In the City of Love's Sleep Read online

  And your mother? she asked.

  English, I suppose. But mostly Irish. My parents were both Catholics, which made it a bit easier.

  A Catholic only child?

  My mother says that she couldn’t wait to get back to work – she’s a radiographer.

  He was learning that Liis liked to make sense of things but did not pursue the matter of feelings.

  So you come from four islands.

  I don’t think of myself as coming from anywhere.

  Everyone on an island arrived there from somewhere else.

  This delighted Raif. At school he had been called different and the harder the other children found it to place him, the fiercer the question became: Who are you? They couldn’t make sense of his face and neither could he. When he looked in the mirror he asked the same question – not Who am I? but Who are you?

  The slight child who looked a bit foreign had been transformed, over the course of one summer, into a young man whose face drew everyone’s gaze. Girls appeared wherever he was and switched themselves on. He was surrounded by smiling girls, laughing girls, girls who puffed their hair, laid a hand on his arm and leant towards him in their straining shirts, who offered him the right to their attention and perhaps to their bodies. The other boys thought this hilarious and then annoying.

  They were on their way out of the world of school, and the king of the boys knew that this year was to be the last of his reign so he made good use of what power he had. When the queen of the girls started to pay attention to Raif, the king of the boys shoved him against a wall, chanting the old question: Who are you? Only now it was a demand that Raif give up becoming this bright new self. He complied and sank back. The queen of the girls walked past as if she’d never met him and the king of the boys did so too.

  This taught Raif that to have someone’s attention is a dangerous thing. He looked away for years and when he looked again, he saw Liis. She arrived in his life and he became the man from four islands whose face people kept returning to, unable to complete their reading. The question was still the same – Who are you? – but he was learning that it didn’t require an answer and that not offering one was a kind of power.

  When Raif remarked that Liis’s life seemed to have been a series of epic histories, she laughed and said she grew up very quietly in a village cut off from the sea by a military zone she was not permitted to enter. She was disliked at school because her father worked for the government.

  I don’t need to belong, she said. It doesn’t mean anything.

  It felt to Raif as if she were cutting him free, which made him want to be bound to her forever.

  I wanted to belong, he said, and then I didn’t and now I do.

  You want to?

  No, I do belong. With you.

  Liis accepted this as if it were not terribly important. For Raif it was the greatest possible expression of happiness.

  They married when her visa expired. She said she didn’t want to continue in her job or return to the States and he was proud of being able to offer himself as a solution. He started his first teaching post and they rented the flat he still lives in at the end of a new extension to an underground line. Their life took on the structures and rhythms Liis gave it and he was glad to conform. She decorated their home in the smart, neutral tones of the company flat, only now the putty and mushroom decor was not to be disturbed. If they had sex at all it was in bed.

  Liis signed up with an elite temp agency and went to a different office every few months, adjusting to complex new systems and procedures each time. She would make observations about the people she met but she was never drawn in. She walked out of whatever office she was in that day as if she were never going there again and arrived home empty-handed. She asked Raif about his research, made logical encouraging remarks and cooked beautiful food that tasted of nothing.

  I’ve made some delicious chicken, she would say. Another pancake? They’re delicious.

  He would eat some more and agree that they really were delicious.

  Within a few years he’d written his book about absence in the seventeenth-century curiosity cabinet. It was twice as long as had been planned and, for a work full of extraordinary objects, strikingly dull. Raif had watched himself move his research into place. He couldn’t think of anything to add.

  He blamed whatever strain he felt on the book and Liis encouraged this.

  He had pains in his stomach after each beautiful meal.

  Female warmth – from colleagues and friends – was overwhelming. He distanced himself by imagining the details of their bodies.

  He masturbated at work and cried often at his desk.

  When Liis began to complain of headaches, he accepted this as another stage in her withdrawal. It took him a long time to understand that she was ill. It was pain that broke her open in the end but then she spoke her own language, which he did not understand.

  He thought only about her and not about himself and believed this to be love. Only much later did he wonder at her nature and later still, his own.

  is he flirting with her?

  Iris does not see Raif as a man slipping on ice, whose friends are bored with the inertia of his grief and whose mind fixes on smaller and smaller detail. She knows he is an academic, that his father is dead and that he has a colleague who slips her arm through his. Otherwise he is in outline.

  For him, Iris is an atmosphere. He can’t see her but what she suggests is palpable. He tells himself that he has found a colleague who shares his interests, and he prints off an image of the cloud mirror she mentioned, which he immediately loses among the papers on his desk. Now and then it surfaces and he looks at it and loses it again until the day he throws it in the bin and decides to get in touch.

  Raif’s message says that he’d like to know more about some of the objects Iris mentioned: the cloud mirror, the merman, the jealousy glass, the bone skates. Perhaps she could give him references and catalogue numbers. My subject is more broadly curiosity, he writes. Is he flirting with her? Iris knows that she could send him these details or invite him to see the objects. He’s forcing her to be the one who suggests they meet. In a small room in her head she sees them years later and he’s saying You asked me to come to see you. You started it. (Started what?)

