What the Eye Doesn't See Page 22

  ‘Maggie,’ she says. ‘You’re wearing your pyjamas.’

  I look down at my plaid cotton legs. ‘Yes, I am.’ I start to laugh and Rosa laughs as well. All around us there are bars of soap, which have fallen out of my bag. I bought them in the market yesterday. Transparent, flat and oval, they have a green oak leaf in the middle – probably it’s not a real leaf, but it’s inside the soap, frozen, like an insect in amber.

  ‘I was just buying the soap ready for when my bath works again.’

  I explain to her about the bath problem.

  ‘Oh, God – what a disaster. You Priestleys can’t last long without a bath.’

  It’s so weird that she understands that.

  ‘You know you can have a bath here any time you want,’ she says.

  I get up from the floor and we gather up the soap.

  ‘Why don’t you have one now,’ she says. ‘You might feel better.’

  I know that I mustn’t do that.

  The bathroom is on a half landing – pink frilly blinds and plastic wallpaper with blue birds. Rosa finds me a towel, lavender oil, shampoo and a comb. From the window I can see an overgrown garden, an arch and a broken-down summerhouse. I sink into the depths of the bath and spirals inside me begin to uncurl. I turn over and over – awkwardly because of my cut hand. The clouds in my head begin to lift.

  Rosa comes in holding a cup of tea. She sits down on the loo seat. I pull my knees up to my chin. She says I can come to the house any time for a bath, and she produces a spare key and drops it into my bag. It occurs to me that she doesn’t look well. Her face is too thin and her collarbones stand out. She’s transparent and green, like a sour apple.

  I’ve never known what I should think about Rosa. In some ways it offends me that she doesn’t look more like a mistress. She should have push-up bras and X-rated clothes. Always I wonder what she does all day – presumably she just sits around waiting for Dad to call, and telling herself that two hours of his time is worth a lifetime of any other man. I’ve no idea what judgement to make. Is she a tough, independent woman having an affair with a rich and powerful man? Or is she sad and on-the-shelf and used?

  She points at a slither of thick cream satin and red roses falling from a plastic bag. The dress that I bought when Adam was here. ‘What’s this material?’ I explain that I have the dress with me because I’d thought of buying a cardigan to go with it. She takes it out of the bag and holds it up. The silk is creased, but inside it you can still see an invisible body, a voluptuous body, cut into its folds and darts. Rosa holds the dress against her and runs her hand down the fabric. It’s amazing, she says, and she means it. I’m still sitting forward in the bath, hiding my flesh from her, and drinking my tea.

  ‘Will you try it on?’ she says. ‘So I can see. Then I could take some photographs of you?’

  I don’t know what to say. I move my hand across my shoulders.

  ‘Could I do that?’ she says.

  ‘Yes, if you want. But why?’

  ‘I don’t know – something about the way you look.’

  Downstairs Rosa is sorting out camera equipment. She stands by the French windows at the back of the house, picks up a slide and holds it up to the light. I can see the shape of her body through the material of her dress. Her stomach and breasts curve outwards. That sour apple look – I know where I’ve seen it before. Women who are pregnant – that’s it. Rosa has moved from the window. The image has gone. Perhaps I was mistaken. My head begins to blur again.

  Rosa opens the back doors of the house and we walk out into the garden. The heat is oily. The garden is lined by high walls and a fretful wind is beginning to tear at the leaves of the trees. I watch a spider hurry back along its extended thread. Rosa takes an ornate chair on spindly legs and stands it by the twisting wrought-iron steps. She sits me down on the chair and makes me face away from her. At the end of the garden there’s a door in the wall, and I imagine it opening into another garden, and then another, stretching far away, instead of the grey office buildings that are what’s really in the distance. The bath has made me sleepy.

  I feel Rosa beside me, and she makes me get up, moves the chair a little, and sits me down again. ‘You look so pretty in that dress,’ she says.

