‘Brilliant?’
‘Fucking.’
O sweet Liz fuck me now. I love you for ever.
‘The thing is,’ he says, ‘so few people have read anything of mine. What you say is really rather important.’
‘Just as well I like it then, isn’t it?’
‘So you do like it?’
‘It’s fucking brilliant.’
They’re like two little children, conspirators in naughtiness.
She serves out the pasta and they finish the second bottle of wine with the food.
‘I have a question,’ she says, her wide mouth twitching with suppressed laughter. ‘The sex phone call. Is that really what they’re like, or did you make it up?’
‘No, it’s real. I edited it here and there, but mostly it’s just the way I heard it.’
‘So anyone can phone a number and hear all that?’
‘Sure. But it costs a pound a minute.’
‘And people phone these numbers?’
‘It’s big business. There’s a lot of them about.’
‘Where?’ she says, blushing a little. ‘I’ve never seen any. I suppose in men’s porn magazines.’
‘They’re everywhere. Even in local papers.’
He looks round the kitchen and his eyes fall on a copy of Friday Ad. He reaches for it, flicks through the pages of flats to rent, cars for sale. There’s an Adult section at the back.
‘See.’
‘Friday Ad! My God!’
Liz takes it from him and runs her eyes down the little black-and-white ads. Unzip and relax. Quick relief. Lay back and climax. Sluts at home. Filthy phone sex.
‘It’s a whole other world.’
‘But you knew it was there, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
He can see that she’s really curious.
‘Why not try it? If you don’t mind the cost.’
‘How does it work?’
‘Well, it’s really quite a complex operation. You dial the number, and – er – you listen.’
She smacks his arm.
‘No, I mean, what do you have to say to the person on the other end?’
‘Nothing. There is no person on the other end. It’s a recording.’
‘I wouldn’t know what to say if it was a real person.’
‘There’s no one there. See, it says it here, in the ad. Don’t talk, just listen.’
She looks at him with bright eyes, wanting to be persuaded. He glances round for the phone.
‘I’ll do it. I’ll dial for you.’
‘What if Alice hears?’
‘Does Alice listen in on your phone calls on another extension?’
‘No.’
‘Then she won’t hear.’
He dials the number. The first recording, as ever, is the age and contents warning. He waits for it to end before handing her the cordless phone.
‘Just listen.’
He watches her face as she listens. At first she giggles and her eyes open very wide, but after a few moments she just sits there listening intently. Then she gets up and goes through to the living room, still listening, and sits down on the deep sofa. He follows. She pats the sofa by her side. He sits down beside her. Now her eyes are on him as the phone whispers dirty secrets into her ear. She seems to have forgotten the time.
He raises his watch and turns it towards her, concerned about the mounting cost. She nods, but her mind is elsewhere.
Alan is enchanted.
She likes my play. She loves my play. It’s brilliant, sharp, funny, shocking. That’s more than politeness, she’s not the polite type, look at her, she’s the real thing. Lorraine Jones would never dial up a sex line.
Tread softly, you tread on my dreams. Touch softly. Stroke softly. Kiss softly.
She pulls the phone from her ear at last and hits the end button.
‘Jesus!’ she says. ‘You could end up spending twenty quid on that stuff!’
‘People do.’
‘I never even got to the end.’
‘But it was fun?’
‘She made him lie back on a desk, then she knelt on top of him so that he couldn’t move his arms and made him – I can’t say it. I don’t know you well enough.’
‘I can imagine.’
She wriggles in the deep soft cushions.
‘God help me,’ she says. ‘If Alice wasn’t asleep upstairs I think I’d be taking advantage of your good nature.’
He smiles at her, too brimming with happiness to mind that she’s telling him there’ll be no sex tonight. But she likes his play.
Suddenly she leans towards him, presses her face onto his chest.
‘You shouldn’t have let me do that.’
