He contents himself with questioning the bear with the buttercup eyes that patiently keeps vigil on a shelf in the darkness of his wardrobe: a silent questioning, suited to the teddy bear with the slightly squashed nose and crinkled ears.
Magnus talks to Magnus, wordlessly, soundlessly, senselessly.
It is only several months after his return to London that he sees Peggy Bell again. She has finally found a way to put some distance on a long-term basis between herself and her homeland, where she continues to feel trapped in the widowhood that came on her too suddenly, too devastatingly: by accepting a job as an English teacher at a school in Vienna. And before moving to Austria she wants to learn a little German. Else has suggested she get in touch with Magnus. This proposal takes him by surprise and above all raises misgivings, for he has never taught his mother tongue, which in any case he still suspects might not actually be his first language, and which he only uses with the Schmalkers, Lothar preferring to talk with him in German. But his relationship with the language remains so ambiguous that an equally tortuous idea occurs to him: he tells himself that by teaching it to someone else, who herself is anxious to evade a too painful memory, he will succeed in smashing the matrix of gloom and chilliness rigidifying the words, and give them a new sound.
They are both on time to meet as arranged in a café, and are waiting, seated at different tables. Neither has recognized the other. They eventually identify each other by the way they both keep looking towards the door every time it opens to admit a new customer — they are the only ones to behave in this way. First taking surreptitious glances, they then observe each other more carefully. The young woman he has noticed finally gets up and makes her way towards him. She is wearing a grey gabardine, belted at the waist, and a dark lilac-coloured felt cloche hat.
He smiles, and inviting her to sit at his table says, ‘Peggy Bell?’
She immediately corrects him, comprehensively sweeping aside both her nickname and her maiden name to avert all familiarity: ‘Magaret MacLane. So you must be Adam Schmalker?’
But he too has changed his name and in turn corrects her. ‘Magnus.’
‘Ah, yes,’ she says. ‘Else told me…’
She does not complete the sentence. Magnus soon discovers she has a habit of suddenly falling silent in the middle of a sentence, leaving her words suspended.
She smokes a lot, stubbing out each cigarette after a few puffs. She smokes in the same way she speaks, in fits and starts, nervously, suddenly breaking off as if changing her mind. The flighty young girl Magnus knew of old would switch without transition from laughter to slight melancholy. Now she switches from a staccato delivery of words to abrupt silence. Her lime-green eyes have acquired a cold glitter, with no gaiety or reverie to lend them any golden reflections, and she so rarely smiles that the dimple in her left cheek remains almost imperceptible. Even her freckles have faded, and her girlish hands have lost their fleshiness, and are now thin and fragile. Finally, when she removes her hat, Magnus recognizes her lovely tawny-coloured hair, but cut short. And is she examining him just as closely, he wonders, comparing his present appearance with that of the adolescent she had fun one day in seducing? But does she even remember him? Has she ever attributed the least importance to him?
Their first encounter does not last long. It is a meeting without warmth, pretty heavy-going in fact, so tense and aggressive is Peggy in asserting her identity as Margaret MacLane. She has come only to discuss terms and arrangements for the lessons she wants to take. Any other topic of conversation is brushed aside. She asks Magnus no personal questions and is no more prepared to allow him to question her about her own past or about her present life and what her plans are. At the end of this strictly professional interview, it is decided that she will come to her teacher twice a week for two one-and-a-half hour lessons, and that she will pay him at the end of each lesson. With a decisive gesture she puts her cloche hat on again, gets to her feet, says goodbye, and quickly walks away without a backward glance.
Sequence
Loneliness whose big heart is clogged with ice
How could you lend me the warmth
You lack and we feel embarrassed
And scared to regret?
Go away, we couldn’t do anything for each other,
At most exchange our ice
And for a moment watch it melt
Under the dark heat that burns our brow.
Jules Supervielle, ‘Sun’, The Innocent Convict
Fragment 19
His student is not particularly gifted for languages, but so eager is she to learn, determined even in her impatience, that she makes fairly rapid progress. As soon as she feels well enough equipped to express herself in German, she uses only that language to communicate with her teacher. And gradually her behaviour relaxes. She becomes less defensive, no longer talks in curt snatches. Finally, she agrees to resume her old nickname, Peggy, as if this linguistic migration made her feel young again, liberated her.
Magnus notices this gradual transformation, and at first his explanation for it is the effort Peggy has to make to construct her sentences correctly, this concentration monopolizing her attention and thereby distracting her from the pathological guardedness she otherwise imposes on herself when speaking to anybody. But he soon suspects some other reason remains hidden behind this rather simplistic analysis, a more complex, obscure reason, related to the tragedy in Peggy’s life, as if Tim’s death had cast a pall over the mother tongue they had in common, the intimate and everyday language of their relationship as a couple, of their love; as if it had blighted that language. In fact she never speaks of this tragedy, and has never mentioned her husband’s name or made the slightest reference to him. Her assiduousness in shrouding in total silence everything about her life with Timothy MacLane makes this silence weirdly penetrating and disturbing. Magnus detects in it the constant cry of inconsolable love.
The lessons turn into increasingly natural and spontaneous conversations that sometimes extend well beyond the time they are supposed to end. They eventually abandon the ritual of the lesson in Magnus’s studio flat, and as soon as the weather is fine they go out for a walk, in town or in the parks, or meet in a museum or café, depending on what they feel like doing that day. But she never suggests meeting at her place.
However, one morning she telephones Magnus to invite him to come to dinner that evening. When she gives him her address, which he did not know, he realizes that she lives close to where he is, although she had led him to believe she lived in another part of town.
A pretty white two-storey house, with tubs of flowers on the door step, and the front door painted dark green. There is no name on the bell, the little nameplate has been removed, which makes Magnus feel suddenly hesitant. He pushes the bell anyway, but it produces no sound. After a few fruitless tries, he knocks on the door. His knocks resonate strangely as if fading away into empty space. Yet the door opens and Peggy, in a pale yellow dress sprinkled with tiny flowers and orange-coloured butterflies, stands in the doorway, smiling.