Where the HeArt is Page 13

  Ann desperately wants to object, to say she could help, she could help it be different. She reaches out and grasps Suzanna's hand on the table.

  “Give me your email address,” she says, and “I'll give you …”

  “No.” The word is harsh. “This is it babe. Finito. You go back into your good life with your lovely family and your new future, and I will have my life. No what-ifs or maybes.”

  “Oh, Suzanna!”

  “Don't! Don't you DARE feel sorry for me. I have more than anyone, any single one, of my schoolmates. I didn’t get pregnant. I didn’t get married. Preferring girls saved me and I'm the one who got out. Don't you understand? My life, your life, opposite sides of the world, and I'm not just talking geography.”

  All Ann can do is nod. Suzanna stands up. “I can't be here when you go,” she says, “so I'm going to Jac's. You take your time, shower, go back to sleep, whatever, just be gone before I get back. A couple of hours is fine.” She was putting her coat on as she spoke, wrapping a scarf around her neck, pulling on a woollen hat, boots. When she finishes Ann is standing. She runs the few steps and flings her arms around Suzanna, kisses her on the mouth, then stands back.

  “Caio babe.” Suzanna stops at the door and looks back over her shoulder.

  “Our revels now are over”

  she says. “Shakespeare.” And is gone, leaving Ann to deliver her Byronic lines to the empty air.

  Fare thee well! And if for ever —

  Still for ever, fare thee well.

  Ann is as if frozen to the spot. When she starts shivering she walks slowly into the shower, turning it as hot as she can bear. Then she is standing in the same spot, dressed. She feels bereft at being left so suddenly—again—and guilt for her advantaged life, and shame at her own ignorance of lives other than those like hers (not true, a small voice is saying somewhere inside her, but it is a small voice) and angry that the world is unfair. So many emotions she could fly apart and splatter into pieces. Cocooning herself in the duvet, on top of the bed, she’s overwhelmed by the smells of their lovemaking. She makes herself make the bed, calmly, then wash and dry the dishes, wipe the table.

  There are some bills on a shelf; she takes one and copies Suzanna's full name and the address, with post code, into her diary.

  Out of here, I have to get out of here. Double-checking that she has everything, Ann closes each door behind her quietly. She walks away with her head down, ignoring anyone she passes, though there are few people in the street. New thoughts hit her, some like blows, others more gently. Tell and leave must have been thought through in advance. Whack! Or maybe Suzanna thought of it when she was awake in the early morning. Tap. She doesn't have a single photograph. Slap on the back. It’s impossible for her to go to the library now. Punch on the arm. It has all been a silly, selfish game for Suzanna. Shake of the head, she doesn't believe that. Suzanna really fell for her and is hurt and upset. Rub on the arm.

  Am I in love? Not exactly. Like, genuine like, and lust, yes, but not obsessed, intense, must-be-with-you-every-moment in-love. Admitting to herself that she wants to go on seeing Suzanna, make love with her, have fun, until she leaves London, makes her feel selfish, but is true. She wants to leave London with trailing ends, like an email address and hopes of further times together and let them fade, if they must, gradually, not slash off any possibility of anything, ever. Why did Suzanna create such a harsh ending? Like cauterising a wound.

  She’s in an unfamiliar street. Somewhere by the park maybe, yes, there are the big trees, so she changes direction and heads back towards Joshua's. Sentimental self-indulgence has no place in Suzanna's life, and she was telling me to harden up and respect that. And Suzanna is right, I have absolutely no idea what whole swathes of people have to do to get by.

  Arriving home to an empty house allows Ann to give in to exhaustion. She goes to bed in her clothes and sleeps for a couple of hours, waking to the sounds of people below. Stories and explanations will be expected, she feels like doing a Suzanna and refusing to say anything, but knows she won't. Feeling dissatisfied with herself, inadequate, off the mark, her smugness (surely not?) punctured, reminds her of those difficult teenage years when she felt like an outsider in all the groups she was in fact part of. She has been judged and found wanting. It is kind of true, she had to come to grips with that, never mind feeling sorry for herself. She was an interlude for Suzanna, an interlude that maybe breached something in the other woman, and it behoves her to think of it in that way. An interlude in her sojourn. Like a longer-lasting art event. Oh, shit and botheration, this is getting her nowhere. She jumps out of bed, washes her face, combs her hair, and goes downstairs.

