knows the place she means – they have been going there for years. ‘Sure. That'd be very nice. I'll phone them up. Reserve us a table.'

‘Do you want me to do it?'

‘No, I think I can manage,' he says.

The phone is on a sideboard. Next to it is a tatty little notebook full of handwritten numbers. He turns the pages until he finds what he is looking for. Then he picks up the phone and very slowly and deliberately punches the number into it. While he waits for them to answer, holding the phone to his ear, he inspects his slumped, jumpered image in the dark window.

*

Over the next few days, Cordelia takes things in hand. She gets a man in to look at the damp patch at the foot of the stairs. She finds and installs an ultrasonic device that is supposed to dissuade mice from establishing themselves in the house. She sets Claudia to work on specific tasks, which Claudia seems to appreciate. Within a few days the whole house seems more orderly and hygienic, more inhabited somehow.

Together they look on the Internet at second-hand cars for sale in the area. They find something that she seems to think would be suitable for him – a five-year-old Toyota RAV4, automatic. The next day they drive to Ferrara to have a look at it and she haggles the price down a thousand euros and they take it back to Argenta, she driving the insurance company's car and he driving his new Toyota. He finds it much easier to handle than the old Passat. And there is something about the way she makes it
all
seem so easy – on his own, he knows, he would have been terribly daunted by the task of sorting it all out. Somehow she makes it seem effortless. She makes the phone calls. She takes him through the Italian forms, telling him what to write and where to sign. She sorts out the insurance. Yes, he is slightly in awe of her. She has such vitality. She wins at Scrabble when they play, which they do once or twice on those winter evenings that start at four o'clock, when darkness falls outside, suddenly, taking you by surprise.

*

One afternoon Claudia's son shows up in his IKEA van, to take her home. He arrives early, while she is still working her way through a load of ironing, and waits in the van.

‘There's an IKEA van at the end of the driveway,' Cordelia says, having seen it from an upstairs window. ‘Have you ordered something?'

‘No,' he tells her. ‘That's Claudia's son. He works for them. He's waiting for her.'

‘Shouldn't we ask him in?'

‘We could. I suppose.'

From the window he watches her tap on the window of the van and say something to the Romanian, who then leaves the van, and follows her back to the house.

He hears her speaking to him in her fluent if English-accented Italian as she leads him into the kitchen.

After a while he joins them and says hello. He only stays for a minute, hovering awkwardly. Then he is back in the wing chair with
The Sleepwalkers
, though less able to absorb its ideas than ever.

When Claudia and her son have left, Cordelia finds him there, and they talk about them, the two Romanians. Very nice people, they decide.

‘He's very good-looking,' Cordelia says.

Her father nods, apparently in agreement. And then says, hurriedly, as if it was not something he had ever thought about, ‘Would you say so?'

‘Yes, I would.'

‘He's married, I think,' he says, oddly.

‘Well, so am I,' Cordelia points out.

‘No.' He seems flustered. And knowing that he seems flustered makes him more flustered. ‘I just meant …'

‘I said he was good-looking, that's all.'

‘Okay.'

He tries to smile – knows he doesn't quite pull it off.

She is looking at him strangely, is how it feels. He says, ‘Well, it was nice of you to ask him in.'

She doesn't seem to hear – she just keeps looking at him in that strange way.

He has hoisted
The Sleepwalkers
up in front of him – is staring without seeing it at a map of Europe in 1914.

She
knows
, he thinks.

What
does she know, though? What is there to know? What does he know himself? That certain men … What would the word be? Fascinate him? And that disturbed by this fascination – if that
is
the word – he is sometimes … What? Ineffably embarrassed in their presence? That's it, though. That's all there is to know. Not even in his imagination has he ever …

Finally he lets his eyes leave the page – the same page, the map of Europe in 1914 – and look for her.

She isn't there.

There is a sense that something has happened. That something has passed between them. He feels slightly sick, as he did when, about twenty years ago now, Joanna said to him that he was ‘obviously queer'. It had seemed an extraordinary thing to say. With Joanna, the subject was never mentioned again, not even alluded to. That was, however, when they started to live more or less separately. He doesn't know if she has ever said anything to Cordelia about it.

He finds her in the kitchen.

She is holding a framed photo – her parents. The way they live – mostly apart – has always upset her.

