A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman Page 20

Nobody, at that period, had thought to ask her about the wild and handsome Peter, who had had so much of the peacock in his nature; he had disappeared into another world, leaving only his name behind him. His drab successor had been edited out. Hannah had appeared to the world’s press as a dedicated professional woman, uncomfortable in the limelight. She had worked hard at this lack of image, for she had impulses towards confession, even towards a certain flamboyance. But now she was unsure that discretion would save her. She would have to work harder at dullness if she wished to be thoroughly ignored.

  She resolved, on that evening, to make herself preternaturally dull. She would become so dull that nobody would dare risk pursuing her. She would sacrifice even her genius to obscurity. She would pass off her work as the work of others. She would hide forever behind a reputation of nonentity. Anything, anything rather than an exploration of her relationship with Peter Elsevir. For, as she sat there, she was forced to realize that it was the resurrection of Peter that would alarm her most. He was her secret, her buried skeleton, her murdered sexuality. He must remain entombed at all costs. Let science falter, let discoveries remain undisclosed. She would not publish, she would not divulge. Her name would fade from the records. Others could claim her credits. She would unmake herself and her past.

  She set about this project with characteristic determination. Over the next few years, she nursed and encouraged her young underling, Brian Butterworth, to answer all queries on her behalf, and to take as much credit for their research as he reasonably could. Brian was a fine geneticist but an innocent in worldly matters, and he did not seem to realize that he was being manipulated – and anyway, reasoned Hannah, why should he care? His reputation prospered as hers remained static. Rumours began to circulate around the Institute that Hannah Elsevir was finished, that she had lost it, that Butterworth had been covering for her for a decade, that Butterworth should have got the Nobel. This was satisfactory.

  Less satisfactory were her attempts to appear undistinguished. She had in her youth been possessed of her fair share of vanity, and as she matured had watched her diet and dyed her hair, as middle-aged women do. Now, as she embraced ordinariness, she decided she could eat as much as she liked and let her hair grow grey. The results of this new regime were odd. She put on weight, as she munched her way happily through buttered crumpets, roasted ducks, cream-filled cakes and Belgian chocolates, but the weight suited her. Her body billowed, and she had to buy flowing tents for dresses, but her face glowed with health and wellbeing. Her hair turned not a dull pepper-and-salt but a luxurious and brilliant white. She looked radiant. She had never looked so good. Hannah Elsevir might have lost the track of the hidden gene, people muttered, but she must surely have a secret lover. Who and where was he or she?

  At first Hannah was indifferent to this gossip, as it was so wide of the mark, but in time it made her uneasy. She had become an object of curiosity, which had been far from her intention. But losing weight is more difficult than putting it on, and she found she could not revert to average dimensions. She was condemned to an outsized glow. And with the glow came energy. She had never felt so energetic in her life. She hardly knew what to do with the excess. She worked long hours, alone and unobserved, and she went for long walks. She swam length after length, she cycled round France, she climbed Great Gable. But wherever she went, she was highly visible. Heads turned in restaurants, cars slowed down to inspect her. What was she to do?

  A kind of paranoia possessed her. She sensed that Peter Elsevir was about to resurface in her life, was about to return to undo her. This was all his fault. Could she blot him out, as she had blotted out her second husband? She would try. She began by going through all her papers and photographs and letters, searching for any reference to Peter, and systematically destroying anything that mentioned his name. She hesitated over her marriage certificate and her decree nisi, but they too went into the bin, with the wedding photos, the press cuttings, the snapshots of Peter as a baby. (She shut her eyes as she shredded some of the photographs, as Peter had been a very handsome man, but she shredded them just the same.) Then she turned her attention to public records. Was it possible to rewrite the past? No, it was not. She bought a bottle of Tippex and contemplated taking it to St Catherine’s House, but realized this was folly and would only draw attention to herself; she satisfied herself with inking out his name and date in the Who’s Who in her local public library. But the thought of all the thousands of libraries beyond her reach caused her much disquiet.

