Slow Man Read online

  A repeat visit. That is not what he wants. Sometime in the future, perhaps, but not now. What he wants right now is an assurance that the story he has been presented with is the true story: that the woman who came to his flat was truly the woman he saw in the lift; that her name is truly Marianna; that she truly lives with her crookbacked mother, her husband having abandoned her because of her affliction; and so forth. What he wants is assurance that he has not been duped.

  For there is an alternative story, one that he finds all too easy to make up for himself. In the alternative story the Costello woman would have located big-bottomed Marianna, known otherwise as Natasha, known also as Tanya, and hailing from Moldavia via Dubai and Nicosia, in the Yellow Pages. On the telephone she would have coached her in a charade. ‘My brother-in-law, you will need to know,’ she would have told her, ‘has certain eccentricities. But then, what man does not have his little eccentricities, and what can a woman do, if she wants to get by, but find ways of accommodating them? My brother-in-law’s chief eccentricity is that he prefers not to see the woman he is engaged with. He prefers the realm of the imaginary; he prefers to keep his head in the clouds. Once upon a time he was head over heels in love with a woman named Marianna, an actress. What he wants from you, and has in an indirect way asked me to convey to you, is that you should present yourself as Marianna the actress, wearing certain accoutrements or properties which I shall provide. That is to be your role; and for enacting that role he will pay you. Do you understand?’ ‘Sure,’ Natasha or Tanya would have said, ‘but outcalls is extra.’ ‘Outcalls is extra,’ Costello would have agreed: ‘I’ll be sure to remind him of that. One last word. Be nice to him. He lost a leg recently, in a road accident, and is not what he used to be.’

  Might that be the real story, give or take a detail here and there, behind the visit of the so-called Marianna? Were the dark glasses worn to hide not the fact that she was blind but the fact that she was not blind? When she trembled, was it less with nervousness than with the effort of holding back her giggles as the man with the stocking around his head fumbled at her underwear? We have crossed the threshold. Now we can proceed to higher and better things. What a solemn fool! She must have laughed in the taxi all the way home.

  Was Marianna Marianna or was Marianna Natasha? That is what he must find out in the first instance; that is what he must squeeze out of Costello. Only when he has his answer may he turn to the deeper question: Does it matter who the woman really was; does it matter if he has been duped?

  ‘You treat me like a puppet,’ he complains. ‘You treat everyone like a puppet. You make up stories and bully us into playing them out for you. You should open a puppet theatre, or a zoo. There must be plenty of old zoos for sale, now that they have fallen out of fashion. Buy one, and put us in cages with our names on them. Paul Rayment: canis infelix. Marianna Popova: pseudocaeca (migratory). And so forth. Rows and rows of cages holding the people who have, as you put it, come to you in the course of your career as a liar and fabulator. You could charge admission. You could make a living out of it. Parents could bring their children at weekends to gawp at us and throw peanuts. Easier than writing books that no one reads.’

  He pauses, waiting for her to rise to the bait. She is silent.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ he goes on – he was not angry when he began this tirade, he is not angry now, but there is certainly a pleasure in letting himself go – ‘what I don’t understand is, seeing that I am so dull, so unresponsive to your schemes, why you persist with me. Drop me, I beseech you, let me get on with my life. Write about this blind Marianna of yours instead. She has more potential than I will ever have. I am not a hero, Mrs Costello. Losing a leg does not qualify one for a dramatic role. Losing a leg is neither tragic nor comic, just unfortunate.’

  ‘Don’t be bitter, Paul. Drop you, take up Marianna: maybe I won’t, maybe I will. Who knows what one may not be driven to.’

  ‘I am not bitter.’

  ‘Of course you are. I can hear it in your voice. You are bitter, and who can blame you, after all that has happened to you.’

  He gathers his crutches. ‘I can do without your sympathy,’ he says curtly. ‘I am going out now. I don’t know when I will be back. When you leave, lock the door behind you.’

  ‘If I do leave I will certainly lock the door. But I don’t think that is what I will be doing. I can’t tell you how much I have been longing for a hot bath. So that is what I will treat myself to, if you don’t mind. Such a luxury these days.’

