The Honeymoon Read online

  Praise for The Honeymoon:

  “Compelling, slow-burning, and written in elegant, unforced prose that draws you in.”

  —Time Out London

  “The Honeymoon is a startling debut. Completely engaging, profoundly moving, and hard to forget, Justin Haythe’s stunning novel is full of pleasures. The Honeymoon is more than a promising beginning—it is an ambitious and accomplished novel of the first order.”

  —Peter Cameron

  “Beautifully handled . . . Lovely, subtle writing, with humour and tenderness.”

  —The Bookseller Star Choice

  “The Honeymoon is so beautifully written, the world it delineates is so sophisticated and the characters are so subtle and complex, that I found it hard to believe that this is Justin Haythe’s first novel. Already I can’t wait for the next.”

  —Margot Livesey

  “The writing is shapely and crafted; the characters glow.”

  —GraceAnne A. DeCandido, Booklist

  “Justin Haythe’s elegiac Jamesian debut is graceful and evocative. Deservedly long-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize, it possesses the same cool appeal as does Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor. . . . The characterization is adroit and the prose is assured and formal as well as attractively conversational. . . . There are echoes of Somerset Maugham and Ford Madox Ford as well as U.S. masters such as William Maxwell and Peter Taylor. . . . A novel of many wonderful moments . . . this beautiful, eloquent novel looks to the best of both English and U.S. writing.”

  —Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

  “An elaborate unsettling character study . . . Haythe’s prose is smooth and probing.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A recasting of Ian McEwan’s disquieting ode to creepy Venice, The Comfort of Strangers, complete with requisite unexpected bloodshed. But The Honeymoon is more than a mere retread. It’s awfully close to being a peer: a sophisticated take on all the big stuff (love, class, death, Bellinis) whose evanescent prose shimmers like mist rising off the Grand Canal.”

  —Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times

  “Justin Haythe has constructed a subtle, disturbing and enigmatic novel. . . . With its themes of dysfunction and dislocation shifting beneath an apparently gilded existence, The Honeymoon carries echoes of Ford Madox Ford and F. Scott Fitzgerald. . . . Through its uneasy, compelling narrator, The Honeymoon emerges as a substantial achievement, a beguiling and significant new work.”

  —Tom Penn, The Times Literary Supplement (London)

  The Honey Moon

  JUSTIN HAYTHE

  For Muriel

  Copyright © 2004 by Justin Haythe

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  First published in 2004 by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd., London, England

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Haythe, Justin, 1973-

  The honeymoon / Justin Haythe.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9959-1

  1. Americans—Italy—Fiction. 2. British—Italy—Fiction. 3. London (England)—Fiction. 4. Mothers and sons—Fiction. 5. Venice (Italy)—Fiction. 6. Honeymoons—Fiction. 7. Violence—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6108.A97H66 2004

  823′.92—dc22

  2003058323

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Part One

  “A word of encouragement for the travelers, the explorers, the seekers – you can find what you’re looking for in the world. It’s all out there, don’t let anyone tell you different.”

  M.C. Garraty, Turned Back at the Border:

  An Art Guide to the Great Cities of Europe

  Life goes on and on after one’s luck has run out. Youthfulness persists, alas, long after one has ceased to be young. Love-life goes on indefinitely, with less and less likelihood of being loved, less and less ability to love, and the stomach ache of love still as sharp as ever.

  Glenway Wescott, The Pilgrim Hawk.

  One

  On a nice day, we used to go out as if we were going out for a night on the town. I sat on the bed and watched her dress the way she thought a French woman would dress: a thin blue sweater, yellow linen trousers with a zip on the side, a hat for the sun. Light from the window fell at her feet. Her hair was folded up beneath her hat, a few loose strands dabbing at the nape of her neck as she leaned down to put on her shoes without bending her knees.

