Love, Etc

  Well, I suppose that’s the answer, isn’t it? It’s my children who bring out the ‘I’ in the ‘I love you.’ Do ‘I’ still love Oliver? Yes, ‘I’ think so, ‘I’ suppose so. You could say I’m managing love.

  You organise a marriage, you protect your children, you manage love, you run your life. And sometimes you stop and wonder if that’s true at all. Do you run your life, or does your life run you?

  Stuart I’ve come to some conclusions in my time. I’m a grown-up person, I’ve been an adult longer than I’ve been a child and an adolescent. I’ve looked at the world. My conclusions may not be blindingly original, but they’re still mine.

  For instance, I’m suspicious of people comparing things with other things. In the days when I was more impressed with Oliver, I used to think that this mania of his proved he had not just better powers of description than I had, but also a better understanding of the world. The memory is like a left-luggage office. Love is like the free market. So-and-so is behaving just like some character you’ve never heard of in some opera you’ve never heard of. Now I think all these fancy comparisons were a way of not looking at the original object, of not looking at the world. They were just distractions. And this is why Oliver hasn’t changed—developed—grown up—call it what you will. Because it’s only by looking at the world out there as it is and the world in here as it is that you grow up.

  I don’t mean that you like what you find, or that what you find is what you want. Usually, it isn’t. But Oliver just makes pretty patterns in the air like—

  You see how tempting it is? I was going to say like a firework or something. And you might have thought: oh, that’s right, but you’d be thinking about the firework and I bet that’s what you’d remember rather than Oliver himself. And if it was Oliver doing the comparison, everyone would be different kinds of firework—Oh, Stuart, old Stuart, he’s a bit of a damp squib, ho ho—and it would all be very entertaining and very … wrong.

  I said that what you find isn’t necessarily what you want. Let’s take love. It isn’t like we thought it would be beforehand. Can we all agree on that? Better, worse, longer, shorter, overrated, underrated, but not the same. Also, different for different people. But that’s something you only learn slowly: what love is like for you. How much of it you’ve got. What you’ll give up for it. How it lives. How it dies. Oliver used to have a theory he called Love, etc.: in other words, the world divides into people for whom love is everything and the rest of life is a mere ‘etc.,’ and people who don’t value love enough and find the most exciting part of life is the ‘etc.’ It was the sort of line he was peddling when he stole my wife and I suspected it was bollocks at the time, and now I know it’s absolute bollocks not to mention boastful bollocks. People don’t divide up that way.

  And another thing. Beforehand, you think: when I grow up I’ll love someone, and I hope it goes right, but if it goes wrong I’ll love another person, and if that goes wrong I’ll love another person. Always assuming that you can find these people in the first place and that they’ll let you love them. What you expect is that love, or the ability to love, is always there, waiting. I was going to say, waiting with the engine running. You see the temptation of Oliver-speak? But I don’t think that love—and life—are like that. You can’t make yourself love someone, and you can’t, in my experience, make yourself stop loving someone. In fact, if you want to divide people up in the matter of love, I’d suggest doing it this way: some people are fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to love several people, either one after the other, or overlapping; while other people are fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to be able to love only once in their life. They love once and, whatever happens, it doesn’t go away. Some people can only do it once. I’ve come to realise that I’m one of these.

  All of which may be bad news for Gillian.

  Oliver ‘Life is first boredom, then fear’? No, I think not, except for the emotionally constipated.

  Life is first comedy, then tragedy? No, the genres swirl like paint in a centrifuge.

  Life is first comedy, then farce?

  Life is first tipsiness, then addiction and hangover at the same time?

  Life is first soft drugs, then hard? Soft porn, then hard? Soft-centred chocolates, then hard?

  Life is first the scent of wild flowers, then of toilet freshener?

