Ninety minutes later he was disturbed by the ring of his palmtop, and came properly awake with it already pressed to his ear as he listened to the voice of the girl whose existence he had done all he decently could to suppress. But here she was, Catriona Beard, as irrepressible as a banned book.
‘Daddy,’ she said solemnly. ‘What are you doing?’
It was six o’clock on Sunday morning in England. She would have been woken by the early light and gone straight from her bed to the sitting-room telephone and pressed the first button on the left.
‘Darling, I’m working,’ he said with equal solemnity. He could easily have told her he was sleeping, but he seemed to need a lie to accommodate the guilt he immediately felt at the sound of her. Many conversations with his three-year-old daughter reminded him of dealings over the years with various women in the course of which he had explained himself implausibly, or backtracked or found excuses, and had been seen through.
‘You’re in bed because your voice is croaky.’
‘I’m reading in bed. And what are you doing? What can you see?’
He heard her sharp intake of breath and the sucking sound of clean tongue on milk teeth as she considered which part of her newly acquired net of language to cast about her. She would be by or on the sofa which faced the large bright window and a cherry tree in leaf, she would see the bowl of heavy stones which always interested her, the Moore maquette, the neutral colours of the sunlit walls, the long straight lines of oak boards.
Finally she said, ‘Why don’t you come in my house?’
‘Dearest, I’m thousands of miles away.’
‘If you can go you can come.’
The logic of this made him pause, and he was beginning to tell her that he would see her soon when she cut across him with a cheerful thought. ‘I’m going in Mummy’s bed now. Bye.’ The line went dead.
Beard rolled onto his back and closed his eyes and tried to imagine the world from his daughter’s point of view. Of time, time zones and physical distance she had as yet no proper conception, and she lived with a machine whose wondrous properties she took for granted. At the press of a button she could speak to her disembodied father, as though at a séance to a spirit of the dead, a ghost on the other side. Sometimes she could summon him in person, mostly she failed. When he did show up, he always brought a gift, clumsily chosen in an airport, often inappropriate – a pack of twelve rainbow T-shirts that were too small, a soft toy she thought too babyish but was too kind to say, an electronic game she did not understand, a box of chocolate liqueurs he was obliged to eat himself in one go. Melissa tried to talk him out of bringing presents – ‘It’s you she wants’ – but Beard’s lifelong habit of mollifying girls with surprises buried in wrapping paper was impossible to break. Without a present, he arrived naked, exposed to raw, unpredictable demands, unable to make amends for his absence, required to exert himself in an uncomfortable personal dimension, obliged to engage.
Even at the age of three, Catriona was the kind of person who felt on opening a gift a responsibility towards the feelings of the giver. How could a consciousness so new be so finely attuned? She did not want her father disappointed in her pleasure. The T-shirts, so she reassured him, were not wasted, for one day they would be useful to her baby brother, a tender being whose arrival she anticipated with eerie confidence. She was an intimate, sociable girl of near-unbearable sensitivity. She might hear in a chance remark an inflection, a raised tone, that she took to be a criticism or a reprimand and she would be horrified, and tearful, and then, quite often, she would be sobbing, and not easily reassured. Sometimes, it seemed, she experienced another mind as a tangible force field, whose waves were overwhelming, like Atlantic breakers. This awareness of others was an affliction and a gift. She was bright and confiding, funny and astute, but her emotional delicacy made her vulnerable, and made her father uneasy. Once, some harmless remark of his, some mild expression of impatience, had caused her great unhappiness and brought her mother hurrying into the room to gather the child in her arms. He did not enjoy being made to seem a cad, nor did it suit him, it was constraining, to be sensitive all day long.