  We spent our afternoons in the museums, our mornings in the park across the street. The leaves in the branches were swollen with sunlight. All across the park, the trees staggered with the weight. We walked around the empty pond, along the gravel path, and through the flowerbeds until we found a bench in the shade of a tree. It was a wealthy part of the city. Most people had gone away to the beach or to the mountains and only tourists or those unfortunate enough to have to work all summer spent their mornings in the park. The tourists sat in outdoor cafes while the workers ate sandwiches and bathed their feet in the fountains. Maureen did not consider us tourists.

  The only other children in the park were the children of wealthy Arabs, dressed in perfect miniature suits and dresses. They came with nannies and minders, and spoke English like royalty. I stood watching until they invited me to join in. We chased each other around the fountain and over the prohibited grass while Maureen sat aloof and reading, a shoe dangling from her foot.

  When I grew tired of the game, she put away her book and took my head on her lap. “To the museum?” she asked. She lifted her hands on either side of her, palms up, as if it was she who guided the airplanes on to their destination. “Aren’t we lucky?” she would ask, and I felt as if we were. But it was the breeze that answered, spinning the leaves above us with the sound of faint applause.

  Maureen had wanted to live in Paris for a long time. She had aspired to it. As it happened, we stayed there only briefly, for just a few months in an apartment she borrowed from a friend.

  She had met Marcel somewhere else, in another European city I was too young to remember. That’s what he told me when we met. We stood in the front hallway of his apartment and shook hands. “We’ve met before,” he said. “You were small.” He kissed Maureen on both cheeks and then held her by the shoulders. He said, “Look at you.” She stepped back out of his grasp so that we could look at her. “You have a beautiful mother,” he told me.

  This was June of 1980. I was eleven years old and he was leaving for the summer. I have often wondered if he and my mother were sleeping together. He was twenty years older than she was, heavy-set, with a thick mustache. On the train into Paris Maureen had assured me that Marcel was, in some ways, a great man. But I cannot help remembering his hands on her body, on her clothes where he could feel what she wore underneath.

  He showed us to our rooms. He put Maureen in the large bedroom where he slept, where the bed was still unmade, and showed me into the guestroom that had once belonged to his daughter, Claudia. There was a single bed, a hand painted child’s desk, and dark carpet. He showed Maureen the priceless artifacts on the sh
elves that could not be replaced if broken and the wine in the cupboard that had survived both wars and was too precious to be drunk.

  Maureen and I sat opposite Marcel at lunch. He gripped the bottle of white wine by the neck, and plunged it back into the ice bucket when the glasses were full. Without turning his head, he gestured out towards the street behind him and said the best shopping in Paris was just a few streets away. “I have no interest in shopping,” she told him. “And besides, I can’t afford it, as you well know.” He laughed as if she had said exactly what he had expected her to say.

  After lunch, we waited at the table for him to finish packing. We could hear him banging closets and drawers until he reappeared wearing a hat. We followed him into the hallway and waited for the elevator. He stood amongst his luggage, my mother and I amongst ours. “Be careful of the Arab children in the park,” he told me. He turned to Maureen. “Petits voleurs,” he explained. She smiled although she did not understand. She would look it up as soon as he had gone. He picked up his cases and stepped into the elevator. She blew him a kiss. “Bon voyage!” she called.

  When he was gone, the reflection of Maureen and myself looked back from the mirrored elevator doors. I wore a white canvas hat and a pair of favorite copper corduroys. Maureen had yet to remove her pink silk jacket.

  “Don’t listen to him,” she said. “He’s trying to impress you. Only men need to impress children. You don’t need to be any more careful with one person than another.”

  She began her inspection of the apartment the way she entered a gallery: as if she had money to spend. She passed from room to room with increasing excitement. When she found one more impressive than another, she called out for me to come and have a look. There was a pink study with a fireplace and a pair of French doors looking out onto the street; a small toilet off of the hallway with a gold-painted sink; and the kitchen with three Thai-wicker umbrellas bound to form a single lampshade. She could not stand still and almost as soon as I entered a room, she left it. She was like a child receiving a gift long obsessed over—slightly panicked by a world in which dreams are realized.

