I pushed what she’d said away from me, told myself I had no use of it. But I never forgot it. It came back, frequently, long after she and I ceased to know each other. And a song she’d once sung echoed in my head when I woke up at half past four in the morning. Further on up the road, it warned. Just wait, it said. Someone will hurt you, just as you’ve hurt me. You think you’ll get away with it, but it’s waiting for you. That was what she wished for, that was what she wanted to say. Further on up the road. Those were the words I’d hear her sing in my head long after she and I had stopped talking. But I didn’t want to listen to that song. Why would I?
Timmy wasn’t obliged to deal with all this. She split up with her boyfriend. It was easier. Although, who can actually say that it’s ever easy to leave somebody? It was difficult, almost unbearable, it always is, for anybody, but it passed. He cried, they both cried, they had a few painful conversations, and then it was over.
* * *
—
Once, Timmy had made a decision about who she was going to be. She would manage for herself, and she would manage for others, and never need help. At night, when she still slept alone, she’d sometimes wake up and think about who she was and who she might become. We’d got together and life would now begin, our life, the life that would spread itself to cover over everything we’d done before. Every night we lay in bed, naked and eager, as though we’d never been naked with anyone else before.
We moved in together, first into one apartment, then into a bigger one, and later into a third which was even bigger. We bought a bed for ourselves and a bed for my daughter, and later we bought beds for the children we had together. We bought chairs and tables, hung pictures and laid carpets and drove the car. We built an existence, acquired habits, it went of its own accord. We wrote our names on our mailboxes and front doors, one name beneath the other. We were a unit. We heard and understood as a unit, overheard and misunderstood, blinded ourselves in unison, imitated each other’s good sides. We took from each other and whatever the world could give us with bold optimism. Our debts increased, but the bank had a new policy, good customers no longer needed to clear the loan itself, just pay the interest. Our debts would never decrease, we only paid the banks what it cost them to lend us the money. We might pay off our debts later, or perhaps never, things would just roll on, average earnings increased a little every year, and so would ours, the economy could only get stronger, our existence too, the love, the joy, the despair, everything, could only grow in strength. We went out together in the mornings, came home at night, sat at the table, walked across floors, lay in our beds. Our voices would sound in these rooms forever.
There was just one thing that must never happen. I’d think about it now and then, not often, but during all those years we lived together, it went through me like a cold ravine, ten or perhaps twenty times, and each time it was crippling, as though we were threatened by a major disaster. Further on up the road. I was going to get hurt too. And on those rare but poignant occasions, when I had to make a wish, one of those wishes that I didn’t believe in, but took very seriously—like when one of the kids and I said the same word simultaneously, and I had to link little fingers with them and make a wish never to be told—then I’d wish that Timmy and I would stay together forever and that nobody would ever come between us. So perhaps I did fear it after all? Fear it more than anything else? I kept it to myself, and more, I kept it hidden from myself, only letting it out in these playfully loaded occasions.
I lived as though my life took place only before her eyes. She was rather startled when I said this. It was me she woke with and slept with, it was me she had all those long conversations with, until the day she no longer did. I would come home in the afternoon from some job or other, I only had short assignments with the smaller papers in those first years. I’d write in the office, then come home and continue writing until late. There was always some article I couldn’t get finished, something I couldn’t get right, something I had to try to improve. I often got up in the middle of the night to work while she and the kids were asleep. I’d wake her in the morning having been up for hours. She’d be woken by me lying down beside her, or on top of her. She woke to the sound of my voice, talking about us, about her, about the love we shared that I couldn’t manage without.
Outwardly our life changed: we had children, first one little boy and then another. Two boys born five years apart. She started work as a GP at a health center, and I got a permanent job with a major newspaper. So I was finally what I’d always hoped to be, a journalist on an editorial team. I had my own desk and my own computer, went to early-morning meetings with other journalists and editors. On the face of it, everything was perfect. I wrote articles that were widely read and that got me recognition in certain circles. I was made section editor, and did well at it. But something wasn’t quite right with the job, or with the role that I felt forced to assume as a journalist. For a while I’d leave home dressed in a smart dark suit; not because anyone at work demanded it, but because, as I explained to her, I needed some sort of protection. I took it off the minute I got home in the evening, stripping off my work attire to become myself again. And then, just as I was starting my paternity leave to be with our second boy, the newspaper industry went into meltdown. My colleagues began taking jobs as researchers and media consultants. Like many others I was offered a redundancy package, I accepted, and I was a freelancer once more. I extended my time at home with our youngest, we didn’t apply for a nursery place for him until he was three, and even then I continued to stay at home. I wrote a children’s book that got published with a degree of success, I wrote another, and soon Timmy and the kids were used to my being at home, and my sitting there writing.
* * *
—
It occurs to Timmy that something changed around this time. Whenever she got back from work, there I was, without fail, with the kids. And the home to which she returned was not as before, its rooms had become an extension of my inner life. There we were, the children and I, waiting. I’d always have made dinner and have cleaned and tidied everything with a fastidiousness she could never get used to. But more than this, I was also getting increasingly obsessed with her. Perhaps I simply had too much time to think, now that I spent so much time alone. I told her how I could sit all day wondering how the kids were at school, mulling over what she or I had said or done the day before. She had become even more central to my life than ever before. I wanted to talk to her about every single thing she did and thought. And that was hard for her to understand. And my writing probably had its effect. It seemed to me that I’d grown more vulnerable not only from being alone, but from having a job that allowed me to go into myself. Perhaps that was why a general sensitivity—if one can talk of general sensitivities—took hold in me: I was constantly observing the intricacies of my own emotions, since I used them now in my writing, and with that perhaps she loomed larger in my consciousness, indeed everything that was important to me grew in significance. Still, it confused her. It was flattering to be admired, but she’d always felt more drawn to me when I was scarcely home, when I was too busy to think so much about her.
