‘You think I made it up?’
‘On the contrary. It’s a well-known tale with many variants, much studied in my field. It even has a name – the Unwitting Thief.’
‘Really,’ Beard said coldly. ‘How interesting.’
‘Actually, it is. Across the variants are some stable characteristics. For example, the wrongly accused is generally a marginal figure, often threatening – a tinker, an immigrant, a punk, even someone with a disability. Your well-built young man with the earrings fits perfectly. The wrongly accused usually performs an act of kindness for the unwitting thief, and this makes the moment of truth all the more agonising. In your case, he lifts down your luggage. One theory is that the tale of the Unwitting Thief – it’s known in the field as UT – expresses anxiety and guilt about our hostility towards minorities. Perhaps it acts in the culture as an unconscious corrective.’
‘It must have occurred to you,’ Beard said, determined to smile, ‘that now and then it actually happens, that people’s stories are real. You know, in an age of mass transport, people squashed up together carrying food in identical wrappers.’
‘What interests us is the way the tale passes in and out of fashion, goes from lip to lip, falls from view, reappears a few years later in a different form by a process we call communal re-creation. UT was widely known in the States in the early nineteen hundreds. We don’t have records of it here until the fifties, and by the early seventies it was everywhere. The writer Douglas Adams put a version of it in a novel in the mid eighties. He always insisted it had actually happened to him on a train – and that’s another common feature. By claiming it as personal experience, people localise and authenticate the story – it happened to them, it happened to a friend of theirs – and insulate it from the archetype. They make it original, they claim copyright. UT has appeared in stories by Jeffrey Archer and, I think, by Roald Dahl, it’s been told as a true story on the BBC and in the Guardian. It’s the plot of at least two films – The Lunch Date and Boeuf Bourgignon, and it’s also . . .’
‘I’m sorry to disappoint you,’ Beard said, ‘but my experience belongs to me, not the collective bloody unconscious.’
The folklorist had a certain autistic doggedness. ‘Yes, what’s new about your version is the crisps. I’ve heard biscuits, apples, cigarettes, whole canteen lunches, never crisps. I might write it up for the Contemporary Legend Quarterly, if you don’t mind. I’ll change your name, of course.’
But Beard had turned aside to touch a waiter’s elbow.
The pale pension funder with the little moustache said, ‘So these stories go the rounds like dirty jokes.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Have you heard this story about Bristol Zoo and the car-park attendant. You see, for twenty-four years . . .’
Beard said to the waiter, ‘I don’t care, as long as it’s not a single malt. A triple, straight up, one ice cube, and would you mind bringing it immediately.’
It was six forty-five. There remained only thirteen minutes of contracted mingling. That it would soon be with him, in his hand, his first serious drink of the day, was already reviving his spirits. That, and the prospect of an evening with Melissa. Confident that a waiter in such an establishment would take the trouble to track him down, he walked away from Mellon, who was holding forth on narrative subtypes of blameless theft, and crossed the room to talk to a mild-mannered man in derivatives.
She was beautiful, she was interesting, she was good (she was truly a good person), so what was wrong with Melissa Browne? It took him more than a year to find out. There was a flaw in her character, like a trapped bubble in a window pane, that warped her view of Michael Beard, and made her believe that he could plausibly fit the part of a good husband and father. He did not understand and could not quite forgive this lapse of judgement. She knew the history, she had some good evidence in front of her, and there was much else she should reasonably suspect, but she remained steadfast in her delusion that she could reclaim him, make him kind, honest, loving and, above all, loyal. Her longing was not, as he thought she saw it, to transform him as he approached his seventh decade, but gently to return him to his natural state, his truest self, the one he failed to lay claim to. This was an unstated ambition. For example, it was not hectoring or denial that would help him lose weight, but lovingly concocted, wholesome, delicious meals, which would ease him back to the shape he had at thirty – his Platonic form. And if her recipes failed, she would have him as he was.
