The Restless Supermarket (10 page)

Once I said to her: ‘You should charge him rent for that chair.’

And he piped up: ‘She should pay me for sitting here. Thanks to me, she can say in all honesty that this place is never empty.’ There were always people coming and going, men mainly, clustering around tables where card games were in progress, drifting off into corners for quieter conversations, talking over their shoulders to ‘contacts’ at the next table, hailing newcomers by sending up smoke signals from their cigars. The recent arrivals from abroad spoke more loudly than the others, and offered cigarettes from garishly coloured packets, which were inhaled like the fair weather of home. Those who were leaving looked distant and bored, and wore too much gold jewellery. They came and they went. But Spilkin was a fixture.

‘There are limits
–
or there should be,’ I said. ‘No offence, Mrs Mavrokordatos, you know how fond I am of this establishment, but I’m beginning to think that Spilkin here is an extremist, beneath his moderate exterior.’

I resisted the urge to follow his example, to seek out company earlier in the day, to pop in at all hours. I have never been the sort of person who pops in anywhere. I could no more pop in than I could knock about or toddle along. It’s not my way. I disciplined myself to leave my flat no earlier than three in the afternoon and to return at a decent hour. Routine is the foundation of happiness. A proofreader needs a clear head and a sharp eye. All my life it had been lights out at ten on the dot, and I saw no reason to make rash changes now. My routine gave me more than enough time for doing the crossword, reading the newspaper, writing the odd letter to the editor, conversing with my friend, and of course working on my System of Records, the meaty main course for which all these other activities were mere appetizers. In this way, several satisfying months went
by.

Spilkin was a ladies’ man. Did I mind, he enquired one day, if Mevrouw Bonsma joined us, just this
once?

‘Mevrouw’ because it did not seem right to call her ‘Bonsma’, in accordance with our usual practice
–
the house style, as I thought of it
–
and because Spilkin had got it into his head that she was Dutch. He said he could not look at her without being reminded of poffertjes (which turned out to be sugar-coated fritters, much eaten in the Low Countries). For my part, I found that she put me in mind of windswept dykes and wheels of cheese. But I went along with his suggestion. I am not easily swayed, but I was perhaps a little too much under his influence at the
time.

‘Tell us about Rotterdam,’ said Spilkin, ‘and your triumphs as a soloist with the Philharmonic.’

Mevrouw Bonsma disengaged her long teeth with a click and patted his arm with a hand as red and square as a stevedore’s (it is with pianists as it is with surgeons and cardsharps). ‘You know very well, Spilkijn,’
–
he had introduced himself thus and she seemed to think it was a diminutive
–
‘that I was born and bred in Rustenburg.’ Despite all her efforts to modulate it and make it lilt, her voice hissed and crackled like an old gramophone record.

‘A lady of your accomplishments? Impossible.’

‘I am just a farm girl at heart. Sincerely, I have never even been in an aeroplane.’

‘Mevrouw!’ Pursing his lips, giving the exotic diphthong the shape of a grape, then swallowing it whole like a tickled schoolboy. If he made ‘Mevrouw Bonsma’ sound as sweet and juicy as a fruit, she made ‘Spilkin’ into an acute little instrument for winkling the stubborn flesh from its shell. Bodkin, kilderkin, cannikin, sooterkin. Was it my imagination or was there a trace of a Dutch accent like a dusting of cinnamon on her flat vowels? Perhaps she was putting it on, under suggestion.

The banter continued while she powdered her face. Pancake, she explained, for the lights. Light, actually: a sixty-watt globe in a bluebell shade, dipping its head over the keyboard. ‘Once an artiste, always an artiste. But I have no illusions, life has stripped me of them, one by one. People used to sit up and take notice when I played. Now I am ‘‘background music’’, that’s all.’ The skin of her neck had the texture of crêpe. She enamelled her lips and went bravely back to
work.

‘So, what do you think?’

