The Darkness of Wallis Simpson (11 page)

He became aware, at this moment, of Berthe waking up. Hearing her stir and sigh and reach out one of her plump arms for a sip of water from her bedside cup, Albert remembered how these intimate noises used to move him, and how it had often seemed like a miracle to him that this sweet-natured and beautiful Berthe was his wife. But now, he saw, as he lay pretending to sleep, that he was indifferent to her. He was tired of the smell of her hair. He didn't really care whether she lived or died.

Albert dragged himself to his office, but cancelled all his appointments with clients. The thought of talking to rich people made him feel ashamed. As the afternoon came on, he decided that he couldn't endure this town any more. It was surely the familiarity of everything in it that had brought on the unbearable sadness of his mind.

He booked himself a wagon-lit on the overnight train to Paris and, once installed on the hard little bed, hearing the wheels of the train grinding on the shining rails, he felt his spirits lift a little. ‘What I'm experiencing,' he told himself as he lay there, ‘is just the onset of middle-aged pessimism. I'm forty-three and my stomach is too large for every single pair of my trousers. I'm feeling the anguish of one who's become too fat for the world he's in.'

It was thus, as Albert drifted off to sleep, that he dreamed of how, for a few days, he would change his world. He would visit Jeanne, his favourite dancer at the Moulin Rouge. He and Jeanne would drink champagne and dance to gypsy violins and make love in a noisy and indecent way. Jeanne, who had nothing, no possessions, no apartment of her own, nothing at all except her beauty and her clothes and her meagre salary from the Moulin Rouge, would console him. She would make life seem beautiful again. Because forty-three was not old; it could be the prime of his life. Perhaps, in a few years' time, he would have made enough money to move to Paris and set up a practice there. And in Paris, he decided, there would be no more picnicking and family outings. They killed a man, these things. They destroyed his curiosity and his desire.

When Albert woke, as a pale sun began to shine through the train window, he became immediately aware of an odd, tickling sensation on his mouth, as though Jeanne might have been stroking it with a feather.

He reached up to his lips and found, to his disgust, an insect crawling there. He swatted it away: a large wasp, heavy and stupid in its autumn torpor. It fell on to the red blanket which covered Albert and as he looked around for something with which to kill it, a burning pain in his mouth assailed him. The damned wasp had stung him!

Albert leaned up on his elbow. As the pain intensified, he thought how he had been lying exactly like this at the picnic in the park, but with his head resting against Berthe, and now, alone in the wagon-lit, he began to cry out to Berthe, saying her name, gasping it out as the venom from the wasp sting – the same venom that had almost killed him as a child – entered his blood and began its lethal work. His throat constricted. His lungs began to burn and ache. He doubled over in his agony, trying to reach out for his cup of water, but knowing, as his hand scrabbled to find the cup, that water wasn't going to save him.

And Albert thought that this, this death by suffocation, by asphyxiation, was exactly the death he had always feared, the worst death, and he cursed it and cursed despicable Nature which had caused it.

In torment, he hammered on the window of the wagon-lit. He tried to call out to the fields and woods and hedgerows speeding by. He tried to tell these green and indifferent things that he was too young to die. He tried to say that it was barely the autumn of his life and that on the beautiful surface of his existence, hardly any leaves had fallen.

Nativity Story

I had a child once. A boy called Daniel. He was just learning to crawl and make noises that sounded like words when my wife left me and took Daniel with her and I never saw either of them again. My wife packed up all the baby paraphernalia and every single one of Daniel's toys and all his little clothes, so there was no evidence left that he'd ever been part of my life.

I went searching in drawers and under furniture, looking for something left behind, but there was nothing left behind. When I was drunk – which I often was – I thought, well maybe I just dreamed this little Daniel? Because I'm prone to spells of weirdness. People stare at me and say: ‘Mordy, what's going on, then?' And sometimes I can't go to work. Sometimes, when I wake up, the world looks so abnormally bad that I have to cower in my room.

I'm a chef. Well, a cook. Chef's too poncy a word for what I do. But I'm good with eggs and I know what proper chips should be like.

