The walkers were mainly women, and they made me welcome. If they thought my attire was out of place, they kept their opinions to themselves. The surprise was Mandy. She had changed a lot. It had only been ten years—eleven, she reminded me. She was…middle-aged.
Claire had never seemed middle-aged to me, though she was now fifty-two. Was it the gym and the absence of kids, or had the change been so gradual that I still saw her as she was when I met her? We were both old enough to be grandparents, but I did not feel it. Years ago, I had groaned when my father said he still felt twenty-five inside.
Mandy had not only put on weight and wrinkles: there was something matronly about her bearing and her personality, too. She had not had an easy time, and it was showing.
The walk was tougher than I had expected. The North was having a wet year and the streams—the gills—had turned into rivers. I managed to keep up, as there were a few in our group who were quite a bit older, though they had an advantage in experience and sure-footedness. I shared the hand-holding and catching duties with Kate as we negotiated the crossings. Unexpectedly, I found myself enjoying it.
There was a point when I was standing, hand outstretched to catch my fellow adventurers as they made the last rock-hop, when it came to Claire’s turn and she lost her balance, just as our hands connected. But I had a grip, she held on, and I pulled her up to the bank and a brief hug. It was a nice moment that probably would not have been so noticeable if our relationship had been on firmer ground.
It was not all Chris Bonington and the North Face of the Eiger. I had a chance to talk with Mandy, and found that we had little to say to each other. It was polite but stilted. Are you working? Who looks after the kids? Of course I’d ask that if you were a man.
Towards the end of the day, I caught up with her again and dipped my toe in the metaphorical water.
‘Are you still in touch with Randall?’
‘I don’t have any choice. He’s legally entitled to speak to my children.’
Ouch. Biologically speaking, ‘my children’ was correct, as there had been a problem with Randall’s sperm. But it set the tone. And set her off.
‘You know the grief-process model? Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. DABDA. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. A divorce is like a death. So the model applies. I looked at it and I thought, bugger this, I don’t want to end up at Acceptance. I’m never going to accept what he did. And I don’t want to end up depressed. You can see what I’m doing, can’t you? I’m working back through the stages.’
‘And obviously you weren’t going to end up bargaining endlessly.’
‘I didn’t bargain at all. I spent five minutes in Denial, got to Anger and decided there was no place from there that I wanted to go.’
‘So you’re still angry?’
‘You can’t tell?’
By the time we reached our lodgings, checked in and hung our wet gear in the drying room, I was exhausted and fell on the bed while Claire showered. The intimacy of a hotel room is different from that of a three-bedroom house. Claire was walking around naked sorting out her clothes, whereas at home she would have travelled from the bathroom to her bedroom wrapped in a towel. What would it take to make this a part of my life again?
Dinner was a big affair, with wooden tables pushed together to form a single long one. The inn had a good feel about it—low ceilings, not too many right angles and an open fire. The rain was bucketing down outside.
We had joined with the other half of the club, who were walking in the opposite direction. Car keys were exchanged according to a scheme that ensured both groups would have transport at the end of their walks before returning the cars to their owners at prearranged locations. It was all quite clever and we were left in no doubt about who the clever person was.
I put Ray in his early to mid-sixties. He was shortish, bearded, a bit of a garden gnome.
Tap on cider glass: ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome. First, if I might, a few formalities.’
Apologies were tabled, the new walker was welcomed and tomorrow’s weather forecast (rain) was presented. Rules for completing the car swap, sharing the bill and finding the toilets were elucidated before Ray returned to his seat at the head of the table.
He stood again as the dinner plates were being cleared and pulled out a concertina. He must have carried it all day on his back, an option not available to a pianist.
He played a few folk tunes and, to give him his due, he was all right. He knew what he was doing and had an enthusiastic audience, not least Claire.
‘Enough of my amateur noodling,’ he said after a bow and round of applause. ‘I shall relinquish the spotlight to Amanda, queen of the Johanna.’
There was a piano. Mandy was a competent player, at least with a sheet of music in front of her. But her response was predictable. ‘Oh, no, Adam’s much better than me.’
Mandy was sitting beside me. I realised later that Ray must have assumed I was her new man.
Claire, on the other side, squeezed my hand. ‘Sorry. You don’t have to.’
I shook my head at Ray, but it was only a formality.
I sang ‘Walking in Memphis’ and found I was enjoying myself. I had forgotten how much I loved performing. The opening line about putting on blue suede shoes earned a round of laughter and applause—they had noticed my kit—as did the reference to the pouring rain. The lyrics were not without resonance for me, either. The piano player asks the singer if he’s a Christian. I was tonight, in the sense of being part of something beyond my usual world. With my partner. Feeling the afterglow of hard exercise. And a pint of good ale on the table beside me. What was I missing out on in life? What was holding me back?
I did the Dylan–Springs obscurity ‘Walk Out in the Rain’ and got another cheer for the line about sore feet.
