In A Strange Room: Three Journeys Read online

  Four months later he goes to Europe. Spring has only just started and the streets of Amsterdam are cold as he walks and walks. He takes a bus to Brussels, he goes by train to Strasbourg. He visits a friend in the Black Forest for a while and then, on a bright morning with the first trace of warmth in the air, he takes a train south, to Switzerland.

  He has written to say he’s coming and from Germany, a few days before, he made a call. Jerome was not at home and when Alice came to the phone she sounded startled but happy. Yes, she said, please come to visit, we are waiting for you. But now, as the train slides and turns through the mountains, emerging at last into the bright open sky over the lake, he has a faint memory again of the fear that gripped him in Africa. He stands at the window, looking at the houses and little streets flashing past at the edge of the water, and feels doubt like a coldness in him.

  He has to change trains and take a smaller local line along the lake. He climbs out on the fifth or sixth stop and descends the stairs into a stone square, from which narrow streets slope down towards the water. The lake is silvery-grey in colour, with hardly a crease on its surface, and on the other side, far away, mountains rise to sharp and jagged crests.

  Now that he has waited so long and come so far, he is in no hurry to arrive. He sits on the shore for a long time, thinking. He would like this moment to suspend itself indefinitely, so that he need never stir himself again.

  But as the afternoon goes on he takes up his pack and walks back along the lake, in the direction from which the train came. The path narrows and goes under trees, past jetties. There are swans gliding in the water, supported on their own reflections. After half an hour he comes to a little street running up away from the lake, and its name is the one written on that scrap of paper from Malawi.

  The house is a largish one, set back from the corner, with a garden behind it. He knocks and after a while there are footsteps and the door opens. Hello, we have been waiting for you. Jerome’s mother has short hair and a wide welcoming smile, come in, come in. She seems genuinely pleased to see him, she holds out her hand. My name is Catherine.

  While they shake hands they look appraisingly at each other. He has no idea what she has been told about him or what she expects. Jerome has just come home, she tells him, it is a surprise. He was supposed to come only tomorrow. He will be so glad to see you. She calls to a young girl hovering nearby, go and find Jerome.

  While they wait they go to sit on a stone veranda behind the house. In the garden there is a tree, a swing, and through a screen of leaves at the bottom, a view of the water. Alice comes out, smiling. There is the awkward happiness of hello, hello, how are you, looking at each other while they also look away.

  When Jerome comes out he is wearing a blue military uniform and his hair is cut brutally short. They shake hands, smiling shyly, under the eyes of his mother and Alice. Ah hello yes excellent. Jerome, I’m glad to see you. The dialogue and the gestures are tinny and false, like some kind of bright paper wrapped around the meaning of the moment.

  They all settle down uneasily around the outdoor table. The girl who was sent off to find Jerome is his younger sister. She is fourteen or fifteen with a chubby, cheerful face. An older sister arrives soon afterwards. Conversation flickers back and forth, returning continually to him, he can sense how curious they are about him. But at the same time he is also an observer, watching Jerome in this circle of women, while the light fades away.

  Why don’t you go for a walk, Catherine says. Before supper.

  He goes with Jerome across the grass to a gate at the bottom of the garden. Through a narrow alley to the edge of the lake. They are alone again for the first time since that minute or two outside the wooden doors of the bank. But everything is different now. The artificial awkwardness of that first moment up at the house continues, they don’t know what to say to each other.

  So this is where you live.

  Yes. Yes.

  It’s beautiful here.

  Ah. Yes. I like.

  Only once does the mask of tension crack briefly, when I ask him, is it hard to be back.

  Yes. Yes. His mouth works to find the words. In my head I am travelling, travelling.

  I know what you mean.

  Jerome is doing a session of military service, he is only home for the weekend. While he’s here they share his room, the visitor sleeps on a mattress on the floor. Although this section of the house is apart from the rest, a separate little flat on its own, they are never away from the rest of the family. It’s pleasant to sit in the sun behind the house, talking with Catherine, or wander to the shops with Alice or one of the other sisters. Jerome is always kind and solicitous, he invites him wherever he goes and introduces him to his friends, and he lets himself be taken along on outings and play the part of a contented guest.

  On the Sunday Jerome’s father comes to visit. He has lived apart from them, at the other end of the lake, for some years now, and in the family his departure has left the lingering trace of a loss. So on this day, when they make a fire to cook in the yard, and knock a ball back and forth over a net, there is a feeling of completion and unity among them, to which I can only be a witness. He sits on the swing, pushing himself to and fro, watching as if from a great distance this scene that in Africa would be unimaginable to him.

  He has come to like all of them, so when Jerome leaves again that night, going by train to some military base at the other end of the country, he is not alarmed at being left with his family. He spends a lot of time walking along the lake, he takes the train into town and wanders there too. He spends a day in a gallery of outsider art, paintings and sculptures made with the vision of the mad or the lost, and from this collection of fantastic and febrile images he retains a single line, a book title by a Serbian artist whose name I forget, He Has No House.

