Читать книгу Darke - Rick Gekoski - Страница 7

Part I

I wasn’t sure of the right word. Builder? Odd-job man? Repairman? Or perhaps I needed to see a specialist? Carpenter? Joiner? Woodworker?

I looked at the keyboard intently, as if the letters could Ouija themselves up, and reveal the answer.

Handyman? I typed it into Google and added my postcode, hope congealing in my heart. Most builders, handy or otherwise, are incompetent, indolent and venal.

I will not pay unless the job is done perfectly, on time and within estimate. I do not provide endless cups of PG Tips with three sugars, ta, nor do I engage in talk, small or large. Preferably no visits to my WC, though a builder who does not pee is rare. Tea makes pee. But if that is necessary, only in the downstairs cloakroom. Afterwards there will be piss under the loo.

I also wanted one who is taciturn. I loathe the inane chatter of workmen hoping to ingratiate themselves while simultaneously padding their bills. A handyman who cannot talk? Bliss. Somebody should set up a company that supplies them. Tear out their tongues or sew up their lips, that’d do it.

I added taciturn to my search options, but unsurprisingly nothing turned up, though one chap described himself as ‘tactile’ which gave me the creeps. I tried various alternatives: Quiet? Nothing. Unobtrusive? Chance would be a fine thing. I eventually opted for Thoughtful, which provided two alternatives: one pictured in a string vest, who I suspect offers a variety of distinctly odd jobs, the other with a few recommendations affixed to his entry, which lauded his reliable service.

Mr Cooper, he is called, but I did not ring him, as that would provide evidence that I can hear, whereas I intended to feign almost total deafness. I emailed him, enquiring if he might be available next week. He responded immediately, which is a bad sign: shouldn’t he be out handy-manning his way around town?

Yes, he replied, he was free next Wednesday and Thursday. What can he do for me?

My requirements of Mr Cooper concern the entry to my house, which has a handsome Georgian door, which will need to be removed and ‘amended’ – I believe this might be the right term – in five ways:

(1) Remove the brass letter box, and then fill in the resultant hole, prep and paint in Farrow and Ball Pitch Black gloss. (There are a variety of blacks, some of them greatly preferable to others, and black is one of the few colours (or absence of colours) in which doors should properly be painted. One of our neighbours, a recently arrived Indian family, decorated theirs in a Hindu orange so offensive, so out of keeping with the tone of the rest of the street that a petition was discreetly and anonymously raised by ‘Your Neighbours’ (guilty as charged) asking him and his wife to reconsider. They did, and repainted it bright turquoise.)

(2) Install a doorbell that rings once only, no matter how many times you press it, and which issues a melodious, inoffensive tone which can be heard clearly inside the house, but not outside the door.

(3) Install a Dia16mm-x-200-Degree-Brass-Door-Viewer-Peephole-with-Cover-and-Glass-Lens, which I will provide.

(4) Install a new keyhole and change lock.

(5) Remove the brass door-knocker, and make good.

The jobs I have outlined will take a day and a half, according to Mr Cooper, ‘unless something goes wrong’, plus an extra visit to put on a second coat of gloss. Mr Cooper’s hourly charge is £35, plus materials, which, when I compare it to others offering similar services (though without extra thoughtfulness), is pretty much standard.

We agreed that he would arrive at 10 a.m., and that I would have a parking permit ready for his van. He seemed untroubled by my announcement of my deafness.

‘No worries, I can get on with my work. Not very talkative myself.’

I considered asking him to bring his own tea, but if he finds himself in desperate need (which he will, he will), he can always pop out to the neighbourhood café, a few hundred metres down the street.

James Fenimore, as I have inwardly designated him – his site, curiously, only describes him as Cooper Handyman – arrived right on time, which was a good sign. Had he been more than fifteen minutes late, I would not have answered the door. He looks reassuringly like a handyman. Stocky, uncombed white hair that manages to be both lank and frothy at the same time, florid face pockmarked like an autonomous wart. The details don’t matter. But the smell did: cheap cigarettes, stale beer, decaying teeth, wood shavings and something acrid that burned my nose, about which I didn’t wish to speculate. He was disgusting, and I could barely resist the impulse to send him away: Shoo! Off you go! Like a stray dog.

My senses are out of control, imperious, undermining. I can smell the decomposing bodies of the flies on the windowsill, the morning light burns my retina, the residue of the morning’s toothpaste coats my gums, my fingertips tingle when they come into contact with hard surfaces. It’s like having a migraine without the headache.

After I opened the door, gingerly, he took a careful builderly look at it, its solidity and sheen, the perfect proportions, depth, weight.

‘Don’t make doors like that any more,’ he said. ‘Shoddy rubbish nowadays.’

I held my hand to my ear to remind him of my deafness, and made a quizzical face, as if he were speaking Mongolian.

He spoke louder, and stepped forward, which I instantly regretted. ‘Shame to muck it about. Security problems I’m guessing? Lot of burglaries round here!’

None of his fucking business, is it? ‘No, not security. Just some changes. I’ll leave you to it. Let yourself out when you finish for the day, and I will see you tomorrow.’

At 5 p.m. I heard the door close, and went down to see how he’d got on. I was pleased – and surprised – to see that he had cleaned up after himself, and the reinstalled door closed with the same satisfying clunk as ever. It now had some new wood, undercoated and primed in dark grey, set where the letter box had been, and the area where the former door-knocker resided was filled in, sanded and painted as well. The new keyhole had been installed, and a set of three keys was on the table in the hallway. There was a newly drilled hole at eye level – he and I were much the same height so I didn’t have to be measured for it – where the peephole would go tomorrow. James Fenimore had carefully taped over it with black masking tape. Altogether, a distinctly workmanlike job.

He arrived at ten the next morning, clutching a takeaway paper cup filled, I presumed, with builder’s tea and lots of sugar. He put it down carefully on the hall table, remembering to put something under it. Keeping the door open, he inspected yesterday’s work and tested that the undercoating was dry.

‘OK so far?’ he asked, in the kind of slow, loud voice one uses for foreigners, recalcitrant children, the stupid and the deaf.

I nodded, trying not to get too close to him. His smell was so invasive that I had not dabbed but sloshed some of Suzy’s L’Air du Temps on my upper lip. When I opened the tiny bottle, it released a painfully sharp memory, not visual but somatic, of my head cushioned between her breasts, her original breasts, smelling of a trace of scent, as blissfully content as a boy can be. And a girl, all those years ago, before we were lost, both of us, lost.

‘Will you do one thing for me?’ I asked James Fenimore. ‘Please go outside and shut the door, and then knock on it as loudly as you can. Maybe five or six times?’

He wasn’t an inquisitive chap, or perhaps he had already marked me down as not merely deaf but barmy. How likely was it that I would be able to hear the door-knocking if I couldn’t make him out at eighty decibels over four feet?

He closed the door, and gave it a few almighty wallops with his knuckles, which must have been severely tried by the experience. I listened carefully, having walked down the hallway into the kitchen. There was a distinct but muffled thudding, to be sure, but it was tolerable at that distance. From upstairs I would hardly have heard a thing. Well-made door that. Don’t make them like that any more.

Greatly reassured, I readmitted James Fenimore, only to find that he recoiled as he passed me in the doorway, stepping back, alarmed, and checking an impulse to raise his hands. His nostrils quivered noticeably, he sniffed. I was wearing scent! And as I hadn’t done so yesterday, I must have put it on just to meet him!

It explained everything. The eccentricity, the fussy taste, the fancy clothes, the fastidiousness. A poofter! And I fancied him! I could see this line of thought pass slowly over his features, as he added one observation to another. He stepped back, and leant against the wall, ready to defend himself. I had a fleeting urge to kiss him on the cheek, just for the fun of it.

‘When you have installed the peephole, send me an email. I’ll be online, and then I can come down and see if it works properly.’

Queer as a coot.

Just after 2 p.m. my email ‘ding-ding’ sounded, as I was making some notes on my current concerns, composing myself in painstakingly extracted bits. I have no job and no life: no occupation, just preoccupation.

My Inbox revealed that Cooper Handyman would be finished in twenty minutes, and reminded me that I had promised to pay in cash, to save VAT. I had ordered an extra cash delivery from American Express in anticipation of this, because my usual fortnightly £400 would not leave enough to cover the bill.

I had purchased the very expensive peephole instrument for $200, when you can get perfectly serviceable ones for a tenth of that, because this top-of-the-range model alters the laws of nature. Your Mr Cooper fits it in your door, and it claims to give you 200-degree coverage. Now I am no mathematician, but even I know that from the flat surface of a door only a 180-degree arc is visible. So, as far as I can make out, the new magical instrument will allow me to see into my own hallway, presumably 10 degrees on each side, through thick brick walls. For the extra $180 I am longing to see how it works. Thus if I stand in the right position, I should be able to see myself looking at myself.

‘It don’t do that, it can’t!’ says James Fenimore scornfully. ‘Just trying to sell it to idiots. Might work if you just held it to your eye, but it’s for a door! Not worth the money you paid for it!’

‘Shall we test it? If you go outside and close the door, perhaps you could stand in various positions while I look though the peephole.’

‘No problem.’

A moment later I was looking through the new peephole directly into Mr Cooper’s face. He smiled uneasily, perhaps concerned that this might be seen as a come-on. And then, with his back against first the left-hand wall and then the right, waved a hand gently, as if the Queen from her carriage.

I cannot imagine what I have done to encourage this skittishness. Does he think all queers like waving Queens? Next thing I knew he would want us to have a cup of tea together, pinkies in the air.

I think he has had enough of me too, and clutching his small cache of £50 notes, shakes my hand, with firm masculine pressure. I allow mine to melt into his. I will wash it thoroughly when he leaves.

‘You take care of yourself now,’ he says warily.

‘You too.’

I tried to suppress a fugitive feeling of gratitude from my tone. After all, he was a good workman, unexceptionable, scratching out a living.

The new door, as I stand on the step to look it over, is stripped of both grace and function without its knocker and letter box. Black, bare, blank, beautiful in its stripped-down brutality. Just spyhole and keyhole. A bit sinister, as if it were guarding a fortress of some sort.

I hope it works. It locks them out, and me in. It gives me a – might I call it a window? – on the world. Or maybe just a way of peeping, unseen.

The next morning I woke early, and after my showering and coffee rituals, arrived at the door at 7.58. I rolled up a newly washed, fluffy hand towel and placed it above the eyehole, leant forward so that my forehead rested on it, comfortably adjusted it until my eye was perfectly aligned. The world came into focus. Across the street, just on 8 a.m., right on time like the Bombay Express, the Singh family left their house. Doctor and young son, top-knotted, turbaned. Mother and daughter in immaculate saris. You could set your watch by them. Sikh and ye shall find. Every morning both parents walked the children to the primary school before making their way to the Tube: he to the Chelsea and Westminster, she to her accountancy offices. Deloitte’s, was it?

They were wonderfully presented, less disgusting than their English equivalents. Stripped of their ethnic accoutrements, their turbans, suits and saris, they would be the colour of lightly toasted Poilâne, redolent of cardamom and ghee. If you were a cannibal, you’d toss aside a pallid smelly Cooper – the colour and consistency of uncooked bread – and have a bite of these tasty Oriental morsels.

*

I’ve composed a list of further world-proofing chores. I like lists. You think of every contingency, plan for it, cross it off. It gives the impression that everything is controllable.

It’s going surprisingly well, the elements falling into place. First, the essential communication – I hope it will be the last.

Dear George,

It was good, all things considered, to see you last week. As I intimated, I have a small request. I am going to be taking some time off, and I need to redirect my mail. If you will be so kind as to receive it, all I ask is that you throw it away. All of it. Please. I do not want to be disturbed for the foreseeable future, for any reason. I will be out of touch.

I am most grateful for this.

I have also changed my email address, as you can see. I do not want this divulged to anyone. Indeed, I would rather you did not use it yourself, once you have confirmed you can help me in this minor way.

