‘It’s nothing,’ he said, this after he’d gone to the window, poked the blinds and stared out. He said, ‘Go back to sleep, Riley.’ But there was no chance of sleep with that dull heavy throb passing in wave after wave overhead, so eventually he got up, pulled on his pants, padded down the corridor to fetch tea from the night porter.
I crawled into his bed again after we had drunk our tea, clung to him very tightly. I was three parts asleep, my head against his neck when he said the words into the darkness.
Many times over the years I’ve thought about what he said then, particularly about the way that he said it. I’ve tried to pin down every last nuance in his voice, tried to decide what gave the words their peculiar emphasis, the resonance that has carried them so forcibly over the years, that makes them still the words for which I best remember him.
There was contempt in there, disgust, but not for me, but more for the state itself as if it was on this that he lavished all that bitter hopeless fury.
‘What does it matter?’ he said, his arms tightening like a band around my shoulders. Then came the words:
‘Soon you’ll be married.’
* * *
I left a week later. The day before I flew out, he took me shopping. He wanted to buy me a present. ‘Call it a Christmas present.’ A coat.
‘A coat?’
‘Trust me, Riley. People are always prepared for how hot Hong Kong gets but never how cold.’
In the end I settled for earrings, simple gold hoops. I lost one early on in Hong Kong but still have the other down the bottom of my jewellery basket.
After the shopping we stood for a moment at the entrance to the mall, shifting from foot to foot and making desultory conversation.
‘You have to go …’
‘Yes …’
‘You have an appointment …’
‘Yes.’
‘The university.’
He took my hand, stared down at the fingers. For a moment he looked like he was about to say something. But then he dropped it, wheeled about abruptly and the next minute was lost among a crowd of arriving tourists.
‘And that’s it?’ Danny was looking at me.
‘Yes.’
He shook his head. ‘That was the end of it? But why?’
‘I was afraid. I didn’t love him enough. I couldn’t love him enough. Also …’
‘Yeah?’
Something else, something that has to do with the passion of that cry spiralling up to heaven: If only I could make you understand how much I love you, Riley.
‘I was … afraid for him. Afraid that he’d take anything I had to offer. And I think he would have done. I think if I’d stayed longer we might have got to some terrible moment where he asked me to go with him and, who knows, I might have gone.’
‘And that would have been so bad?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it couldn’t have worked out. Our lives together.’
‘How could you know that?’
‘Because I knew myself. What I was. What I wanted.’
He’d talked little about his life, it’s true, and yet, even in the absence of facts, I believed, still believe, I could form a picture of it. Such a serious existence, far away from the lightness, the gaiety that suited me, and which he’d seen too through that taxi window.
I saw a low, dark house with heavy furniture, heavy rugs, heavy classical music, Wagner say, Beethoven, or that modern jazz, all the stuff that belonged to his life and not mine, playing low, scarcely disturbing the silence. I saw books, shelf after shelf of them, and I heard a clock ticking, that heavy tick that measures the minutes one by one and falls solemn and heavy into the silence. I saw myself trying to be a part of this life and I saw what would happen – boredom first, then disillusionment, bitter sniping, anger, and worse, tawdry, soul-sapping affairs. Afternoon sex perhaps with one of his colleagues, even a student.
I think he saw it all too.
‘I don’t believe he ever truly thought it could work between us.’
Because, looking back on all this, I think that Nathan knew me better than anyone has ever known me. Certainly, as far as the affair is concerned, I think he knew what would happen from the beginning, that he saw it all spread out before him like a map. And yet still he threw himself into the thing, wholeheartedly, holding nothing back. More than a quarter of a century on, such courage, such utter generosity of spirit still takes my breath away.
At the airport all the papers were full of the bombing.* Their front pages all carried pictures of Hanoi and Haiphong, both looking like Hiroshima. One called the bombing ‘a stone-aged tactic’, Nixon ‘a maddened tyrant’, another ‘a senseless terror which stains the good name of America’. I read them in a deserted corner in the basement where I lit up the joint of sweet Thai grass Zoe had given me the night before as a farewell present.
Zoe had arranged a party for me that night. She strung lanterns and gaudy Chinese decorations around her room in our hotel, swelled the guest list with freaks I didn’t know and who had no idea who I was either. Sometime in the early hours of the morning, when there was just a handful of people left, and both she and I were very stoned, she dragged me to my feet, made me dance with her.
She said, ‘What are you doing, oh, what are you doing, Riley?’
There was such a terrible edge of tragedy in her voice that we both burst into laughter. She draped herself over me, arms over my shoulders, howling with it and taking deep tokes from the joint in her hand. With each toke her laughter became more hysterical. She said, ‘You’re making a terrible mistake. You know that, don’t you, Riley?’
She could hardly get the words out now for the awful cackles of laughter. At the same time she had begun to weep, using the thumb of her right hand, which held the joint to wipe away the tears of combined sorrow and laughter. She kept trying to compose herself, to say something serious again, but each time she did, both she and I broke into further hysterical laughter. We rocked and swayed as the few remaining guests began to laugh with us. Their laughter added to the great gale of the stuff that rose up with the dope smoke and hung on the ceiling.