Would he have been better off with a bullet-headed, shin-kicking son? Probably not. What bound him to her – at least, as far as he could be bound to anyone – was her insistence, her unconditional, uncritical love. For Catriona, it was simple. He was her father and she claimed him for herself. She understood that his job was to save the world, and since the world was her mother, Primrose Hill, the dance shop and her playgroup, she was fiercely proud. What use Melissa saying that the father did not need to be involved? Catriona would not permit him to defect. She did not care or even notice that he was fat and short and was not very nice and was growing a triple chin, she loved him, and she owned him. She knew her rights. That was another reason why he felt guilt, and brought her presents to distract her from throwing herself at his stomach as he came through the door, and climbing onto his lap and whispering a little girl’s secrets in his ear the moment he had sat down after a tiring journey. Like his own father, Beard did not find it easy to be physically affectionate with a child. Like her mother, Catriona was prepared to love unequally, and did not notice his reticence.
In all, he was an irresolute parent and lover, neither committing to nor decently abandoning his family. He clung from habit to a youthful notion of independence that was unusual in a man of almost sixty-two. On arriving back in London he often stayed in the Dorset Square flat, at least for the first two or three nights, until its grime and multiple defects drove him out. Yellowish-grey mushrooms were flourishing along a line where the wall met the ceiling in the kitchen. A gutter outside, which in theory belonged to a neighbour, had cracked and rainwater was penetrating the brickwork. But Beard did not want to confront the belligerent, partially deaf man upstairs, and he did not want to initiate the hacking and plastering, noise and intrusion of a thorough repair. In the hallway the light always failed, however often he changed the bulb. As soon as he turned the switch it popped. In his bathroom upstairs the cold water had long ago run dry. To shave, he ran the hot slowly, and became adept at finishing before the water scalded him. To take a bath it was necessary to fill the tub and let the water cool for an hour or so. These and other small problems required deep attention, and so he preferred to improvise. A large vase collected raindrops in the spare bedroom, an iron foot scraper held the fridge door closed, a frayed and curling length of grubby string substituted for a chain on the ancient lavatory cistern.
But there were no accommodations to be made with the matted, sticky carpets, unvacuumed since his last cleaning lady departed six years back. Nor with the piles of unsorted papers, letters, junk mail and periodicals, the boxes of empty bottles, the odorous sofa, or the grime that seemed to have caked the very air as well as every surface and all the plates and cups and bed linen. He used to tell himself that although the flat was scruffy, it was an office of a sort, it was where he had cracked Tom Aldous’s file and reinvigorated his life. At Primrose Hill Melissa and Catriona liked talking to him, whereas here he could sprawl in the lap of squalor and read undisturbed. But that was not always the case now because his ankles itched. The fleas were moving in. There was so much to do to make the place tolerable that no single task seemed worth the trouble. Why refurbish it, why even carry out the dusty scotch and gin bottles and gather up the corpses of flies and spiders when he might, after all, move in with Melissa?
And this hovel, many years back, after he left Patrice, was supposed to be a stopover on his path to the austere and well-lit refuge, as innocently clean as Eden, purged of clutter and distraction, where a free and open mind could range unimpeded. Everywhere he looked in his apartment, made gloomier by unwashed windows, reflected some aspect of himself, his worst, fattest self, incapable of translating a decent plan into a course of action. At any point in the present, there was always something he would far rather do – read, drink, eat, talk on the phone, drift through the interne
t – than contact an electrician or plumber or a house-cleaning agency, or sort through the three-foot-high paper piles, or answer one of the letters from Tom Aldous’s father. It was the same inertia that had forced Beard to stay on an extra year in Dorset Square, the same laziness that had prompted the purchase from the landlord.
