The Name on the Door is Not Mine Read online

  She said, ‘I don’t know.’ And then, ‘Is it?’

  Helen had come to his room because she’d found a poem he’d published long ago when he was first in Paris. He said, ‘I gave up poetry in favour of being a professor—is that what you mean?’

  ‘Only you can say.’

  ‘Only I can say what?’

  ‘If the cap fits.’

  He thought about that and said, ‘No it doesn’t. The young monk—his was an act of will … A decision … A decision to stop writing poems.’

  ‘Decisions are not always conscious, are they?’

  His shrug, she thought, was irritable, but he didn’t argue.

  At the Fontainebleau-Avon station a minibus was waiting to gather those enrolled for the Gurdjieff tour. They drove straight to the building that had housed Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, three storeys and quite grand, in beautiful grounds, now a block of private apartments. Gurdjieff’s home, a big wooden house, was next door. This whole complex was where the great man’s devotees had come to live under his command, to learn ‘wakefulness’ rather than the ‘sleep’ which was, he’d taught, the norm for human lives. They were to become ‘conscious’, to rid themselves of wasteful and negative emotions, to eschew regret, to shed ‘personality’, and to make their life’s work the creation of a ‘soul’. You were not born with a soul, but you could create one. That was the ‘work’.

  The tour commentary was partly a lesson. They had to imagine it all happening within these walls—the importance placed on very early rising, on chores and menial duties, on preparing meals, drawing water from the well, milking the cow, feeding the hens and finding their eggs; bee-keeping, and especially gardening; and then, in the evening, listening to a talk by the Master which might be on any of his favourite themes—the law of three, the law of seven, the four bodies of man (carnal, natural, spiritual, divine), even ‘Beelzebub’; and then would come the thrilling Sufi dancing, and the music.

  They were shown the stairs where the writer Katherine Mansfield, one of the Master’s better-known devotees, had had the tubercular haemorrhage that killed her. As the group moved on Max hung back at the bottom of the oak-brown stairway with its heavy banister, and Helen waited for him at a discreet distance, thinking she was respecting an observance; but when he turned and hurried to catch up she saw he’d been checking his cell phone.

  It was very hot and they walked in the extensive gardens, rested under trees, listened to further accounts of the Institute’s way of life; and then they were set free there to roam, to eat and drink whatever they’d brought for refreshment. Helen found a sort of bower in the long grass under the shade of a tree, and opened her bag, taking out two cans of fruit juice, the baguette, which she broke into pieces, ham, cheese, tomatoes.

  Max lay in the grass, propped on one elbow. ‘What are you thinking?’ she asked, hoping it might be about the Zen monk, Kitano, so skilled when young, who stopped being a poet.

  ‘Nothing. Not thinking.’ He took a bite of the crusty bread. ‘Just enjoying this good bread. I should have brought something.’

  ‘You’re here,’ she said. ‘That’s your contribution. Imagine if I’d brought a picnic and you hadn’t come.’ As she said it, she did imagine him not there—a space, an emptiness. It frightened her, because for a moment there was a space, just pressed-down grass and the trunk of a tree, where Max had been. She shivered. Perhaps he had no soul, it had not yet been created, and she had seen its absence. But then who had written that poem she so much admired? Where was the youthful Max’s soul hiding? She would make it her project to find it, to bring it out.

  When they’d finished eating he sat up and brushed the crumbs away, then settled down again, his head resting on her thigh.

  ‘Maximus,’ she said, and giggled.

  So they both dozed for a while in the warmth of summer and the scent of grass and flowers, but out of the sun, until the phone in his pocket buzzed him awake. He sat up, looking at it, then stood up. ‘I’ll have to take this … My wife …’

  As he walked to put a little distance between them she heard him say, ‘Ça va? How are things?’ When he spoke next he was out of range. She could pick up only a word here and there.

  LOUISE WAS ASKING WHETHER he could do a little bit of research for her. ‘There’s a passage where Hélène Cixous compares Flaubert’s style in L’Éducation sentimentale with Clarice Lispector’s in I’m not sure what. Possibly A Breath of Life. It’s a male–female thing of course, and I can’t find it in the books I have here.’ She thought he might call in at the Sainte- Geneviève for her. ‘I’d be so grateful, darling.’

