We had started a row about where our relationship was going, just after the moment when we should have left for a Famous Club lunch at Julian Alman’s. This was one of our favorite ways of making ourselves unhappy. It was always me who started these conversations—mainly because Oliver’s behavior made me so insecure. If you ask where a relationship is going too often the question has a habit of turning into where the relationship went. Unfortunately, however, God has given women an inbuilt irresistible urge to insist on knowing where their relationships are going, and to force their partners to discuss the matter at length whenever they are late for something.
Having reached an inconclusive impasse on the love front, Oliver and I moved on to clothes, and in particular my outfit for today. Oliver did not like my clothes. He never said so in so many words, but it was clear. Oliver had excellent taste and lots of money. I had always been unsure about what I was wearing on every occasion but had never seriously bothered about it before. I just lived with it, the way you live with always thinking you are overweight. But now the clothes issue nattered away at me, giving a spoiling tinge to every meeting with Oliver. He had helped out by buying me a little black Alaïa dress, in order that I should look more exactly like all the other women at the functions we attended. Although this was a casual Sunday lunch I ended up squeezing myself into the Alaïa corset-style garment, just for the sake of confidence.
“Do you think I look fat?” I said.
He sighed. “No.”
I climbed up onto a chair and inspected an imaginary roll of fat in the dressing table mirror.
“YOU ARE NOT FAT,” he shouted through clenched teeth, as I twisted round to try to look at my bottom.
What happened to my generation of women? Who doomed us to spending our entire lives wishing we were half a stone lighter? I wasn’t anorexic, bulimic, or anything else you could put in a textbook but I still managed to see everything I ate as an indulgence, and eating it an act of weakness. God, what a thing to remember now.
In the car, mentally bruised and exhausted like ancient warring beasts, we moved on to major-row-trigger number four, which was me going out to Africa. The more miserable I became, the more eager I was to go and the more determined Oliver was to stop me. I couldn’t understand why at the time. Partly, I think, he just didn’t want me to go away for a fortnight. Given that he claimed not to love me or be in love with me or whatever was going on in his head, he was inconsistently jealous, both of all the other men in the world, and of my time. But most of all I think he wanted me to stay as I was, with my life totally revolving around him, backing him up, with nothing that I was doing particularly important to me. He had sensed that if I went out to Africa then all that would fall apart and crumble away. He was very astute.
The row raged on in the car. Every couple has rows. Rows when you’re tense because you’re late, rows when you’re drunk, rows when you’re fed up, rows when you’re tired, rows after parties when one of you gets jealous of the other for flirting. Rows don’t need to matter. But Oliver was so clever, so eloquent and so cruel that our rows would completely destroy me, and leave me feeling that my personality and everything I believed in had been taken away. I used to want to tape-record them and play them back to someone else to prove that I wasn’t mad. I was terrified of him when he was in row mode. When we got to Julian Alman’s, I sat shrunken down in my seat, staring straight ahead, not saying anything, hoping he would simply go away.
Oliver said, “Fine, if you’re going to be like that you can sit in the car,” took the keys and went inside. I sat there limp with misery for half an hour before I could rouse myself to get a taxi home. Later that evening he came round and started talking about how much he’d like to have children with me. Two days later he stopped calling, without explanation, and didn’t answer my calls for four days. When he eventually rang, he told me he loved me and I asked when we would meet. He said he couldn’t find his diary and disappeared for another two days. The following week it was all on again.
Sometimes it is hard to remember why I loved him so much. He was clever and funny and beautiful and I fancied him with the sort of driven chemical desire which won’t lie down. Oliver was unstable but he was never, ever, a bore. And although I grew to hate it, in the beginning it was fun going out with a celebrity. It was fun feeling smug when we were out and everyone wanted a little piece of him, and I was the one on his arm. It was fun knowing that Hermione was jealous. It was fun telling my mum I was going out with a man on the television. It was glamorous going to all the dos and meeting all the people. If I hadn’t gone to Africa I would probably just have accepted Oliver’s lunacy and carried on.
I was in and out of Nambula within four days on that trip in 1985. Just four days.
Once Sir William knew that Soft Focus wasn’t going to film the trip he decided against coming, but he did put a lot of his own money into buying the food. All I had to do was make sure that the Ginsberg and Fink logo featured in all the photographs. It was plastered on the food sacks, stuck on the sides of the food lorries. I had boxes of carrier bags and bookmarks all sporting the company logo.
On the way from El Daman airport I watched from the taxi as we drove past failed idea after failed idea: the ornamental park by the river with walkways and archways all covered in sand, the enormous painted sign, festooned with leopards and lions, saying El Daman Municipal Zoo with a gaping hole in the fence beside it. We passed the deserted Municipal Crazy Golf overrun with goats. I looked at the taxis with doors hanging off, the piles of rubble by the side of the road, a group of women walking along arm in arm, laughing, dressed in torn dirty robes and shoes with the straps hanging off them, the El Daman Municipal Ministry of Works with the driveway cracked, the pillars of the entrance broken and smears of mud all over the once-white interior. I felt liberated. I thought that here was a place where it was all right to be only all right; to have grandiose fantasies which came to nothing.
