She has no idea, as she walks with him, as she listens to him, as she interjects to say, let’s try it the other way first, that all is not lost. That it won’t be long. That a plan will unfold, a chance will arrive, the script will write itself.
She must, for the moment, keep her expression neutral, guileless, as she walks towards the set, Timou next to her, as people around them adjust their headsets, stand a little straighter.
She has no idea that, a couple of years from now, after this film and halfway into the next, she and Timou and Ari will be sailing the Stockholm archipelago with Timou’s parents in their yacht. A week’s break from filming in the city, a sequel to the movie about infidelity, featuring the same couple five years later. She has been suffering from more headaches, more vision disturbances, flares and flashes, sparks and stray lights, and a doctor has diagnosed acute stress, has told Timou that Claudette needs complete rest for a week. So here they will be, sailing the archipelago.
The Lindstroms haul up the anchor, unfurl the sails, uncoil the ropes, shouting to each other about this way or that way or this wind direction or that compass point. They run up and down the deck in their natty rubber shoes, calling to each other in urgent voices. She sees, as soon as they pull out of the harbour on the first day, that she has made a terrible mistake in agreeing to this trip. She hates the keeling motion of the hull, the water reeling by, the menacing flap of sail, the wild veer of the boom, the way she must fold herself and her child into a corner so that everyone else may run about unimpeded. The ever-present terror that Ari will be swept overboard, into the unforgiving water. She hates the cabins, the low ceilings, the cramped, airless beds. But, as Timou says, where else can they go? Where else will they be unbothered, unrecognised, unless they are at sea, in constant motion, never touching land?
In India, the people on set are making their way towards her, they are speaking, they are holding out their hands, as you might to an animal that may or may not make a run for it.
Not too far away in time, there will be a morning in a boat in Sweden when Ari will wake early, too early, before five a.m., and Claudette will raise herself from the cabin bed, careful not to wake Timou. She will pick up Ari, she will soothe his nightmare and, to chase it away entirely, she will take him up on deck.
Outside, the world is another place. She and Ari emerge from the hatch into a blue-lit dawn so still that she wonders for a moment if something has happened to her hearing in the night. The boat is moored in a channel between three islands, low-lying, wooded, their striated granite sides like the hides of sleeping leviathans.
She looks about her. She had come up here with the idea of showing Ari what the dawn was like, with the idea of letting the rest of them sleep, but as she stands there on deck another notion spreads its wings. She can feel the flex and strain of its feathers, the febrile power of its muscles.
‘Wait here,’ she says to Ari. ‘Don’t move.’
She ducks down again into the humid stillness of the boat, listening. The cabin door to where Timou is sleeping is shut tight. His father snores beyond a second door. From a space under Ari’s bed, she slides a backpack: she has it with her always, never lets it far from her reach. With deft movements, she shuts the door, climbs the ladder, lowers the hatch after her and smiles at her son.
‘Shall we go for a row?’ she says.
So easy to step into the little rowing-boat, to hold out her arms for Ari, to untether themselves, to push off. The plash-suck of the oars through the brackish waters. She keeps an eye on the contours of the yacht. If Timou or his parents were to appear – no harm done. What could be more natural than a woman taking an early-morning row with her son?
But no one appears. No voice calls her back, no shouts are raised. The yacht is motionless, anchor down, curtains shut tight, sails tied. A heron standing on coat-hanger legs in the reeds turns its face towards them, then away, as if to say, I never saw you.
She reflects, then, and only for a moment, on the film she is rowing away from. Half-made it is, half-realised, as yet in that state where it has the potential for perfection, for something outside their reach. Those small inhibitions and compromises have not yet crept in. It will be good – would have been good. She has that feeling. The script has an inner balance, a momentum, an endoskeleton all of its own. Shouldn’t she wait, shouldn’t she finish it? Can she really be considering throwing it up, abandoning it in its unformed state?