Thanks,

James

George is as close as I came to making a friend amongst my fellow schoolmasters. He is a harmless, good-hearted duffer, and a passionate enthusiast for all things Victorian. He kits himself out in fancy dress: silken cravats or bow ties, itchy tweed suits, waistcoats, flouncy shirts, shoes with buckles. And a bushy beard, of course. He is idealistic, staunch, sentimental, hearty, blinkered, patriotic, and hopeless with women. I suppose – there was speculation about this in the Common Room – you might have mistaken him for a repressed homosexual, but he is not. He is one of that virtually extinct species, the bachelor. He visits friends in the country at the weekends, is a reliable walker for widows and spinsters, has godfathered half the children in Gloucestershire, and is keen on travel, amateur theatrics, cricket, and especially on the works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Every 15th of September he celebrates the death-day of Arthur Hallam, the poet’s lost friend and only true love, with a select dinner at Boodle’s, at which he insists on declaiming the entire text of ‘The Lotos-Eaters’, a poem that, like Hitler, should never have been born. He acts it out, waving his arms like a drowning fairy, sensuous, mellifluous and slinky.

But, comic figure though he is, I can count on him. I’d solved my incoming mail problem. Brilliant. I have also cancelled my landline, got a new mobile number, and made a database of essential providers: handyman, plumber, electrician, doctor, dentist, optician, nurse, cleaner, ironing and laundry service, computer and telly fixers. I can order cash, coffee, cigars, food from Waitrose or Harrods, wine from Berry Brothers if I outlive my cellar. I have enough clothes and shoes to last a lifetime.

I will never go out again. If I am incapacitated by severe illness or a heart attack, I will abjure the emergency call, suffer and die. If the house catches fire, I will go down with it, perhaps put on some smothering and sizzling music – Stravinsky perhaps, can’t think what else he’s good for – and smoke and barbecue like Joan of Arc.

Of course the price of my enforced isolation will be a regular invasion of both house and self by a succession of strangers, none of whom will be congenial to me. Of course I dislike a chippy chippy, but I’m equally hostile to the charming, the well spoken or well read, the interesting, the beautiful, the whimsical. Next thing I know they will be smiling and waving at me from their carriages.

Anyone who enters this house does so as an instrument of my will. I am not here to meet people, but to use them. If they could be replaced by machines, I would do so without compunction, and if they were robots they would be programmed to listen but not to talk.

Only four days after its installation, the doorbell rang. I ignored it. Either it was someone who didn’t matter or, much worse, someone who did. I cannot say what time it was. I have renounced my watch, drawn the curtains. It is dark amid the blaze of noon, a total eclipse without hope of day. I am become a thing of darkness.

I do not follow the news, hardly turn on the telly or wireless. My computer wants to tell me the time and date, but after some searching I turn off that function. The house is still, timeless. Eternal in its way.

I drift off in my chair, resolve to drink my way through the wine cellar, nibble smoked oysters on cracked wheat biscuits. The oysters are delivered (on Thursdays) from Scotland. They do not come in tins. Anything that is tinned, tastes tinny: baked beans, tuna in oil, white asparagus, all similarly contaminated. No, my oysters are plump, recently smoked, and come in plastic packaging that hardly affects their taste.

I eat grapes, though it is hard to source decent ones. But if I eat too many, or drink too much, I am sick, sick at heart, vomiting, bereft. The nausea rises out of me like a metaphysical force. It is in the walls, it is everywhere around me, it is the air that I cannot breathe. But I carry on with my grapes, both liquid and solid. I don’t wish to die of scurvy. I don’t wish to die at all, not yet.

I feel as if the house is under surveillance, staked out, as I am staked out within it. Crucified. But behind its blank façade, there are few signs of life, as I have few signs of life behind mine.

The only vulnerability is on Thursdays. If you were a weary gumshoe slumped over your steering wheel, eyes propped open, in need of a shave and a toothbrush after a sleepless Wednesday night, in the morning you might observe someone walk up the path confidently, open the door and go in. You might try to confront them, or more likely advise your employer to do so.

When the doorbell rang again a few days later – just once, that was a good idea – I snuck into the hallway, my footsteps muffled by the thickness of the carpet, and surely imperceptible outside the door. I looked through the peephole. It was just as I had anticipated, and feared. I retreated upstairs, my restless heart threatening its cavity, and a few moments later the knocking started, first a regular rapping, followed soon by a robust banging, less loud than burly James Fenimore had produced, but surprisingly vigorous nonetheless. I closed the door to my study.

It happened again the next day, the hammering, and a more protracted and furious banging. When I opened the door a few hours later, having ensured that the 200-degree coast was clear, there was an envelope taped to it, obviously with a letter inside it. Perhaps four or five pages thick. I took it inside, tore it up without opening it, and threw the many pieces into the bin.

From the outside, with the curtains closed, the house might well have looked uninhabited. The only tell-tale sign, ironically, was the change to the door. Why would someone who had left a house for a protracted period feel a need to reinforce its entrance in such a way? No, the unwelcoming black door signalled that someone was inside, who would not welcome the presence of an intruder. I steeled myself – not a cliché, just the right metaphor – to expect further visits, further knocks, further entreaties. I will ignore them, steely in my resolve.

The air is stifling, humid, it feels as if I could drown in it.

Here I lie where I need to be

I am the sailor home from the sea

I choose the darkness because I hate it, and I loathe the sea, it’s so bloody insistent: whoosh whoosh, drown. No, my adventures are over. Save this one, which I am writing.

If – God forbid – I had to go outside now, I would wear a sign. I could print it on the computer, on heavy gauge paper in Gils Sans typeface, and attach it with a string around my neck:

Do not talk to me, or come near me.

I am not interested in your opinions.

Thinking this gives me a warm feeling. I can no longer bear to be in the presence of my fellow man, even to dismiss them. I will not go out, though sometimes of a morning I fold my towel and lean against the door, peeping at my fellows on their daily rounds. The sight of them fills me with hatred, disgust and contempt. This feeling comes upon me with the buffeting terror of a tsunami. I am swept away, hardly able to breathe, in danger of extinction. The thought of wandering into the streets, bumped and jostled by these acrid creatures, makes me retch.

I have lost my capacity to avert my eyes, or my nose. They stay open, however much I blink and flinch and turn away. I keep thinking those thoughts which, if we can only cast them aside, allow us to live tolerable, satisfied and self-satisfied existences. To make do. Reality punches you, pummels you into bruised submission, except that there is no way in which you can throw in the towel, wave a white flag, mutter ‘No más’ like that poor boxer once did, and retreat to the safety of your corner.

Or perhaps to your house? Reality: out there. Aversion: in here? If only it were so simple. If only it worked. How can we bear to be ourselves? How can we bear our children, whose lives begin in pain and terminate in agony? Enough. Too much.

O dark dark dark. They all go intothe dark.

Fucking T.S. Eliot. All of them? Damned? Surely somebody gets to go into the light, don’t Christians think like that? The source, the beginning, the brightness at the end of the tunnel, the soft fading dribble of final consciousness, the ethereal infinite. In his end is his beginning, like a snake with its arse up its head. Welcomed by the heavenly hosts and hostesses. Pearly gates, genial chat with St Peter, try not to push in the queue, get your individual destination. Not very efficient. More sensible to suppose some quick transformation from person to angel. The soul leaves the poor just-dead remains and Swoosh! like that sound mobile phones make when they send a text (better than Quack! Quack!). The soul shoots away and finds itself in the clouds.

What do you do up there? What are you going to do tomorrow? Next year? Next millennium? What sustains and nourishes them, the angels of the dead? In pictorial accounts they are corporeal in some faded, washed-out way, like threadbare cotton nighties left to dry in the sun, softly flapping, drained of essence.

Yet they have human features. Faces, chests, wavy hair, noses, arms (wings, anyway), something sort of leggy. In heaven there are no signs or vestiges of what got you there. No swollen tumours, no bullet holes or crushed skulls, no filled lungs or ruptured appendixes. No shrunken cadavers. Every body filled up and filled in. Reformed, reformulated, returned, retuned, resurrected. Good as new. Better.

Does this celestial self retain its humanity? Does it get cystitis or haemorrhoids? There is no testimony that it gorges and disgorges, excretes or sodomises. Do angels have arseholes?

Do they examine themselves, these freshly minted angels, wonder at this shimmering new essence, this new freedom from weight and care? Might they, before they morph into pure angeltude, do an anxious inventory of what is, astonishingly, missing, as if they had survived some terrible bomb blast, and in a hectic, final shocked moment checked to see what was left of themselves? Lips? Check. Legs? Hard to tell. Eyes? Functioning. Ears. Nothing to hear. No viscera at all at all. No stomach: nothing to eat. No lungs: no air to breathe. No blood: no menstruating angels, no cut fingers. It’s enough to make you scream with laughter. Dead and not dead. Body and not body. It makes me hysterical.

Angels are the riddles of heaven: dead things with feathers. Only the damned remain fully alive, cursing and writhing, bleeding and bruising, smelling and excreting, in agony and despair. Bit like life really.

Later in his dreadful poem, Mr Eliot assures us – can you fucking believe it? – that you are damned according to your profession. The Great and the Good go to Hell, along with the usual haul of cowards, narcissists and murderers. Plenty of arseholes in Hell. Mr Eliot includes himself amongst the damned. I like that in a poet.

Heavenly reward is only for the meek, the humble, the unostentatiously kindly: dinner ladies, scout masters, carers, primary schoolteachers, nurses, cleaners, rubbish collectors, gardeners, college scouts, curates and handymen. The worthies who, in their finest hour, are offered an MBE by the Queen, and are charmingly and naively delighted. And after that they become angels!

And here we have him, ladies and gentlemen! T.S. Eliot: classicist in literature, royalist in politics, the most pompous form of the Jamesian American ex-pat. Worse yet: as from his religious conversion, a Believer! It horrified his friends, his erstwhile friends. That frigid snitbag Virginia Woolf was so distressed that she virtually sat shiva with her husband Lenny the Jew to signal the passing of poor Tom, no longer a member of the atheist tribe.

Unlike Leonard’s, her nose hooked up, not down, it sniffed, she was a great sniffer, a terrific bitch. Her letters and diaries are fastidious, superior, deadly. So much more enjoyable than all those girly hyper-sensitive novels. Mrs Shalloway. To the Shitehouse. Beyond reprieve or comprehension, poor Tom, sighed Virginia, ‘may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He believes in God and immortality, and goes to church . . .’

Of a sudden, he’s all public pious, intellectual, and – how ghastly, how utterly uncongenial – a seeker after wisdom. We are told his poems have spiritual quality. What an oxymoron. Worse! He would be an imparter of wisdom, another failed-priest poet. Like them all.

Like that dreadful gasbag Kahlil Gibran, the archetypal fakir, whose platitudes informed the weddings of a whole generation. Lucy produced two of his ‘poems’ at her ceremony: one read with doleful earnestness by her soon-to-be husband Sam the other intoned by herself:

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,

Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Christ! This ghastly humbuggery was enough to make me yearn for Mr Eliot. Perched in the front row on a hideous plastic chair wrapped in a floppy gentrifying serviette, I suffered mightily, and (I gather) let out a discernible groan. Lucy glared at me. She was still angry from our disastrous conversation two days before.

I’d thought I was helping, like a signalman on the tracks diverting a runaway train. She’d been at the house, sitting on the bed doing something with a pile of clothes. She and Suzy had been assembling her ‘going-away outfit’ – which I gather is what your change of clothes after the wedding is called – and Suzy had announced she was popping out to buy some suitable garment or other. Lucy was turned away from me, her shoulders hunched, shaking gently and regularly.

‘Lucy, love, are you all right?’

‘It’s Mummy, she’s driving me crazy. This whole bloody farce is down to her. Just because she had to endure a big wedding, she’s inflicting it on me. She says it’s one of a woman’s rites of passage, like childbirth, you just have to bear it.’

