In the City of Love's Sleep Read online

  The train slowed as it neared her station but just as she moved towards the door, it stopped. Underground trains stop all the time and for the first thirty seconds most people pay little attention. Thirty seconds is a pause. Longer than that and it becomes a delay and the passengers, who have been dreaming, reading and sleeping, become present. It’s as if they wake up, each saying I am here, in this small space, with strangers, inside the earth, and I cannot move. After two minutes the possibility of moving seems far less likely than that of being stuck there for hours.

  David noticed that she kept looking from door to window. Eventually she sat down again and got out her book. Her eyes were shut, her hands shaking. He went over and sat beside her.

  Were you looking for something?

  She surprised herself by answering him honestly but kept her eyes shut.

  I’m wondering how to escape, if we need to.

  You can always escape.

  How?

  The doors can be opened, the windows can be smashed. There’s a hammer for that exact purpose in a box over there.

  But we’re not going to do that so for now we’re stuck.

  We’re not even really underground. Just tucked inside a tunnel. The driver can probably see the platform.

  David didn’t ask what she feared might happen.

  I like your dress, he said and then shrugged.

  As Iris turned towards him, the train started to move. David pretended that it was his stop too and followed her out of the station. She hurried ahead.

  I was on my way east, he called after her. Only I liked your dress.

  She walked back and gave him her card. She’d printed them herself and he was the first person she’d given one to. It announced her as Conservator of Inlaid Objects.

  They started as rescuer and rescued. He was drawn to her concentration and she to a source of relief. He never asked why she’d felt so panicked. People do ask these things, as if there are clear reasons. We come up with answers and these become our reasons.

  *

  David arrived the next morning at the address on the card. It was a solid suburban villa with a subdued privet hedge and a paved front garden. When Iris came to the door she too looked less remarkable than he expected. She led him upstairs to a tightly organised bedsit and explained that the house had belonged to a couple who collected inlaid objects. The downstairs rooms had been filled with their acquisitions and they’d retreated to live upstairs. The couple’s son had inherited the house and packed up the collection. He then decided that he wanted it all restored and valued before offering it for sale. Iris was a friend of his daughter’s. He was impressed that she had a PhD and didn’t want to waste money on a proper expert (he’d phoned one or two) or time carting this stuff about.

  There were ash and ebony trays, pewter and mother-of-pearl boxes, screens inlaid with tortoiseshell, a walnut clothes brush inlaid with silver, a comb of boxwood and ivory, a tortoiseshell snuff box and Roman buttons of mosaic butterflies inlaid on porphyry. One or two things were museum standard but many appeared, when Iris scrutinised them more carefully, to be fakes.

  The son was furious. He’d grown up with objects more cherished than he had been himself and understood them to be of extraordinary worth. His parents were experts. They’d scoured auctions and catalogues and were friends with the best dealers.

  My parents did not buy fakes.

  If you could locate the bills of sale, we might be able to verify their origins.

  The dealers they bought them from were friends. There wasn’t much paperwork.

  The son turned towards the largest object in the collection, a Chinese screen.

  Look, love. I know you’re fresh out of college and don’t yet have an eye but this is tortoiseshell.

  It’s actually a form of plastic. It’s very well done but the discoloration is an unarguable sign.

  It’s old.

  It’s fake.

  Iris was young. She thought he’d be glad of the truth. When she’d confirmed that it was plastic, she’d been thrilled. Why shouldn’t he be thrilled too?

  It’s tortoiseshell, the son said. It says so here in my parents’ catalogue. They were experts. They would have known.

  Iris realised that it was her job to give him the information he wanted. They were his objects. And now that she’d raised doubts about their authenticity, he’d be forced either to sell them as fakes or knowingly pass them off as genuine. No wonder he was angry. She tried to think of something conciliatory to say.

  Even real tortoiseshell isn’t real. It’s usually turtle.

  These are not fakes.

  Fakes are a legitimate part of cultural history, she explained. They are an art in themselves.

  Fakes have no value.

  Museums are full of them.

  The son was in his sixties and lived three hundred miles away. He did not have the patience for this. He told Iris to identify the most valuable objects, to clean them and write up an inventory. The next time he came down, she’d laid them out.

  They look a bit dingy, he said.

  I could give the wood a coat of varnish, she said.

  She did what she’d been taught to do: to protect something by sealing its surfaces. She didn’t know that twenty years later she’d be removing this kind of varnish wherever she could. She would also learn to ask if restoring an object would expose it to more harm. If an eighteenth-century marquetry tea caddy was varnished forty years ago, should that varnish be removed as inauthentic? Or was it now part of the object’s story? And what did it mean to restore something when you could never make it new?

  *

  David wore clothes which adapted to any occasion, in colours Iris couldn’t name. It was important to her that he wore them carelessly and he was still young enough, at thirty, for this to look boyish rather than sad. Her idea of him continued to shift according to her mood. His looks wavered most. For some time she wasn’t sure if he was tall or slight, animated or animal. Then he became familiar and she didn’t think about what he looked like at all.

