What I saw most of all that night was how important the quote marks were around that ‘David’ I saw at Fergie’s party – how, had he ever really been, he might never have attained the age of that fantasy figure, how instead he might have died from some fatal disease at an early age, or had an accident, fallen off a roof or a cliff, been hit by a car and this at the end of his own street, how he might have drowned white-water rafting or been murdered in the outback on one of those years out travelling, just like the one currently freezing my heart up with fear for Jonah, in any or all of these things, leaving me only half alive and faced with the impossible task of going on living; how, there again, he might never have been at Fergie’s party talking comfortably with Jonah at all, and this because he despised everything I was, including my family, how instead, at the very moment I thought I saw him slouched easily and handsomely against that wall with Jonah, he might have been holed up in a squat somewhere, bad-mouthing his mother, and sticking a needle in his arm; how, indeed, he might never have been ‘David’ at all, but Davina, one of those extraordinary, tough, cold-hearted young women, working in the City perhaps, and with a life-style to match; Davina who each time I rang would take my call without affection, who would never visit even at Christmas, and who would reserve for me, in a more mature and far more terrible fashion, that same visceral dislike, which, with a bit of luck in a year or two, Rochelle will have swopped for fond amusement, which instead she will bestow upon her mother.
‘I guess you can’t get through life without regret,’ Archie said with a small sigh by way of farewell at the gate of the car park. Despite the spat, we managed to part as friends.
‘It’s not about regret,’ I said with a return to my former sharpness.
He said, ‘What’s it about then, Riley?’
I said, ‘It’s about the choices you make. Simply that. The paths you didn’t take … the doors you didn’t open.’
‘And that’s not regret?’
‘No, because you took other paths, opened other doors instead.’ I said, ‘We all got to follow our own yellow brick road, Archie,’ and even as I said the words I felt that I’d plucked them from the air, that they’d been hanging there waiting for the taking.
Sitting on the bench, that same one I sat on years ago as a returning traveller, feeling so jagged as all that humdrum small-town life went past me, I wondered where I’d heard the words before.
I was putting the key in the lock of my own front door when I remembered they were Nathan’s.
* The reason for the quotation marks will become apparent.
* Although who or what the Designer might be, I’m not prepared to speculate, dear Reader.
* What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Y is … for that old
Yellow Brick Road
He wrote me a letter, you see, the only letter he ever wrote me. I opened it up in my tiny room in the grubby backpackers’ hostel where I was staying in Hong Kong.
It said, ‘We’ve all got to follow our own yellow brick road, Riley.’
Nathan, Nathan.
In direct translation, given of God.
A scary thought.
‘If I believed it. Which I don’t.’ I said this firmly despite everything.
Danny said, ‘I’m so sorry, Riley.’
I’m not sure now what made me decide to contact Nathan again that night after Fergie’s party. The reminder of Nathan’s letter, perhaps, in the words I spoke to Archie. Probably what had happened with ‘David’ at the party too, that glimpse through an unopened door of another path untaken. Perhaps, as well, what I saw on TV when I got in, cracking open a bottle of wine as I watched, those lumbering old warhorses that had woken us up all those years ago with their dull, rumbling throb, now rising up from an airbase I’d once camped outside with Magda. Or maybe it was just Danny. Danny, spotting my light still on, rapping on my window, coming in for a glass of wine. Danny saying, ‘Come on. Let’s do it, Riley,’ plumping down in front of my Mac, twenty minute later – this the real magic in this sorcerous town – laying out Nathan’s life before me.
