Nathan, Nathan. In direct translation, Given of God. A scary thought.
‘If I believed it. Which I don’t.’ This to Danny.
Over the years, thinking of Nathan, I’d daydream sometimes, imagine myself jumping on a plane (this before I’d discovered I couldn’t fly), crossing to the other side of the planet, checking into some hotel near the university, playing the detective and finding out when and where he was teaching. I’d imagine myself going to one of his lectures, see myself sitting at the back behind my dark glasses, watching as he put up his dry dusty slides with those dry dusty statistics, made his dry dusty asides.
‘Do they like you? Your students?’ I asked him that once.
‘I guess.’
‘No. Do they?’
‘Yeah. Maybe. I make them laugh … sometimes.’ This said with that old determination never to show the slightest hint of vanity or self-favour.
I’d imagine then, how it would be at the end of the lecture, how I’d wait until the last student had departed. How I’d walk down those steps, very quietly, very slowly, how he’d see me out of the corner of his eye as he collected up his slides and his notes, how he’d ignore me, refusing to raise his head, thinking it no more than a pitiful excuse for a late essay. How I’d stand there for a moment, just staring at him and then how I’d say his name so very quietly.
‘Nathan …’
‘Jesus. And all this time you’ve never contacted him.’
‘Did I say that?’
Oh, did I say that, Danny?
Because every so often, for no reason, out of the blue, something like an alarm would go off in the back of my head. I’d awake with the desire, the need to phone him.
‘Right. So you have been in touch?’
‘No.’
Not exactly, Danny.
‘Because when I phoned him, it was always out of hours. I’d always get the night porter and I’d make up a story. I’d tell him I was phoning Nathan about some conference. That Nathan had told me to ring because he knew he needed to be in his room overnight finishing a paper. And the porter would try Nathan’s number for me, and the phone would ring on and on, and as it rang, as I waited, the receiver would grow wet in my hand, so wet that sweat would run down my hand into the receiver. And all the time my heart would hammer hard against my chest, and I’d have my eyes closed, both of these against the possibility of Nathan actually picking up the phone, and me hearing his voice, actually hearing it, so that all the time I’d sit there lost in the contemplation of it, the sheer honest-to-God fear and wonder of it, that amazing, unmanageable moment. And all the time I was thinking this, the phone would ring on and on with that one long weird empty tone they have over there. And in the end the porter would come back on and say that there didn’t seem to be an answer, that Nathan didn’t seem to be there. And he’d apologise, like it was his fault and not mine. And I’d say that was OK, and it didn’t matter. That I’d try again later …’
‘So let’s get this straight … You knew the time difference.’
‘Yes.’
‘But even so you still rang at those times?’
‘Yes.’
‘How many times?’
‘What?’
‘How many times did you ring?’
‘You mean over the years?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Yes you do.’
‘What is this? An interrogation? I don’t know. OK, maybe half a dozen.’
‘Even though each time you knew he wouldn’t be there?’
‘Yes. Except he was.’
‘What?’
‘There. Once.’
It was early in the morning. Earlier than I could have expected him to be in. The phone rang out a couple of times and then the tone broke and it was lifted.
‘Well, what happened? What did he say?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’
‘I put the phone down.’
‘Look, I know how crazy it all sounds …’
‘You bet.’
‘But the fact is I always believed, I mean really believed, from the bottom of my heart, that we’d meet again and it seemed wrong, that’s all.’
‘Wrong?’
‘Phoning him and stuff. It seemed like … I don’t know … like I was trying to engineer the thing. Trying to push the plot forward.’
‘So you thought it was better to leave it to chance, to sheer luck?’ Danny’s eyes were fixed on mine, like he was trying to see something, trying to discern it.
‘Yeah. I guess so.’
There was silence. Danny leant back on the sofa, crossed his arms over his chest and then uncrossed them. After that he pursed his lips, shook his head and gave a long low whistle of what sounded like appalled admiration.
He said, ‘I’ll tell you something, this is one weird town. But sometimes I think you’re the weirdest thing in it, Riley.’
* See A for Attitude.
* Still, regrettably, unavailable.
† Magda and Mervyn were an item for a while back in those CND days, something I discovered coming upon them one day amongst some bushes around the perimeter of one of our better-known American bases.
* In fact so traumatised did Royston declare himself to be that the case had to be adjourned. Further, when it was reconvened a week later he discovered that the shock of Mervyn’s collapse and death had completely erased from his mind any recollection of the incident for which he was being tried, in which he had almost run over the pensioner on the zebra crossing. Thus, yet again and by the due, although in this case, remarkably murky process of law did Royston save his licence.
* Here are the lines in their entirety that Mervyn underscored:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
nto the rose-garden
S is for … Solitude
(or Sunday in the Park with Riley)
The question is, what will they find when they comb through all that DNA searching for the little bundle that binds us, spinsters all, together? What will be the predispositions, the tendencies they discover? An overaffection for freedom? I guess. A wariness as regards love and marriage? That too. But something else. Because I’ll warrant that when they get in there, start pulling all those strands apart to find those genes that predispose us to what we are they’ll find one Big Bad Mother labelled ‘Solitude’.