  David offered her conspiracy. He flattered her with his assumption that she understood his rapid, allusive banter. He mocked and demolished those she held in awe – the director of a museum, the architect of a new gallery extension – and dismissed the most eminent names in her world, whom he appeared to know well. He held out what he could glean, a polished opinion or sharpened snippet of gossip, rather than himself. Iris didn’t notice this because she was more comfortable with what he brought than who he might be.

  So you design exhibitions? she asked.

  In a way.

  In what way?

  Iris didn’t mean this as a challenge. It was characteristic of her to be thorough.

  I extrapolate. I interpret. I convey.

  He was laughing as he made this pronouncement so she laughed too. He then quizzed her for an hour and she told him about her cautious adolescence in a northern seaside town, her tidy room, how she liked to wear several layers of clothing and that getting drunk felt like adding even more.

  He observed the way she sat up straight and built her sentences and when she’d finished he proclaimed her:

  Iris the iridescent, the refracted, the divine! Conceived on the darkest coldest edge of the North Sea under great cliffs in a place of iron and slate! Iris of the purest colours, glimpsed only in a rainbow or in oil on water! Iris the precise, Iris of the strata, Iris who needs specific atmospheric conditions in order to reveal herself!

  His vision of this strong-limbed woman in a white dress was already varnished. Her desire to escape from the carriage of an underground train brightened into noble ambition, her fear a supreme acuity. When he met her for the second time, she seemed quite relaxed. Would she ever need rescuing again?

  *

  After the moment of yes and the decision to follow someone comes the matter of time and place. David waited a long time to sleep with Iris. This wasn’t difficult because it was in keeping with his idea
of her. He was in love with Iris and desired her above anyone else but sex was at times an abrupt and separate matter. He had one or two special friends and he experienced neither guilt nor power in this.

  One night they lay down and Iris asked him what he wanted her to do.

  Undress me, he said.

  She undid the buttons on his sludge-lemon shirt. She kissed his narrow chest, which was robust and not (as she’d imagined) bird-like at all. He lay back, imperfect, aroused and open to scrutiny. She felt for the second time that he was showing her the way out of a place where she’d got stuck, and she stood up and undressed too. She meant to do this quickly, just get out of her clothes and lie down beside him, but when David glimpsed her strong round breasts he gave such a desirous sigh that Iris felt proud and stood back, adjusting to this unexpected pleasure: someone who allowed her effect but did not encroach. She sat in the armchair and parted her legs, just a little at first and then wide.

  For the first year of Iris and David’s life together, the most loving moments occurred in such rooms. They discovered together how exciting it is to see and be seen by someone who keeps meeting you in the act. Sex became focused on the space between them and how long they could sustain it. David might ask Iris to turn her back so that he could trace, with his eyes, her long waist and broad hips.

  Your parts are so defined, he said.

  They were twenty-eight and thirty. Their natures were more fixed than they knew but they didn’t feel the drag of pattern or memory on each fresh encounter yet. Later he would declare her mechanical but for now he found her body powerful, and pliable too. They lay in the dark and he surrounded her, his fingers in her mouth, his penis deep inside her, his tongue on her breast. She was thrilled by his body’s changeable nature, how it could be fluid or rigid, resistant or generous. She would rename him inconsistent, unstable and deceitful soon enough.

  David had unlocked the stranger he’d found. He didn’t wonder what she contained or why she’d been locked in the first place. They looked and looked at each other but not deeply within. He didn’t detect the trauma at her core. She thought he’d seen it and had known not to disturb it. She gave herself to someone she believed had looked beneath the surface and seen the worst of her and had not turned away.

  withdrawn memory

  The city with its millions is a place where we think we drift and so we greet any chance meetings with exclamations of disbelief. What are you doing here? we ask one another and feel obliged to provide an answer. No one drifts.

  Still the city persuades us that the first meeting with a lover is a matter of chance. When you are one among millions, there’s always a sense that had your lover turned right instead of left, looked up instead of down, she or he would be getting caught up with someone else.

  Those who like to get caught up must be prepared to get lost. Perhaps they don’t cherish their own substance or maybe they’re so sure of themselves that they can dissolve into the city confident that they will emerge again.

  When we’re young we assume that we’ll wake up from any adventure back at home in our own solid beds, as our familiar selves, and mostly we do. But we all have dreams from which we have not entirely woken. No wonder the girl in her party dress out cold on the train or the boy crouched in the doorway with his head buried in his knees bring us such pain. In them we see our lost dreaming selves and we cannot bear them.

  *

  Iris grew up having bad dreams. This is how her parents and doctors referred to them but they were not dreams. At any time of day she could experience a lapse in reality. She found herself in an abstract space about to see a terrible thing. All she could do was try to stop time so that the thing didn’t appear. Her parents thought she was having seizures but the doctors said there was nothing wrong and sent her, aged ten, to a psychotherapist.