He’d seemed a million miles away, across the universe, not just the other side of the planet, all those times in the past when I’d phoned him. Now, staring at the screen beside Danny, scrolling down through all the minutiae – his career, undistinguished I could see that; always deputy, always acting, his teaching schedule, attendances at university council meetings (never speaking), those still dry-as-dust research papers – I felt like I was spying on him, like I was looking in through his window. I seemed to see him there in the low dark house I’d imagined, that familiar bull-headed stooping figure bent over his desk, low dark serious music playing in the background. He seemed so utterly real and alive I laid a hand on my heart from the sheer shock and amazement of it. I had to get up from the Mac with the force of it. I made an excuse, going into the kitchen to fetch more wine. There I found myself walking up and down thumping a fist agitatedly into the palm of my hand. I was mid-stride, one hand cupped into the other when I realised it was exactly the same action, exactly the same way I’d behaved a decade before. The last time I’d phoned Nathan.
It was not long after Lennie had left. Just how mad and bad I was then I never quite realised until Connie Cheung said, years later, ‘I don’t think I’ve seen anyone as crazy as you were then, Riley … that is, outside an institution.’
I think it was principally the loneliness that made me call, not the loneliness of losing Lennie but the loneliness of sorting the whole thing out, the loans, the leases, the small print, which seemed endless. When friends asked about it, I’d say, ‘There’s nothing to say,’ which wasn’t true, there was everything to say, but I just couldn’t bear to go through it, to see their eyes, against their will, glaze over.
I was drunk and stoned that night. I wasn’t sleeping much either, so that when I called him it was almost dawn, office hours on the other side of the planet. I figured that if the phone was lifted it would have to be him, and as it rang out the sweat formed on my palm as usual and ran down the receiver. When the tone was broken abruptly I closed my eyes, feeling my throat tighten as I waited for his voice. But instead of that growl it was a woman’s voice, someone in his faculty office. She said Nathan wasn’t there. He was in London. Researching at the British Library.
I jumped up from the sofa as I put the phone down. I began to stride up and down, thumping that fist and palm together. I rang the station, got all the times of the trains to London, phoned Tourist Information too, booked a hotel room. After that I sat down on the sofa, opened a bottle of wine, fired up a spliff while I tried to figure out the best way to approach him. Whether to leave a letter at the desk in the library, or play the gumshoe, following him to his hotel, spying on him from the gallery.
That was how it continued all the following week, every day checking the train times, cancelling a hotel room, booking another. Every day, opening a bottle of wine, lighting up a joint. Every day that walk, thumping, thumping, fist to palm, unholy palmer’s kiss …
‘Sorry … what … wait …’ Danny is leaning forward, his forehead screwed in confusion. ‘Are you telling me you never went? He was here. In England, a couple of hours away on the train and you didn’t go?’ Danny is shaking his head at me.
In fact, I did almost make it once. I got so near, so very near. It was the day before Nathan was leaving. I showered, threw some things incoherently into a bag, took a taxi to the station. There I sat on a bench for a long time watching the trains to London come and go until I began to attract the attention of staff. In the end I walked out, took a taxi home, downed some more wine with some more dope and this time some sleeping pills. When I woke up Nathan must have been somewhere over Asia.
‘I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go to him when I was strung out over Lennie. It wouldn’t have been righ
t. He was worth so much more than that.’
You see, I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of in my life (I can feel myself defending myself to you here, just the way I was doing it to Danny), but at least I’ve never played the Victorian heroine, never laid my head on a man’s chest just until I’ve got my strength back and I’m up and running and no longer need him.
‘Besides which, it wouldn’t have worked, I knew that. I knew that if we were ever to meet again I had to be feeling good about myself.’
‘I can see that.’
‘You can?’ I was surprised.
‘Sure. But things are different now.’
‘It’s not that simple.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’ve changed.’
‘So what? People do change.’
‘No. It’s more than that. I’ve tried to explain to you. The whole thing was based on a fantasy. Me the little bar girl, him the professor.’
‘But it wasn’t what he wanted. And now it’s not what you want either.’
But I wasn’t saying the things I wanted to say and I knew it.
‘He was … an old forty. He said so himself. Now he’ll be in his seventies.’ But these weren’t the right words either.