I was driven from office to office that day, with Malcolm introducing me and organizing my permissions. I sat in his jeep, pulling my dress from my body to let the air in. I leaned back, fuzzled and exhausted with the heat and I thought that you couldn’t ask too much of yourself or anyone else here. You didn’t have to dress up, make up, look perfect, be whizzy, marry a handsome prince, succeed. You could have a go at things without a whole world of people who were charged up, fine-tuned to performance pitch and better than you at everything, staring coldly at your every hiccup and stumble. A part of me that had been lying scared in bed could at least get up and walk around outside here. It was entirely selfish. I was thinking that Africa could do a lot for me.
Even when I first arrived at the camp, I didn’t understand what I was dealing with. I stood admiring the view for a while, then walked back to join the photographer and the SUSTAIN people who were standing talking just by the entrance to the compound. A lorry was driving towards us on the road. It was brightly painted with an open rear surrounded by metal rails, to keep the cargo in. A terrible sound of human voices was coming from it. As it passed us, I saw that the back was packed like a cattle truck with human beings, who were so thin that their heads were like skulls. As it was driving away a body slipped out between the slats around the back and crumpled onto the ground, and a woman still in the lorry gave a cry and stretched out her arms towards the body, while the truck carried on driving away. The body lay in the road near to us: the neck was broken and the head bent to one side.
For a long time afterwards, I tried not to remember those two days I spent in the camp. I had been shocked when I watched the BBC coverage of the Ethiopian famine in November 1984, Michael Buerk’s terse, haunting script: “Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night . . . it lights up a biblical famine, now in the twentieth century. This place, say workers here, is the closest thing to hell on earth.”
I was shocked when I watched Live Aid, and saw the footage of a starving child trying to stand, with the Cars song playing in t
he background. But that was a safe breed of shock: something was being done, the stars were on the case, you could send your fifty quid and know that you cared and you were doing your bit. It was never going to be allowed to happen again.
This was the shock of feeling for the first time that the world had no safety in it, that it was not governed by justice, and that nobody who could be trusted was in control. It was the shame of feeling that I shared responsibility for this horror and of breaking down, and ceasing to function in the midst of an emergency where I could have helped. It was impossible to eat. It was impossible to sleep. Panic had seized me. I felt that I had the guilt of the whole world on my shoulders. I thought I was going to be found out, blazoned across the newspapers, sent to prison. It was as if I had glimpsed a corner of some massive, dark crime in which I was implicated and punishment would follow.
*
Back in London the panic did not end. It was Christmas time, and I sat in festive houses feeling like a small child at grown-up parties, hearing the voices drift farther and farther away, feeling incapable of talking. The city seemed to be strangling itself, a maze of streets choked and jammed with too many cars, too many shops, too many restaurants, too much of everything. It made me claustrophobic. It made me want to scream. I used to incense Oliver by going outside to sit in the car. I used to sit, watching the rain on the windshield thinking of the African night, of the big sky, rich with stars, and wanting to go back.
In short, I became a complete pain in the arse.
*
“Champagne?” Julian Alman held up the vintage bottle cheerfully. “Merry Christmas,” he said. The price tag was still on it: £27.95.
“I’ll have a glass of water, please.”
Oliver sighed.
“Sparkling or still?”
“Out of the tap, please.”
Julian closed his refrigerated mahogany drinks cabinet and disappeared into the kitchen.
“I wish you would stop this,” said Oliver.
I sank on to the rock hardness of the Biedermeier sofa. “I’ll drink what I want to drink.”
He walked over to the fireplace, and looked at the van Gogh above it. “Ugly, isn’t it?” he said. “It was the only one he could afford.”
The whole room was ugly. The walls were dark green. The furniture was antique and heavy. The floor was marble. The van Gogh was set behind thick double-glazed glass with a burglar alarm flashing behind it. The windows had bars.
Julian reappeared with a glass of water. “Shall we go upstairs?”
He lived alone in this tall, thin, five-story house in Fulham. It was full of applied architectural features. We ascended the eight flights of stairs, with their ornate, curling banisters. We passed dark-paneled doors, unfathomable items of occasional furniture, heavy-framed paintings with red flashing lights beside them, and stiff, ruched curtains, reminiscent of posh rubber-lined babies’ pants. Finally we reached a room at the top which was completely undecorated. There were papers all over the desk, a huge seventies brown-corduroy sofa with a spring sticking out, bare floorboards, beanbags scattered about and Pink Floyd posters on the walls. This was where Julian spent all his time. Often he slept on the sofa because his seventeenth-century four-poster gave him backache. “Blast,” he said, “I’ve forgotten the cigarettes,” and set off downstairs again.
I stepped behind the desk and looked out of the window, under the sloping eaves. It was dark, and raining. I watched the cars moving in two steady streams below, the white Georgian houses opposite.
The phone rang. Oliver picked it up. It was a switchboard phone with a line of buttons marked “Kitchen,” “Garage,” “Laundry Room,” “Second Floor Bathroom.”