Once upon a time, I’d have gone to my grave trying to explain to Fleur the difference between being alone and being lonely. But as we know, times change.
I’m just so looking forward to being on my own, Riley.
I learnt early on in this business what a complete waste of time it is trying to explain the difference to those who can’t or won’t grasp it. He that hath ears to hear, is my motto. If not, why bother?
Trying to explain the attraction, nay necessity, of solitude, is kind of like being stuck in the middle of that old joke about asking the way in Ireland. The guy giving directions says, ‘But I wouldn’t start from here,’ which is how it is with the debate over loneliness and being alone. Where I start from is the presupposition that being alone is a physical state, simply that, no more and no less, yours to cherish and enjoy, worship like a god, hoard like a miser or spend wisely as best suits you. Being lonely, by contrast, is a state of mind and one which more than likely won’t be cured by any amount of company. But if you don’t start from there, then it’s a waste of time trying to explain or even discuss the thing.
One thing’s for sure, though. When they come across that strand of solitude in my DNA, it’ll have come straight from my father. He loved to be on his own. Evenings, weekends even, he’d be there in his garage alone until ten or eleven at night.
‘I know you blame me for that,’ my mother said once, the mask of the happy but tragically truncated union slipping drunkenly sideways. ‘But he wanted it that way.
He was a loner. Me, I need people.’ And it’s true. And actually I didn’t blame her.
‘She doesn’t understand,’ my father said, his head bent beneath a bonnet one night, the long peaceful summer twilight disturbed only by the clink of his spanners. ‘I don’t want to spend nights sitting drinking with her cronies. I like a bit of peace and quiet, a bit of solitude …’
I used to try and cover up how important solitude was to me. I treated it like a dirty habit, like an alcoholic hiding the bottle in the laundry basket. Now I don’t care who knows. Neither am I interested in any form of therapy or rehabilitation. The fact is, I get withdrawal symptoms if I don’t get enough time on my own. That’s the way it is and that’s the way it suits me. As far as I’m concerned, the main problem with relationships, the thing that gets me down about them, is the time they take up, the way they eat into your life, and in particular Saturdays and Sundays when you could be on your own. A night in bed with someone (sometimes no more than satisfactory, which always adds to the chagrin) and the next thing you know, instead of doing what you should do, which is call it a day, wave him off on the doorstep, you’re trying to figure something incredibly boring to do together, taking part in physical activities that don’t suit you, quite possibly requiring you to buy special clothing, or walking, in parks, on waterfronts where you don’t really want to be, or round museums of dubious interest, or art galleries or, quelle horreur, country houses, so that in the middle of some drizzly English Sunday afternoon you find yourself drinking cold, overfrothy cappuccino surrounded by pushchairs in the steamed-up coffee shop of some stately home.*
Alternatively (and just as bad in my opinion) you spend far too long in bed, cooing over croissants and coffee like they’ve just been invented, sharing, God forbid, the Sunday papers, finding yourself left with travel and business, and this because he’s snaffled the culture section, all of this like you’re already in training to become some old married couple. As the afternoon progresses you make love again, usually unnecessarily, so that it acquires an overblown, used-up edge, leaving you in the late afternoon with a feeling of ennui and faint nausea. Before you know it you’ve hit rock-bottom, so bored and unable to function you’re sitting beside him on the sofa watching the God slot or the kids’ serial on Sunday tea-time television.
And all this, dear Reader – and tell me it’s not true – because you felt that terrible responsibility to do things together.
Look, the fact is, I never was a Sunday-in-the-Park sort of girl. My fondest memories in recent years of that first fine careless rapture of sex comes from those days spent working on this cottage, helping (well, watching) a man take a sledgehammer to a chimney breast to find the original fireplace, thereafter pouring him a large glass of good red wine, cooking him a spaghetti, and retiring to bed with him.
See, I like what might be termed the economical approach to relationships. Time is not money for me, it’s something even more precious. For this reason I like to merge my work and play. I like to have my business and pleasure conveniently bound up together.* I realise that this is an unorthodox approach. Some might even call it reprehensible. Relationships are supposed to be about give and take, I know that, I’ve read the advice columns. They’re supposed to be about sharing your life, and if I needed a first-class example of that (which I don’t) I’ve got Cass and Fergie to show me.
‘You have to understand,’ Fergie said with tears in his eyes, when we were coming to terms with Cass having cancer, ‘there’s no one else in the world I want to be with.’ And I know it’s true. And I know she feels the same because I see it in the way they are together. Even dumb ordinary things, going to the supermarket, taking the car to the garage, they actually prefer to do together. They would just rather, given a choice, be in each other’s company, and I know this because I can see it in their faces. But it’s not for me, that’s all. Life’s too short to share, as far as I’m concerned. Just too damn short. And I don’t care if that sounds selfish. I don’t want to merge my life, my past-times, my passions with someone else. I don’t want to cheer him on at football, lay out the cucumber sandwiches in his cricket pavilion, or sit in some folk club (God forbid) while he sings some thirty-eight-verse songs about shipwrecks and mining disasters.* I don’t want to trail round his exhibitions (Norris, a painter), and since I don’t want him to read my books, I don’t see why he should expect me to read his either. (Richard. And, by the way, I never did like your novel.) I don’t want to go to his firm’s dinner (Harris, a solicitor) or drinking with him and his friends (Mark), and I certainly don’t want to meet his parents.† I don’t want to spend a weekend with someone, book a holiday together. In fact, I don’t want to do anything normally thought to constitute a relationship, all of which, as I said to Sophie, serves to convince me that there’s a gap in the market.