  He took a deep breath. He should not have taken the call. ‘There’s always a queue.’

  ‘Not at this time of year, Max. And I can’t get away from here today. The kids are home early.’

  ‘Tomorrow I could do it.’

  ‘Tomorrow I could do it myself. I need it now.’

  Only a wife would press like this—or a husband of course. Were they married or not? ‘Not sure,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I can …’

  ‘Come on, Max. What’s the problem? It’s only a few blocks away.’

  ‘Not from here it’s not.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  Unable to think of a better answer, he said, ‘Out of town.’

  ‘Really? Out—how far?’

  ‘Fontainebleau-Avon.’

  ‘Why? What on earth are you doing?’

  He thought of telling her that he and she now occupied separate apartments and separate beds precisely so that this kind of inquisition, of either party by the other, would not be necessary. But no, that would suggest he had something to hide, something to be ashamed of.

  He said, ‘I’m learning about Gurdjieff. Did you know Katherine Mansfield couldn’t decide whether he looked like a wise man or a carpet seller?’

  A pause, and then, ‘No, Max. I didn’t know that.’

  ‘And then she died. Right here. I’ve seen the very spot. It’s a staircase.’

  After a long silence she said, ‘So you can’t hunt out that quote for me.’

  ‘I’ll do my best, Louise. Depends on the trains. But if I can I will. I’ll phone you tonight.’

  Another silence. He knew he should end this conversation but he didn’t want to just cut her off. ‘So …’ he said.

  ‘So are you going to tell me what you’re doing?’ And then, ‘Who you’re with?’ And then, ‘I know I have no right to ask.’

  ‘I don’t mind your asking. I only mind the conclusions you’ll jump to. I’m with a student.’

  Louise was on to it at once. ‘The one who writes you letters?’

  ‘One letter—yes, that one. And how do you know that?’

  ‘You left it on your table.’

  ‘And you read it.’

  ‘No, Max, you know I wouldn’t do that. It was open. I saw her name at the bottom of the page—Helen someone.’

  ‘Of Troy. Yes, that’s her.’

  ‘You’re a fool, Maximus.’

  ‘She’s English—from Oxford. St Anne’s. She’s had a few problems. She needs help—a sympathetic ear, that’s all.’

  ‘At Fontainebleau-Avon?’

  ‘It’s the summer vac isn’t it? We had a bit of a picnic.’

  ‘What kind of problems?’

  ‘Mental …’

  ‘Max …’

  ‘I don’t mean she’s mad …’ As he said this he remembered she’d said that’s exactly what she was: mad; bipolar.

  ‘And you’re with this disturbed young woman …’

  ‘She’s not disturbed …’

  ‘Learning about that fraudulent Russian …’

  ‘Gurdjieff—was he Russian?’

  ‘Armenian mother. Greek father.’

  Oh for god’s sake, how did she know that? He wouldn’t ask. ‘I’m sure it sounds odd, Louise …’

  But there was a click and she was gone.

  THEY WERE TA
KEN NEXT to the Gurdjieff grave in the local cemetery. It was a large level raised oblong in grass, with a border of flowers and a massive rough-cut stone at either end. There was a small stone seat where you could think about the man in the ground under you, and his philosophy and what he meant when he said ‘I cannot die.’

  The guide explained that you could spread a cloth on the grave and it would absorb something of the kaife that would come up through the ground from his body—the emanation of his great spirit.

  Helen told Max that devotees would sometimes bring cloths ornately woven in bright colours for this purpose; and one or two of their group now did have rather superior-looking pieces of coloured silk which they laid out reverently. Helen had only a fine, beautifully laundered and ironed cotton handkerchief, which she spread on the grass.

  ‘They could have buried a horse in there,’ Max said, looking at the size of the grave. ‘Even lying on its side.’