  The wind makes the trees break like waves across the sky, their leaves turn as shields against the wind. Rosa pulls my hair back over my shoulders, and her hands are cold on my neck. I feel like I’m being prepared for an execution. Behind me I hear the click of the camera shutter again and again. Then she takes the chair away and photographs me standing in the same place, arranging my hair once again. Always she turns my face away from her. The camera clicks seem to hit inside me, so that I imagine them like gunshots, unmerciful and dangerous.

  Just as she finishes the storm starts. White light flashes on the hem of a cloud, helicopter seeds twist down and smash on the lawn. As the air pulls tight, a bird’s scream is swallowed in a yawn of thunder. Rosa and I go inside and stand at the long windows. Two blinks of white light catch the garden unawares, before the rain is sucked down. The air moves more freely in our lungs.

  On the table there are piles of Dad’s papers – official journals, letters, reports. But there are also some of Rosa’s photographs. They show people looking up from everyday situations – unpegging a shirt from a washing line, or choosing fruit outside a grocery store. Or they show people passing in the street, blurred, caught just as they step out of the frame.

  ‘Why do you take photographs?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Rosa says. ‘I suppose it’s a way of cheating time. And a way of getting beyond the transient.’

  ‘But these are photographs of transient moments?’

  ‘It’s a question of what you think is significant. Yes, a camera would usually be used to record a big moment. Like a ceremony, or a meeting. But that isn’t how the mind works. The mind doesn’t actually record a fantastic theatrical production, it records a pair of angel’s wings, hanging from a hook, backstage. Somehow that’s where there’s a real permanence.’

  ‘And the people? Why are they only half in the photograph?’

  She tilts her head as she considers. Her hand rests just above her stomach. Outside, the rain bounces off the terrace, and the wind tears at the fringes of the trees. ‘I suppose what you don’t see is more interesting. You know, I painted before I became a photographer, and I used to think that photographs were too bald, too open. But then I realised it doesn’t have to be like that. What I do is create a landscape, then the person who looks at the photograph can fill in the details, which means that they’re a creator as well. Sorry, I’m never very good at explaining. Do you understand at all?’

  We wander through the dust-sheeted house. Flies buzz against the long windows. The rooms are inhabited – a secret presence hides behind the curtains as we come in. Thick crusty wallpaper, frills, oriental carpets, stained glass. The silence is itchy. On the first floor I step into the bedroom she shares with Dad. One of his suits hangs on the wardrobe door.

  I walk over to the window and look out across the park to where fruit trees are trained into rigid grids. Then I fiddle with a pair of Dad’s cufflinks lying on the desk. I don’t want to look at the bed. It is unmade, with the sheets turned back and rumpled up. I imagine the shape of them together, entangled in those sheets.

  ‘Rosa, don’t you want Dad to leave Fiona? Don’t you want to get married?’

  She smiles at me, then laughs. ‘No, not really.’

  I think of the iron grilles in Seville and Adam washing his hands after sex.

  ‘Do you want to get married?’ she asks.

  I hadn’t expected that question.

  ‘No, not really. Well, maybe a bit, sometimes. I hadn’t really thought of it.’

  Except I do think of it now.

  ‘I’m not awfully good at possession,’ Rosa says. ‘Or possessing. And I’m never sure that one person could supply all that one might want …’

 
The silence draws words out of me.

  ‘But are you happy? I mean, like this?’

  ‘You know, I’m not sure happiness is the aim – or not for everyone. For me what’s more important is that feeling, when you get up in the morning and life pumps through you like an electric current. It’s not happiness, it’s something else. Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘That feeling of being out on the edge of something?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rosa says. ‘You know, some people’s lives are just B-plus all the time. They’re content, which is fine, except I prefer to try for A – but inevitably that often results in F.’

  ‘Couldn’t it be A all the time?’

  ‘No, sadly I think F is always part of A. You can’t have one without the other.’

  ‘And if you got married then it would all just be B-plus?’

  ‘Probably. Some people are pioneers and some are settlers.’