  She sends him a list of references, links and catalogue numbers, and tells him who to contact if he wants to view anything. She adds her best wishes. A month passes and Iris starts to feel as if she’s waiting for an echo. One day she comes across an image of the merman and is about to send it to him but this is supposed to be a casual contact and the merman is not a casual thing. She finds a photo of the cloud mirror and sends that instead – as if the cloud mirror has nothing to suggest.

  the cloud mirror

  The 1862 International Exhibition covered twenty acres of the site on which the street of museums now stands. Great halls of cast iron, brick and glass were filled with cotton mills and ship’s engines, submarine cables, electronic telegraph machines, sculpture and wallpaper. Among all this, James Goddard demonstrated two small instruments. One was a device for measuring sunlight hours through the use of photographic paper and the other was the cloud mirror. A mahogany disc the size of a dinner plate, it contained a small mirror surrounded by a paper collar on which the cardinal points had been broken down into south, south-west, south-south-west and so on. The idea was that it could be used to track the speed and direction of clouds and so better predict the weather.

  That same year a scientist called James Glaisher decided to find out more about clouds by going up among them. The only way to do this was in a hot-air balloon. He had a willing companion in Henry Coxwell, a dentist with a lifelong passion for ballooning, and together they designed a balloon that was eighty feet tall. They chose a site in Wolverhampton, as inland as they could possibly get. Glaisher brought along seventeen instruments with which to monitor the air.

  They rose easily to five thousand feet. On emerging from the cloud at seven
teen minutes past one, we came into a flood of light, with a beautiful blue sky without a cloud above us, and a magnificent sea of cloud below … I tried to take a view of their surface with the camera, but the balloon was ascending too rapidly and spiralling too quickly to allow me to do so.

  They were now in a perfect position in relation to their subject. If only they could then have remained there! The balloon continued to climb. The height of two miles was reached at twenty-one minutes past one. The temperature had dropped to freezing. They jettisoned sand but still the balloon rose. Eventually they were at an altitude of around five miles. A line became tangled and the dentist clambered up to free it. After that he found it difficult to catch his breath. Glaisher continued to monitor his instruments but was now having trouble making sense of them: I could not see the fine column of the mercury in the wet-bulb thermometer; nor the hands of the watch, nor the fine divisions on any instrument. He started to lose sensation and then found himself unable to move and passed out. Coxwell had somehow to release the valve and start bringing the balloon back down but his hands had lost all feeling and were turning black.

  They continued to float upwards into thinner air, the dentist watching the balloon expand, knowing that eventually it would burst. He pulled himself by the elbows up onto the rigging and managed to tug at the rip-cord with his teeth. At last the balloon began to descend. The pressure dropped and the scientist revived (having been unconscious for seven minutes). He checked his instruments and poured brandy on Coxwell’s numb hands. No inconvenience followed our insensibility.

  They made it safely back down to earth but what had they learnt, these Victorian boffins in their autumn tweeds? They learnt only what had happened to them while understanding very little about it.

  How else do we begin in the knowledge of something? They went on to make more flights and Glaisher, by returning to his subject and persisting in his measurements and records, made vital contributions to our understanding of rain formation and wind speed.

  Neither Raif nor Iris would have gone up in that balloon. He would have sought out contemporary newspaper reports of the experiment and records of the economic impact of unpredictable weather. She would have analysed the balloon’s materials, construction and durability. In this they were more like the inventor of the cloud mirror – preferring to observe rather than to enter their subject, and to look down rather than up.

  meeting point

  The image of the cloud mirror that Iris sends to Raif is the same one he printed for himself. Still he prints it again. He ought to go to see it. He tells his students that they mustn’t rely on images any more than they should secondary sources. Where possible, they must see the thing itself. So he writes to Iris and says he’s coming to look up something in the museum’s library and wonders if she could show him the cloud mirror.

  Now he’s standing next to her in a research room at the museum. The lighting is thorough and both feel exposed. The summer has got stuck, as it always does, in a series of grey days. The city is unbreathable and its people feel guarded and ashamed. They will submit to the crowd but encounters such as this, when the body comes under the scrutiny of someone known, are to be avoided. Raif is conscious of a pooling under his arms. Iris is suddenly aware of the slick wet of the nape of her neck, the river at her lower back. They keep turning away as if it is the other who is bringing about this terrible liquefaction.

  She struggles to put on gloves, offers him a pair, unpacks the cloud mirror and passes it over. He hadn’t expected the real thing to be quite so ordinary. Iris explains that the frame was coated with an unstable varnish she wants to assess but she’s not sure how to treat the wood without damaging the brittle paper collar. He asks how she’ll decide this and she explains that she’s been trained to identify the most fragile component of any object and to make protecting that her priority. She’s probably going to recommend that the varnish is left untouched.