  While Helen listened to the guide, Max wandered about among the graves. Only a few metres away from Gurdjieff he found Katherine Mansfield. The inscription said ‘Katherine Mansfield / Wife of John Middleton Murry’. It didn’t mention that she was a writer.

  There were a few delays on the line and the journey back to the Gare de Lyon took more than an hour. It was too late for a visit to the Sainte-Geneviève library. Max’s sunburned face was hot. His head throbbed faintly. He wanted to lie down again and go to sleep. He felt he’d been foolish, and yet he argued with himself. Why had it been foolish to go on this expedition? As he’d said to Louise—it was summer wasn’t it? Vacation time? The sun was shining, the flowers were out, the countryside was lovely. What harm had been done?—unless it was harm to his wife’s French bourgeois sense of propriety; to the necessary grandeur of the professorial role. Yes, that was it, undoubtedly.

  Louise had unsettled him, but when Helen told him she lived in the rue Parrot, just a short walk from the station, and suggested he should come in and have a cup of tea—or even a bowl of pasta if he felt like staying a while—he said, very properly, even primly, tea would be nice.

  The apartment, five floors up in a rickety lift, was very small, long and narrow like a railway carriage, with two windows on one side, a divan-bed on the other against the wall, a small table and two chairs at the far end, an alcove kitchen at the other, and a cubicle douche et WC. ‘Dinky’, she called it, and it was, especially with her decorations, which he was invited to admire—a modest couple of book shelves, sea shells, a single Roman tile, a Japanese glass paperweight, a framed photo of a mill house and mill stream with trailing willows, and one of what appeared to be an English country rail-stop with the word ADLESTROP.

  There was no space for easy chairs, and hardly room to pass one another between the windows and the divan, which, though placed longwise, was quite broad. In fact, with its bright orange cotton cover, the divan (where he imagined she slept) dominated the room and made everything else subsidiary. The windows, pushed open, looked out on the Mansard roof, ending in the rainwater guttering, and beyond that, five storeys down, was the rue Parrot.

  Helen pushed him into a sitting position on the divan, took three steps into the kitchen to fill the kettle and switch it on, and three steps back to dump herself down beside him. She’s very vigorous, he thought.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Relax. You’re tense. Look at you.’ And then, laughing, ‘Relax, Max! Relax!’

  Her hands were on his face. ‘Close your eyes. That’s right.’ She ran fingers delicately over his eyes and up into his hair; then down over his ears to neck and shoulders.

  ‘Lie face down,’ she said. ‘Let me give you a massage.’

  He allowed himself to be pushed forward on to his face. She lifted his lower legs up on to the divan, pulled his shirt up from under his belt and began to massage his back.

  The kettle whistled and she paused long enough to turn it off.

  Now she climbed on to the divan with him, knelt beside him, then straddled him, and applied strong hands, strong fingers, to his back, to every inch of it, to his neck and up into his scalp.

  ‘I like this,’ he said, surrendering.

  ‘Of course you do. Everybody does.’

  Helen’s hands moved up to the back of his neck again. ‘This is beautiful,’ she said. ‘You’re relaxing now. I can feel it here. And here.’

  He drifted, and for a brief time slept, then woke feeling her no longer massaging but lying half over him, her limbs loose. Perhaps she too was asleep. Yes, she was sleeping—he could tell by the even, just-audible sound of her breathing, with a small whistle at the end of each breath. He could feel her breasts against his back and wondered why he hadn’t noticed them. They felt quite large. They must be the broad kind, not pointy.

  He was thinking in a rather uncertain way of the Gurdjieff doctrine that ordinary lives were a ‘sleep’ and that ‘wakefulness’ had to be worked for, worked at. And then of Shakespeare’s ‘sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care’—which merged into what were really just words—misty, mysterious, meaningless …

  Then he really did sleep.

  THAT NIGHT MAX WALKED all the way back to the 5th arrondissement. A light rain was falling, but he pressed on. He was happy. Summer was making strategic advances through streets and gardens, and Paris was bright and loud, busy and pleased to be Paris—‘Nobody’s dream but your own’ as he had written in that long-ago poem that had brought Helen as a visitor to his room —but everyone’s dream too.

