The Name on the Door is Not Mine Read online

  Praise for C.K. Stead’s short stories

  ‘Elegant clarity.’ Robert Gilmore, Auckland Star

  ‘… unusual and challenging, a clear and welcome step beyond the patient liberal developments of much of our fiction.’ Patrick Evans, New Zealand Listener

  ‘Enjoyable, urbane, confident, witty and masculine, these stories are a breath of cool air through the female living-room of domestic fiction.’ Jane Westaway, New Zealand Herald

  ‘Seamless and civilised.’ Norman Bilbrough, New Zealand Books

  ‘Intellectually bold, emotionally liberal and watchful, technically adroit … The buoyancy and boyishness can soar into lyricism: “the old absurd ebullience, the unreasonable sense that life is its own reward.”’ David Hill, New Zealand Listener

  ‘With wit and his customary disregard for what was and is now the fashionable conformity, with attention to illuminating detail and lovely writing, Stead’s stories challenge and entertain.’ Barbara Wall, Timaru Herald

  ‘Suddenly what seemed to be interesting takes flight into the infinite white spaces, the blank page of the imagination, and life becomes art.’ James McLean, The Evening Post

  ‘Delightful, ingeniously comic, elegant and sensitive …’ John Mellors, London Magazine

  ‘Stead writes the way Torville and Dean skate. He makes it look so easy … Very few people can put together such luminous sentences.’ Iain Sharp, Sunday Star-Times.

  First published in 2016

  Copyright © C.K. Stead 2016

  Derrida, Jacques. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Line from Of Grammatology. Corrected Edition. on page 13 © 1974, 1976, 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

  Eliot, T.S. Lines from ‘The Waste Land’ on page 28 from Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot. Reprinted with permission of Faber and Faber Ltd, 2005.

  Perec, Georges. Translated by Andrew Leak. Lines from ‘A Man Asleep’ on pages 30–1 copyright © 1967 Editions Noel. Translation © 1990 by William Collins Sons & Co., Ltd. American edition published by David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.

  Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use copyrighted material in this book.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

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  Allen & Unwin

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  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

  ISBN 978 1 87750 581 2 (NZ)

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76029 536 3 (AU)

  eISBN 978 1 95253 550 5 (AU)

  Cover design: Kate Barraclough

  Cover art: Henrietta Harris

  To O, C and M again:

  the olives are almost over

  and the future is now.

  Contents

  A small apartment in the rue Parrot

  ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’

  ‘And still the sun shines’

  True love

  Sex in America

  Anxiety

  A fitting tribute

  Marriage Americano

  Determined things to Destiny

  Last season’s man

  Class, race, gender: a post-colonial yarn

  The name on the door is not mine

  Stories in this collection have appeared in Arete, the Kenyon Review, Landfall, The London Magazine, New Writing 6 (British Council), Sport and Griffith Review. ‘Last season’s man’ won the Sunday Times/E.F.G. Private Bank short story prize for 2010. Earlier versions of several appeared in two collections—Five for the Symbol, and The Blind Blonde with Candles in her Hair, both long out of print.

  A small apartment in the rue Parrot

  I

  HELEN WHITE WAS SITTING on the grass with her back against a tree just inside the iron gates of the Luxembourg Gardens, eating an ice cream she had bought from the vendor’s cart out there on the street, and dreaming of home. Like (she thought) ‘Drake was in his hammock and a thousand miles away, slung a’tween the round-shot in Nombre Dios Bay, and dreaming all the time of Plymouth Ho’. Nombre Dios must be Name of God. Funny, she’d never thought of that. When she’d sung it as a child she’d thought it had something to do with number. Nombre Dios. Drake had God’s number. But home for her had not been Plymouth Ho and was not at this moment a thousand miles away. It had been in Oxford, where her mother had been a paediatrician at the Radcliffe Infirmary and her father a Fellow of St John’s. And now she supposed it must be Norfolk, where the parents lived, semi-retired but still both professionally busy, in a beautiful old mill house with wooden beams inside and white weatherboards out, and the mill stream running by under willows, and with a wood, or perhaps it was a spinney or copse, of poplars at the back. (A spinney of poplars. A copse of poplars. She tried them both for sound and liked them equally.) She had gone to school in Oxford, and then to the university, St Anne’s College, and had flourished, she thought—everyone thought—until her mind became over-filled with poems, including one by Edward Thomas called ‘Adlestrop’. It was not just the poem that became an obsession but the word. Adlestrop. It represented Englishness, the country rail-stop in late June surrounded by willows in full leaf, with meadows and pasture and hay and a blackbird; and then, as in the Hitchcock movie, the just one bird became all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire—a congregation of polluters of silence, which was what birds were if you cared about it, if your ears were sensitive. And if you said the word Adlestrop to yourself too often the birds got more confused and the scene mistier until everything was lost and there was just ADLESTROP, too many syllables fighting for the light—sinister, secretive, dangerous, and perhaps hinting at something you did not want to know, ever …

