He glanced into his former study, where his books were packed in boxes on the floor. He had, as yet, nowhere to take them. Beside them were a pair of men’s black shoes he had not seen before.
She said to the children, ‘I’ll get your tea.’ To him she said, ‘You haven’t given them anything to eat, have you?’
‘Doughnuts,’ said Eddie. ‘I had chocolate.’
‘I had jam,’ said Oliver.
She said, ‘You let them eat that rubbish?’
Eddie pushed the crushed flowers at her. ‘There you are, Mummy.’
‘You must not take flowers from the park,’ she said. ‘They are for everyone.’
‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ said Eddie suddenly, with his hand over his mouth.
‘Shut up! People don’t like it!’ said Oliver, and hit Eddie, who started to cry.
‘Listen to him,’ she said to Roger. ‘You’ve taught them to use filthy language. You are really hopeless.’
‘So are you,’ he said.
In the past few months, preparing his lectures, he had visited some disorderly and murderous places. The hatred he witnessed puzzled him still. It was atavistic but abstract; mostly the people did not know one another. It had made him aware of how people clung to their antipathies, and used them to maintain an important distance, but in the end he failed to understand why this was. After all the political analysis and talk of rights, he had concluded that people had to grasp the necessity of loving one another; and if that was too much, they had to let one another alone. When this still seemed inadequate and banal, he suspected he was on the wrong path, that he was trying to say something about his own difficulties in the guise of intellectual discourse. Why could he not find a more direct method? He had, in fact, considered writing a novel. He had plenty to say, but could not afford the time, unpaid.
He looked out at the street. ‘It’s raining quite hard.’
‘It’s not too bad now.’
He said, ‘You haven’t got an umbrella, have you?’
‘An umbrella?’
He was becoming impatient. ‘Yes. An umbrella. You know, you hold it over your head.’
She sighed and went back into the house. He presumed she was opening the door to the airing cupboard in the bathroom.
He was standing in the porch, ready to go. She returned empty handed.
‘No. No umbrella,’ she said.
He said, ‘There were three there last week.’
‘Maybe there were.’
‘Are there not still three umbrellas there?’
‘Maybe there are,’ she said.
‘Give me one.’
‘No.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I’m not giving you one,’ she said. ‘If there were a thousand umbrellas there I would not give you one.’
He had noticed how persistent his children were; they asked, pleaded, threatened and screamed, until he yielded.
He said, ‘They are my umbrellas.’
‘No,’ she repeated.
‘How petty you’ve become.’
‘Didn’t I give you everything?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Everything but love.’
‘I did give you that, actually.’ She said, ‘I’ve rung my friend. He’s on his way.’
He said, ‘I don’t care. Just give me an umbrella.’
She shook her head. She went to shut the door. He put his foot out and she banged the door against his leg. He wanted to rub his shin but could not give her the pleasure.
He said, ‘Let’s try and be rational.’
He had hated before, his parents and brother, at certain times. But it was a fury, not a deep, intellectual and emotional hatred like this. He had had psychotherapy; he took tranquillisers, but still he wanted to pulverise his wife. None of the ideas he had about life would make this feeling go away.
‘You used to find the rain “refreshing”,’ she sneered.
‘It has come to this,’ he said.
‘Here we are then,’ she said. ‘Don’t start crying about it.’
He pushed the door. ‘I’ll get the umbrella.’
She pushed the door back at him. ‘You cannot come in.’
‘It is my house.’
‘Not without prior arrangement.’
‘We arranged it,’ he said.
‘The arrangement’s off.’
He pushed her.
‘Are you assaulting me?’ she said.
He looked outside. An alcoholic woman he had had to remove from the front step on several occasions was standing at the end of the path holding a can of lager.
‘I’m watching you,’ she shouted. ‘If you touch her you are reported!’
‘Watch on!’ he shouted back.
He pushed into the house. He placed his hand on his wife’s chest and forced her against the wall. She cried out. She did bang her head, but it was, in football jargon, a ‘dive’. The children ran at his legs. He pushed them away.
He went to the airing cupboard, seized an umbrella and made his way to the front door.
As he passed her she snatched it. Her strength surprised him, but he yanked the umbrella back and went to move away. She raised her hand. He thought she would slap him. It would be the first time. But she made a fist. As she punched him in the face she continued to look at him.
He had not been hit since he left school. He had forgotten the physical shock and then the disbelief, the shattering of the feeling that the world was a safe place.
The boys were screaming. Roger had dropped the umbrella. His mouth throbbed; his lip was bleeding. He must have staggered and lost his balance for she was able to push him outside.
He heard the door slam behind him. He could hear the children crying. He walked away, past the alcoholic woman still standing at the end of the path. He turned to look at the lighted house. When they had calmed down, the children would have their bath and get ready for bed. They liked being read to. It was a part of the day he had always enjoyed.
He turned his collar up but knew he would get soaked. He wiped his mouth with his hand. She had landed him quite a hit. He would not be able to find out until later whether it would show. If it did, it would cause interest and amusement at the party, but not to him; not with a date to go to.