  As she lay awake at night in her house by the canal she worried about the depth of the silence that came out of California. It was as though Peter Elsevir had disappeared from Earth. She had already taken to searching through the indexes of all memoirs and biographies that could possibly contain any references to him, and had discovered him lurking here and there – most dangerously, in a hostile and dismissive analysis of the Counter Culture by a critic from the New Right. However, here too, he was laconically dismissed as only briefly notorious. She wrote to the author of this work under a pseudonym, from a false address, requesting any information about the subsequent career or whereabouts of Peter Elsevir, but received a not very helpful answer: he had, according to this source, left England in 1976 (well, she knew that anyway) and had gone to Santa Monica. Two possible contacts were suggested: she could try Elsevir’s ex-wife, the geneticist Hannah Elsevir, or she could try to locate a religious sect called Icon, with which he had once been involved. That was the last that had been heard of him. Maybe he was dead. So many of that generation had died young. (And serve them right, the source implied.)

  Hannah could find no references to this mystery sect. She drew a blank. She even thought of contacting Peter’s family, through a third party, but dismissed this as too dangerous. She leafed her way through Elsevirs in international directories, even rang a few random phone numbers, but found nothing promising. Could she employ a private detective? She thought not.

  Inspiration came to her as she was browsing yet again in the open shelves of the reference and biographical section of her university library – shelves which she had begun to haunt with conspicuous frequency. What about his old school? Peter Elsevir had attended a well-known, historic public school, to the memory of which, like many Englishmen, he had been attached by a sentimental hatred. Perhaps he had, against all the odds, kept in touch with it? Perhaps he still received its old boys’ annual newsletter?

  There was nothing as helpful as an address in the newsletter, but there was, miraculously, a sighting. Her instinct had been right. Peter’s old pal Giles Reader had spotted Peter, by chance, in distant Anatolia. He had been, claimed Giles, in search of God. ‘A much changed figure, of monkish austerity’, wrote a shocked but admiring Giles Reader, himself now a successful financier.

  They had met, it seemed, in a rock church in Goreme, staring at a fresco of the raising of Lazarus. They had exchanged a few words. Peter had not been forthcoming. He had not, he assured Giles, taken a vow of silence, but he claimed to be in semi-retreat, and out of the habit of conversation. Giles had respected this, and had moved on to complete his own theological art tour of Turkey and Syria. (He gave colourful accounts of Saint Eustace chasing the hart of Christ, of Saint Simeon the Stylite stinking on his lonely tower, of the Forty Christian Martyrs of Sebaste shivering and dying in their frozen lake, of the Thirty-five Salman Rushdie Martyrs of Sivas suffocating in their smoky hell.) ‘This is a tormented landscape,’ wrote Giles Reader in the Old Borrovian, ‘a landscape of lonely extremes, of miserable pinnacles and underground cells. It tempts the traveller to hermit’s dreams, to dreams of union with history and God.’ But most of all Giles Reader had remembered the haggard features of his old friend, and his pale blue eyes, ‘which seemed to see beyond this veil and pierce another world’.

  From this unlikely eloquence it seemed that Giles Reader too was changed, and that he had been much shaken by this chance encounter with his old school friend.

  Hannah stare
d long at this account, already three years old, and wondered if she should pursue the cold trail. There was something in Giles’s description that assured her Peter had not merely been passing through Goreme. He had been there for some time, and was perhaps there still. Anyway, it was a beginning. A starting point. She had never seen the eastern regions of Turkey. She had never been east of Ankara. She thought she might visit Cappadocia in the spring. It was said to be an interesting region. She collected guide books and brochures, browsed her way through accounts of sculpted tufa, fairy spires, almond blossom, obsidian, apricots. She resolved to go in April.

  There was pleasure in planning her trip. She could travel in style. She could join an exclusive art tour, as Giles had done. She could take a cruise with an art tour option. She could hire a car. She could hire a car with a driver. She could advertise for a tame archaeologist, or offer to lecture on Vanity in Trebizond.

