Out of Mind (2 page)

The house seems bigger than it did once, when Kitty and Fred were still at home. Only Robert goes upstairs now, the ground floor is enough for us. We potter. That is one difference with the past, when you still went to work. You start pottering, you walk around for the sake of walking around. Open a door or closet here and there, and shut it again. For no reason. You see the room, the familiar furniture as it is arranged, the portraits and trinkets, the gleaming glass panes of the dresser in the corner of the room which always reminds me of Grandma's and Grandpa's living room, of Grandma's secret store of candy behind a row of snowy-white canisters with their stern black lettering: 'Sugar', 'Salt', 'Cinnamon', 'Coffee'. Thin bars of chocolate she used to keep for me there, and acid drops or pear drops; words from an improbably distant past, but still with a whiff of their former flavour.

I look around me. Everything has received its own immutable place. You don't throw things away so easily any more, and if you break something you have a feeling other than the indifference of long ago. You look around you and you know that pretty well all these objects will survive you. They surround you and sometimes you feel: They are looking at me, almost as equals.

'Look at New York!'

It is snowing on the television screen too. A mustard- coloured snow plough in Madison Avenue shoves muddy breakers of snow on to the sidewalk. Behind large, illumined showcase windows, store assistants stand watching. I must not forget to fetch wood from the shed. Those logs are really too heavy for Vera. I haven't sawn and chopped them myself for years. I buy the wood from Mark Stevens, who also supplies Tom at the lighthouse. It could do with another log now, though more for the sake of cosiness than for warmth.

I pick up a book from the low round table beside the fireplace.
The Heart of the Matter
by Graham Greene. Never seen that lying here before. It doesn't come from the library either. Almost half-way through the book, a bus ticket peeps out from between the pages, a return ticket, Gloucester- Rockport. I haven't seen Vera reading it. Maybe she borrowed it from Ellen Robbins and that bus ticket is hers. (Why do I so much want this to be the case? Why does this innocent book suddenly seem an intruder?)

Poke the fire, it makes such a lovely shower of sparks. Go on, fly away, up the chimney, you lot. Out there you'll all be extinguished by the snowflakes with a big hiss. Black dots on the snowy roof, that is all that remains of the falling sparks. I've seen it many times, coming home from a winter walk in the woods with Robert.

Graham Greene. Didn't he write
Our Man in Havana
? I saw the movie once, with Alec Guinness. I remember only a scene of two men playing a game of checkers. But instead of checkers they play with small bottles of liquor. Bourbon and Scotch. Every piece that is taken must be drunk. The loser wins.

'Do you remember
Our Man in Havana,
that film with Alec Guinness? Based on a book by Graham Greene?' I deliberately shout a bit, so as to be heard above the television.

'Vaguely,' she says, wiping a crumb from the corner of her mouth.

'Based on a book by Graham Greene.'

'Could be, yes.'

She does not react to the name. Surely it would have been natural for her to say: That's a coincidence, I am just reading a book by him. Then I would have replied: Not at all a coincidence. I saw that book lying here and it reminded me of the film. Then everything would tally, our words would fit together like pieces of a jigsaw. But she says nothing.

Walk, I must get up for a moment and walk about. Then it will ebb away again, this feeling of being absent while being fully conscious, of being lost, of losing your way, I don't know what to call this feeling, which can apparently be aroused by the simplest objects, like this book.

Robert scratches at the kitchen door. Vera can't hear him. I have to hold the door knob with two hands against the wind. The dog immediately pushes his cold nose into my outstretched hands. I stroke his tobacco-brown spotted hide in which snow crystals still glisten here and there. Robert knows the way, straight to the crackling fire.

From the kitchen window you can usually see the rocky coast through the trees, and the grey, rolling sea, but today there is nothing in the distance except a black hole. Not even a light anywhere. The fishermen have probably stayed indoors in this weather.