He stood in a doorway watching the people hurry past. His trouser legs stuck to his skin. It would not stop raining for a long time. He could not just stand in the same place for hours. The thing to do was not to mind. He started out then, across the Green, in the dark, wet through, but moving forward.
Morning in the Bowl of Night
It had been snowing.
He got to the house, looked at his watch, saw he was late, and hurried on to a pub he knew at the end of the street. He pushed the door and a barking Alsatian on a chain leapt at him. Young children, one of them badly bruised, chased one another across the slush-wet floor, tripping over the adults’ feet. The jukebox was loud, as were the TV and the drinkers’ voices. He hadn’t been in here for months yet he recognised the same people.
He was backing out when the barman shouted, ‘Hey, my man Alan. Alan, where you been?’ and started to pull him a pint.
Alan took a seat at the bar, lit a cigarette and drank off half his glass. If he finished quickly he might get another pint in him. It would mean he had no money but why would he need money tonight? The last time he had attended a school nativity play and carol service he had been fourteen, and his best friend’s father had turned up so soaked in alcohol that he didn’t realise his tie had been dunked in red wine and was still dripping. The boys pointed and laughed at him, and his son had been ashamed.
Alan nodded at the barman who placed the second pint beside the first. Alan’s son was too young for shame; in fact, Mikey was starting to worship his father.
Alan needed to calm himself. Melanie, his present girlfriend, with whom he’d lived for a year, had pursued him down the street as he’d left the flat, pulling on his hand and begging him not to go. He told her repeate
dly that he had promised his son that he would attend the nativity play. ‘All the daddies will be there,’ Mikey had said.
‘And so will this daddy,’ Alan had said.
After much shouting, Alan left Melanie standing in the snow. God knows what state she’d be in when he returned home, if she were there at all. Alan worked in the theatre, though not as an actor. Yet today he felt she had cast him as a criminal, a role he wasn’t prepared to play.
Alan finished both drinks and got up to go. It would be the first time he, his wife and their son had been out together as a family since he had left, eighteen months ago.
Perhaps it was his fear that had communicated itself to Melanie. He wasn’t sure, however, that fear was the right word. On the way over he had been trying to identify the feeling. It wasn’t even dread. The solution came to him now as he approached the house. It was grief; a packed, undigested lump of grief in his chest.
The boy was standing on a chair by the window. Seeing his father he jumped up and down, shouting, ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!’, banging on the smudged glass.
It had been a week since Alan had seen Mikey, and he was used to looking for the alteration in him. Yet how peculiar he still found it to visit his own son as if he were dropping by for tea with a relation. What he liked most was taking Mikey out to cafés. Occasionally the boy would slip off his stool and run about to demonstrate how high he could jump, but mostly they sat and made conversation like friends, Mikey asking the most demanding questions.
‘You’re late,’ Anne said at the door. ‘You’ve been drinking.’
She was shaking, and her eyes were fixed and wide. He was familiar with these brief possessions, the sudden fits of rage she had throughout the day, usually when she had to ask for something.
Alan slipped past her. ‘Pretty Christmas tree,’ he said.
He crouched down and Mikey ran into his arms. He was wearing tartan trousers and a knitted sweater. He handed Alan a maroon woolly hat. Anne went to get her coat. Alan pulled the hat down over Mikey’s face, and then, as the kid struggled and shouted, picked him up and buried his face in his stomach.
Alan had never liked the street, the area or the house. It had some kind of guilty hold over him. When he visited he felt he should go upstairs, get into bed, close his eyes and resume his old life, as if it were his duty and destiny. Anne still blamed him for leaving, though Alan couldn’t understand why she didn’t see that it had been best for both of them.
‘Kiss,’ said Mikey when Anne joined them. ‘Kiss together.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Kiss Mummy.’
Alan looked at his wife.
She had lost weight, her face coming to a point at her chin for the first time in years. She had been dieting; starving herself, it looked like. Her face was covered in white make-up or powder. Her lips were red. He had never let her wear lipstick, not liking it on his face. She dressed better now, presumably on his money. She hadn’t been sleeping at the house often, he knew that. Her mother had been staying there with Mikey, not knowing – or not saying – when she would be back.
He and Anne managed to press their lips together for a moment. Her perfume touched off an electric flash of uncontrollable memories, and he shuddered. He tried to think of the last time they had touched one another. It must have been a couple of months before he left. He remembered thinking then, this will be the last time.
It was dark when they went out. Mikey held their hands as they swung him between them. To Alan’s relief he chattered away.
Outside the school the parents, dressed up, were getting out of their cars and passing through the gates in the snow. Alan noticed with surprise how happy the children were and how easily their laughter came, whereas the parents exchanged only the necessary courtesies. Was he a particularly gloomy person? His girlfriend said he was. ‘If I am, you have made me so,’ was his reply. He did feel gloomy, certainly. Perhaps it was his age.
Inside it was warm and bright, and even the teachers smiled. Alan chuckled to himself, imagining what other people might think, seeing him with Anne. How unusual it was, these days, to see a husband and wife together. He exchanged a few amiable words with her, for the public show.