  On the next weekend Jerome is back again, but if he was hoping that the gap of five days would change something between them, it doesn’t happen. They are pleasant and polite with each other, but their interaction has something of the quality of a letter which Jerome sent him, the studied and careful presentation of words that have been translated and copied from a dictionary. It isn’t only Jerome who makes things this way, he brings his own painful awkwardness to bear. He isn’t himself, he is a guarded version of his own nature, nor does he recognize in the cropped hair and military terseness of the person whose room he shares the soft and gentle young man he travelled with four months ago.

  There are hints, perhaps, that it might be possible to move past this state. Jerome makes some tentative conversation about plans he has for the future, how, when he’s finished with this stint in the army, he would like to travel overland down to Greece. But this will only be in a couple of months from now. The possibility of another shared journey floats in the air, both of them consider it, but neither of them has the courage to say anything more.

  He knows already that he must move on. On the night before Jerome gets back that next weekend, he takes a walk along the water. Mist is rolling in from the other side, smudging the outlines of the little boats at their moorings. When he comes to a jetty that projects a long way into the lake he walks out on the wooden planks to the end. From here there is no shore any more, no edge to anything he can see. He is adrift in the white mist, with the water slapping softly below, cold air rolling across his face. He leans on the railing and stares into the whiteness and thinks about everything that’s happened.

  When Jerome returns this time, he finds a moment to let him know, I will be going on Monday. To London. I can’t stay here for ever. I’m sure your family must be getting tired of me.

  No, no. Jerome is vehement in his protest. You can stay.

  He shakes his head gently and smiles, I have to go, I can’t keep standing still.

  Later Jerome comes back to him again, bringing a friend who lives a few houses away. This friend speaks fluent English and has come along, he says, to translate.

  Jerome says you must stay.


  No, really. Tell him thank you. But I can’t. Maybe I will come back.

  When, Jerome says.

  Later. When I’ve gone travelling for a while.

  And it’s true, he tells himself, maybe he will come back. There is always another time, next month, next year, when things will be different.

  But after these flickers of feeling, that last weekend is much like the others. Jerome is friendly but distant, he makes no special effort to talk or be alone. At one point he says, we talk with Christian, yes, and picks up the phone. But the number just rings and rings. Jerome says, later, and puts it down again, but they never do try later.

  On the Sunday evening when Alice drives her brother to the station, he goes along to say goodbye. Jerome is in uniform again, with all his buttons gleaming, his black shoes reflecting the light. He is proud of how he looks, although he pretends that he isn’t. They all go into the bar together to wait. There are two friends of his there, also in uniform, with whom he’ll be travelling, there are introductions and handshakes and murmured pleasantries all round.

  You go tomorrow, Jerome says at last.

  Yes.

  But you come again later.

  Maybe.

  One of the friends says something and all of them stand up. Sorry. We must to go.

  In the end they shake hands again, smiling formally, amongst all the artificial surfaces and military buttons shining like eyes. They have never been more distant, or polite. In the morning his actual departure will be an echo of this one. He has already left, or perhaps he never arrived.

  He goes to London, but the same restlessness comes over him there, and he goes on somewhere else. And somewhere else again. Five months later he finds himself in a strange country, at the edge of a strange town, with dusk coming down. He is watching people drifting into a funfair on the other side of an overgrown expanse of ground. Circus music carries towards him faintly over the weeds and in the gathering gloom at the base of a high green volcano he sees the lights of a ferris wheel go round and round and round.

  He doesn’t know why, but this scene is like a mirror in which he sees himself. Not his face, or his past, but who he is. He feels a melancholy as soft and colourless as wind, and for the first time since he started travelling he thinks that he would like to stop. Stay in one place, never move again.

  Eight months after he passed through he is in London again, on his way back home. He is only here for a week, after which he will fly to Amsterdam and then, five days later, to South Africa.

  He phones Jerome from a booth in the street. He doesn’t know exactly why he’s making this call, except that he promised he would, and he’s unsure of whether to go back to visit them again. Before he can even mention the idea Jerome has put it to him, come, come, please. This time, even through the thin vein of the telephone line, he can hear the urgency of the invitation.

  I have to think, he says, I have no money.

  My family, it’s okay, no money.

  Also no time. I have only four days before I go. Maybe, all right, I’ll see. I’ll phone you from Amsterdam.

  But before he gets to Amsterdam he has already made up his mind not to go. It’s true that he has little money and time, but these are not the reasons for his decision. The memory of the last visit is still strong in his mind, he has carried it with him all the way on his travels, and he fears that the same thing will happen again. He will arrive, he will be made very welcome, he will spend a day or two in placidity and comfort, but the silence and distance between them, which they have incubated somehow since the first day they met in Africa, will amplify and grow, even as they become nicer to each other. This isn’t what he wants, it is very deeply what he doesn’t want, although it has taken this short conversation on the telephone for him to realize how unhappy that first visit made him.