‘What's that?' he asks.

She doesn't answer.

And he thinks, standing at her shoulder, sharing her view of the photo of himself and Joanna –
She's thinking it's all a sham
. It's not all a sham, though. He wants to tell her that. He doesn't know what words to use.

He is trying to find a way of saying it when it occurs to him that perhaps Joanna
does
see it as a sham, their marriage, the forty-five years they've spent together, and sort of together. And of course Cordelia will see it from her mother's point of view, mostly. She will pity her mother, for having had to live for so long like that. With someone who is ‘obviously queer'. The words still seem to have nothing to do with him. He wonders if Cordelia knows about Joanna's affairs. Probably she knows more than he does – he knows nothing specific. It's difficult to know what information passes between them, his wife and his daughter.

She is still looking at the photo. He's in morning dress, you can just make out. It's the day he got his knighthood, twenty-odd years ago.

‘The day I landed the K,' he says.

It is so obviously not what she is thinking about, so obviously not the aspect of the image that is absorbing her, that to say it makes him sound much less sensitive than he actually is, much less perceptive. He knows that, and knows that it's the price he pays for steering things away from what he does not want to talk about, or for trying to steer them away.

She seems to have taken the hint, though. ‘Yup,' she says, and puts the photo down. ‘Is it too early for a glass of wine?'

He looks at his watch.

It's not even five.

She says that in London it's office-party season, the Christmas drinking season, liver-punishing time. Afternoons in the pub. All that.

‘I vaguely remember,' he says.

‘Do you still miss work?' she asks, obviously not very interested, but knowing that he doesn't mind talking about
that
so much.

‘Not as much as I used to.'

He stoops thoughtfully to the wine rack.

‘Not as much as I used to,' he says again.

He puts a bottle on the table.

‘I've had to accept,' he says, matter-of-factly, ‘that my life, in terms of potential, is over.'

It's as if he is trying to make up for not wanting to talk about what she wants to talk about – the forty-five years he has spent married to her mother, what was the story there – by talking with unusual frankness about something else.

That's what he thinks himself as he starts to open the bottle, first nicking the lead foil, and then unpeeling it. With a satisfying heaviness, it separates from the glass underneath. He says, ‘I don't have much left to offer. In a practical sense.'

‘You shouldn't say that.' She still seems distracted, her mind on something else.

‘Oh, I've achieved everything I'm going to achieve.'

‘Professionally, you mean?'

‘Yes. Partly. I mean, I'm not down in the mouth about it,' he says. ‘I'm very proud of what I've achieved.' Which is true. Even as he says it, though, he is aware of how weightless, how intangible, how even strangely fictitious, his achievements feel – even the ones he is proudest of, like his minor part in negotiating, over many years, the expansion of the European Union in 2004. Something, he is not sure what, seems to nullify them. He says, trying to maintain his philosophical tone, ‘I'm very proud. It's just that that's it now.'

‘Do you want a hand with that?' Cordelia asks. She means the wine he is struggling to open.

He hesitates for a moment. He seems to think about what to do. Then he says, ‘Yes, okay, please,' and passes it to her.

‘Now this wine,' he says, obviously keen to talk about happier matters, ‘we got, your mother and I,' he slightly emphasises, as if to point out that they did sometimes have fun together, which indeed they did, ‘some years ago, when we went down to Umbria, in the old Passat, may she rest in peace, and we got this wine in Perugia, I think. Anyway, it's one of the best, supposedly, that they make down there, and I think it's time it was drunk.'

‘Hear, hear,' Cordelia says – though something is still missing from her voice.

He pours out two glasses, not too much in each, and slides one over to her.

‘So,' he says. ‘To …?'

He waits a moment – long enough for her to smile, and shrug. The smile is wistful, sad, it withholds something, is unpersuaded.

He does not let it deflect him.

‘To life?' he suggests.

She seems to weigh this up, then acquiesces. ‘To life.'

*

The next morning they drive to Ravenna. He needs to have another scan at the hospital. They take the new Toyota. Cordelia drives.

As they drive towards the sea the farming country gives way gradually to something more garish – the tourist economy of the sandy coast. There are signs for theme parks. Hotels. Everything shut up for winter. Except that the prostitutes who line Strada Statale 309 in summer are still there, though fewer. Bosnian girls, quite a lot of them, he has been told.