She sipped. “You know I’ve never liked routine.”
“Why didn’t you tell me so before?”
“Because I knew you wouldn’t like to hear it. It often strikes me I’m not the sort of person you think I am.”
“That’s good news. But don’t you know that routine is a way of making life go by with as little trouble as possible? It’s the only system that allows me to get any work done, which I suppose is why you’ve taken against it.”
“It’s not only that. I’m not doing your breakfast today, because as soon as I’ve had my coffee I’m leaving you.”
“Not again! What is it this time? Have I said something you don’t like? Or is it that I don’t tell you everything I’m thinking? All right, I’ll mend my ways, and tell you that last night, before getting into bed, I fell on my knees and prayed for the first time in years: ‘Dear God,’ I said, ‘send me a stroke, a coronary, or a quick cancer (all at the same instant, for preference) to get me out of myself, which will release Mabel and me at the same time.’ Then I changed my mind, and asked God not to kill me under any circumstances, so that I could encourage myself to be more loving and open with such a sweet and willing paramour. ‘She’s the best angel in the house any man could have,’ I said, ‘far too good and beautiful to ever be sent to Coventry.’ I really did pray like that, so what’s ailing you, my darling, that you could possibly want to leave me?”
I felt an ugly mood coming on, and lit a cigar, knowing she couldn’t stand its odour so early in the morning. “Here I am, smoking and belching to my heart’s content, having romped from slumber in my Roland Rat siren suit, and then I see you, the light of my life, such a tall lovely comely bosomly heavenly woman that I can only weep with joy at my good fortune.”
She poured more coffee. “Gilbert, why can’t you say such complimentary things to me all the time?”
“Because, my dearest, I sit at my desk creating other lives, which leaves me with no strength to break my own and gain enough self-knowledge to collect my genuine thoughts concerning you. But I know I have a lot to make up for—you see, I’m truly contrite—so let me tell you about an awful dream I had last night. When I woke this morning I felt as if I had just come back from the battlefront. I was in a truly pitiable state.”
She came from the table to hold my hand. “What was it, darling? I’m so sorry. Do tell me.”
“Can I sit on your knee?” She didn’t know how close she was to a slap she hadn’t experienced since the last one, but her intuition had become somewhat sharper during the years we had been together.
“Tell me the dream first,” she said.
“I was driving up the motorway with my latest novel in a cardboard box on the seat beside me, feeling so happy it was finished at last. I could get some money from my publisher then take my darling Mabel to Frinton-on-Sea for a well deserved fortnight’s holiday. She’d be all dressed up in her nurse’s uniform and admiral’s hat, pushing me up and down the front in a bathchair with a typewriter on the tartan blanket covering my knees. Oh yes, I saw it all so clearly, because I’d have a lollipop in my mouth. But paradise was not to be, unless for you my love when I was killed—because while mulling on the romantic Frinton escapade, on my way up the motorway (or was it on the way down?) a car passed so close it struck mine and, as I swerved, my car broke into a hundred pieces. Sheets of my novel flew up and down the tarmac, and as I ran over the barrier and across the fast lane to retrieve what pages I could, stupidly trying to put them back into numerical order, an enormous black lorry came towards me, all lights lit and klaxons screaming. I felt the fear and panic of certain death while life’s great force was in me as strongly as ever. My whole life was starting to unroll, a scenario so dreadful that I woke up in a wash of scalding tears. I thought of coming into your room, but didn’t want to disturb your sweet and innocent dreams, so while trying to get back to sleep I consoled myself with the idea that novelists live in a dream world anyway.” I stopped. “Don’t cry, darling.” She was nowhere near it, but gave me a quick kiss and went into the kitchen to make my breakfast.
The marmalade was sweet but otherwise tasteless, butter like axle grease, and her favourite Miracle Bread stuck to my gums, all flavour gone in any case at her having made me talk so much. I couldn’t stop, in case she thought I didn’t love her, when I didn’t know whether I loved her or not, but how can you love a woman if you love her? Only when you feel hatred can you sense it coming through, and when the hatred stops you love her till you think you don’t again.
She was trying to leave me. If only she would. If only she was as determined to do it as her expression led me to believe. It would solve everything. “Life with you is so romantic,” I said. “It’s positively gothic, since it can only end in death, like all genuinely romantic associations. Life is an ongoing Glass Bead game, don’t you think?” I felt like one of the poor bloody infantry, since ninety per cent of my time was spent waiting for her to wipe the smile of eternal grief off her face so that I could go over the top in the sex war and pull her into bed.
She passed a piece of buttered toast. “I don’t know what my life is all about, Gilbert. I’m so continuously disturbed living it with you. But I do know that I’m not a person of routine, and never have been. It’s only you who force me to be so.”
“Recriminations coming up? Big guns being wheeled out? Carpet bombing about to commence? If you’re going to leave me why bother? Or do you want to sow the Carthage of my soul with salt before you do? If so, don’t try. It’s been done a dozen times already. As for Dido pining for Aeneas, I expect she found another paramour in hell, or so the great poet said. You’re making me throw away priceless words on you when they could be gainfully employed in my novel. Darling, you must have known from the beginning that I was a blighted spirit, and that you’d have to take me as we found each other.”
