Questions of Travel Read online

  Her attachment to the country was a blind thing, tunneling up through the years. Her father, once a journalist of some renown, had taken her all over the island when she was a child. She had seen Jaffna and the great blue harbor at Trincomalee. From a beach where spindly casuarinas grew, she had waded into the sea. “For miles. The water never came over my arms.”

  Her father had shown her the chain of tiny islands at the northern tip of the country that linked it to India. In Islamic legend it was known as Adam’s Bridge. “But then Daddy told me that Hindus call it Rama’s Bridge. That was so typical of him. He was always trying to teach me that everyone has their own version of events.”

  Ravi thought of his father-in-law: a wall topped with broken glass. It had been a long time since a newspaper had employed him. In Welikade jail in 1983, psychopaths kept under lock and key had been excited with stimulants, provided with weapons and turned loose on the Tamil political prisoners. Malini’s father, tipped off by a warder, arrived in time to see what they had achieved. After that, his drinking was never less than daily and fabulous. He had been known to strike his wife, igniting Malini’s fury. But Ravi, walking in on an argument that ended when the old man picked up a slipper and hurled it at the girl, sensed that this was the parent who mattered; the knotted force of Malini’s rage suggested its origin in foiled love. By contrast, her attitude towards her mother, a soft-armed woman with a secretive smile, was at once protective and laced with contempt.

  Snooping among his wife’s belongings, Ravi had found an old exercise book. Between stiff red cardboard covers, it contained verses she had copied out, exhortations, lists of Hit Parade songs, sporadic diary-like jottings. He read, Friendship is a china bowl / Costly, rich and rare. / Once it’s broken, can’t be mended / The crack is always there. Someone, identified only as T, was “an open door leading nowhere.” On her sixteenth birthday, there was an entry in red ink and capital letters: I RESOLVE NOT TO LIVE MY LIFE IN VAIN.

  One evening, under a luminous green sky, she told him about the earth’s shadow. The phenomenon was easily observed on the east coast, where, a few minutes before the sun went down, an ominous band showed on the horizon. It was nothing less than the shadow of the whole planet cast up on the atmosphere. As the sun sank, the shadow crept higher, then gradually faded away. Its ascent was thrilling and frightening. Almost no one noticed it. “That’s the way with people, you have to point out what’s under their eyes.” Ravi felt accused, although Malini’s tone was offhand and her thoughts had already skipped on. Why, she wondered, was “nightfall” the standard expression? Night didn’t fall. She had seen it rising above the earth.

  Laura, 1990s

  WALKING A TERRIER IN Hampstead, she noticed an open window on the upper floor of a house. There was a video camera between sash and sill.

  The window was closed and curtained in the days that followed. Then the camera appeared again. After a while, she worked it out: it was there on Saturdays, and only briefly. If she walked back the same way half an hour later, it was gone.

  On a midweek morning, as the terrier sniffed around the gate of the house, a young man came out of the garage. He wore a blue and gray striped shirt over a blue and green checkered one. Seeing Laura there at the gate, he smiled.

  Laura barely hesitated. She would be gone from Hampstead in three days, the little puzzle forever unsolved. And then, one advantage of being colonial was that brazenness was expected and overlooked, if not forgiven.

  So she spoke; and boldly, Australianly unlatched the gate; and proceeded to her involvement with Theo Newman.

  Inside the house, a first glance suggested nothing more sinister than deep pockets and cultivated taste. Laura followed Theo to a scrubbed oak table where she sat on a vinyl chair. An empty bottle stood on the draining board beside a glass with a ruby sediment. The radio, like radios across the planet, was playing Nirvana in tribute to freshly dead Kurt Cobain. There was a view of an apple tree knee-deep in grass, of a granite woman with apple blossom in her hair.

  Coffee arrived in translucent porcelain and chunky stoneware with an unpleasantly gritty base.

  Theo noticed her noticing and touched first cup, then mug: “Mutti. Me.”

  The terrier chose that moment to dance ragefully about the stranger’s feet. Fed expensive poison from a tin, he was dyspeptic and irascible. Theo scooped up the dog, one long hand about the muzzle, and expertly massaged his ears.