  So he goes down to Paris instead and stumbles aimlessly around the streets, wandering into shops and out again, sitting on benches. He’s aware that he’s engaged again in that most squalid of activities, using up time, but the journey hasn’t ended where he wanted it to, it has frayed out instead into endless ambiguities and nuances, like a path that divides and divides endlessly, growing fainter all the time.

  There are moments, it’s true, in those three or four days, when a longing to go back to Switzerland comes over him like a pang, it’s only a few hours on the train, he could do it on a whim, but then he remembers how he came back this way last time, emptiness weighing him down like a black suitcase chained to his wrist.

  When he passes a public telephone now and then he remembers that he promised to call, but he can’t do it yet, not yet. There would be a discussion again on the line, the push and pull of their broken attempts to communicate, and he might give in, in spite of himself.

  So he leaves it to what is the very last moment, when he is at the airport in Amsterdam, with his bag checked in, waiting to board. There are crowds of people under the fluorescent lights, clutching packets from the duty-free shops, and outside, through the plate-glass windows, the weird unnatural shapes of aircraft in rows. He makes the call from a bank of public phones, jostled from either side by elbows and foreign syllables. He hopes that Jerome won’t be home.

  Catherine answers the phone and recognizes his voice before he’s said his name. Hello, are you coming back to visit us.

  No, I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m at the airport right now.

  Ahh. She sounds disappointed. What a pity, we were hoping, Jerome was hoping.

  I know, I’m sorry about it. He starts to babble the excuses about money and time, but his tongue is tripping him up. Another time, he says, and now he means it, there will be another time to make this right.

  Another time, she agrees, do you want to talk to Jerome, and though his money is fast running out he knows he must.

  There is a brief conversation in the background before Jerome comes on, in his voice he knows already. Ah, but why.

  No money, he says again, no time.

  Come. Come.

  It’s too late. I’m at the airport. I’ll make it up to you, he says, I promise. Another time.

  Yes, I want. Travelling. Next year.

  Where.

  I don’t know. Africa. Possibly.

  That will be wonderful, he says. It sounds as if he’s been invited, although the words, as always, haven’t been said. Jerome, I have to go. The money.

  I don’t understand.

  And then the phone goes dead. He hangs up slowly, wondering whether to ring again, but he’s said what he has to say, and anyway he has to leave. Another time.

  Friends who live in London have bought a house in the country three hours from Cape Town, and when I was passing through they offered the use of this place to stay in. If you think you would like it, it’s going to be standing empty, it would be nice to have somebody keeping an eye.

  He said he would think about it but the next day, just before leaving London, he phoned to accept. It felt in some way like a providential offer. He has no other place to return to, and he knows he can’t go back to the way he was living before, the endless moving around, the rootlessness. So the idea of this house, far away from all the old familiar sites, is like a fresh beginning, the possibility of home.

  The move isn’t easy, he has to take all his things out of storage and hire vans to load everything up and conscript friends to help him drive. The house, when he gets there, is like nowhere he’s ever lived before. It’s rustic and rough, with a thatched roof and concrete floors and a windmill turning outside the bedroom window. His friends help him unload and then drive back to Cape Town almost immediately, leaving him alone amongst the piles and piles of boxes.

  That first night he sits on the back step, looking out across a back yard choked with weeds to the occasional lights of trucks on the single road that passes the town. He watches the moon come up over the stony tops of the valley and gets gently drunk on sherry and wonders what he’s done to himself now.

  But over the n
ext few days, as he sweeps and cleans and unpacks the boxes and puts his possessions into place, he starts to feel better about where he is. It doesn’t belong to him, but he lives here, he doesn’t need to leave unless he wants to. And as the shapes of the rooms and the noises of the roof become familiar, a sort of intimacy develops between him and the place, they put out tendrils and grow into each other. This process deepens as his life overflows outdoors, he starts pulling up the weeds in the garden, he digs furrows and lets water run to the fruit trees and the rose-bushes, and when old dead branches begin to sprout buds and leaves, and then bright bursts of colour, he feels as if it’s happening inside himself.

  By then the little town and even the landscape around it are also connected to him, there is no interruption between him and the world, he isn’t separate any more from what he sees. When he goes out the front door now it isn’t to catch a bus, or to find another hotel, he walks into the mountains and then he comes back home again. Home. Sometimes he stops on whatever dirt road he’s followed today and looks back down the valley to the town, and then he always picks out the tiny roof under which he will be sleeping tonight.

  He doesn’t feel like a traveller any more, it’s hard to imagine that he ever thought of himself that way, and when he finally settles himself to write a letter to Jerome it’s like a stranger willing up the words. He tells about where he is and what it’s like to be here, and says that he hopes Jerome will come to visit him one day.