Читать книгу Commencing Our Descent - Suzannah Dunn, Suzannah Dunn - Страница 7

Yesterday I went to London again. There are friends who I should have planned to see; some of whom I have not seen for years. But arrangements would have required energy and forethought, neither of which I had. Philip is always encouraging me to do as I please; this time, I took him up on his suggestion. I went to London to see Edwin.

I had enjoyed the time spent with him on that train, last week, even though much of the conversation was far from fun, and the journey was hell. What I had enjoyed was his company. Time spent with friends these days, for me, is in anticipation of a return to my natural state of solitude.

I knew that the phone number that he had given me was his home number, he had told me that he was working from home for the months that he was on sabbatical.

Sabbatical: a lovely word. I would love to have a job whereby that word could apply to me.

I phoned him, said that I was going to be in London. ‘I thought that it might be nice to have that coffee.’

‘I can’t imagine anything nicer: a coffee is what we shall have.’

We settled on a time, which was lunchtime, twelve-thirty, before turning to the question of where. He started with, ‘Where would be convenient for you?’

‘Oh, anywhere fairly central.’

‘Well …’ he was thinking aloud, ‘… I’ll be in the library …’

‘The British Library? Bloomsbury it is, then.’

We agreed to meet on the library steps.

‘The only problem,’ he said, ‘is if there’s a bomb scare. The last time that there was a bomb scare, they locked us in.’

‘Out.’

‘No, in.’

‘Who did? The IRA?’

‘No, the library staff.’

‘The staff locked you in? they took the chance to see off Britain’s entire intelligentsia in one go? to retire early en masse to Marbella?’

He explained, ‘The bomb wasn’t in the library; the bomb was somewhere nearby. I suppose that whoever makes these decisions believed that we were safer inside the library than outside roaming the streets.’

‘Which is, of course, the raison d’être of libraries.’

There was a pause, during which I feared that I had offended him, but then came a sigh that was close to a laugh and he said, ‘You’re a cynic, Sadie.’

I had to tell him, ‘It’s been said before.’

So, yesterday, I went to the steps of the British Museum. I have only ever been into the building on school trips. When I was a child, I was fascinated by the ancient Egyptians. Why? Because of their appealing, pictorial literacy? their extensive, opulent monarchy? their literally earth-moving faith? My primary school years teemed with projects, drawings, stories and library loans on the subject of the pharoahs. I was confident that I was going to be an Egyptologist.

Egyptologist: even the word captivates me; that ringing stress on the third syllable, the kind of sound that usually compensates for a silent consonant, although in this case everything is spoken.

How odd, that the passing of my passion was so thorough and so unconscious: a passion of which I had no memory until yesterday when I walked into Coptic Street. As soon as I saw the building, I wondered why I had never achieved that ambition of mine, and decided that I must have lacked resolve. But then I pondered the real, live curators in there: what had they wanted to be when they were eight, nine, ten years old? Train drivers, probably, or nurses, or ice skaters: the usual; something action-packed. What was puzzling was why, as a child, I had been drawn to a disappeared civilisation, to corpses that were buried bizarrely with their earthly essentials in the hope of some further, fantastical life.

To me, as a child, the British Museum meant ancient Egyptians. Yesterday, approaching the building, I had no clearer idea of its contents: it was still a misshapen pyramid in central London, a massive mausoleum for the wrapped husks of people who, over thousands of years, have been excavated, ripped open, broken up, and stripped of their treasures. The journey that they have endured is not the one that they had in mind when they chose to have their brains drained down their noses. For them, the vital organ was not the brain but the heart; the state of one’s heart decided one’s fate. On their version of judgement day, the heart was placed on some scales with a feather, and if the heart fell, then the owner was condemned. How would I have fared? During the past year or so, my brain could well have leaked away down my nose. But with a heart like mine, I am sure as hell not going to heaven.

From their chosen site on the banks of the Nile to captivity in the vicinity of Russell Square tube station: that building must be alive with ghosts.

Plunder: a faintly sickening word, with echoes, to my mind, of asunder, lunge and pluck, all words that have in common a sense of utter disregard.