I hate weddings, especially this one, for which I had to pay. Why does the bride’s family have to shell out? Though we would have had to anyway, for Sam’s worthy parents didn’t have two beans to rub together. Though if they’d had them, they would have.

Give me a good funeral any day: some happy memories and encomia rather than fatuous hopes for a dodgy future. No drunken rowdies, no idiotic dancing till early morning, no ill-dressed maids of honour losing theirs with best men desperate to shuck their formal clothing and get on the job.

Lucy’s eyes drifted downwards again, and she selected a cream blouse, pressed it against her chest, looked into the mirror, put it back down. She tested another blouse, rejected it, frowning. Her displeasure was directed more at the activity than the various garments. There were only two days until the wedding, and (as Suzy insisted) choices have to be made.

Lucy had been suborned into compliance. Left to her own devices, she’d have put on a frock, gathered a couple of friends as witnesses – not her parents, nor Sam’s – trotted off to the local registry office, had a celebratory nosh-up with some pals, then gone back to work the next day, a wife.

‘Lucy? I’ve been thinking . . . Can I say something?’

She put down yet another blouse, and sat on the bed. ‘Sure. What?’

‘I just wanted to say, you know, while there’s still time . . .’

‘What?’

‘You don’t have to do this, you know.’

She nodded her head in agreement. ‘I know I don’t! But I got hassled into it by Mummy, and somehow once you agree to a proper wedding you end up with all sorts of stuff that you don’t need or want.’ She leant sideways and began to flick through various items of clothing.

I was determined to persevere, though I had nothing to fall back on emotionally. Suzy told me I needed to ‘work on my relationship’ with Lucy, but I never thought we had one, not quite, which was rather a relief. She was unaccountable to me, and I cannot recall many sustained personal conversations between us. I was rarely alone with her adult incarnation, and vaguely ill at ease when I was. She had made, it seemed to me, a set of uninspired choices, the consequences of which – work at a desk in some down-at-heel centre of worthiness – were no doubt admirable in some abstract way. Sam was another, and far more dangerous, example of her bad judgement.

‘No, love. I’m sorry. Do come over here and sit for a moment.’

Lucy looked up, puzzled by my request for enhanced proximity, and came to sit beside me in the twin armchairs in the alcove by the window, her body turned slightly away, as if shielding herself from unaccustomed intimacy. ‘What’s this all about?’

‘I just want to have a little chat, you know, before the day.’

‘Day? What day? You’re being awfully mysterious.’

‘I’m so sorry, I’m not very good at this. Your wedding day, of course. Saturday.’

She turned to face me squarely. ‘What about it?’

‘Well, I was wondering, perhaps you might be getting cold feet? You seem on edge. And I just wanted to say it isn’t too late if you want to reconsider. I – Mummy and I – would quite understand . . .’

‘Let me get this straight. Are you asking me if I have cold feet, or advising me to have them? Because if you are . . .’

I knew there was some risk involved, but was determined to pursue the thought. ‘It’s just that people often marry in spite of the fact that they have misgivings. They just get carried along with the flow, and are too timid to say “hold on a minute, I’m not sure I’m ready for this”.’

She stood up from her chair, until she was only a few feet away from where I was sitting, and I was looking up at her angry face.

‘How dare you! First Mummy hassling me about clothes and stupid fucking details, now my father is trying to call the whole thing off! That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what you want!’

‘No, love, not at all. It’s just that – ’

‘You’ve never liked Sam. You never gave him a chance, did you? You never met him halfway, sat down and talked and tried to get to know him?’

That was true enough. From our first acquaintance, when he came to dinner to meet the parents, uncomfortable in a new jacket and tie, I’d spotted him as the sort of earnest working-class Northern boy who would have benefited from a decent education, had his sharp edges and broad vowels polished and regularised.

She was leaning down now, her face close to mine. ‘And you know what is sad? You don’t get it at all. Sam is his own man, and he has wonderful qualities, you just can’t see them.’

‘Tell me what you mean.’

‘It’s hardly worth bothering,’ she said, standing straight and backing away, making a curiously operatic gesture with her hands. ‘You’d find it hard to recognise his virtues.’

‘Oh yes? Tell me about them. I’m genuinely interested.’

‘Goodness,’ she said. ‘And integrity.’

‘I’m glad you feel that way.’

‘I do. I only wish you did too. And I do want to marry him with all my heart. It’s the only thing in this whole ghastly mess that I’m certain about.’

I stood up to comfort her, though reassuring cuddles are well outside my normal repertoire.

She turned away. ‘Let’s leave it,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘perhaps it was ham-fisted of me. But I meant well.’

‘Did you now?’ she said.

This always seems to happen when I try to be fatherly.

Lucy’s stare, as I perched on my plastic, was a rich amalgam of triumph and warning, and I turned away, unforgiven. I stifled myself, clenched my cheeks.

Suzy elbowed my ribs, then clasped my hand firmly in tacit reassurance. The sleeve of her silk blouse, that we’d bought in a market in Rajasthan fourteen months before, made a shocking contrast with the pallor of her wrist, where the veins traced their purple trails in a manner that should have felt ominous. The royal blue of the silk shimmered, startlingly lit by a tribe of crimson parrots, beaks slightly agape, dangerous and moronic, yearning to squawk or to nip.

She’d been uncertain, in that stifling market smelling of turmeric and petrol, cooking curries and cow dung, urine and the waft of human shit. I gagged with humid disgust. She held the blouse in the air to inspect it, then placed it across her chest.

‘Very nice lady! Very nice! Parrot most lucky bird. I give you good price!’

A tiny boy and his smaller sister, dressed in rags, had followed us around the market, importuning, holding onto Suzy’s skirt and attempting to grab hold of my trouser leg. A quick slap put paid to that. The little boy pointed to his slim but by no means distended stomach, and groaned piteously. The little girl looked up – at Suzy – beseechingly. At first glance – I didn’t take a second – the lower half of her face was composed entirely of snot.

‘Hungry, sah!’ He put his hand out, and his tiny sister mimicked the gesture. Suzy patted them on the head kindly, already thinking of a way to slip them a few rupees without causing an urchin storm. She took out a piece of Kleenex, wiped the girl’s nose, and threw the tissue into the dirt with the other detritus. I shuddered. I know nothing of caste systems, but these children were verily untouchable.

‘For pity’s sake,’ I said, ‘just buy the damn thing! How much can it cost? You can always give it to Lucy if it doesn’t suit you. Let’s go!’

‘I give you best price!’

‘Yes! Yes! She’ll have it. How much?’ I offered half the amount.

‘Hungry, sah!’

‘Are you sure?’ Suzy held the garment uncertainly. I had confused her by switching categories. Was it for Lucy? Would it suit her?

Back at the hotel, after a revolting walk of some fifteen minutes, beseeched by beggars of the heat and dust, the children paid off by the front gate, I made straight for our room, convinced that the stench of the market followed me across the marbled foyer, carried subtly on the jasmine-conditioned air. I spent the next ten minutes in the shower, soaping and gelling and scrubbing. I sniffed my hands, and they carried still the odour of dung and spice. I washed them again.

The ritual of changing into freshly laundered clothes was soothing, and with each layer – freshly ironed socks and underwear, a crisp cotton shirt with a touch of starch, and finally the careful donning of my mushroom linen suit – I felt as if I were being reincarnated. I put my filthy clothes in the hamper, ready for the hotel butler to pick up and return – pristine – tomorrow. Draped over the chair were Suzy’s nightgown and bathrobe, and on the floor lay discarded underthings, for she had changed, God knows why, before we went to the market. Getting clean to get dirty.

The unshowered Suzy was standing on the veranda, her rumpled carrier bag with the silk shirt in it on the recliner beside her, looking over the gardens and the water below. The late afternoon air was freshening. I opened a bottle of wine from the fridge, and poured a glass for each of us.

My box of cigars was in the safe in the wardrobe. I opened it ceremoniously, spirits already lifted by the anticipation of my evening treat. The hotel had a humidor in the bar, next to which a stagey turbaned gentleman with silk robes and silkier moustaches stood at attention, whose sole employ was pompously to facilitate the choice of a cigar for anyone willing to fork out the hefty price for importation from Havana to a five-star palace in Rajasthan. That didn’t bother me. Good for them. But the cigars – I was informed before coming – might not withstand the travel, and would deteriorate further languishing in an inadequately moisturised humidor. They would be brittle to the touch, crack and crumble in the mouth, and shed outer leaves in the hand. I saw a florid gentleman, the evening before, expostulating furiously as he peeled the dried outer leaves off the Bolivar Churchill for which he had paid the equivalent of £65.

Forewarned, I’d brought a box of twenty-five Montecristo No. 2s, opened it in London and smoked three cigars – just enough to create room for two peeled halves of a new potato – and resealed it firmly, tapping the nails back into place. The cigars would stay moist for our full three weeks, allowing my usual one a day. Twirling it between my fingers, I snipped the torpedo end, and gradually heated the tip, turning it slowly and regularly, until a red glow showed across the entire area, blew on it gently, then slightly more firmly. I took the first, the most highly anticipated, the perfect first draw, held it in my mouth, exhaled slowly, allowed the smoke to surround my face – indeed, stepped right into it – and took a deep breath. Richer than a glass of great claret: earth, cinnamon, cream, perhaps a hint of vanilla, also some chocolate, perhaps a homeopathic trace of manure. Even in the morning, when the smoke would have settled and infused the curtains – and as Suzy would remark (again) her clothes (I like it when it infuses mine) – it would still, in its lingering staleness, be one of the great smells of the world. And quite enough, just then, to get the filth out of my nostrils as effectively as the water had expunged it from my pores.

Joining Suzy on the veranda, I offered a glass of wine to her unresponsive hand. She looked out over the lake, unmoved, sucking at a cigarette. Why the smoke did not penetrate her clothing, while mine did, was one of the unexplained mysteries of our marriage. Her claim, which had no merit that I could detect, was that her Sullivan & Powell tipped cigarettes emitted only the mildest and least penetrative of odours. Unlike my Montecristos.

‘Never again,’ I said. I may actually have shuddered. I remember some involuntary movement, a full body tremor. ‘I’m happy to see the sights. I like our driver. But keep me off the streets. They utterly disgust me.’

She half turned, and took a long drink of the wine, lips pursed as if against excessive acidity, some crass grapefruity sauvignon perhaps. It wasn’t. Along with my box of cigars, I had imported an adequate supply of Meursault, which had travelled better than I had.

‘Tell me about disgusting,’ she murmured, not meeting my eye.

I came up behind her and put my arms around her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, ‘this is all my fault.’

‘I know,’ she murmured, ‘you’re doing your best. It was asking too much of you . . .’

I kissed her neck, which smelled of the market and humid air.

‘There’s still time before dinner,’ she said. ‘Let me have a quick shower.’

She ‘felt at home’ in India, she said, though this was our first trip together. She’d been determined to save me the discomforts of such a visit, but eventually I had insisted: if she felt that India was (in some idiotic way) ‘her spiritual home’, then the least I could do, before we both dropped off the perch like dead parrots, was to accompany her there.

She would happily have abjured the palaces and luxury hotels with which India is now so amply provided, and stayed instead in simple hostelries, or – more desirable yet – with ‘real Indian families’, as she had on previous visits with various friends. (I don’t know what ‘unreal’ Indian families would have been. Except, of course, for her own.)

Her parents Henry and Sophia – latterly Sir and Lady – lived in a Georgian rectory in Dorset, which they purchased in their late-thirties with money gouged out of the City. They proceeded to reinvent themselves as stereotypes, took up country pursuits with the idiotic enthusiasm only urban refugees can generate. They hunted (fox), fished, went on bracing walks in wellies, planted a kitchen garden, were active in the local church, and provided occasional jobs for a number of locals, whom they, not entirely discreetly, called yokels. Their only deviation from the county norms was in their choice of governesses for the children, Suzy and her older brother Rupert. Not for them the sulky and hormonally hyperactive au pair – ‘trouble on wheels, my dear’ – nor indeed, did they look for the sort of nanny self-advertised in The Lady. No, they wanted only Indian women, of mature age, to look after their children. They wanted an ayah, and indeed a succession of them were called just, and only, that. The local gentry sneered, but Sir Henry was triumphantly unrepentant: ‘It’s what they would have done, if they’d thought of it first. Too late now.’

