Becoming Strangers Read online

Page 20


  'You have judged us.'

  'No,' Burns said, his voice rising, 'not you. Just what happened. I wish it was none of my business.'

  'What shall I do?' Jan stood up and covered his face with his hands for a moment, the dark was pure comfort. When he took his hands away he felt the swat of air on his face from the overhead fan and the light from the window behind Burns, it was all too dry and too light.

  'You should comfort her, you should get ready to go home.'

  'Home?' Jan walked towards the door, nodding. If there was ever any home to go to, this would put paid to what remained. He turned on his heel as he opened the door, he heard the singsong note of the computer on Burns's desk starting up again.

  'I was young like you once, I thought only in terms of doing my job. You don't truly see how other people are when you are young, you are not married, you have no children. It is all theoretical. But things change.'

  Burns stood up straight and opened out the palms of his hands. 'I am sorry, Mr De Groot, honest to...'

  'No, you are not. Not really.'

  58

  THAT NIGHT JAN PROPOSED that they get out of the re-sort, hire a car or take the bus to have a look round the main town. He sat by the balcony leafing through the hotel compilation of brochures, circling things in pencil, preparing to make a call.

  'I don't want to walk through reception with everyone looking at me and whispering.'

  'No.' He closed the folder.

  'And what if we bumped into him?'

  'He's been fired. Burns will be taking care of that.'

  'I shall stay in the room for the last few days of our final holiday together. I don't mind.'

  'You know, I asked him to press charges on your behalf, Annemieke. It is his most serious advice not to do so.'

  'Why? Why is it his serious advice?'

  'Because it just is, it would be traumatic for you, hard to win,'Jan had said feebly, stepping out on to the balcony. On this occasion she got up from the bed and followed him out there. She looked quickly from him across the vista of the lawns and flowers and back again.

  'He doesn't like me. Don't you think that if I was Jason Ryder's wife things would be very different?'

  'Well, perhaps she would not be in this situation, Annemieke,' he said, his back against the railing, facing her. He arched his back; it hurt at the base of his spine, when he breathed in it seemed to catch painfully.

  Tears sprang to her eyes and she pressed her lips together, gathering herself a moment before saying, 'I knew it would come out. You've always thought so little of me. You've always seen me as little more than a tart who cannot be trusted and should not be given any respect. You know, my mother was mortified when I brought you home. You know what she used to say to me when I called her crying, she said, "Next time marry someone of your own class." And I said, "There will be no next time; I have to make this work." She said to me, "Then for God's sake have affairs, find a man who can make you happy, you deserve to be happy."'

  And so you took her advice.'

  'Only when all else failed.'

  'That's some fine advice, coming from a mother.'

  There was a knock at the door, quiet at first, then insistent. Jan looked at his watch, it was after seven p.m. and the beds had not been turned down. He looked at Annemieke and she waved him past her. He opened the door just enough to look through and was surprised to see Burns standing there. He stepped out of the room, holding the door behind his back.

  'What is it?'

  Burns took a deep breath.

  'Mr De Groot, I came,' he took another breath, 'I came to tell you that I will give you my support, on behalf of the resort, I will call the police in and we can press charges if that is the course you want to take. I've changed my mind, I want to help you.' He raised his eyes from looking at Jans hand holding on to the door knob and looked the man in the face. He saw there fatigue and despair. He felt sick to his stomach, sick with sorrow, overcome. It felt like being lovesick.

  'I thank you,' Jan said, 'but it is no use, I think.' Burns opened his mouth to speak but Jan shook his head. 'And it is not necessary,' he said with a smile, 'nothing good can come of it.'

  'For your wife's sake?'

  'Nothing good can come of it.'

  Burns had the sudden impression, seeing Jan at the door, holding it, of a man holding out against wrongdoing. He understood that this was an insight and was startled, he tried to hold on to it, to make sense of it, but as suddenly as it had come, the understanding was gone.

