The Manner of the Mourning

by Robert Ward

  Jenny had taken off her boots and was leaning with her elbow on the arm of the settee and feeding herself chocolates and drinks with her free hand. She seemed to have a remarkable capacity for both as her mouth was hardly ever free from activity not including when talking. As Richard himself became more drunk he found himself looking at her more and liking her more.

  Her face seemed small, surrounded by her long dark hair and she was very pretty as he had observed when first he saw her, but now she seemed beautiful. Her complexion was very fair and she had a lovely neat nose and mouth and her eyes were full of youthful beauty. Her proportions were flawless, so much so that her legs appeared long despite her self-professed shortness, which in fact was an asset rather than a detraction in his eyes. Five foot two, eyes of blue, came into his mind. He poured them both another drink and put too much coke into her glass so that it fizzed and bubbled over the side.

  “Whoops,” she said, helping him to mop it up with paper tissues from the Kleenex box on the table. “Butterfingers.”

  “A slight miscalculation,” he said. “This stuff looks positively toxic. God knows what it does to your insides.”

  “Who cares? As long as you can’t see it.”

  She drank to half way down her tall glass and added more vodka, needing two hands to hold the big Smirnoff bottle. Her hands were tiny he noticed and her red nail-polish had flaked away leaving little irregular patches in the centres of her fingernails. She had a thin gold band on the middle finger of her left hand.

  “What d’you do then” she asked. “What’s your job?”

  “I’m a writer. I write plays.”

  “Oh, that’s interesting,” she said, sounding unimpressed. “Are you famous?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “You’re young for a writer. Most of them are old arses aren’t they? I don’t know any though. I just thought they were all old.”

  “You get them of all types,” he said.

  “Plays, not books?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t think I’ve ever seen a play. Is it the same as a film?”

  “Some plays have been made into films.”

  “Any of yours?”

  “No,” he said, not explaining.

  “I never read books anyway. It’s fucking boring. The telly’s better. For stories I mean. You can see what’s going on.”

  He couldn’t argue with her and looked out of the window while she flicked through the channels. The park and the square were still quiet and there were fewer lights visible now from the houses opposite. He wondered for a moment why he was doing what he was, being with this girl, but he wasn’t in the mood for analysing himself too closely and he smiled inwardly and allowed the drunken feeling to flow over him.

  He noticed that he had put his arm along the back of the settee, and so had she, and she moved closer to him and rested her head on his shoulder so that he felt the press of her hair against his cheek. He let his hand drop over his shoulder and she took it in hers, their fingers touching. She had done it seemingly unconsciously and naturally and he thought that anyone seeing them would think they were lovers.

  “Tell me when you want to go to bed,” she said.

  “I will,” he answered, noticing that her hair was a very dark brown and not black. But no one had truly black hair, he remembered. “Are you tired?”

  “No, I’m okay,” she said, turning her head to look at him. “I thought you’d want to. Some blokes can’t wait ten seconds to get my knickers off once they’ve paid for it. You’re a funny bloke though, aren’t you. But you’re nice though. I’m having a better Christmas eve than I would have in the fucking rat-hole or out on the streets. I’ll do whatever you like. We can get pissed and watch telly all night if you want.”

  He put his arm across her chest and felt her left breast through her blouse, gently squeezing it, and she turned her head to kiss him. She tasted of chocolate and vodka. Vodka does have a taste despite the popular myth that it doesn’t. She had a small spot at the corner of her mouth which he could feel with his lips. It felt hard and he wondered if it was sore.

  “I’ve only got little tits,” she said. “Some blokes like them that way though. Lets them know I’m young.”

  Richard thought back to his joke with Sally when first they had met, about their sexual fetishes.

  “It’s my bum most of them go for though. Some of them just pay to play with my arse. Don’t even want to fuck me. Funny that, isn’t it? What about you? What do you like?”

  “Let’s go to bed now,” he said.

  He watched from the bed as she undressed. Her body was young and neat and beautiful. Her breasts were small as she had said but beautifully shaped with upturned erect pink nipples and her stomach was flat and her waist slim. Her bottom was gorgeous, so appealing and human and feminine. She climbed into the bed next to him and he felt every inch of her with adoring, gently caressing hands.

  “Lie on top of the covers, on your tummy,” he said.

  She did as he asked and rested her head on her forearms, closing her eyes. He lay next to her and ran his hands repeatedly over her lovely skin.

  “I was about your age when I first fell in love,” he said. “A bit younger in fact. The girl I loved was the most beautiful person I’ve ever met. She used to lie on the bed, just like you are now. We used to talk and talk and I was always in awe of her because she was so much cleverer than me. At least I thought so then, and I was so gauche and awkward and unsure of myself and tongue-tied and I couldn’t believe that she could feel for me what I felt for her, and maybe I was right. You know how girls are supposed to mature quicker than boys do? We were the same age you see.

  She was from a different class. An easy, confident class and I was frightened of everything. Things like failure and disapproval. She never meant to, I think, but she made me feel the difference all the time by things she said. She didn’t understand that the things she said were jokes to her but deadly important to me. I loved her. I still do. I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone like I loved her. She was beautiful and clever and my best friend and I’d have died for her.