“Hello? Janey.” Janey was Julian’s new girlfriend. “Oliver here, how are you, sweetheart? Are you after the old beached whale?”
Julian’s voice boomed up the stairwell. “Put it through. . . Kitchen, will you?”
“Hang on, Janey.” Oliver went to the top of the stairs and yelled, “How do I put it through?”
“Press . . . then press Kitchen.”
“Press what?”
“Hold.”
“Hold then Kitchen?”
“Yes. No, Hold, then Kitchen, then transfer.”
“OK.” He came back to the phone. “Just transferring you to Julian in the kitchen.” He pressed the buttons. “Damn.” He walked to the stairwell again. “I’ve cut her off.”
“What?”
“Cut her off.”
“. . . God’s sake . . .”
“Call her back. It’s Janey.”
“Who?”
“Janey.”
Never had a man been more debilitated by wealth than Julian.
Images from Africa were going round and round in my head. I couldn’t stop them. I thought I was going mad. Lights flashed on the phone. I moved from the window and sat down on a beanbag, holding my knees, resting my head on the holes in my jeans. Oliver came back into the room.
“Rosie, I wish you wouldn’t come out in those jeans. You look like a member of a teenage girl band. What’s happened to all your nice clothes?”
“Sold them,” I said, still with my head down.
“You’ve what?”
“I’ve taken them to a shop called Second Thoughts. They’ll get five hundred quid for them and I’m sending it to Oxfam.”
“How naïve can you get? What the fuck difference is that going to make? How are you going to live life here if you can’t dress appropriately?”
“It’s what’s inside you that counts, Oliver.”
“Oh. Is it really? Is it? Thank you. Thank you, Mother Teresa, you have shown me the light.”
I kept my head down, saying nothing.
“Jesus, Rosie, when are you going to snap out of this? Look, I’ll send Oxfam five hundred quid if you feel that strongly about it. Go and get the clothes back. When did you do this?”
“You can send them five hundred as well.”
“I’ll send them a grand, all right? You get the clothes back, then everyone will be better off.”
I straightened up and looked at him. “And what would I have done?”
“Got a grip at least.”
“You can’t buy me out of what I believe.”
“Oh, God, spare me the violins. Someone pass her an onion.” He saw my look. “OK, sorry, I know. I know. But could you just try to keep at least some hold on reality, however tenuous?”
Julian’s heavy, lumbering tread was approaching up the stairs. He came in, flung himself on the sofa and lit a cigarette with an air of aggrievement.
“Margarita is stealing from the fridge.”
“Who?” said Oliver.
“The lady who looks after me. You’ve met Margarita. I had six bottles of Moët in there and now there are only four. It really isn’t on. I’m more than generous to her. I have her son clean the cars five times a week and then he leaves fleck all over them. What shall I do?”
“Cut off their heads,” I said.
“Shut up,” said Oliver.
Oliver had come round to look at the scripts for an advertising campaign for British Telecom that Julian had been offered. Julian was worried that the character he was playing wasn’t funny enough.
“How much?” Oliver said, as Julian handed him the scripts.
“A hundred grand.”
“Not enough. You should ask for two.”
I got up and walked out. I stamped down a flight of stairs to the fourth-floor guest room bathroom. It was the size of my flat and lined with mirrors. The floor looked as though it had been cut from a single piece of jade, and in the center, standing on wrought-iron eagles’ talons, was a mock Victorian Jacuzzi bath. The loo seat matched the floor. I put the lid down and sat on it. I stared into the gilded mirror opposite seeing the starvation lorry and the body falling out. My face didn’t look like my face. There was a marble stool at my feet with another of the switchboard telephones on it. Two fluffy toweling bathrobes hung on a
brass eagle’s head behind the door. I got up and went out onto the landing.
Julian’s voice boomed, “You could always do it better, couldn’t you, Oliver?”
“Have you ever had one good word to say about Soft Focus? Ever?”
I walked very slowly up the stairs and into the room. They both looked up nervously as if they had a lunatic in their midst. I sat on the chair behind the desk. Once I was settled they looked at each other, picked up their scripts gingerly, and started talking about the advert again.
Amongst the papers in front of me was an invoice with Leighton Health Club written on top. I picked it up. “Julian Alman, one year membership, full and social, £3,500,” it said.
“Ahem.” They both looked up.
“Why have you done this?” I said.
“Leave Julian’s papers alone.”
I held it out to them. “Three thousand five hundred pounds. Why?”
“I need to lose weight.”
“Three thousand five hundred pounds to lose weight?”
“Rosie,” Oliver said. “Will you stop being so fucking sanctimonious?”
“Do you know what this would buy out in Africa?”
“I know, but I do give money to Africa.” Julian looked apologetic. “I just don’t give all of it. And of what I keep, what does it matter what I spend it on?”
“Well, exactly,” said Oliver. “Exactly what I’m telling her. Either you give it away or you don’t and if you’re not going to give it away it makes no difference what you spend it on. Whether it’s horses, stocks and shares, Picassos, microwaves—it’s all the same.”
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