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She will, he realizes now, always have a serious face. She has moved from being a young woman into having the angular look of a queen, someone who has made her face with her desire to be a certain kind of person. He still likes that about her. Her smartness, the fact that she did not inherit that look or that beauty, but that it was something searched for and that it will always reflect a present stage of her character. It seems every month or two he witnesses her this way, as if these moments of revelation are a continuation of the letters she wrote to him for a year, getting no reply, until she stopped sending them, turned away by his silence. His character, he supposed.
– I’m your friend. Hana there sleeping is your friend. The people tonight in the audience were your friends. They’re compassionate too. Listen, they are terrible sentimentalists. They love your damn iguana. They’ll cry all through their sister’s wedding. They’ll cry when their sister says she has had her first kiss. But they must turn and kill the animals in the slaughter-houses. And the smell of the tanning factories goes into their noses and lungs and stays there for life. They never get the smell off their bodies. Do you know the smell? You can bet the rich don’t know it. It brutalizes. It’s like sleeping with the enemy. It clung to Hana’s father. They get skin burns from the galvanizing process. Arthritis, rheumatism. That’s the truth.
– So what do you do?
– You name the enemy and destroy their power. Start with their luxuries – their select clubs, their summer mansions.
His mind skates across old conversations. The past drifts into the air like an oasis and he watches himself within it. The girl’s eyes that night when he was eighteen were like tunnels into kindness and lust and determination which he loved as much as her white stomach and her ochre face. He saw something there he would never fully reach – the way Clara dissolved and suddenly disappeared from him, or the way Alice came to him it seemed in a series of masks or painted faces, both of these women like the sea through a foreground of men.
What the dyers wanted, standing there together, the representatives from separate nations, was a cigarette. To stand during the five-minute break dressed in green talking to a man in yellow, and smoke. To take in the fresh energy of smoke and swallow it deep into their lungs, roll it around and breathe it up so it would remove with luck the acrid texture already deep within them, stuck within every corner of their flesh. A cigarette, a star beam through their flesh, would have been enough to purify them.
“I’ll tell you about the rich,” Alice would say, “the rich are always laughing. They keep saying the same things on their boats and lawns: Isn’t this grand! We’re having a good time! And whenever the rich get drunk and maudlin about humanity you have to listen for hours. But they keep you in the tunnels and stockyards. They do not toil or spin. Remember that … understand what they will always refuse to let go of. There are a hundred fences and lawns between the rich and you. You’ve got to know these things, Patrick, before you ever go near them – the way a dog before battling with cows rolls in the shit of the enemy.”
He had wanted to know her when she was old. At lunches she would argue her ideas against him, holding up her glass, “To impatience! To the evolving human!” while he was intent on her shoulder, romantic towards the dazzle of her hair. Her grin was always there when he spoke of growing old with her – as if she had made some other pact, as if there was another arrow of alliance. He couldn’t wait to know her when, in years to come, they would be solvent, sexually calmer, less like wildlife. There was always, he thought, this pleasure ahead of him, an ace of joy up his sleeve so he could say you can do anything to me, take everything away, put me in prison, but I will know Alice Gull when we are old. Even if we cannot be lovers I will come each afternoon, come as if courting, and over lunch we will share our thoughts, laughing, so this talk will be love.
– Your goddamn herringbone tiles in the toilets cost more than half our salaries put together.
– Yes, that’s true.
– Aren’t you ashamed of that?
– You watch, in fifty years they’re going to come here and gape at the herringbone and the copper roofs. We need excess, something to live up to. I fought tooth and nail for that herringbone.