  It is not the first time the Costello woman has refused to explain herself. But her latest evasion both irritates and disturbs him. Maybe I won’t, maybe I will. Is it as provisional as that, her interest in him? May Marianna, rather than he, turn out to be the chosen one? Setting aside the shadowy portrait session, of which he can truly remember nothing, were their two encounters, the first in the lift, the second on the sofa, episodes in the life-story not of Paul Rayment but of Marianna Popova? Of course there is a sense in which he is a passing character in the life of this Marianna or of anyone else whose path he crosses, just as Marianna and everyone else are passing characters in his. But is he a passing character in a more fundamental sense too: someone on whom the light falls all too briefly before it passes on? Will what passed between himself and Marianna turn out to be simply one passage among many in Marianna’s quest for love? Or might the Costello woman be writing two stories at once, stories about characters who suffer a loss (sight in the one case, ambulation in the other) which they must learn to live with; and, as an experiment or even as a kind of professional joke, might she have arranged for their two life-lines to intersect? He has no experience of novelists and how they go about their business, but it sounds not implausible.

  In the public library, under A823.914, he finds a whole row of books by Elizabeth Costello: The Fiery Furnace, The House on Eccles Street in several well-thumbed copies, To the Friendly Isles, Tango with Mr Dunbar, The Roots of Time, Mannerly; also a rather severe dark-blue volume with the title A Constant Flame: Intent and Design in the Novels of Elizabeth Costello. He scans the index. No mention of a Marianna or a Marijana; no entry for blindness.

  He pages through The House on Eccles Street. Leopold Bloom. Hugh Boylan. Marion Bloom. What is wrong with her? Can she not make up characters of her own?

  He replaces the book, takes up The Fiery Furnace, reads at random.

  He rolls the plasticine between his palms until it is warm and supple, then pinches it into little animal figures: birds, toads, cats, dogs with pricked-up ears. On the table top he sets the figures in a half-circle, bending their necks back as if howling at the moon, or baying, or croaking.

  It is old plasticine, from his last Christmas stocking. The pristine cakes of brick red, leaf green, sky blue have bled into each other by now and become a leaden purple. Why, he wonders – why does the bright grow dull and the dull never bright? What would it need to make the purple fade away and the red and blue and green emerge again, like chicks from a shell?

  Why, why? Why does she ask a question and then not give the answer? The answer is simple: the red and the blue and the green will never return because of entropy, which is irreversible and irrevocable and rules the universe. Even a literary person ought to know that, even a lady novelist. From the multifarious to the uniform and never back again. From the perky chick to the old hen dead in the dust.

  He flips to the middle of the book. She could not stay with a man who was tired all the time. It was hard enough to hold her own tiredness at bay. She had only to stretch out beside him in the too familiar bed to feel the weariness begin to seep out of him and wash over her in a colourless, odourless, inert tide. She had to escape! Now!

  A Marion but no Marianna. No blind folk, as far as he can see, no amputees. He snaps The Fiery Furnace shut. He is not going to expose himself to any more of the colourless, odourless, insert, and depressive gas given off by it
s pages. How on earth did Elizabeth Costello get to be a popular author, if popular is what she is?

  There is a photograph on the jacket: a younger Elizabeth Costello wearing a windbreaker, standing against what appears to be the rigging of a yacht. Her eyes are screwed up against the light, her skin is deeply tanned. A seawoman? Is there such a word, or must a seawoman be a mermaid, as a seahorse, cheval marin, is a fish? Not exactly handsome, but probably better looking in middle age than in youth. Nonetheless, a certain plainness, even blankness, to her. Not his type. Not any man’s type, maybe.

  Contemporary World Authors, in the reference section of the library, has a brief biography together with the same nautical photograph. Born Melbourne, Australia, 1928. Lengthy residence in Europe. First book 1957. List of awards, prizes. Bibliography but no plot summaries. Twice married. A son and a daughter.