The threat of her leaving me didn’t worry me, because she usually announced it at the time of the full moon. “The basis of all complaint,” I said, “is lack of energy. You sit down too much. You don’t work enough. You should go out more. Walk around London. Notice people living on the street who are much worse off than yourself.” I drew her affectionately onto my knees, which I knew she liked—though it almost cracked them. “Please don’t leave me.”
“You give me no alternative,” she said with warm and cloying breath.
Her accusation deserved a sudden parting of my legs so that she would drop through and do herself an injury that could only be cured by six months in traction. Oh how she would adore the sight of me smiling towards her along the garbage strewn National Health ward with flowers in one hand and sour grapes in the other, my overcoat open so that she couldn’t miss the lipstick down my flies. But I kissed her, a sign of genuine affection I hoped would be enjoyed.
“I’ll never know how I got into your clutches,” she said.
“Don’t you remember? I do. How could I forget, loving you as I always have? No two people ever got together in such an outlandish fashion. You can’t have forgotten that you won me in a raffle? My girlfriend of the time wanted to leave me, I can’t think why. But she still loved me, and didn’t want me to feel too bereft when she went, so she stood outside Harrod’s with tears streaming down her face, selling tickets at a pound a time, and you in your admirably feckless way bought one. Maybe you’d had a sherry too many that morning, but I’ll treasure your impulse till my dying day, and never forget that wonderful instant when the bell rang and you stood in the doorway with your satin bloomers in one hand and the winning ticket in the other, your lovely blue eyes so much a-glitter I thought you were over the top with benzedrine. From that moment I was convinced that all writers should be raffled off every seven years, and women writers too, bless ’em, so why don’t you get a book of tickets and stand outside Knightsbridge tube station selling them? It’s the least you can do, if you’re going to leave me.”
Energ
y was rushing back at the notion. “You wouldn’t like to leave me, with tears of anguish pouring down my cheeks, would you? Even you can’t hate me that much. Another raffle is the only solution to our predicament. You could have a placard hanging from your bosom saying ‘Win a well known novelist. Tickets a pound each, or six for five pounds.’ A lovely young idealistic girl might win. Failing that, you could make the prize one of having tea served by a famous novelist, tickets four for a pound. I could seduce at least one girl a day.”
“I’m sure you could,” she jeered. “In my more sober moments I see you as a Machiavellian phallus. I know all about your japes since we began living together.”
I brought out my last line of defence: “I’m capable of living life to the full, but have to give everything to my art,” which was the sort of babble she didn’t like to hear, and the stiffening of her posterior muscles on my knee told me I had gone too far, which was never far enough, because it was always too close to where I had started. I had expected laughter, but after a second well-placed kiss she stood aside, which was just as well because my knees were going dead.
“If you want to flee, flee.” I said, as she reared and glared at me. “I’m a lone wolf, so it’s not in me to try and stop you. I have forty books under my belt—though I haven’t counted them lately, and because you might have fed some into the stove there could be more. We live in a smokeless zone, but that doesn’t stop you getting that unjustifiable glint of neglect in your eyes. In fact I’ve had so much published I was in line for a knighthood as a reward for my services to English literature, and for keeping people reading at home when they would have been on the streets rioting, burning and looting as a protest at being treated like infants by the media and government, but I made it known in no uncertain Anglo-Saxon terms that whoever thought I deserved one should stick it so far up their rear ends it would come out of their throats and choke them.”
Her features wobbled in torment at my cavalier dismissal of England’s greatest honour. “You never told me you’d been offered a knighthood. ‘Sir Gilbert Blaskin!’ It would have sounded wonderful. Oh, you fool!” She stamped her foot. “How could you have turned it down?”
“Well, I did, and I know you’ll never forgive me. You think I’d have changed my ways into a Doric column of obscene respectability by marrying you and making one more honest woman in the country. You would then have been called a lady, at least by other people.”
She screamed for me to stop. I was getting somewhere. She would never leave me, in case it made me happy. “Listen,” I said, “yesterday I worked hard. I filled three fountain pens in the morning, and by evening they were empty.”
I poured the last coffee into my cup before she could take it. It was cold, so with a gentlemanly gesture I passed it across. “I don’t like you,” she moaned.
“That’s a good start. Let’s get married, then we can have a divorce. I never play my cards right. I live so much in torment from you I sometimes feel tempted by The Suicide’s Handbook, which is always on my desk, but the last sentence says: ‘Pass this book manual on when you finished with it,’ and I don’t have the habit of giving books away. But why don’t you like me, darling? If you know the cause you know the cure.”
“It’s because you always talk such fiddlesticks. How could I know the cause of anything?”
Her indignation was so intense I was almost proud of her. “So you’re leaving me? Where do you intend to go? Will you light off in search of the Holy Grail? You’d be just the person to find it.”
I decided to say no more, but my silence was taken as only another way of making things worse. On holiday in the South Pacific a few years ago she had struck my head with a half coconut, which cut me so much she thought—as I did—that she had killed me. I sensed such a desire coming on her again, so attempted to divert her. “When I went out the day before yesterday,” I said, “I met Ursula Major in the Latitude Club, and we took rather a shine to each other.”