  We are back downstairs now and I’m looking again at her photographs. Outside it has stopped raining and the sky is clear. ‘At least they’re black and white,’ I say. ‘So you don’t have to worry about Dad seeing the wrong colours.’

  She laughs and holds a pile of photographs in her hand. ‘He’s so funny because when I do take photographs in colour he says he can’t see them properly and he asks me to explain the colours to him. So I have to think up words to describe colours …’

  My skin turns cold and my stomach clenches. She’s talking to me as though I don’t know. But I do know, I do. That was our game. Blue tastes fresh like peppermint, or a sharp winter morning. Red screams and burns your fingertips and smells like pepper … She is standing in my light. English public schoolboy suddenly marries unknown Spaniard. An inconvenient mistake. But yet I exist. Look at me, Dad, look at me.

  ‘I must go,’ I say. I pick up my bag and my pyjamas.

  ‘There’s no need,’ she says.

  But there is. I need to get away from her.

  ‘Maggie, listen. Your father is going to be back here on Wednesday …’

  So now we come to the point.

  ‘Rosa, you know he was there that night, don’t you?’

  Her eyes do not flicker.

  ‘Maggie, you can’t seriously believe he killed her?’

  I look out of the windows at the white sky.

  ‘For God’s sake, Maggie – your father can’t set a mouse-trap.’

  ‘So what did happen then?’

  ‘He made a fool of her – and she couldn’t live with that. People can bear anything better than the loss of their self-respect.’

  I think of Adam and his book.

  ‘Maggie, you know sometimes what looks like an heroic act of truth-telling is just a way of shifting guilt.’

  ‘I’m not going to court.’

  ‘Maggie, do you love your father?’

  Increasingly I realise I don’t know what that word means.

  ‘Maggie …’

  But I am at the front door. She is too proud to plead. The front door opens and sunlight floods into the hall. I turn to say goodbye and then stop. I see into her eyes. For all her apparent calm, she’s more frightened than me. I turn and go down the curving steps. She looks beyond me to where a child in Wellington boots splashes through the puddles.

  At home my angry fingers switch on the computer.

  Blue tastes fresh like peppermint. Red screams and burns your fingertips …

  I go through my bag and find the address of Tiffany’s lawyers. I switch on the computer and try to type a letter. The words won’t come. How exactly can I explain this to them? Just keep it short and to the point, businesslike. Just explain what I know – but the words won’t come. I sit and stare at black-legged insects lined up on the white glare of the screen. My anger has gone. Outside, the evening light is failing. I save the half-written letter, turn off the computer and lie in bed with the duvet over my head.

  Nanda

  What will eternity be? Theodora and I talk of this in the late August nights, with my sitting-room window open, me lying on the sofa and Theodora beside me … a place where the cobweb-veil between past and present will be pushed aside, a chance to unravel it all backwards – Max’s hand reaching for hers on that ledge, and pulling her back, the toy ship still on the shelf in the bedroom, with the washing flapping outside, the shadow of a wartime aeroplane tattooed forever on the pale skin of his shoulder blades … the past, the present, the future, assembled together.

  Theodora says eternity will be a place where we’ll have all the love we craved and did not receive, a place where we’ll do all the things we never did, go to the places glimpsed on the horizon but never visited, release all the captive words – and that every pleasure here will be replicated there, but freed from the relentless turning of the clock … eternity, beyond, the place of light – now, at last, it is close.

  Freddy cannot bear my pain. I wish I could explain that it does not trouble me as much as she thinks. I look down from above and I see my sitting room like a doll’s house with the roof lifted off, and I am lying on the sofa and I’m twisted with pain … so much so that I feel a distant compassion for myself – and Freddy and Theodora are with me, and they’re bent over the bed, then they scurry away to find blankets, or hot-water bottles or glasses of milk. Always they are so very busy – they panic and argue, they stumble around, unseeing. The doctor must be called – no, he must not. Freddy’s rough hands grip at a blanket with a red-stitched edge and I see the ivory head of Theodora’s walking stick, and the mud on the knees of Freddy’s trousers, and the dusty piles of books and letters. And there is Theodora’s hair, twisted into its usual double buns – but what a mess it looks now that I cannot do it for her.