  III

  AUTUMN ARRIVED ON TIME, and the two trees in the courtyard Max Jackson looked out on turned quite a showman’s orange-yellow or yellow-gold, depending on what the light was doing—and it was all, as any photographer would tell you, a collaboration with the light. Still at this date, the first day of November and a Saturday, there were, among the leaves, a few pallid green survivors, brave rather than bravura and soon to die. It was a collaboration too, quite as significantly, with the wind, which came and went, or refused to come, sending down (or not) showers of orange-yellow gold over his small garden and over the paved (he would have called it cobbled—they were lumpy enough underfoot, though not true cobbles) courtyard, the protected enclosure that had all the secret charm of Paris as it had appeared to him, and had captured him, in the uncertainty of his youth. There was, erratically, sunshine too, but it was the first sun of autumn rather than the last of summer, with little of summer left in it, hardly a hint, only a memory. It was the sun of the northern hemisphere November, a shadow of its former self.

  As he watched from his window the casual gardener employed by the Syndic was sweeping leaves from the paved area with a broom, but he was armed also with a noisy blower (no modern gardener is without one) with which he would soon blow leaves out of the garden beds and hedges. But here in this sheltered courtyard his blower was the worst of winds. Out in the boulevards, where the real wind blew, the fall was more advanced, and the leaves, most often plain brown, were showering down and clattering along the pavements faster than the men in their sweeping machines could keep ahead of them. The trees in the Luxembourg Gardens had lost their summer shapes and the reflecting pool of the Medici Fountain was so cluttered it reflected nothing but its own failure.

  Sitting there in the window embrasure Max was invaded by a particular memory of his early days in Paris. He had been there perhaps a year, much of which had been spent hunting for street names and managing maps, often in wind and rain, getting lost, finding his way, congratulating himself for having done well or cursing himself for failure. This particular day it was autumn, November like today, fine but cold, and already the drunks and homeless ones were lying down over the pavement grilles to warm themselves in the air coming up from the Metro; and, as Max was walking towards the river in the morning sun, he found himself wondering what had changed, what was the different (and wonderful) feel about this day? It was then he recognised that he was walking freely, not checking constantly where he was, because he knew and didn’t need even t
o think about it. Paris, or this part of it, had become his city, and he was its inhabitant. And just then, as he was crossing the Pont Sully from left to right bank, he looked downriver and there was Notre Dame in full morning sun, with its twin towers, its iron spire and flying buttresses, looking like the great ship of souls sailing towards him up the river. It took him by surprise and he was faint with the beauty of it, and of the city, and had to stop and lean on the balustrade and stare. He tried to think of a French poem to suit the moment, knowing there must be many, but could only bring to mind Apollinaire’s ‘The Mirabeau Bridge’, which didn’t match the place and the time. So he quoted to himself T.S. Eliot’s lines about the Thames and they seemed to fit perfectly because the trees over the Seine were also shedding their tent of leaves:

  The River’s tent is broken. The last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land unheard. The nymphs are departed.

  He was, that day, already in love with Louise, who was resisting him with a sort of French—or perhaps it was just female—ambiguity and cunning. The problem, insofar as she was willing or able to make it clear, was his foreignness, his ‘Britishness’. It made no difference to tell her he was not British, he was a New Zealander. And when he tried to explain the differences, their complexities and declensions, she said he was being needlessly subtle and essentially boring—and he thought so too.

  ‘One day you will want to go back there,’ she said. ‘Or to Britain.’

  ‘Only if you were with me,’ he’d said. It was a commitment.

  The gardener had gone now, taking his portable wind with him, and Max moved to sit outdoors in the courtyard as if to encourage the sun, as if to tell it not to be faint-hearted or sorry for itself: there was honour in old age. Like a true Frenchman he took Le Monde to read out there. Today it was featuring the tortures the ISIS militants had inflicted on their Western captives before releasing those for whom the governments of Spain and France had (though denying it) paid a ransom, and beheading one by one, and by hand, the two Americans and two British whose governments had announced that no blood money would change hands.