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Comma Press - David Constantine

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108 pages

English

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Description

Following the death of her husband, a literary biographer resolves to turn her professional skills to the task of piecing together aspects of his life, in particular, a journey he made years before they met a hitchhike through France that he had tried to tell her about in the last few hours of his life. Picking her way through bundles of letters and postcards from five decades earlier, Katrin begins to uncover a life she knew nothing of, and an expedition that exceeded anything her professional, biographical subjects ever undertook. Think of me then, her husband beseeched her, at the roadside, thumb in the air, gaily setting forth, never forget me then. David Constantine's passionate tale of grief and rediscovery marks only the second foray into novel writing for an author whose short fiction has won international acclaim. A great work of literature, he reminds us, is never finished, it is a living and moving thing, alive in all its parts in every fibre, designed to be inexhaustible and to outlive. As Katrin's journey proves, the lives of those we love are similarly inexhaustible, they keep on offering up new revelations, possessing the people they leave behind, and forever needing to be re-written.

Informations

Publié par	Comma Press
Date de parution	26 novembre 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781910974698
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Comma Press.

www.commapress.co.uk

Copyright © remains with the author 2015.

All rights reserved.

The moral rights of the contributors to be identified as the Author of this Work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges assistance from Arts Council England.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18

Translations
About the Author
By the same author
1
Then Eric said, I don’t want to be like that colleague of yours, Dennis What’s-his-name, I don’t want to be like him, clinging on, nothing else in his head every minute of every day, nothing only clinging on. I don’t call that living when all you think about is staying alive. He halted, they looked at one another, and the man Eric did not want to be like appeared in the cold gap in their conversation, the man whose only thought was not to die, who had no other interest, no other conversation, nobody else’s doings, hopes, fears, interested him in the least, nothing in the world outside himself, no past, present or future, nothing, all he thought about and spoke about was how not to die. He trawled the web for cures and the last he hit upon was carrot juice. He carried a large bottle of it in his briefcase and took a glass on the hour every hour in whatever company and wherever he happened to be. Nothing else, no other food or drink. Just in time, he said, I’ve found the one thing that will work. To his wife, family, friends, colleagues, strangers he became a living horror, his black eyes, black as anthracite, burning brilliantly in his sunken face. And that was what he was remembered for: his final year when he thought and spoke of nothing but staying alive, the potion supposed to cure him dyed him through and through, and his frightened eyes shone blackly from the holes in his yellow head. No, said Katrin, I don’t want you to be like poor Dennis, of course I don’t. But you can’t just give up. I haven’t, Eric answered. And I promise you I won’t. But it was as though some current or the tide had felt for him, found him, and was beginning to exert an attraction no amount of love would be able to withstand. He would turn, sink, and be taken away from her, far far away, quite beyond her reach. The onset of that remoteness showed in his face sometimes like the vagueness in the face of a pregnant woman, the look of belonging elsewhere, a look Katrin could not bear. He took her hand across the breakfast table. I can’t complain, he said, I’ve had a good life, only two years short of my three score years and ten, that’s not young, think of the people at school and university with me, dead already several of them, ten, twenty, forty years ago, let alone the poets, painters and musicians you write about, so many of them dying so very young. I can’t complain.
It was early January, the low sun entering lit up their kitchen in a strange orange light. The strangeness horrified her, all their familiar things, his mother’s dresser and the blue china on its shelves, his cookery books, his saxophone leaning in the corner by the music stand, she wanted them to stay exactly as they were, familiar and ordinary, let the room be always as it was, day after day, without effulgence and transfiguration, no lurid sunlight entering with the lie that sorrow is beautiful and fit to live in. Katrin stood up and began to clear the table. Eric watched her. Since the diagnosis, her face had altered, it had set hard into the struggle. I will age her, he thought bitterly, I will close up the years between us. She had taken the breakfast things to the sink and stood there turned away from him, looking out into the small garden at the birds she fed. They would die when they were due to die but in the meantime, in a wintry sun, they flitted, settled, flitted, each after its fashion, in their various lovely colourings, restless, quick, all hungry. There was grey in her short black hair. Sadness lay on her neck and shoulders, visibly heavy. He went and stood by her, embracing her. He kissed her neck. Will you work at home today? he asked. I shall go out and do my shopping. I thought we’d have a cassoulet. And I’ve found some very nice wine. You’d like that wouldn’t you? She nodded. Yes, I’ll stay home. Yes, I’d like your cassoulet and your wine.