The nativity was performed by the eight-and nine-year-olds, with younger children playing shepherds as well as trees and stars. A painted sky suspended between shortened broom handles was held up by two tiny children. The angels had cardboard wings and costumes made from net curtains. Next year Mikey would be old enough to take part.
A few weeks ago the teacher had asked Alan for suggestions as to how the nativity should be done. Alan was the administrator of a small touring theatre group. He loved the emotional intimacy that actors created between them; and he still liked the excitement of the ‘show’, the live connection between his colleagues on stage and those who had left their homes for the honest spectacle. There was some sort of important fear that united them all, which made the theatre different from the cinema. His work was badly paid, of course. Some of the actors he worked with appeared on television; the director was married to a rich woman. Alan, though, had no other income. His girlfriend Melanie was an actress. She was pregnant and soon wouldn’t be able to work for a while.
When the nativity started Alan checked his pocket. He had taken a handkerchief out with him, a proper cloth handkerchief given to him, inexplicably, by Anne, years ago. He had not gone out with a pocket handkerchief since his last day at school. But all afternoon he had been afraid the children’s voices would make him break down. To cheer himself up he had thought of his father, in church at Christmas – the only time he went – singing as loud as he could, not caring that he was out of tune. They were celebrating, Father said, not making a record for Deutsche Grammophon.
The parents cried and laughed through the nativity, and the younger children, like Alan’s son, shouted out joyfully.
Alan compared himself to the people he knew there. At the door he had been greeted by a man who had said, ‘I could do with a drink, too, but I’m not allowed.’
Until the man reminded him that he had fixed Alan’s car a couple of times, Alan couldn’t think who he was, for he was thin and decrepit, with a shaven head.
‘But at least you look well, you look well,’ the man said, as Alan moved away uncomfortably, only at this stage becoming aware of how ill the man must be.
There was a woman sitting in the adjacent row. Alan had been told by an acquaintance earlier in the year that she had thrown herself naked from a window, smashing her face and breaking her ribs, before being taken to hospital in a strait-jacket. Another woman, sitting further along the row, had ignored him, or perhaps she hadn’t seen him. But she had walked often with him in the park, as their children played. She had told him she was leaving her husband.
It had been a murderous century, yet here, in this comfortable
corner of the earth, by some fluke, most of them had been spared. For that he sang, wondering, all the same, why they were so joyless.
Melanie hadn’t been pregnant long, but her body had started to change. She was losing her girlishness. Apart from her thick waist, she felt heavy and claimed she was already forced to walk with a ‘waddle’. She wasn’t working at the moment, so it didn’t matter that she had to go back to bed in the morning. When they weren’t fighting he would sit with her, eating his breakfast.
She had an appointment the next day, for an abortion. He would pick her up the day after. A long time ago he had been involved in two other abortions. The first he had avoided by going away to stay with another woman. Of the second, he remembered only how the woman lay on the floor and wept afterwards. He recalled sitting across the room from her with his eyes closed, counting back from a thousand. The relationships had broken immediately after. His life with Melanie would end, too. It would seem pointless to go on. Why was it important that relationships went on? By tomorrow night his hope would be destroyed. He couldn’t go from woman to woman any more.
Their argu
ments were bitter and their reconciliations no longer sweet. He had locked her out of the flat. She had thrown away a picture his wife had given him. Alan had flung some of her belongings into the street. For weeks they had pounded one another, emerging into the world as if they’d walked out of a fire, their skin blackened, eyes staring, not knowing what had happened. Would they be together for good or only until tomorrow?
Looking sideways at his wife now, over the head of the boy who connected them for ever, Alan knew he couldn’t make such a mistake again.
In their better moods, he and Melanie talked to the child in her belly and considered names for her. They had talked of having a child in a few years. But a child wasn’t a fridge that you could order when you wanted, or when you could afford it. The child in her belly already had a face.
Outside the school, as the three of them walked away, Alan spotted an abandoned supermarket trolley. Instantly he picked Mikey up, dumped him in it and ran with it along the side of the road. The yells of the delighted boy, crouching in the clattering tray as they skidded around corners and over speed bumps, and Anne’s cries as she ran behind, trying to keep up, pierced the early evening dark.
Laughing, breathless and warm, they soon arrived at the house. Anne closed the shutters and switched on the Christmas tree lights. The room had changed since he’d last been there. It contained only her things. There was nothing of him left in it.
She poured Alan a glass of brandy. Mikey gulped down his juice. Anne said he could pick a bar of chocolate from the tree if he shared it with them. As they discussed the nativity Alan noticed that his son seemed wary and uncertain, as if he weren’t sure which parent he should go to, sensing he couldn’t favour one without displeasing the other.
At last Alan got up to leave.
‘Oh, I forgot,’ Anne said. ‘I bought some mince pies and brandy butter. I don’t know why I bothered, but I did. You still like them, don’t you? I’ll put them on one plate for you and Mikey to share. Is that okay?’
She went to heat them up. Alan had told Melanie he wouldn’t be long. He had to go to her. What a terrifying machine the imagination could be. If it was terrible between them tonight, they might do something irreversible tomorrow. He was afraid her mind might become set.