  59

  ANNEMIEKE WOULD NOT LEAVE THE ROOM the next day. She lay on the bed, mute and unmoving, while he was there. When he left the room, he waited outside for a while and heard the bed creak as she got up from it. He heard the TV emit the small but growing note of electronic euphoria, then he heard the bed creak again followed by the discordant sounds of channels being changed rapidly. When he returned in the late afternoon there was a room service tray outside the door and he saw the plucked twigs that had borne grapes, the rind of a cheese and an empty butter packet. There was a slice of cheesecake that had been robbed of its fruit topping. She was fine.

  Jan had gone out on to the pool terrace, taken his shirt off and his shoes and sat on the end of a recliner. There was no one he recognized. He had hoped to see Laurie, hoped not to see any of the Americans; he was able to discern George, stepping out of the new annex. George turned back and with a hand steadying himself on the doorframe, he bent down to inspect the tiles. He came outside rubbing his forefinger on his thumb, saw Jan and tilted his head in recognition, then made towards him.

  'Chalky, that grout,' he said, still rubbing fingertip on thumb. He popped his finger in his mouth to clean it and wiped his lips with his big dog's tongue.

  'Looking forward to going home? I expect you feel like a bit of a rest, I know I do.'

  'To be honest with you, I have been wondering what home I am going back to.'

  'Oh. I see.'

  'Yes.'

  'Not so good then, things with the wife.'

  'No.'

  'Well, there's your boys at least.'

  'They are their mother's sons.'

  'My girls have always been most loving.'

  'I was not a good father. Young men can be so busy with other things, their own life. I know I was. I used to resent taking them out, used to get irritable with their chatter. We were so eager to get on with our lives.'

  'We're all the same, at that age.'

  'The war, you know, we grew up with it in our faces and afterwards we were always pushing it back behind us. You know how they say it was the Americans who won the war but not us because afterwards all people wanted was the American lifestyle. Well, that's true, things changed. My people, they are quiet, modest but also perverse in a way. You speak to a Belgian and he'll shake his head about the Nazis and then say to you, "But the French! The First War, that was much worse." They always remember how the French took charge then, the officers were French, the foot soldiers Belgians, "Avant!" they'd order and the Belgians, the Flemish speakers, would retreat. But this ill-will is because of pride, and for a modest people like mine to be so encumbered with this. Why? Who in their right minds could go on about the French when you look at what the Nazis did? They brought with them their anti-Semitism, and they took thousands of our men away to work in factories. My own father died in one. But no, the French are awful, my people say.

  'Oh, we tidied everything up, as we always do in Belgium, we're used to being invaded and getting back to work. And men like me, we said, the war is all done, that was our fathers' business, let's make some money and make our families rich and let's not think about countries and ideologies. But perhaps we went too far.'

  'Well, I've no time for ideologies myself. Real life is being lived while intellectuals are busy putting it into boxes. The wars were different; terrible both of them, but we was right with the Second one, right to fight it. Perhaps you could say we was lucky that the choices were so clear. W
e had God on our side, I expect. We had to take a stand against evil. We wanted to be with our families, of course we did, but we said that some things were more important than what we wanted.'

  'Did you know the Jews were being killed?'

  'We didn't get in it for that. Nor for the Polish and all the others. We had to stop the Nazis coming knocking on our front doors.'

  Jan shook his head, 'I am really in the dark, you know.'

  'You did what you did, mate. You shouldn't have to worry about the war; it was done and dusted before you could do anything about it. There was so much more opportunity about for you lot who was born afterwards. See, that was different with us. We worked, we worked but we couldn't make nothing. We was always selling up stuff. The war changed a lot. People didn't go to church so much, they went drinking. We'd lost the empire and all, but still those years after the war there was the Welfare State and making sure we looked after our own. I'm proud to collect my pension. It's right. I put the time in. I tell you something. We had nothing; nobody had two shillings to rub together. Do you know, most families back then, if they sold up all they had, wouldn't have got no more than a hundred quid for it. Funny, ain't it?'