  “The day after the night before?” Joshua is jolly. “Happy new year.” She goes around and kisses them all on the cheek and says “Happy new year”.

  “Good night?” Joshua again, probing.

  “Great!” and she tells them about the fireworks, entertaining the twins with flamboyant gestures.

  “We didn't even make it to midnight.” Chloe sounds rueful. “But on the other hand, so far today no nausea. None. The end may be in sight. Of the nausea that is,” she adds quickly.

  Late that afternoon Joshua finally manages to get a working skype connection with Shirley and Keith. It fails to engage the children, except when Shirley pokes out her tongue and crosses her eyes, but is a great success with the adults, especially the two couples. Shirley is overcome by how like her brother Joshua is, more than she has seen in any of the photos. They are all so pleased with each other, Ann notices, watching from behind, seeing herself on screen hovering in the background. Good, she tells herself firmly, this is good.

  The next four days look bleak and empty. But who knows when she will next be in London, so she makes a plan. The Tate for the Turners one day, another day the Tate Modern again for Miroslaw Balka's box of darkness, which she skipped last time because of the queues and a disinclination for walk-in works, but now the title, “How It Is”, draws her. The royal parks will be a walking day's worth if the rain stays away, Westminster Abbey and St Paul's for an inclement day. Enough shops, already.

  “The twins will miss you when you go,” says Chloe, as they all have an early supper together, “so will I.”

  “You're much better now, though, aren't you?” She certainly has more energy.

  “Uh huh. Another week and you'd see me in fully organised mode if you were still around. Eh, Josh?”

  “Ah yes, formidable, you are. The day I see myself on a spreadsheet is the day I —“ and he collapses onto the table, to the delight of Jo and Chris.

  “Don't be silly." Chloe flaps a cloth at him.

  “Just joking, dear heart, just joking.” Ann suddenly needs to do her emails. She has cooked, so leaves Joshua to clean up while Chloe puts the children to bed.

  Oh no, a message from Paula. HOW COULD YOU? the subject line shouts at her. Some well-meaning friend has told her Ann is having an affair in London. Ann can't bear to read the message, dispatches it to the trash. Ignoring her friends for now, she opens an email from her mother.

  “Oh dear,” she reads, after a paragraph about how lovely it has been to see them all on the computer, “we had a visit from Paula.” Ann feels a thump in her solar plexus. “She was very upset, and going on about you and some 'black woman' (her words, dear) in London and what did we know about it and how serious was it? Well, your father and I were quite flummoxed. Of course we had to say we didn't know anything, and your father suddenly had something he had to do outside. It was a short visit, but left me a little shaken up. Is there something we should know?”

  “Dear Mum and Dad, I'm sorry you had to deal with Paula. I have seen someone a few times, but it's come to a natural end, and there really is nothing to know.” A travesty of an explanation, but it will have to do.

  “Dear friends, I am writing one email to you all tonight. 'My librarian,' as some of you call her has gone. Finito. No more. I'm not devastated, but shaken up by the
way it ended and what she's made me think about. Character-building for sure. It's too difficult to write any more about it, suffice to say I am not at all sorry my whatever-it-could-be-called with Suzanna happened.” And she goes on to describe the New Year’s Eve fireworks, and her plans for her last days in London.

  Paris is sitting in a corner of her mind like an unlit firecracker, ready to burst into excitement some time soon.

  Ann goes to the Tate Modern the day before she will leave. There is no queue for How It Is, named, she reads, from a book title by Samuel Beckett, and influenced by the artist's Polish background. Walking into the black interior, engulfed in resonating sounds, is disorienting. There are other people in there, but she can’t see or sense them. The sounds turn into something she hears as a low-pitched rendering of “we are we are we are” over and over. Feeling small, she goes into a crouch, putting out a hand to steady herself and touching a soft, furry wall. The blackness is so complete her eyes have no light to adjust to, she remembers being in an underground cave somewhere, perhaps Rangitoto Isand, and the total blackness when they turned their torches off. Gradually she expands, taking up more of the dense space, standing, spreading out her arms and legs, keeping one hand on that disconcerting wall.

