All That Man Is Read online

  None of these subjects seems to have any significance. And on the one subject that does seem to, he feels he has said everything there is to say. He does not want to say it all again. He does not want her to feel that he is pressuring her.

  It is very important, he thinks, that the decision should be hers, that she should feel it was hers.

  They sit in silence for a while, surrounded by soft German voices. Older people, mostly, in this place. Older people on their summer holidays.

  He says, desperate to know, ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘Why did you choose this place?’

  ‘Why?’ He is not prepared for the simple, ordinary question. ‘It wasn’t too far from the airport,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to drive too much further today. It was in the direction we were going. The hotel looked okay. That’s all. It’s okay, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she says.

  He turns his head to take in part of the street and says, ‘It’s not very interesting, I know.’

  ‘That’s why I like it.’ They share that too – an interest in uninteresting places.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to stay here for a week or something,’ he says.

  ‘No,’ she agrees.

  Though after all, why not? He does find a lot to like in this place. It is tidy. Quietly prosperous. Secluded in its modestly hilly landscape. Evidently, not much ever happens. There aren’t even any shops – or perhaps there is one somewhere, one that is open mornings only, on weekdays (except Wednesday). Hence, presumably, the cigarette machines. Maybe, with a teaching post at the Universität Würzburg, twenty minutes up the motorway, he would be able to find a way of living here …

  As a train of thought it is absurd.

  And escapist, in its own weird way.

  A weird escapist fantasy, is what it is.

  A fantasy of hiding himself in a place where nothing ever happens.

  She has another taste of her peach juice. She is drinking peach juice, though that does not necessarily mean anything – she is not a habitual drinker.

  ‘And now,’ she says, ‘we’ll never forget it.’

  The noises around them seem to slide away to the edges of a tight, soundless space. He hears his own voice saying, ‘Why will we never forget it?’ as if it wasn’t obvious what she meant. And when she says nothing, he wonders, fighting down a wave of panic, Is this her way of telling me?

  He does not want her to feel that he is pressuring her.

  Panicking, he says, ‘Please don’t make a decision now that you’ll wish later you hadn’t made.’

  ‘I won’t,’ she says.

  They sit there, swifts shrieking in the hot white sky.

  ‘Just,’ he says. ‘Please. You know what I think. I won’t say it all again.’

  And then a minute later, he is saying it all again, everything he said in the hotel.

  About how they don’t know each other that well.

  About the impact it will have on her life. On their life together.

  There is a furtive desperation in his eyes.

  ‘Stop this, please,’ she says, turning away in her sunglasses. ‘Stop it.’

  ‘I’m sorry …’

  She starts to well up again; a solitary tear plummets down her face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says again, embarrassed. People are starting to look at them.

  He has, he thinks, really fucked this up now. His hand moves to take hers, then stops.

  He feels as if his surface has been stripped, like a layer of paint, all the underlying terrors exposed.

  ‘I just need to know,’ he says.

  ‘What do you need to know?’

  It seems obvious. ‘What’s going to happen?’

  ‘What you want to happen,’ she says.

  ‘It’s not what I want …’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘I don’t want you to do it just because I want it …’

  ‘I’m not doing it just because you want it.’

  It is like waking up from a nightmare, to find your life still there, as you left it. The sounds of the world, too, are there again. It is as if his ears have popped. ‘Okay,’ he says, now taking her hand. ‘Okay.’ It would not do to seem too happy. And in fact, to his surprise, there is a trace of sadness now, somewhere inside him – a sort of vapour trail of sadness on the otherwise blue sky of his mind.

  She sobs for a minute or two, quietly, while he holds her hand and tries to ignore the looks of the pensioners who are watching them now without pretence, as if, in this place where nothing ever happens, they were a piece of street theatre.

  Which they aren’t.

  3

  The motorway is taking them north-east, towards Dresden. In the vicinity of each town the traffic thickens. The sun looks down at it all, at the hurrying traffic glittering on the motorways of Germany. It is Monday.

  They woke late, to find the sun beating at the curtains, beating to be let in. Heat throbbed from the sun-beaten curtains. They had kicked off the bedding. She had not slept well. She was, in some sense, it seemed to him, in mourning. He had no intention of talking about it, not today.

  Last night, after the scene on the terrace, they had walked for an hour, walked to the end of the village and then along the river – little paths led down to it, to wooden jetties where boats were tied in the green water. Steep banks on the other side, where there were more pretty houses. Clouds of gnats floated over the water. It was evening, then, finally. Dusk.

  They walked back to the Gasthaus Sonne. They hadn’t eaten anything.

  In the harshly lit room, she said, ‘You always get what you want. I know that.’

  ‘That isn’t true,’ he murmured. Though even then he thought, Maybe it is. Maybe I do.

  She was undressing. ‘I should get used to that,’ she said. ‘I know people like you.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘People that just drift through life, always getting what they want.’ She was speaking quietly, not looking at him.

  ‘You don’t know me,’ he told her.

  ‘I know you well enough,’ she said.

  ‘Well enough for what?’

  She went into the bathroom with her washbag.