And so Suzy grew up, in their Dorset idyll, a foster child of Empire. Sir Henry encouraged Ayah to read Indian stories, sing Indian songs, draw pictures of tigers, elephants, and parrots, make Indian sweets, and otherwise indicate to the children that there was something other – if not something more – than the long tedious days of West Country life. He could hardly wait to catch the 6.50 train from Dorchester to London every Monday morning and spending the week at his set in Albany. He had some grand times there, and Sophia left him to it. It was rather a relief, she said.

On the raised dais, slumped next to the couple as they exchanged rings, was their dog Bruno, an ungainly slobbering half-breed, tarry black, bleakly unappealing, intermittently dangerous. He’d twice bitten their postman, and their mail now had to be picked up at the local post office. The ring had been attached to a string around his neck, and the wedding celebrant, who to my surprise wore neither beard nor sandals, had some difficulty getting it off the beast’s neck, and into the hands of the increasingly anxious groom.

Further noxious blather ensued. Suzy’s crimson parrots seemed to mock and threaten me, as her hand released the firmness of its grip, and became still, coolly resting in mine. When the groom, finally, kissed the bride, with more enthusiasm than I thought seemly, the pleasure on Lucy’s face soothed me. Next to me Suzy wiped her tears. Our daughter was married.

I presume it should be a happy memory, but its edges are frayed and foxed by sadness. Happiness is fragile at the very moment of pleasure-taking, so easily defeated by a toothache or an itinerant virus. And past happiness? That lovely weekend at Lake Garda? The week that Suzy’s first novel came out? Delicate, easily bruised, soon rotten, evanescent. Do we lie on our deathbeds remembering such nonsense? Who cares? Who cared?

I was undelighted by Lucy’s choices and prospects, though I am unsure, as things developed and she entered fully into her life as wife and mother, whether I was right to worry so. And now worry seems a pallid, almost desirable state of mind compared to my daily dose of helplessness, desperation and withdrawal. Oh, to have some worries! School fees. Recalcitrant teenagers. Marital disharmony. Any of the above, please. All of the above. Anything, rather than this.

When Lucy was three, I recall her slight and wispy in a favourite cotton dress, white with tiny pink hearts perhaps – I can’t remember – but in the story I am constructing she looks dreamy in it, worn unfashionably long for one so tiny, floaty and ethereal as an angel. She would walk alongside as we went to the local shops, reach up on tiptoes and, if I leant down, put her hand in mine. We weren’t holding hands, hers was too slight to grasp mine, yet, but I would enfold her tiny fingers in my palm, and squeeze them as gently as if I were testing a downy apricot in the supermarket, anxious to avoid bruising.

I found myself whistling quietly as the song drifted through my head: Johnny Mathis’s ‘Misty’, a sentimental ballad that I had always scorned, though when I was sixteen my first girlfriend found it moving, though not moving enough. I get misty, just holding your hand. The metaphor felt surprisingly appropriate, for such a rotten song. Love fills every available space, soaks, suffuses and diffuses like a sea mist filling a room. Distances recede, all you can see is what is in front of your face. It makes you feel soggy. Nothing is better than love.

It was striking, only a year or so later, when Lucy had gained a couple of inches and no longer had to tiptoe, nor I to lean, that we could walk hand in hand, she giving me an answering squeeze, as firm as she could. We were both aware, I felt, of some new dimension to our relations, something grown up, reciprocal but diminished. I had stopped singing ‘Misty’ by then – you had to lean down to feel that way.

Her childhood reappears, now, only in cloudy vignettes that I rather suspect I have invented, or at least elaborated considerably. I suppose it doesn’t matter. We reconvene what time allows, and the arc of our stories is drawn from the few incidents that we recall, or make up. Most of my memories of her as a tiny girl are set in the summer. In the winter she was a demon, felt the cold terribly, shivered and sniffled, and resolutely refused to wear warm clothing when she went out. One Christmas Suzy bought her a chic olive green duffel coat with wooden toggles, which Lucy loathed from the very moment it emerged from its wrapping paper and refused to wear.

‘No buttons!’ she would howl. ‘No! No! No buttons!’

I was inclined to struggle and to confront, hold her steady and force her arms into the sleeves, to insist on doing up the dreaded toggles.

‘Not buttons!’ I said, trying to keep calm. ‘Toggles! Toggles good, buttons bad!’ I pushed her little arms firmly into the sleeves and commenced toggling her up. If she cried, too bad. Children have to be taught to stop crying. ‘Do hold still! How are you going to keep warm without a coat?’

‘Don’t you say that to me! No buttons!’

What was so objectionable about buttons was unclear. She hated them on a blouse, on pyjamas, on a coat. We eventually capitulated, for Lucy was amenable to zippers, which she liked to play with, and (particularly) to Velcro.

‘Velcro! For fuck’s sake. I have a daughter who loves Velcro . . . Kill me,’ said Suzy, initiating a lifetime’s disappointment with her daughter’s tastes. She even disapproved of Lucy’s Laura Ashley phase: ‘all those cutesified anodyne patterns, the awful pastel colours, the sheer drab mediocrity of it. She’s Welsh, you know.’

‘Who is?’

‘Laura Ashley. All you need to know.’

Call me a damn fool, but I loved it, at least on Lucy. Her mother would have looked soppy swanning about in all those flowery garments, but on a three-year-old they looked peachy.

I want to remember Lucy’s dress as it was, that summerised day walking to the newsagent’s. I scrunch my eyes up to replay it, to see us walking so slowly and happily up the street, hand in hand. Some sort of little girly dress, wispy and delicious. I can make one up if I want to. I try a variety of colours and patterns, of the kind that she loved. Pink? For sure. Polka dots against a cream background? Or perhaps white? I try them on her. She looks – we’re in the present tense all of a sudden – she looks gorgeous in it – cream is better! So delighted and free, aware of herself.

That was the past, then: not immutable, oddly biddable, malleable. There was no one to object, and it no longer mattered. The past is something we make and remake, remember or disremember – same thing, almost. You can polka-dot it, change times and seasons, rewrite the dialogue, rearrange the cast of characters. There is no dissembling in this. Most is lost, the vast percentage of what we have been. This is what it is to be a person, and it gets worse as you get older.

‘Worse?’ Not that, not quite. As we age, our stories are reduced until the constituent flavours are enhanced and concentrated. And sometimes, as in this story of little Lucy, too great a concentration gives not pleasure but something closer to pain, as a reduction of the essence of sensual pleasure, say, would produce something unendurable. As my recollection of my little daughter causes me to smile and to wince.

I am reduced to this. I live in reduced circumstances, left with the unendurable intensity of wormwood and gall (whatever they are), with fading hints of honey. There is something both inevitable in this, as we move towards the final telling of our final stories, the last version of ourselves, and something moving.

This journal? A coming-of-old-age book, dispirited, hopelessly knowing. For what happens, faced squarely, is loss. Loss of what we have been, loss of the history of our dear loved ones, loss of the incidents and narratives that have defined us.

I cannot locate much by way of gain in this process, save that most of what I have forgotten wasn’t worth remembering. Good riddance really, like clearing the attics before the house is sold.

So what? I can’t even remember the plot of the novel I read last week. Or its title. I struggle sometimes to remember what the names of common objects are, I keep losing things. A fork, a sofa, the Prime Minister. I am still a master of adjectives and verbs, and pretty damn good at summoning adverbs, but I am losing my nouns at an alarming rate.

I would worry about early onset Alzheimer’s, only I’m not young enough for it. But you can get away with a lot when there is no one to talk to but yourself, and you know you are ‘misty-fying’, like one of those fade-out images in a film, but you are watching it by yourself, and can turn your head at the scary bits, whine a little and put your paws over your eyes.

How do I remember myself? Or Lucy? Or Suzy? Why should I?

I cannot bear dogs, they disgust me. Why would a civilised person welcome such a creature into an otherwise orderly home? No matter how cunningly disguised by fluff and fealty, all I see is a shameless slobbering arse-sniffing leg-humping scrotum-toting arsehole-flaunting filth-spreader: as profligate a shitslinger as Kahlil Gibran, only closer to the ground. If I presented myself like that I’d be hauled away, no matter how much I licked your face or howled on your grave. No dogs in heaven.

I particularly detest my neighbour’s dog, whose hideous noises are sufficient to awaken the dead, or at least the dying. I gather it is called Spike, and it looks the part, with a face composed of overlapping layers of fat mysteriously transformed into muscle. Hard blubber, hideously prophylactic: not even his proud owner could have stroked that face tenderly.

I don’t know what sort he is. Are they called breeds? I can’t tell one from another. I’m not even very good with people. When I taught, I would make up a class physical appearance list on the first day, correlating physical characteristics to names in my desk diary. It was ever so helpful, and within a couple of weeks I wouldn’t need it any more. But for the first days, it gave me a sense of intimacy with my new charges that I could recognise them so easily, as long as I could take a peek at my list and their faces.

One day, leaving the teaching room with a surprisingly pressing need for the loo, I left my (closed) diary on my desk, rather than putting it in the top drawer as usual. On my return, five minutes later, Fatboy Linus was crying at the back of the room, Cross-eyed Charley had exacerbated his disability so radically that he can have seen nothing but his own nose, and Acne Andy – I was told – had run out of the room, scratching himself madly. I didn’t see him again for a week.

The next morning I received a brusque note from the Head:

Dear Darke,

I have had one or two parents on the phone, regarding an unfortunate incident in your classroom. Could we have a word about this? I will be free between 4.15 and 4.40.

Best,

Anthony

He was a pacific fellow, liked but mildly mocked by his staff, and he hated confrontation. The very word ‘parent’ made him anxious, and if you attached ‘concerned’, or even worse, ‘irate’, he reached for the Panadol and drew the curtains.

I entered his study at 4.15 on the dot, to find him pacing in front of the fire. His room was over-heated, as if some objective correlative of his state of mind, and he had never been known to open the window. He smoked a pipe of some noxious Balkan mixture (not Sobranie) to add to the fug. It was hard to see, and harder yet to breathe. The idea, I presume, was to make the place uncongenial to visitors, while he himself was inured to it, smoked as a kipper.

‘See here, James, we have something of a to-do about some damn book of yours . . .’

‘Book, Tony, what book?’ I called him ‘Tony’ when I wanted to irritate him, for he much preferred ‘Anthony’ or, better yet, ‘Headmaster’.

‘Apparently you have a book that you use to write insults about the boys, and you left it for them to see. I must say – ’

‘You are referring, I presume, to my desk diary, and to the unpleasant incident in which the boys opened it in my absence?’

‘And uncovered the most appalling descriptions of themselves! I have two sets of parents threatening not merely to remove their boys, but to sue for damages. For trauma, humiliation in front of their peers. It’s just dreadful.’ He pulled at one of the few strands of what was left of his hair, which resides largely on the lower left side of his bald pate, somewhat further down than anatomically plausible.

‘Guilty, Tony. And innocent.’

‘How is that?’

‘I do keep such a diary, and at the start of term it helps me to remember which new boy is which. To do this, you fasten on the single defining characteristic: curly hair, very tall, that sort of thing.’

He looked down at some notes jotted on a pad next to his telephone: ‘Acne, cross-eyed . . .’

‘Very defining characteristics, wouldn’t you say? I learned their names in only one lesson. Most of them I still can’t remember. I’m always grateful for ugliness, or better yet disfigurement.’