She endured his absences, the silences from abroad, because she was certain he was bound to see the matter her way in the end. Besides, her own life was busy enough. Her patient conviction was touching, and Beard, never a complete cad, felt it like a reproach. During the period of his press bother she had seen him at his worst and was undeterred. She seemed to love him more. With all the passion of a rationalist, she bore him up through the unreasonable storm. But she never brought her reason to bear on her love. If she had, the affair could have been over in minutes. It troubled him to discover that she was one of those women who can only love a man in need of rescue. And she preferred the rescuee to be much older than her. Was he to fall in line then with her sad troupe of past lovers and one ex-husband, elderly dullards, reprobates, losers, louts – exploiters all – whom her kindness had failed to recuperate and who had cheated her out of a child? None of them had banqueted with the King of Sweden, but they were comrades of a sort. Allowing himself to be Melissa’s one success would be a proper mark of distinction, but he did not think he was up to the job. He thought he too would cheat her out of a child.
‘Why me?’ he once asked, when he lay post-coitally supine on her bed. The question seemed ripe, and complimentary in the suggestion that he was not worthy.
‘Because,’ was her reply, and she moved to sit astride him and brought him on again, her rotund slow-moving Michael, who had long thought that an encore within the half-hour was light years behind him.
She owned a string – if three was a string – of shops across north London selling dance clothes. Professionals from the London companies were her customers, as well as all kinds of amateurs, including young mothers who had tired of yoga classes, and even men as ancient as Beard, inspired to take up tap or tango in one last throw at feeling young. But at the centre of a barely profitable business was an unageing core of tiny dreamers, an inexhaustible corps de ballet replenished down the generations – little girls with an old-fashioned yearning to be in tutus, tights, leggings, pumps, twirling before the mirror and the rail, under the stern eye of a flinty ex-prima donna with a heart of gold. The dream of hard work on scuffed boards, of the first night, the first breathless leap onstage before astonished gasps, had survived the electronic age, the girl bands and TV soaps. The resilience of the fantasy gave an impression of genetic compulsion. The smallest tutu in Melissa’s stock would fit an infant girl of twelve months. The mothers of these girls remembered their own dreams and sometimes spent hard to live them vicariously.
But dancing in the modern age was precarious. In public consciousness, it surged and fell like a futures market, and Melissa had to be quick in response down the line to distant warehouses. A sudden TV documentary, and during one week four hundred men were in her shops wanting a certain shirt to tango in. A certain movie, a certain musical, a clip on MTV could drive an insatiable, transient need. One lavatory-paper advertisement with a Swan Lake theme, and there were more little girls than ever, but clamouring now for rainbow tights, or leggings with a laddered look, or a leotard with an artful tear, just like they wore in the film. And then came lean times when no one danced but dancers and the core of little dreamers, and no one even wanted to look like a dancer, and Melissa could only wait. Useless, she said, to make predictions.
As a hedge against these fluctuations, she widened the appeal of her shops. The eight-year-olds who longed to be ballerinas were a small fraction of their age group, but they shared with their cohort an inexplicable taste for the colour pink. Not
just any shade, but a particular soft, candied, babyish pink. All three shops made over part of their window displays to this gentle enticement. Beard visited Melissa at work one Saturday morning and stood in the high-pitched throng to witness the strange power wielded by a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Who was instructing the girls, how did they know how to behave, how to crave a pink pencil and sharpener, or pink trainers, bed linen, hair grip, satchel, notepaper? Pedantically, he tracked down a paper by an esteemed neuroscientist in Newcastle whose work suggested a gender difference in retinal sensitivity, with females tending to favour the red end of the spectrum. But that hardly explained the Saturday stampede through the shop, or the radical reduction Melissa was able to make in her bank borrowing within the year. In the pink for months! Then, suddenly, colour exhaustion set in and the magic was gone. Overnight, girls did not need pink things. Unwanted stock could not be unloaded in a knockdown sale. It was beyond explanation. There should have been a younger generation of little sisters fresh to pink, but they were not moved. It was not as if another shade took its place. As a sole motivator, colour itself had faded. Pink went to ground, and then, to her credit, at the moment of its resurgence, Melissa was ready.
