The Love Secrets of Don Juan

  I found out more about her. She was thirty-two, and had recently been abandoned by her boyfriend for no reason that she could fathom. She was on the rebound, and was cautious and edgy, but was also, I could tell, keenly aware, like me, of having depleted value in the unregulated free market that is urban love. She couldn’t face going to another salsa class, she told me. She was sick of Marks & Spencer’s meals for one. If I’d been someone else, at a different time of my life, I’d have said she probably told me too much, that she revealed too much need. But I was me, and I was at the same imaginative place in my life as she was. So need was OK with me. Need was valid.

  When it came to the end of the evening we exchanged telephone numbers, almost wearily. Both of us were in the later stages of young-adult courting life – searching for sanctuary rather than a ride on the roller-coaster. We’d had enough of hunting in bars, ritualized conversations, ‘getting to know’ new’ people. We both wanted it to end. We were perfect for each other. We were the right-enough people at the right-enough time.

  We started dating the next week, slept together the time after that, then fell into an accustomed and comfortable groove that had been, as it were, waiting for us. We went on holiday together. We told each other we loved each other, and we meant it, we really meant it, but perhaps that was partly because we were so ready to mean it. It was fine, it was lovely, I guess – but there was something perfunctory about it, as if we were filling in the time before I asked her to marry me.

  This was what the relationship was about. Fate had it in for us, it was our destiny – I think we both sensed that, and neither of us was prepared to resist. We were both too long in the tooth to fail to register each other’s flaws – I could be lazy, distanced, patronizing, she could be bitchy, fickle, anally retentive and obsessive. But we chose to ignore them, dressing up denial as mature tolerance. Disillusioned idealists, we had decided to opt for a practical sort of love.

  We did fit together well. We shared interests – books, fashion, soft drugs, politics. We were attracted to each other. We rubbed along – we had the average number of arguments about the average number of things, we had the average number of hand-holding moonlit walks on the average number of deserted tropical beaches. We were old enough to understand that love was not the proverbial bowl of cherries.

  Perhaps that was the problem. We were both too ready, too grown-up, too clear-eyed to believe in the myth any more. You need to believe in your product before you start counting up its virtues and failings. The brand outranks the product every time.

  We moved in together a year after starting to date. We tried for a child almost straight away, but in fact it was a few years before anything happened. When at last she got pregnant, I was happy. She was happy. We were happy. Inasmuch as we believed in happiness. All we really knew was that we weren’t hurting like we used to hurt. We had each other, and although we weren’t one of the century’s great love stories, we rubbed along OK. Our respective friends liked each other. It was enough, especially after Poppy was born.

  That was our happiest time although it was also our unhappiest time. Now we had something that transcended our lives, which truly bound us together. Yet the practical, commonsensical, fatalistic approach we had taken, which had always worked, began to come unstuck. It was as if bringing something this special into the world deserved more passion, more blind love between its parents – or, at least, that was how I saw it. We had taken the biggest step a couple could take, and I was fine with it. But only fine. Fine wasn’t enough.

  Two other things happened that, looking back on it, sowed the seeds of our future destruction. First, Beth found out that she couldn’t have any more children – some problem during Poppy’s birth had damaged her uterus, and she was now effectively barren. Our commonsensical arrangement was being unpicked by the God that didn’t exist: we had both wanted at least three children, and that mutual desire was one of the things keeping our marriage afloat.

  The grief and bitterness that Beth felt at her inability to have more children started to impinge on her thinking. She blamed me, because she needed to blame someone. It’s female, the proposition that disaster calls for a sinner. It’s religious – the product of the metaphoric mind.

  Beth became obsessed with Poppy, pouring not only her love but, dangerously, her hopes, dreams and ambitions into her, fantasizing that she might become a ballerina, a great concert pianist, a poet.

  This drove a wedge between us, because I felt that what Poppy chose to be was her business. I disliked the idea of parents projecting too powerfully their wishes and needs on to their children, using them as puppets, a dumb-show for their frustrated desires. But Beth was determined.