  I wish I could tell them that they should not trouble so much.

  I think of the pills, waiting in my drawer, and days turn into nights, and nights turn back to days, and still I delay … although my flesh stinks and leaks and retches, and my right hand lies loose beside me on the bed, crumpled, like an empty glove. Yet at my centre a molten heart continues to beat, and I breathe but the air goes through me, like wind through the timbers of a ruined house – for I need air from the fields, not this bottled air.

  I am alone, and with one hand, I pull my feet out from underneath the sheets … and even the shivering hurts, and my body is crumpled and shrunken, shallow and bloodless. I rock onto the dead foot, and back again, and the window moves closer, and I stretch out my hand and take hold of the metal catch … On the end of it there’s a flat spiral of metal, like a snail’s shell, moving outwards, passing the same point again and again, and I hold the handle in my hand, running a finger around the spiral.

  The window comes open, and I lean against the frame and, oh, how the night air against my face has a flavour of autumn, and the corn is cut in the fields, and lies in rows … and there is the wind turbine, standing in the garden – sleek and white, turning silent and stately in the breeze – and a sliver of moon lies on its back, as though ready for sleep, hanging low over the hills, a moon with faded edges and a pockmarked skin …

  The light flashes on and I squeeze my fingers round the window frame. ‘What are you doing?’ Freddy says.

  ‘I want to go out.’

  ‘You must stay in bed. You won’t get any better if you don’t.’ She pulls me back to bed and I lie there holding all the bits of my body together. I cradle the struggling knot inside me in my arms, and feel it settling deep within. Freddy shuts the window, pulls the blanket back over my feet, and runs her fingers through my twisted hair. I hear her pick up the jug from the bedside table, and a glass clink.

  Very close I can see Maggie, against the background of the shadowed hills, and the landscape powdered by the moon. She is turned away from me, walking into the shadows, and I have no voice to call her. Her hair covers her back, the ragged ends of it twisting down to the curve of her waist, and red shoes, torn at the heel, swing from her hand as she walks. She wears a pale dress with roses and they bloom red across my v
ision, blocking out the light. The colour of them spreads like gunshot wounds.

  Why do I delay? For what do I wait? For Max, of course. Oh, for Max. For that boy with the wooden sword, fighting in the garden, every ray of the sun focused in on his pale hair.

  But the best they will bring me is a man I hardly know … Sometimes he comes to see me and he talks about himself in the third person. I could perhaps do this, he says, but Max Priestley the politician couldn’t do it. I think this, he says, but Max Priestley could never be seen saying that. When Lucía died he lost so much of himself that he had to invent another person to put in his place. But oh, how I want the real person to come back. However maimed and wretched, I want him to come back. All the structures of this world – all those laws, governments, politics and wars – they are nothing more than grandiose facades which we build to mask the void where the heart should be.

  Theodora glides across the room in her velvet dressing gown and sheepskin slippers, the shadow of her thick hair falling around her shoulders. She switches the light on in the kitchen and a bright triangle falls onto the floor and when she comes back she’s got a bottle and a glass in her hand – and there’s the warm, ginger smell of whisky as she places a glass in my hand and pulls the pillows up behind my head.

  ‘I want to go outside,’ I say.

  She sits herself down on the bed, crushing the foot I can still feel, and she bends towards me, and as she kisses me, her long hair brushes my cheek. She smells of face cream and talcum powder. Outside, the wind blows and an owl hoots and there’s a rush of water from upstairs as Freddy turns on a tap. The material of Theodora’s dressing gown rustles as she wraps it more tightly around her and it falls open to reveal one satin knee, and she draws on her cigarette … the red point of it making patterns like a sparkler on bonfire night.

  ‘Max,’ I say. ‘Max.’

  ‘We’ll ask him to come home,’ Theodora says.