What an irony: the more precautions, the more plunder. Massively, absurdly fortified, both materially and spiritually, they were unable to prevent their inevitable downfall. What goes up, must come down, and down they came, with so very far to fall. And then the final insult: the all-seeing, unstoppable assault from X-rays. In my library books, the mummies’ remaining embedded charms were exposed in black-and-white, along with their frailties and fatalities. I was horrified to see that their jewels looked like stupidly-swallowed sixpences. To those who knew the code, who could read the X-rays, the pristinely-preserved bones displayed indelible patterns of fractures, erosions and misplacements. Those embalmed bodies, which had been biding their time, became mere bundles of dietary deficiencies, diseases, domestic accidents and treasons.

As I walked through the gateway, I saw Edwin in the distance. He was sitting on the steps, and had not seen me; he was reading, his attention locked down over a book. I did not recognise the clothes that he was wearing; jeans and a shirt. I stopped, struck that this was the first time that I had ever seen him from anywhere but up close. He was, of course, so much more than the person to whom I had chatted on a train. He had a whole life that was unknown to me; and there he was, in that life, back in that life, quite beyond me. I had everything to learn about him.

Standing there, I realised that he would look up and see me before I could reach him. I was going to have to walk towards him for whole seconds while he watched me. The crowds of tourists added to the problem: he would watch me blundering through those intangible tripwires between posers and photographers. And my dress was too short. My entire wardrobe flashed before me, every article of clothing tantalisingly more appropriate than the one that I had chosen. I had only two options: to rush towards him, or to try to creep up on him. That was when he saw me, and spared me: he smiled but then became busy, slotting his book into his bag and removing his glasses. Reaching him, I closed the remaining distance between us with a kiss on his cheek. As I came away, his hand stayed for a moment in the small of my back.

We headed back towards the road.

‘How was your journey?’ he asked.

‘Fine, but I’m in need of refreshments, to use a good, old-fashioned word.’

‘Rehydration, to be more prosaic.’

‘And cake, to be blunt.’ I indicated his bag. ‘What were you reading?’

He fished for the book, showed me: a novel, not one that I had read.

‘What’s it about?’

‘Oh, you know, the usual: life, love …’ Having delved into his bag, he had found some sunglasses and was now staring blackly into the crowds.

‘With jokes?’

He laughed, or almost laughed. ‘They are the jokes, aren’t they?’

‘And you said that I was a cynic.’

‘I didn’t say that I wasn’t.’

Listening to the jauntiness in his step, I thought, No, but you’re not, you know; not quite.

He asked me, ‘Are you reading anything?’

‘Rereading,’ I had to admit. I have been unable to settle to anything new for some time.

‘Rereading Grace Paley.’

Airily, over my head, he said, ‘I don’t know her.’

‘Well, you should.’

‘Well of course, but there are so many books that I should read.’

I stopped, so that he had to stop. ‘No, I mean for your own sake.’ For me, returning to her stories had been like turning up treasure that I had forgotten I had hidden. I had experienced a sense of reprieve. ‘The pleasures in life are so few and so brief that I don’t think that you can afford to be without her.’

‘I’ll do my best, then.’

‘You do that.’

We went into a coffee shop which, like all the others that we had passed, was crowded. We were lucky to have one of the few tables for two by the window. Our tiny tabletop barely accommodated two tall glasses, gaudy with ice cubes and lemon, and two bottles of mineral water; big, bulbous bottles of green glass, ostentatiously Italian. Edwin checked, ‘Not tempted by the cakes?’

‘No room.’

‘You’ve already had lunch somewhere?’

‘No, I mean, no room on this table. When I’ve had my water, I’ll consider cake.’ Then, to be polite, I asked him: ‘You?’

‘No room because I devoured a not-insignificantly-sized bar of chocolate while I was waiting for you.’

I was alarmed, ‘Was I late?’

‘No, I was greedy.’

I laughed. A man with a sweet tooth is a man that I can trust.