  On a Saturday half a century after a German child arrived in London, her son stood at the window of her bedroom for nine minutes. He had just watched life shiver from her face. That first morning, drinking coffee in the kitchen with Laura and trying to describe what had passed through his mind as he contemplated the hateful, ordinary street, Theo spoke of the bald light and the blank day.

  Since then, at the same time every Saturday, Theo Newman set up a camera at his mother’s window and recorded whatever passed in the next nine minutes. “It’s one of my projects. They’re pointless and vital.” Five years of tapes were stored, unviewed, under the dead woman’s bed.

  Theo had inherited her house, its contents and half her money. As it turned out, there wasn’t a whole heap of money: Anna Newman had failed to fill out the life insurance forms, and had spent with an open hand. Her stockbroker son-in-law saw to the investment of what remained. When it was not enough, Theo sold a Meissen dessert service, a Biedermeier secretaire.

  His sister was ensconced in a home county with the stock-broker, their three children and a lurcher. “She has vanished into the known, poor Gaby.” Then, rubbing his ivory forehead, he pondered the case. “There is the dog…A retriever would have left no room for hope.”

  He told Laura that he was working on a DPhil about nostalgia in the twentieth-century European novel. “I’m calling it The Backward Gaze. Proust, Lampedusa, Thomas Mann…” A hand can design an arabesque that suggests everything/nothing.

  His study, a large room, was dim. At the window, a venetian blind was suspended between curtains of heavy blue stuff. Theo, speaking of fictions of longing, tilted plastic slats. Now light and the apparatus of scholarship could dazzle: photocopies, floppy disks, cardboard folders, a desktop umbilically linked to an inkjet printer, books stubbled yellow with Post-its or Dewey Decimal–stamped on the spine. Many of these objects wore a light coating of dust. But Laura was looking at an orange portable TV on a marquetry escritoire. It stood next to a telephone table with angled gilt legs and a handsome marble veneer.

  Months passed before Laura noticed that questions about Theo’s research usually brought only a fresh revelation about his supervisor, Dr. Gebhardt. This libelous saga, of which Theo never tired, opened in the impetuous, cobblestone-hurling years of Dr. Gebhardt’s youth when the chief cause of broken necks in Paris was slipping in seminal fluid in the Sorbonne amphitheaters. Laura learned that Dr. Gebhardt had stripped to the skin in one of Lacan’s seminars while keeping up a forceful chant of Woman is the profane illumination! Thereafter idolized by the great man, she still referred to him, not unkindly, as Shorty. Theo also claimed that Dr. Gebhardt’s father, once Idi Amin’s preferred arms dealer, had later founded the planet’s first Buddhist fur emporium—the demand in Hollywood was strong. His widow lived on in a nursing home in Bournemouth, turned out of her flat because Dr. Gebhardt needed somewhere to store her collection of shoes.

  Theo’s face—bloodless, long-nosed, prominently boned—was pure Northern Gothic. Dark brows contradicted gray eyes that went back and back. Laura placed him in the company of angels, gorgeously robed at the edge of the canvas, and burdened him with a lute.

  When they met he was almost twenty-seven, three years younger than Laura. He drank a bottle of wine every night; more if he had company. “I’m a steady drinker. But not, I think, a drunk.”

  He was not; or not exactly; or at any rate, not yet. Wine—in those days, he never drank anything else—turned Theo garrulous. Then he was inclined to hold forth. But when Laura first knew him his talk ran in une
xpected directions, its course not yet grooved.

  In a pub one night with Laura and other friends, Theo was expounding his theory that a dystopian fairy tale could be glimpsed in the Holocaust. The journeys in cattle trucks were a version of the arduous expeditions undertaken by the heroes of tales. As for the camps, they resembled those brutal, fantastic kingdoms ruled by ogres where the contravention of arbitrary laws brought death. Uniformed witches tended the ovens. Impossible tasks—a lumpish sack that had to be made up into a bed or an order that required the starving to stand to attention for hours—were variants on ropes woven from ashes and fortunes spun from straw.

  The discussion looped around the table and back to its beginning: a bestselling Holocaust memoir recently revealed as a fake. A girl with soft lips in a hard face wondered aloud why the writer had lied. “The lure of squillions, I guess.”