  Which made my decision to give up advertising peculiarly significant. For Beth, if Poppy was going to be the great Renaissance woman of the twenty-first century, we needed money. Beth had already given up nursing, tired of the oceans of bodily waste. She’d decided she wanted to work in public relations, because it sounded good and she’d heard it paid good money. She was only kept back from this ambition, she decided, by having to look after Poppy all the time.

  When she managed to snatch some time away from motherhood, Beth worked at Miranda Green’s PR company, MG Media. I last saw Miranda in the back garden of the house, blandly watching her son, Caleb, torture worms. Beth made phone calls, licked stamps and filed files. This kept her illusions alive – that she was more than ‘just’ a mother. Paid work, Beth had come to believe, made a person’s life meaningful.

  At the same time, I was reaching the opposite conclusion. I was in the process of deciding that work was a Trojan horse, full not of warriors but of emptiness. That the whole nineties idea (our marriage occupied most of the 1990s) that the way to Valhalla was through how many hours you could put in at the office, or how much income you could generate, was a con, another illusion in a life that was a parade of competing illusions. Life was life: not work, or your ‘relationship’, or your struggle. Life was only what it was.

  So I decided I was going to abandon the nine-to-five, Freddy’s Fifteen Fruit Flavours and Yogi’s Yoghurt Fizz, and instead of writing cliches, I would live one. Like many in advertising before me, I was going to write the great existential novel. I was going to abandon pseudo-creativity for the real thing. For art.

  This would mean we would have to move to a smaller house, cut corners, and even stint on some of Poppy’s precious school fund.

  Two years of the hell that is writing a novel ensued. I never had a clue, how difficult it would be. I thought you just sat down, waited for inspiration, then wrote. It would be fun, and fulfilling, and at the end of it, you would have something immortal and someone would buy it, and if it didn’t sell many copies it didn’t matter. You had expressed yourself. You had done your bit. You had paid your talent a bit more respect than writing cheery jingles and constructing breezy strap-lines for pointless products all day long.

  It wasn’t like that. Number one: money worries. Number two: relationship problems. Try telling your wife, who’s at the end of her tether with your infant child, that you need the space to be left alone and possibly just stare out of the window – for, believe it or not, and partners never do believe it, an essential part of writing is just loafing about doing what looks like nothing.

  Number three: writing is a nightmare. You sit at your word-processor writing words that mean nothing to you, that stare back at you with no ring of truth, no wit, no life, no nothing, and without even much hope of publication, while your child is crying, and your wife is sick to death of it, and you think you’re probably hopeless anyway. It stinks.

  But I did it. I wrote The Sandstone Ghost, 400 pp, 110,000 words, a tragedy in the Greek style about a man who is swept away by the winds of fate, who is not up to the demands made of him. It’s set in a fast-food outlet in Dalston and it’s post-modern, witty and knowing (lots of not very omniscient narrators, lots of plots within plots, characters announcing themselves as characters, blind
alleys and red herrings) but finally it was about irresistible fate. After two years, I proudly printed it out, and even more proudly gave it to Beth. She read it that same day. You know what she said? She said, I thought it wasn’t meant to be autobiographical.

  That was just about all I got out of her on the subject. I still don’t know what she meant. It isn’t autobiographical. It’s about a man who pushes Pukka Pies and gets drawn into a doomed bank heist. It’s about identity and meaning and the search for truth. It’s about failure and the limits of life. It’s not about me.

  Bloody Philistine.

  Beth’s critical assessment of my book, such as it was, did not do much to help our marriage either, particularly since it seemed to fare no better with the thirty or so publishers and agents to whom I posted it. Every one of those rejection slips was a piece of shrapnel in the heart. I wasn’t the sort of person who was going to keep writing novels that nobody liked or wanted. I’d had my go at Art, and that was that. Nobody would go near The Sandstone Ghost. It’s still in my bottom drawer, where it will doubtless stay.

