Claudia calls. There’s a party she wants to go to but Howard is ill. She asks Tonie to go with her instead.
Tonie agrees – she likes the unexpected. And it’s touching, sort of, that Claudia requires a chaperone, that after two decades of marriage she doesn’t quietly seize the chance to experience something on her own. She picks Tonie up in her dog-smelling estate car. It is a black, penetrating night. Claudia is wearing something with a fur collar, like a Russian aristocrat. Her eyelids are bruised-looking, the mascaraed lashes tarred into spikes. Her hair is untidy, her nails bitten, her earrings expensive. In the yellow street lamps she has a pleasing look of degeneracy.
‘They’re such interesting people,’ she says of their hosts.
‘What’s wrong with Howard?’
Claudia makes an exasperated sound, lifting her hands from the steering wheel.
‘Don’t even ask! I’ve been beside myself – he hasn’t been to work for three weeks! He just doesn’t seem to get better. He spends all day moping around the house in his dressing gown.’
Tonie has known Claudia for years, has caught her eye over countless family dinners, has stood beside her, their smart shoes chafing their feet, at christenings and funerals, has held her babies in her arms. She knows the forms her joy and resentment take; she has heard it for most of her adult life, Claudia’s part, like the melody from an other section of the orchestra.
‘But what is it?’ she says.
Claudia looks into the dark distances of the windscreen.
‘Something to do with his lung, apparently. He finally went to the hospital two days ago and got it X-rayed. He thought it was flu, but flu doesn’t just stay the same day after day, does it? I’ve been saying, you know, for heaven’s sake go to the doctor and get a diagnosis! Get a diagnosis! Get a diagnosis!’
She thumps the steering wheel.
‘So he did get one,’ Tonie reminds her gently.
‘Well, only after he’d laid waste to all my work plans and virtually barred my path to the studio, because he felt I should be looking after him, even though this was my first real chance to do some painting since the children went back to school after the summer –’
It is now December: the Christmas holidays start next week, as Tonie must suppose Claudia knows. They drive along in silence for a while.
‘Anyway, it turns out he’s got a patch,’ Claudia resumes.
‘What’s a patch?’
‘Just a sort of dark – patch, on the lung. They want to do a whatsit, a biopsy. I suppose sooner or later they’ll tell us what it is.’
Tonie presses her palms flat against her thighs. The night is as fine as pitch. Outside the trees and railings are already rimed with frost. They are in a suburban area she doesn’t recognise, big houses, their bulky forms dark, smart silvery cars in driveways with white frost on the windows. Everything looks perfected, abandoned. They pull into one of the driveways, ring the bell at a door lit by carriage lights. It is a big, rambling place. The bell sounds deep in the house. Tonie is afraid.
A large woman, robust and richly dressed as an opera singer, opens the door. At the sight of them she flings out her arms.
‘Darlings!’ she exclaims.
They are in a room full of people. The woman makes a lot of noise. Tonie can’t hear what she’s saying, just the sound she makes saying it. Her name is Dana or Lana. The room is bright, busy, confusing. The walls are painted red. There are African sculptures, primitive masks, a tiger skin nailed above the fireplace. Tonie looks at the other people, middle-aged people with crumpled faces and thinning hair and soft shapeless bodies. They are depleted, exhausted-looking among the giant ebonised phalluses, the carved forms of pregnant savages. Claudia is talking to a documentary film-maker. She asks him questions about himself while Tonie watches. He is pale, moon-faced, with eyes like chips of vacant blue sky: Tonie notes the consideration with which he has dressed himself, his look of battered fashion. He has recently returned from filming in the Galapagos Islands.
‘How fascinating,’ Claudia says, so ingratiatingly that Tonie thinks she must be being ironic.
She asks him one thing after another, like a mother spooning food into a baby’s mouth: when he comes to the end of one question she is ready with the next. They hear about the iguanas, about the turtles coming up the beach to lay their eggs, about the valour of his dedication to vulnerable beasts. Claudia nods and coaxes and smiles, and every time someone offers Tonie a drink she takes it.