At last she got the words out.
She said, ‘You love him. Why won’t you see it? Don’t you see that you love him, Riley?’
He was right about the weather in Hong Kong. The rich of the colony were celebrating when I arrived, it being one of those rare, sought-after opportunities to bring the fox fur out of cold storage. There’d be frost in the New Territories, something that happened one or two days a year and which always made the morning papers.
The biting wind, as I walked across the tarmac at Kai Tak, felt like it was sweeping straight down from the Steppes. Scornful of Nathan’s offer of a coat, I was wearing no more than a T-shirt.
The chill in the evening air seemed more than physical, I remember. It seemed to bring with it a blast of pure misery and loneliness that blew right through me, telling me that Zoe was right. I was making a terrible mistake and I did indeed love Nathan. Inside the building I halted before the check-in desk of the airline I’d just left, stood looking at it so long I caught the attention of the girl behind it, who stared back at me suspiciously as I fought for and against the desire to walk up, throw my last traveller’s cheques down in front of her in a grand gesture, get back on the plane to Bangkok. I imagined myself going straight to his hotel, tapping again on his door, seeing it open that crack and then more, as he saw who it was. Flinging myself his arms, feeling them. All that solace.
I’ve made a mistake, Nathan.
I love you, Nathan …
A grand gesture indeed. Because I still couldn’t say it. Not with the truth required. Not so he’d believe it. No more so than he’d been able to do that night outside the Oriental.
I knew all this and I knew something else too, something more wicked and deadly. I knew that lying beneath all the dark, cold misery and loneliness I was feeling now, all but hidden between all
those layers, was the smallest, the most minute gleam of something – nothing but a shard, but still shining. It was excitement, a clean, sweet sense of new beginning. Of freedom.
‘Do you think that’s terrible? Do you think that’s awful?’ I said to Danny. I mocked because the moment was so serious. I said, ‘Do you think it makes me a bad purrrrrrson?’
He answered in a Danny way, kind of cool, like he does sometimes so that you don’t quite know what he’s thinking.
He said, ‘No. Probably just seriously emotionally stunted.’
On the other hand he also said, ‘Let he or she who is without sin, et cetera, et cetera … I guess there’s plenty of us not entitled to reach down and pick up that first stone, Riley.’
* The Christmas bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong lasted from 17–29 December. Instituted by Nixon with Kissinger’s agreement, it was designed to kick-start the mouldering Paris peace talks, a piece of diplomacy hereafter famously referred to as ‘bombing the enemy to the conference table’. It worked, and on 27 January 1973 the infamous ‘peace with honour’ was officially declared. The Vietnam War cost the lives of some 57,000 American servicemen. The number of Vietnamese casualties, plus those in Laos and Cambodia, runs into millions. As regards the US total, it’s worth mentioning that it’s reckoned that more Vietnam veterans have committed suicide since the end of the war than actually died fighting it.
‘It’ll haunt us for generations,’ Nathan said that night as the rumble continued overhead. ‘It’ll take years for us to get rid of it.’
Q is for … A Question of Sex
No. Wrong.
Not a question of sex, the question.
The only question.
The question that has troubled mankind since time immemorial and possibly even before that; the one that has been mulled over by the great minds, Plato, Descartes, Lao Tzu …
How often do single people, spinsters in particular, have sex?*
And when all is said and done, and at the end of the day (which, after all, is still when it’s most likely to happen), do they have it more or less than their married sisters?
My married sister, for instance.
‘Mind your own bloody business.’
‘Look, it’s not idle curiosity. It’s a purely scientific enquiry.’
According to the Office of National Statistics, forty per cent of married couples have sex at least twice a week.* Or at least they claim they do.
‘Well, I’m sure.’ Sophie raises a deeply sceptical eyebrow. ‘I mean. You’re married, right? And someone comes along with a clipboard and asks you if you’re having sex. You’re not going to say No, are you?’
‘The singles did.’
Because indeed they did. In the same survey three-quarters of unmarried men owned up to falling short of the twice-weekly marrieds’ figure, while spinsters let the single side down even further. Only a bare one-fifth were able to lay claim to the married total.
Now, I’ll warrant you, there’ll be more than a few of you married people out there surprised at this. You, sir, for instance, yes, you. Or you, madam, stuck there in the middle of those first fine glorious years of child-rearing, reading this at two in the morning, book in one hand, rocking cradle in the other, you who have learnt to live not just without sleep but without other things too – health, for instance, humour, all those other common decencies of human existence. And, of course, sex, which has become so vague a memory you couldn’t even swear any more that you know how to do it. Listen. No victory more sweet than the unexpected one. No laurels more welcome than those placed unforeseen upon the brow.
Next time your party-going, dirty stop-out, single, next-door neighbour wakes you up by banging the front door at three in the morning and clumping heavily up the stairs, don’t get mad, get even.
Remind yourself you’re statistically more likely to have had sex than she has.