  She chose to travel alone. Over the past ten years she had taken several packaged excursions, sometimes as paying holidaymaker, sometimes as guest lecturer. She had spoken on her Gene in Kenya and the Galapagos, she had listened to the lectures of others in Egypt and Mexico. And once or twice, on these outings, she had met other single or divorced women whose lives too uneasily echoed her own. On one occasion, to their mutual chagrin, she and the archivist of her university library had found themselves sailing along the Danube together. They had felt obliged to share a table at dinner. They had cramped one another’s style. She did not wish to risk such embarrassed proximity again.

  And so, in April, Hannah Elsevir found herself driving along a straight road of uneven habit past rock and mountain and snow and stream towards the rock caves of Cappadocia, in pursuit of her vanished husband. The scenery was monotonous, or, more accurately, repetitive. Browns, greys, purples; the colours of infertile upland mineral earth. Was it the prevailing drabness that had goaded one or two of the villages through which she passed to paint their houses in a lurid, lively shocking pink and turquoise? Hawks circled high above her, watching from afar. There was not much cover on this barren high plateau. Where had Peter Elsevir gone to ground?

  As she approached Goreme, after spending a night in a town that purported to be or to have been Caesarea, the landscape changed. A steep little winding valley, lined by trees hung with delicate pink bloom, led her to the strange and fantastic displays of shapes that had disturbed Giles Reader. Here there was cover, here there were hiding places. She parked the car at a tourist vantage point and surveyed the amazing panorama beyond and beneath her. And she despaired. For she could see that here a man might hide forever, here a hermit might embrace eternal solitude. Avenging armies might thunder, private detectives might track and pry, but here one could evade all pursuit. Each hollow hill, each towering turret was pierced by natural windows, by peep holes and arrow slits. Flocks of pigeons flew in and out of the thousand watching eyes of the rocks. This was the land of a myriad secrets. Where should her search begin?

  She was booked into a pleasant small hotel in Urgup where her fellow guests included a couple of Bible-reading Americans, a Dutch family party on its Easter break and an Australian art historian. Over drinks in the heavily orientalized Harem Bar (surely she was far enough from home to sit and socialize incognito over a glass or two of raki) she listened to advice about sightseeing. She must visit the Church of the Apple and the Church of the Buckle and Sakli Kilise, the Hidden Church; she must see the Valley of Roses and the Red Dale; and, if not a claustrophobic, the Underground Cities where troglodytes had lived for centuries, safe from persecution.

  Had Peter Elsevir become a troglodyte? Would she meet him peering at her from behind a grid in a wall in an earth-red cavern? Would he roll a stone down at her as she approached his cell?

  For two or three days she explored the region, losing her way amongst its scattered monuments, joining noisy parties with guides, eating alone in wayside cafés. Of an evening, she encouraged the barman and the hotel manageress to gossip about the tourist trade, and about the pilgrims of various faiths who came here – scholarly theologians, fundamentalists both Christian and Islamic, New Age mystics and, quite recently, an angelic choir which had travelled from Arizona to sing for the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. Had they heard, she enquired, of a sect called Icon? Did any of their visitors settle here? Were there still hermits walled up amongst those lunar mountains?

  On the third evening, she was told of an Englishman who lived alone in a little village in the Valley of the Sword. She knew that this was Peter Elsevir.

  The sun shone on her fourth morning. It was the hottest day of the year. Protected from the dazzle by hat and sunglasses she set off to the Valley.

  Peter was sitting at a little yellow-painted wooden table on the pavement outside a small low rock-and-brick shack sticking out from the rock wall. He too wore dark glasses and an old straw hat perched on the back of his head, and he was reading a book. The bright light had brought him out of his hiding place. She parked her hired car across the road, and stared at him. Her heart thumped perilously.

  He looked more beautiful than ever. How could this be true? Years of abuse and indulgence had failed to coarsen him; they had worn him thin and pale, they had refined him into an extraordinary elegance. Was this right, was this fair? His haggardness became him. His hair hung still in Sixties ringlets, its blond-grey touched gold by the sunlight. His nose was long and thin, his cheeks were hollow, his long bony hand languidly turned a page. And he smiled to himself, a secret smile. Would he sense that he was being watched? Dare she approach? Or should she drive away? The neck of his shirt was open to receive the springtime warmth on his thin chest. He had always had smooth, dry, hot skin. Gazing at it, at him, she was overcome by a pang of memory so intense she felt faint. She could feel that skin beneath her fingers. She could smell it from here.