She keeps rowing. She rows until the muscles in her arms are aflame, until they have rounded the headland to a different gully, a different set of islands. The little boat comes to rest on a sanded shore where the pebbles are sharp underfoot and each rock is furred with waving green. She lifts Ari out of the boat, then pushes it back into the choppy waters, oars trailing loosely.
‘Let’s walk to the jetty,’ she says to Ari, and he takes her hand, without question, and she turns her head to see the double set of footprints obscured and smoothed by the waves.
By seven a.m., she and Ari have boarded a ferry to Stockholm, she in a hoody and large glasses. By the time Timou wakes, showers, makes coffee, discusses the plan for the day with his parents, wonders where Claudette and Ari might have got to and when they are coming back, they are in a taxi for the airport. By the time Timou sees that the rowing-boat is gone, they are boarding a plane. At around lunchtime, it seems to the Lindstroms that they have been away a long time, even for someone as flighty and capricious as Claudette, but by now it is too late. They have gone, they have escaped, they have found their loophole and have slipped through it. The next day, Timou will receive a single line on his pager: I’m sorry. Cx
In India, however, Claudette is walking across the set, towards the men in headphones. She raises her hand, in a gesture of supplication, of defeat, of admission. Yes, she says to them, I’m ready, I’m coming, here I am.
The Girl in Question
Teresa, Brooklyn, 1944
Teresa had been engaged for a week, her fiancé back in occupied Europe, when a young boy ahead of her on the subway steps slipped and made a grab for the grille under the handrail. She was close enough to see a loose wire slice into his hand, almost heard the clean butcher-swish of metal through flesh.
He cried out, in the voice of a much younger child, crumpling to the ground. People, stepping off the late train, flowed around him and she was crouching beside him, already pulling a scarf out of her pocket-book, when she noticed a man sprinting back up the steps, saying, ‘Jackie, Jackie, what happened?’
Blood was coursing in three neat lines from his finger and into the lap of his raincoat. His face was white, his lips pale under his cap.
‘It’s cut to the bone,’ she said to the man – the boy’s father, she assumed – without taking her eyes off the child, ‘I’m going to tourniquet it.’
‘Are you a nurse?’ the man said.
‘No, a librarian,’ she said, adding, ‘but we do a first-aid course as part of our training.’
She tied the scarf, once, twice, around the boy’s palm and put her hand on his shoulder. The man was hunkered down next to her; she was aware of laced shoes in a dark-caramel leather, a coat that smelt of rain-damp wool, but nothing more. Her attention was entirely on the boy.
‘You’ll be all right,’ she said, as she pulled tight the final knot. ‘Does it hurt much?’
Jackie lifted his eyes to her and nodded. Lips still pale, she noted, in her first-aid manner. His irises were the blackest she had ever seen, entirely swallowing their seeing centres, and brimming with suppressed tears.
‘He’ll need stitches,’ she said, closing the flap on her pocket book, dusting down her coat.
‘You think?’
She and the father raised the boy to a standing position between them.
‘You’ll need to get him to a doctor,’ she said, still looking at the boy.
The man passed a hand through his hair. ‘My sister’s going to kill me.’
‘Your sister?’
‘Jackie’s mother.’
So, Teresa thought, not father: uncle. She finished rearranging her coat and turned to look at the man for the first time. Her intial thought was that he was familiar. I know you, she almost said, don’t I? We’ve met, surely.
She could tell he was having the same thought: his expression was one of confusion, hesitation, tempered by a strange, cautious joy.
She doesn’t know it at the time but she will think about this moment again and again, the two of them standing on the steps of the subway station, a boy between them, a pool of blood at their feet, trains arriving and departing above their heads. She will play it over and over in her head, almost every day, for the rest of her life. When she lies in the bedroom of her apartment with only hours to live, her daughters bickering in the kitchen, her husband in the front room, weeping or raging, her son asleep in the chair next to her, she will think of it again and will know it is perhaps for the last time. After this, she thinks, it will live only in the head of one person, and when he dies, it will be gone. She finds herself hoping that the man will, in a few days’ time, happen to read the death notices in the paper so that he will come to her funeral; she knows he would come, without doubt, that he would sit near the back, that he would bring well-chosen flowers, nothing too gaudy, that he would speak to no one. She knows that people will look at him and wonder who he is, what his connection is with her, and perhaps conclude that he knew her via the library. No one, she knows, would guess his true link with her, not even Daniel, her son, who naps next to her, looking washed up and burned out and too thin and already grieving, who guesses and divines too much about people, always: it is his blessing and his curse.