But first he would go out into the rather dark conservatory along the north side of the house, and at the far end of it, in his smoke-hole, he would read the paper, do the crossword and smoke a cigarette. At the start of their marriage she had hoped this banishment when he wished to smoke would cure him of it. Instead, he grew to love the place and the routine. He sat there among her plants, did the crossword quickly, sat there contentedly reading, smoking, thinking. And she had thought he might give up the habit, to please her! She hated the smell of it on his clothes, on his breath, in his hair, his beard, his flesh. But he shrugged and smiled, those were the facts, nothing could be done about them, he mused affectionately over her and over himself, they were as they were, what more was there to say? His cancer was not a smoker’s after all, so why stop smoking now? He liked the habit, it made a large part of his contentment among her plants and seeds, the half hour after breakfast, he enjoyed it, and Katrin would surely not begrudge him that uncomplicated pleasure.
Katrin left the dishes – Eric would do them when he came in from his shopping – and climbed two flights of stairs to her study in what must once have been the maid’s room, under the eaves. She had no desire to work. If she turned the computer on at all it would be to dispatch the most necessary emails as quickly as possible and to study online a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet a colleague had recommended as efficacious when all else failed. I can complain, she thought. If I were your age it might be bearable. You have had forty-five years of your life, your life with others, that I haven’t had. All very well for you to say you can’t complain. What about me when you leave me here, aging alone and we were never young together? But that was a thought which, even as it formed, more or less consciously she pushed to the back of her mind. Let it lodge there, if it must. Later, during passages of grief in which love and its sorrow took the form of self-recrimination, she accused herself of harbouring that thought as one might a grievance, for some future occasion, to be brought up and deployed in an argument against the person you could not live your life without. Such a sad and cruel argument. For by then he was not there to answer back.
Promising Katrin that he would not give up, Eric was honour-bound to co-operate in her efforts to extend his life. He agreed to her getting a second opinion, and commiserated with her when it matched the first. Further along the way, very sick from the chemo, he let her radically change his diet. He had no appetite by then and lost nothing by compliance. He saw she would grieve worse if, afterwards, she could not be assured that together they had tried everything. For that was the heart of the matter: that they should stand together against the thing which would separate them. He complied, for her sake more than for his own he let her have her way – which she suspected, at times knew certainly. It felt like betrayal, like standing shoulder to shoulder in a matter of life and death with a person you cannot trust. She told him so, she cried out in anguish, Oh you don’t want to live! You have given up. You want to leave me. Then he took her hands, sat her down by him, and did his level best to explain himself. Do you think I love my life less than Dennis What’s-his-name loved his? How can you say that I want to leave you? I love my life and you are the best part of it. Then why won’t you fight? she answered. I do fight, he said, and I will. But only for me, she said, you’re only fighting because I ask you to, not wholeheartedly, you don’t have faith. Then he confessed that the diagnosis, the moment it came, seemed to him correct and final. I saw a dead-straight railway line, he said, like the one I used to cycle to as a boy, the west-coast line that passes under the East Lancs Road, we stood on the bridge and watched the express come at us, nearer and nearer, till it vanished us in the tremendous noise and the steam. Like that, the armoured head of an express locomotive, coming down a dead-straight track, very fast, but in slow-motion. I saw my sickness as an unalterable and ineluctable fact, coming at me in slow-motion, very fast. And I remembered an old teaching: the fact is fixed, but my attitude towards it is mine to fashion as I please. So I decided I would live by that teaching, to the last. And to be honest, I have surprised myself. First, that I ever remembered the teaching – I suppose it surfaced in answer to my case – and then that I have tried to live by it. So that’s what you meant by not giving up? she said. Yes, he answered. The fact: in how I view it I have a sort of freedom. All on your own, she said. All on your own in your head. You have left me already. You have left me all on my own. No, no, he answered. But it wearied him, he closed his eyes, the space behind them filled with hopeless sorrow. Katrin went to her room and wept in rage and shame.
Wordlessly, they came to an understanding. He would fight in her sense, which meant he would align himself loyally with her in trying to stay alive. She, for her part, would leave him free in his philosophy, in his idea of a sort of freedom against the inevitable. She knew he complied out of love for h