When he could stand no more, of himself, of the place, of himself in the place, he retreated north-westwards to the embraces of his lover and their daughter. Cleaned and ironed clothes were waiting for him in Primrose Hill, and a functioning shower and a meal, and two girls who took it in turns to tell him their news and tease him harmlessly about his girth – the Expanding Universe, Melissa named it – and make him relate his adventures in the American desert in his quest to rescue humankind from self-destruction. He would read to Catriona in bed and she would be so awed by the occasion, by the fact it was not her mother but her father intoning, that she lay on her back in a kind of swoon, gripping the duvet beneath her chin, and barely paid attention. Fighting tiredness, she gazed up with contented and possessive love at the bulk of her father sagging over the tiny Beatrix Potter book in his hands. He was all hers. At that time these were the only tales she cared to hear, but Beard was not the man for Potter’s dystopia of hedgehogs with ironing boards and rabbits in breeches, and he too struggled to stay awake, and sometimes, mid-sentence, his head would snap forward, and then he would come to and re-engage with affectless voice in the matter, say, of a stolen carrot.
Beard in his Texan hotel room, still on his back with the palmtop in his hand, was thirsty but too weary to raise himself and find a bottle of water. All those miles in the air, all those scotches, and twenty-four hours without sleep were pressing him down into his America-sized bed. He felt waves of virtual movement passing through his back and legs, his body’s memory of riding all day the undulations of the stratosphere at three quarters the speed of sound. In this state he was completely without desire but, all the same, he was thinking of Melissa. How did things stand? Generally, after the bedtime story, he would be alone with her at last. At last? These days, he no longer experienced such sharp impatience and urgency, and that was fine, he could concentrate on the food and on hearing about the dance shops. The recession made people feel less like dancing. She was a clever businesswoman, keeping all three shops open by cutting lines, reducing hours but sacking no one. Balletic little girls, in tune with the times, had discovered a taste for black, and middle-aged men no longer tangoed in such numbers, but their wives dropped by for cowboy hats to wear to the line-dancing, which was both unfashionable and popular. Another unexpected boost had been the reality-TV dance contests.
Such talk was soothing, especially in the past frantic weeks, as the on-stream moment for the Lordsburg plant approached. As she chatted he watched her and was certain that in her own, full, rich way, she was as beautiful as ever, and happier than he had ever known her. Motherhood came easily to her. She was warm and relaxed with Catriona, not doting or possessive as she could have been with an only child born three months past her fortieth birthday. Her happiness exceeded anything he had known in his own life, and he thought it had removed her from him partially, placed around her a protective casing that she knew he would never bother to penetrate. She had something magnificent now, a private joy that she thought was not worth the trouble communicating, because he would not understand. She was always pleased to see him, she made love with him as heartily as ever, she encouraged him with Catriona, she even found time to iron his shirts. He gave twenty-five thousand pounds a year to the household, and that was declared more than sufficient. But he suspected that Melissa would have been fine without his money and was just as happy when he was not there.
In effect, she was keeping to the promise she had made many times while they were wrangling over her pregnancy. She would ignore his arguments for an abortion, and in return, she would make no demands. And for his part? He would never have guessed how faithful to himself, how constant he could be. He had made friends with a woman in Lordsburg, a waitress called Darlene, who lived in a trailer on the south side, on the road out to the ghost town of Shakespeare. Darlene was not exactly beautiful, not remotely in Melissa’s class, but nor was Beard much to look at now that he waddled a little when he walked and had developed these supplementary chins, the lowest of which hung like turkey wattle and wobbled when he shook his head. When he asked women he did not know out to dinner, they laughed before they said no.
The point about Darlene was that she said yes, and she was good-natured and funny and liked to drink with him. On his last trip to Lordsburg they had got drunk together in the trailer and in a wild moment he had agreed to marry her. But it was while they were making love, it was rhetorical, a mere expression of excitement. The following night, to avoid the scene that would surely accompany his retraction, he got drunk with her all over again, this time in a bar on the north side of town, and he had almost proposed to her a second time. All this meant was that he was fond of her. She was good company, she was a sport, a trouper. But she was currently adding to the general untidiness of his life by wanting to come to England.