‘We pay people to mind our children, after all, to walk our dogs and clean our houses. Why not pay them to go out with our lovers? To take care of the boring bits.’
‘What sort of boring bits?’
‘Oh, you know. Drinks after work. Firm’s do’s. Dinner parties.’
‘So do you have sex?’
‘Of course. But then it’s quality time. You meet once a month or something.’
‘Once a month?’
‘OK. Twice.’
Sophie is shaking her head. ‘I tell you, there should be an organisation for people like you, Riley.’
‘There will be. I’m forming one. It’ll be like Outrage except it’ll be called Faintly Annoyed. We’ll march for the rights of the sexually lazy beneath a banner that says, “SORRY, CAN’T BE BOTHERED”.’
Sophie is hard on my sex life, or rather my lack of it. Like I said before, I’ve been through feasts and famines in my sex life and what bothers Sophie is that one bothers me no more than the other.
‘Remind me again. When did you last have sex?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t remember. When was the Coronation?’
‘If you don’t get it soon, you’ll start doing weird things.’
‘Like what?’
‘Shoplifting. Writing salacious letters to weathermen and news readers.’
‘Oh, I’m doing that already.’
I’m not like Sophie, you see. Sophie is never without sex, but that’s because she puts time and effort into acquiring it. She treats it as a hobby, approaching it the same way, trawling the personal adverts, clicking around the on-line dating.
On a Saturday night, with a glass of wine in her hand and nothing better to do, she’ll say, ‘Come on, give it go … oh, look … “Bookish Bohemian, forty-seven” … that would suit you …’
But it wouldn’t, you see. Because the way I feel about it is this. I’m pretty much up for anything people want to do in life – morris dancing, stamp collecting, trainspotting – I’ll march to the death for their right to do it. It’s just not for me, that’s all. And I feel the same way about personal ads and on-line dating. And it’s not just laziness, although that’s what Sophie normally accuses me of. But as I tried to explain last time we had the argument, it’s more complicated than that.
‘Look, I’d like to believe, I mean, I’d truly like to believe that a relationship is the answer.’
‘The answer to what?’
‘I don’t know. That’s the problem.’
Because when I look at my life, this Life of Riley, I feel, like I said right at the beginning, that it is a pretty good one. I don’t live Thoreau’s life of ‘quiet desperation’, far from it. In fact, in the main I’d say that I’ve got pretty much everything I want in life.
‘Obviously I could do with a bit more money, but then who couldn’t?’
‘Umm … let me think … Oh, I know, Archie.’
Still, all that said, I’d be dishonest if I didn’t hold up my hands and admit that there does sometimes seem to be … well … a gap in my life.
‘Not a major gap, you understand.’
‘Of course not.’
‘I mean, not a yawning chasm.’
Not even a gap I can pin down, if you want to know the truth of it; put a name to. But a gap none the less. And the problem is that I can’t imagine a relationship plugging that gap, at least not any sort of relationship known to me, not one I could even imagine knowing, as I said to Sophie.
‘I mean, when you get to our time in life, you pretty much know what’s on offer, don’t you? How it all works?’
‘How all what works?’
‘Everything. Men, women, sex. Relationships. I mean, there’s no surprises any more, are there?’ And I think that’s true. So all you really yearn for is some sort of alternative. Some entirely new option.
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Little green men with a completely different take on life. With entirely different appendages and orifices.’
Meanwhile Sophie says. ‘I like a man with his own bed to go to,’ and I agree with her. I like a man who knows how to say farewell, to observe the traditional courtesies.
Gosh … two a.m.
Well, there, doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourself?
Still, if you must go …
After all, we both have to get up in the morning …
The fact is that I get choked up when I lose out on my solitude. I get a feeling of being strangled. It works on me like torture, the way sleep deprivation works on other people. I get fractious, short-tempered. I begin to see the world in a different way. Stay after breakfast and I’ll name names. And truth to tell, I feel the same way about relationships. I get the same cramped feeling, the same feeling of mild strangulation.
Because what I hate is the way, all of a sudden, they turn you into a couple, the way, all of a sudden, people are inviting you Together. But I don’t mind showing up everywhere on my own – in fact, I’ve come to like it. For a start I can arrive when I like; even better, depart when I choose to.
‘No doubt you’re going to do that old methinks the lady doth protest too much thing now,’ I said, sitting on the wall in the darkness as the sounds of Fergie’s retirement party came out through the pub window. ‘Well, let me tell you, I’ve had that from other people, and as far as I’m concerned it’s just about as patronising, condescending and self-satisfied as it gets.’
Not Married, Not Bothered Page 21
