Grimly I began to prepare our dinner. What would we do this evening? I felt like a bandit who hides a gun in his mouth. If I spoke I would reveal everything. Better not to speak. Eat, smile, make space for Jacqueline. Surely that was right?
The phone rang. I skidded to get it, closing the bedroom door behind me.
It was Louise.
‘Come over tomorrow,’ she said. ‘There’s something I want to tell you.’
‘Louise, if it’s to do with today, I can’t … you see, I’ve decided I can’t. That is I couldn’t because, well what if, you know …’
The phone clicked and went dead. I stared at it the way Lauren Bacall does in those films with Humphrey Bogart. What I need now is a car with a running board and a pair of fog lights. I could be with you in ten minutes Louise. The trouble is that all I’ve got is a Mini belonging to my girlfriend.
We were eating our spaghetti. I thought, As long as I don’t say her name I’ll be all right. I started a game with myself, counting out on the cynical clock face the extent of my success. What am I? I feel like a kid in the examination room faced with a paper I can’t complete. Let the clock go faster. Let me get out of here. At 9 o’clock I told Jacqueline I was exhausted. She reached over and took my hand. I felt nothing. And then there we were in our pyjamas side by side and my lips were sealed and my cheeks must have been swelling out like a gerbil’s because my mouth was full of Louise.
I don’t have to tell you where I went the next day.
During the night I had a lurid dream about an ex-girlfriend of mine who had been heavily into papier-maché. It had started as a hobby; and who shall object to a few buckets of flour and water and a roll of chicken wire? I’m a liberal and I believe in free expression. I went to her house one day and poking out of the letter-box just at crotch level was the head of a yellow and green serpent. Not a real one but livid enough with a red tongue and silver foil teeth. I hesitated to ring the bell. Hesitated because to reach the bell meant pushing my private parts right into the head of the snake. I held a little dialogue with myself.
ME: Don’t be silly. It’s a joke.
I: What do you mean it’s a joke? It’s lethal.
ME: Those teeth aren’t real.
I: They don’t have to be real to be painful.
ME: What will she think of you if you stand here all night?
I: What does she think of me anyway? What kind of a girl aims a snake at your genitals?
ME: A fun-loving girl.
I: Ha Ha.
The door flew open and Amy stood on the mat. She was wearing a kaftan and a long string of beads. ‘It won’t hurt you,’ she said. ‘It’s for the postman. He’s been bothering me.’
‘I don’t think it’s going to frighten him,’ I said. ‘It’s only a toy snake. It didn’t frighten me.’
‘You’ve nothing to be frightened of,’ she said. ‘It’s got a rat-trap in the jaw.’ She disappeared inside while I stood hovering on the step holding my bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau. She returned with a leek and shoved it in the snake’s mouth. There was a terrible clatter and the bottom half of the leek fell limply on to the mat. ‘Bring it in with you will you?’ she said. ‘We’re eating it later.’
I awoke sweating and chilled. Jacqueline slept peacefully beside me, the light was leaking through the old curtains. Muffled in my dressing gown I went into the garden, glad of the wetness sudden beneath my feet. The air was clean with a hint of warmth and the sky had pink clawmarks pulled through it. There was an urban pleasure in knowing that I was the only one breathing the air. The relentless in-out-in-out of millions of lungs depresses me. There are too many of us on this planet and it’s beginning to show. My neighbour’s blinds were down. What were their dreams and nightmares? How different it would be to see them now, slack in the jaw, bodies open. We might be able to say something truthful to one another instead of the usual rolled-up Goodmornings.
I went to look at my sunflowers, growing steadily, sure that the sun would be there for them, fulfilling themselves in the proper way at the proper time. Very few people ever manage what nature manages without effort and mostly without fail. We don’t know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo sapiens. Who’s kidding whom?
So what am I going to do? I asked Robin on the wall. Robins are very faithful creatures who mate with the same mate year by year. I love the brave red shield on their breast and the determined way they follow the spade in search of worms. There am I doing all the digging and there’s little Robin making off with the worm. Homo sapiens. Blind Nature.