  Seventy-two! As old as that! What is she doing, sleeping on park benches? Has her mind begun to ramble? Is she dotty? Might that explain everything? Ought the son and daughter to be brought into the picture? Is it his duty to track them down? Please come at once. Your mother has taken up residence with me, a complete stranger, and refuses to leave. I am at my wits’ end. Remove her, commit her, do whatever is called for as long as I am liberated.

  He returns to the flat. Costello is not there, but on the coffee table lies her notebook. Quite possibly she has left it out intentionally. If he takes a peek it will be another victory for her. Nevertheless.

  She writes in fat black ink, in large free-flowing script, just a few words to a line. He pages to the most recent entry. Dark dark dark, he reads. They all go into the dark, the vacant interlunar spaces.

  He leafs back.

  Keening over the body, he reads. Davening, the word underlined. Rocking stiffly back and forth at the bedside, her hands over her ears, her eyes wide open, unblinking, as though afraid she might miss the moment when, like a spurt of gas, the soul will leave the body and rise through the layers of air, one after another, to the stratosphere and beyond. Outside the window, sunshine, birdsong, the usual. She is locked into the rhythm of her grief like a long-distance runner. A marathon of grief. If no one comes to coax her away she will go on thus all day. Yet not once does she touch him (‘him’, his body). Why not? The horror of cold flesh? Is horror after all stronger than love? Or perhaps, in among the welter of grief, she has steeled herself not to try to hold him back. She has said her goodbyes, goodbyes are over with. Goodbye: God be with you. And then, over the page: Dark dark dark . . .

  If he reads back far enough, it will no doubt become clearer who the grieving woman is, whose the corpse. But the imp of curiosity seems to be deserting him. He is not sure he wants to know more. Something unseemly about this writing, the fat ink sprawling carelessly over the tramlines; something impious, provocative, uncovering what does not belong in the light of day.

  Is the whole notebook like that: a provocation, an affront to decency? He pages cautiously through it from the beginning. For long stretches he cannot stitch the entries together. She writes as if she were hurrying through some story she had overheard, compressing the narrative, cutting the dialogue short, jumping impatiently from one scene to the next. But then a phrase catches his eye: One leg blue, one red. Ljuba? It can only be Ljuba. Harlequin, crazy-coloured. In Germany, brindle cows are the crazy ones, the moonstruck, the ones that jump over the moon. And the little dog laughs. Bring in a dog, a little mutt that wags its tail to all and sundry, yapping, eager to please? PR’s reaction: ‘I may be doggy, but not to that extent, surely!’ Mutt and Jeff.

  He snaps the book shut. If his ears are not burning they might as well be. It is as he feared: she knows everything, every jot and tittle. Damn her! All the time he thought he was his own master he has been in a cage like a rat, darting this way and that, yammering to himself, with the infernal woman standing over him, observing, listening, taking notes, recording his progress.

  Or is it worse than that, incomparably worse, so much worse that the mind threatens to buckle? Is this what it is like to be translated to what at present he can only call the other side? Is that what has happened to him; is that what happens to everyone?

  Gingerly he settles into an armchair. If this does not amount to a big moment, a Copernican moment, then what does? The greatest of all secrets may just have unveiled itself to him. There is a second world that exists side by side with the first, unsuspected. One chugs along in the first for a certain length of time; then the angel of death arrives in the person of Wayne Blight or someone like him. For an instant, for an aeon, time stops; one tumbles down a dark hole. Then, hey presto, one emerges into a second world identical with the first, where time resumes and the action proceeds – flying through the air like a cat, the throng of curious onlookers, the ambulance, the hospital, Dr Hansen, et cetera – except that one now has Elizabeth Costello around one’s neck, or someone like her.

  Quite a leap to make, from the word D-O-G in a notebook to life after death. A wild surmise. He could be wrong. More than likely he is wrong. But whether he is wrong or right, whether what in the most hesitant of spirits he calls the other side is truth or delusion, the first epithet that occurs to him, typed out letter by letter behind his eyelids by the celestial typewriter, is puny. If dying turns out to be nothing but a trick that might as well be a trick with words, if death is a mere hiccup in time after which life goes on as before, why all the fuss? Is one allowed to refuse it – refuse this deathlessness, this puny fate? I want my old life back, the one that came to an end on Magill Road.