I can see the fishing industry going to the dogs here in Gloucester. The rusty fishing vessels are small, dirty and old-fashioned, and the fishermen are quite unaware of the development of modern, all-automatic fishing fleets on the other side of the globe. I know about it through my work, but I don't tell them. When I occasionally go to the tavern I only listen to their stories. At sea you don't learn how to talk, one of them said to me the other day. You're too busy. And when you're free for a moment there is always the sea about you and you must never take your eyes off it. IMCO, would that mean anything to them? There is surely nobody who knows it stands for Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization? Not even Vera. She has always said IMCO right from the start, without ever asking what those letters actually meant.

I used to take the minutes at meetings. Later they had a secretary for that, and I switched to doing the catch targets, together with Karl Simic. He never said much. And certainly not about himself, unlike, for instance, Chauvas who always chattered nineteen to the dozen. Catch targets. There were years when I used that phrase every day. No, I don't really think about the office much anymore. Occasionally of that tall, skinny Karl Simic, even though he is dead now. Simmitch, that's how you had to pronounce it. A Yugoslav name. He lived on his own in an apartment in Boston. And one morning they found him dead in his bath. When I heard that, I was sorry I had never struck up a friendship with him. But he was just like me: shy and reserved. When we were working you could hear a pin drop.

'What were you doing in the kitchen so long?'

'Catch targets.'

'What?'

'Oh, nothing, a phrase from work. I was suddenly thinking of the office. And of poor Karl Simic who committed suicide and none of his colleagues understood why, except me, but I kept my mouth shut. What is left of it all, apart from some faded old minutes and reports full of advice that no one ever took?'

'You men are always so keen on being important and having meetings.'

'I was a cog, a well-paid cog, admittedly. But how that

intergovernmental machinery fitted together exactly I still don't know to this day.'

She has switched off the television. I sit down beside her on the settee. We are silent. Then she puts her hand on my knee.

'You shouldn't always wear the same old pants,' she says.

From the front room comes the ringing of a bell. It stops and then starts again. An irritating, intrusive sound that stridently advances among the furniture. At last it stops.

'Wasn't that the phone?'

'No,' I say, 'you must have imagined it.'

'Maybe it was Ellen Robbins,' she says. 'She said she might drop by this evening.'

She gets up and walks out of the room. I feel an impulse to follow her but, of course, that is silly. She'll be back in a moment. I intertwine my fingers and squeeze them.

It should soon become day now. If only spring would come soon. Once it is spring again Robert and I can walk on the beach or along the bay. I throw pieces of driftwood into the waves and he brings them back to the beach. A pointless pastime which we both enjoy, each in his own way.

I go to the window and press my nose against the glass. Black. Vera was up first, as usual. She has opened the curtains. I close them again. It's much too early to have them open on such a cold wintry morning. Even the schoolchildren are still in bed. I rub my hands together. Wouldn't mind my coffee now. I sniff. Nothing. She can't have started pouring the water on yet. Might as well read a little first.

I take the book from the fireside table and open it where I left off yesterday. I read in bed last night. It happens sometimes that I then fall asleep and the next day I cannot remember what I last read. I leaf a chapter back and put the bus ticket to Rockport inside the front cover.

Vera enters the room. Not in her navy-blue dressing-gown but in black cotton pants and a loose lime-green jacket over a white blouse. In her hands she is holding long shreds of paper, strips of torn newspaper.

'Did you do this?' she asks.

I shake my head. 'Maybe Robert?' I suggest hesitantly.

'Since when do dogs tear newspapers into strips in the toilet?'

She goes to the wastepaper basket beside the piano and drops the paper into it. I watch her and cannot understand why these dumb bits of newspaper make me feel so embarrassed. And it still isn't getting any lighter, it still won't become light.

'If you're closing the curtains, then close all of them,' she says. 'I'm going to phone Ellen Robbins. It's such foul weather, she'd better not come this evening.'

Of course, it is evening. 'What's for supper?'

'I'll heat up a pizza. It's Sunday, after all.'

'Of course,' I say. 'Sunday. All right with me.'

I try to read the book I am holding in my hands, but the words refuse to form sentences. It is as if I suddenly no longer know English, even though I have been virtually bilingual these last fifteen years. At home we speak Dutch together, but as soon as someone else is present we effortlessly switch over to English. And it also happens quite often that we catch ourselves still talking English together long after the guests have left. I stare at the sentences. Slowly they slide back into place. Something flutters to the floor. I bend down and pick it up. An old bus ticket. I put it at the back of the book.

