Fatima finds herself in a glamorous but unsuited marriage, but her life takes a fateful turn when she makes an unlikely connection in her favourite restaurant.
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In the city of Grover there is a restaurant called Penceys. It is on Patmos Street and has been there for as long as anyone in the Tuppertown area can remember. It is a small affair, twelve tables covered in cloths of red and white check, and a menu that changes only rarely. The same family has owned the place for sixty or so years.
Fatima Pawelski first went there with her husband and his artistically inclined pals. There were a few of them around, the would-be artists and writers and actors, bohemian types who cut a dash in the small working-class district. Whether they had any ability or not, she didn’t know. It seemed to her that what they did was so strange that there was nothing to judge it against and therefore couldn’t be judged.
She was not born into that world. Her family did regular work. Her father and her older brother worked on the railways, and her mother was a nurse. They were decent people, and she could have no real complaints about them. But from early on she had felt a kind of suffocation; it seemed to her that they never went anywhere, or did anything other than work and rest, and that their lives were going nowhere. And in her parents, she saw her older self, living and working and dying in their small district. And when she really gave it thought, when she was lying in her bed at night, the prospect scared her. She didn’t make any mention of her fears; she was sure that her parents would be upset to think that their lives so disappointed their daughter.
So, when she met Donal Pawelski, she breathed more freely for a while. He had a studio above a warehouse by the river. And he used to spend an inordinate amount of time in there, painting and sculpting, and having his pals drop by to talk the kind of talk she had not before heard, certainly not in her own home. Donal and his pals would make reference to artists she had heard of – the ones everyone had heard of – and also to many she had not. And when she heard a name, she made sure to go the library to acquaint herself with the person in question, and with others whom she came across during course of her informal studies, just so that she would not be left behind on the next occasion. She gave her opinions in the vaguest of ways – it’s got something, or the colours are kind of Kandinsky – without going so far as to saying whether she did or did not like it. For the fact was that she did not like it. His work was of an abstract nature, all colour and shape and swirl, with no depiction of any life that she could imagine, or of anything that she had seen around her. She formed the opinion early on that these abstract people did what they did to disguise the fact that they had no talent.
What she liked in a picture was to see life, to see people and things as they were and as the painter had seen and rendered them. One of her favourite paintings was The Man at the Table by the American, Gilpin Terrie. She first saw it when her class was taken to the Roman Lane Gallery and she had seen it many times since. There was on that first visit, and still is, something about the indifferent expression on the man’s face, his brown hat hanging on the back of his chair, and the crook of the waiter’s elbow as he laid a plate on the table; the whiteness of the plate; not life as lived and seen, but life of a different kind; a life captured and caught; a life noticed then so that it may be noticed forever, the white plate being laid down, then and now and into the future. She often made visits in her lunch breaks to look at The Man at the Table and noticed something new almost every time.
But it would not have done to mention The Man at the Table in the company of Donal and his friends. It would be everything they claimed to be against. A man sat at a table, so what? A waiter putting a plate down, who cares? They called it representative crap. She wondered what was so wrong about things being represented.
They went out together, Donal and his bohemian group, all men with a changing backdrop of women. And, as good Baudelaires and Modiglianis, they drank in an abandoned fashion, and talked as if everything they did and said mattered. Whether someone rated Rothko over Pollock seemed to them to be a greater concern than any war then taking place, or people dying through lack of food. They had been known to come to blows during such disputes.
It was during one such debate, concerning the competing merits of Joan Miro and Pablo Picasso, that she first noticed the man alone. They were seated in proximity to him on that first occasion and he could not have been but aware of the urgent nature of the talk at their table. People at the other end of the room looked their way, toward the noise, as they often did wherever they were. But, as far as she could tell, he did not so much as glance in their direction. But she watched him. She guessed that he would be in his forties, early fifties maybe, and he obviously took care of his skin and hair and clothing. It was always a suit, always a tie, even in the heat of summer evenings. Her guess was that he was unmarried, or widowered, otherwise where was his wife? Could it be possible that she stayed at home while he ate out? His stillness contrasted to the noise and arm-waving of her husband and his friends.