Then a familiar scene began to play out. A punter gets up, walks self-consciously to the piano and asks for a song. Said punter is usually male, and the song is of deep emotional significance to him.
Once I was included in a team-building retreat, despite not being on permanent staff, probably because I was a contributor to the team’s dysfunction. It might well have been my last chance: when there are problems with teamwork, it’s easier to offload the contractor than fire the permanent staff. After dinner, we gathered around the piano and the boss, who had my contract in his gift, asked me to play Bob Seger’s ‘Against the Wind’.
By the time we had put aside commitments and deadlines, and finished running against the wind with people from long ago who were not our current partners, there were tears in his eyes, and possibly mine, and I got two renewals of that contract before the love ran out.
One day, somewhere in the world, someone was going to request ‘Delilah’ or ‘I Did What I Did for Maria’, and a pianist would have to decide whether to call the cops.
What was Concertina Ray going to ask for? Most of the time, requests are about love: unrequited love, lost love and, occasionally, love being experienced right now—‘You Are So Beautiful’. Then there are songs of angst, of loneliness and alienation: Jon Voight walking New York to the accompaniment of ‘Everybody’s Talking’. And the unadulterated ego songs: I had Ray picked for ‘My Way’.
‘D’you know any Gilbert and Sullivan?’ he said.
All right: that was not what I was expecting. I could name the operettas, but my repertoire was limited. I played a couple of chords, found the tune and sang:
I am the very model of a modern major-general.
Would that do? It would not.
‘Gilbert O’Sullivan.’
‘Alone Again, Naturally’. Not the first time I had been asked for that one. Despite myself, I felt a twinge for this guy and his concertina and his once-a-month social circle, using a song to send a desperate message that he couldn’t bring himself to say in his own words.
I played the introduction, and again he stopped me—and spelled out what he wanted.
I had never been a
sked to play the song he requested, but I knew it. The lyrics have not travelled well. There may have been a time when an uncle’s love for his niece, with explicit reference to age difference and marriage, was seen as innocuous, but that time has passed. I doubted Concertina Ray wanted to confess an interest in little girls. Too late, anyway: I was already feeling my way through the intro.
Let me be fair to Ray. People take what they need from a song and ignore the rest. ‘Walk Out in the Rain’ is not about hiking. ‘Walking on Sunshine’, the chorus of which brought back happy memories of driving down the Great Ocean Road with Angelina, has lines about waiting for the loved one to write, to return, which passed me by at the time.
Ray probably had not thought much past the title of his selection and the general romantic feeling of the tune. As I sang it, he turned from me and looked out into the audience. At Claire.
Clair. That’s the title and the first word. It only took me a few moments to realise what was going on, but by then I was committed. Ray was channelling the song I was singing, projecting it at my partner, apparently in ignorance of our relationship.
I played it straight, sang da-da-da over the dodgy bits, and made it a proper love song, as though I was singing it directly for her. Ray played some nice fills on the concertina, and when I nailed the key change from A to B flat in the instrumental break, he followed without missing a beat. After thanking me, he took the vacant seat beside Claire—my seat—while I sang ‘Goodnight Irene’ and tried to gauge what was going on between them. I got no sense that she was telling him that he’d made a fool of himself.
I left it to Claire with an e to raise the subject. I had just been playing requests.
Upstairs, she was almost embarrassingly positive about my turn on the piano.
‘Are you okay? I know you don’t like to play, but you looked like you were enjoying yourself. Anyway, thank you. You were great. I love you playing.’
It had been a long time since either of us had said those words, even with the qualification. Then she added, ‘I don’t know what’s changed lately, but keep doing it.’
I had walked twelve miles up and down hills in the rain and drunk several pints, but we managed to make up for missing Friday night.
Before we fell asleep, she gave me a non-answer to the question that was still in my mind.
‘Don’t worry about Ray. He’s a sweetie.’
18
I was relieved that the hike was only two days. I had woken to discover that hiking used different muscles from jogging, and the second day was tougher than the first. I had a fuzzy head from drinking, though the rain set that right, and I found myself walking with Mandy again.
‘How are things with you and Claire?’ she asked.
‘Not too bad. Actually, pretty good.’
‘That’s the way it looked last night. I must say it’s a relief. I’d got the impression you two were having problems. Claire’s needed a bit of support with all the stress she’s going through at work.’
‘We’ve both been pretty flat out. What’s the story with Ray?’
‘You noticed. He’s a bit funny, at first, but he’s all right. He lost his wife a couple of years ago. You’ve nothing to fear. As long as you take care of Claire.’
I wanted to press her, confirm that there definitely was nothing to fear from an unattached man who had declared an interest in my attractive partner who was feeling unsupported at home, but we had apparently talked enough about me.
Mandy launched into the divorce story without prompting—a long tirade about the custody dispute. The problem, to my simple way of thinking, seemed to be that they wanted to live in different countries, but the story she told was a litany of complaints about someone I had once counted as my best friend. I interrupted as the muddy track up the hill robbed her of breath.