  The poet has it that the three events of life are ‘birth, copulation and death,’ a bleak wisdom which thrilled my adolescence. Later, I realised Old Possum had omitted some of the other central moments: the first cigarette, snow on a tree in blossom, Venice, the joy of shopping, flight in all its senses, fugue in all its senses, that moment when you change gear at high speed and your passenger’s beloved head does not even stir on its spinal column, risotto nero, the third-act trio from Rosenkavalier, the chuckle of a child, that second cigarette, a longed-for face coming into focus at airport or railway station …

  Or, to be argumentative rather than decorative, why did the poet list copulation rather than love? Maybe Old P was more of a goer than I thought—I am no student of biography—but imagine yourself on your deathbed, reflecting on that brief allotted time between an arrival of which you were not conscious and a departure on which you will be unavailable for comment: would you be deluding yourself or speaking true if you maintained that the chief events of your life had been to do with the breathless unfolding of the heart, rather than with a catalogue of shaggings, even if they numbered mille tre?

  The world is full of vile things. Agreed? And I’m not just referring to toilet freshener, vile, viler than any bog-pong as it is. Let me quote you what I quoted you once before. ‘It’s the vileness that ruins love. And the laws, and properties, and financial worries and the police state. If conditions had been different, love would have been different.’ Agreed? I am not proposing that the genial London bobby, so helpful to the disoriented tourist, is much of an immediate menace to l’amore. But in general terms, agreed? Love in a leafy democratic suburb on six figures a year is different from love in a Stalinist prison camp.

  Love, etc. That has always been my formula, my theory, my wisdom. I knew it at once, as an infant knows its mother’s smile, as a fledged duckling takes to the water, as a fuse burns towards a bomb. I always knew. I got there earlier—half a lifetime earlier—than some I could mention.

  ‘Financial worries.’ Yes, they do drag one down, don’t they? I leave that side of things to Gillian, but I have had my moments of pecuniary inquiétude. Do you think the local police state, benign version, should give out love grants? There’s family benefit, there are funeral grants, so why not some state allowance for lovers? Isn’t the state there to facilitate the pursuit of happiness? Which in my book is just as important as life or liberty Just as important, I realise, because synonymous. Love is my life and it is my liberty.

  Another argument, one for the bureaucrats. Happy people are healthier than unhappy people. Make people happier and you reduce the burden on the National Health Service. Imagine the news headlines: NURSES SENT HOME ON FULL PAT OWING TO OUTBREAK OF HAPPINESS. Oh, I know there are certain instances where illness strikes regardless. But don’t quibble, just dream along.

  You’re not expecting me to refer to individual cases, are you? Or rather, the individual case of Mr and Mrs Oliver Russell. Not that we are such. Mr Oliver Russell and Ms Gillian Wyatt, as the pustular postman, lubricious hotel clerk and nickel-fucking tax-collector see us. You don’t want me to go into detail, do you? That would be Stuart-like behaviour. Someone around here must represent both the ludic and the abstract. Someone around here must be allowed to soar a little. Stuart could only soar in a microlite, chugging along like a motor-mower in the empyrean.

  Another reason for not going into detail is recent events. Recent discoveries. I really am trying not to think about them.

  Mme Wyatt Love and marriage. The Anglo-Saxons have always believed that they themselves marry for love, while the French marry for children, for family, for social
position, for business. No, wait a minute, I am merely repeating what one of your own experts has written. She—it was a woman—divided her life between the two worlds, and she was observing, not judging, not at first. She said that for the Anglo-Saxons marriage was founded on love, which was an absurdity since love is anarchic and passion is sure to die, and that this was no sound basis for marriage. On the other hand, she said, we French marry for sensible, rational reasons of family and property, because unlike you we recognise the necessary fact that love cannot be contained within the structure of marriage. Therefore we have made sure that it exists only outside of it. This, of course, is not perfect either, in fact in some ways it is equally absurd. But perhaps it is a more rational absurdity. Neither solution is ideal and neither can be expected to lead to happiness. She was a wise woman, this expert of yours, and therefore a pessimist.