  I went back to work at the agency and the money started coming in again, but it wasn’t the same. Beth and I were now both living with punctured dreams – for me the book, for her the big family, for both of us the relationship – and that was like trying to run the London Marathon with a punctured lung.

  I knew the game was up when we started having arguments over my dreams.

  Towards the end I had the same dream again and again -or, rather, slightly different dreams with a connecting theme. They always featured buildings of some sort – buildings that were apparently small, with cramped rooms and tiny corridors. Sometimes my old girlfriends would live in them, in inaccessible basements and crannies. But I could never quite find them, only hear their voices. Beth rarely featured. The girlfriends came and went, or were absent. The buildings changed location and shape. Yet all the dreams had one thing in common. At some point, I would discover that the buildings were much bigger than I had previously realized. I would come through a familiar door, and suddenly see that the house I was living in, which I had lived in for years, had a whole section that I hadn’t found before. Parts of it were full of light and air, with great vaulted roofs, and huge open spaces and my heart would fill with light and hope.

  After I’d had this dream two or three times, I made the mistake of telling Beth. She looked at me with fury in her eyes. It’s only a dream, I said.

  Beth knew better. She withdrew further into herself, and my dreams multiplied in frequency and intensity. She knew what the house represented. She knew what the spaces I longed for would cost us both.

  What is more sour, what stinks worse, what is in more bad faith than a marriage in decline? I don’t really want to record it all because declining marriages are boring – they’re similar to what Terence would call a ‘stuck state’. They’re just a series of set, monotonous patterns out of which no one can break, because there’s too much invested in the rigidity. Every argument is the same argument reinflected, every dispute is drawn from the same stagnant pool. Neither of you believes in the marriage enough any more to put in the effort needed for any kind of progress, change or resolution. Both of you have been too disappointed too often to have that kind of faith.

  What’s left is just a practical arrangement, a series of well-rehearsed moves, both in bed and in the house, in which you decide that the person you’re with is the only person in the world safe enough to unload your pain and disappointment on. You can’t unload those things on to your friends, because your friends would dump you. You can’t unload them on to your child, because she’s your child. That left her and me to use each other as punch-bags.

  It was an impossible situation. You’ve never experienced pain, you’ve never known anger until you’ve been in a marriage break-up where there’s a child involved. The regret, the guilt, the anger, the blame, the fear. When the only dreams you have left are those of hidden spaces in dark buildings, the end is upon you. After my book failed, after her womb failed, we failed.

  I moved out; Beth called her lawyer. Then the trouble really started.

  I’ve been expecting to hear from Carol for a long time. Now an envelope has arrived, but it contains no letter, not even a note. I hold the contents in my hand – a piece of cheap jewellery. I turn it over and over between my fingers.

  What’s that, Daddy?

  Just a toy. From long ago.

  Let me see. I want to see.

  I hand her the tiny golden heart, still untarnished, set in the ‘broken’ position. Hard to believe that Carol kept it all these years, since I gave it to her on the night of Sharon Smith’s party, more than thirty years ago. No need for a note.

  You can’t start over. No second chances.

  It’s nice. Can I have it?

  Of course you can. It’s a present from Auntie Carol.

  When are we going to see her again?

  I don’t know, poppet. She’s gone away for a while.

  I love Auntie Carol.

  Me too.

  Poppy pulls the heart open and closed. Then she pins it on to her T-shirt. Does it look nice?

  Very pretty.

  Are you going to wear it?

  It’s not really for boys.

  Unless they’re sissies.

  That’s right. Boys don’t have broken hearts.

  Are they better, then? Because a bit of them isn’t broke? Because I think girls are better.

  Do you, sweetheart? Why?

  Because everybody says so.

  Well, everybody may be right.

  Do you really think so, Daddy?

  No. Maybe. I don’t know.

  Tell me.

  I can’t.

  Tell me. Who’s the best?

  Shall I tell you a secret about grown-ups?

  I like secrets.

  You might not like this one.