He puts his arms round her. His right hand rests on her hip. She takes it and puts it between her thighs.
‘Unfinished business,’ she whispers.
‘Then let me get closer.’
She unzips her jeans, pulls down denim and cotton, sinks back onto the sofa. His hand returns, his finger feeling for the soft folds. Her hand joins his, guides his, makes his finger press on the perfect spot. Her pelvis moves, pushing back, chafing. Then it’s her finger alone between her thighs, flying up and down, while she twists and turns silently in his arms.
Just before she comes she goes still. Then she shudders and folds up on herself, and rolls against him. For a long moment she remains like this, clinging to him tightly. Then she lets go.
‘Thank you.’
‘My pleasure.’
‘But it wasn’t.’
She feels the ridge of his cock, hard beneath his trousers.
‘Do you want to do something about it?’
‘I’d rather do it properly.’
‘I can’t. I’d be too worried Alice would hear.’
‘Some other time.’
‘Oh, yes, I think so. I owe you now.’
She cuddles up against him. He bends his head down and kisses her brow. She looks up at him. He kisses her lips.
‘You’re gorgeous,’ he says. ‘And sexy. And highly intelligent.’
‘And an excellent judge of contemporary drama.’
‘The best.’
They kiss again.
The phone rings. She reaches about for it, finding it at last on the floor.
‘Yes? Oh, it’s you.’
Alan lets himself sink back into the sofa cushions, feeling his erection soften and dwindle.
All in the blue unclouded weather
‘I can’t, Guy. I just can’t. I’ve got too much on. Tell me your plans for Alice’s birthday. Okay, okay, I’m only asking. Just make sure you call her on the day. No, sorry. Don’t go on about it, Guy. I’ve got company, okay? Just company. Sure. You do that. Bye.’
She puts the phone back down on the floor and zips up her jeans.
‘Alice’s father,’ she says. ‘One of my many errors of judgement.’
He looks at her. He has nothing to say. Nothing would make this time more perfect. Let it go on for ever.
She feels his approval and his happiness.
‘You know what makes you very unusual,’ she says. ‘You write about sex as if you like it.’
‘Doesn’t everyone?’
‘No. Not at all. Most writers make a joke of it, or make it creepy and disgusting, or sad. They don’t want to do pornography and they don’t want to do bodice-rippers so they put on this superior tone about sex, as if they’re not part of it. But they are part of it. We’re all part of it. Well, I am.’
‘Me too.’
‘I could work from home tomorrow. I could make some time tomorrow afternoon.’
‘What’s tomorrow? Tuesday.’ He shuts his eyes, mentally scanning his timetable. ‘I’ve got a gap between two-fifteen and three.’
‘That’s enough, isn’t it?’
He opens his eyes and there she is, smiling at him.
‘Yes. It’s enough.’
56
Break something.
Ah, those iconoclasts. They thought they were breaking images, but they were breaking patterns. Not the great pattern, not the framework that sustains daily life, that would be more than iconoclasm, that would be revolution. We’re talking small ruptures in the fabric of habit. But through these rips comes new air, bearing new smells.
Window down in the car. Sussex on a May evening, the hawthorn in scented bloom. A land saturated with new life. Darkness coming, but it’s never fully dark, even when there’s no moon. The one true darkness is in death, which is coming too, but not yet, not yet. The poplars on the corner have such a respectable way of standing there, as if there was never a time when they did not mark the junction of the lanes, and yet they too were once seeds, were once shoots.
Anything is possible once you learn to endure disappointment. Hopes are dashed, plans miscarry, but next May the leaves will unfold once more, each year’s leaves are a new creation, a reprise of joy. And how many more Mays will I live to see? Forty if I’m lucky. A finite number, inexorably ticking down to zero.
Let Laura be alive when I get home. Let Jack and Carrie be alive. Let all be well.