‘Also …’
‘Yes?’
‘Supposing he’s quite different?’
‘Different?’
‘Different from what I remember. Dull … some old academic stick … not at all the glamorous man of my memory.’
‘So that would be the end of it.’
‘No … no … you don’t understand. I put a hand to my head. ‘Don’t you see, that would be worse than the end of it? By contacting him again, I’d have destroyed something. Utterly. The memory of it. Of that perfect affair.’
And there it was. The absolute truth. Unvarnished. Out in the open.
‘Don’t you see, it’s all been a stupid game, Danny. Ringing at the wrong time, not going to see him. All of these years I’ve been holding on to this thing, keeping it alive, intact, away from light: the memory of the perfect affair unspoilt by reality.’
Danny said, ‘Sounds good to me. Lots of psychobabble, lots of bollocks.’
He said, ‘On the other hand you could just be a good old-fashioned coward, Riley.’
* * *
At the door, laughing, I said, ‘Anyway, what the hell would I say if I did e-mail him?’
Danny said, ‘Just tell him the truth, girlfriend. Tell him you never married.’
Perhaps that’s what did it in the end. It’s as good as anything else, anyway. All I know is that a glass of wine later, I wanted more than anything else in the world to e-mail Nathan. And while it’s true that was always the way when I contacted him, i.e., I’d always had a little too much to drink, this time it was different. This time everything seemed clear in my head, more than clear – simple, confident. I saw how much easier and more straightforward things were than I’d been making them. I realised I didn’t care whether Nathan was old now, which he would be, or boring, which I very much doubted, because none of these things mattered. They didn’t matter because I didn’t have to be terrified any more. I didn’t have to suffer from that old philophobia, and this because I didn’t have to worry about getting in too deep or finding myself under some sort of obligation or losing any of that precious freedom or independence. I didn’t have to be worried about being tied down either – something he tried to tell me all those years ago – and it had taken me until now, until I’d established and understood the depth and satisfaction of my own spinster life, to realise it. I knew that life could only benefit from the likes of Nathan, at least if he was the Nathan I remembered, as cussed and spikey and ill-fitting as myself.
All this I realised suddenly so that the words came surprisingly easily in the end.
Dear Nathan,
If this e-mail comes as an unpleasant surprise, or is awkward, or in any way unwelcome to you, please ignore it. I am merely writing to say that I have thought of you many times over the years and with much pleasure. I have wanted to contact you and indeed, on several occasions, have made inadequate attempts to do so. The benefits of e-mail, however, now make this so much easier. I hope that you are well and happy, as I am, and wish you all the very best whether or not you choose to reply to this.
Best wishes, Riley Gordon
PS. By the way, you were wrong. I never did get married!
I have a weird, other-worldly, rather melancholy voice on my Mac. When I do something wrong, she says, ‘It’s not my fault,’ sounding faintly hurt and offended. Since it was late at night when I eventually clicked on Send, the sound of her voice as I rinsed out the wine glass in the kitchen telling me I had mail, this less than ten minutes after I’d sent the thing, surprised me.
Long descriptions of feelings at tense moments are inappropriate. They merely break up the action. Thus I will only tell you that I was shaking when I sat down before the screen, that as my hand had sweated all those times on the receiver, so it now sweated on the mouse as I grasped it.
Clicking on, as the e-mail opened, I registered first of all and almost instantaneously the briefness of the e-mail and a split second later the words ‘AUTOMATED MESSAGE’.
What came next seemed to uncurl like some ancient scroll very slowly, as if the two of us, the message and I, were taking the long plodding steps together.
Time bends and shifts and shapes, doesn’t it? It falls down black holes. It seemed aeons before the words finally formed themselves into a whole to make sense in my brain.
It is with regret that the University has to inform you of the death of Dr Nathan Feinstein.