I never stay in one place for long. It's like I'm afraid I'll look up from the fryer one day and see my ex-wife and my son eating food that I've made and be filled with a sadness I won't be able to bear. So I keep moving on. On and on.

And more and more I keep away from towns, choose places way out in the countryside: motels, guest houses and B-and-Bs. If you work in these places, especially out of season, you can often get a room in them, the smallest, cheapest room they've got, but the room's part of the deal and then at least you can sleep OK and go to work clean and smelling of shower gel. And I've got no possessions. Not as such. A few clothes, a little tobacco tin, a torch. Oh, and an oyster shell. I did a stint at an oyster bar round about the time when Daniel was born and one oyster I opened had such a fantastic pearly shine inside it that I took it home and scrubbed it and stored it away, wrapped in a rag. I thought I'd give it to Daniel when he was older. I imagined myself showing him the shiny shell and saying something pitiful like: ‘There aren't that many beautiful things left in the world, mate, but this is one of them.'

When last winter began, I found a job in a big old rundown hotel that was empty most of the week but on Saturdays and Sundays hosted ‘Dance-and-Dream' weekends for elderly people. A ‘Dance-and-Dream' weekend was one in which you played bingo or roulette all day and dreamed about the fortune you could win, and then in the evenings danced to a three-piece band who played rumbas and tangos and old embarrassing songs. The average age of the Dance-and-Dreamers was seventy-nine.

In the kitchen, we made steak pies and sherry trifle. The steak had to be soft and tender, and the trifle extra sweet. Late at night, just as the kitchen was closing, orders would come down for hot chocolate and malted milk.

During the week, I occupied quite a nice room with two beds in it and coffee-making facilities and a shower of my own. But the Dance-and-Dream weekends caught on so well that the bookings increased fivefold and the hotel manager had to take me aside and say: ‘Mordy, you don't mind roughing it, do you, just for the two nights of the D-and-D? We'll make it up to you in tips.'

I was taken down to an enormous room in the hotel basement, which smelled damp and weird, like some breathing creature had once lived there, chomping on the green moss of the snooker table. There were big leather sofas round the walls, where the snooker players once sprawled around and smoked, and the manager said I could sleep on one of these and wash myself in the rusty little toilet the players used. It was cold down there and the floor was damp in places, but I said it would do. Since Daniel left, I can't bring myself to care that much about where I am or on what surface my body has to lie.

On the Saturday of this particular D-and-D weekend, the weather had been misty and mild, but on the Sunday, during bingo and while we were simmering the steak and opening cans of peaches for the trifle, you could feel the outside temperature suddenly drop.

I opened the pantry door and looked out on to the pitch-dark yard. An amazing frost had crept up on everything in sight, hard and glittery as sugar. I called over the other chef, whose name was Rinaldo, and we stood together breathing the frozen air and looking up at the stars, which seemed incredibly near and low, like they were crowding out of the cold universe to get some warmth from us. ‘Phew, lucky our Dancy Dreamers not goin' any place in their cars!' said Rinaldo. ‘Very lucky tonight.'

I got to bed on my leather sofa about one o'clock. It was really cold in the basement and my blankets were itchy and my pillow made a crunching noise every time I moved my head, like it was filled with barley husks.

I knew I wasn't going to be able to sleep. I got out my oyster shell, to see if it had kept its shine, and this staring at my shell seemed to calm me. I was just on the brink of sleep when I heard voices on the basement stairs.

The overhead light snapped on and I saw the manager at the door in his dressing gown and with him was a young couple. The girl was whimpering and being comforted by the bloke, who was pale and thin with a nerdy kind of beard. The manager was carrying an armful of blankets and pillows. ‘This is it,' he said. ‘This is the best I can do for you. At weekends we're absolutely chock-a-block full.' Then he said: ‘Oh, Mordy, sorry. I'd forgotten you were down here. These poor people's car went off the road. They're not hurt, but they're dreadfully cold and tired. Can you help them get comfortable?'

I put my shell away. The woman stared at me in confusion. She thought she'd be shown into a proper room with a shower and a double bed with clean white sheets, and now she found herself in an old snooker den with a man who smelled of cooking oil. And I wasn't even wearing proper clothes, only a string vest and a pair of boxer shorts.