  She’s impressed by the time he’s taking to study the cloud mirror and looks forward to what he might say. Eventually he puts it down.

  So a cloud could be said to be travelling in any one of thirty-two directions.

  Really? (She knows this.)

  He picks it up again and looks at her with a big smile he’s borrowed from somewhere.

  Shall we give it a whirl?

  He takes it towards the room’s one small window, which is usually closed but has been left open as the day is so close. Iris is alarmed.

  You can’t—

  Raif, caught up in his performance of daring, is slow to gauge her tone.

  You mean you’ve never tried to see how it works?

  Iris is baffled. Does he not know how to handle such things?

  It shouldn’t be exposed. The ink, the paper …

  Of course, he says. Stupid of me.

  As she takes the cloud mirror from him she sees a spasm pass across his face which she decides is annoyance, anger even. She’s right that he’s furious but only with himself. He’s always done his best to be correct and was trying to impress her by being less so. She busies herself packing the mirror away.

  You can tell that it wouldn’t work all that well, she says. It was just a prototype and didn’t get taken up.

  It might have been useful in the field – to farmers and military strategists.

  Do you think so?

  No, not really.

  Iris has gone to some trouble to retrieve the cloud mirror. It’s her gift to him and now that he’s disappointed so is she. He’s smaller than she remembers, thickening at the waist and even a little womanly about the hips. His hair is ominously fine but his looks don’t depend on it. She notes these details as a way of calming herself down because her body has switched itself on, as it did when they first met. She is so aware of the warmth and scent of his skin that she might as well be touching him, they might as well be pressed together, inside one another, right here.

  He thanks her and picks up his jacket. So he has seen the cloud mirror. What else? He’d said in his message that he was coming to the library and now he recalls a footnote to a chapter that he’s been meaning to pursue.

  I’ll walk you out, Iris says. The quickest way is down the back stairs and through the central hall but if you’re interested, and have time, I could show you the new gallery?

  Raif confuses his desire to escape this room with a desire to escape her.

  No. That’s kind of you but I have to … The library closes in an hour.

  The library. Of course.

  Another time.

  No need.

  Now that he’s mentioned the library, he must go there. He orders a book and looks at it.

  *

  At half past five Raif makes his way to the underground. He’s late for a supervision with a doctoral student but doesn’t rush. A train is waiting at the platform and he stands before it. He remembers having to stand close to Iris, closer than he would have chosen. He doesn’t move.

  Fuck! someone erupts from a cluster of people hurrying cautiously down the stairs onto the platform, hoping to catch this train. Fuck! the boy yells again as he loses his balance and stumbles, knocking someone over. He’s young and gathers himself without hesitation, bouncing back up and onto the train just as the doors close.

  The woman the boy knocked over is sitting on a step gathering up the things that have spilt from her bag. It’s Iris. There are people muttering sympathy and indignation and asking her if she’s alright and she’s nodding her head without looking up because for some absurd reason – she wasn’t hurt, not even all that surprised – she’s trying not to cry.

  Raif approaches, leans down to help pick up her things and finds himself offering her a tampon, an empty blister pack of painkillers and her phone. Not knowing what to do next, he takes her hand and raises her to her feet and they pause in the moment as they did on first meeting when passing through that doorway side by side. Having helped her up and brushed the dirt off the sleeve of her jacket, he doesn’t touch
her again, although he asks three times if she’s sure she’s alright.

  To those around them it seems as if these two people, colleagues surely, are passing the time on their way home. Who can tell that they’ve right now reached the purest stage of connection? Thanks to the minor accident that has just occurred, they’re gathering substance. This is the first thing to have happened to them.

  Their affinity has yet to be tested or applied and so is easy to believe in. They know almost nothing about one another but if one had to describe the other, they would do so confidently and in the most idealised terms. If one said they were about to travel the world and would be gone for six months, the other would wish them well. They would feel neither left nor that they were leaving someone because they are not yet part of each other’s lives.

  A train pulls in and Iris suddenly says that she’s forgotten something and must go back to her office and that it was nice to see him and she hopes his visit has been helpful. He watches her struggle back up the stairs through the next wave of passengers, who then surround him. When the train moves off he’s still there on the briefly empty platform. If only she were there too. If they could stay where they are, before any sort of map is drawn, their relationship would be perfect.

  varnish

  Iris met David on the underground. It was late in the evening and there were only a handful of people in the carriage. She was sitting opposite and along from him, lost inside a stiff white dress she’d made herself. Her face was emphatic and her hair was cut as if it were just something to get out of the way. She held an open book in her hands but kept her eyes fixed on the window opposite. He couldn’t get a sense of the body beneath her dress and enjoyed speculating on this. She wasn’t delicate and he liked that. Her limbs were heavy and shapely, her hands blunt.