The Necessary Angel

C. K. Stead

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781760631161
• eBook ISBN: 9781760638238
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Women in Fiction
• Index: Literature

Max Jackson, a New Zealander living and lecturing in Paris, has a complicated arrangement with his estranged French wife, Louise. In love with his younger Sorbonne colleague Sylvie, he finds himself entangled with Helen, a troubled young English student. When a Cezanne painting goes missing from Louise's apartment, the boundaries he has struggled to maintain threaten to collapse. Infused with literary musings and the spirit of Paris, The Necessary Angel is as much an ode to the power of literature as a nuanced exploration of love, fidelity and the balance of power within relationships.

II.

SUMMER

LIGHTNING

4.

SLEEPING

AND WAKING

HELEN WHITE WAITED IN THE forecourt of the Gare de Lyon, keeping her eye on the clock in its tower with its beautiful, faintly blue face and ornate numbering. The train for Fontainebleau-Avon would go at two minutes past the hour. It was twenty minutes to. She was early. Max Jackson would be late—or he would not come at all. He’d said he would come but she was sure—almost sure—he would not. She repeated Zen lessons.

‘Watch what you say, and whatever you say, do.

‘Do not regret the past. Look to the future.

‘Have the fearless face of a hero, and the loving heart of a child.’

She wondered whether she was confusing herself by mixing Gurdjieff with Zen; yet they seemed to go together, not to conflict.

She wondered what the Buddha had meant when he said he saw Nirvana as a nightmare of daytime.

It was ten to the hour, then five. No, Max would not come. She had bought two tickets…

She tried not to think, to achieve not-thinking, mindlessness, but her eyes were on the tower, the clock up there, waiting to hear it strike. Would she go without him?

And then he was there beside her, arriving from the other direction, the wrong, unexpected one. ‘Quick,’ she said. ‘Downstairs…’

He was apologising for being late. And ‘Tickets,’ he said.

‘I have them. Quickly, Max.’

They boarded the train just as the whistle was blown. They found a double seat and dumped themselves down, panting.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

She had collapsed halfway over him, holding him by the shoulders. ‘Don’t be sorry.’ And she pecked his cheek as she pulled herself into a sitting position. ‘I knew you’d be dithering right up to the last minute.’

He didn’t argue with that, and they sat, recovering, composing themselves. She pointed to the big yellow-striped bag at her feet. A baguette stuck out from its top and there were shapes, two bottles, fruit, other things…‘Picnic,’ she said.

He nodded, smiling. ‘Nice. I came in such a rush I brought nothing but a newspaper.’

‘A newspaper,’ she said. ‘That’s important.’

‘In case we need to know what day it is?’

‘And what’s going on.’

Several kilometres clicked by. Feeling his warm thigh touching hers, she asked what Max was short for.

‘Maxwell,’ he said. And sang, ‘“Maxwelton’s brae’s are bonny where early fa’s the dew.”’

‘Oh you sing in tune,’ she said. ‘And a nice—what are you—tenor? Baritone?’

‘When my wife’s feeling playful she calls me Maximus.’

‘Maximus.’

‘Playful or displeased. Sometimes both, of course.’

Helen nodded, approving. ‘Max. Maxwell. Maximus. It’s like conjugating a verb. Big Max, bigger Maxwell, and Maximus—biggest.’ She gave this some thought. ‘Funny word, big. Odd, I mean, when you say it over to yourself. Big. Big.’

‘Bigger is odder,’ Max said.

‘And biggest…that’s oddest.’

‘Odd’s pretty odd too,’ Max said. ‘Anglo-Saxon monosyllables.

Like God…How odd of God…’

‘Who chews the Jews.’

‘To choose the Jews,’ he corrected.

And they fell into another comfortable silence. What a strange young woman, he thought, and was pleased he’d come.

She told him about her recent discovery of Zen Buddhism. ‘It’s my new medication. I’m cutting down on the lithium. More Zen; less lithium.’