In the front room I hear Vera on the phone.

'Yes, I thought so. But Maarten said I was imagining
it. . .
That's what I was going to suggest too. We'll be in touch.'

I heard her put the receiver down.

'You see, it was the phone just then.'

I nod.

'So you did hear it?'

'I remember hearing something,' I say, 'but I don't think it was the phone.'

'But it was.'

She goes to the kitchen. I hear her opening the flap of the oven and a moment later the dull plop of the gas leaping into flame. I am still holding the book in my hands. When Vera returns, I say, 'Yes, I remember now. Just as I was about to get up, it stopped. That can happen to anyone. Was it Ellen Robbins?'

'Yes, it was Ellen Robbins. She thought we weren't in, that maybe I had forgotten what we had arranged. Will you keep an eye on the clock? It needs another ten minutes. I'm going to put on a jersey, I keep feeling cold.'

I want to ask her, but she has already left the room. Ten minutes. The big hand is now on the seven. When it is on the nine, ten minutes will have gone. But what then? What has to be done? I shut the book and push it away from me. I stare at the black hands of the gold-coloured wall clock. There is no second hand on it. It looks as if the clock has stopped. It is a modern one, it doesn't tick.

I go to the kitchen, sit down at the table and look at the bright red kitchen clock on the wall, an electric one with a gold-coloured second hand that moves round the clockface with little jerks. I don't let my eyes stray from it for an instant. I have always been a man of the clock. Punctual. That is more than you can say of some people.

One more turn and then the big hand will be on the nine. Then ten minutes will have passed. Time is up. I get up from the chair and go to the living room. 'Vera,' I call, 'time is up.' I walk across the room, into the corridor. 'Vera, Vera, the ten minutes are up,' I call, as calmly as possible.

Then I hear her answer coming from the bedroom. 'Turn the oven off then, will you?'

I don't know how fast to get back, to carry out this instruction. When I hear the rushing sound of the gas cease, I sit down at the kitchen table with a sigh of relief. It is only thanks to her answer from behind the closed bedroom door that I have been able to carry out this task. Otherwise I would not have known what to do. It worries me that you can suddenly be so cut off from the most ordinary everyday actions. I have no explanation for it.

Vera is wearing a grey-blue, thick-knitted jersey with a broad, wide-open neck. She has pinned up her hair.

'Why have you put your hair up like that?'

'I usually do when I have to do the cooking.'

'Do you have to do the cooking now, then?'

'It's already done, really. You're right, it's no more than a habit.'

She puts on her flowery kitchen gloves and pulls the baking tray with a pizza on it out of the oven.

'Pizza,' I say in surprise.

'Yes,' she says, 'it's Sunday, after all.'

'Pizza day,' I nod, and I get up from my chair to fetch plates and cutlery. Vera cuts the pizza into four parts with a meat knife. She flicks two dark bits of meat on to my plate.

'Anchovies, I don't like them.'

'Pizza,' I say, 'I like pizza.'

'We ought to have a glass of red wine with it,' she says. 'Do you remember in Rome, by that large square? I can't remember what it was called. There was a big fountain in the middle. We had a pizza so big it didn't fit on the plate, it was hanging all over the sides. Two gypsy beggar girls in those long ragged skirts saw that I couldn't possibly eat all of it and just as I was about to give them each a piece they were ordered off the terrace by one of the waiters. Those indignant dark eyes as they looked over their shoulders when they walked away! Later we saw them on a wide sidewalk in front of another terrace, dancing like two grown-up women. Do you remember?'

'Yes,' I say, 'Rome. The Trevi Fountain.'

'No, that was a different one. That's the fountain you have to throw coins in and make a wish. I wished for a daughter.'

'And?'

'I got a son.'

I nodded. 'There are many fountains in Rome,' I say. 'I remember. It was before the war.'

Vera nods. She has little blushes on her cheeks, from talking, from remembering. I dare not quite look at her. I spear the leftover piece of pizza on to my fork and hold it so high that Robert has to jump at it with wide-open mouth.