I had had the opportunity to examine Mevrouw Bonsma closely over the months, but I had not drawn many conclusions from the exercise. She was highly strung, but that was fitting. And she thought too much about what other people thought of her. Taking pride in one’s appearance is nothing less than good manners, but she was overly concerned with trifles. An occupational hazard, perhaps. While one of her raw-boned hands bickered away at the keys, the other was always wandering to the nape of her neck, fumbling for a label, checking whether her jersey was on the right way round. I saw that she did not have the feet of a pianist either. Her big plates of meat, tilted on the wineglass heels of slippers made of silver chain-mail, pumped the pedals, while her hands rolled over the keys, setting up a pale vibrato in the flesh of her upper arms. She looked like a navvy driving some shiny piece of earth-moving equipment. Five-letter word: spade. Or: piano. Incongruously, the music itself was a soft, insistent outpouring, like drizzle on the roof, or the tinkling of a wind-chime, to which one grows so accustomed, one only hears it when it falls silent. ‘A charming woman.’

‘You like
her?’

‘Well enough.’ I did too, although we were not friends as such. There was something heroic in her efforts to be light, to keep her bulk afloat on such a thin stream of sound. Her fingertips touched the keys with exquisite delicacy, defying gravity, skipping like a flurry of raindrops across the surface of a pond, producing ever more intricate Venn diagrams of interlocking ripples.

Spilkin and I sat up straighter than usual, while she paddled through ‘Swanee River’.

‘Her name,’ Spilkin whispered, ‘is Suzanna, but I promised not to tell. She enjoys being Mevrouwed. Bit of a snob, never mind the country-girl stuff.’

Total snob, in reverse, to a degree (6). National serviceman in a boa (6). New edition of Bosman
(6).

When she rolled without missing a beat into ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’, we gave her a round of applause, which found a few polite echoes at the other tables
–
or it may have been draughtsmen clacking over their foes. She showed us her grateful yellowed ivories.

‘Just this once’ was no more than a manner of speaking. Mevrouw Bonsma acquired a permanent place at our table. She would join us between shifts at the piano, to moisten her throat with the mug of tea or rock shandy to which her contract entitled her. She laughed voraciously at Spilkin’s jokes, as if she were crushing rusks between her molars, and left fading echoes of her laughing mouth on the rim of her teacup and the ends of her satin-tipped cigarettes.

Once had been a tolerable novelty; but being in her company constantly aggravated me. The sheer bulk of her was an imposition. When she sat down at the table, I felt myself rise momentarily in my own chair, as if the room had subsided in her vicinity. She loomed over us like a dam wall, which had seemed sturdy enough when observed from a safe distance, but appeared to be crumbling away now that we squatted, like a pair of truant schoolboys, in the damp shade at its foot. I felt as if I was
on the shores of Mevrouw Bonsma
.
The phrase rang in my head, trying to fit itself to the tune of ‘Loch Lomond’ or ‘On Top of Old Smokey’, without success. Always, it was Rotterdam I saw. Such a watery fecundity! What if she burst? I would be washed away like a stick of balsa on a flood of evergreens. Even when she went back to the piano, the threat remained. She had elbowed her way out of the background to which she belonged, and could no longer be ignored. When she played, we had to listen. Her personal favourites bubbled along perkily, flats tumbling like little propellers, sharps concealed like lures in soft lumps of melody. The special requests, hauled up from the abysmal deeps, could be positively sodden. More than once I felt as if I was drowning.

It was impossible to discuss my fears with Spilkin. I could not be sure what he thought of Mevrouw Bonsma. He seemed to like her a great deal. But then he also treated her as if she were a fool. He thought nothing of speaking about her in the third person, while she sat nodding pleasantly, fingering the ugly beauty spot stuck like a pastille of salted licorice to the corner of her mouth.