None of this surprises me. Because it stands to reason, as far as I can see, that by and large, and all things being equal, anyone who lives as part of a twosome under the same roof with another person is bound to have more chance of having sex than someone living alone. Because the most obvious advantage of a live-in relationship is that, theoretically at least, sex is on hand. There. At home. In the freezer.
‘Yeah, well. We all know about freezers.’ Sophie ticks her argument off on her fingers. ‘One, the stuff has to be defrosted before you can use it. Two, half the time when you’ve done that you don’t want it. And as for the sell-by date …’
‘Right.’
‘Don’t even go there.’
One thing’s for sure. The news that marrieds have more sex than singles comes as no surprise to the spinster, neither is it going to swing any red-blooded of her species the married way. Because only a fool would try to sell the single life on the grounds of sex. Because being single is like being on an expedition to the North Pole, or climbing Mount Everest, or sailing single-handedly around the world. In all these instances you’d be pretty sure of being short of sex. But it wouldn’t matter because sex wouldn’t be the reason you were there. Sex wouldn’t be why you were doing it.
For years I kept the faith, believing in the mythical little black book, believing that somewhere there existed a society, a utopia, inhabited by like-minded singles keen to combine sex and friendship in occasional, uncomplicated couplings. All I had to do was find it. But what I can say all these years on, is that if such a Shangri-la exists, if there is such a community, fraternity or fellowship, if somewhere on this planet there are men and women with the names and numbers of purveyors of cordial and unconditional sex pinned up on their notice boards next to the plumber and the electrician, well, I have yet to come upon them.
‘That’s because you’re straight.’
Oh, yeah. Sorry. My mistake.
I was forgetting Danny and Hanrahan.
Our cottage walls are thick and built to last. Still sometimes I hear Danny and Han making love. Normally it’s that last cry of joy and abandonment. It wakes me from sleep. Hangs on the air a moment. Then it falls away into the night like the call of some forgotten bird.
Danny and Han have known each other for five years, since Han opened Hanrahan’s Books at the bottom of the High Street. Still, according to Danny, they only meet for sex.
‘“According to …” And that means what, precisely?’
It means I don’t quite believe him. Because I can’t help noticing that other things have crept in now as part of this ‘only for sex’ relationship. Meals out together, for instance, visits to the cinema and art galleries. A while back they even spent a long weekend in Prague together.
‘I think you get on better with Han than you’re willing to admit, that’s all. In fact, if you were up for settling down—’
‘Which I’m not.’
‘Which you say you’re not.’
Well then, as far as I can see, Han would do quite as well as the next man.
Dr Johnson said all of us could be happy with one of fifty or fifty thousand people. The only trick is you have to want to be happy with someone. Which is more than a trick; actually, it’s the crux of the matter. And therein lies the difference between me and Danny. Because Danny’s ten years younger than me and still looking for a relationship, even though more often than not he won’t admit it.
‘It’s not a love thing,’ he says about Han.
I say, ‘Tell me, what does a love thing look like, Danny?’
It’s an old argument, this, but one good and true. Be absolutely sure when you’re yearning for something you know what it looks like. Be sure you’d recognise it if it turned up.
Last time I was in Han’s shop he said, too casually, too carefully, ‘So how’s Danny? Haven’t seen him for a while.’ I said, ‘He’s fine. He was coming in with me but then he got a call to go back to the office.’ Which was a lie. I only said it to make Han feel better and more than likely he knew it.
Because it turns out the pursuit of the easy, uncomplicated
sex is a difficult business inasmuch as it’s hard to keep up the reciprocal aspect of the arrangement. Before you know it, one’s up and one’s down. The givers and the takers have asserted their positions, and this because sex has a way of sorting out the winners and the losers.
In short, in my experience you can go to bed with someone so confident of the lightness of the thing, its lack of importance in your life, in fact you’d be willing to take bets on it. Six months later you can be down on the ground and scrabbling at his feet, not knowing how you got there.
All of which I know from Lennie.
* * *
Sometimes I think Lennie is a bit like God. If he hadn’t existed, I’d have had to make him up, which is actually what I did. I made him up. I assembled him like one of those paper dolls. Took the outline and coloured it in to my own specifications. Which is why I’d never be able to come out of the undergrowth with my hands up as regards Lennie, never be able to wave a white flag like some innocent bystander. When I think of Lennie, I think of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I wonder how I fell asleep on that bank but, more importantly, who dropped the potion in my eyes. And then I realise it could only have been me who did it.
Because I knew Lennie, you see. That day, for instance, when the phone went in his office as I was signing the forms for my new sound system, the way he said, ‘Currys, can I help you?’ cheerily, and then the change in his voice, instantly, hearing it become hard, inflexible, like that. As if there was granite in it. No, not granite, marble. Because it was still a salesman’s voice, bright and white and even.
‘I told you not to call me here.’
Somewhere down the line, even from where I stood outside the little glass box of an office, I could hear the female voice squawking, just the way mine would squawk sometime in the future, all this like a warning, a message from the gods.
‘So what? It’s none of your business what I do.’
And then the words that would forever sum Lennie up, that should have been tattooed on his forehead the way they were engraved on his soul.
Not Married, Not Bothered Page 18