  The thing is you see, I still love her and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to love anyone else like I love her. That’s why I’m alone tonight. Or was alone. No matter what happens in my life, something will be missing because I’m not with her. No matter what I do, I know I’ll never really be happy.”

  He stopped suddenly, only then realising what he had been saying, and looked at Jenny.

  “Jenny?” he said.

  She was asleep and breathing deeply.

  He put on his dressing gown and went into the sitting room and poured himself another very large scotch and lit another cigarette. He stood in front of the window overlooking the little park.

  “You drunken fool,” he said aloud to himself.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Elizabeth was asleep in the passenger seat when the car pulled up in front of her house. Her friends woke her and asked if she was all right. She looked at them bleary-eyed and slurred that she was. It was three o’clock in the morning.

  After several attempts to get the key in the lock she staggered through the front door and stumbled into the hall. She hit her head on the wooden coat-stand but hardly felt it. She caught her reflection in the wall-mirror and stared for a moment, her head swaying.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said. “Is that me?”

  She climbed the stairs holding on desperately to the banister and patted her bedroom wall to find the light-switch. She virtually tore her clothes off and crawled under the bed-covers. In a moment she was fast asleep.

  She woke at noon with her head splitting and her tongue glued to the roof of her mouth. Crusts of sleep clung to her eyelashes and she felt like throwing up. She sighed inwardly and thought, oh God, not again.

  She went to the kitchen and gulped down an alka-seltzer. The cold fizzy bubbles shocked her system into some kind of relief and then the phone rang. It was her
father calling from New York.

  Her parents had separated some years ago and then finally divorced. Her father’s acting career had remained good, though not spectacular and he spent most of his time either in New York or Los Angeles. Her mother lived in town mostly, and though the house belonged to her, she was hardly ever there. Elizabeth lived there alone for the most part, apart from the odd transient boyfriend. She worked at the local university library, her mocking description of herself to Richard having in some ways at least come true.

  She exchanged love and merry Christmas with her father and then rang her mother, getting the ritual over with. She only then really realised that it was Christmas day and rubbed her throbbing temples with her fingertips.

  The house was wrecked, as it usually was, but especially so because the cleaning lady hadn’t been for nearly a week as she had gone to stay with her daughter for Christmas, which seemed to last for a fortnight rather than a single day as Elizabeth had almost said to her. The cleaning lady, who was a nice jolly sort of a person, as all cleaning ladies should be, would not be back until after New Year and Elizabeth dreaded to think what the place would be like by then. She sat on a tall stool in the kitchen and pulled her white flannel dressing gown tighter around her. Coffee, she thought.

  Retrieving a cup from the mountain of crockery in the sink she rinsed it and then waited for the percolator to finish doing what it did. Instant coffee just wasn’t strong enough. She enjoyed the rich bitter taste and had three cups. She then felt a little better and decided to have a shower. It was one o’clock by the time she flopped onto the chesterfield and lay on her back, closing her eyes.

  She fell into a state of half-sleep, listening to the silence and the ticking of the grandmother clock and to her own breathing and swallowing and she tasted the neutral taste of her still swollen tongue. She tried to blank her mind and just concentrate on being alive and not ill. She could feel and hear her chest wheezing and occasionally she had a coughing fit and brought up some brown phlegm from having smoked too much the night before. She spat it into a paper tissue. It tasted thick and salty. She was hungry but couldn’t summon the will to make herself anything, and she didn’t know what she wanted anyway. She thought of the Christmas dinners she’d had as a child with roast goose and roast potatoes and Brussels sprouts and mashed carrot and turnip and gravy and apple sauce and sage and onion stuffing followed by Christmas pudding with brandy butter and mince pies. She thought of pulling crackers and wearing the coloured paper hats that were inside them and drinking chilled wine and lemonade that tasted funny after the hot food. Somehow, everything from the past, even the thought of it, seemed more intense than the present, even the reality of it. She opened her eyes and took a deep breath.

  She dressed and came down again to the drawing room wearing jeans and a black jumper. She switched on the radio and listened to a programme of carols from King’s. She was feeling much better and decided to cook herself a steak. She ate it in the kitchen, sitting at the long breakfast table and had more coffee. She then lit a cigarette and inhaled the smoke deeply, dispelling the natural aversion her body had for the poison and getting herself used to it again.

  Her father had put five thousand pounds into her account as a Christmas present and her mother had taxed and insured her car for another year. She still missed the excitement of tearing brightly coloured wrapping paper from presents under the tree however, and ruefully considered the fact that this year there wasn’t even a tree. Actually, there wasn’t a single thing in the house that betrayed the fact it was Christmas at all.

  The Queen was speaking in that strangely clipped accent that people used to have in the nineteen forties, at least in British films, when the phone rang again. Elizabeth answered it, having just lit another cigarette.

  “Oh, hi, Rich,” she said. “Lovely to hear from you. Did you get my letter? Of course you did. I’m proud of you. Honestly. I know I sound like a bitch, but then I am, as you know. How’s your Christmas? Happy Christmas by the way, or should it be merry Christmas?”

