Out of Mind (3 page)

'Pity we have no photographs of that trip,' says Vera.

'Yes,' I say, 'Rome. Rome, city of fountains.'

'Three years later it was war.'

'All over now,' I say. 'In the end everything is all over.'

I get up to make coffee while Vera washes the plates and puts them in the plate rack. I look sideways at her. She must now be almost as slim again as then, on that vacation in Rome of which I remember nothing. Luckily she told me all about it. My God, what would I do without her in this situation (and the worst is that I cannot form a precise picture of what that means: this situation)?

After coffee we play a game of chess. I give up half-way, I can think of nothing but vanished memories and therefore dare not think of the past any more. Even less dare I talk to Vera about it. Perhaps it is only temporary, perhaps they will come back. Memories can sometimes be temporarily inaccessible, like words, but surely they can never disappear completely during your lifetime? But what are they exactly, memories? They are a bit like dreams. You can retell them afterwards, but what they really are, whether they are real, you don't know, no one does. I have sometimes heard Robert dream, at night, squealing thinly and plaintively from the living room. And sometimes Vera mutters a few words in her sleep, under her breath and unintelligible. I never dream. That is to say, I do not remember having dreamt for ages.

'Do you ever hear me dreaming these days?' I ask. 'Aloud, I mean.'

'Not that I know,' she says. 'I suppose I am always asleep myself.'

I had hoped I would sleep well last night.
Vera slept. She always sleeps soundly, has done ever since she started using sleeping tablets three years ago. I was suddenly awake, awake and totally lucid. A branch kept knocking, at ever-lengthening intervals, against the veranda railings. Then even that sound ceased. My head was one large brightly lit space, completely empty. And outside it, there was total calm, winter darkness and Vera's regular breathing.

I got up and sat down at the kitchen table with a glass of milk. Robert scrambled out of his basket and stood motionlessly before me for several minutes. 'Something is the matter, Robert,' I whispered. 'You have noticed that correctly, but God knows what it is.'

It must be this wretched winter. That is the only thing here, the winters last too long for my liking.

Suddenly Vera is standing before me in her dressing-gown with a face as if fire had broken out. What are you doing here in the dead of night, sitting at the table fully dressed?

Yes, of course, that was rather strange, that I was dressed. I do occasionally get up at night, but I only put on my dressing-gown and my slippers.

I couldn't find my dressing-gown, I said, by way of explanation. She asked if anything was the matter. Nothing, I said, except that my head feels transparent, made of glass or ice, very clear and yet I am not thinking of anything.

Read for a while then, she said, or do the crossword. She pushed the newspaper towards me across the table. You gave me a fright, she said. I wake up all of a sudden and you're no longer there. You shouldn't worry yourself, I said. Take another half of a sleeping tablet and go back to bed. I'll do the crossword and then I'll go back to bed, too.

Of course it is a stupid pastime, but it makes time fly, I'll say that. I was only half through when it started getting light. I looked at the clock. Half past seven. Not worth going back to bed. Why not surprise Vera with coffee in bed? I always used to do that on Sundays when I was home from work, from IMCO. Coffee and a rusk. And then we'd make love. Not too noisily, because of the children. She would hold it in her hand and circle with her thumb over the tip and push it inside herself. That used to be all she needed to do and I'd come, but these days it usually takes much longer. Sometimes too long. Then we both grow too tired to carry on with it and fall asleep again.

She was surprised when I suddenly stood in front of her with the tray. Reinstatement of an old tradition, I said. She sat up. She was wearing a loose black T-shirt that must have been Kitty's. I felt like touching her breasts but I did nothing. I sat down on the edge of the bed and watched how she drank the coffee, with small, careful sips, while holding the cup between her slightly trembling fingers.

She didn't like rusks with aniseed sugar, she said. Anyway, you're supposed to eat them only when there's a birth in the family. I just thought it looked festive, all those colourful grains, I said. And since when did she take sugar in her coffee? Not in the last ten years she hadn't.

Absent-mindedness, I said. Sorry. I was doing the crossword and I wasn't paying attention properly. So you didn't come back to bed at all? No, I said. Once I start doing the crossword . . .