She noticed him because he was alone at a two-chair table, his back to the window, side on between the window and the room, the only person in the room without company. She noticed him drinking his soup, then watched him as he waited for his main meal. He wasn’t reading, or pretending to otherwise occupy himself as lone diners tend to do between courses; he didn’t even seem to take much of an interest in what was happening in the room. He just waited and said thank you when his food arrived. She noticed that too, the thank you at every attendance upon him, because not everyone said thank you.
It was around the time she first noticed the lone diner that she realised she was not happy with Donal. While he spent his days painting his abstracts, she spent hers working at various jobs, sent by an agency to type and file and to organise offices. Although he had a part-time job teaching art at the Institute, it was her money that kept them going, paying for the studio and the small flat in the same building. They never reached a stage of overt hostility; first they became irritated by each other, then when the irritation wore itself out, they became indifferent.
Things began to change when he inherited a large amount of money from a Polish relative he had not heard of, let alone met. Following the acquisition of that money, the balance between painting and drinking shifted, painting became something to be squeezed between drinking sessions, and pretty soon there was no room for the painting. And then within three years he was dead. Toward the end, she couldn’t bear him to have his hands on her, whether in lust or in violence.
At the funeral they said that the art world had lost a rare talent and a great teacher. It came as news to her. It was a predominantly younger crowd at the church, students from the Institute she guessed. People pointed her out and strangers hugged her. Someone asked her, How on earth will you survive without him? He was such a presence. But she knew how she would survive, quite easily; although he left no will, the law was such that his money, the money that he had inherited, came to her. She pondered the oddness of the matter, of having her life transformed by a dead Polish woman, a person not previously imagined, let alone encountered.
So following Donal’s death, when she next went to Penceys it had been just over two months since her last visit. She went with her brother and his wife who for some reason thought that she should get out, as they put it; after Donal’s death they meant, to get her out of herself.
Her brother and his wife were the kind of people who weren’t used to restaurants. There were she knew, many such people, her parents included – what’s the point in sitting elsewhere to eat when you’ve got food in your own cupboards? And her insisting that it was her treat unnerved them further. They knew she had come into money, but they didn’t know how much. She only told them it was enough to have three courses and as much to drink as they wished.
After a couple of beers and a glass of wine, her brother asked, ‘So what now, sister? What now that your husband has died?’
The question caught her off guard, they had never been a family for big talk; even small talk was a struggle at times. So, this seemed like a big question, as if someone might be interested; it sounded as if somebody might be interested. Also, she had not given the matter a lot of thought, she was just glad to be free of the noise of Donal and his artistic pals.
‘I don’t know. I might travel,’ she said.
‘Travel?’ he said. ‘Travel where?’ He made it sound like a crazy idea, as if he could think of nowhere it might be worth travelling to.
‘I don’t know. I might, I might not.’
Her brother’s wife was Celandine, everybody called her Cel. Celandine was a radiographer at the Saint James Infirmary. Everybody seemed to like her, including Fatima. As they waited for their desert, Celandine, who had had three glasses of red by then, put her hand on Fatima’s and said, ‘You going to be ok? You know, with Donal and everything? It must have been an awful shock. I never really knew him, but he must have been a great guy.’
Fatima didn’t answer, she was distracted by the entry of the man, who was being shown to his table by the window. She realised that she had not been here when he was not also here, and that must be what – thirty times over recent years? She wondered if he came every night, and supposed that he must. And she wondered who would do that. What kind of a person would go to a restaurant every night, let alone the same one, and sit in the same seat? One might imagine that he would wish to face the street now and again, but she had never seen him do that, and she therefore supposed that he never did.
‘Fats?’ her brother said. ‘You think? What Cel’s asking?’
She wished he wouldn’t call her Fats. He had called her Fats since they were kids, and back then the more she told him to stop, the more he did it. She was glad that no one else had taken up the habit.
‘Yes, it was a shock. But I’ll be ok. Don’t worry.’
‘You’re very brave. I don’t think I could be so brave if anything happened to my Bobby.’
He put his hand on hers and said, ‘Nothing’s going to happen to me.’
‘I hope not, I don’t know what I’d do.’
Fatima thought, Of course something will happen to you, sooner or later. Something will happen to all of us. But it would spoil the mood if she said that. As it would if she said that she was happier now without Donal than she had been with him.