  He is exhausted, his mind is reeling, he has merely to close his eyes and he will sink into sleep. But he does not want to be lying here inert and exposed when the Costello woman comes back. He has begun to be aware of a certain quality about her, vulpine rather than canine, that has nothing to do with her appearance but that makes him nervous and that he does not trust at all. He can all too easily imagine her prowling from room to room in the dark, sniffing, on the hunt.

  He is still sitting in the armchair when he is lightly shaken. Before him stands not the vulpine Mrs Costello but Marijana Jokić, the woman with the red head-scarf who is in some way (he cannot for the moment remember how, his mind is too befuddled) the root or source or font of all these complications.

  ‘Mr Rayment, you OK?’

  ‘Marijana! Yes, of course. Of course I am OK.’ But that is not the truth. He is not OK. His mouth tastes foul, his back is stiff, and he hates being surprised. ‘What time is it?’

  Marijana ignores the question. She sets down an envelope on the coffee table beside him. ‘Your cheque,’ she says. ‘He say give it back, we don’t accept money. My husband. He say he don’t accept other man’s money.’

  Money. Drago. Another universe of discourse. He must collect his wits. ‘And what about Drago himself?’ he says. ‘What about Drago’s education?’

  ‘Drago can go to school like before, he don’t need boarding school, my husband say.’

  The child Ljuba fingers her mother’s skirt absent-mindedly, sucking on her thumb. Behind her the Costello woman glides discreetly into the room. Was she here in the flat while he was sleeping?

  ‘Would you like me to speak to your husband?’ he says.

  Vigorously Marijana shakes her head. She could not imagine anything worse, more stupid.

  ‘Well, let’s give some thought to what to do next. Perhaps Mrs Costello has a word of advice to offer.’

  ‘Hello Ljuba,’ says Elizabeth Costello, ‘I’m a friend of your mother’s, you can call me Elizabeth or Aunt Elizabeth. Sorry to hear of your problem, Marijana, but I am new on the scene, I don’t think I should interfere.’

  You interfere all the time, he thinks venomously. Why are you here if not to interfere?

  With a sigh that is almost a cry, Marijana throws herself down on the sofa. She shields her eyes; the tears are coming now. The child takes up her post beside her.


  ‘Such good boy,’ she says. ‘Such good boy.’ Sobs overtake her. ‘He want to go so much!’

  In another world, a world in which he was young and whole and his breath sweet, he would gather Marijana in his arms, kiss away her tears. Forgive me, forgive me, he would say. I have been unfaithful to you, I don’t know why! It happened only once and will never happen again! Admit me to your heart and I will take care of you, I swear, until the day I die!

  The child’s dark eyes bore into him. What have you done to my mother? she seems to say. It’s all your fault!

  And indeed it is his fault. Those dark eyes see into his heart, see his secret desire, see that in his innermost this first glimpse of a rift between man and wife makes him exult, not grieve. Forgive me too! he says mutely, looking straight into the child’s eyes. I mean no harm, I am in the grip of a force beyond me!

  ‘We have plenty of time,’ he says in his most sober voice. ‘There is still a week before applications close for next year. I will guarantee the school fees; I will get my solicitor to write a letter guaranteeing them, then it will not seem so personal. Speak to your husband again, once he has calmed down. I am sure you will be able to bring him around, you and Drago together.’

  Marijana shrugs hopelessly. She says something to the child that he does not understand; the child trots out of the room and comes back with a handful of tissues. Noisily Marijana blows her nose. Tears, mucus, snot: the less romantic side of sorrow, the underside. Like the underside of sex: stains, smells.

  Is she aware of what happened here, on the very sofa where she sits? Can she sense it?

  ‘Or,’ he continues, ‘if it has become a matter of honour, if your husband finds it impossible to accept a loan from another man, perhaps Mrs Costello can be persuaded to write the cheque, acting as an intermediary in this good cause.’