I used to be very quick at these things, but last night at the kitchen table nothing would go right. Another word for - another word for - I couldn't think of anything.

There's been something wrong with my thinking recently. Or could it be that my English is at fault? Since my retirement I am at home with Vera practically all day and speak almost nothing but Dutch.

A few times I filled in the wrong word. Deliberately. So as not to do what the puzzle wanted of me. It gave me a brief moment of relief. And I drew a moustache under the Pope's nose, almost without thinking about it, the way I used to scribble matchstick men in the margin of my note pad when taking minutes at meetings. Doodles.

I screwed up the paper with the puzzle and stuffed it right down to the bottom of the garbage can. Vera would no doubt take those wrong words in bad part. (As long as I do not know what exactly is the matter, I must keep all this to myself.)

Our house has shiny stained wooden floors with a rug here and there. You need only go over it with a soft broom and all is clean. Yet the house gets a bit dirtier every year. In corners and grooves burnt-out matches and hard, withered berries and crumbs accumulate. Vera does not seem to notice. Maybe my eyes are better than hers.

Because she is wearing her slippers I cannot hear her walking about now, but otherwise all day long we know of each other's whereabouts in the house. And Robert's, of course, with his sharply tapping claws.

The house no longer creaks, the wind died down last night. Snow is falling again. The thermometer reads exactly zero degrees centigrade.

Vera is wearing her wine-red corduroy jacket and jeans. She has adapted somewhat to the American style of dress. In this country an older person must, at least as regards clothes, look like a twenty-year-old. I myself stick to the English suits from Dodgson's in Boston. Charcoal grey with a thin stripe. I don't mind if people can tell I don't come from here.

'I'm going out for a little walk with Robert,' I say. 'When I come back I'll get some wood for the fire.'

'Don't forget to put your scarf on,' she says, leaning on the broom. Before going out into the hall to put on my coat I kiss her gently on her left cheek.

'You might have shaved,' she says, tapping my cheek disapprovingly with a gleamingly lacquered nail.

'Do you know what it is?' I say when I shuffle down snow-covered Field Road with Robert. 'It all starts with great, confused feelings.'

Later you remember only a kind of fever, a glow from within, which made everything special, the most ordinary things that you walked past together and looked at and talked about with her. A barn, a notice board, a flock of starlings flying up from a field. You felt a longing to absorb everything she looked at, to forget nothing, not one moment of this world that had suddenly become her world: cool, bright, unfathomable.

You should never go back to places you used to know. If you do, you destroy that glow, the core of your memories, like Pop, who, old as he was, took the car after Mama's death and went back to all the houses in which he had lived with her. A few had been pulled down, in others strangers were living, behind pleated net curtains and thick-leafed potted plants on the window sill. After his journey his memories seemed more like fiction than fact, he said, and he felt bitter because the world had changed and had not taken account of his past and his loss.

'So, don't look back!' I say to my dog and I forgot to put on my scarf, after all. Vera is sure to have found out long ago. Sometimes she thinks I deliberately disregard her advice, but that is not so.

All around us, snow falls in thuds from wide-spreading fir branches. When the sun comes out presently, there may well be a thaw. High above us a few seagulls zigzag, but in the wood not a bird stirs. Wherever you go, around here, you smell the sea. A strong smell of algae, seaweed and fish, mingled with the mild, rising scent of millions of brown, decomposing pine needles.

We turn left into Fort Hill Avenue and arrive at Eastern Point Boulevard. Across the bay, the wooden houses of Gloucester on their stone foundations lie scattered against the hillsides, painted in the same cheerful colours as the fishing boats: moss-green, dove-grey, flamingo-pink or brick-red. The two sky-blue, bell-shaped spires of the church high above Main Street seem to keep watch over all those scattered snowy roofs. Between the blue spires stands a life-size statue of the Madonna, holding, instead of the Baby Jesus, a schooner in her left arm. Our Lady of Good Voyage.