‘Why do those films always make the world look like it’s perfect?’ Tonie asks him.
He ponders her, the baby in his chair: is she friend or foe?
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I sort of see what you mean. We’re editing out all the mess, aren’t we? People don’t realise that just out of shot there’s a car park and a big line of hotels – not to mention other film crews all going for the same thing and getting in each other’s way. Sometimes it’s a nightmare, getting what you want and keeping out what you don’t.’
‘Terribly difficult,’ Claudia agrees.
‘But why can’t you show it as it really is?’ Tonie says. ‘What’s the point?’
He frowns, puts his hands in his pockets. ‘People don’t want that sort of reality. And it isn’t my job to give it to them.’
‘Then you’re just a liar,’ Tonie says, but the room is noisy. She isn’t sure he’s heard her.
‘Hasn’t your wife had a baby?’ Claudia asks him. She says the word ‘baby’ as though it’s a big treat, something to reward him for having done so well. Tonie is surprised: she didn’t think Claudia knew this man. She is certain he doesn’t know Claudia’s name. He has not asked them one question about themselves: she and Claudia do not exist for him, they are just lines of perspective, ways for him to measure his location in space.
‘– six months old,’ he is saying. ‘I’ve barely seen her because of the filming. I think I’ve spent –’ he calculates ‘– one fortnight at home in the whole six months, you know? But that’s what it’s like to have a vocation. It’s hard, really hard. But that’s how it is. You have to make sacrifices.’
Claudia looks almost tearful with sympathy, as though she were nothing to do with the person Tonie once witnessed screaming out of a top-floor window at Howard that she had bolted the door and wasn’t going to let him into the house, because Howard had promised to be home that night by a certain time to help her with the children, and had either broken the promise or forgotten it. Tonie thinks about Howard, considers him. In her mind he is suddenly very small, like a doll. He is ringed by destiny: he has become representational. Everything he has done and been has been compacted into this tiny figure, emitting the squeak of life. She sees him being moved as though by an invisible hand around a toy kingdom. She sees he could be dashed away in an instant.
She leaves Claudia and pushes through the room. Later she finds herself talking to a man who makes coffins. He is threadbare, hippy-looking, with long grey hair. He makes the coffins by hand, out of wood from sustainable sources. He arranges natural funerals, in accordance with the wishes of the family. Tonie learns about the diversity of these wishes, their sources and outcomes. By now it is almost sexual, her desire to be penetrated by a question, but nobody asks her one. Instead she learns about the woodlands of Sussex and Kent, the tensile properties of the chestnut tree. There is African music playing, loud. Half of what the man says is blotted out. She watches his mouth moving. He glances at her frequently: he can tell she is untouched, disengaged.
Suddenly Claudia is at her elbow, listening. She nods her head as the man speaks; she asks questions. He becomes aware of her, turns the stream of information in her direction. She is a more gratifying audience than Tonie. She asks about the coffin made of English oak. She asks about the ultra-sustainable willow model. Her interest is genuine, the man can tell. Tonie watches in consternation. Has Claudia gone mad? She feels suddenly that she was brought here to witness Claudia in an act of betrayal. It is the ineradicable quality of her dependence – on Howard, on men – that is being exposed tonight. Claudia puts a hand on the man’s arm. She is bright, transactional, faintly tragic in her fur collar.
‘Do you have a card?’ she asks him.
‘As it happens I do,’ the man says, producing one from his back pocket. ‘Are you anticipating a – passing?’
For an instant Claudia looks both startled and mesmerised, like a snake being charmed out of its basket: her face is lit up, her mascaraed eyes unblinking. She takes the man’s card and puts it in her handbag.
On the way home, there is a feeling of constraint between them. It is clear Tonie did not enjoy the party. And Tonie feels, suddenly, that she does not know Claudia at all. She is aware of Claudia’s body, her hands with their rings on the steering wheel, her atmosphere coming at her across the dark. But her knowledge of this entity – Claudia – has been marginalised. They turn left and right through deserted roads. At Montague Street Tonie gets out, and Claudia drives away.