He was sufficiently agitated that he could not be further provoked. ‘But what,’ he asked plaintively, ‘am I to say to the parents?’

‘Tell them the truth. Tell them that one of the boys, wholly without permission and entirely dishonestly, contravening every law of privacy and good behaviour, opened my diary, and – what is worse – read the contents to his fellows. I have some idea of who that was, and I suggest that he be expelled, and that the angry parents assault him with sticks and rocks.’

‘I really don’t think your levity appropriate here.’

I have no time for the schoolmaster’s pastoral role, which most use as a way of cosying up to the gentry and currying advance favour with the soon-to-be celebrated, rich and powerful. I will not do this. ‘I’m a teacher, not a damn curate.’ In spite of my insouciance, I never managed to say ‘fucking’ to the Head. ‘Let them move on to pastors new.’

The headmaster winced. ‘Must you, James?’

I was dismissed. Not from my position, but from the study. The Head would no more fire me than rusticate the culprit. I’d have respected him more if he’d done both. But, as often happens in schools, the matter blazed merrily for a few days, and then was forgotten, though attendance in my class diminished somewhat.

Only a couple of years later, to the not entirely secret pleasure of his staff, he died of a cerebral haemorrhage, rather than the emphysema he had courted so assiduously. He should have drowned in his own Latakia-infested sputum, lungs burbling like a hookah. Instead, he was found slumped over his desk, looking rather peaceful (according to the school secretary, who found him), that smirk of wimpish sanctimony wiped finally from his features. Lucky bastard.

Spikedog, sadly, was more reliable in his attendance than my former pupils, and I don’t need any mnemonics to remember him. He had a thick black collar with fearsome nails sticking out, which, had he aimed properly and generated the right momentum, might have crucified a toddler. I didn’t know his owner’s name. Spike too, probably. Ugly enough, though without the muscles, but equally dangerous. He bore more than a passing resemblance to his brutal pet, and if he lacked the neck-nails, he had various bits of steel protruding from his ears, nose and lips. I suspect many other bits of him were also highly metallic. God knows how they got him through security at airports. Though proud of his doggie – he tended to simper at the mutt – he never did anything as normal or desirable as taking him for a walk. Instead, every evening he would let the dog loose in the garden for a crap, and leave him there for an hour or so, while he retreated to his flat to receive his conjugals from his visiting girlfriend. I never heard her name. She was a Gothic, dark, black-clothed, steely, pale, skinny, silent, miserable.

Spikedog hated being excluded from the fun, and would first yap, then whine, and finally howl at the back door, demanding to be let in. He never was, and he never learned. He knew enough to do his business on what passed for a lawn – a bit of uncut scrubby grass – before returning to demand readmittance. Every now and again Spikeman would open the bedroom window, which overlooked the garden, and shout ‘Shut the fuck up!’ First asked to stifle the mutt, then begged, then severely admonished by neighbours leaning out of the windows of the adjoining flats, he soon said the same to them.

Considered as an exile, it might have been possible to see something representative in Spikedog’s abject misery. Had he merely whimpered, I might have pitied him, felt some fellow creaturely feeling. But he had no restraint, no consideration for the feelings of others, sunk in his howling canine narcissism. I could do that too, I recognised in him a shadow self, mon semblable, mon doggy frère. But I am not a brute, I howl not, though I’ve been known to whimper.

From my first-floor window I had a perfect view of the scene. By the end of the week the garden would be replete with piles of dog shit, until at the weekend a resentful crop-headed teenager – a gristly leftover on the plate of divorce – would appear with a handful of plastic bags to clean up the mess. The first time he was required to do this, he vomited copiously, and was ordered to clean that up as well, which is less easy. He didn’t do that again.

There is no use arguing with such a dog, or such an owner – both more anxious to bite than to placate. No, to influence the behaviour of such animals, you have to attack before they do, get in the first blow. But I am a pacific fellow by nature, most distinctly unmartial. When I was ten, the class bully punched me on the nose, I daresay not very powerfully, but I recurrently find myself feeling it to make sure it isn’t bent out of shape.

But what I lack in courage I more than make up for in cunning. If the dratted hound would not shut up, I needed him to develop a fear of the garden, to associate it so thoroughly with pain that he would refuse – whatever the punishment – ever to go there again.

In my next Waitrose order I included three bottles of tabasco sauce, and a pound of Aberdeen Angus aged fillet steak, an extravagance I justified on the grounds that its tenderness might make it sop up more of its lethal marinade. On its arrival, I cut a piece an inch and a half square (saving the rest for a celebratory dinner), pierced it with a knife and hollowed out the centre, which I filled with half of the bottle of sauce. The tabasco had a pungent aroma that teased the nostrils, and would have brought tears to the eye if I’d got too close. But I never cry. I do not approve of it. Once you start, it would be impossible to know when, or how, to finish. I have observed this in infants and women. There is nothing agreeable about the process, which is largely used to wound or to manipulate.

That evening I waited until Spikedog ascended to his highest pitch of declamatory desolation, so that he would associate that noisome activity with the punishment to come, and tossed the meat into the garden next door, hoping he wouldn’t be put off by the smell. The dog saw it land, not so many feet away from him – I was rather proud of my aim, it’s not that easy from a half-opened window – and sniffed it expectantly. As I had hoped, he ate the piece in one slobbery bite, leaving no trace of my malign intervention in his life.

A few moments of blessed quiet followed, as he stood stock still and interrogated the new sensation burning his mouth. He whined a little, but exhibited no signs of the extreme distress I had anticipated. The tabasco did quieten him for a few moments, during which he paced the garden, returned to the patch where the steak had landed, and sniffed it with what seemed – could this be possible? – a sort of longing.

He wanted more. When I repeated the trick the next day, he couldn’t eat the meat fast enough, and the following day I could swear that his howling was directed not at his copulating owner, but at my window, demanding some hot stuff of his own.

I’d made a friend.

We oldies are almost without exception narcissists and bores, until the blessed lapse into silence in the corner armchair in the old folks’ home, unvisited by relatives and ignored by staff. If you asked the elderly what they really want to talk about – after all of the stuff about the weather, what’s been on telly, how rotten the food is, and by the way how are the grandchildren? – what were their names? – most pressingly what the old want to talk about is the state of their bowels. Dutiful daughters will listen sympathetically, but not for long; their husbands will find a reason, screaming silently and metaphorically plugging their ears, to get a coffee, talk on the mobile, or even visit the WC, which is a bit hostile really.

The sad irony is that, if a human (like a Spikedog) is a machine for producing shit, it is not a reliable long-term mechanism for expelling it. I’ve gone three days without a visit this week, which is my normal pattern. Eaten the statutory fruits and vegetables, ingested my revolting mixed seeds, like a parakeet, for my breakfast. Indulged my favourite ritual, more delicious than efficacious: the making of the morning coffee.

One of my little treats, a few years back, was the purchase (almost £5,000, I didn’t let Suzy know) of a restaurant quality – and size – Gaggia espresso-maker. And, also essential if I was going to get the best out of my new machine, a Super Caimano burr grinder. Coffee beans arrive once a month, made to my own recipe (two thirds dark roast Ethiopian and one third Blue Mountain beans) by Higgins and Co. of Mayfair, labelled Special Dark Blend, which rather tickles me, though they always forget to add the final ‘e’ to my name.

Suzy did not begrudge me the foolish indulgence, and grew used to the diminished space, but what she couldn’t tolerate was the fuss. The grinding of the beans, just so, the full but delicate pressure as you put the coffee in the professional filter holder, the heating and frothing (by hand) of the milk – press the plunger one hundred and twenty times at a steady and regular pressure – the gentle stirring of the resulting liquid with a spoon, the slow and even pouring onto the one-third full cup of crema-rich espresso. The unhurried process is soothing, though the resulting coffee is anything but.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Suzy would say, ‘it’s like a religious ritual.’

‘Better. If Jesus had blood like this, I’d go to church.’

In the mornings Suzy drank hot water with a slice of lemon. I was so in love with her, I forgave her the sheer insipidity of this, for she was distinctly sipid in many other ways. During the day she would drink some herbal tea or other – boysenberry with extra digitalis – the kind of tasteless stuff imbibed by vegetarians, Buddhists, neurasthenics, homeopaths, organic food faddists, faith healers and members of the Green Party. Stupid tea for stupid people.

And this is the worst part: her bowels were as reliable as a clock. Hot water with lemon, piece of sourdough toast with her home-made Seville orange marmalade, off to the loo. And I would drink my double-shot flat white (the only great invention to issue from the southern hemisphere), eat my seeds, and continue to swell inwardly, discomforted and discomfited, morose.

The poor old body can hardly keep running. Sooner or later there will be a Tube strike: the tunnels get blocked and the trains can hardly get through. And when they do, they’re more and more likely to have suicide bombers within: tumours, viruses, bacterial infections of every sort, so intent on mayhem that they willingly kill themselves too.

It’s not just the bowel that is a reluctant worker. Arteries fur up, the large intestine grows polyps and muddy protuberances, the throat will not disgorge, the nose ceases to release its blockages. Even my penis, such a reliable ejaculator for so many decades – I once got sperm in my eye – can hardly be bothered to release its pitiful discharge. Having indulged myself with a very occasional wank – Think! Reminisce! Fantasise! Pray for Rain! – I am aware of having come, however mildly, only to notice that the tip of my penis bears no sign of the release of the (previously) essential body fluid. If I give it a post-orgasmic squeeze, upwards and firm, sure enough a little trickle of semen will appear at the tip, hardly enough to wipe off with my finger.

I can accept that. It’s in the natural course of things. Ejaculations are for the young and pious. But I can’t even piss any more. Unless I constantly top myself up with water, making sure my kidneys have something to work with, charged like a tank of petrol, all I can release, however urgent the imperative, is a series of effortful dribbles.

It’s not just my pants and trousers that I stain. I bleed. I get blood on my socks, the cuffs of my shirt, my pants, the insides of my trousers. My face bleeds, and I put tiny swathes of tissues to mop and staunch it. It comes from my scratching. I bleed less but more frequently than a woman, and I scratch more often than a baboon. I have eczema on my psoriasis, my skin itches as if infested by insects. I scratch and scratch, apply ointments and then scratch in the wetness, humid furrows plough my skin, and when they dry, patches of red sores mature into tiny scab fields, which I pick, which then bleed, and itch.

But my scratching of my multiple itches is also recreational. The satisfaction of this has to be experienced to be credited. I moan, I prance, I gibber – though I am not entirely sure what gibbering entails.

My pants, my shirts, and most of all my sheets bear the brown – again! – residue of this frantic activity, and the stains are hard to shift. Though she was in charge of laundry matters, Suzy finally refused to clean up after me somatically: if I was going to ooze into the sheets and shirts, she said, I’d have to deal with the consequences myself.

I cannot send the sheets to the laundry, for they come back still stained. When the laundry lady returned the ironing and washing, I could feel her regarding me peculiarly. That bleeding man . . . No, I need to put stain remover onto the offended garment before putting it in the wash myself. I’ve never done this before. I’d say it was therapeutic, creating cleanliness where there was dirt and disorder, but it’s not. It’s just another choreful humiliation.

It’s enough to break your heart, life. It breaks it, the sheer ghastliness of decline, best not to speak of it, as women do not tell expectant first-time mothers of the pains of child-birth. What’s the point? Which brings me back to Mr Eliot, doesn’t it? Youth, fleshiness, emptiness, loss. Waste:

Electric summons of the busy bell

Brings brisk Amanda to destroy the spell . . .

Leaving the bubbling beverage to cool,

Fresca slips softly to the needful stool . . .

Needful? Shit will out. Consider Spikedog, who was once handsome and tall as you.

I’ll be damned. Is there a book lurking in this? The Needful Stool: Sitting at the Feet of the Master.

