In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,46
Jerome is his younger sister. She is fourteen or fifteen with a chubby, cheerful face. An older sister arrives soon afterwards. Conversation flickers back and forth, returning continually to him, he can sense how curious they are about him. But at the same time he is also an observer, watching Jerome in this circle of women, while the light fades away.
Why don’t you go for a walk, Catherine says. Before supper.
He goes with Jerome across the grass to a gate at the bottom of the garden. Through a narrow alley to the edge of the lake. They are alone again for the first time since that minute or two outside the wooden doors of the bank. But everything is different now. The artificial awkwardness of that first moment up at the house continues, they don’t know what to say to each other.
So this is where you live.
Yes. Yes.
It’s beautiful here.
Ah. Yes. I like.
Only once does the mask of tension crack briefly, when I ask him, is it hard to be back.
Yes. Yes. His mouth works to find the words. In my head I am travelling, travelling.
I know what you mean.
Jerome is doing a session of military service, he is only home for the weekend. While he’s here they share his room, the visitor sleeps on a mattress on the floor. Although this section of the house is apart from the rest, a separate little flat on its own, they are never away from the rest of the family. It’s pleasant to sit in the sun behind the house, talking with Catherine, or wander to the shops with Alice or one of the other sisters. Jerome is always kind and solicitous, he invites him wherever he goes and introduces him to his friends, and he lets himself be taken along on outings and play the part of a contented guest.
On the Sunday Jerome’s father comes to visit. He has lived apart from them, at the other end of the lake, for some years now, and in the family his departure has left the lingering trace of a loss. So on this day, when they make a fire to cook in the yard, and knock a ball back and forth over a net, there is a feeling of completion and unity among them, to which I can only be a witness. He sits on the swing, pushing himself to and fro, watching as if from a great distance this scene that in Africa would be unimaginable to him.
He has come to like all of them, so when Jerome leaves again that night, going by train to some military base at the other end of the country, he is not alarmed at being left with his family. He spends a lot of time walking along the lake, he takes the train into town and wanders there too. He spends a day in a gallery of outsider art, paintings and sculptures made with the vision of the mad or the lost, and from this collection of fantastic and febrile images he retains a single line, a book title by a Serbian artist whose name I forget, He Has No House.
On the next weekend Jerome is back again, but if he was hoping that the gap of five days would change something between them, it doesn’t happen. They are pleasant and polite with each other, but their interaction has something of the quality of a letter which Jerome sent him, the studied and careful presentation of words that have been translated and copied from a dictionary. It isn’t only Jerome who makes things this way, he brings his own painful awkwardness to bear. He isn’t himself, he is a guarded version of his own nature, nor does he recognize in the cropped hair and military terseness of the person whose room he shares the soft and gentle young man he travelled with four months ago.
There are hints, perhaps, that it might be possible to move past this state. Jerome makes some tentative conversation about plans he has for the future, how, when he’s finished with this stint in the army, he would like to travel overland down to Greece. But this will only be in a couple of months from now. The possibility of another shared journey floats in the air, both of them consider it, but neither of them has the courage to say anything more.
He knows already that he must move on. On the night before Jerome gets back that next weekend, he