  “Liz, love. Merry Christmas.”

  “My, that was said with feeling,” she said, flicking ash at the ashtray on the telephone table and missing. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, I’m fine,” he said. “I’m on my own and it’s Christmas day though.”

  “Snap.”

  “What?”

  “I said snap. God, sometimes you’re so slow. I mean I’m on my own as well. Though why that should be a cause for concern is beyond me. What’s so bad about being alone? And what does it matter if it is Christmas day? It’s only a fucking Saturday.”

  She heard him laughing.

  “I wish we were together,” he then said.

  “Well we could have been if you’d arranged it. You know where I live goddammit. And how many times have you said that? And I still haven’t seen you for years. Sometimes I think you’re just beastly to a fellow for the sake of it. You know a fellow sometimes feels lonely and needs another fellow to be his pal and just to be with him and yet you never are, are you? But I suppose that now you’re a famous writer of plays you don’t care for your little playmate any more.”

  “Liz, if only you knew,” he said.

  “If I only knew what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “If you don’t tell me, how can I possibly know what you’re talking about?” she said.

  “Never mind that now,” he said. “I just wanted to say that I think of you, all the time, and that I want to see you so much and that we can’t go on like this, not seeing each other, I mean. Liz, I… I.”

  She sensed something in his voice that disturbed her and she stubbed out her cigarette and told him to hold on while she got herself a drink. She returned to the phone with a tumbler half full of bourbon.

  “Now, what is it, Rich?” she asked.

  “I don’t know how to explain it, Liz,” he said. “But I feel desperate and so alone. Not alone from people. You know what I mean?”

  “What is it you’re trying to say?”

  “I don’t know, Liz. But maybe I do but can’t say it?”

  She drank a good measure of her bourbon and asked him again and he answered again in a vague and unconvincing way.

  “Rich, are you drunk?” she asked. “Maybe you should talk to me again another time? You’re not making any sense.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m sorry if I sound like an idiot, but that’s because that’s what I am I suppose.”

  “Now I know you are drunk,” she said. “But listen, Rich. Phone me anytime. And try to work out some time when we can see each other. Take care now, and lots of love.”

  Elizabeth thought about Richard for a moment and wondered what it was that was troubling him and then she lost herself in thoughts about herself and dismissed him from her mind. Whatever she lacked in her life, she knew it wasn’t Richard.

  Elizabeth went to her front door and opened it, looking out onto the drive. It had been snowing and the scene was one of winter in its most beautiful disguise, being seen from the inside. She’d wanted a cold breath of air but closed the door again quickly. It was very cold. She looked at herself again in the mirror.

  “What’s to be done, Liz?” she said. “What am I doing here? What the hell happened? I’m starting to talk to myself. Perhaps I’m going bonkers.”

  She finished her bourbon which had made her feel a little easier with herself but decided not to have another. She knew that if she had another drink she wouldn’t stop until she was unconscious. She drank out of boredom and she liked the inward concentration it gave her. She liked herself when she was drunk, but she didn’t want to like herself that way just yet. She knew she would drink later.

  Richard crossed her mind again suddenly when she was sitting on an armchair in the drawing room, listening again to the radio. He was so like her she thought. They seemed to feel and think the same things and she did miss him even though it was so long since they’d seen each other. She loved him as h
er friend, which she knew was a very important kind of love, and it was as though she knew that because of him she would never be completely alone. If everything and everyone failed her there would always be, Rich. She smiled at the thought of him and then he left her again.

  Christmas day, she said to herself. Of course, it was a midwinter pagan festival much older than Christianity. It had nothing to do with Christ, and people who said that the true meaning of Christmas had been lost in a welter of commercialism annoyed her. She wanted to tell them that the true meaning was to gorge in an excess of food and drink and hot sex under furs. There was much she wanted to tell people.

  Tired of the radio programme as it had changed from music to talk and the way people spoke hesitantly and exaggeratedly on the radio annoyed her, she switched it off. People on the radio spoke sensually as though they were tasting the words she thought. She preferred the silence.

  She pushed her hands through her long dark hair and thought she might have it cut. A complete change of style. It was something she thought of often but never did. Maybe this time she would. She looked at her hands. They felt moist.

  Ennui, she thought. The terrible desperation of being alive. Things had to happen, all the time. Otherwise life was a hellish nightmare of static nothingness. She wondered how people in times past with so few external stimulants could bear it. They had sex almost continuously she concluded. That’s why religion was invented also. To explain the spaces between events.

  She was healthy and clean and warm and fed and she should be happy and grateful for that, but she found gratitude irksome. She should demand these things. It was the way she hated people who having seen a disabled person turned and said, aren’t we lucky, or we think we’ve got problems. She hated a lot, she considered.

  She switched on the television out of boredom but then switched it back off again. The grandmother clock chimed another hour and she thought, a little bit closer to death. I wonder how many heartbeats I’ve got left? The number must be finite and known. They say we’re made of stardust. I’m a little tiny spark of creation. The way it works is remarkable though. How all this mass of water and minerals makes me move and think. The lump in my head is the most remarkable though. All those little electronic explosions going on.