I don’t feel wise. Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?
The facts of my case are not unusual:
1 I have fallen in love with a woman who is married.
2 She has fallen in love with me.
3 I am committed to someone else.
4 How shall I know whether Louise is what I must do or must avoid?
The church could tell me, my friends have tried to help me, I could take the stoic course and run from temptation or I could put up sail and tack into this gathering wind.
For the first time in my life, I want to do the right thing more than I want to get my own way. I suppose I owe that to Bathsheba …
I remember her visiting my house soon after she had returned from a six-week trip to South Africa. Before she had gone, I had given her an ultimatum: Him or me. Her eyes, which very often filled with tears of self-pity, had reproached me for yet another lover’s half-nelson. I forced her to it and of course she made the decision for him. All right. Six weeks. I felt like the girl in the story of Rumpelstiltskin who is given a cellar full of straw to weave into gold by the following morning. All I had ever got from Bathsheba were bales of straw but when she was with me I believed that they were promises carved in precious stone. So I had to face up to the waste and the mess and I worked hard to sweep the chaff away. Then she came in, unrepentant, her memory gone as ever, wondering why I hadn’t returned her trunk calls or written poste restante.
‘I meant what I said.’
She sat in silence for about fifteen minutes while I glued the legs back on a kitchen chair. Then she asked me if I was seeing anybody else. I said I was, briefly, vaguely, hopefully.
She nodded and turned to go. When she got to the door she said, ‘I intended to tell you before we left but I forgot.’
I looked at her, sudden and sharp. I hated that ‘we’.
‘Yes,’ she went on, ‘Uriah got NSU from a woman he slept with in New York. He slept with her to punish me of course. But he didn’t tell me and the doctor thinks I have it too. I’ve been taking the antibiotics so it’s probably all right. That is, you’re probably all right. You ought to check though.’
I came at her with the leg of the chair. I wanted to run it straight across her perfectly made-up face.
‘You shit.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘You told me you weren’t having sex with him any more.’
‘I thought it was unfair. I didn’t want to shatter what little sexual confidence he might have left.’
‘I suppose that’s why you’ve never bothered to tell him that he doesn’t know how to make you come.’
She didn’t answer. She was crying now. It was like blood in the water to me. I circled her.
‘How long is it you’ve been married? The perfect public marriage. Ten years, twelve? And you don’t ask him to put his head between your legs because you think he’ll find it distasteful. Let’s hear it for sexual confidence.’
‘Stop it,’ she said, pushing me away. ‘I have to go home.’
‘It must be seven o’clock. That’s your home-time isn’t it? That’s why you used to leave the practice early so that you could get a quick fuck for an hour and a half and then smooth yourself down to say, “Hello darling,” and cook dinner.’
‘You let me come,’ she said.
‘Yes
, I did, when you were bleeding, when you were sick, again and again I made you come.’
‘I didn’t mean that. I meant we did it together. You wanted me there.’
‘I wanted you everywhere and the pathetic thing is I still do.’
She looked at me. ‘Drive me home will you?’
I still remember that night with shame and rage. I didn’t drive her home. I walked with her through the dark lanes to her house hearing the swish of her trenchcoat and the rub of her briefcase against her calf. Like Dirk Bogarde she prided herself on her profile and it was lit to suitable effect under the dull streetlights. I left her where I knew she’d be safe and listened to the click of her heels dying away. After a few seconds they stopped. I was familiar with this; she was checking her hair and her face, dusting me from coat and loins. The gate squeaked and closed metal on metal. They were inside now, four-square, everything shared, even the disease.
As I walked home, breathing deeply, knowing that I was shaking and not knowing how to stop it, I thought, I’m as guilty as her. Hadn’t I let it happen, colluded with the deceit and let all my pride be burnt away? I was nothing, a weak piece of shit, I deserved Bathsheba. Self-respect. They’re supposed to teach you that in the Army. Perhaps I should enlist. Would it recommend me though, to write Broken Heart under Personal Interests?