As an act of self-preservation, to save myself from being swept away, I began to tell her about my System of Records. ‘Over my head,’ she protested, ‘Greek to me. I’m no good with words.’ But she was impressed with me, I could tell, she thought I was frightfully clever, and so I kept pressing my clippings on her and reading her extracts from the notebooks. At other times, it was lexical gymnastics, flashy routines full of pikes and rolls and tearles with a twist, moves I could execute in my sleep. ‘
Medley
, Mevrouw,’ I would say. ‘Heterogeneous mixture. See meddle.
Meddle
, busy oneself unduly. And
mêlée
. Same root in “mix”
–
from the Latin
misceo
.’
Then again: ‘Do you see, Mevrouw,’ I would say. ‘
Wormwood
. From the
OE
wormod
,
wermod
,
after worm, wood: cf vermouth. And
vermouth
. From the G.
Wermut
,
wormwood. That’s what we call a backflip. Let me show you how it works here in the dictionary.’ And sometimes, when both of us were exhausted, I would fall back on frenzied bouts of lexical fartlek. ‘Here we are:
absinth
. A shrubby plant,
Artemisia absinthium
,
or its essence. Also called “wormwood”. Hence a liqueur flavoured with wormwood. Are you still with me?
Artemisia
. Any of various plants, including sagebrush and wormwood, f.
ME
, f. L., f. G. plant sacred to Artemis.
Artemis
. G. Myth. The virgin goddess of the hunt and the moon.
Sagebrush
perhaps? f. L.
salvia
,
the healing plant, from
salvus
,
healthy, safe.
Salvation
!’ And so on. She would bite her bottom lip with her ragged incisors and gaze at me anxiously. I had the distinct impression that she admired me, an impression I had not gained from a member of the fairer sex (to stretch a point) for quite some time, and it flattered my vanity, I suppose, or what few shreds of it remained. I couldn’t help myself: I began to take pleasure in making her clap one of her big red hands to her mouth in astonishment and delight.

My behaviour was uncharacteristic; obviously, it lacked the decorum people associate with me. And it appeared to infect Spilkin too. Lapsing out of character, just as I had done, he began to tell jokes. Have you heard the one about? he was always asking. Mevrouw Bonsma, who did not have a funny bone in her body, declared that he was the wittiest man alive. Under this onslaught, shoals of old punchlines came adrift in my head and slewed about, looking for jokes to attach themselves to. Knock knock. Who’s there? Ja. Ja who? Boo. Boo who? To get to the other side. And one to hold the light bulb. Because it feels so good when I stop. What was that Indian’s name again? Said the Texan. Said the Irishman. Said the Jew. Clutter and disorder. I found myself plucking index cards out of box-files like some door-to-door salesman in a cartoon, an ugly little man with Dagwood Bumstead shoes and a daft hairstyle. Spilkin told another joke, something off-colour, lime-green,
puce.

What was this attack of nerves all about? To speak for myself, I found the lack of discrimination in Mevrouw Bonsma’s dim interior alarming. A great jumble of music had been poured into her, like leftovers into an olla podrida, and it bubbled out in an indiscriminate broth. I am a repository too; but in me, everything has its place. In me, things are filed, whereas she was merely filled.

I imagined that Spilkin, with his fine sense of discrimination, felt the same. When Mevrouw Bonsma sat at our table, we burbled away desperately, as if trying to mend a crack in her foundation. When she returned to her piano, we sat in depleted silence, with our backs stiff and our fists clenched on our knees, while our newspapers lay unread on the table before us. When I went home exhausted, Spilkin was still clamped to the table under the sconce, like a floodlit statue.

Later it occurred to me that if Spilkin had felt the same anxieties as I did, he would have responded with a recitation of the eye chart or some favourite prescriptions, a mortar of solid sense, rather than this sludge of inane jokes. In the light of his subsequent behaviour, I came to believe, strange as it may seem, that he was competing with me for her favours. In which case
he
had infected
me
!

Then Mevrouw Bonsma, bless her chapped heels, announced that she had invited Merle and Benny to join us for afternoon
tea.

More people! I was mortified. But as it happened, the newcomer
–
because there was only one
–
was just what was needed to restore our equilibrium.

*

Benny turned out to be a Pekingese, a canine knick-knack, disproportionately fierce. Benito, I called her afterwards: Il Puce, The Fleabag. In those days, animals were not allowed into the Europa, and so she spent her first visit to the Café tethered to a downpipe next to the door, nipping at the heels of patrons as they came and went. She had a go at my turn-ups, but I made her see sense with the business end of a brogue. They say that people grow to resemble their pets, or choose pets that resemble them. Merle was small, full of bounce, with round wet eyes and limp grey hair in a bob. She was already settled at our table, in the company of Spilkin and Mevrouw Bonsma, thankfully not in my chair. I hardly had time to sit before she declared, matter-of-factly, ‘You must be
A. Tearle.’

‘I am
the
Tearle,’ I replied, ‘the definite article.’