The surprise was this: his existence since Catriona’s birth was much as before. His friends had told him he would be astonished, he would be transformed, his values would change. But nothing was transformed. Catriona was fine, but it was the same old mess. And now that he had entered upon the final active stages of his life, he was beginning to understand that, barring accidents, life did not change. He had been deluded. He had always assumed that a time would come in adulthood, a kind of plateau, when he would have learned all the tricks of managing, of simply being. All mail and emails answered, all papers in order, books alphabetically on the shelves, clothes and shoes in good repair in the wardrobes and all his stuff where he could find it, with the past, including its letters and photographs, sorted into boxes and files, the private life settled and serene, accommodation and finances likewise. In all these years this settlement, the calm plateau, never appeared, and yet he had continued to assume, without reflecting on the matter, that it was just around the next turn, when he would exert himself and reach it, that moment when his life became clear and his mind free, when his grown-up existence could properly begin. But not long after Catriona’s birth, about the time he met Darlene, he thought he saw it for the first time: on the day he died he would be wearing unmatching socks, there would be unanswered emails, and in the hovel he called home there would still be shirts missing cuff buttons, a malfunctioning light in the hall, and unpaid bills, uncleared attics, dead flies, friends waiting for a reply, and lovers he had not owned up to. Oblivion, the last word in organisation, would be his only consolation.
His final night in London, a mere thirty hours ago, should have been the ripe time when he was reconciled in joy with his tiny family. Few men could have resisted it, and Vasco da Gama himself could not have been unhappy with such a send-off. And at the beginning Beard was happy. Melissa put on an exceptional show. Even Catriona understood that he was going to America to switch something on, and when he did, the world would be saved. She and her mother, dressed in party frocks, prepared a special early-evening meal, the centrepiece of which was a ball moulded by Catriona’s own hands, covered in blue icing with green patches. This was the earth, and on top was a candle, which he blew out in one go, to the little girl’s rapture. Melissa and Catriona sang a song about ducklings, Beard sang the first few verses of ‘Ten Green Bottles’, the only song he knew all the words to. His daughter’s arms were round his neck for most of the celebrations. Wasn’t this bliss? Almost. He had forgotten to turn his palmtop off, and Darlene rang as Melissa was cutting the cake. Automatically, he took the call and said a little too tersely over her opening remark, ‘I’ll call you back.’ He knew that Melissa had heard a woman’s voice and the tension in his own, but nothing in her manner changed, there was no clever presentation of suppressed anger that Catriona would not see and he would. She met his eye, she smiled at him warmly, she pour
ed his wine, she celebrated him.
When Catriona was down for the night and they were alone, he poured himself an extra large scotch and braced himself for a scene. It must come, they should confront it. But she kicked her shoes off and sat close to him and kissed him and told him she would miss him. They talked of other things, of travel arrangements, of his return, and all the while his irritation increased. She was playing with him, she was letting him stew in his guilt. But why should he feel guilt? Someone please tell him why. He was not bound to her exclusively, their arrangement was clear. And she was wrong, he decided, to mask her jealousy with kindness and seduction. She poured him another scotch, she moved closer, nuzzled him, put her tongue in his ear, laid her hand between his legs, caressed him, kissed him again. It was an intolerable deceit. She could feel that he was not aroused. How could she pretend she had not heard Darlene’s voice, when she knew that he knew that she had?
And then, while she was telling him an unamusing story about something Catriona had said or done, it came to him, an idea as brilliant and plain as any insight he had ever had. She was not jealous at all, she was untouched, she was indifferent. And for that there could be only one explanation.
He pulled away from her and said as levelly as he could, ‘Are you seeing someone?’
It was a move born of his silent anger. But another part of himself, the part that had not touched a drink, did not suspect her at all. His question was more of a punishment, and he reasonably expected her instant denial.
In fact, she was affronted. Her lips formed into the pout he found so likeable, before she said in surprise, ‘Aren’t you? Michael, of course I am.’
Oh yes, that. The tired old argument from equivalence. The level playing field. Rationality gone nuts, feminism’s last stupid gasp.