I had begun our first session for this select group of boys – before they sailed through their A levels and Scholarship exams – begun by making a plea. I enjoined them like a vicar intent on saving souls, only employing an unpriestly lightness of touch (I hope) and mild irony designed to penetrate the carapace of their cynicism, begged them as we read our literary texts, only to listen. To wrench open – it takes an effort of will – the portcullis to their teenage hearts for just a couple of hours once a week, to humbly admit another, and better – a Yeats or Shakespeare, a Crazy Jane or Hamlet – and to welcome them, to allow for those tiny spots of time some vibration in the jelly of being, that makes, once it has settled, a subtle new mould.

Boys are not unregenerate monsters of solipsism. There is hope for them – some of them at least. I could sense at first some interest, then a sort of attention, however grudging. I am not sure, recovering this now, whether they were listening because they were moved by my ideas, or because I was. Why would someone feel so passionately about books, and the act of reading?

Otherwise, I would observe tartly (a number of them rather resented this), you are merely going to become a product of your family, the few friends you might make and the few lovers you may garner – a product of a good London address or of an estate in the West Country, nothing more than a function of your upbringing – a type. Whereas, if you will only read, and listen, you will admit a multiplicity of voices and points of view, consider them with some humility, allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound, then you will grow and change, and each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being.

It is literature and only literature that can do this. The Church can’t help us, not any more. (I got a visit from our rather aggrieved chaplain the first time I said this, when one of the boys snitched on me.) But good reading of good literature, I insisted, both to him and to my boys, interprets life for us, sustains and consoles us.

Whatever even the most cynical of those boys might have felt, none could deny that I said so with a full heart. I might have appeared a zealot, a wanker even – I rather hope not, even all these decades later – but I was not being teacherly, this was not by rote, it was sufficiently real to be embarrassing, rightly, to many of them, and year after year, to myself.

We met once a week, my chosen group of boys, slouching to Oxbridge to be born. I gave them their head, which was dangerous, for a couple of them loved showing off their literary wiles, trying to amuse and to subvert. But any form of engagement, I counselled myself – and them – is better than sitting there looking bored.

‘Next week, choose one of Yeats’s poems,’ I suggested, ‘and then read it aloud, and we can discuss it.’

The first couple of boys, biddable and unimaginative, wanting to please by a demonstration of sensibility, came up with the usual suspects, and I made the usual responses:

‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’? Boring! Sentimental. Stupid. Sounds like a yokel.

‘The Second Coming’? There was some sniggering from the rough beasts, which I expected, and ignored.

Which led us to Golde, who had been lying in wait with ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’, which he read ponderously, until he got to the final lines, which he smothered in lascivious relish.

I met the Bishop on the road

And much said he and I . . .

‘A woman can be proud and stiff

When on love intent;

But Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement;

For nothing can be sole or whole

That has not been rent.’

There was a silence that I would hesitate to call pregnant.

‘Please, sir,’ he said, ‘I find this very intriguing, but I’m not sure I understand entirely. Could you guide us through it?’ The class closed ranks in quiet expectation and for a moment I had their full attention.

‘What exactly is the nature of your problem, Golde?’

‘Well, sir, I’m not sure whose problem it is. It might be that Jane is just crazy, like it says, and bishops are only bishops, aren’t they? But perhaps Yeats was a little confused about such matters? Wasn’t there a bit of a problem with that woman he fancied?’

‘Maud Gonne.’

‘Ah, sir: Maud today, and Gonne tomorrow. It’s no wonder she ran a mile if he told her he wanted her in the – ’ He pretended to consult the poem. ‘Oh yes, sir, “the place of excrement”.’

‘Wanted? I see no mention of desire.’

‘What do you see, sir?’

‘I see a reference – perhaps you might think about this – to pitching a mansion.’

He was ready and waiting. ‘Oh I have thought and thought, sir. It seems a very uncongenial place to build a house.’

There was a mass guffaw, which I allowed to peak and settle down.

He wasn’t finished. ‘After all, sir, there’s plenty of arseholes in mansions, but there can’t be many mansions in – ’

By this time I had joined in the laughter. For a schoolboy, it was a masterful act of deconstruction, and his comic timing could hardly have been improved.

‘I must admit, Golde,’ I said, ‘that I’ve always had my doubts about that line. There seems something unparsable about it, something personal perhaps. But I agree with you – ’

‘In what way, sir?’

‘It’s crap.’

He looked proud, but humble.

‘But Golde, perhaps you and Jane have something in common?’

‘Are we both crazy, sir?’

‘No, you are both fools. But she is a wise fool, like the one we studied in King Lear, if your memory stretches back to last term. Whereas you are just as foolish, and not at all wise.’

‘Tell me why she is wise, sir, and I am not.’

‘Because she is trying, in her way, to assimilate the tragedy of getting old, and inhabiting a body that was once luxuriant and is now decaying. Whereas you are just being a smart arse.’

It was a bit unfair. He’d done very well, and the exchange had left me with an increased respect for him, and a diminished admiration for Yeats. Funny old Willie.

Respect for Golde was rare, and unlikely to abide. He was physically unprepossessing – small, weak, whey-faced, curdled as a bowl of yoghurt left in the sun – and his fellows tend to turn on such creatures with a ferocity that makes you think William Golding underplayed his account. But my description makes him appear insignificant, whereas Golde was as memorably repellent as Tolkien’s Gollum, given over to obsessional nocturnal habits, stroking his Precious, fingering and fondling his ring. You could imagine him trailing a spool of viscous liquid behind him, like a snail.

It was reprehensibly easy to turn against such a boy, who was universally despised, teased and diminished. If there had been keystrokes to do it, the boys would have reformatted his disc. I ought not to have colluded in this, but the temptation was irresistible. I consoled myself that, like many boys who are relentlessly bullied, the poor chap found an identity in his victimhood: being the butt of jokes and worse was presumably better than not being noticed at all.

I carried on with my evangelical enterprise for years, too many years, indulged the recurrent Goldes, allowing Crazy Jane her yearly pilgrimage into instructive madness. The premise was clear, obvious, and unchallenged by man or boy: reading exposes us to the experiences and minds of others, makes us challenge our own provinciality, deepens and widens who we are and what we can become.

It was an inspiring notion, and I tried to live by it, and to teach my boys to do so as well.

Unfortunately it was wrong.

I cannot go on, like this. I cannot go on. Passing the dying days. Remembering, thinking, justifying. Assembling bits of stories, making stupid jokes – logical, scatological. For what? Nothing assuages the pain of being. Faced squarely, it unmans and unmasks; evaded, it undermines and casts a shadow.

Sitting in my study, thinking. I think, therefore I am not.

All you can truthfully say, anyway, is that thinking is going on. But who is doing it? I’m the last person to say, or to know. Silly old fool, gorged on the saturated fatheads of philosophy, putting Descartes before des horse.

Thinking is the opposite of being. And it is so boring. Thoughts are the dullest things, they leave a funny taste in the mouth.

It is impossible to say just what I mean. There is nothing to be done. I shall do nothing. Nothing will come of nothing, it lies coiled in the heart of being – like a worm. Nothing is what I am used to, what I have, what I choose.

Nothing is better than love.

Do not go gentle into that good night . . .

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dark, doubly dark.

The boys did not understand this. Understandably. Everyone gets this wrong. This is not a poem about death, though that blubbery piss-artist’s father is old now. That’s a metaphor, and this is literal – his father is going blind. That’s worse. Bang! God curses him with blindness, but he is going to die soon anyway.

When I imagine being blind, a groan involuntarily escapes me and I shudder. Not figuratively. I am a claustrophobe, the sort who begins to claw at the door if the Tube gets stuck – pauses even – in a tunnel for more than fifteen seconds. In a foolish desire to see if I could train myself into slowly increasing tolerances of discomfort, I once asked Suzy to lock me in a darkened closet, and to stand outside and count to twenty, loudly. By the time she reached seven I was banging desperately on the door. She knew better than to tease me, even for the extra thirteen seconds. When I emerged, I had somehow managed to cover myself in sweat.

I cannot bear movies or novels in which someone is buried alive, perhaps by a sadistic kidnapper who entombs his prey underground in a coffin, with only a tiny duct of air to breathe. Or perhaps she – it’s always a she, isn’t it? – is locked in the boot of a car for hours, or days. Annihilated in the dark, helpless, stripped of air and movement and light. I wouldn’t rather be dead – I would be, soon. A heart attack perhaps? Or merely a fright paralysis so crippling as to stifle life. The triumph of the darkness.

He is the Prince of Darkness. Not Satan, who has been given rather a bad name in this respect. He is a man of integrity, the Devil: if he promises your bowels will boil, get ready to burble. What you see is what you get. Yet his is merely High Octane Badness. Evil is not so simple. To do evil you have sometimes to promise good, and willy-nilly keep your promise, but sometimes break it: build up expectations and satisfy them, or outrageously deflate that which was confidently expected. To be genuinely, heart-breakingly wicked, you have sometimes to do good, both satisfy and disappoint, and you have to ensure that your anxious subjects – your Abrahams and Jobs – can hardly tell what sort of being they are engaged with.

He is supposed to protect us.

The LORD shall preserve thee from all evil:

He shall preserve thy soul

Either He can’t, or He can but He won’t. Or perhaps the evil from which He is supposed to protect us is integral to His nature, unruly and ill-controlled? I need Him. He is the focus for my indignation, a bull’s-eye for the rage that our poor sad predicament – lonely, desperate and perilous – causes in me. I need someone to blame.

FUCK GOD

Fuck Him and His angels and archangels, fuck the Heavenly hosts and hostesses, fuck the saints and the sainted, fuck their priests, and most of all, and at long last, fuck the Virgin Mary.

My eyesight is deteriorating. Particles float across my field of vision, when I read, the print gets blurry and my head begins to ache, I get shooting pains in my eyeballs, and itching around my eye sockets. My glasses no longer clarify or magnify, and sometimes I abandon them and press the book close to my face, anxiously scanning the text until the pain gets too bad, and I put my book down, full of dread.

I summon my visiting optician, who arrives reluctantly, bemoaning the absence of his most treasured and necessary instruments, which are too large and too delicate to make home visits. We begin, like Vladimir and Estragon, with him moaning and me telling him to shut up. Then I moan, and he tells me to relax.

I call him Dr Karlovic, though I suspect he has no such qualification. But he has never corrected me, and the glint of pleasure when I proffer the D-word is presumably a sign not so much that he has hoodwinked me (his business card has no mention of a medical qualification or PhD), but because he takes it as a form of respect.

He changes my prescription, and next visit brings me my new glasses. They work. I should email him to say thanks. It’s a blessing to see clearly again.

Hand in hand, we walked round the corner to Khan’s, the local newsagent’s, which was one of Lucy’s favourite places. Better than the park, the swimming baths, or even the beach. From her earliest months she’d had a craving for sour things, and Mr Khan stocked a particularly mouth-puckering lemon super-sour ball, for which Lucy was, I suspect, his only customer. Not that she was allowed to buy one. Nor was I. As we entered the shop most days, in search of the newspaper and perhaps a magazine, he would open the large plastic jar of lemon sours that sat on the shelf behind him, and pick one out.

‘Goodness me,’ he would say, looking at the ceiling, where the fan was circling lazily, ‘I wonder if anyone likes these nasty sour things?’

‘I do! I want one!’

‘Now who could that be?’ he would enquire, for her head didn’t reach above the counter, and he would pretend to look around the shop to see who was talking. ‘There is nobody here, is there? Except you, Dr Darke. Good morning, sir!’

‘No, no! It’s me! I’m down here! I want one!’

Mr Khan loved this game, but Lucy had only a limited toleration for it, before her desire for the sweet became overwhelming and she would start to cry.

‘I’m down here!’

‘Where is that voice coming from?’

‘Me! Here! I want it!’

With practised timing, he looked down to spot her head, inclined backwards as she tried to look over the edge of the counter to catch his eye.

‘Oh,’ Mr Khan would say, ‘it is you, is it not?’

‘It’s me! It’s me!’