  What is it?

  We don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t know where we’re going. And we don’t know what we think.

  Daddy, are you ever going to get another girlfriend?

  I don’t know, sweet-pea. I’m trying my best not to.

  I wish you did have a girlfriend. Are you sad?

  I’m not sad really, popsicle. I’m just… fallow.

  What’s that?

  It’s when a field grows lots of things one time, and it’s fertile, and then it gets exhausted and you have to let it rest for a while until it can grow things again.

  How long does it last?

  I don’t know. Maybe I’m not fallow. Maybe I’m tundra.

  What’s tundra?

  Frozen. Like in Siberia. Dead. Unthawable.

  I don’t understand.

  Don’t worry. I’m sure I’m not tundra. I’m fallow, all right. You’ll see. There’ll be green shoots one day.

  But are you going to get a girlfriend? Are you?

  I don’t know.

  Are you going to marry Mummy again?

  No, darling. No, I’m not.

  Ohhh. What about Auntie Carol?

  No.

  Poppy sighs. She seems disappointed but not distraught by this revelation. The waters close over everything so quickly when you’re a child. For adults, the recent past is so much more persistent. The powers of recovery decay.

  Poppy takes a lollipop out of her pocket and begins thoughtfully to suck it. What happened to Alice?

  I don’t know.

  Can we go and see her?

  No.

  Why can’t we?

  Because she’s gone away.

  To the same place as Auntie Carol?

  Sort of. Yes.

  A year has passed now since Alice went back to Martin. She sent me a letter once: I returned it unopened. I’ve learned that much at least. The one Love Secret that still holds true. Be ruthless at the end. The weak torture the weak.

  I’ve never found myself in this state of mind before -having given up completely… in, I think, a good way. I
’ve always invested too much hope in relationships. It’s one of the reasons Martin always said I was too much like a woman. But I don’t want it any more. I’m beyond it. There’s Poppy and me and work, and that’s enough. I don’t want the struggle any more. It’s not worth the prize. It is for some people, I know, but not for me. I’m not cut out for it. Love, for me, is not just more pain than it’s worth – it’s far more pain, it’s an utterly unbalanced equation, a lousy overinvestment for an imaginary return.

  I see Poppy more often now that Beth’s been made a partner in Miranda Green’s PR firm. I have her for four or five nights a fortnight, and she’s everything to me, the last arena in which I still have feelings that operate.

  I’ve put my bedsit on the market. By working every hour that God sends I’ve been able to raise enough money to buy a two-bedroom flat, so there’ll be enough room for Poppy when she comes round. Beth and I have stopped fighting. Nothing to fight about any more, I suppose. Also, her letter changed me, changed the shape of the past once again. Words are so powerful. We should learn to use the right ones more often. She and Oliver are getting along well. He’s a lovely guy. I wish her well. I wish him well. I wish everybody well.

  God, I’m such a nice guy. Except that I’m a nightmare, and I tried to grope Carol and I ripped off Martin’s ex, and I dropped a condom on Juliet Fry’s lap, and I told an eight-year-old boy to fuck off, and informed my infant daughter that I hated her. Of course I’m a nightmare, otherwise my life wouldn’t be such a disaster. But I’m not sure, other than those few isolated specifics, how I’m a nightmare. What links it all together? What’s the subtext?

  If I could work out what it was, I could solve this thing. I could get another life. Then again, I’m not sure I want one. There’s something comforting about being fallow. Or, if it’s Siberia, if it’s really tundra, that’s fine too. I don’t want women any more. I haven’t got enough left to give. I can’t go over the top one more time. Call it war psychosis, call it shell-shock, whatever you want, but I’m on permanent furlough. I’m going to be an eccentric, solitary old bachelor. It’s enough. No pain any more. Nothing much, except for the ring of Poppy’s laugh and the feel of her arms round my neck. I’ve lost all feeling, which means, at least, that I’m not angry any more. It takes too much energy out of you. I’m fallow. I’m a fallow fellow.