At the Clap Clinic the following day, I looked at my fellow sufferers. Shifty Jack-the-lads, fat businessmen in suits cut to hide the bulge. A few women, tarts yes, and other women too. Women with eyes full of pain and fear. What was this place and why had nobody told them? ‘Who gave it to you love?’ I wanted to say to one middle-aged woman in a floral print. She kept staring at the posters about gonorrhoea and then trying to concentrate on her copy of Country Life. ‘Divorce him,’ I wanted to say. ‘You think this is the first time?’ Her name was called and she disappeared into a bleak white room. This place is like the ante-chamber to Judgement Day. A pot of stale Cona coffee, a few scruffy leatherette benches, plastic flowers in a plastic vase and all over the walls, top to bottom, posters for every genital wart and discoloured emission. It’s impressive what a few inches of flesh can catch.
Ah, Bathsheba, it’s not the same as your elegant surgery is it? There your private patients can have their teeth removed to Vivaldi and enjoy twenty minutes’ rest on a reclining sofa. Your flowers are delivered fresh every day and you serve only the most aromatic herbal teas. Against your white coat, their heads on your breast, no-one fears the needle and syringe. I came to you for a crown and you offered me a kingdom. Unfortunately I could only take possession between five and seven, weekdays, and the odd weekend when he was away playing football.
My name was called.
‘Have I got it?’
The nurse looked at me the way you do a flat tyre and said, ‘No.’
Then she started filling out a form and told me to come back in three months.
‘What for?’
‘Sexually transmitted diseases are not normally an isolated problem. If your habits are such that you have caught it once it’s likely that you will catch it again.’ She paused. ‘We are creatures of habit.’
‘I haven’t caught it, any of it.’
She opened the door. ‘Three months will be sufficient.’
Sufficient for what? I walked down the corridor past SURGERY and MOTHER AND BABY and OUTPATIENTS THIS WAY. It’s a feature of the Clap Clinic that it’s situated well out of the way of proper deserving patients. Its labyrinthian cunning means that the user will have to ask at least five times how to get there. Although I lowered my voice, particularly in deference to MOTHER AND BABY, I was returned no such courtesy. ‘Venereal Disease? Down the end turn right turn left straight on through the gates past the lift up the stairs down the corridor round the corner, through the swing doors and there you are,’ yelled the male nurse, carefully stopping his trolley-load of dirty sheets on my foot … ‘You did say VENEREAL?’
Yes I did, and I said it again to the junior doctor rakishly swinging his stethoscope at the OUTPATIENTS. ‘Clap Clinic? No problem, you’re not more than five minutes away by wheelchair.’ He pealed with laughter like a posse of ice-cream vans and pointed in the direction of the incinerator chute. ‘That’s the quickest way. Good luck.’
Maybe it’s my face. Maybe I look like a doormat today. I feel like one.
On the way out I bought myself a large bunch of flowers.
‘Visiting someone?’ said the girl, her voice going up at the corners like a hospital sandwich. She was bored to death, having to be nice, jammed behind the ferns, her right hand dripping with green water.
‘Yes, myself. I want to find out how I am.’
She raised her eyebrows and squeaked, ‘You all right?’
‘I shall be,’ I said, throwing her a carnation.
At home, I put the flowers in a vase, changed the sheets and got into bed. ‘What did Bathsheba ever give me but a perfect set of teeth?’
‘All the better to eat you with,’ said the Wolf.
I got a can of spray paint and wrote SELF-RESPECT over the door.
Let Cupid try and get past that one.
Louise was eating breakfast when I arrived. She was wearing a red and green guardsman stripe dressing gown gloriously too large. Her hair was down, warming her neck and shoulders, falling forward on to the table-cloth in wires of light. There was a dangerously electrical quality about Louise. I worried that the steady flame she offered might be fed by a current far more volatile. Superficially she seemed serene, but beneath her control was a crackling power of the kind that makes me nervous when I pass pylons. She was more of a Victorian heroine than a modern woman. A heroine from a Gothic novel, mistress of her house, yet capable of setting fire to it and fleeing in the night with one bag. I always expected her to wear her keys at her waist. She was compressed, stoked down, a volcano dormant but not dead. It did occur to me that if Louise were a volcano then I might be Pompeii.