On the subway steps, Teresa and the boy’s uncle looked at each other, in something close to shock or fear. She was filled with an urge to apologise, she wasn’t sure for what: I didn’t know, she wanted to say, I didn’t realise.
She broke the lock of their gaze first. She fitted her gloves onto her hands, feeling her skin slide against the wrong side of the leather. ‘Have you money for a cab?’ she said, as if to her hands.
‘A cab?’ the man repeated, dazed.
‘To get the boy to a doctor.’
She wasn’t going to look at him again, no, she wasn’t. For the first time, an image of Paul floated through her mind and, in an effort to recall herself to herself, to her life, she clenched the fingers of her left fist to feel the pressure of her engagement ring on the neighbouring digits.
Then she did look and the same sensations hit again, like a row of dominoes toppling into each other: the towering sense of recognition, the disbelief that she doesn’t somehow know him, the ridiculousness that they do not know each other, the impossibility of them not seeing each other again.
‘Yes,’ the man said, delving in his pocket. ‘I have money for a cab.’
‘Good,’ she said, and she thought again of Paul, of his mother, of her parents, her sisters, as if they were all there, on the subway platform perhaps, looking down on her as she stood with this man. She was seized with a terrible dread and it propelled her away from the man and the boy, down the stairs, made her pretend not to hear him yell after her to wait, to hang on a minute. ‘Good luck,’ she threw over her shoulder, and was gone.
She didn’t see him again for a week, for seven days and seven nights. She went to and from work; she cooked supper; she ironed her clothes. Her mother tried to get her to write to Paul, to ask if they could set a date for the wedding during his next leave. Her sisters fought over who would get to be chief bridesmaid. She went to the movies, twice, with her friend Maureen. She received a bundle of letters from Paul, some dated two months previously and held up in some mysterious wartime net; she read some of them; the others she put in the tin box under her bed. She locked herself into the bathroom for hours on end, until her brother hammered on the door to let him in, for pity’s sake, a man has to go. And at the library she conducted a search about love at first sight.
Teresa was not a romantic. She was not what she thought of as an airy-fairy type of girl. She had never dated anyone other than Paul and when news of their engagement had been made public, she discovered, in people’s expressions of surprise, that it had been expected she would never marry. She’d had the misfortune to be born tall in a time when women were meant to be petite, neat, fit nicely under the arm of an accompanying man. As a newborn, her mother was fond of telling anyone who would listen, she wouldn’t fit into the crib; her feet had stuck out of the bottom, ‘like ninepins’.
Who could have predicted, then, that one of the most eligible boys in the neighbourhood, Paul Sullivan, whose parents ran a general store on Vinegar Hill, would start to pay court to the bookish, lanky eldest daughter of the Hanrahans when he was home on leave from fighting in Europe? She didn’t, at first, understand what he wanted: she assumed he was asking her to the movies, to walk back from mass because he wanted to date one of her sisters. But, no, it seemed it was her he wanted and when he sank to his knees in the middle of Brooklyn Bridge on a drizzly evening, how could she have done anything other than nod, turn herself slowly, like a speeding ship, towards that alternative destination of wife-and-mother to escape her predicted role of librarian and maiden aunt?
In her lunch-hour, she sat in the park and thumbed through Romeo and Juliet but found nothing in there to alleviate her turmoil: all that palm-to-palm stuff and the holy kiss seemed strained and constructed. It hadn’t felt like that at all. It was as if someone had reached into her with an electrical wire and given her such a jolt that her heart had been obeying a new rhythm ever since. She tried Anna and Vronsky’s meeting but became distracted by how silly and unworthy of Anna’s love she always found the count. Over the following days, she took with her to her park bench Donne, Browning, Byron, the Brontës and Christina Rossetti. But nothing came close to what she had felt on the subway steps.