Despite the cramped conditions, I was thankful that we were in Bloomsbury, I could cope with Bloomsbury. The scene on the other side of the window was quite unlike anywhere else in central London in this undertow of a heatwave. Across the narrow street, people were loitering in the shade of the awnings of a bookshop, a gallery and a deli. I made a start on my designer water. Sharing our neighbouring and similarly stool-sized table were two men who clearly had nothing to do with each other. One was chopping his spoon into a slice of cream-dolloped Dutch apple pie, his back overlapping the slats of his chair, his shirt’s lower buttonholes taut. Next to his plate was the Telegraph, firmly folded into the shape that is ideal for fly-swatting or worse. Opposite him, a bespectacled and bearded man in black jeans and T-shirt was hunched over a paperback entitled From Plato to NATO, readings in political philosophy, and nibbling a lettuce-sodden bap.

Edwin asked, ‘So, anyway, what have you been doing to that house of yours, since I last saw you?’

Because, of course, that was what I was doing: the house; that was all I was doing.

Between sips of water, I told him about the man who had come to advise on the floorboards, the man who was a twin from a family of two sets of twins and who had twins of his own, one of whom had twins of her own. And I received appropriately appreciative responses as I worked through this particular box of tricks.

Then he asked, ‘Do you want children?’

‘A coffee will do for now.’

His smile was quick, small, uncertain.

‘Do you have children?’ I asked him. I had been wanting to ask, on that train journey; there had been no mention of any.

‘No.’

I said, ‘I don’t know whether I want to stay married.’

There: said. Said concisely and calmly. Said as if I had been saying the words casually every day for years, for all the years that they had been unsaid. Close friends are too close to be told; this burden of mine would simply become theirs too. So the truth was said to a man who I barely know. But if he is to know me, then this is what he has to know; this is who I am.

And, anyway, he asked.

Sort of.

He was silent for a moment, presumably giving me a chance to say more, before he responded with a careful, ‘Ah.’

This ah somehow served to lessen the impact for me: Ah, that little brain-teaser. Suddenly I was so grateful, hopeful: that little brain-teaser, the one that other people have; the one to which there is a solution. I reached for my glass, craving a salutary, celebratory mouthful. Up close, the fizzing water sounded like fat frying. I looked down into that volatile mixture of liquid and ice; down on to the pip-shedding, popeyed, swirling slice of lemon.

He asked, ‘Does your husband know?’

‘Philip,’ I said: I felt that we should say his name, that this was his due, and I felt that if we were to have this conversation, then it was important to be clear about absolutely everything.

‘Yes,’ I answered: somehow, I realised, he knows.

‘And what does he say?’

‘What is there to say? I think that he thinks that I’ll settle down.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘do I.’

Neither of us spoke again for a moment, but I wanted to say, Go on, ask me another. I was ready for more. Never having spoken a word of this, here I was, replying to his questions with no hesitation. And of course I was, because I had had the answers for a long time. There is nothing that I do not know about my situation, about living with someone and keeping up appearances but longing to be somewhere else, anywhere else. Oh, yes, I am an old hand.

His next question was, ‘And for how long have you been thinking of leaving?’

But this was wrong, I knew instantly that this rang untrue, and I knew why: I have not been thinking of leaving, during these bad years. Thinking of leaving is not what I have been doing. I have simply been thinking of not being where I am. I have nowhere to go. I have no reason to go, and every reason to stay. Mine is a perfect life, courtesy of a perfect husband. Leaving is unthinkable.

I said, ‘Three years.’

‘Three years,’ he did not seem to flinch, he seemed to be mulling this over. ‘How long have you been married?’

‘Three years.’ I was the one who flinched. ‘We’ve been together for seven.’ Seven minus three leaves four. I looked around for the waitress, then smiled for her to come and take an order. I wanted so desperately to avoid mention of those four years; four years when Philip and I were happy, the four years of my life when I was happy; four years that are lost to me, that I have lost. I have lived three years on ice. What would Jacqueline have given to have had three extra years of life?

Edwin said fairly cheerfully, or at least with some vigour, ‘We’ve been married for six years. We’ve been together for seven. We married because Vivien was pregnant.’