  Marcel had inherited his money. The apartment was large for a bachelor living alone, with both a guestroom and maid’s quarters. It was substantially larger than our place in New York, and had a view of the park across the street and, in the evenings, of the patches of setting sun reflected from the windows onto the tops of the trees. Marcel directed documentary films, usually about the Amazon. Several years later, Maureen took me to see one when it was playing in New York. I found it slow except for one gripping sequence when Marcel sits on a log with a spectacular view of a dam behind him. As he discusses the terrible outbreak of disease amongst an Indian tribe who worked on the dam with migrant laborers from San Paulo, he carefully inches the peel from an orange. He takes great care to keep it all in one piece. When he succeeds, he looks at the peel and nods with satisfaction before tossing it into the bushes.

  He had agreed to let Maureen and me live in his home while he was away making his next film. His daughter lived in an apartment on the ground floor. Claudia was twenty-seven years old, five years younger than Maureen. He said she would keep an eye on us.

  When Maureen went out to dinner or to the theatre in the evenings, she paid Claudia to come upstairs and look after me. Claudia was tall and exceptionally long-limbed, her torso nothing more than a hesitation between arms and legs. When she rose from sitting contorted on the couch, she unfolded to a startling height. Her mother was Venezuelan, but something besides foreignness was foreign between us. All that remained as evidence that she had spent her childhood in the apartment was the piece of colored glass hung from the window frame where I slept, and a small brass travel frame, the size of a matchbox, that sat on Marcel’s desk. The frame opened like a locket and contained two photographs: on one side, a young unsmiling Claudia wearing a pair of swimsuit bottoms at the edge of the ocean, on the other, a lean, happy-looking Marcel against an identical background. The pictures were taken on the same afternoon, roughly in the same spot, as if this had been the only afternoon they had ever spent together.

  Whenever Claudia looked after me, she fried eggs with small cubes of smoked-ham for my dinner. She sat next to me on her father’s sofa, smoking cigarettes and arranging her rings and earrings into piles on the table. She taught me my first French words. She did not seem to mind that my mother and I were living in her father’s apartment, or that I was sleeping in her bed. Later, as I lay in that bed, I would listen to her move around the apartment. She played the piano and when she tired of that, she talked on the phone, laughing loudly. When she hung up, I felt a terrible silence as if she had gone out and I was left all alone. Perhaps she felt the same, for after a moment, she would make another call and when she had run out of phone calls she walked around, her footsteps indecipherable from the rattle of the windows, or the lives going on in neighboring apartments.

  * * *

  At the end of August, it began to rain. Maureen sat each day at her desk in the small study near the kitchen. I spent most of the week sitting at the living room window looking out. The building opposite echoed ours: red brick with a white balustrade, a black-speared fence guarding the edge of the pavement. I thought I could see figures in the windows, but it was usually just the reflections of the sky cramping in darkness overhead.

  On the fourth successive day of rain, the skies calmed for about an hour. For a brief period the street became brighter, but very soon the clouds were shifting, threatening again. In the building opposite, lights came on in the windows and with each, a square of reflected sky disappeared. I had the sensation I was not alone. I turned to find Claudia standing in the doorway. Her hair was damp. She looked at me, at first, as if she did not know me and then she smiled. “Bonjour,” I said.

  A moment later, Maureen appeared in the hallway behind her. She held a pen in one hand, a cigarette in the other. “Claudia,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in.” Claudia turned and faced Maureen. “You’re still in your pajamas,” Maureen laughed. “It’s the middle of the afternoon!”

  Claudia looked down at herself thoughtfully.

  “Are you just getting up?” asked Maureen. “I don’t blame you with this never-ending rain . . . . Have you heard from your father? I have some mail. The envelopes look important. You can take them.” She turned away. “I was going to make tea,” she said and disappeared into the kitchen.