Laura is in the kitchen when she hears Henry’s car pull up outside. She hears his footsteps on the gravel, his key in the lock. The rattle of the closing door, the clunk of his bag onto the hall table. Then silence.
In this time, she knows, she sees without seeing, he bends down and unlaces his shoes. He eases them off, pushes them under the hall bench, finds his slippers, shuffles his feet into their home embrace. He loves to get out of his shoes at the end of the day. He wears leather heel-less slippers, she buys them for him, they make a soft flop-clack sound as he walks.
Flop-clack, flop-clack. His face in the doorway.
‘Carrie still up?’
She gives him a nod and off he goes up the stairs. She can’t speak because she’s overwhelmed by the realization of how well she knows him. She knows him even in his silences.
Carrie is in bed, curtains drawn, her light not yet out. She tells Henry of the latest turn in her turbulent relationship with Naomi Truscott.
‘She wasn’t there in the lunch queue and no one had seen her and I was really hungry so I went on into lunch, I did wait, I waited lots, but she didn’t come. What was I supposed to do? Miss lunch? How was I to know she was looking for her clarinet? But she got so stressy as if I’d deliberately abandoned her or something.’
Henry sits on the side of her bed, nodding gravely. He’s watching her hands, seeing how perfect they are, how pale the skin, though she does bite her finger-nails. He remembers her when she was born, a quick birth, much quicker than Jack. The way she gazed at him, almost suspiciously. ‘That one’s nobody’s fool,’ the midwife said. My little girl. My girl.
Only the bedside reading lamp is on, throwing a pool of soft light onto the crumpled pink flowers of the duvet.
‘Maybe she’s frightened you’ll make best friends with one of the others.’
‘Well I won’t. Except if she carries on like this then I will. Tessa says she’s a retard.’
The cruellest truth: we only give our love to those who have no need of it. But later the need grows. Or another kind of love. A historical love, love with a history.
‘Maybe you’ve outgrown each other. Maybe it’s time for new friends.’
‘Oh, Daddy I couldn’t. We’ve been best friends for ever.’
This offer and her rejection of it brings to an end her inner agitation as effectively as if she had talked it over with Naomi herself. The unfairness of Naomi’s accusations against her neutralized by her own generosity.
‘Do you want me to tuck you up now?’
She nods and puts away her book.
‘Tuesday tomorrow. I like Tuesdays. Tuesday’s a good day.’
He leans down to kiss her.
‘Love you, darling.’
By the door he looks back and sees her fuzzy head framed by the white pillow in the pool of lamplight. The lamp stays on until Laura comes up for the final phase of the night-time ritual.
Descending the stairs he recalls a time when for him too different days had different colours, different tastes. Monday always the worst. Monday the return of struggle and dread. And yet today is a Monday.
‘She’s ready for you,’ he tells Laura.
Jack is in the living room watching a television programme about spiders. Henry watches with him in silence for a few moments. He is shown a close-up of a funnel-web spider’s fangs oozing venom.
‘One bite and you’re dead,’ says Jack. ‘But they only live in Australia.’
‘How was Toby Clore today?’
‘Toby’s okay.’
The crisis has passed. The extraordinary immediacy of life to a child. The wave of terror rises and falls and is forgotten. There’s something he’s been meaning to ask Jack for days. What is it?
‘Oh, yes.’ Pausing in the living room doorway as he leaves the room. ‘That composition you wrote at school about a dream. Was it really a dream you had?’
‘I think so. Probably.’
‘About walking on walls. Clouds below.’
‘Don’t really remember.’
‘You didn’t ever fall? In your dream.’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘So was it a happy dream?’
‘Don’t really remember.’
Henry goes on to the kitchen, swept by his own thoughts. He’s thinking of the unimaginable otherness of other people. We each live in our own world, and our worlds collide, but all we get is a little dented. A little bruised. These bruises our only chance of understanding those who are not ourselves. The precious ache of understanding.
He pours himself a glass of red wine. Laura comes down from kissing Carrie goodnight.