Vivien. Momentarily I was baffled, because he had said that they had no children; but I realised what had happened in the instant that he explained, ‘She miscarried.’

I said, ‘Oh. Oh, I am sorry,’ and I was.

‘I expect that a pregnancy seems a bad reason to marry, but I’m not sure what a good reason would have been, for me. I didn’t want us to marry, I didn’t see that marriage would make a difference, but that was what she wanted, and why should I refuse? In the end, she miscarried before we married, but …’

‘Yes,’ I said quickly, to save him from having to say.

Much slower, he admitted, ‘That would have been really rather heartless.’ Then he resumed, ‘And if that was important to her, why should I refuse to sign a piece of paper and have a party? I mean, we were together, and we seemed to be going to stay together.’

He had not mentioned love, but perhaps that was a given.

‘I was thirty-three, and I suspect that there’s something about reaching thirty-three, that round number.’

I said, ‘It’s not a round number, Edwin.’

He frowned. ‘But you know what I mean. It looks round.’

Thirty-three plus six: he was thirty-nine, he was only thirty-nine, only eight years older than I am. I had thought that he was much older because of his less than full head of hair, and because he looked so resigned. Yes, that was his look: one of resignation. Also, I should have allowed for my habitual over-estimation, my tendency to assume that grown-ups are so much older than I am simply because they always were.

He finished with a sudden, cheerful, ‘In seven years, we’ve never had a crisis.’

I did not know what to say, whether to congratulate him or to ask, Why? what have you been doing? The waitress whirled to our table, and I blurted, ‘Coffee?’

His mouth opened and closed, he was undecided, and looked as if he would remain forever undecided.

I heard the impatient shuffle of the waitress’s shoes, and requested, ‘Two espressos, please.’ She turned on her heel, literally, causing a squeak.

He looked up, puzzled. ‘I don’t drink espresso.’

‘A double for me, then.’

‘Why did you marry Philip?’

‘I don’t know. No reason.’ I meant, of course, no specific reason like pregnancy: and this Edwin seemed to understand. I meant no reason other than the usual ones such as that Philip asked me and I was in love with him. Are they reasons? do they explain? I have been thinking, yesterday and today, and now, if I do not remember why, I do remember how: I know how it happened.

This is how: Philip had said, ‘Marry me,’ as a little joke – no, a little dare – and in the same vein I said, ‘Okay, then.’ He was serious, though, and so was I. This had come out of the blue, we were whoozy in slapdash evening sunshine. He was lying in bed, our bed, and I was sitting on the edge. There should be a word for the edge of a bed, that crucial, pivotal place. I was leaving him, but not quite back in the world. The warmth of him was on my skin: a sensation of blood-warm water. He was propped on one elbow, he had been drawn up in my wake, but I had a sense that this was as far as he was coming: he would stay there for a while, happy with my body-heat wrapped into the bedclothes. His smile was dazed because he had been dozing; he was smiling because he had been trying to persuade me to turn back, but knew that he could only do so a few times and that this was the time he had lost. His little dare was a diversional tactic: I had to stay a moment longer in order to answer.

I answered, and he had what he wanted. I married him because he was good and good-natured and he had faith in me and he loved me, and I loved him for that. Looking at him looking as if he had never before set foot in the world, I was thinking, You’re perfect. Marrying him must have been the right thing to do. The problem is that somehow it was wrong for me: the closest I can come to what is wrong is that I married Philip because of him, not because of me.

Edwin and I were in the coffee shop for two hours and we never did have any cake; cake did not happen. Perhaps we never paused for long enough to make a decision of the magnitude required by the cake display. I was stoked with coffee, that raw, black bean juice, and he sipped his way through several pots of camomile tea. Finally, the conversation moved from the state of our respective private lives to the only person our lives have in common: George. Edwin explained that he had finished interviewing George; he will not be returning to my town. When we said goodbye, he wanted to know if I would be in London next week.

I said, ‘Possibly.’

I have no plans; but conversely, there is nothing to stop me.