  “Not money.” Theo’s finger circled the base of his glass. “The fulfillment of a wish. The currency of childhood is wishing. Money’s only what grown-ups put in its place.”

  “So you’re saying…what? That when this woman was a child she wished she’d been in a concentration camp?”

  “She wished what everyone wishes. To be loved unconditionally. So you could say she wished for a happy ending. A fairy-tale ending. Like surviving the Holocaust.”

  Laura rose and crossed to the bar. When Theo’s mother was sixteen, a ghost had come looking for her. It was Cousin Ernst: toothless, rheumatic, twenty-eight years old. He had come to tell Anna that everyone else in her family was dead: not only her mother and father and sisters, but the grandparents, the uncles, the second wives, the babies bayoneted first in front of their parents. Ernst said that the forest floor had moved for days. How could Theo, knowing all this, talk of an enchanted wood of shining Polish birches? It was monstrous. It was spotted with brilliance.

  He accepted the thick Australian claret Laura offered, then ran a finger down her pimpled arm. “Someone’s walking on your grave.”

  Theo loved men. He loved the unrepentantly heter, men who had wives or girlfriends, men who didn’t love him in return. His current Beloveds were an old college friend, now an actor in a long-running soap, and a neighbor with whom Theo engaged in guerrilla gardening. They planted tomato seedlings in telephone booths—that kind of thing. He dined, a frequent guest, at these men’s tables. Their women confided in him. He was godfather to the actor’s younger son.

  For sex, there were strangers met on dance floors and so on.

  “Nothing doing there,” said Laura to Laura, sternly. But it was far too late.

  In the pub in Clerkenwell, it tickled Englishmen to ask, “Do you know the difference between Australia and yoghurt?” Or rather: Orstraylia and yogurt. They were hilarious, spluttering into their warm beer.

  There was another kind of man, whose methods were more refined. At parties, he would stand between Laura and the door asking, Which is your favorite Tarkovsky? Have you read Discipline and Punish? Whom do you rate more highly, Borges or Kundera? At confessional moments, angry names broke from him: Bellow, Roth. His brow might as well have been stamped “Frightened Early & Often.” Laura dressed him in a clean shirt rolled up at the elbows and placed him behind a desk in a room with no shadows. The luckless, passing one by one before him, wept hot, useless tears over their cancelled lives: they had mispronounced Coetzee or chosen Warhol over Duchamp.

  On that first morning in Hampstead, “Australia,” admitted Laura and readied herself. “How lucky you are!” said Theo Newman. He quoted an Australian poem: To sit around in shorts at evening / on the plank verandah.

  He told her that when he was a boy, hours had disappeared into a daydream that would rise like a cloud from an old book. The frontispiece showed a fanciful map, ornamented with monsters and putti, where lost souls gathered at the edge of the world. Curled in the red chair on the landing at the top of the house, the child Theo lost himself in the map’s invitation to imagine. The southern hemisphere boasted a ship in full rigging. It was sailing to Australia. “I was the boy on the bowsprit.” He did battle with tempests and monsters. Dolphins were his familiars. At last, the shuffle of surf and a shining bay.

  Laura pictured it, the boy’s limbs whiter than eucalypts folded into the red chair. Theo spoke of looking up from his book to a little window with a curved top, and how the rain skittering across the glass was spray stinging his face. His recollection of detail struck Laura from the first. Theo Newman kept the past in a brass-bound chest, drew out memories like ropes of pearls.

  In the early days, he would say, “Tell me what it’s like in Sydney.” Laura said that the rain fell in sheets there and so did the light. She spoke of the train ride between Edgecliff and the city: the stretch where the track ran over Woolloomooloo, and the jacarandas were already flowering there in the dip, answering the summons of a blue bay. Once she said that Sydney was a pointillist painting of leisure and democracy. Take any fine Sunday afternoon, everyone picnicking half naked by the water, the dogs frolicking and the sails: you could almost see the dots.