  I do not know why Stuart chose to tell you all those years ago that I was having an affair. I told him in confidence and he acted like the popular press in your country. Well, it was a difficult time for him, with his marriage breaking up, so perhaps I forgive him.

  But since you know, I will inform you a little about it. He—Alan—was English, he was married, we were both in our … no, that is my secret. He had been married for … well, for many years. At first it was about sex. You are shocked? It always is, whatever anyone says. Oh, it is about an end to loneliness, and interests to share, and talking, talking, but it is really about sex. He said that after so many years making love to his wife, it had become like driving along a familiar stretch of motorway, you knew all the curves and the signs so well. I did not find this comparison exactly galant. But we had agreed—as lovers habitually do, with a kind of arrogant naïveté—only to speak the truth to one another. After all, there were so many lies to be told every time, simply so that we could meet. And I had set the example. I told him that I did not intend to marry again and I did not intend to live with another man. This did not mean that I was not going to fall in love again, but—well, I have explained that. Indeed, I was beginning to love him at the time of the … incident.

  He had arrived for the weekend. He lived about twenty miles away. I had been busy that week and so, when he came, I said we must go shopping for what we need. We drove to the Waitrose, we parked the car, we got the chariot—the trolley—we talked about what I would cook, we filled the trolley, I put in various things I needed for when he wasn’t there, I paid with my Wait-rose card. By the time we got into the car again I saw he was in a sudden depression. I did not ask, not at first, I waited to see what he would do—after all, it was his depression, not mine. And he was heroic, because he was also beginning to love me, and that is when heroism is possible. I mean, the heroism to fight your own character.

  We passed a happy weekend together and at the end of it I asked him why he had suddenly become depressed in the supermarket. And his face became sombre all over again, and he said, ‘My wife pays with a Waitrose card as well.’ At that moment, I saw it all and I knew that the relationship was without hope. It was not just the card, of course, it was the carpark, the trolley, the Friday night shoppers filling the store, it was the fact, the terrible fact that your new mistress also needs rolls of kitchen towel just so much as your wife. He had walked along the same aisles, even if they were twenty miles separated. And it probably made him think that before very long, with me, he would be driving along that too familiar stretch of motorway.

  I did not blame him. We just thought differently about love. I was able to enjoy the day, the weekend, the sudden time. I knew that love was fragile, volatile, fugace, anarchic, so I would allow love its entire space, its empire. He knew, or at least he could not persuade himself from thinking, that love was not a magical state, or not one only, but rather the start of a journey, which led, sooner or later, to a Waitrose card. That was the only way he could think, despite me telling him that I did not want to live with anyone again, or marry. So, fortunately, in a way, he had found out sooner rather than later.

  He went back to his wife. And—I do not say this because I want to pretend to virtue—he may even have been happier when he went back. He had learned the lesson of the kitchen towel. What do you think? Nowadays La Fontaine’s Fables take place in the supermarket.

  Mrs Dyer What’s that? Speak up. I’m Labour, is that what you want to know? Always have been. My husband too, when he was alive. Forty years, never a cross word. I’m ready to join him. Are you selling something? I don’t want anything. I’m not letting you in. I’ve read about people like you in the paper. That’s why I had the meters put on the outside wall. So be off with you, whatever it is you want. I’m shutting the door now. I’m Labour, if that’s what you want to know. But you’ll have to send a car if you want my vote. It’s my legs. Right, I’m shutting the door now. Whatever it is, I don’t want it. Thank you.

  Terri You know how, you’re falling in love, everything seems, like, totally original? The words they use, the way they hold you in bed, the way they drive a car? You think, I’ve never been talked to, or made love to, or driven, like this before. And you have, of course, most likely. Unless you’re twelve or something. It’s just that you’ve never noticed before, or you’ve forgotten. And then if there’s something you really haven’t heard or done before, however small, then it seems, well, so original you could scream, and such a part of how you are together.

