Joanna Kavenna - Inglorious

Things to pack, she thought. She went on weighing things up with her head in the consoling softness of the pillow. A warm pair of shoes. A jumper. Your jeans. Socks and other small items. A shirt. Buy them some presents. Take a newspaper. Ask Andreas. But she thought she would phone him from the Lakes. She would try her father first, over lunch, and then she would go away and phone Andreas with the soothing distance of a few hundred miles between them. Through the window she saw it was a tempestuous day. The night had blasted at the clouds, tearing them into vapour rags. Everything was ragged, the trees were bowed. Rain was falling in thick lines and leaves were gusting along the pavement. She turned to Andreas and kissed his head. He moved slightly and said, ‘ Was? What?’ She kissed him again, and he settled. She gathered herself in the half-light, reaching for her watch, twisting it onto her wrist. There was a plant on the table, something like an orchid, deep red. Behind it she saw faint rows of books. It was too dark to see the titles on the spines. She heard someone walking along the corridor outside; she listened to their footsteps on the stairs.

*

Slowly, she moved into the bathroom and shut the door softly behind her. She sat on the toilet, sluicing her mouth with toothpaste at the same time. Then she flushed the toilet and splashed her face with water. Still much the same, she thought, with a glance at the mirror. She heard the loud gurgle of the pipes and wondered if that would wake him. Then she took a raincoat from the cupboard in the hall, and left a note. Andreas, thanks so much for dinner. I’ve borrowed a raincoat. The oldest one you had. She tore that up. Andreas, my dear young man. I’ve gone away for a couple of days. Good luck with learning your fucks. Love, Rosa . That wasn’t quite right either. Andreas, my dear young pup. Thanks for dinner. I’m going away for a couple of days. Rosa. Rosa X. Rosa xxx. Back soon, Rosa x. So she took that one and folded it into her pocket. Andreas, thanks for dinner. Sorry to go without saying goodbye — I had to catch a train. Will call you on return. Took a raincoat — the oldest you have (I hope!), R x.

*

Outside she crossed the bridge and stepped under the Westway, alert to the morning clash of tyres and steel. She surrendered herself to the wind and the rain. Fumbling with the raincoat, she walked with her head bowed. HEY LYLA: A STAR’S ABOUT TO FALL; she saw the words on a lashed and rain-licked wall. She turned at a shop selling kimonos and passed on to Golborne Road. Mod’s Hair Salon was already busy, and in the window a woman was going blonde. The shops had their fronts open, and their shelves were filled with ornamental tagines. The street smelt of fish and coffee. A woman passed by wearing a sealskin coat. And there was a woman walking slowly in a green jellaba. A man sat on a bench in his shop. He was selling old ceramic baths and antiquarian mirrors. He had on a ski hat and shorts, and he was holding a cigarette and a mobile phone. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said, ‘right, yeah’, as she passed him. From the upper windows of a building a round of applause broke out. Thank you, thank you all very much, thought Rosa. HEY LYLA: A STAR’S ABOUT TO FALL. With the stone turrets of the Trellick Tower above her, she went to Café O’Porto and ordered coffee and custard tarts. It lifted her mood. She found a discarded paper and rustled through it. She ate a couple of tarts and sipped her coffee. She whistled a tune and wrote: I’d not mention a man, I’d take no account of him, if he were the richest of men, no matter if he had a huge number of good things, unless his prowess in war were beyond compare. She paused, and then she gripped her pen again. To the Guardians of the Laws, with my apologies for behaving so badly. She stared around at the others: a woman feeding a custard tart to her child; a man with a hacking bronchial cough, drinking greedy gulps of coffee in between his fits. To her left was another man, this one with a tie and an edgy stare. She recognised that look, the look of a man who had worked hard already, and would keep going all day. He was the last man to leave every evening, devoted to his four feet of office space. It had made him toad-like, flabby and flattened. There was a crowd who knew the café owner, speaking Portuguese into a cloud of smoke. The toad-faced man was assessing her with a beady glare. He had pushed his chair against the window and was leaning back, surveying the room. The room, or her? She was sure he had been staring. She was so certain that she was on the verge of turning round and asking him what he wanted. YOU! What do you want? How can I help you? Is there anything I can do? She knew she was being absurd, at one level she was quite lucid and aware that this was mental rambling, superfluous, even preposterous. She understood that a man is allowed to stare. Why look at me? she was thinking nonetheless. I can assure you I’m as befogged as you are! From my vantage point, even with the width of idle months between my former self and this person you see before you, I still have nothing to say on the compelling subject of TEMP . She was trying to clear her thoughts. Staring is quite common, she thought. There’s nothing to stop him, no law set against those who stare. He stared at you, then he stared at the man with the distressing cough. He stared at the counter where the cakes are, at the women talking, at his newspaper. He’s been staring all over the place. No doubt you are staring too, she said to herself. If she was honest she had given a good eyeing to the woman with a child. So she bowed her head and looked at her custard tart. She thought of the things she had to do. She gripped her pen and began a list.