Z is for … Zing Zing Zing *
(went my heartstrings)
You know what I think. I think sometimes the gods decide to lay it all out before you, roll it out like a carpet, this as if they’re saying, Take a look at your life, see the way you’ve lived it. See if you think you could have lived it any better. That’s the way it seems to me now, anyway, when I look back on the night of Fergie’s party.
‘It’s the perfect ending for me, isn’t it?’ I said to Danny.
He was in the bathroom cleaning his teeth when I banged on his back door. It could only have been ten minutes or so since I received the e-mail but it seemed like I’d read it a thousand times, each time like an archaeologist trying to make sense of hieroglyphics on a cave wall, or a detective poking around for clues in the undergrowth, something that would tell me I was misinterpreting the whole thing, reading it all wrong, and that actually Nathan wasn’t dead at all but alive and well and waiting to hear from me.
‘It’s all so nice and clean, isn’t it? It means I don’t have to worry about doing anything, making any sort of emotional effort. Look, I even get to weep these crocodile tears.’
Danny shook his head. ‘Give yourself a break, Riley.’
I was sad, you see, just so damn sad, and there wasn’t any other word for it. And what it made it worse was the feeling of phoneyness.
‘Don’t you see, if I’d cared, if I’d really cared, I’d have done something about it over the years.’
‘We all have regrets, Riley.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s not about regret.’
Regret just seemed too damned simple.
There was a name on the bottom of that e-mail, a number too, for an administrative assistant, an offer of further information. But I didn’t want any further information, I didn’t want to know when or how precisely Nathan had died. I didn’t want to know if there were any awful ironical strokes of misfortune lying in there. All I knew was what I know now, which is that I want him to have died in the best possible way, peacefully, from some benign disease, the sort that might take off a man in his seventies without too much pain and trauma, this with family or friends or both about him, maybe even his wife, with whom he was reunited, his son too (who may or may not have become a rock star), perhaps grandchildren, or another wife, or a long-term lover, or any or all of these t
hings, but so content with life that he had long since forgotten that autumn of ’72 in Bangkok and the woman with whom he spent it. What else could I give him in return for what he had given me? After all, thanks to him, thanks to his dying, I’d be able to do what I’d always wanted to do, which was to keep our affair perfectly preserved in that aspic of memory.
To keep it complete, standing there with its icing and its ribbons and its little silver bells.
Miss Havisham’s wedding cake in the middle of the table.
I shut myself away for a week or so after all this. I was due some holiday from the paper and I took it, this thanks to an immediate dispensation from Sophie. As if determined to match my mood it rained for most of the time. There was flooding on the moors, the worst for many years, but I didn’t go out so I didn’t see it. I didn’t even know about it till I saw Danny’s pictures some time later in back copies of the paper. Then one morning I just gave the thing up. Pulled back the curtains that had been drawn for a week or so. Because in the end, life goes on, which is the best thing about it, the truly good and amazing thing, Real Life that is, not the abstractions that in the end were ‘David’ and even Nathan.
Speaking of Real Life.
Not.
Magda is now a ‘married’ woman.
Magda’s ‘wedding’ took place one glorious long midsummer night when the sun scarcely seemed to sink down over the horizon. She claimed she’d picked the date because according to her astrological chart the omens were good, but I happen to know it was the only Saturday she could get the upstairs room in the Jolly Pilgrim.
She went for an ancient Egyptian theme in the end (white dress with a sort of tinsel wig and winged gods on her sandals), this as a tribute to her last days, which were spent in Alexandria after she was carted off to be walled up in the tomb of some pharaoh.* This didn’t seem to me to be an entirely propitious way to start a marriage; on the other hand I could see that Magda’s wasn’t going to face the usual trials and tensions associated with the more traditional bipartisan arrangement. (For just this reason I decided against spending long nights with my workbox, cross-stitching ‘Never Let The Sun Go Down On Your Wrath’ as a wedding present and instead settled for a set of coasters.)
Not Married, Not Bothered Page 28