  Taking small steps, staying in contact with the furry edge, she continues slowly until she comes to the exit. Her eyes close to slits as they meet the light.

  “Awesome,” says a man who came out just ahead of her. “Awesome,” he says again to his companion, “but is it art?” Yes, What It Is is art all right Ann wants to say, and like Suzanna it leaves no wriggle room for sentimentality, what-ifs or might-bes.

  Chapter 13

  The English countryside rushes past as the Eurostar heads for the south coast, after warm farewells in Kennington, and tears in the taxi on the way to St Pancras Station. Underneath Ann’s sadness at leaving her new family lies the kapow! of that guillotine-fast chop that has left behind it a Suzanna-shaped hole. Not even a thread of future to stretch between them until it fades in a human sort of way. Nothing. Nada.

  The countryside vanishes, then the ugly warehouses and rows of trucks; they have entered the tunnel. Ann blows her nose, unwraps the filled roll she bought at the station and gets her notes on Paris out of her day-pack, a fizz of anticipation peeking through her gloom. This part of the trip had been the highlight of her planning, she’d imagined it as the culmination of her whole venture; on her own, no relatives, minimal contact with home, really on her own.

  Just as suddenly as England disappeared, France is there. Warehouse and truck ugliness again, but soon enough rolling countryside falling behind. This train doesn’t slow at stations, never mind stop, each one is there and gone in a whiplash flash. A shower arrives without preamble, manifesting as raindrops skidding horizontally across the windows. The outskirts of Paris could be any city, but it is Paris and Ann is finally excited.

  Sitting in a café in the Gare du Nord with her first French coffee, she studies her map. A half an hour walk at most to the hostel, there’s no need to expose her bad French to a taxi-driver. “Un café s'il vous plait,” she’s managed well enough, and the coffee is good enough for her to believe it’s a Paris coffee.

  With English language tourist brochures shoved in her bag she sets off, pulling her suitcase-on-wheels. The air outside the station hits her like a slap, its coldness nibbling at the exposed skin of her face; sharper than in London. Stopping to rewind her scarf across her nose she nearly trips a hurrying woman, who sidesteps past muttering something that doesn’t sound like “'Scuse-moi.”

  Buildings in Paris are made of grey stone, not the reddish brick of England; she'd forgotten that. The whole sense and feel is not-England, too, the air, the light is different. The few trees trace crisp outlines against a greyish sky with traces of blue. As she walks, Ann's spirits rise.

  The man who checks her in at the hostel speaks English with an accent she doesn’t recognise. Her small single room is up a flight of stairs with a turned wooden railing and has the tiny, private “facilities” she paid extra for. In spite of its warmth, the room feels impersonal and lonely so she unpacks right away, stowing her laptop in the middle of a folded jumper at the bottom of a pile of clothes; no internal internet access here.

  Busy days, that's what she’ll need, so she sits on the bed with her brochures and her notes trying to focus on planning. She has seven days, seven full days starting tomorrow. Minutes later she is staring at the empty open pages of her diary with unseeing eyes and a blank mind.

  It’s nearly dark out, but still only five o'clock so she decides on a walk of the local streets, finding some supper and the nearest internet café. But it’s even colder than earlier. She enters the first eating place she sees, and devours pizza, stumbling her way through an article on immigration from North Africa in a Paris Match from a pile in the corner.

  When she gets back to the hostel she joins the people sitting around in the lounge and listens to conversations, mainly in English or French, mainly travel tales, many about delays and disruptions because of the cold, cold weather and the snow. Someone asks her where she is from. Nouvelle Zélande gets responses from “le All Blacks,” to “Paradise,” the latter from a young German man who seems to have been everywhere. It’s pleasant to be in company, but Ann feels no connection to anyone, nor does she want to.