  Time to change the subject. So she went in her head to Gerard Manley Hopkins, always a comfort, ‘Margaret, are you grieving over golden-grove unleaving?’ Gerry Hopkins, the unhappy priest of so long ago, who ‘caught this morning morning’s minion’ and wrote about the cutting down of the Binsey poplars at Oxford (‘my aspens dear whose airy cages quelled’) which had, since his time, grown again and could be seen on the walk across the port meadow from Southmoor Road to a pub called the Trout …

  Oxford where she had encountered the philosopher Roger Scruton with his idea that there were two kinds of metaphysics, descriptive and revisionary, and she had tried, in an essay for her tutor at St Anne’s, to apply the same distinction to poetry, making Keats the ‘descriptive’ poet and Blake the ‘revisionary’. This was not the …ake who was in his hammock and a thousand miles away, but William Blake in his London garden naked with Mrs Blake pretendi
ng to be Adam and Eve. Two of them, Mr and Mrs. The Naked Blakes. Aching for Eden, and Blaked.

  The ice cream was eaten and she would have liked another but lay on her back listening to the traffic and looking through the trees at the sky, like the sky at Adlestrop, with small white cloudlets, floating. I could be happy there, she thought. It was better to be Keats than Blake, Keats than Shelley, Kelly than Sheets. And when was it she had first encountered that book by Derrida and the sentence that had taken hold of her, demanding that she understand it though she didn’t and couldn’t, and yet she had wrestled with it? She said it over: ‘We are dispossessed of the longed-for presence in the gesture of language by which we attempt to seize it.’ Her boyfriend in Oxford had said this was a description of a failed rugby tackle. His name was Hugo and he came to Oxford from Rugby, and played it. He had tried to keep her there, in Oxford, but Derrida had won, had brought her to Paris, though he was already dead, had been dead ten years. In fact on 9 October, only a few months away, it would be a decade exactly. Derrida a decade dead. She’d thought she would be nearer to his mind, the French mind, if she put herself inside the French language, but perhaps she should have taken his Algerian childhood into account and gone there. Would that have helped, nothing would have helped, Derrida was like his name, or a nursery rhyme, something you just had to struggle with and make the best of, like the refrain of a song by Shakespeare, da derri-da down dilly, and da derri-da.

  Thinking this in a kind of silent singalong she drifted asleep for a few minutes and dreamed she was in a room with high sash windows wide open and white curtains billowing in a faint breeze. Beyond was the green of trees and lawns and the mild thwack and knock of tennis. She was dressed all in white and so was Hugo, who was also Professor Max Jackson; and perhaps she and Max had just made love because she was telling him he did not know what it was to feel shame. He said (and now it was definitely Max) this was nonsense everyone knew Shame, Shame was everybody’s friend, and she’d had an answer for that, perhaps about degrees of it, but as she woke she couldn’t remember what it was, only that it was a good one, unanswerable …

  What she needed now was to be conscious, in the Gurdjieff sense of consciousness, which included focus, finding her centre. Professor Jackson—Max, as she was allowed to call him—had agreed to come with her to Fontainebleau-Avon, where they would go on a little organised tour to the house and gardens that had been Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Max had sent her a nice little message in reply to her letter, agreeing to meet her at the Gare de Lyon …

  No need for shame. She must be mindless, centred; must pass through the gateless gate and walk freely between heaven and earth. She must work towards Zen, towards enlightenment, towards Satori …

  II

  HELEN WAITED IN THE forecourt of the Gare de Lyon, keeping her eye on the clock in its tower, on its beautiful, faintly blue face with the ornate numbering. The train for Fontainebleau-Avon would go at two minutes past the hour. It was twenty minutes to. She was early. The Professor—Max—would be late—or not come at all. He’d said he would come but she was sure—almost sure—he would not. She repeated Zen lessons.

  ‘Watch whatever you say, and whatever you say, practise it.

  ‘Do not regret the past. Look to the future.

  ‘Have the fearless attitude of a hero, and the loving heart of a child.’

  She wondered whether she was confusing herself by mixing Gurdjieff with Zen; yet they seemed to go together, not to conflict.

  She wondered what the Buddha had meant when he said he saw Nirvana as a nightmare of daytime.

  It was ten to the hour, then five to … No, Max would not come. She had bought two tickets …

  She tried to not think, to achieve mindlessness, but her eyes were on the tower, on the blue-faced clock up there, waiting to hear it strike. Would she go without him?

  But here he was, beside her, come from the other direction, the wrong, the unexpected one. ‘Quick,’ she said. ‘Downstairs …’

  He was apologising for being late. And, ‘Tickets,’ he said.

  ‘I have them,’ she said. ‘Quickly, Max.’

  They boarded the train just as the whistle was blown. They found a double seat and dumped themselves down, panting. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

  She had collapsed halfway over him, holding him by the shoulder. ‘Don’t be sorry.’ And she pecked his cheek as she pulled herself into a sitting position. ‘I told myself you’d be late. I knew you’d be dithering right up to the last minute.’