‘Leth lithium,’ he said. He asked was that safe and she said it was. She thought it was.

He said, ‘But not instead of…’

‘Not instead of. In addition to. Zen as supplement. Zen as additive.’

And more kilometres clicked by.

He held up his newspaper, which had a front-page shot of the French president in New York. ‘I don’t like him,’ she said. ‘I’m on Valérie’s side.’

‘Trierweiler? She’s a very angry woman.’

‘He lied to her.’

‘About Julie Gayet. Of course he did.’

‘Why “Of course”?’

‘Because she’s a very angry woman.’

‘But he’d been unfaithful.’

Max shrugged. ‘So he had something to hide.’

He told her that when he was young there was another socialist president of France—another François—Mitterrand. France was still testing nuclear bombs in the Pacific. Greenpeace had a ship, the Rainbow Warrior—had she heard about that?

‘They were protesting about the bombs.’

‘They were, and French secret agents blew it up—sank it in Auckland Harbour. I was a student at the time. I remember hearing the big boom, and then a few minutes later a second one, even bigger. It was late at night. I said to the girl I was in bed with that we were being attacked. I meant it as a joke, but it was true—sort of true. Most of the agents got away but two were caught.’

He told her the story—their conviction for manslaughter and how after that the Mitterrand government put economic pressure on New Zealand to release them.

‘After a couple of years the government agreed they could serve out the rest of their sentence on an island in French Polynesia. As soon as they were there, France said they were unwell and had to be brought home.’

Their train ran on through the outskirts of Paris, past tall suburban houses and little tree-shaded villas, on, out into green countryside. Helen was quiet a while, and then asked, ‘Was she nice?’ He was unsure what she meant, and she said, ‘When the bombs went off—the girl you were in bed with.’

‘Oh…Yes, she was nice. She was very nice.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘Where indeed? Good question. Where do the dead go?’

Helen looked at him, frowning, trying to show the concern she felt for him, for his loss.

‘Oh, it wasn’t a tragedy,’ he said. ‘I mean it was, but not for me. We’d long since gone our separate ways. She married, had children—and then she died.’

The train rattled and clacked, rattled and clacked.

‘Breast cancer,’ he said. ‘Thirty-nine.’ Why was it important to get these things right? It wasn’t, of course. And yes, he was sad about her death, but no need to say so.

Helen closed her eyes, listening. ‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘that during the Battle of Waterloo a British soldier told the Duke of Wellington they had Napoleon in their gun-sights, and the Duke said it wasn’t proper in war for commanders to be shooting at one another.’

Max laughed. ‘No I didn’t know that.’ After a few seconds he said, ‘Someone picked off Lord Nelson. He was a commander.’

‘Different rules, do you think?’

She told him a story about a young Zen monk called Kitano who studied Chinese calligraphy and poetry, and grew exceptionally skilful at it, until his teacher praised him so highly Kitano thought, If I go on like this I’ll be a poet, not a Zen teacher, so he gave up and never wrote another poem.

Max nodded, absorbing this. ‘Is that a message for me?’

‘I don’t know. Is it?’

‘I gave up poetry in favour of being a professor—is that it?’

‘If the cap fits.’

‘No I don’t think it fits. The young monk—his was an act of will…A decision…A decision to stop writing poems.’

‘Decisions are not always conscious, are they?’

His shrug might have been in disagreement, but he didn’t argue.

At the Fontainebleau-Avon station a minibus was waiting to gather those enrolled for the Gurdjieff tour. They drove no great distance to the building that had housed the institute, three storeys and quite grand, in beautiful grounds, now a block of apartments. Gurdjieff ’s home, a big wooden house, was next door. This whole complex was where the great man’s devotees had come to live under his instruction, to learn ‘wakefulness’ rather than the ‘sleep’ which was, he argued, the norm for most human lives. They were to become ‘conscious’, to rid themselves of wasteful and negative emotions, to eschew regret, to shed ‘personality’, and to make their life’s work the creation of a ‘soul’. You were not born with a soul, but you could create one. That was the ‘work’.