  The supplied breakfast, she learns, is okay if you like bread and coffee, and no-one seems fussed if you take an extra roll for lunch. One of the staff makes pancakes on Sundays, but they don’t run to bacon. A conversation about whether a pancake breakfast is really a pancake breakfast without bacon doesn’t hold Ann’s attention and she browses the shelf of books left by other travellers, picks out an early Sue Grafton and withdraws to her room. Of course I’m lonely, she tells herself, fresh from family life to a solo room in a hostel.

  Noises in the street wake her at four, and she tosses and turns, wanting to distract herself by reading, but not willing to get out of bed to turn on the light. The next thing she knows is it’s seven o’clock and she can shower and dress and go in search of breakfast.

  As long as it isn't raining or snowing, she'll walk, cold or not, in her English boots.

  Day one, fortified by two fresh rolls, cheese and coffee, she sets off for the Musée D'Orsay. It takes all morning by the time she’s stopped here and there and had a coffee next to a brazier, reading a Guardian from a street stall. In the Champs Elysées, an oasis of lights in the gloom, she can just make out the Arc de Triomphe, but heads in the opposite direction, towards the Place de la Concorde, marvelling at the shop windows full of marked-down goods. The famous Paris New Year sales are on, but she is not inclined to shop.

  On the Pont de la Concorde, she leans on a balustrade, looking along the Seine, thinking about history. There’s so much history around this river. All the stone in all these buildings and bridges, all dug and cut and put together over centuries. Stop it, she tells herself, of course there is history; she's the product of a newer world.

  The Musée is a work of art in itself—the great hall, the clock. Another Cézanne rendering of Mt Saint Victoire to admire, from a place standing back, just admire. And a Degas dancer, with a more peachy, less frayed tutu. So much, so much, so many works to happily absorb and in a musée blessedly lacking in crowds.

  The black servant with the flowers in Manet’s Olympia takes her unawares. The servant is holding up a bouquet, looking at Olympia – Ann can’t read her expression, is it a servanty look, or something else? Olympia herself looks directly out of the picture at Ann. Naked, apart from a flower in her hair and a heeled slipper, she’s reclining, not in the least abashed, even self-satisfied. Ann’s knees bend—if there had been a stool she would have sat on it—and she is mirroring the servant, holding out an imaginary bouquet, searching the composed face for a response. Does Olympia see the whites of her eyes as she sees those of the servant? Supplicants. Ann drops her arms as the word comes into her mind then looks at th
e floor in a momentary panic for damaged flowers, and feels guilty, guilty for all the times she has never taken notice of the servant in a painting or a book.

  Suzanna could be in that painting, she thinks, but as Olympia, not the maid. Or there could be some of her in each. In a muddle of thoughts and feelings, she looks around at the few other people in the room, peering at labels and paintings, pointing, talking to their companions. Oh well, she thinks, and leaves the museum to stare at the river again, and think of history some more, real history, not her own history of the last weeks, not being with Suzanna, wanting to be with Suzanna now, what she would say, what S would say back, how they would laugh, touch. Then her phone is in her hand, she is texting—come to paris—. She looks at the words for what feels like a long time, then quickly scrolls to Suzanne’s number, sends the message. She looks around—who’s to see, much less care if they do?—and drops the phone into her bag, closes it, clutches it firmly under her arm and walks off briskly, noticing strangers, feeling the cold; anything to stop herself thinking about what she has done.

  When a tone sounding in her bag that tells her there is a return message she stops abruptly. People brush past. Then she is looking at three words.—Please. Don’t. Ever—. Ann’s sob is part grief, part shame. Another tone, another message. —New phone, new number—.

  “Shit!” A passing woman looks, raises her eyebrows, strides on.

  Ann is walking, more or less in the direction of the hostel. She is hot with embarrassment and freezing cold, shivery, castigating herself, feeling stupid, gauche, childish, ashamed. Staggering. No, she isn’t staggering as she walks, she’s tripped over herself, been a stupid romantic fool, desperately wants to have not sent that message. But what if … didn’t she have to try … something …