She next went to Penceys, alone for the first time, a few weeks later. A Tuesday, a quiet night between weekends for much of the population; just another night for her, and it seemed also for the man. They knew her by then – Mrs Pawelski – and the waiter brought her a glass of dry white wine without her having to ask for it.
That time, she took a book – The Way Love Looks from Certain Angles by Andrea Oppen – and she read it fitfully, unable to concentrate amid the distractions of voices and cutlery. When the man came in, she kept her eyes to the book and only glanced across when she thought he may be settled. Then, when she looked, he was looking back. They both quickly looked away. When she looked again, he was reading but she could not see the title. He seemed to have no difficulty, unless he was not really reading.
The next time she went, she was later than usual and he was already there. As she passed his table, he was being served his soup and the pages he was reading were spread face down. The cover showed Bruges-La-Morte by Georges Rodenbach. The following day she bought a copy of Bruges-La-Morte and took it to the restaurant that evening. She did not usually go on consecutive evenings, but she did not wish him to finish his book before she saw him again.
When he lifted his book, she lifted hers. It seemed to take an age, but eventually she caught his eye, looked to his book and then down to her own. Almost imperceptibly, just a crooked stretching of their closed mouths, they exchanged smiles then looked away again. She tried to read the book, a gloomy thing, but came to think that there must be an art to it, the ability to shut out the distractions of a restaurant and to make sense of the marks on the page, to translate them into words and images and feelings. How did people do that? She had seen them, on the trams and on trains, in the corners of crowded bars, and some she had seen walking the streets while reading some book or other. She wondered, didn’t they ever collide with lamp-posts, or fall from kerbstones, or get hit by trams?
And at Penceys that night, because there was a party, her efforts were made all the more difficult. A cake with candles was brought to the birthday girl’s table and other tables joined in the singing of Happy Birthday, those who didn’t know the woman mumbling the unknown name. She felt foolish not singing, but singing would have felt more foolish, would have made her appear lonelier than necessary and maybe too desperate by far for some kind of companionship. Aware of her solitary self, she smiled toward the table anyway. Then she looked across to the man. He, for the first time that she was aware of, was looking at her. Each catching the glance of the other, they averted their look. But soon they found themselves looking again, and that time they held the look a second longer, and smiled.
It was a few days later that she saw him again, this time in the City Gallery. She was standing before The Man at the Table when she sensed someone behind her. He was facing the opposite wall, looking at an early Picasso. There was no one else in the room. Had he followed her? Would he think she was following him? It occurred to her to cross the floor and speak to him, to clear the air, maybe make a remark about Picasso’s precocious talent – her time with Donal and his pals had qualified her to do such things. But she turned again to The Man at the Table; painted, according to the caption, when Gilpin Terrie was ninety-two. She dislikes the long captions; they remind her of Donal Pawelski and his pals, saying too much without saying much at all. But the Gilpin Terrie caption contained only his dates and nationality – Canadian – and the fact that The Man at the Table was painted in Le Havre in 1932, the year before he died in a hospital in Rouen. Who needs any more information?
In the American Rooms she noticed him again. She was looking at one of Andrew Wyeth’s Helga portraits. He was at the other end of the room, looking at The Fight by George Bellows. It wasn’t a picture she liked. It wasn’t a picture she could imagine any woman liking. Again, she thought she might approach him, and then just as quickly decided that she would not. Without knowing how or why, she thought that an introduction might take whatever was going on between them in a direction neither of them wanted to go.
They were both in Penceys that night. He was wearing a different tie, at least different to anything she had seen him wear before – pale blue and green cross-stripes. Did he know she would be here tonight? She did not have regular nights. He looked across. She took a risk, pointed to her throat, and nodded approval. His mouth twitched again, the memory of a smile.
As she waited for her desert, a waiter came to her table. ‘From Mr Fairlight,’ he said and passed her a folded napkin. She unfolded it and read: I hope you will pardon my intrusion. My name is Gilbert Fairlight.
She looked across, but he was reading his book. She wrote: Fatima Pawelski underneath his name and the waiter took it across to the man, the man who she now knew to be Gilbert Fairlight.