Every now and then cars and pick-up trucks drive past slowly. The drivers greet me, although they don't always know me. Fifteen years ago Vera and I came to live here. The house belongs to IMCO. An ex-secretary lived in it before, Joseph Stern. After that it was empty for a year. No one wanted to live so far from work. I didn't mind travelling to Boston every morning on the little train. Maybe the oldest and most ramshackle train in the United States, with such dirty windows to the carriages that you could hardly see that you were practically chuff-chuffing through the back yards of the wooden houses of Salem. In the summer I would watch half-naked toddlers playing in brightly coloured inflatable paddling pools, in winter the garden furniture would be stacked and covered in snow. The wooden seats in the train were hard - there was no first-class carriage - but the journey lasted no longer than half an hour and almost all the time closely followed the coastline of marshy inlets full of grassy tussocks, islets and small bays with marinas, wooden jetties and summer chalets along the banks. It was a friendly journey through a friendly world.

When I retired, IMCO allowed me to stay in the house. It was never really mentioned. I simply continued to pay the rent to a real-estate office in Boston and for the rest nothing changed.

You get cold feet in the snow, no shoes are proof against it. 'Come,' I say to Robert who plods faithfully beside me, 'we'll go a bit faster.'

Many of the clapboard houses around here are empty in the winter. They belong to rich people in Boston and these days even as far as New York, who come here in the summer to go sailing and fishing. The clocks stand still in the empty rooms and only a magazine or a newspaper on a table indicates that people lived here last year.

Denial. Of course! Another word for refusal. Five letters beginning with d. I'd been chewing on that for a whole hour. It is as if the winter air is widening my veins. Maybe that's what it is, hardening of the arteries. You become forgetful. It's part of old age.

Year by year things happen to your body. Your feet lose their springiness. You go up and down the stairs once and you have to sit down to catch your breath again. Your eyes start to water when you look at one spot for a long time. The shopping bag moves more and more often from one hand to the other and you meet fewer and fewer people's eyes. But this is different. More a general feeling of unease than a specific symptom. But no, it would be nonsense to think there is something really wrong. 'I'm still going strong!'

I must not make a habit of this, of talking aloud to myself, especially not now that Robert and I are approaching the inhabited world. Robert dashes through a white open gate, and down a garden path. Must have smelt another dog. He disappears behind a house. I walk on. He'll catch up with me soon enough.

Now you can see the harbour clearly, cutting deep into the land; the concrete landing stages and the cranes in front of the white fish factories and cold stores. Here and there, rows of wooden poles of former landing stages stick criss-cross out of the water, in some places still connected by cross-beams.

Cod and lobster. Lobsters as big as your head. Thanks to the tourists there is still a bit of a living to be made here. And some export to Boston and New York in those large, silver- coloured freezer trucks that drive back and forth every day.

I don't have much to do with the world as such any longer, but I still enjoy observing all these daily activities. There's not much going on at home these days. That is why you have to get out, not sit indoors all the time. Your world would shrink too fast.

In the past a ferry used to cross from here to the other side but now you have to walk all the way round the harbour to reach the town. And the nearer you get to the centre the more steeply the road climbs. I am beginning to feel my legs. If the tavern is open I'll take a rest there.

Change has struck in the tavern, too. Where six months ago there was still a billiard room with six of those green meadows on bulbous brown legs, slightly mysterious under low-hanging steel lampshades, there is now a stage crammed with sound equipment and microphones. There is probably dancing here on Saturdays. But the long bar is still the same. I look around. The barmaid is standing by the cash register with her back towards me.

When she turns to face me I have to hold on to the raised rounded edge of the bar with both hands. I order a pint of draught.

Of course, I must have changed a great deal in fifty years. Grown fatter. Her nails are painted bright red. The nature of the work requires it. When the phone rings I hear that her voice is deeper, rawer. From smoking, of course. Even in those days she used to smoke a packet a day. Beautiful firm round buttocks. Again she turns, still speaking into the phone. Her eyes meet mine, then rove further away, around the empty café. When she has finished phoning she puts a cassette into the recorder. I ask her if she would please turn the music off. There is already so much noise in the world. I shan't say anything about the restlessly flickering but soundless television, obliquely to my right, on a protruding shelf above the bar. It is the sun of every establishment, determining the customers' visual focus, and food for conversation.