Despite this liability and daily worries over staff and suppliers, Dance Studio appeared to Beard a haven of innocent aspiration and pleasures. Once, calling at the Primrose Hill branch to take Melissa to lunch, he waited for her on a stool at the back of the shop and took it all in – Lenochka, the assistant with spiky cropped hair dyed black, lisping Russian-inflected cockney through pierced-tongue jewellery, the piped Tchaikovsky, the scent of sandalwood, a general air of unmockable devotion to children and adults at play. Sitting in the gloom among half-unpacked cardboard boxes he indulged a fantasy (a windowless room sometimes worked on him this way), incrementally erotic, of retiring from the world’s ills and gripes and labouring back here, Melissa’s partner in all things, cocooned in the stock room, perhaps improving the inventory software or planning special events, with talks and demonstrations, and so placidly tracing the passing years in a swoon of sex and dullness, and one evening, obedient to Melissa’s prompting – impossible tawdry dream! – persuading Lenochka to make a threesome on the wide bed in the meticulous flat on Fitzroy Street, and discovering for himself how it felt, a flesh-embedded tongue-jewel’s most intimate touch. He surprised himself. He could pass a lifetime right here, dreaming among the unsorted leggings.
That was one haven. The other was Melissa’s apartment, a two-minute stroll from the Primrose Hill branch, almost opposite the building where Sylvia Plath once put her head in the oven after setting out bread and milk for her sleeping children. The poet, a daughter of the fifties, was a diligent housewife who kept about her an unpoetically tidy domain, like Melissa’s. Beard, on the other hand, was a domestic slob, clean about his person, vain about his clothes, but a dedicated sower of unconscious disorder, for whom the retrieval of his own dropped towel or the closing of a drawer or cupboard door or disposal of a wrapper or apple core would have seemed as purposeful an act as spring cleaning. The lady who once tended his Marylebone flat had walked out without explanation, but he knew why and had not found a replacement. His third wife, Eleanor, once discovered in the pages of a valuable first edition an ancient rasher of his breakfast bacon doubling as a bookmark.
Like many slobs, Beard was appreciative of the order that others created without effort, or any that he noticed. In Melissa’s flat, which was spread over two floors, he was particularly happy. She lived such an uncluttered life at home. There were open perspectives untroubled by furniture. The foot-wide beeswaxed floorboards recovered from a Gascony chateau shone with dull perfection. There were no loose objects, all the books were on the shelves in the right order, at least until he visited, and the art on the walls was sparse lithographs, mostly of dancers. There was a single statue, a Henry Moore maquette. Other surfaces justified themselves by their own particular empty dustless gleam. In the bedroom, no clothes were on view, and the bed, unruffled as a millpond, was as big as any he had seen in an American hotel. Melissa’s was the sort of place whose ambience Beard could wreck in two minutes by sitting down in it, shrugging off his coat, opening his briefcase and removing his shoes. He never felt at home until he was shoeless. But he was impressed by her apartment, it seemed like the embodiment of mental freedom, and he did his best not to litter it, and was partially successful.
A burglar entering the property, silencing the alarm and taking the trouble to glance about before settling down to work, would never have guessed the nature or even the gender of its owner. The apartment was subdued, cool, masculine in its light browns and battleship greys. Whereas in her shops, as in bed, Melissa was loud, cheerful, generous. She stood only an inch higher than her Michael, was rounded and soft and wide-hipped like a Renoir bather, though not remotely in Beard’s plump league. She had black hair that was curly or curled (he would never ask), dark eyes and rich skin colour – nut brown, with a bloom of red across the cheekbones that deepened when she was furious or suddenly happy. She claimed a dash of Tobagan and Venezuelan blood, like Angostura bitters she said, through her great-grandmother. Whatever the truth, she thrived in a heatwave, loathed the cold, defined as under fifteen degrees, and believed she belonged in some other country further south, but it was too late to shift now.
Perhaps she chose the decor in the Fitzroy Street flat to highlight her wardrobe. She wore bold prints (the Tobago inheritance) or deep-hued silks, and had an array of stilettos in reds and greens as well as black, and pastel dancing shoes that never fitted. At home, arranged on a sombre sofa against a neutral wall, she shimmered in her colours, in Beard’s eyes, like a new-minted Gauguin in his Marquesas phase.