I didn’t go in straight away, I stood lurking outside with my collar turned up, hiding to get a better view. I thought, If she calls the police, it’s only what I deserve. But she wouldn’t call the police, she’d take her pearl-handled revolver from the glass decanter and shoot me through the heart. At the post-mortem they’ll find an enlarged heart and no guts.
The white table-cloth, the brown teapot. The chrome toast-rack and the silver-bladed knives. Ordinary things. Look how she picks them up and puts them down, wipes her hands briskly on the edge of the table-cloth; she wouldn’t do that in company. She’s finished her egg, I can see the top jagged on the plate, a bit of butter that she pops into her mouth from the end of her knife. Now she’s gone for a bath and the kitchen’s empty. Silly kitchen without Louise.
It was easy for me to get in, the door was unlocked. I felt like a thief with a bagful of stolen glances. It’s odd being in someone else’s room when they’re not there. Especially when you love them. Every object carries a different significance. Why did she buy that? What does she especially like? Why does she sit in this chair and not that one? The room becomes a code that you have only a few minutes to crack. When she returns, she will command your attention, and besides it’s rude to stare. And yet I want to pull out the drawers and run my fingers under the dusty rims of the pictures. In the waste basket perhaps, in the larder, I will find a clue to you, I will be able to unravel you, pull you between my fingers and stretch out each thread to know the measure of you. The compulsion to steal something is ridiculous, intense. I don’t want one of your EPNS spoons, charming though they are, with a tiny Edwardian boot on the handle. Why then have I put it in my pocket? ‘Take it out at once,’ says the Headmistress who keeps an eye on my conduct. I managed to force it back into the drawer, although for a teaspoon it put up a lot of resistance. I sat down and tried to concentrate myself. Right in my eyeline was the laundry basket. Not the laundry basket … please.
I have never been a knicker-sniffer. I don’t want to lard my inner pockets with used underwea
r. I know people who do and I sympathise. It’s a dicey business going into a tense boardroom with a large white handkerchief on one side of the suit and a slender pair of knickers on the other. How can you be absolutely sure you remember which is where? I was hypnotised by the laundry basket like an out-of-work snake charmer.
I had just got to my feet when Louise strode through the door, her hair piled up on her head and pinned with a tortoiseshell bar. I could smell the steam on her from the bath and the scent of a rough woody soap. She held out her arms, her face softening with love, I took her two hands to my mouth and kissed each slowly so that I could memorise the shape of her knuckles. I didn’t only want Louise’s flesh, I wanted her bones, her blood, her tissues, the sinews that bound her together. I would have held her to me though time had stripped away the tones and textures of her skin. I could have held her for a thousand years until the skeleton itself rubbed away to dust. What are you that makes me feel thus? Who are you for whom time has no meaning?
In the heat of her hands I thought, This is the campfire that mocks the sun. This place will warm me, feed me and care for me. I will hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world will come and go in the tide of a day but here is her hand with my future in its palm.
She said, ‘Come upstairs.’
We climbed one behind the other past the landing on the first floor, the studio on the second, up where the stairs narrowed and the rooms were smaller. It seemed that the house would not end, that the stairs in their twisting shape took us higher and out of the house altogether into an attic in a tower where birds beat against the windows and the sky was an offering. There was a small bed with a patchwork quilt. The floor sheered to one side, one board prised up like a wound. The walls, bumpy and distempered, were breathing. I could feel them moving under my touch. They were damp, slightly. The light, channelled by the thin air, heated the panes of glass too hot to open. We were magnified in this high wild room. You and I could reach the ceiling and the floor and every side of our loving cell. You kissed me and I tasted the relish of your skin.