She asks him, when she has finished on the phone, if he wants to watch a film.
‘A film?’ he says, slightly as if she’s interrupting him, as if she’s distracting him from something important. ‘Alright.’
He notices the full glass of wine in her hand. She’s drinking a lot of wine, he thinks. She’s uneasy, with them here together like this. ‘What film?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know. We’ve got all these DVDs.’ She is at the shelf, in her voluminous woollens, starting to look through them. ‘Groundhog Day?’
‘We must have watched that,’ he says unkindly, ‘twenty times.’
‘Okay. On Golden Pond?’
‘No.’
‘The Bucket List?’
He snorts.
‘How about Driving Miss Daisy?’
‘God, no.’
She makes some more suggestions, all of which he irritably dismisses.
‘Why don’t you choose, then?’ she says, starting to lose patience. ‘Come here and choose something yourself.’
‘Joanna…’ He is still sitting in the wing chair. He puts his hands together, the points of his fingers, as if about to offer her some wisdom.
Then he just sighs, and says, sounding put-upon, ‘What else is there?’
‘There are loads. About Schmidt?’
He sighs again.
‘About Schmidt?’ she half-shouts, turning from the shelf.
‘No!’
‘Do you actually want to watch a film?’ she asks.
‘Not really,’ he says, with a sort of defiance.
‘Why didn’t you say so, then?’
‘Where are you going?’
She is leaving the room. ‘I have things to do.’
‘What things?’
‘Work. I’m supposed to be in New York.’
That infuriates him. ‘I didn’t ask you to come here,’ he shouts after her.
Alone he puts his hand over his eyes — feels the tenderness of his damaged face, which he had forgotten about.
Then she is there again, standing in front of him.
‘Look,’ she starts, making an effort, ‘I’m here because I thought you needed help…’
‘I don’t need your help,’ he hears his own voice say.
There is a moment of ominous silence.
‘Well, fuck you, then,’ she says quietly.
He hears her walk up the stairs, the sound of her door shutting.
After a few minutes he stands up, stiffly, and follows her. He feels dizzy on the stairs, has to stop for a moment.
Softly, he knocks on her door. ‘Joanna?’
Nothing.
‘Joanna…I’m sorry.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says again. ‘I’m not myself today.’
He doesn’t open the door — that’s not allowed, hasn’t been allowed for years.
‘Please come downstairs,’ he says to the painted wood, which was once white, probably. ‘I’m going to make some tea,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry — I mean it.’
Downstairs, he makes the tea — in a warmed pot, the old-school way. People just don’t do that any more, he thinks sadly.
When he enters the sitting room — when he shuffles in with the tray — he is surprised to find her already there. She is on one of the sofas, with her large unfeminine feet on the pouf, looking unsentimentally at her own hands. ‘It’s just so depressing,’ she says.
‘What is?’
He puts down the tray.
‘I mean, I’m only here for two days, and something like this happens.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘It was my fault.’
‘Yes, it was.’
He sits down in the wing chair, flops down into it, so that his legs swing up slightly. He sits there, panting.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asks.
He says, ‘Okay. A bit dizzy. I’ll be okay.’
‘You shouldn’t be doing anything,’ she says. ‘The doctor told me you shouldn’t do anything for a few days. You should have let me deal with the tray.’
‘I’ll be okay.’
She stands up and pours the tea.
Then they watch The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
He starts wheezily snoring about halfway through.
7
One always imagines that there will be some sort of serenity at the end. Some sort of serenity. Not just an awful sordid mess of shit and pain and tears. Some sort of serenity. Whatever that might mean. And what that might actually mean becomes problematic up close. Amemus eterna et non peritura. That would seem to be sound advice, if serenity is what one is after. The same problem, though — what is eterna? What is eternal, in his world? Wherever he looks, from the loosening skin of his weak, old man’s hands — which somehow don’t seem to be his, since he does not think of himself as an old man — to the sun shedding white light on the flat landscape all around, wherever he looks, he sees only peritura. Only that which is transient.
Joanna has left. She had an earlyish plane and left just as the late dawn was lightening the sky over the poplars of Strada Provinciale 65, a field or two away. The taxi was outside, vapour spewing from its tailpipe. She had hauled her suitcase downstairs and in the entrance hall she had stopped for a moment and said to him, ‘Cordelia will be here this afternoon.’
A minute later he was alone, in the kitchen, trying not to succumb to an unexpected flood of emotion, with trembling hands spooning coffee into the percolator.
How little we understand about life as it is actually happening. The moments fly past, like trackside pylons seen from a train window.
The present, perpetually slipping away.
Peritura.
He sits in the wing chair with his iPad.
Tap.
Tap. Tap.
Emails. No new emails, other than the spam and semi-spam that never stops.
He still hasn’t written to Simon about his poem. He will do that now. First he has another look at it.
The portrait shows this — his eyes fixed elsewhere
,
Mehmet the Conqueror holds a rose
To the Turkic scimitar of his nose
.
The engrossing necessities of money and war
,
The wise politician’s precautionary
Fratricides, the apt play of power —
All proper activities in his sphere
,
And he excelled at them all. So why the flower?
A nod, perhaps, to something less worldly;
Not beauty, I think, whatever that is
,
Not love, not ‘nature’
,
Not Allah, by that or any other name —
Just a moment’s immersion in the texture
Of existence, the eternal passing of time
.
That final phrase. It didn’t make much of an impression on him last week.
He stands up and fondles the radiator, fondles its warmth with his stiff hands.
The passing of time. That is what is eternal, that is what has no end. And it shows itself only in the effect it has on everything else, so that everything else embodies, in its own impermanence, the one thing that never ends.
Which would seem to be an extraordinary paradox.
Claudia says, ‘Good morning, Signor Parson.’
Startled, he turns. ‘Oh, Claudia. Hello. How are you?’