Get a job (embrace your inner toad)

Wash your clothes

Phone Liam and ask about the furniture

Get a place to stay

Go to the bank and negotiate an extension on your overdraft

Meet your father

Explain to Andreas

Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities.

Read The Golden Bough, The Nag-Hammadi Gospels, The Upanishads, The Koran, The Bible, The Tao, the complete works of E. A. Wallis Budge

Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the rest

Buy Judy and Will some presents

Catch a train

Go to the Lakes

Understand the notion of participation

Be kind to their children

Stop thinking about Liam and Grace

The fifth combination?

Be bloody bold and TEMP

Retrieve the plot. Guard it well

Stop writing lists

Go to your father and beg! she wrote. Then get out of here for a night. Even a night, that would kick-start her conscience. She really might come back galvanised and determined to stop wasting her time. She only needed a change of scene, a simple remedy, age-old, well-practised, generally advocated. A nice dose of difference. Dr Kamen had been ragging on about holidays, taking it easy, others had said the same, Grace and Whitchurch and even the other day Jess had said it, though that had been a feint to get her out of the flat. Now, Rosa was quietly optimistic. A few gaudy fells, a few evenings spent listening to the soft sounds of the English countryside, a pub lunch, a change of mode, and she would send off applications while she was there. She would write to people who might want an amanuensis, someone roughly literate to proofread their work. She would try to find that sort of job while she was away. If not, she would seek out a good office and die quietly into it. She would learn to love the paper shredder, the coffee break, the woman with the squeaky voice who delivered sandwiches, the whirr of the lift running people up and down the building, the tea-stained kitchen, the photocopier, the round robins and office games, the squabbles over territories no one really wanted anyway, the conspicuous waste of time, the death in life! She would learn to love it all. You! You the toad-face, over there! I’ll come back with you, whenever you like. Just name the day and we’ll walk hand in hand, back to the open-plan office, and I’ll never ask WHAT THE TEMP again. Just tell me when. Now she told herself to stop. There was still Madame la Braze, who hadn’t called her yet. She would sort a few things out. Andreas, for one. She would certainly write to Andreas from the Lakes. Safely ensconced, far away, she would come clean. She would explain everything and ask him for a place to stay. Oh God, she thought, shaking her head. Tell him you’re a despairing toad. That you have dyspepsia. As long as she kept limping round to Andreas, she would never really resolve anything. But it was absurd to call him a distraction. He was so tranquil. Whenever she thought of him she felt a stabbing sense of guilt. Guilt or lust, she couldn’t quite tell. She desired him even as she sat there, and that confused her. She thought of his body — perfectly rounded buttocks, hair-downed legs, straight back, smooth skin, long nose, brown eyes — it amused her that she saw him buttocks up, first the moon-like rounds of his arse and then the rest. Cerebral , she thought. Now she wanted to call him. With Liam they suffered from platonic drift. By the end they were lying side by side in a sexless bed. Still, with Andreas she felt the sort of basic passion she had entirely forgotten. It recalled her youth when she was, she now saw, green in judgement but perfectly handsome in an unformed way. She wanted to go back to his flat and lie in bed with him. She wanted to touch his skin. Would that be so bad, she thought? Still she couldn’t decide, so she stayed there writing in her notebook.