And now, nearly a whole twenty-four hours later, Hal and I are patrolling our territory. Ahead, a poster announces a fun run, surely a contradiction in terms. Beneath, a small, bedraggled, handwritten poster pleads for the safe return of a missing cat. The pitiful inventory of charms concludes with, She might be hiding.

Cloud, today, is thin and broken like the milky residue of bubble bath on cool bathwater.

Earlier, Hal was sunbathing on the carpet in front of the window. On cloudy mornings, he will follow me around the house, staring into my eyes; sometimes whimpering and going to the door. He is stilled by sunshine: this morning, all that I heard from him was the occasional sigh.

Once I said to Philip, ‘Hal’s sighs are so human.’

He looked sceptical.

I had to explain: ‘Well, I mean, do cats sigh?’

Across the park is the blind dog, a very old red setter, florid, with eye-catchingly fluorescent cataracts. The dog’s habit is to lumber from the path – her ribboned coat an autumnal grass skirt – and stagger in circles as if preparing a bed. Then she sits, cautiously, and sniffs, extravagantly: dredging the air for scents.

‘She’s happy,’ her owner reassured me, when we first met them. The owner – unlike her dog – is a youthful middle age. ‘That’s all she wants to do.’

What else can she do?

Usually, Hal tries to be sociable and the setter tries to reciprocate, bumping into him time and time again like something on water. The first time, we two owners laughed kindly over this sorry display of compromised dogginess, this cobbled-together bottom-sniffing.

While apologising for Hal’s enthusiasm I had turned towards him.

Behind me, the woman said, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t hear very well; I lip-read.’

Immediately I realised that I had indeed been listening to the indistinct speech of someone who is deaf.

She sees me, now, and waves.

What a coincidence, seeing her here. Working in my garden, today, for the third consecutive day, is Carl, Jason’s cousin; a cousin in need of work – odd jobs – for the summer months before beginning a college course.

‘What’s the course?’ I asked Carl, on his first day.

‘Signing.’

‘Painting them?’

He laughed. ‘You’re thinking of sign writing. I’ll be doing sign language.’

On Carl’s first day, Philip called to me from the kitchen when he arrived home: ‘Poppy? Why is there an Adonis in our garden?’

I called back from the hallway, ‘Better than a gnome.’

Joining him at the window, I said, ‘He isn’t an Adonis; look how skinny he is.’

Philip smirked, and went from the room singing, She was thirty-one, I was seventeen.

Carl’s job is to clear the back of the garden, the patch which Philip has always avoided. Philip stays close to the house, pruning and planting. Behind, beyond the pond, is an area decades-deep in brambles and rubble. In many ways, we took on too much when we took on this house: a house that was big enough for three, but dilapidated enough to be affordable. A knock-down price, says Philip: they paid us to knock it down.

When Jacqueline was here, we had no energy for DIY; but since she has gone, we seem to have even less.

The clearance is heavy work for Carl; heavy work in heavy weather. The unrelenting sun is a problem for him. His back is the colour of cinnamon. All day, he is dressing and undressing, putting on and then pulling off his T-shirt, each rise and fall of the neckline tousling his hair.

From Jason, I know two facts about Carl: at the end of last year, he separated amicably from his girlfriend of five years; and he is twenty-seven. He has the kind of face and figure that will never slacken. God’s own bone structure.

I was never beautiful, but seemed to have whatever was needed: I had whomever I wanted. Perhaps there were beautiful bits of me; perhaps I was beautiful in bits, and had enough to do the trick. Whatever I did have will now have faded. Not literally, unfortunately: my hair is as weal-coloured as ever, and my skin still glows like freshly-sliced pear flesh. But I cannot be a patch on what I was. I cannot shake the feeling that I am nothing, nowadays; I am scuttled bones.

Whenever Carl catches me watching him from the window, he smiles. That smile is far from self-conscious, or reluctant. It is sheer smile. I remember an expression that was favoured by my mother: There is no side to him. Whenever I look away, he comes with me, his image burned on to my eyes. Asleep, I dream of him. The dreams come in the mornings, when sunshine strokes my eyelids. They are close to daydreams. Too close. They are sexual dreams, dreams of sex, vocal sex; more sexual, somehow, than any sex that I have ever had. In these dreams I am not me; I am no one else, but not me. I am no one. I am desire: something fed into a vein, distilled, heavy but slick, treacly, deadly, pure.