  What do you see?

  Nothing.

  What are you frightened of?

  The nothing.

  What does the nothing look like?

  It looks like nothing.

  The therapist tried another approach, asking Iris if she knew someone who’d seen a terrible thing.

  My gran.

  Did she tell you about it?

  My mum told me the story but it’s not a story. It happened.

  What happened?

  My gran was in a place and she saw a terrible thing and that’s why I must never ask her.

  But your mum told you what happened.

  I told you what happened. Gran was in a place and she saw a thing.

  How did your mum describe this place and this thing?

  I don’t know. I can’t remember.

  Would you like to ask her?

  Iris did not want to ask her grandmother what she had seen because then she would see it too. She didn’t know how to say this so she told the therapist as much as she could of what her mother had told her. Your grandmother is quiet because something happened to her. She saw a terrible thing. When she thought about it, Iris couldn’t even be sure her mother had said that. She couldn’t remember not knowing this story or when she had been told. She just knew it and she knew that when she had the bad dream she was in the same place as her grandmother. She also knew (without being able to say how) that this story was one that neither her mother nor her grandmother could bear. That Iris must bear it for them.

  As she got older these lapses became so rare that eventually they passed from memory into dream. They were neither referred to nor discussed and Iris persuaded herself that she’d invented the whole thing – not only the nothing but what her mother had said.

  We can inherit bad dreams just as we might a gesture. We have our great-aunt’s way of biting her lip or raising her arms when she’s annoyed, even though she died before we were born. We repeat things we’ve never known.

  curiosity

  Are we our worst pain? Raif types the words and stops. He’s trying to write a proposal for a conference about curiosity, anomaly and the body. It’s years since he’s done anything like this. He’d been getting bored, or was it tired, and then his wife died and no one pressed him to do anything. He’s lost track of what matters. Current thinking seems to be about how to approach the study of objects. There’s not so much about the objects themselves. Or is there? He hasn’t kept up.

  He distracts himself by clicking through the site of the museum where Iris works. He wanders the collections and selects an object at random. It’s a small bronze figure of a woman with a large goitre – nineteenth-century, found in Nigeria and thought to be either an amulet or a teaching aid. He tells himself to think. Her pain would have defined her voice, if she had one. People might have listened to her more carefully. Perhaps she was venerated for this great swelling in her throat?

  Curiosity has been Raif’s starting point for twenty years. He intends to find out more about the bronze but instead puts Iris’s name into the site’s search box and works his way through what appears, which is mostly committee notes and acquisition reports. He finds a video of her standing in a room full of shelves of boxes. Her voice is flat and a little harsh and she does not smile. He searches for her name more broadly but nothing much turns up and he’s starting to feel uncomfortable. He’s been seeing Helen for almost a year and has never been curious enough to search for her.

  Rosa knocks on his door.

  Are you going to come and have a drink? I’m off tomorrow.

  I don’t think I can. I’m too—

  Sad. I know.

  It’s not that, I’m just—

  See you in six months.

  Rosa is off on a research trip. She has no time for Raif and his sadness now. But she notices something.

  More offerings?

  On a shelf above his desk there’s a glass fish, a string of five amber beads, a tiny kaleidoscope, a rose quartz, a disc of silvered mirror, a death-watch beetle, a bird’s skull. Rosa goes over to them.

  Are they from the same student?

  No, it’s all sorts.


  He gives his lecture on the curiosity cabinet, and the shells and skulls arrive. Perhaps his students can detect how little curiosity he now has and try to provoke it in him.

  What am I supposed to do? he says. I can’t just throw them away.

  Rosa shrugs, says goodbye and goes to meet her friends. She tells them about how the students keep giving Raif these little offerings.

  It could be a minefield, someone says.

  He’s in no danger, says Rosa. He’s still mourning his wife.

  What about his girlfriend? someone asks. I bumped into them the other day. She looked nice. Tall, pretty, sweet …

  Rosa has been speaking about him with authority. She and Raif work next door to each other and they talk. He has told her his most private stories: about going to see his father’s body and how he came to doubt Liis’s version of events. She knows the details of Liis’s illness and death, and she sat with him while he cried. He has never mentioned a girlfriend.

  I am not what I am

  When people ask Helen and Raif how they met, they hesitate because it was online. Helen is happy to say so but Raif has made clear that he is not. His profile was set up by his cousins, girls in their twenties. They are triplets, born by IVF to Raif’s aunt Sorcha when she was forty, and named Jessica, Ashley and Emily because their parents could not decide what to call them and ended up taking the three most popular girls’ names of that year from a newspaper.

  Raif had been a teenager when the triplets were born but their presence in his life gave him joy. They were tiny creatures with frizzy orange hair who grew up to be noisy, indulged and quick, determined to solve any problem and happy to say everything out loud. They were told from early on that their cousin Raif was a bit sad. He’d lost his father and found it hard it fit in. They knew he loved their silliness and exuberance and so this was what they continued to offer him.