  'My family rose to be ready for when the sun came up, we worked together to maintain the farm. By ten in the evening we were all exhausted—no one asked what we would do next—we slept, my brothers and I in the one bed and my sister in another. George, all of the people we knew were farmers, like us. They traded amongst themselves in a village of some five thousand people, a complete economy. Only the doctor asked for immediate payment, you know, and sometimes of course he would forgo this. Each year proceeded as it should, holy days and so on. There was the summer's hard work, piles of pancakes at the end of the summer when the harvest was done, the killing and salting of pork for the winter. Each day had its schedule too, the first meal at sunup, the second meal was at nine in the morning, some bread and lard or jam, lunch was at midday, pork and potatoes, and maybe an apple cake, then there was a slice of bread again in the evening with cheese. Twenty, thirty years later it was all gone.'

  'A way of life went, didn't it?'

  'We had a different life. But I don't think I was really much good at the new ways. Certainly my wife and I would have been better if we had just settled with being a business partnership, in the old way of things. I never really took the time to understand Annemieke or to find a way of getting along with her; I think I saw it as a retirement project.'

  'Well, I suppose you made a mess of things, didn't you...'

  Jan smiled; he now understood that English phrase 'cold comfort.' He was used to receiving tepid advice rather than cold comfort. The way George spoke to him, with a dour gravity, felt fatherly. He took him seriously. Jan had been a lifetime without a father.

  'Yes. It is strange, you expect that death will meet you halfway, even now I do. I hoped, coming here, to get a reconciliation with my wife that I could take home with me, share with the boys too. You don't think that death will come when you know that you've made a mess of things.'

  'It's your kids what affect you the most. You ought to set things straight with the boys. Do what you need to do. My girls know how I feel. I shan't go making a song or dance about it before I go. I don't want to say goodbye. I don't want to be sitting with my bags packed, waiting. Makes me a bit nervy.'

  'It's been a long drawn out anticlimax. I never liked birthdays either. You tell yourself you deserve some finer feelings from those people around you, you ask yourself why they are not kinder to you, you become bitter. This is what has caused my sons to distance themselves from me, I believe, the bitterness.'

  George sighed. 'Don't know what to tell you, mate, except I wish for it to come like a bolt out of the blue. And I know it's selfish but I was expecting it would be me first. Now, I don't know. It's like she's gone already; walking and talking, but she's on her way out, you can see that. Anyway, I've decided to write my memoirs. For the kids. Jot down the past before she can do a runner with what's left of it.'

  'Good idea,' Jan said, with a smile. 'What about a drink at the bar, my turn?'

  George looked at his bare arm as if it bore a watch. 'It's time,' he said. 'We could have a spot of that pizza too.'

  'Pizza. A good English dish, I hear, like lasagne.'

  'No, it's Italian, son,' said George, going ahead.

  60

  SAT IN THE ARMCHAIR next to slightly parted French doors, Jan made notes in his book. He was noting the effect of the 'holiday,' the temporary evacuation. 'The movement is circular,' he wrote, 'it allows for a reconciliation of man's liberal imagination with his conservative constitution.' It appeared to him that the need to holiday was part of the human condition, an agreeable palliative for an ailment mankind barely knows how to complain about; the life we have made.

  He watched as Annemieke began packing. George and Dorothy had begun the same day. Bill had already started to stow one or two of his Hawaiian shirts. He no longer put his underpants in a bag to be laundered but let them fester in the corner of the wardrobe, transferring them to the zipped compartment of his suitcase on Monday afternoon for the sake of the room maids. Jason and Missy held out for any final fine dining, keeping the exact number of outfits hanging, but by Tuesday afternoon, Missy was going about the folding of Jason's better shirts with the solicitousness of a new mother.

  A couple of days remained, yet the holiday was over for their group. They were marking time, each dragging himself or herself between pool and bar the way a dog turns about itself to settle in the same place.