  He lay down on the soft mattress. He was still trying to think of a single significant instance, in his whole life, when he did not get what he wanted. The fact was, his life was exactly how he wanted it to be.

  It had been his plan to visit Bamberg the next morning, and that is what they did. They stuck to his plan, and spent the morning sightseeing, as if nothing had happened. In the Romanesque simplicity of the cathedral, he pored over the tombs of Holy Roman Emperors.

  Heinrich II, † 1024

  The middle ages. Yesterday’s mad scenes next to the motorway, among the trucks, seemed very far away in the limpid atmosphere of the nave. Their feet whispered on the stone floor. They were walking together, looking at statues. He felt safe there, doing that. He did not want to leave, to step out of the hush into the sun, the blinding white square.

  She still wasn’t saying much. She had hardly spoken to him all morning.

  Maybe this was the end, he thought, as they walked in the streets of Bamberg, every blue shadow vibrating with detail.

  Maybe she had decided – as he had intended, in the madness of yesterday – that she didn’t like him.

  He had disappointed her, there was no doubt about that.

  Lunch, though, was almost normal.

  Sunlight fell through leaves into the quiet garden where waiters moved among the tables. This was what he had imagined. This was what he had had in mind. Not the scenes next to the motorway. This windless walled garden, the still shadows of these leaves. This was what he wanted.

  That she was pregnant, and what would happen about that, was the one thing he did not want to talk about. The decision had been made. There was nothing else to say. They would, at some point, have to discuss practicalities. Doctors. Money. Until then, talking about it might simply
open it up again – might somehow unmake the decision – so he stayed away from the subject, or anything like it.

  After lunch they drove out of the town to the church of the Vierzehnheiligen. They were standing outside the church, and he was reading from a leaflet they had picked up at one of the tourist stands. ‘“On 24 September 1445,”’ he read, ‘“Hermann Leicht, the young shepherd of a nearby Franciscan monastery, saw …”’

  He stopped.

  He would not have started if he had known how the story went.

  He went on, quickly, ‘“A crying child in a field that belonged to the nearby Cistercian monastery of Langheim. As he bent down to pick up the child …”’

  He had already started on the next sentence when he saw that it was even worse.

  ‘“As he bent down to pick up the child, it abruptly disappeared.”’

  He wondered whether to stop reading the thing out.

  Deciding that that would only make matters worse, he went on. When he had finished, he shoved the leaflet into his pocket. ‘Should we go in?’ he said.

  And then inside, in the mad marble dream of the interior, something similar happened.

  They were standing at the altar, inspecting the statuary there – each statue was numbered and there was a key to indentify them. That was what he was doing. Pointing to each of the fourteen saints, and telling her who they were, and what they did. For instance, he pointed to one and said, ‘St Agathius, invoked against headache.’ Or, ‘St Catherine of Alexandria, invoked against sudden death.’ Or, ‘St Margaret of Antioch, invoked in …’

  It was too late – he had to say it.

  ‘Childbirth.’

  He wished then more than ever that they had not driven out there, in the heat of the day. He didn’t like baroque, or whatever this was. And he had a feeling that something was coming unstuck.

  The next saint, he told her, was St Vitus, invoked against epilepsy.

  ‘St Vitus’s dance. And so on,’ he said. Her eyes, he was sure, were still on St Margaret of Antioch. ‘Here, I won’t read them all.’ He handed her the paper and, after standing there for a few seconds, started off at a leisurely pace across the brown marble floor, past pinkish columns, their markings swirling like the clouds of Jupiter.

  She was still at the altar.

  The place was as full as a station at rush hour.

  Full of murmurous voices like the wind in a forest.

  He found himself standing in front of the font – another extraordinary accretion of kitsch – staring at its pinks, its golds, its powder blues.

  A stone bishop holding in his hands his own gold-hatted head.

  As weird, he thought, as anything in any Inca or Hindu house of worship.

  A stone bishop holding in his hands his own gold-hatted head.

  A martyr. Presumably. And he wondered, with the habit of wanting to know, who this man was. This man, who had invited oblivion on himself, or taken it peaceably – the stone face on the severed head was nothing if not peaceful – when it took him.

  Oblivion.

  He looked up, looked for her.

  She was not at the altar now. She was near the entrance, where the devotional candles were. And she had put a euro in the box and was taking a candle and lighting it from one of the ones already there.

  He wondered, again, whether she was in any sense devout. Her personal mores – as far as he had been able to make them out – suggested not. Or at least had not in any way led him to think that she might be. The first time he had set eyes on her, more or less, she had been snorting cocaine, at Mani’s party.

  Everyone else in that space was moving, it seemed, and she was standing still. She was standing still and watching the little flame that she had lit.

  Which meant what?

  He wanted to ask her. He did not dare. He was frightened about what she might say.

  ‘I preferred the cathedral in Bamberg,’ he said, as they walked down the hill, hoping that she would agree – as if that would mean anything. As if it would dispel the worries that had started, since they arrived at this place, to interfere with his tranquillity.