He would have gone on for another few minutes – he loved it – but the ritual ended here, with the transfer of the sweet. Lucy grabbed it and stuffed it into her mouth, her fingers already sticky with the white sugar covering.

‘Ooooh,’ she said, puckering and slurping, ‘it’s sourlicious!’

‘Shall I have it back?’

‘No! No! It’s mine!’

‘What do you say?’ I enquired from my news rack, unable to choose between the stodgy London Review of Books and the high-falutin’ New York Review of Books, neither of them likely to occasion a smile, much less any laughter. Perhaps I should buy Private Eye, and have a good sneer, but I cannot abide that sanctimonious midget, its editor.

I occasionally buy one of the literary magazines, prey to the stale fantasy that they represent a view of the world, of reading and writing, that can still move me. But they don’t. If I find even one article or review that amuses me, I feel blessed. Why is literature become so dull?

The magazines are curatorial. Run by curates, marching off to war: improve the unimproved, wash the unwashed, enlighten the heathens. Literature improves you. I believed that for God knows how long, ever since being brainwashed by Dr Leavis and his gang of Cambridge acolytes. The improved! Poor fucking Frank and his ghastly and appropriately named wife Queenie. I wonder if they thought of him as Kingie?

‘Thank you, Mr Khan!’ said my slurping girl, her face a rictus of received sourness, her attention now on a young African who had selected an ice lolly from the freezer, and was approaching the counter.

Lucy stared at him intently. ‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘why is that man so dirty?’

I think it is American cowboys – or perhaps Bugs Bunny? – who skedaddle, a word I’ve always fancied using, though actually doing it is not all that different from the (weaker) English locution ‘beat a hasty retreat’. You turn as fast as you can, passing the enemy (who glared not at tiny Lucy, but at her reprehensible father) and head for them thar hills.

As we made our way home, she sucking away industriously, I tried to explain. It’s not easy. To her innocent eye the poor African had looked distinctly odd, and other. ‘Darling,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid you hurt that poor man’s feelings.’

She looked up at me, bemused, sour-mouthed, puckered. We lived in a largely white, middle-class neighbourhood, and I’m not sure she’d ever noticed the few West Indians or Africans who occasionally drifted by.

‘You see, darling, the man is not dirty. He just has brown skin. You have white skin, he has brown. But both of you are people.’

She looked up at me quizzically.

‘You both have faces, and noses and eyes and arms and legs, don’t you?’

I expected some response, some acknowledgement that there was, if not a problem, at least a mystery to be explored. But she wasn’t interested.

‘You know Amarjit and Sanjay at the crèche? They have brown skin too. And you know they’re not dirty.’

She laughed. ‘That’s silly. They’re the same as me.’

‘Everybody is the same, but sometimes we just look different.’

Poor. And untrue – or true in a way that it would take her many years to assimilate. How to explain things to a three-year-old, who was now staring at me with the wide-eyed fixity of a barn owl?

‘I have a good idea,’ I said, in what was intended to be a breezy and assured tone, ‘let’s go back to Mr Khan’s. Shall we say we’re sorry?’

‘No.’

Relieved, I took her hand once again, and we walked home, quickly.

The new cleaner will come on Thursdays. I couriered the agency a key so that she could let herself in, and the first week I left detailed instructions on the kitchen table – not detailed enough, as it turned out, for she was curiously selective about which she chose to follow – telling her where the cleaning materials and Hoover were. On the first day she arrived, as promised, at nine in the morning and I heard the front door close as I sat upstairs in my study, with the door locked and a yellow Post-it sticker on its door (and the one across the hall), saying ‘Do not clean this room’.

For the first couple of hours she busied herself emptying the dishwasher, putting the clothes in the washing machine, and doing the ironing. I heard her hoovering the drawing-room and dining-room carpets. But what I also heard, sometime just before noon – she must have brought a wireless with her – was the sound of music, blaring, inane, peace-destroying. Pop music, accompanied by the grating voice of an adenoidal presenter whose every utterance required an exclamation mark.

I had every intention of hiding away. I had no desire to meet, only to evade her. I did not even, at this point, know her name. Or perhaps I had forgotten it. But she had been sent to try me and I rebelled. I unlocked the door and shouted down the stairs. ‘Will you turn off that bloody wireless!’

This may have been a bit loud, and sounded, well, demented, perhaps. I needed to be heard above the din of both Hoover and music, and perhaps I bellowed. It must have given her a considerable fright.

Both of the offending objects were soon silenced. She started up the stairs, determined to meet and presumably to pacify her new employer. Her footsteps sounded sturdy.

She soon appeared on the landing, flushed and unembarrassed, martial, facing the enemy. I must have frightened her, and I had spoken to her rudely. She had every right to be cross. I didn’t care.

‘I cannot abide loud music in my house. There is to be no wireless playing.’

‘I did not know. They say no one is here.’

‘Well, you know now.’

‘I return now to cleaning.’

Her face had the oval quality of the Slavs, without defining planes, with a pronounced forehead that did not suggest extra brains – a face that in repose looked vacuous, but animated when lit by feeling, as it was now, simmering with irritation. She was probably in her mid-forties, tall and slim, her bare arms wiry with sinewy muscle that ran from her shoulders down to her wrists. Some sort of athlete, perhaps, or a gym rat, or perhaps just designed that way. She turned to descend the stairs, with an oddly graceful whirl, as if she were about to throw a discus, and made a quickstep retreat. Her smock, vulgar but not unclean, swished around her waist, and her too-tight jeans, quite inappropriate for cleaning duties, showed off a bottom crisp as an apple as she descended.

Anxious to re-establish my supremacy, which had slipped alarmingly, I followed her downstairs into the drawing room, to be met by another horror. The curtains and windows had been opened wide. There was a soft breeze blowing, and outside the sun was shining as brightly as ever it can in this godforsaken country, the skies were pretty well unclouded, pretty much blue.

I’ve never been a great admirer of weather. It has no integrity, it teases and promises and disappoints. You can’t count on it in England, and in those places where you can, it’s even more irritating and oppressive. I have exiled weather, and the relief is palpable. Fuck it. I don’t much like natural light either. Give me 150 watts any day.

Which is to say I hate nature? Not at all. I couldn’t do without it. I just don’t want to be plunged into its unregulated midst. I commend my fish and my fowl, praise my beans, leaves and grapes, transformed by human ingenuity into a well-cooked Dover sole or roast pheasant, a demitasse of dark roast espresso, a Montecristo No. 2, a bottle of Bâtard-Montrachet or glass of Krug: nature still and sparkling, nature methodised.

‘Close those windows and draw the curtains please!’

‘But,’ she remonstrated, ‘is hot and dark. Not nice to work. And dusty. Bad smell. How you say – ?’

I can’t resist a word game. ‘Stuffy?’ I suggested.

She looked puzzled. ‘No.’

‘Yes! Stuffy! I love stuffy!’

She looked mildly alarmed. Was I propositioning her?

‘I clean some more now,’ she said firmly.

I went on a tour of inspection. The curtains in the kitchen, dining room and downstairs study were pulled back, the windows opened wide. The sunlight infiltrated my interiors alarmingly. I went round hastily, closing and drawing, re-establishing the gloom. You can’t study the darkness by flooding it with light.

She followed me, puzzled. ‘I am Bronya,’ she said. She did not offer her hand, thank God.

‘I am – ’

‘I know. Mr Dork.’

‘Darke,’ I said.

‘Yes, Mr Dork.’

When I’m not desperate, I’m bored.

I spend a lot of time in bed on the desperate days, and in my comfy armchair on the bored ones.

But I am not inflexible with regard to my emotional states and sites, and can make do in either place in either mood. But then I get bored being in bed, or desperate in the awful comfort of my chair.

Being bored makes me desperate, and being desperate is boring.

I am a double helix of human emotion, and its absence. Over-filled, then empty. Up, then down. Only without the up.

*

The pleasure of my daily rituals is that I have no one to share them with. I wake slowly, make my first cup of coffee and return to bed, read for an hour or so before showering and shaving. Though I have no one for whom to look good, I take care with my appearance, as I never feel whole unless I am dressed well. I am aware that this sounds foppish, or foolish, or perhaps just sad, but I wear a clean white shirt every day, and a casual cashmere jacket. My moleskin trousers are pressed, my shoes shined. My scruffy colleagues – most schoolteachers lose their self-respect quickly, and end up mooching about, whiffy and rumpled – teased me about my fastidiousness. I didn’t mind. I looked better than they did.

I feel imposed upon by the mere ringing of the doorbell, much less by the person that it may herald. And so I have – I thought rather cleverly – made Bronya’s regular Thursday hours (between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m.) the time at which my various deliveries appear. She can then receive and unpack whatever shows up. The Waitrose order comes in the morning delivery slot, and Bronya has been instructed never to accept substitutions. They once offered a jar of pickled Jewish cucumbers when I ordered cornichons!

She turns out to be competent in many ways, and I am delighted that her English is too rudimentary for sustained conversation, else she would no doubt impose her life history on me. I pretend to be very hard of hearing, though I slip up too often. She has proved biddable in all respects save her insistence that the curtains be opened while she works downstairs, and having admonished her about this, her innate intractability set in and she threatened to quit.

‘Is not healthy. I rather work someplace else.’

You have to pick your issues with Bulgarians, and had she resigned, who knows, I might have done much worse. A surly Latvian perhaps, or a talkative Pole. After all, I could stay upstairs – as she was quick to point out – while she worked downstairs. And when she came up to do my bedroom, bathroom and study, I could retreat to the drawing room and close the curtains.

This small domestic tiff having been settled, we are consequently getting on adequately: she knows how to programme the dishwasher, do the week’s washing and ironing, and (which took some time) learned where everything goes: wine glasses here, dinner plates there, silver – not to be put in the dishwasher! – in the drawer in the sideboard, sauces on this shelf, seeds on that, pickles and chutneys on the second shelf at the rear of the fridge. I like things in their places. I am by nature what I call orderly and Suzy deemed obsessional.

I’d come into the kitchen to make a second cup of coffee, though Bronya had offered to make one and bring it up to me. I interrupted her search for the Nescafé (!) and said I would do it myself. She’d seen Gaggias in cafés, but was astonished that a private person could own one, and watched me carefully as I made my cup.

‘Smells good!’

She peered into the cup, her face intrusively close enough to attempt a quick slurp of the contents. I pulled it away, rattling the saucer. It would have spilled, but a double espresso only fills half the cup.

Bronya pointed to the contents. ‘What is that?’

‘What is what?’

She pointed again. I was for a moment alarmed that she might be about to dip her finger in.

‘Oh, that. It’s called crema.’

‘Is cream?’

‘No, is oil from coffee bean. Is very delicious.’

Why is it that, faced with a person with limited English, we end up talking in this pidgin variety, rather than setting a good but simple example of right usage?

‘You make like this – ’ She searched for the right word.

‘Purposely.’

She nodded. She was a quick study, and I suspect could have produced a passable cup if I had allowed her to try. I did not. I do better than passable, and I already resented the invasiveness of her desire to please, to know, and to participate. If I wasn’t careful, next thing I knew I would be making coffee for her, and then we would be having companionable lunches together. I needed her presence, but did not want it. Did not like the thought of her using even the downstairs WC, and had instructed the agency that she was to bring her own lunch.

I was making my way out of the kitchen – it was dangerous to linger – as Bronya began unpacking a bag of heirloom tomatoes, in their muted purples and greens, yellows and oranges.

‘What this?’ she asked, holding a large purplish one in her beefy hand, and thrusting it towards me aggressively, as if I had brought something dangerous into the room.

‘A tomato.’

‘Is not. I know tomato. Red.’ She looked at it again. ‘Is wrong. Gone off.’

I do not discuss vegetables with my cleaner.

‘Just put over there. On basket on table. Not in fridge!’