The tour commentary was partly a lesson. They had to imagine it all happening within these walls—the importance placed on very early rising, on chores and menial duties, on preparing meals, drawing water from the well, milking the cow, feeding the hens and finding their eggs, bee-keeping, and especially growing things; and then, in the evening, listening to a talk by the Master, which might be on any one of his favourite themes—the law of three, the law of seven, the four bodies of man, even ‘Beelzebub’; and then would come the thrilling Sufi dancing, and the music.

They were shown the stairs where the writer Mansfield, one of the Master’s better-known devotees, had had the tubercular haemorrhage that killed her. As the group moved on, Max hung back at the bottom of the oak-brown stairway with its heavy banister, and Helen waited at a discreet distance, thinking she was respecting an observance; but when he turned and hurried to catch up she saw he’d been checking his cell phone.

It was hot and they walked in the extensive gardens, rested under the trees, listened to further accounts of the institute’s way of life; and then were set free to roam, to eat and drink whatever they’d brought for refreshment. Helen found a bower in the long grass under the shade of a tree, and opened the big bag with the yellow stripes, taking out two bottles of fruit juice, the baguette, which she broke into pieces, ham, cheese, tomatoes, two apples.

‘A feast,’ Max said. He lay in the grass, propped on one elbow.

‘What are you thinking?’ she said, hoping it might be about the Zen monk Kitano, so skilled when young, who stopped being a poet.

‘Nothing. Not thinking.’ He took a bite of the crusty bread. ‘Just enjoying this good bread. Eat good bread, dear father. E.G.B.D.F. Did you ever learn the piano? I should have brought something.’

‘You’re here,’ she said. ‘That’s your contribution. Imagine if I’d brought a picnic and you hadn’t come…’

As she said it, she did imagine him not there—a space, an emptiness. It frightened her, because for a moment there was a space, just pressed-down grass and the trunk of a tree, where Max had been. She shivered. Perhaps he had no soul, it had not yet been created, and she had seen its absence. But then who had written that poem she so much admired? Where was the youthful Max’s soul hiding? She would make it her project to find it, to bring it out.

When they had finished eating he sat up and brushed the crumbs away, then settled down again, his head resting on her thigh.

‘Maximus,’ she said, and laughed.

She had told him about her boyfriend in Oxford. ‘This Hugh,’ Max asked, ‘is he a good guy? Does he treat you well?’

She said he was and he did, and she showed Max his photo on her cell phone.

‘He looks OK,’ Max said. ‘In love with him, are you?’

She said it was hard to say. ‘I suppose if it’s anyone, it has to be Hugh.’

It sounded to Max as if she’d said, ‘If it’s anyone, it has to be you’—but he knew that was not what she would have said, or meant to say.

‘But when you have my kind of head,’ she went on, ‘it’s hard to put anything ahead of it.’ And then, amused and distracted by the verbal echo, she said it again. ‘Ahead of the head.’

‘Makes you a bit of a solipsist,’ Max said.

She laughed again and heard the laugh and noticed there was a bit of hysteria in it, because Max had that effect on her. ‘Solipsist, yes. Soloist too,’ she said. ‘But I love my friends. I love the whole choir, really.’

His look was enquiring. What did that mean—the whole choir? But he didn’t ask.

So they both dozed for a while in the warmth of summer and the scent of grass and flowers, but out of the sun, until the phone in his pocket buzzed him awake. He sat up, looking at it, stood up. ‘I’ll have to take this.’

As he walked to put a little distance between them she heard him say, ‘Ça va? How are things?’ When he spoke next he was out of range. She could pick up only a word here and there, and the ups and downs, the recognisable roller-coaster ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• PRAISE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• NOTE
• CONTENTS
• I. SUMMER 2014
• II. SUMMER LIGHTNING
• III. TOWARDS AUTUMN
• IV. THE WINTER OF DISCONTENT
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• ALSO BY C.K. STEAD