Over the next two weeks she ate at Penceys on five more occasions but there was no further communication between them during that time. After the sixth occasion, when she returned to her apartment, and when in bed opened her book, a note fell out. It said: Ms Pawelski, I hope you will forgive my forwardness, but the long absence of your passionate friends has I think emboldened me. I have noticed you and, pray god I am not wrong, I think that you may have noticed me. In short, I do believe that we may have noticed each other. And I seek nothing much beyond the noticing; it is, I think, an important thing in itself, the noticing of one another and the noticing of such things as Man at Table, or Helga. As I have made you aware, my name is Gilbert Fairlight. My friend, now long dead, used to call me Gibby. Thank you for taking the time to read this.
She noticed the friend, not friends. Can there have been only one? Then again, how many had she? Two maybe, two to whom she felt close, two with whom she shared thoughts and laughter. She had met Veronica Petty and Patty Benmont at school when she was ten and they remained friends beyond school. But Veronica died at nineteen and Patty married and moved north and was not heard from again. There were others to share the occasional laugh and inconsequential conversation, people in the various offices she had worked. But no one to call a friend, no one to call for a spur of the moment drink, or to ask a favour, or to watch a film with. And now Gilbert Fairlight seemed to be in her life.
At Penceys the following Tuesday she sent only this: Hello, Gibby.
He sent a reply: How wonderful to hear from you, and in that manner. May I call you Fatima? If so, hello Fatima. If not, too late.
It continued for six weeks, many such short correspondences, carried by waiters between people sitting in the same room:
How are you? I trust you have had an interesting day.
I am well, yes. And also yes, moderately interesting.
Later, from him: I trust you are well. I like the jacket, pardon my boldness. I plan to visit The Criterion tomorrow for the 2:00 showing of the new Pacino film.
She does not reply, but is in the cinema the next day where they – he seated at the end of a middle row, she at the opposite end of the back row – watch a film called Scarecrow. He leaves before her. That evening:
You liked the film?
Yes, I liked the film. You?
Very much. First time I have seen the Hackman fellow. I look forward to seeing him in future.
Then a gap.
She does not see him for three weeks, and she surprises herself by worrying. The waiters have not seen him. They tell her that – other than when he has gone to the coast, as he does from time to time and which he forewarns them about – he has not had such an absence in the fifteen or so years that he has been eating at Penceys.
Then on the Thursday of the fourth week he is there when she arrives. She thinks he may be thinner in the face, but it might only be the diminishment of the evening light. They nod and smile, but exchange no correspondence that evening.
She goes next on the Sunday evening. When she returns to her bed, another note drops from her book:
Hello Fatima,
How very pleasing it was to see you again on Thursday. I feared that my absence may have caused a change to your routines and that I might never see you again. My fear surprised and excited me. My absence was, I am afraid to relate, occasioned by the onset of a medical problem, as a consequence of which I shall die within a matter of weeks…
She stops reading in order to absorb what she has read, then she reads it again:
Hello Fatima,
How very pleasing it was to see you again on Thursday. I feared that my absence may have caused a change to your routines and that I might never see you again. My fear surprised and excited me. My absence was I am afraid to relate occasioned by the onset of a medical problem, as a consequence of which I shall die within a matter of weeks. How very strange I find it is to write that sentence. I have not spoken it before, not even to myself. It bears repeating – I shall die within a matter of weeks. It seems to me, and maybe only to me, an important thing. I hope that such news does not shock or burden you unnecessarily. I have no one else to tell. O poor me. I will understand fully if you seek no further information or correspondence.
Gibby
She goes to Penceys the following night. He is already seated and she puts her fingertips briefly and lightly on his table as she makes her way to hers. As she waits for her soup she writes:
Hello Gibby, how are you?
After the soup, the waiter brings the reply:
Gibby, how I love that.
I am as well as a dying man can be, and grateful for the question. My food and wine and art remain a source of pleasure. Your attention remains a pleasure. So, even though I find myself now reaching down into its sediment, life still yields some joy. However, I should begin think about preparations post-extinction. Might I burden you further as the time approaches?
Gibby
She replies:
It is no burden.
Fatima
There is no further correspondence that evening, or for the following two, just the occasional glance and smile.