  But it was dangerous to linger on those summers: the houses shut against the heat all day, then flung open at both ends so the southerly could walk through. So sometimes Laura said things like, “Have I mentioned that they can’t spell ‘boulevard’ in Sydney?” Or, “It’s the kind of place where you see orange lipstick worn non-ironically.” But even as she mocked, her mind tilted back to an evening when every open door she passed showed a corridor leading to a lighted room, where two women, an old one and a younger one, were watching TV. Why should this now pierce as if Laura had swallowed glass?

  In the house she bought in Hampstead, Anna Newman had set about re-creating the villa in Charlottenburg from which the Kindertransport had plucked her, aged six, in 1939. There was a photograph of her taken on arrival in London: a solid, braided child with careful eyes. Fostered by Quakers, she had grown up English, secular, scientific. She specialized in neurology, acquired a husband, discarded him after the birth of their son.

  Remembering and misremembering the vanished rooms of childhood, Anna might have confused Turkish and Persian, mistaken beech for walnut, substituted pistachio for eau-de-nil. There was certainly an excess of painted wood and fruit stands about the place: like anyone making up for losses, Anna had put too much in. From a table crowded with frames, Laura selected a large photograph that showed the room in which it stood. The picture had been taken on Anna’s last birthday. The mantelpiece was visible in the background, and a shepherdess who had simpered since 1783. She still clasped her flowery crook, but now Darth Vader had insinuated himself between her skirts and her porcelain suitor. Laura looked from the plastic doll to the photo. It showed part of a Hepplewhite chair. In fact there were two in the room, she saw, with a milk crate between them. Laura glanced around. On one wall, paintings of plump-cheeked children, their eyes glistening with tears, flanked a tiny watercolor by Klee. Below them, propped on a credenza beside a bust of Mozart, was a sooty rectangle stamped with a golden nude. Laura’s finger stroked the marble, the velvet. Mutti, said Theo’s voice. Me.

  As a child, Laura had loved those puzzles that ask, What is wrong with this picture? The image in question would appear perfectly banal until careful scrutiny revealed a single-bladed scissor or a sunrise in the west. It was not so much the spotting of the anomaly that satisfied as the sly intrusion of the anarchic into the everyday. This slippery enjoyment was what Laura had missed in those mathematical riddles which, requiring the calculation of the next number in a sequence, insisted on the merely inevitable.

  As she came to know the house in Hampstead, Laura might surprise Bambi prancing over a cushion on one of the Hepplewhites, or realize that the palm in the bay window sprang from a synthetically Grecian urn. She might notice an aluminum saucepan with a colored lid among the copper-bottoms and the Le Creuset. Whereupon, What is wrong with this picture? she would think, amused.

  Laura Fraser belonged to an age and a place where an amazin
g thing was taken for granted: for the first time in history, ordinary people could raid the past and the planet to decorate their homes. Her eye was accustomed to ecumenical style, to African masks hanging beside industrial signage, to a witty postmodern aesthetic that refused to distinguish between designer and detritus, kitsch and cool. She wandered around Theo’s house counting venetian blinds and orange TVs. In the garage—Theo had sold the Renault long ago—were things like gilded sconces and a macramé wall-hanging draped over a stack of mirror tiles. “You can pick them up for pennies,” said Theo of two cheerful polyurethane cherubs that served as bases for lamps. You could pick up white plastic roses, bedsteads covered with buttoned vinyl, biscuit tins that featured Van Gogh paintings, pictures of weeping children, oval plastic buckles decorated with Pre-Raphaelite images that had adorned a type of wide, stretchy belt popular in the 1970s. You could pick up anything untouched by retro glamour and find a place for it among the Tyrolean cupboards and the Dresden.

  The rooms that Laura knew in Theo’s house were the public ones on the ground floor; she was never invited upstairs.

  When she told Theo about dropping out of art school, he replied that he wasn’t surprised. Art’s first imperative was to make. An artist was someone who reimagined the world through new objects. “But technologists do that better than anyone else today. And they do it more. There’s so much radically new stuff coming into the world that we’re overwhelmed by change. What you were suffering from was the exhaustion of excess.”

  The exhaustion of talent, more likely, thought Laura. What mattered, however, was that like a magic mirror, Theo gave her back to herself in a kindly form.

  “These days, new is for technology,” he was saying. “Art makes do with now. The only tense it has is the present.”