I tried to reassure the couple that I wasn't drunk or weird – just a chef who had no family. I showed them the rusty toilet and helped the guy pull two sofas together and lay out the blankets and the scratchy pillows while the girl went to wash away her tears of cold and fright. The guy's name was Joe and he had a quiet voice. In this soft little voice of his, he told me he worked as a kitchen fitter.

The girl wouldn't speak to me or look at me. She just kept her coat wrapped round her and got under the blankets and turned her face away. Joe whispered to me: ‘Nothing personal, mate. She's just a bit traumatised by what happened with the car. She'll be OK in the morning. And I'm sorry we've interrupted your night.'

We put out the light and tried to go to sleep. I could hear Joe talking softly to the girl and I couldn't help thinking about the days when I'd had a wife to talk to in the middle of a freezing night. I could remember the smell of her hair and the way she breathed so silently you couldn't tell if she was alive or not.

I don't know what time it was when I woke up.

The light was on. The guy Joe was bending over the girl, who was lying on her back and gasping. There was a weird smell in the air and parts of the floor were wet.

‘What the hell . . .?' I said.

Joe said: ‘Sorry about this. Does the hotel have a doctor? Could you go and phone?'

‘What's wrong with her?' I asked.

‘Oh, nothing,' he said vaguely. ‘She's just having her baby.'

‘Having her
what
?' I said stupidly.

‘She'll be fine,' said Joe. ‘But I guess we ought to get somebody. If you could . . .'

I wrapped a blanket round me and went up to the hotel foyer, which was silent and dark. A tray of malted milk cups had been left on the reception desk. I put on a couple of lights and reached for the phone, then put it down again because I didn't know what to dial. Was I meant to call the emergency services or wake the manager, or what? When my wife was about to have Daniel, we just went calmly to the hospital in a minicab . . .

I saw a packet of fags lodged on the hotel switchboard and I took one of these and lit it and tried to decide what I was supposed to do. Memories of the birth of Daniel kept coming to me and distracting me from the here and now. I thought about the moment when the surgical mask had been tied round my face and the way my wife gripped my hand when her contractions came and how her hair got damp and stuck to her head. And then I remembered the doctor and nurses suddenly scurrying about and doing things, like there was an unexpected emergency and I said: ‘What's happening? Is everything OK?' and they said, ‘Yes. Everything's fine. Everything's under control.' And then Daniel came out. He was covered in blood and a sort of whitish gunge. He was wrapped in a bit of green material and laid on my wife's breast and as I bent over them, I could hear a sound coming out from behind my surgical mask and I thought, fuck, I'm crying.

I lit a second cigarette. I still hadn't telephoned anybody. When that second fag reached its end, I thought I would go and wake up the manager and let him decide what to do. I was stubbing out the ciggie when I saw one of the Dance-and-Dreamers coming down the stairs. He was an oldish guy with a bald head and a tiny little crown of fluffy hair going round it. He was wearing a dinner jacket and in his hands he was carrying one of the prizes he'd won at the bingo game. It was a useless glittery box, made out of mosaic pieces.

He nodded to me. He looked rosy-cheeked and happy. He said: ‘Did you see those stars?'

And I said: ‘Yes, as a matter of fact I did, sir.' And then he went on down along the corridor, heading for the basement.

I was thinking, what on earth is that old geezer doing wandering about in his dinner jacket at four in the morning, when I heard someone calling my name. It was Rinaldo. He'd appeared from out of the kitchen area, wearing his chef's whites and his chef's hat. ‘Mordy,' he said, ‘
fantastico
! Don't you think?' Under Rinaldo's arms were two bottles of Vermouth.

‘What?' I asked. ‘What?' But he was gone, also heading for the basement. And I thought, God Almighty, what's going on in this bloody place? This is the weirdest night I've ever lived.

I picked up the telephone receiver again and was looking down the hotel listings for the manager's number, when I heard more footsteps on the stairs. It was the manager himself. And he was carrying the huge arrangement of sunflowers that normally stood on a table on the first floor. It was so enormous he could barely hold it or see round it, so that some of the sunflowers looked as if they were growing out of his head.