Lucy had a new best friend. This had already happened several times in her young life, for her feelings were both intense and shallow, like most children’s. Attached to a playmate, she was ferociously monogamous, but it rarely lasted. One year, propinquity bound her to a flaxen-haired waif called Jenny, who had joined the playgroup at the same time as Lucy. The two were as inseparable as five-year-olds can be, visited each other’s homes and begged to stay overnight, went to the park together in the afternoon and swimming at the weekends.

‘I love her so much,’ Lucy would enthuse, holding Jenny’s hand. ‘She’s my best!’

The next autumn Jenny was taken out of the group, because her mother could no longer afford it. Lacking its support, both mother and waif were desperate for Lucy to visit as before, or more than before. But Jenny was out of sight and nearly out of mind. Lucy had a new playmate called Gloria.

‘She’s my best!’ said Lucy.

At which point, clear that some response had to be made quickly, or Lucy would be forever lost to her daughter, Jenny’s mum – I never quite mastered her name, it seemed to come and go as frequently as she did, and on each of her reappearances I would have ask Suzy sotto voce what her name was – came up with a master-stroke and bought a puppy, a Shih Tzu called Milly, a bite-sized fluffball of vulgar gorgeousness, with a shaggy little face and an insatiable desire for company. It looked as if it had come straight from Hamley’s Cute as Fuck Dog Department.

Milly was wholly promiscuous, it even approached me skittishly on its sole visit to our house. I took an instant dislike to the creature, as tricky and licky as a schoolgirl on heat. I measured its stature, how far its stomach passed above the ground, and reckoned – the calculation was inexact, to be fair – that if I got my foot squarely under it, I could kick it at least three metres through the air.

‘How cute,’ I said, though even the besotted Lucy could sense my reservations.

‘She’s my best!’ she said happily.

The puppy ploy worked a treat, and Suzy was distinctly irritated by how easily manipulated her daughter was. ‘That bitch, she knew exactly what she was doing! Of course Lucy would fall in love with the mutt. Who wouldn’t? It’s like a paedophile offering sweets to kiddies, it ought to be illegal!’

Nothing to get heated up about, I counselled. Surely the dog was bought for Jenny, not Lucy? And why not? The little girl was now at home a lot, her best friend had abandoned her without a wave of farewell, and she needed a treat. It was quite the right thing to do.

‘Mummy,’ said Lucy, ‘I want to go to Jenny’s to see Milly. Please can I go? Please?’

‘But darling,’ said Suzy severely, ‘you don’t like Jenny any more, you said so.’

‘I don’t, she’s boring. But I LOVE Milly!’

It shouldn’t have mattered so much, but Suzy couldn’t reconcile herself to her daughter’s new obsession. Lucy visited Milly, dreamt of Milly, begged to go to Milly’s. One evening, as I read her a bedtime story, I noticed that she had a picture of Milly Blu-Tacked above her little desk.

She saw me looking over her shoulder. ‘Isn’t she dear!’ she said. ‘Do you want to see the pictures of her and me?’

‘Have you shown them to Mummy?’

‘I did,’ said Lucy. ‘But she doesn’t like Milly.’

‘Why is that?’

‘She says she’s too small. And she doesn’t like her name.’

‘Her name? What’s wrong with “Milly”?’

‘Not that name, silly. You know, her rude name.’ She giggled.

Lucy had quickly discovered a joke lurking there, which could cause a potent combination of merriment (hers) and irritation (her mother’s).

‘Don’t you just love her, Mummy?’ she’d say. ‘She’s a real Shih Tzu.’ A well-timed pause between the syllables of the dog’s breed, and you had: ‘She’s a real shit, Sue!’

Suzy found this mildly amusing the first time she heard it, but she was oddly prudish about our daughter’s language, and believed children ought not to swear, apparently forgetting that she’d been a foul-mouthed child herself. The fact that she swore constantly was an adult prerogative, which Lucy might look forward to. ‘That’s enough of that, young lady!’

‘A shit, Sue! Get it? Like a shit! And Sue! That’s funny, isn’t it?’

Later, I overheard her on the phone, apparently talking to the dog. ‘It’s me. It’s Lucy! I’m coming to see you soon. Did you miss me?’

She made some kissy sounds. ‘I do love you,’ she said, ‘I’ll see you soon.’ Before Jenny could regain control at her end of the call, Lucy hung up.

‘This has got to stop,’ Suzy said to me.

Only a week later it did. The sort of narcissist who thinks that everything that happens involves them would have felt responsible for the disaster. But neither Suzy nor I felt remotely answerable for Milly’s death, much though we had wished her to go away. Neither of us had warmed to the pooch, but it was quite impossible not to be moved by the tragedy.

Not Milly’s tragedy. There’s plenty of dead dogs out there, but I save my regrets for the demise of (a very few) members of my own species. No, this was Lucy’s drama, her first encounter with the death of anything more dear to her than a goldfish, and she – if I may be allowed an unfatherly thought – wallowed in her misery, indulged herself so utterly and so publicly that there was something luxuriant and performative in her grief. When she retreated to her room to be alone, for one reason or another, she fell silent.

She had no idea of death, of the brutal finality of it, the tearing physiological degeneration, the erosion of functioning, the inexorable return to dust. The unmitigated, unmanning awfulness of it. No, what Lucy – like all small children – reacted to was not death, but absence. She hated parting with something that she was used to, that she needed fiercely in her fickle way, and was shaken when it was taken from her. Her feelings were not grief, if that may be supposed (commonly but mistakenly) to involve feelings for the deceased. No, her feelings were for herself alone. She was outraged. Milly was hers, her best, and now she was not. There was something shockingly arbitrary about it.

‘It’s so unfair!’

She’d exhibited the same reaction when a redundant piece of furniture was taken from the house, to be replaced by something better, more beautiful and more useful: the kitchen sofa with its tatty brown William Morris loose cover full of holes, with springs beginning to worm their way through the seat, to one’s occasional acute discomfort. It had to go, and Suzy found something prettier, less dated and more comfortable to take its place.

On the day it arrived, the delivery men agreed, for a tenner, to take the old one away. They grabbed an arm on each side, and hoisted it up to be transported out the back door, through the garden, and into their lorry at the back of the lane. But they hadn’t reckoned on Lucy, who burst into tears, screaming ‘No! No!’ and clung first to the sofa, and when that became precarious, to the leg of one of the removal men.

Her outrage had two distinct and equally felt components. First, she was used to her sofa, she had grown up with it. It was part of her world, yet another best. But more profoundly and oddly, her feelings were actually for the thing in itself, as Kant put it. The poor sofa would be devastated to be taken away.

She was the last of the animists. At the supermarket she searched through the tinned vegetables to find those with dents in them, and made sure that Suzy purchased them – otherwise no one else would, ‘and they’d be sad’.

‘It’s so unfair!’ she howled.

I detached her from the man’s leg and held her in my arms, screaming, as the funeral procession of the sofa wended its way down the garden path. The gate opened, and it was gone.

Lucy stopped crying and sat on the new sofa, sucking the little rag of cloth that she carried with her at that age. She looked pensive, and settled down into the undoubtedly more comfortable new surroundings. ‘Can I watch Sesame Street?’ she asked.

Milly’s death, little as I regretted it, was both sudden and shocking. Most days, after school, Jenny and her mother, accompanied by their new mutt, went for a walk in the local park, a play on the swings, and a choc-ice at the café. An intelligent and biddable little creature, in no time Milly was let off the leash and able to sniff about at her leisure. She was far too gregarious, and needy, to wander very far, but liked making the acquaintance of the other dogs, large or small, young or old, male or female. And one day she chose the wrong dog.

You couldn’t have seen it coming, I gathered. The wrong ’un was not a Spikedog with a Spikeman, swaggering bundles of danger, from whom you needed to avert your eyes and move to safer ground. Onlookers later described it as medium-sized, with curly dishevelled brown hair. It was over in a moment. Milly approached her assailant in her usually friendly manner and, for whatever reason – perhaps she nipped it, or just pissed it off by being small and friendly – in an instant Milly’s head and shoulders were clutched between the dog’s jaws, being tossed about, both of them making frightful noises. Within a few seconds the Shih Tzu was thrown back onto the grass, broken and bleeding, howling, then silent.

I had no wish to imagine the ensuing drama, though it was hard not to. The problem was how to tell Lucy, in some suitably restrained, edited and untraumatising manner. Milly’d been attacked by another dog in the park. She was in the doggy hospital and was very poorly.

‘But Milly wouldn’t fight with anybody! Milly loves other dogs! Milly loves everybody!’

‘Maybe the other dog started it, I don’t know.’

‘Poor Milly! I want to go and see her!’

‘I’m afraid we can’t. She’s not allowed any visitors.’

‘But she’s going to come back soon, isn’t she?’

‘We’ll have to see.’

But there was nothing to be done. Sometime the next morning, Milly, on the vet’s unambiguous advice, was put out of her misery.

Lucy took the news badly. ‘Why didn’t the doctor fix her?’ she asked tearfully.

‘She was too poorly to fix, darling. She lived for a little while, but she was never going to get better, and was in a lot of pain. So they thought it kindest to put her to sleep.’

‘Sleep?’

‘She’s in Heaven now. That’ll be lovely for her, won’t it? With all the other doggie angels?’

There was a very long pause. ‘You mean they killed her?’

‘No, darling, I don’t. I mean they ended her suffering, because there was no way she was going to get better. That is a kind thing to do.’

‘But I need to see her again!’

‘I know, love.’ Suzy picked her up, resisting, for a wriggling desperate cuddle. ‘So do I.’

‘You don’t! You’re lying! You hated Milly!’

Anyone with sufficient emotional or narrative sense might have seen it coming. I am living alone by both choice and necessity, but in spite of my many talents for both self-indulgence and self-deception, I continue to need another voice, if only to project mine against, another visage, if only to register what I have to say.

In my enforced isolation is an accompanying solipsism: it is intermittently enjoyable, being the only person in the world, like God, free to torment the odd dog. But, not to put too fine a point on it, and I resist even writing these words, I was getting lonely.

I do not want the company of Bronya, but I have come, appallingly, to need it. A bit, perhaps a little bit. This is more than surprising to me, I feel abashed by it. Bronya? Like many Eastern Europeans, she is both blunt and insensitive to a degree that, to an English sensibility, is shocking and easily mistaken for crassness. I can be rude to her, dismissive, angry, domineering. Equally, her approaches to me are not so much tactless – which somehow suggests someone who, knowing what tact is, eschews it like a Yorkshireman – but utterly without consideration of how her words might sound to someone who isn’t similarly disabled by having come from Sofia.

Bronya is abrasive without knowing it. She has no sense of humour, is as capable of irony as an armadillo, takes everything literally. Lightness of touch? Not even with the dusters. I am surprised that the paintwork on the ceilings survives her attempts to clear the cobwebs. Should I point out these manifold truths, she would not know what I was talking about.

I feel invaded and bruised by her company, but she is all that I have. And, to be fair, she is also bright, hardworking, cheerful, inquisitive and anxious to learn. When she wormed out of me that I had been a teacher – of literature! – she wouldn’t let go of it. She was apparently well read in the classics of Bulgarian literature, and reeled off a list of -ovs and -ics, none of whom I had heard of.

‘I want to read books,’ she said, ‘improve English. Who is good writer?’

‘I’m frightfully sorry,’ I said, holding my hand to my ear, and making my voice louder. ‘Bad day for hearing. Not getting you at all.’

‘Want to read! You tell me books!’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, ‘you’re not getting through to me at all,’ and left her to my ironing.

Suzy had history with cleaners. She’d collected them over the years, bonding with one after another, though they frequently disappeared without notice or trace. You can’t count on cleaners. Not in London anyway. I think she was unconsciously nostalgic for country servants, like bleached ayahs, but instead all she got were unreliable refugees from old countries. She enquired of agency after agency for robust Indians or sturdy Bangladeshis – even Pakistanis at a pinch – but they were never on offer. Presumably most of them were employed by the NHS. They probably run the damn thing by now.