Then:
My Dear Fatima,
I have not long. Two weeks, maybe three. I do not plan to die in this city, but in a place where I spent several childhood holidays with my dear parents and which I still visit from time to time. It is a fishing community, once thriving and now declined, and it is on the north-east coast. Like many such forgotten or never known, it is a place lost to time and which I find most congenial. It has, since my childhood, been a place to go in my mind at times of turmoil or loneliness. A place amenable to the friendless. I have not yet heard happy birthday sung there. (Don’t you, like me, long to sing happy birthday when it is sung in the restaurant? To be a small part of that inane and joyous babble.)
Gibby
She replies:
And?
He doesn’t reply until the following evening:
My Dearest,
As the man in the portico of the railway station has been reminding us for many years, The End is Nigh. Therefore, I intend to travel to St. Agnes on Wednesday. It is there that, if the actuarial calculations of my medical advisers are accurate, I expect to die. I know that I have no rights or claims and so do not wish to appear presumptuous, but I have a feeling that we have become close over this past year or so. If I am wrong, then you are of course entitled to disregard this request and treat it with the disdain it may warrant.
But if I am correct, then I would be grateful if you would accompany me on my final sojourn, and bear witness to my final days.
The following evening:
Dear Gibby,
I would be honoured to accompany you.
He replies immediately:
My Dearest
If you are, as you seem to be, sure that you are inclined to follow our liaison to its only end, then I shall be staying at The Trumpets – a place where I have been known since my childhood, and the owner of which has been made aware of the nature of this my final visit. It is a ten-minute walk from the station, or a three-minute taxi-ride. I always have the same room – 8, with a view out to sea. If you wish, I could enquire about booking 7 for you, a similar view. Or another. Or nowhere. For I will fully understand if you now wish to abandon our joyous folly.
Let me know.
Gibby
She responds:
7
In the eight days between that correspondence, and Fatima Pawelski boarding the 1:10 from Grover to Garlin via St. Agnes, they exchange no more notes.
They sit at opposite ends of coach C. Only they leave the train at St. Agnes. She follows him. At first impression on leaving the station the place is as she imagined it might be. It has rained, and the cobbled streets are wet.
She is not surprised to find The Trumpets an agreeable place. She would have been surprised to find that a hotel frequented by Gilbert Fairlight was anything other than agreeable. Since coming into the Polish money, she had stayed in more hotels than she had in the entirety of her life previously. Previously, her experience had consisted of Holiday Inns and SleepEasys on the edge of towns she had visited for work. They were clean and efficient and she had no complaints, but they did not give the impression that anybody would work there for longer than a month, or that beyond basic maintenance anyone might actually care about the place. The Trumpets looked and felt different; it looked as though somebody cared about it and therefore, if that was the case, they would maybe also care about the people who paid to stay there. It had a small nicely-lit foyer, and behind the desk stood a man who looked so right there that he might look ridiculous elsewhere.
‘Ms Pawelski?’ he said, before she had time to speak. It sounded as if they expected no other customer that day.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘How lovely to see you. And you Mr Fairlight. Shall we book you in for eight.’
To her right, she can see the dining-room beyond the French windows. It has the look and layout of Penceys, three lines of four white-clothed tables, the cutlery already laid out. Behind her, an older couple are seated together by the fire, he reading the local paper – St Agnes Man Catches Nice Trout – she leaning into him, looking into the fire. She tries to imagine herself and Gilbert Fairlight in that pose, but the only picture she can form is a blurred one.
‘Yes, thank you. Eight o’clock will be fine.’
When she comes down at eight, he is already there. Seven of the twelve tables are occupied, but there is not the noise of Penceys, just a pleasant low murmuring and the noise of cutlery in use. She is shown to a table on the opposite wall, ten feet or so from the dying man. He smiles and sends a napkin across:
You came. Thank you. I wasn’t sure. The veal is magnificent.
Gibby
She orders the veal, and with it the waiter brings a half-bottle of 1956 Chateau Margeaux, which she has not ordered. She looks across; he has a half-bottle of the same. He raises his glass and she raises hers.