  Claudia stepped out of her shoes, leaned over and arranged them neatly against the wall. We did not say anything to one another, which was not unusual. I believed that we had an understanding.

  One night, when I was almost asleep, I had heard her on the phone, weeping instead of laughing. Streetlight came through the piece of colored glass she had hung at the window of her old bedroom. Claudia came into the room without turning on the lights. After a moment’s hesitation, she lay down on top of the covers beside me. I felt her legs and her breathing, the weight of her grown body. I watched her face soften into sleep. I reached out my hand and laid it over hers. I thought that one of us should stay awake unless my mother returned and discovered us there together, but soon I fell asleep as well. To my great relief when I awoke the next morning she had gone.

  Maureen came back with a small pitcher of milk in one hand and a plate of inexpensive petite-fours in the other. She put them down on the table and switched on a lamp. The light made the sky seem darker still. “Perhaps, you can tell me if we should send any mail on to him directly . . . . How do you feel? You look pale.” She put her hand to Claudia’s cheek. “Petal,” she said. She took Claudia’s earlobe between her finger and her thumb. Claudia leaned forward and gave Maureen a kiss.

  “Oh,” said Maureen, obviously surprised. “Thank you.” Maureen looked old beside Claudia for the first time. Petal was my mother’s name for me and Claudia was, in my eyes, a grown woman.

  Maureen returned to the kitchen for the tea tray. Claudia crossed the room and stood beside me, loo
king out. She opened the French door and went out onto the patio as if she wanted a closer look. She stepped over the potted plants and from the railing she stepped into the sky. She had come to us for the height.

  For a moment, a breeze tapped the plants against the railing and then there was a version of silence, a flexing of the space that had swallowed her before Maureen returned. She was in the middle of saying something, but when she saw me she fell quiet. She looked around as if Claudia might have concealed herself in the shadows. She stepped out onto the patio, and without getting too close, peered over the edge.

  Maureen held me on her lap while we waited for the siren. Small breaths of steam escaped from the teapot. She served the tea to the police once she assured them we were in no way related to Claudia. She wandered around filling cups, the policemen thanking her politely. She forgot to put out ashtrays and after some hesitation, the men went ahead and ashed in their saucers.

  Marcel came home early from the jungle. Claudia’s mother sat at the table in the living room where my mother had left the petit fours and the mail. Our bags were already in the hall. Maureen told her how sorry we were. The woman silently sipped her tea while Marcel stood at the window smoking cigarettes. They did not speak in our presence. Four bars had to be sawed away from the fence on the pavement when they cut Claudia’s body free. Paris was finished. So was my mother’s friendship with Marcel. And then there was the airport, the plane full of people, and the sky.

  Two

  I am an American. I live in London. I spent my childhood cir cling the continent of Europe. My mother was writing a book about the most beautiful things in the world.

  I think that I now possess the only complete manuscript of TURNED BACK AT THE BORDER: AN ART GUIDE TO THE GREAT CITIES OF EUROPE. Maureen was too disorganized and in ways had too much faith to have made a duplicate. The dedication is to me—For Gordon, My Faithful Assistant (Of Course). To the front page she paperclipped two photographs of herself—potential dust jacket pictures, I imagine. The first was taken quite recently here in Cape Cod in cold black and white. In the picture she sits alert on her porch in a wooden deckchair. A corner of the wood-shingle house is visible behind her, a window stands open; it is warmer than it looks. Her face is thin; her hair has grown long again. She wears a coat over her shoulders. The smoke from her cigarette is washed away in the breeze, or perhaps it is unlit. Her expression is intently serious, as if a photograph of her was something rare—as if she were someone who had renounced the world for a life of contemplation. She looks directly into the camera, at whomever was taking the picture. I cannot help wondering who that would have been? I had not imagined anyone new in her life—she never mentioned anyone—but of course there would have been someone.