  She said she would have expected him to prefer the cathedral. ‘You’re not interested in anything post about fifteen hundred,’ she said, ‘are you?’

  ‘Fifteen hundred,’ he said, pleased that she was at least being flippant, ‘at the very latest.’

  ‘Why is that, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You must have some idea. You must have thought about it.’

  ‘It’s just an aesthetic preference.’

  ‘Is it?’ She was sceptical.

  ‘I think so. I just feel no love,’ he said, ‘for a place like that.’ He meant the Vierzehnheiligen, and he seemed determined to do it down.

  When she started to praise the tumbling fecundity of its decoration, he took it almost personally.

  ‘I just don’t like it,’ he said. ‘Okay?’

  She laughed. ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Whatever. You liked it. I didn’t. Fine.’

  They drove back to the motorway – a few kilometres through humid fields of yellow rapeseed.

  ‘Why did you light that candle?’ he asked, trying to sound no more than vaguely interested.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were religious,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I just felt like it. Is it a problem?’

  ‘Of course not. I was wondering, that’s all.’

  ‘I just felt like it,’ she said again.

  He asked, ‘You don’t believe in God?’

  ‘I don’t know. No. Do you?’

  He laughed as if it should be obvious. ‘No. Not even slightly.’

  And then they were on the motorway again, north-east, towards Dresden.

  He said, after a while, ‘I’ll pay for it, of course. The …’ He found himself unable to say the word.

  He needed to know, however, that the decision still stood.

  It seemed it did.

  She said, just looking levelly out at the motorway, ‘Okay.’ And then, ‘Thank you.’

  He wondered, having started to talk about it, whether to talk about it some more. To ask, for instance, where she wanted to have it done. To nail it down with details. Specific places. Times.

  The silence, while he wondered this, ended up lasting for over an hour.

  And now they are stuck in traffic outside Dresden. It is five in the afternoon. Light screams off windscreens. The air conditioning pours frigid air over them.

  Satisfied again that he has no major problem, small ones start to trouble him. It was a fault in his plan for today, he thinks, that they should be passing Dresden at this time. He ought to have known that this would happen. It was foreseeable. (He moves forward another few metres, sick of the sight of the van in front of him.) It was an unforced error.

  And the damage to Stańko’s paintwork – that is still there, to be talked about, to be apologised for.

  To be paid for.

  Another thing to be paid for.

  4

  He is thinking about the piece he needs to write for the Journal of English and Germanic Philology. ‘Anomalous Factors in the Form “Slēan” – Some Suggestions’. He is in the shower, offering his face to the warm streams of water, thinking about it. Thinking about the work that needs to be done. The hours that will need to be spent in libraries – Oxford, London, Paris, Heidelberg. The shower is in a sort of hollow in a stone wall – the whole bathroom is like that. The windows, two of them, are narrow slits. The functional elements, though, are impeccably modern. The tiles on the floor are warm to the soles of his feet when he steps out of the shower and takes a heavy towel. Tastefully done, everything. Once it was a monastery, now it is an upmarket hotel. While he towels himself he leans towards one of the windows, which is set in a deep narrowing slot in the wall, to see out – steep forested hills, quite far a
way. He likes to imagine the time when this was a monastery, when it sat in fields next to the meandering, pristine waters of the Elbe. When the only way to get to Königstein was by walking for an hour. When Dresden was a whole day’s walk away. He towels his hair, flattens it with his hand until he is satisfied with how it looks. ‘Anomalous Factors in the Form “Slēan”’. That must be his focus now. Now that this nightmare is over, and the future is there again.

  It is early evening. The sun puts warm shapes on the wall opposite the windows. The decoration is monastic minimalist: fluid lines, unelaborated. Polished stone. White sheets. Everything white.

  She is sitting on a pale leather sofa, hugging her knees, looking towards one of the windows, with its view over neat modern houses to the hills farther away. Disappointingly, the hotel is surrounded by suburban normality. Streets of newish single-family houses, and a sort of industrial estate.

  Kilted in the white towel he descends the two stone steps from the shower room. He starts to search in his suitcase for his deodorant. ‘Are you hungry?’ he asks.

  She is sitting on the sofa, hugging her knees.

  He applies deodorant.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ he asks again, not impatiently, just with a different intonation, as if she might not have heard him the first time, though she must have.

  ‘The food’s supposed to be excellent,’ he tells her, looking forward to the meal himself. ‘French. They’ve got a Michelin star.’

  This was to be their treat, this immaculate hotel and its Michelin-starred food – their indulgence, their luxury. Tomorrow night they will be at her place in Kraków. The day after that, she will be at work again, on television, and he will be on a flight to Stansted. She likes her work. Just after they arrived at the hotel, late this afternoon, someone phoned her. It turned out to be her producer. It was interesting to hear her work voice, and it seemed obvious, overhearing her – just from the tone, he understood nothing else – where her priorities were.

  He is doing up his linen shirt.

  She is sitting on the sofa, hugging her knees.

  ‘I can’t do it.’

  ‘Can’t do what?’ He thinks she might mean the Michelin-starred meal, that she is feeling too depressed or something.