  At dinner and at the bar, at lunchtime and in the evening, Jason turned expectantly to his cellphone, seeking messages where there were none, worrying out loud that the system was at fault. Bill offered to lend him his own and Jason looked at him as if Bill were in some way stealing from him. Bill stowed the phone back in its leatherette crocodile-look soft case and turned it off. He finished his drinks alone those last nights.

  Laurie was spending a couple of days on snorkelling expeditions. She was tired when she came back in the evenings. After a coffee at the bar, and an inquiry regarding their mutual friends, she went to bed, determined, she said, to be in good form for the return journey.

  'Where to?' Bill had asked her, as nonchalant as a big ruddy Irishman could be.

  She'd shrugged. Ah, New York,' she said, 'just for a week or so.'

  'That's a fine place to do some thinking,' he'd said.

  Any place is fine for that.'

  'How about coming along to Belfast?' he'd said, making it sound like a joke. She gave a single hard fast laugh, the noise of a suitcase being slapped shut.

  61

  LYING BY THE POOL, face down, his back like a tombstone, Jan remembered the real world. Flanders. The northern fields, apparently still and yet moving when you got close to the earth, put your nose to it. With his eyes closed, he saw the baked mud of the farmyard in the summer, a brown oasis where he had lain as a child in the place the dog had chosen, having pushed the mutt away to listen to the pulse of the land.

  The land had been his to take, by the handful, freely. As a child he knew every square kilometre. His was a kingdom of mud that checked the spread of grass. He played in it, wet and dry, knew it by type, from woodland humus-rich or field-dry like a watercolour palette of one colour, ready to be made into paint with a lick. He could hear the music of the earth, the grains of dirt on the narrow ridge of his teeth as he removed mud from under his fingernails.

  Now, with the sun burning through his thin hair, he lay, a grown man in a sterile place, and heard again a shout or a laugh from his childhood, the breaking of the icy cracked waters of the pond and the thud of silence that came with each night, sleeping in a room with his brothers and his sister. They, like many others, forsook the church schools in the village and cycled there and back each day, and sometimes at lunchtime too. In a few years, hundreds of years of history were done away with and the state took over education and welfare in Northern Eu
rope and supplanted family, community and church all at once. The modern age overcame them more forcibly and more unexpectedly than any of their many invaders. It was irresistible. The education was free. His brother became a doctor. No one had imagined that a farmer's son could be a doctor. The priest chided parents from the pulpit. But the Catholic Church was losing its grip. Few would choose to pay the weekly stipend of the local church school. Around the same time, electricity came to the village. The agricultural regions were late to it; it must have been the 1950s by the time the whole village had the benefit. At first lights were barely lit and the electric outlet was just here and there, often in places where it was not needed. His mother stood in the new light one evening, by the front door, held a book up to it and then got her chair to sit under it. But she turned it off after a few minutes, shaking her head.

  Over the years, walking home from one of the bars in the village he saw more and more lights in the dark—false stars. In his earlier years, the village had lain quiet at night. Slowly at first, and then with a momentum that was gathering by the late 1970s, came televisions and telephones, and his aging mother realized that what was far away was in their own home and what had been near, the quiet watching land, was remote.

  The modern age had straddled them like a bully. But Jan was obdurate. His core was earthen. He would go back to the land.

  He heard the soft sound of someone settling beside him, the slight giving way of the lounger next to his, and he felt a hand on his back, between his shoulder blades where it fitted, like a cup being put on a saucer. He did not stir. After a while he felt the draught as the hand was removed and he felt the absence more than he had felt the touch. He heard the shuffling of shoes being regained and only after a while did his hearing converge upon the sound of footfalls on the tiles, at a distance, going away. He turned his neck slightly and opened one eye to see Laurie making back towards the hotel. He was aware of a quickening of pain in his lower back and thought of the morphine in his room. He closed the eye and replaced his head where it had been, swallowed, and went back to the dark.