from Amsterdam.
But before he gets to Amsterdam he has already made up his mind not to go. It’s true that he has little money and time, but these are not the reasons for his decision. The memory of the last visit is still strong in his mind, he has carried it with him all the way on his travels, and he fears that the same thing will happen again. He will arrive, he will be made very welcome, he will spend a day or two in placidity and comfort, but the silence and distance between them, which they have incubated somehow since the first day they met in Africa, will amplify and grow, even as they become nicer to each other. This isn’t what he wants, it is very deeply what he doesn’t want, although it has taken this short conversation on the telephone for him to realize how unhappy that first visit made him.
So he goes down to Paris instead and stumbles aimlessly around the streets, wandering into shops and out again, sitting on benches. He’s aware that he’s engaged again in that most squalid of activities, using up time, but the journey hasn’t ended where he wanted it to, it has frayed out instead into endless ambiguities and nuances, like a path that divides and divides endlessly, growing fainter all the time.
There are moments, it’s true, in those three or four days, when a longing to go back to Switzerland comes over him like a pang, it’s only a few hours on the train, he could do it on a whim, but then he remembers how he came back this way last time, emptiness weighing him down like a black suitcase chained to his wrist.
When he passes a public telephone now and then he remembers that he promised to call, but he can’t do it yet, not yet. There would be a discussion again on the line, the push and pull of their broken attempts to communicate, and he might give in, in spite of himself.
So he leaves it to what is the very last moment, when he is at the airport in Amsterdam, with his bag checked in, waiting to board. There are crowds of people under the fluorescent lights, clutching packets from the duty-free shops, and outside, through the plate-glass windows, the weird unnatural shapes of aircraft in rows. He makes the call from a bank of public phones, jostled from either side by elbows and foreign syllables. He hopes that Jerome won’t be home.
Catherine answers the phone and recognizes his voice before he’s said his name. Hello, are you coming back to visit us.
No, I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m at the airport right now.
Ahh. She sounds disappointed. What a pity, we were hoping, Jerome was hoping.
I know, I’m sorry about it. He starts to babble the excuses about money and time, but his tongue is tripping him up. Another time, he says, and now he means it, there will be another time to make this right.
Another time, she agrees, do you want to talk to Jerome, and though his money is fast running out he knows he must.
There is a brief conversation in the background before Jerome comes on, in his voice he knows already. Ah, but why.
No money, he says again, no time.
Come. Come.
It’s too late. I’m at the airport. I’ll make it up to you, he says, I promise. Another time.
Yes, I want. Travelling. Next year.
Where.
I don’t know. Africa. Possibly.
That will be wonderful, he says. It sounds as if he’s been invited, although the words, as always, haven’t been said. Jerome, I have to go. The money.
I don’t understand.
And then the phone goes dead. He hangs up slowly, wondering whether to ring again, but he’s said what he has to say, and anyway he has to leave. Another time.
Friends who live in London have bought a house in the country three hours from Cape Town, and when I was passing through they offered the use of this place to stay in. If you think you would like it, it’s going to be standing empty, it would be nice to have somebody keeping an eye.
He said he would think about it but the next day, just before leaving London, he phoned to accept. It felt in some way like a providential offer. He has no other place to return to, and he knows he can’t go back to the way he was living before, the endless moving around, the rootlessness. So the idea of