A week since the meeting and she found, in an anthology of love letters, something by Hazlitt: ‘I do not think that what is called Love at first sight is so great an absurdity as it is sometimes imagined to be. We generally make up our minds beforehand to the sort of person we should like … and when we meet with a complete example of the qualities we admire, the bargain is soon struck.’
She raised her head, tilted it one way then the next, as if the words were the ball bearings of a puzzle, seeking a resting place in her skull. Not so great an absurdity, she murmured to herself, and something touched her shoulder and there was Mr Wilks, the head librarian, saying that someone was here to see her. Teresa stood and smoothed her hair, and tried to breathe above the cantering of her heart because she knew who it would be – she’d known he would come, somehow and soon.
And there he was, by the enquiry desk, without a hat this time but still in his wool coat, a package gripped in his hands. Again, they looked at each other in confusion and Teresa wondered how this had come about, what had happened there on the steps as Jackie sliced open his finger.
‘For you,’ he said, breaking the spell, holding out the package to her: brown paper, knotted twine.
‘What is it?’ she said, as she took it.
He grinned. ‘A scarf. A new one. Yours was –’
‘Oh, really, you needn’t have. I—’
‘– all stained and ruined, and my sister said it was the least we could do.’
They both took a pause, looking away, then back at each other. One of the elderly librarians, behind them, cleared her throat, snapped shut a drawer.
‘How is your nephew?’ Teresa asked, rather formally.
‘Jackie?’ He grinned again. ‘Fighting fit. Got six stitches and couldn’t be more proud of them.’
The colleague behind her coughed again and Teresa, not knowing what to say next, where to take things, said, ‘Shall I walk you out?’
Outside the library, as the revolving door released her into the winter air, he was there; he took her hand, he guided her to one side so that they stood out of the way of people going abo
ut their business, out from under the lit portico, so that a light rain fell on them, flecking his face and lashes.
‘I don’t even know your name,’ he said urgently, at their new proximity.
‘Teresa,’ she said. ‘Teresa Hanrahan. Yours?’
‘Johnny Demarco.’ He squeezed her fingers in his. ‘It is,’ he said, with a smile on his lips, ‘very nice to meet you.’
‘Thank you for the scarf.’
‘I hope you like it. I chose it. It’s a little brighter than your other one but I thought, hey, she needs something to bring out those blue eyes of hers. You wouldn’t believe the trouble I’ve been to to deliver it. I’ve been to every library in Brooklyn today, looking for the girl in question, just to—’
‘I’m engaged,’ Teresa said.
He gave her a long look. ‘Huh,’ he said. He stepped sideways and slumped against the library wall. ‘Huh,’ he said again. He took out a lighter, put a cigarette in his mouth and stared up into the darkening sky. ‘Well,’ he said, inhaling, ‘it figures, I guess.’
‘I didn’t …’ Teresa began ‘… I don’t …’
He let out a short, mirthless laugh. ‘Me too, actually.’ He took a drag of his cigarette. ‘I mean, sort of. Almost.’
‘Oh,’ she said, trying to master the surge of grief, of jealousy rising in her chest.
Johnny Demarco flung his cigarette to the ground and turned towards her. ‘So, what do you want to do?’
It was four years before she saw him again. Brooklyn was a big place and the Italians and the Irish, although celebrating the same festivals, the same masses, had different parks, different streets, different shops.
Paul said they should open the store on Easter Monday; his mother disagreed, as evidenced by the thin line of her mouth, the heft with which she slammed down the skillet onto the stove. Teresa had no opinion on the shop’s opening times – she couldn’t have cared less: she wanted only to go into the next room, to place her head on the cool pillow, pull up the covers and sink into the novel she had borrowed last week and of which she had managed only fifteen pages, the children and the store keeping her so busy.