  Like, I had this Mickey Mouse watch—I know it sounds … I don’t know what—anyway, I did. Never wore it to work, because what would you think if the maitresse D at a French restaurant wore a Mickey Mouse watch? You’d think we got Pluto in the kitchen making Jell-o or something, right? So I kept the watch at home, by the bed, and wore it only on Sundays when we were closed. And when Stuart moved in with me one of the first things I noticed was he always knew exactly which day of the week it was when he woke up, even if he was half asleep. And I knew he knew it was Sunday because when he stirred and put his arm across me and burrowed into the back of me, he’d ask, ‘What does Mickey say it is?’ And I’d look, and I’d go, ‘Mickey says it’s twenty of nine,’ or whatever.

  Does that embarrass you? It still makes me almost want to cry, just thinking of it. And because he was a Brit, there were all kinds of little phrases he used that I didn’t know and they seemed, like I say, totally original. And part of him. And part of us. He’d say, ‘Bob’s your uncle,’ and ‘I’m only here for the beer,’ and ‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating.’

  The first time he said that, I thought he was talking about the restaurant. About some dessert that hadn’t panned out. And it’s kind of a weird phrase when you think about it because the only way you can really tell if a dessert is any good is by eating it, same as prime rib or an oyster stew. So it’s not just a cliché, it’s so obvious that it’s not even worth saying. But by the time I thought about it, it was too late, the phrase was there, already part of us, and the fact that we ran a restaurant made it a private joke. ‘P of the P,’ Stuart would whisper to me, when we were with other people.

  Well, P of the P to you, ex-husband, P of the fucking P to you. I’ve been out with a number of guys, and I’m currently in a relationship, so I’m not just talking about you, Stuart Hughes, but if you take this personally I’ll understand. Some people lie when they fall in love, some people tell the truth. Some people do both, by telling honest lies, which is what most of us do. ‘Yes, I like jazz,’ we’ll say, when we mean, ‘I could like it with you.’ Love is meant to change your life—right? So it’s an honest lie if you say things you aren’t sure of. All the way up to ‘I want you to have my kids.’

  And that’s all the way it went up to in your case, didn’t it, Stuart? Proof of the fucking Pud to you, Mr. Ex. Show the photograph, that’s what I say, show the photograph. Some lies are more honest than others.

  Ellie Look, I’m not complaining, but if you really want to know it goes like this.

  I’m twenty-three, nearly twenty-four, and I’ve been what those sur
veys call sexually active for a third of my life. Yeah, yeah, fifteen, I know, against the law or whatever. Also normal. And if I counted—which I don’t—I bet I’ve shagged far more boys than my mum has in her entire life, and that’s the way it is too. And I’ve lived with one of them so I’ve been in love. And I’ve had a married man for a bit, which was OK but not much different except he told me more lies than the others. And—what else?—I’ve been to college and I’ve got a job and I’ve been round the world and I’ve done the usual drugs and I’ve got the vote and I dress how I want and people who haven’t seen me for a year or so or more say, Hey, Ellie, you’re really so grown up now.

  Except I don’t feel it. Not when I look at people who are grown up, people like Gillian, say. Then I feel incredibly young, and a fraud if you really want to know, as if someone’s going to point the finger any moment and say I’m ignorant and a fake and I have the mental and emotional age of twelve, and I know I’ll just agree. I can’t imagine I’ll ever pass for grown up.

  When I said that about the married man I didn’t mean Stuart. I mean, I hadn’t counted him.

  On the other hand, when you look at them, most grown-ups are really fuck-ups. My parents split up when I was ten. At least half my friends’ parents split up too. They always say: oh Ellie, it’s not a failure, you mustn’t think of it like that, blah blah, it’s just that we grew apart and we’re being so much more honest than our parents, who carried on living together even when they were bored to death and hated one another, just because of social convention, so can’t you see that it’s both more honest and in the long run less painful blah blah blah when all they’re really saying is I’m shagging someone else.