‘Drink?’ he says.
‘Definitely.’
He pours more wine and considers how much to tell her of his day. Not all: she can never know it all. There are limits to intimacy. But he feels the need to narrow the gap. Every day the gap widens, and every evening, no, not every evening, but most evenings, they bridge it anew.
‘I had a talk with Aidan Massey today. A real talk.’
‘That’s a first.’
Laura moves back and forth between the table and the stove, making dinner.
‘His father was a greetings card salesman.’
She turns and reads his expression.
‘You’ve stopped minding.’
As quickly as that. Must be my tone of voice.
‘As a matter of fact I walked out today. But then I walked back.’
It sounds ridiculous. It is ridiculous. He grins.
‘As far as I’m concerned,’ says Laura, ‘you can walk out any time you like. You know that.’
‘Maybe tomorrow.’
‘Ah, the famous tomorrow.’
‘I just thought, what the hell. I like the people.’
And the money, and the status, and the somewhere to go where demands are made, and coming home tired at the end of the day. Not the end result after all, but the doing of the thing.
‘That’s what I miss most,’ says Laura. ‘The people.’
‘You could go back.’
‘I don’t know if they’d even have me back.’
‘Or somewhere else. If that’s what you want.’
He’s thinking how beautiful she is. Just like when he saw her by the lake at Glyndebourne. Dove sono. Where are they now, the happy moments?
‘If that’s what I want,’ she says. She stops doing what she’s doing and looks at him in the way she looks when she’s thinking. ‘I’m not sure it really matters what any of us want.’
Then her face smoothes out and she gives a laugh, laughing at herself.
‘Stupid thing to say.’
Henry understands. It’s not stupid at all.
‘No, you’re right.’ Then he adds, ‘Just don’t die, please. Ever.’
‘All right. I won’t.’
Now as good a time as any. Make a
joke of it.
‘I need your money.’
‘Our money. The family’s money.’ This her way of making him believe he’s not a beggar. ‘You want me to have a word with Daddy?’
‘The funds are a bit on the low side.’
She puts down what she’s doing and goes to where he sits, in the kitchen’s only armchair. She drops down on her knees so that her face is on a level with his. She takes his hands in hers.
‘If you want, we’ll sell the house. I don’t care. I really don’t. It’s just that Daddy’s got so much and he loves to help us and I think, why not? But you hate it, don’t you?’
‘No. I don’t hate it. I have a bit of a struggle from time to time, that’s all.’
‘I don’t want money to make you sad, Henry.’
‘You’d rather we were poor but happy.’ Teasing her.
‘Any day.’
She kisses his hands. It strikes him that she’s more overtly affectionate than usual.
‘What have I done to deserve this?’
‘Nothing special,’ she says. ‘Sometimes I think I take you for granted. But I don’t really.’
She leans forward and kisses his lips. Then she gets up and goes back to making dinner.
‘It’s all just pride,’ he says. ‘Stupid male pride. I’m getting better about it.’
There’s the true modern idolatry: the worship of the self. The pursuit of self-fulfilment. Each of us makes our own idol in our own image.
‘You have been a bit down lately,’ she says, her back turned.
‘Yes.’
‘Anything I’m doing?’
‘No. Just life. Growing older.’
He watches his wife with love and gratitude. Feels her soft kiss still lingering on his lips.
‘I want you to be happy, Laura.’
‘How happy?’ she says.
There it is. Two words: the simple impossible question. How happy am I supposed to be? When am I entitled to complain and ask for more? Absurd to expect perfection, but how far short are we to allow ourselves to fall?
Where’s your fucking ambition, Henry?
‘That is the question, isn’t it?’
‘I went for a walk on the Downs with Nick Crocker,’ she says. She’s ladling risotto from the pan onto dinner plates.
‘Is he still around?’
‘Not any more.’
‘What’s he doing with his life these days?’