  She opened her car door, and crossed the silent deserted little road towards him, in the blazing noon day. He looked up at her approach. She could not read his eyes through his shades. He shut his book. He smiled, a puzzled, polite, delicate smile. He rose to his feet, taking off his hat to greet her. He had always been a gentleman. How had she forgotten these things?

  She saw the moment of his recognition. He stood there, holding his hat, still smiling.

  ‘Hannah,’ he said. ‘Is that you, Hannah?’

  ‘Peter,’ she said.

  He shook his head slightly, in what seemed but a mild surprise, and gestured towards one of the other little chairs at the table. She sat. He sat.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘You hunted me down. I tried to hide, but you hunted me down.’

  She was ashamed. She could find no words. She had loved this man. The memory of the feel of his hot skin assailed and reproached her. She had to reach out a hand to touch him. She leaned to him across the table, and laid her hand upon his. He burned with a pure dryness.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I came to find where you had hidden.’

  ‘I wonder why,’ he said, smiling a gentle, quizzical smile.

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘I had come to think I had treated you badly.’

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It was I that did not treat you well.’

  They sat there, drinking raki which he had brought forth from his hut. The cloudy chalky white of bittersweet aniseed perfumed the air. They ate black olives, and slices of warm red tomato, and cubes of hard white salted cheese, and sharp dried brown wrinkled plums. Peter Elsevir said that he had embraced a life of simplicity. Not of austerity, but of simplicity.

  He stared at his onetime wife, with measured appreciation.

  ‘You look very fine, Hannah,’ he said, as he poured her another glass of the strong clear spirit and added to it the transforming alchemy of water. ‘You look large and fine. You have done well. You look quite opulent.’

  ‘You too look well,’ said Hannah, thoughtfully. ‘I had not expected you to look so handsome still.’

  They went indoors and lay down together, in the afternoon
heat, on his narrow monk’s bed, and talked. They spoke of their adventures, their discoveries. A fly buzzed in the dry silence. Hannah laid her hand on Peter’s smooth chest, then lowered her head over him and deliberately inhaled his refined odour. He smelled of sun and salt and resin. Preserved, purged, purified. She sighed, deeply. She had done well to track down this man. He was remission, he was forgiveness, he was resurrection. She would leave him now, she would in all probability never see him again in this life, but he would remain with her, her secret virtue, her secret strength. She breathed again, and took in a deep inspiration of her youth, her love, her innocence, her hope. All these things had been good. They were not to be buried, or despised, or forgotten. They held no shame. They were a treasury of great happiness. The past forgave her, and she forgave the past. They lay there, peacefully. Nobody would ever know of this moment. No biographer could record it, no friend could mock it, no footnote could catch and snag and snap at it.

  He smelled of apples and of honey, he smelled of the virtues of the wilderness.

  ‘Peter,’ she said, sleepily, in the afternoon heat. ‘Peter, you smell divine.’

  (1999)

  13

  Stepping Westward: A Topographical Tale

  You must not imagine me as speaking to you in my own person. I speak to you as Mary Mogg, and it is her story that I tell. Imagine me as Mary Mogg, a schoolteacher past the middle of life and slowly nearing retirement. I look forward with a mixture of feelings to my pensioned years, and wonder where to spend them. Mary Mogg – a plain name for a plain person. Plain speaking, I hope I am, and reasonably plain living, though I am not a water drinker. By now I am plain of person, though I was not always so. I would not claim that I was ever pretty, but I was personable enough – had you been told I was plain, you might have found me pretty, and had you been told I was pretty, you might have found me plain. Now I look like what, in part, I am – a sensible, hardworking, somewhat solitary teacher of English Literature, who enjoys long walks in the countryside as an escape from the demands of trying to persuade restless sixteen-year-olds in a comprehensive school to appreciate Wordsworth.