They order their desserts separately. Then he sends across another note:
My Dear
I do hope that your first impressions of St. Agnes were not too dispiriting. But now that you are here, would it be too presumptuous of me to assume that you plan to see this thing out. If so, your interests as I understand them should be attended to. Also, as I understand them, your interests appear to correlate closely with mine. With that in mind, I intend tomorrow to visit the Virginia Steed Gallery on Oyster Street at around eleven. It has some pieces which may be of interest to you, including three pieces by our friend Mr Terrie, and several by an American by the name of Winslow Homer. You may or may not know that, though American, Mr Homer spent a couple of years in the early-1880s on this stretch of coastline and painted what he saw. And some of what he saw – the sea and those whose lives were bound to it – we can also see in the Steed Gallery, seven pieces in all. Following the gallery, I plan to lunch at Meisters Café on John Dory Street where the shellfish is wonderful, then return to our hotel, read and nap before dinner. And in case you were wondering, I am feeling fine. Which, I suppose makes the situation doubly bizarre. Bizarre, but in your presence more bearable than it might otherwise have been.
Thank you.
Gibby
She doesn’t reply, just reads the note and nods across to him.
Five days and evenings pass in that manner – she following him on walks along the beach, to the end of the pier, to the cinema to see The Sting, to the cafes where old men play cards and dominoes. Sometimes they are out on their small and adjacent balconies at the same time, where they exchange silent greetings and take in the sea view.
From her room, she can hear him moving in his, turning on his bed, running the taps, opening his window. He occasionally goes out alone, and from her small balcony she has watched him standing at the end of the pier, looking out to the horizon. And in wondering what he might be thinking about, she has chastised herself for her stupidity.
He sends a note:
An agreeable place to complete one’s time on this earth, don’t you think?
At dinner on the Saturday:
At the risk of attracting a charge of melodrama, I feel the warmth of the reaper’s breath upon my neck. This may be our final rendezvous. Would you care to join me in a dessert? I have a weakness for Albert’s crème brulee, unavailable to us in our more usual haunt. Not good for one’s health I’m told.
They eat their dessert, smiling and nodding back and forth, as people sitting together at the same table might. At eleven, they are the two remaining diners. Then he drains his glass – a 1960 Montrachet which she is also drinking – and as he rises to leave, kisses the tips of his fingers and flattens his hand toward her. She returns the gesture. She notices the slowness of his walk toward the foyer and beyond.
In her room, she lies awake listening, but hears only the sea. At around five, she falls into sleep and is awakened at eight by the sound of church bells. She listens, but there is no sound from 8 and he is not in his seat when she comes down to breakfast. She has her cereal and orders one poached egg. By the time it arrives, he has still not come down.
She goes back up to her room and puts her head side-on to the wall. There is only the sound of the waves through her open window. She goes out into the corridor, where at the far end the maid is busy in her cupboard. She knocks quietly on his door.
‘Gilbert?’ she says, her brow pressed to the door. ‘Gibby?’
She opens the door, just far enough. He is lying on his back, dressed as he was at dinner, save for his shoes which are laid neatly by the bed. His hands rest on his chest as if placed there by a priest or an undertaker, someone versed in the etiquette of final things. She thinks of Mantegna’s Dead Christ. She enters, the lamenting figure.
‘Gibby? Gilbert?’
There is an envelope in his breast pocket. It is unsealed and her name is written on it:
Thank you, Fatima. It has all come late, but that it has come at all is a small and precious wonder. In our short and strange time together, you have meant so much to me and I am grateful to you. I do not wish you to be burdened by the trivialities and inconveniences of my death; therefore, Mr Barrow has all of the details necessary for the disposal of these remains and of my effects. If you remember me at all, I would prefer that you remember me as we have in our manner known each other, unencumbered by the paltry details of our lives.
I have not been a seafarer, but now I hear the sea calling and, much as I wish I was able, I cannot ignore the call. And I am not afraid.
The next time you look at The Man at the Table you might think of me.
Feel free to touch me.
Love Gibby
She opens the bedside drawer. Next to a bible bound by an elastic band lie all of the notes that she has sent to him. She sits on the bed and stares at his face for a long while, the closest to him that she has been. Then she touches his cold hands with hers, sweeps his hair back, and kisses his brow. Outside, the nine o’clock bell sounds loudly through the open window. When it ceases and its vibrations fade, there is only the sea turning over the pebbles on the beach and the cry of a child. She lifts the phone and Mr Barrow answers.