‘You know, as a friend, someone who likes both of you, it’s pretty sad to see it come to this. If you add up all the good things—’
‘You’re a T, aren’t you? A Myers-Briggs Thinking type? Am I right?’
We did not spend all the time at those team-building retreats singing around the piano.
‘INTP,’ I said. I remembered the result of the personality test but not what all the letters stood for.
I for Introvert, of course—a surprise for those who confuse a love of performance with a desire for intimacy with strangers.
And there was the tolerance for uncertainty. P for perceiving rather than J for judging. That one had stuck for obvious reasons: ‘Ps often don’t understand that Js need to get closure, to have a decision: Js would prefer the wrong decision to no decision at all,’ the facilitator had said. Was that all it was? Had one different letter determined the course of my life?
‘Right,’ said Mandy. ‘T. So you make decisions based on cold, hard facts. You and Claire. I’m an F. Feelings. I make decisions based on values.’
I remembered this one now. ‘And emotions.’ Ha. That didn’t sound so superior.
‘Whatever. Randall violated my values.’
I waited.
‘We went to a marriage counsellor and he asked us to rate our marriage on four dimensions.’
‘Sounds like he knew his audience.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Models. Grids. Speaking your language. A two-by-two matrix, right?’
‘No, it wasn’t. If I’d meant a matrix I would have said two orthogonal dimensions. And he uses it with everyone. The four dimensions were Emotional, Practical, Intellectual and Physical—meaning sexual. And what do you think he rated me as sexually?’
‘The therapist?”
‘Yes, the therapist. I slept with the therapist so he could score me.’
Ha ha. Except someone once had sex with me to find out if she was any good.
‘No,’ said Mandy. ‘Randall. We had to rate each other.’
‘Out of what—a seven-point Likert scale? Somewhat satisfied? Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied?’
‘Out of ten. What do you think he said? I suppose you guys talked about that sort of thing while you were doing the barbecue. What did he say to you?’
Women will never believe that men don’t spend a lot of time talking about their partners, and that when they do it’s seldom in a negative way. In all the hours I had spent drinking Coors and marinating ribs with Randall, neither of us had ever asked the other: ‘What’s the missus like in the sack?’ Randall was the only person I had shared the Angelina story with, but I had never mentioned her sexual journey, which had been an important part of it, let alone any of the details.
I knew more about the San Francisco Giants than I did about Mandy’s performance in bed. I was happy for things to stay that way. I made an attempt to convey that sentiment without appearing uncaring. She ignored it.
‘I’m not trying to say I’m something special. I’m just normal. I mean, I don’t think most women want to—’
‘Too much information. What did he score you?’
‘Seven. He gave me a bloody seven.’
‘Better than zero. Or six. I’d have thought that was all right. Leaves room for improvement.’
She wasn’t smiling. ‘You know, on the NPS, a seven isn’t even a recommendation.’
‘What’s the NPS?’
‘Net Promoter Score. Rating whether customers will recommend you.’
‘Right.’
‘The point is, there I was trying to look after twins who took turns in staying awake. I didn’t have time for sex, and then he criticises me for it.’
‘I suppose if you’re not having it at all…’
‘That’s the bloody point, isn’t it? He was rating me on how I was before it stopped. Explains everything. I felt like asking how he rated her.’
‘Her?’
‘Her.’
‘You’re talking about…’
‘There’s only one person I’d be talking about, unless you know about others.’
‘From what he told me, it was pretty awful.’
/> It had certainly been awful after Randall had confessed. If he had been in England, he might have talked to me instead of a therapist about his guilt over a drunken one-night stand. And I might have told him about a recording my dad had of a Lenny Bruce performance from about 1960—a triple album on vinyl. I used to play it from time to time, partly to wind up my mother with the bad language. There was one routine that stayed with me, about a guy in an ambulance who has lost his foot in a multi-fatality road accident, and he’s coming on to the nurse. She can’t understand how he can be interested in sex at time like this. ‘I got horny,’ he says, pathetically.
It was probably a better explanation of what Randall did than anything his therapist came up with. Lenny Bruce laid some further advice on my twelve-year-old self: Never confess. Even if your wife catches you in flagrante, deny everything. That, he implies, is the social contract.
Things have changed since then, and Randall’s therapist helped him reach a point where he could share his story with Mandy, explain that it was impulsive and meaningless and that he was terribly, terribly sorry, so the marriage could continue on a basis of openness and trust. And the rest is history. When it comes to infidelity, every partner becomes a Myers-Briggs F-for-feelings with their values violated.
‘How did you rate him?’ I asked.
‘How do you think? After what he’d done and then having the hide—the sheer bloody hide—to compare me to her on sexual performance, I rated us emotionally as zero. So everything else was zero, too. If you’ve got no relationship, the rest doesn’t matter.’
Message conveyed, Mandy strode ahead, the rain came down again, and I was left inside my hooded jacket with my thoughts. How would I rate my own life at the moment?