She paused in clearing the breakfast things. “I thought she was a lesbian?”
I stood away, in splendid isolation. “She was. We went back to her flat afterwards. You know me. I go where angels fear to tread: one foot in hell, the other in her bed.”
A cup spun at my head, missed, and fell to the carpet. At least it didn’t break. “You’re lying, you beast,” she shrieked. “And boasting, as well.”
“I only say such things to entertain you.” She sat down, worn out with bickering. Fortunately we only quarrelled every month or so. Had we done it more often we’d have been dead among the daffodils long ago. “You never show any curiosity about what goes in my head,” she said.
“That’s because all the twists and turns are so convoluted it’s only possible to make them plain by what I say to you. You never tell me, so I have to guess.”
“It takes all sorts to make a fool.”
“Only two,” I said. “I’m too interested in what you are going to say to be offended by whatever comes. The thing is you never learned joined-up thinking. Every time you come out with a quip like that I know it’s the end of a screed of thought you’d been struggling for hours to get out. If you’d let me hear all the preambles I’d know that you cared for me. I’m tired of that constipated stiff upper lip you put on most of the time. You know I love you, but you won’t let the fact through, and I’ll never know why.”
An icy tear gathered at the corner of a beautiful cornflower blue eye. “It’s because you don’t respect me, Gilbert. Nothing you say points to it.”
Let no one think I do not have self-control. It’s a quality I have treasured since the day I sucked the coloured paint off my rattle in the pram and didn’t cry when I got smacked for it by the nanny. Never a move was made without self-control ever since. I was, and am, always aware when the moment arrives for its use, because its limit stretches across my conscience like a line of barbed wire. My coolness in action was often commented on in the army, and consequently I came out of the fighting alive, as did most of my men. Self-control is the supreme moral quality of life (ask Epictetus) and if everyone showed enough of it the world would be a better place. But there’s always another side to the equation, in which one exercises self-control only so as to know when with effect, if not dignity, to lose it, and for a purpose however shameful. She backed away. “Don’t hit me!”
Astonishingly agile for a superbly buxom woman, who had been the captain of her hockey team at an excellent school, she missed the worst of a medium-powered slap across the cheek. “Never,” I said, “say that I don’t respect you, because to me that’s the vilest calumny. I love you, don’t I? Aren’t we made for each other? And if I love you it goes without saying I respect you. Haven’t I proved it by showing I can’t tolerate you saying I don’t respect you?” I gave her another, to emphasize my distress. “Of course I respect you. Don’t I know everything you’re thinking, and tailor my responses accordingly? If that’s not respect—as well as kindness, consideration, and devoted attention—I don’t know what is. I love and respect every living fibre of you, and the only thanks I get is for you to tell me so callously that you’re leaving. If you go, how many years will have to pass before I can build up the same intensity of relationship with someone else?” I lit another cigar, and considerately waved the smoke away from her. “If you take up with another man—or with a woman—you’ll have to go through it all again as well.”
She stopped crying. “Oh, Gilbert, I don’t know what to think.”
“You only say that to torment me. How do you imagine anybody would put up with you if you never knew what to think?”
“I always try, you know I do.”
A wicked thought came to me. “In that case, take your knickers off.”
She bridled, and stepped back. “I won’t.”
“And unclip your suspenders.”
“Certainly not.”
“And liberate your gorgeo
us breasts.”
“Never.”
“You see,” I said, triumphantly, “when you say no so quickly it shows you’re not thinking. You glory in the fact that you can’t, when you should be ashamed. Come on, take off your liberty bodice. Make stepping stones to the bedroom with your underwear so that I can tread my way to bliss.” I do believe she was about to, when the infernal door bell rang. “Who can that be?” I snarled.
“It might be Mr Dukes. He said he’d take me to lunch today.”
“So you weren’t going to leave me?”
“No,” she said, with a malicious haircrack smile, “but when I do I certainly won’t tell you.”
“That will spare my feelings at least. But isn’t it a little early for lunch?”
The bell jangled again. “He doesn’t have any conception of time,” she said.
“If it is him, be sure to take down all he says on the hand-held tape recorder. He’s in with the racketeers, so I’ll have some realistic dialogue for my work.”
“I wouldn’t do such an underhanded thing.”
Another spate of something close to a fire alarm, and when she went to answer it I called out that I was going to get my revolver and kill him. Either Kenilworth Dukes had had an operation on his windpipe, or it was someone else. “You can’t,” she said from the door. “You definitely can’t.”
“I most certainly can, and will.”
“He’s out for the day.”
“I’m sure he isn’t.”
“He’s not here I tell you.”
“Get out of my way, you hussy.”
Mabel did a backwards spin to where I was standing, as if to ask my cooperation in saving her life. A six-foot elderly female followed her in, with a laden cloth reticule on one arm and a formidable ivory-handled umbrella under the other, looking like an impersonator from the Clapham omnibus after a good day giving out white feathers in the Great War to men who rightly didn’t want any part of the carnage.