When the dream drains away, I am beached in my bed. And for a time, the real, everyday world is beyond me. Coming to, dry-mouthed but damp everywhere else, sloppy with sexual desire, I am rudderless, a mess of limbs and linen. Then I begin to be aware of Philip. He is turned demurely away into his doze. He seems so far away, borne on his tidy half of the bedclothes, waiting patiently for the turn of consciousness. For him, sleeping, dreaming and waking are not the exertions that they have been for me. Across the expanse, he is unrecognisably-shaped and I take a moment to make sense of him. If I reach to touch him, he is dough-warm and calico-clean.

It’s nothing, it’s physical: this is what I tell myself, whenever I look at Carl.

I feel like Samantha in Bewitched, acting the model housewife and coping with a contrary nature.

Carl is scrupulously cheerful, as if to be otherwise would be to do me a disservice. He called me Mrs Summerfield until I impressed upon him not to do so. Early this morning we had coffee together. Having brought my coffee into the garden, I called: ‘Come over here, have a break.’ He had already done over an hour of hard work.

‘I’m fine, honestly, Mrs Summerfield.’

‘Don’t call me that. And I mean that.’

‘Sorry. Forgot.’

‘Come over here.’ He is younger than I am, and I am paying him: I suppose that I can issue orders.

He came over, smelling of grass.

I looked down at my tray, at my cafetière. ‘You want some water or something?’

He, too, looked at the cafetière. ‘I don’t suppose you have any spare coffee?’

‘Oh, sorry: I didn’t think you’d want a hot drink, that’s all.’

‘But there’s something about coffee in hot weather.’

‘Yes, isn’t there. I drink far more coffee during the summer.’

‘Me, too. And the treaclier, the better.’

Treaclier. I laughed. ‘Yes.’

I went to the kitchen for a cup for him. Returning, I asked, ‘Has anyone ever asked you that question: if you were on a desert island, what would you pay five hundred pounds for? Has to be a food, or a drink.’

‘No,’ he raised those eyes of standard, boyish blue; he was smiling, ‘No one has ever asked me that.’

Philip says that I am a one for creature comforts. I suspect that I am made of them: take my creature comforts away, and nothing remains.

‘Tobacco isn’t allowed?’

‘You’re a smoker! I didn’t know.’

‘Ex-. But once a smoker, always a smoker. Nothing to do with addiction, everything to do with pleasure. Ideal for a desert island. And you?’

‘Well, when I was asked, I thought I’d say chocolate but found that I went for coffee, and that was a surprise. The same reason, I suppose: I live on coffee but, until then, I’d thought that I was simply addicted, that coffee was a mere addiction, not a …’ … a what? ‘Not a …’

‘Passion,’ he said.

‘A passion, yes.’

I had some physalis on the tray – an attempt to break the habit of chocolate – and as I offered him the plate, he asked, ‘What’s your favourite fruit?’

‘Depends what for.’

He raised his eyebrows: explain.

‘Blackberries for ice-cream, I think. Apricots for juice.’

‘Apricots …’ he pondered.

‘Yes, try it. Papaya for texture. And, oh,’ of course, ‘oranges for their smell.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘And raspberries for …’ but the best I could do was, ‘for themselves.’

‘Unadulterated.’ He popped a physalis into his mouth. His eyes widened slightly with the first bite. Perhaps he had never had one before. But perhaps their flavour always comes as a surprise.

‘So, they’re your passion,’ he said, when he had finished his mouthful. ‘Raspberries.’

‘Well, they have a rival: strawberries, but only for the one that’s just right, the perfect one in every punnet. There’s always that one, isn’t there.’

Smiling away over the garden, he muttered, ‘Oh, Mrs Summerfield.’

‘Don’t –’

‘I was joking, that time.’