When he visited, she cooked up a tropical storm. Her well-balanced meals were spicy and much to his taste. Any advantage to his health was easily offset by outsized second helpings. She never served herself much of her own cooking, but she watched him eat from across the table with smouldering satisfaction, telling him that hot spices would burn off his fat and make him an ardent lover, or that she was fattening him up so he could never run away. The latter was closer to the truth. After one of her spreads, feeling neither thinner nor even faintly aroused, he would sit in near silence, sweating in an armchair for half an hour to recover.
How did he ever deserve her? She ran him baths on winter nights and lit candles around the bathroom and squeezed into the oversized roll-top tub with him. She bought him shirts, silk ties, cologne, wine, scotch (she did not drink), underwear and socks. When it was time for him to leave, she booked his flights. In a poor return, he brought back expensive presents from airport duty-free, a modern form of parsimony by way of flagrant convenience and notional tax avoidance, but she did not seem to mind. She loved his physics, the indecipherable sheets of photovoltaic calculation, his ‘Arabic’, that often spilled across the oak boards, and she made him explain – again – the symbols, the Dirac bras and kets, the tensor products, the Young diagrams. But she too could have been a mathematician. He had seen her complete the morning newspaper sudoku at a speed with which others might fill out a form, hurrying to be done before she rushed to work. She approved of his mission and loyally read climate-change stories in the press. But she told him once that to take the matter seriously would be to think about it all the time. Everything else shrank before it. And so, like everyone she knew, she could not take it seriously, not entirely. Daily life would not permit it. He sometimes quoted this observation in talks.
She talked about her previous lovers with a freedom he could not match. She had never troubled to get seriously involved with a contemporary. Of the various men she described, all were fifteen or twenty years older. The one exception was early on, and he was even more ancient. At the age of twenty she had a year-long affair with a married man, a professional golfer of fifty-six. Now he was seventy-seven, and they still kept in touch. Her preference in partners had a history. She grew up by Clapham Common, in
south London, an only child, whose parents divorced when she was eleven. She loved her father and lived with her mother, with whom she often fought. When her mother married the last in a series of ‘obnoxious’ boyfriends, Melissa went to live with her father across the Common, just as he suffered a stroke. From the age of fourteen she nursed him (intimately, for he was almost completely paralysed) until his death four years later. She told Beard what a therapist friend had told her years ago. Caring for the father she loved at a formative period in her sexual development, then failing to keep him alive, she was guiltily bound in subsequent relationships to the task of finding a replacement, retrieving him from the grave, rescuing him from his misfortune and redeeming her failure.
Beard was equally bound to believe that this was the kind of nonsense that science was invented to protect him from. But he said nothing. So many unexamined assumptions, so many unproven elements! An unconscious that wrote its own craftily concealed stories peppered with inept symbolism? Not a shred of neurological evidence. Repression? Empirically, no such mechanism had been shown to exist. On the contrary, unwanted memories were hard to forget. Sublimation? Likewise, a fairy tale that no serious investigation could sustain. Attending to the toilet needs of her father could just as likely have put her off older men for life, and then there would have been an equally confident Freudian confabulation. Many women who had never nursed a dying father, or had any analogous experience, preferred older men. Why were Melissa’s lovers (with one exception) only fifteen or twenty years older, when her father was thirty-seven the day she was born? Could her unconscious, so literal in other regards, not do the simple adding-up?
The truth was simpler. Women knew it in their hearts. Since he was too tactful to say it to her, he was obliged to set it out impartially for himself. Repetition was helpful. Older men were better companions, they were seasoned lovers, they knew the world, they knew themselves. Unlike younger men, they held their emotions in balance. They had read more, seen more, they were warmer, kinder, less boastful, more tolerant, less violent. They were more interesting, they could choose the wine. They had more money. Besides, it irked him to believe that it might not be him she was drawn to, but some symbol of seniority of which he was an acceptable approximation. He was further irked to hear that when she met her first serious love, the errant golfer, he was the same age as her father when he died.