An earthquake is a bit like mad love at first sight, in that it happens in a moment. If you’re unprepared for that moment the consequences could be catastrophic. If you’re in one of our patented buildings with walls full of airbags, like the dwellings I designed and got built and mass-produced with the kind aid of the strapped-for-cash Crown, a vile totalitarian Middle-Eastern desert state trying to clean up its tawdry act and several obviously corrupt NGOs, you have a chance to catch onto that moment without the distraction of the immediate and violent collapse of walls. If you get out, don’t forget your notebook.
Those words are from my original draft of a prospectus my company foists on unwary visitors, usually well-heeled ones, to various trade fairs we take part in. I’m always slightly sorry to see the anodyne version that made it into the final glossy brochure. The last sentence is the only one that might have truly mystified a pencil-wielding proof-reader.
I’m one of those odd people who carry pen and paper with them at all times. I’m always writing things down. One reason is that I’m what you might call an academic type, for better or worse, with the PhD I’m working on more or less constantly and the books I’m always reading, sometimes in a state of mystification and with the feeling that I’m the only person in the world reading them. The main reason though is that I have no reliable short-term memory, for appointments, things on television or say buying shopping on the way home. I carry lists of things around with me and cross them off when they’re done just in case I forget I’ve done them and do them all over again. We academics sometimes get away with things like that. Other things we do include subscribing twice to magazines in which there is nothing of interest even once, watching documentaries all the way through insomniac nights and poking around in second hand bookshops – I do a lot of that.
My pen-and-paper habit arose from a lesson I was given once. It was not part of my academic life but came cruelly, out of the blue, as most of life’s useful lessons do.
It happened in the early nineties during my time in the Army in, mostly, what had been West Germany. Just after Christmas I was on leave in London spending a tense few days with my sister. She was older than me and disapproved of me for a number of odd and yet recognisable reasons. After a few drinks her husband turned from an affable bore into a morose one and became very hard going. My niece and nephew were sulky adolescents over whom Christmas had long lost its charm; not old enough to strike out and spend Christmas among their friends, all equally imprisoned in family homes, they suffered it and let everybody in their orbit know. “Better,” I told myself, “than being in a barracks in Essen.” At times, though, I wasn’t so sure.
I was glad to get out of the house by the twenty seventh. I didn’t intend to do much; see a film perhaps, or have a meal that didn’t include fowl and gravy. As my life was spent in camp with seven thousand others, being alone didn’t bother me. On the contrary, it was liberating. I walked around London’s subdued West End, the few people around perhaps too overfed to be raucous and disagreeable. I saw it in faces that, like me, they were glad to be free of Christmas and its trappings. Enjoying the sense of space in the streets and remembering the awful television programmes I’d sat through, I decided against the film. I mooched, had a coffee and, surprised and pleased to find it open, spent a couple of hours in the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square. One of my favourite paintings hangs there, Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding. What a beautiful girl, I thought, as I always did, the girl Arnolfini married. Mrs Arnolfini, with her translucent features. Who was she before? Where did she come from? I resolved, as I always did, to find out. As I had nothing on which to write it down, that was destined to be forgotten again.
I wasn’t hungry, so I went and had another coffee in a tiny café in a street that led eventually to Leicester Square. I got engrossed in my book, Hotel du Lac – I was enduring a Booker Prize winners’ phase at the time. When I looked up, the place was nearly full. I was surrounded by couples or groups relaxing in a familiar seasonal relief. I shared in it in my own way and ordered more coffee. Life was not so bad: I had a good book and good coffee.
I also had a woman standing over me saying, “Is this seat taken?” Her hand was already on the back of the chair across the table from me.
“No,” I assured her. “It’s free.”
“Keep an eye on my bag for me, will you?” she threw over her shoulder as she went to the counter to order. I promised I would. What a beautiful girl, I thought to myself. No, she didn’t look at all like Mrs Arnolfini.
I knew we’d talk. I knew too – I don’t know how – that we’d go out together. I knew we’d fall in love without realising and that we’d both cry when it came time for me to head back to Germany. I knew she’d visit me there and that we’d get married and have babies and Christmases and this period, special for us, just after it.
Almost as soon as she sat down we were in easy conversation. We talked about Christmas first, of course. She’d had a bad one, too. “There are ways to improve Christmas,” I said, cautiously, not looking at her till I had to.
Her eyes reflected mine as she agreed, said, “For sure there are.”
The silence was short, and too intense to hold onto. I returned to small talk, babbling about my plan to finish my architecture degree as soon as my Army service was up, and then getting out there into the world to build.
“Build what?”
I had all kinds of ideas. I borrowed her pen and sketched one out on the inside cover of my book. It was my dream design for an earthquake zone dwelling, one I’d had since the age of fourteen or so, its flexible walls full of airbags.
She was a student too, she told me. “English Literature,” she admitted. “You wouldn’t be interested in that.” I was, though. I offered my paperback in evidence. We talked books, somewhat irreverently, as if their authors, all these greats and not-so-greats, were friends. “Or at least people we met at parties,” she said, excited.
“And didn’t like. Or did we?”