  He didn’t argue with that, and they sat, recovering, composing themselves. She pointed to the bag at her feet. A baguette stuck out from its top and there were shapes, two bottles, other things … ‘Picnic,’ she said.

  He nodded, smiling. ‘Nice. I came in such a rush I brought nothing but a newspaper.’

  ‘A newspaper,’ she said. ‘That’s important.’

  ‘In case we need to know what day it is?’

  ‘Yes that kind of thing. And what’s going on.’

  Several kilometres clicked by. Feeling his warm thigh touching hers, she asked what Max was short for.

  ‘Maxwell,’ he said. And sang, ‘Maxwelton’s braes are bonny where early fa’s the dew.’

  ‘Oh, you sing in tune,’ she said. ‘And a nice—what are you—tenor?’

  ‘When my wife’s feeling playful she calls me Maximus.’

  ‘Your wife …’

  ‘My ex. My sometime. My sometimes …’

  ‘Are you getting a divorce?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. It hasn’t been mentioned.’

  Helen stared, and he added, ‘Not to me. She lives upstairs. I have the ground-floor flat.’

  ‘She’s famous,’ Helen said.

  ‘Yes I guess. Famous in France.’

  ‘Which is where we are.’

  He touched her arm. ‘Good point, thank you for reminding me.’

  ‘Famous for Flaubert.’

  ‘As his editor. The Pleiade edition.’ He smiled. ‘She’s the senior professor in our marriage.’ It seemed he didn’t mind.

  ‘And she calls you Maximus.’

  ‘Sometimes, yes. Playful, you know. Or displeased. Sometimes both.’

  ‘Max, Maxwell, Maximus,’ Helen said. ‘It’s like conjugating a verb.’

  She told him about her recent discovery of Zen Buddhism. ‘It’s my new medication. I’m cutting down on the lithium. More Zen, less lithium.’

  He asked was that safe and she said it was. She thought it was.

  ‘Instead of Gurdjieff?’

  ‘Not instead of. In addition to.’ And more kilometres clicked by.

  He held up his newspaper which had a front-page shot of the French President in New York. Hollande had been in trouble lately. His current partner, Valérie Trierweiler, had kicked him out and written a book about his infidelity with a French actress.

  Helen said, ‘I don’t like him. I’m on Valérie’s side.’

  ‘Trierweiler? She’s a very angry woman.’

  ‘He lied to her.’

  ‘About Julie Gayet. Of course he did.’

  ‘Why “Of course”?’

  ‘Because she’s a very angry woman.’

  ‘But he’d been unfaithful.’

  Max shrugged. ‘So he had something to hide.’

  He told her that when he was young there had been another socialist President—François Mittérand. France was still testing nuclear bombs in the Pacific. Greenpeace had a ship, the Rainbow Warrior—had she heard about that?

  ‘I think maybe …’ she said. ‘They were protesting …’

  ‘Yes they were, and French secret agents blew up their ship—sank it in Auckland Harbour. I was a student at the time. I remember hearing the big boom, and then a few minutes later a second one, even bigger. It was late at night. I said to the girl I was in bed with that we were being attacked. I meant it as a joke, but it was true—sort of true. Most of the agents got away but tw
o were caught.’

  He told her the story—their conviction for manslaughter and how after that the Mittérand government put economic pressure on New Zealand to release them.

  ‘After a couple of years the New Zealand government agreed they could serve out the rest of their sentence on an island in French Polynesia. As soon as they were there, France said they were unwell and had to be brought home.’

  Their train ran on through the outskirts of Paris, past tall suburban houses and little tree-shaded villas, on, out into green countryside. Helen was quiet a while, and then asked, ‘Was she nice?’ He was unsure what she meant, and she said, ‘When the bombs went off—the girl you were in bed with.’

  ‘Oh … Yes, she was nice.’ And then, ‘Very nice.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Where indeed, good question. Where do the dead go?’

  ‘She died?’ Helen looked at him, frowning, trying to show the concern she felt for him, for his loss.

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t a tragedy,’ he said. ‘I mean it was, but not for me. We’d long since gone our separate ways. She married, had two children, and then she died in her forties. Cancer.’

  The train rattled and clacked, rattled and clacked. Helen closed her eyes, listening. ‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘that during the Battle of Waterloo a British soldier told the Duke of Wellington they had Napoleon in their gun-sights, and the Duke said it wasn’t proper in war for commanders to be shooting at one another.’

  Max laughed. ‘No I didn’t know that.’ After a few seconds he said, ‘Someone picked off Lord Nelson. He was a commander.’

  ‘Different rules,’ she suggested.

  ‘The Navy, d’you think?’

  She told him a story about a young Zen monk called Kitano who studied Chinese calligraphy and poetry, and grew exceptionally skilful at it, until his teacher praised him so highly Kitano thought, if I go on like this I’ll be a poet, not a Zen teacher, so he gave up and never wrote another poem.

  Max nodded slowly, absorbing this. ‘Is that a message for me?’