We shared likes and dislikes and even a few disagreements, but I thought all the while how a choice of such things can say a lot about somebody. It didn’t matter that I liked her; my sense that she liked me was more important. My premonition was fleshed out behind my eyes. When she looked at me and said, “What are you thinking?” it was revealed to both of us, I believe, and have always believed, as a thing that lovers said. The thought inspired me.
“If you think hard, you’ll know,” I told her.
She made a smile that turned into a grimace as she looked at her watch and said, “I’ve got to go. I didn’t realise the time. I’m meeting some friends.” She looked into the distance for seconds. “I can’t let them down,” she decided. “You know – Christmas and all – I mean, I’ve not seen them since last Christmas.” She indicated her bag, presents in pastel wrapping. Though the few words disappointed me, I liked her for them. “It’s been nice talking to you, though.”
“We can do it again,” I said.
“We can.” She gave me a long look as she got to her feet and into her coat. I noticed then that the café was almost empty. There were one or two other stragglers readying to leave, one of the cheery Italians who ran the place half-heartedly urging people on their way back to what was left of Christmas. “I don’t even know your name, though.”
We made our introductions. Her name was Neela, which suited her in all kinds of ways I didn’t quite understand. There was a whole history in the name, of a large and complicated continent in flux, its people once colonised by the army I was a part of, and emerging from that experience in their own way, with inventiveness and humanity. I couldn’t give her my number; I didn’t have one. I had never memorised my sister’s number. My only other number was at the base in Essen. “I’ll give you mine,” she said. She flourished her pen, and said, “Got some paper?” I didn’t, so without asking she picked up my book and wrote in the flyleaf over my impromptu diagram, saying, “There. Phone me tomorrow.”
“I will,” I promised. “About eight?”
“In the morning?” She laughed. “Twelve might be better. But you’re sure, now?” she teased me, for I’d told her how the Army was making some progress towards curing me of my bad memory. “You won’t forget?”
“How could I?”
Rather stiffly, we shook hands. We almost parted there. Instead, I asked Neela if I could walk to the bus stop with her, and she agreed. I was walking lightly, no square-bashing pace from me. Something had happened, and I felt the force of my premonition, knew I was already in love. In Charing Cross Road her bus pulled up to the stop. As we were shaking hands again Neela stepped forward and pecked me quickly on the cheek. “Till tomorrow,” she called. I watched her wave at me from inside the bus, and then she was gone.
I didn’t want to stay out anymore. I’d go back to my sister’s, I decided, and would start getting ready for the following day. My sister could glance at me however she wanted, my brother-in-law could pontificate and fulminate all he liked and the kids could grouch their way into oblivion. None of them would bother me. Festive television wouldn’t touch me at all, nor turkey sandwiches. On my pocket of air, I walked across Trafalgar Square and down Villiers Street to the tube.
It was at Earl’s Court that I reached in my pocket for my book. I hadn’t wanted to read, just wanted to look at Neela’s name, her number, a trace of her. There was no book there. I guess it was the walking on air that had been the big mistake; I’d been in such a hurry to walk to the bus stop with Neela that I’d left the book behind.
I got off the train and crossed to the opposite platform and went back to the Embankment and up the hill and across the square, up the side street to the café. I flattened my face onto the window to see if any of the staff were still there. There was a light on at the back, and I knocked, but there was no answer – of course there wasn’t. They’d almost been in coats and scarves and party hats as we left, their eagerness for a night out in their eyes.
When I got there the next morning and made my way through the crush of customers at the counter for their first reluctant outing back to work, I ordered a coffee and asked my questions. No, nobody had handed in my book. “Good book?” I was asked. They weren’t unfriendly, just busy, and possibly hungover. My annoyance was threatening to rise to a panic. Did they know the woman who’d sat at my table? “Yes,” one of them recalled. My hopes rose, but he was simply checking. “Indian woman?” Not a regular, as far as they knew.
“If she comes in again…” Another offered a wink. “Want us to call in the Army?”
I was nearly always numbered as a squaddie – my bearing, I’d been told, something dogged in my walk. My terrible haircut more like, or perhaps the visible sense of ill-at-ease in non-military company I’d grown into after only two years.
I wrote my name and my sister’s address down, and her phone number this time, and handed it over. Deep down, I knew it was no good.
Back to the National Gallery for me then, and back to the café several times until I began to feel foolish under the looks I was getting. Twelve o’clock came and went. Mrs Arnolfini sent me her boyish little smile. I thought of that same smile on Neela’s face, and kicked myself.
I tried to remember her number, superimposed over my walls full of airbags, but couldn’t unlock it from whatever corner of my mind it sat in. I couldn’t even remember the area code. I couldn’t remember where she was studying, for she hadn’t said a place in particular, made it into an unfamiliar acronym. I saw her face, saw her lips moving around the words, but they wouldn’t come back to me. As the gallery closed, I was left there alone, a man with only one thought in his otherwise empty mind.
I went and bought a notebook and a pen, and wrote in it, To Neela: if I find you again, next time I won’t forget. I bought another copy of Hotel du Lac from one of the bookshops on Charing Cross Road. I finished it and liked it, but if any of you out there have a copy you picked up second hand somewhere and it has a cryptic design and a number and a name, I’d be interested in seeing it again, just for old time’s sake.
Illustration : Suman Mukherjee