But I was glad of these days at home, I said, I’d started to find myself. My redundancy had come in the nick of time; had I stayed at the newspaper I’d have lost touch with everything I liked best in myself. She listened, but suggested I was more robust working in a professional setting, with other people. She was keen to offer a counterbalance, an alternative perspective. She’d liked being with me when I was at the paper, when the life I led reflected her own.
Now all I wanted was to hear about everything that happened to her. She worked hard and was beginning to achieve her goals. She had specialized, gone on to gain a doctorate, before taking a job at the Department of Health, where she was made head of the division, responsible for research into public health. We had gone in opposite ways, she told family and friends. She had aband
oned her patients—all those unique cases, babies, pensioners, teenage girls with their diagnosed and undiagnosable ailments—because she wanted to work in a wider social capacity, because she wanted to influence the circumstances that affect everyone’s lives. Meanwhile, I was at home now, busy writing short stories about children reminiscent of the child I had once been, or might have been: individual stories about special cases, emotional truths, nothing more.
* * *
—
We’d gone through that first phase—that initial flush of love—during which we occasionally had my little daughter, and were a new couple left to our own devices for the rest of the time. Long mornings in bed, devoted to our bodies’ pleasure-seeking explorations. Then came the home-building phase with young children, baby food all over the kitchen worktops and tiny clothes drying over the bath. Then the kids got bigger, more voices joined the conversation around the table, and she and I were seldom alone.
Except at night, in bed. There we lived a secret life, about which we spoke to no one, a warm dark tunnel through the days. Out there, up in the light, we did our jobs, socialized with friends who almost without exception had children the same age as ours. We attended parents’ groups, went shopping on Fridays, cried when anything got too much, followed the news, discussed the professional issues in our respective fields. Or we drove the kids to their sports activities (Timmy) or took them to the library (me). She began taking regular exercise and I volunteered for an environmental organization. We had more money and filled the family diary, much like everyone else around us. Afternoons, weekends, holidays: we made plans and carried them out as best we could, packed the car and unpacked it again, screamed at the kids to come down from their rooms and leave their computer games. Our life resembled that of everyone else, superficially at least, which gave us a sense of belonging and calm. But the thing that bound us together, that gave us a sense of continuity, was this secret life that concerned only the two of us, and which we called our love.
It had to be love. What else could it be? And it had to be a great love, an exceptionally great and utterly overwhelming love. There had to be a closeness, a unity and an attraction between us that was far beyond the ordinary. Or it wouldn’t have been worth it, worth the separation from my daughter, which meant I only saw her once a fortnight—and not even that, in those first few years. My daughter was two years old when I fell in love with Timmy. How could I justify this betrayal to myself, or to my daughter when she grew up, if this upheaval in our lives hadn’t been caused by a uniquely great and earth-shattering love?
We didn’t have any mutual friends when we first got together. New couples often don’t. My old friends had to choose whether or not to accept the fact I’d left my wife because I’d fallen in love with someone else. The same went for Timmy’s old friends. We were met with skepticism from both sides. How could they not think that we’d let some random flirtation destroy the lives we already had? Who hasn’t heard of men—particularly men—or women who fall head over heels in love and destroy what they have, only to discover later that their new relationship is a mistake, a moment of blind sexual infatuation? Such romances rarely lead to long-term relationships. I was a thirty-year-old dad who’d fallen in love with the young doctor who treated his daughter for a sore throat. Timmy was the young doctor who’d fallen for the father of a little girl in her care. Before even qualifying, she’d broken one of the unwritten cardinal rules in patient treatment. How could anyone believe that what we had would last?
We lay in bed together, naked and sweaty, the room smelling of sex, talking about our future life together. Telling each other that all this would make a good story some day. Right now “we” were a bad story, right now “we” were regarded as nothing but a careless springtime affair that had wrecked everything for our previous partners, for my child and both our families. Only we had faith in the two of us. But we took the task seriously. “We” were a bad story that would almost imperceptibly turn into a good story, as the years passed and our love appeared to be the sole love ever to have existed in our lives, for the kids at least, and eventually everyone else. No other love was thinkable, we were the perfect match, it seemed after time. Is it possible, in fact, to live with someone for decades without believing that he or she is the only one? We knew there were other possible lives, other possible lovers, perhaps better lives and better lovers, even for us. But we did not want, we could not allow, this thing that we’d built up to fall apart, we didn’t want to leave each other because of some random “falling-in-love,” as we had done before so as to be together. On that we were agreed. We could not do to each other what we had done to our previous partners.
Yet it was essential that we set each other free. After all, we had liberated desire in each other, together we had unleashed our curiosity and zest for life. We mustn’t guard each other and restrict each other’s freedom. We didn’t want to live under some sort of apartheid, she with her girlfriends and me with some buddy or other. We wanted to live together, not in segregated male and female worlds. We wanted to be each other’s confidants, to share the best and most intimate conversations with each other, not with some random friends. And we succeeded in this. We succeeded until our pact led her to confide something in me that she ought to have kept to herself. If I hadn’t been privy to every single exchange she had with Gloveman, as I called him, what then? Then it might have been a flirtation that was allowed to develop quietly, in secret, and that could have ended equally secretly.
But there must have been a trigger for the events that drove us apart. Perhaps they were already set in motion at the very start. During that first summer we took a holiday to a foreign city. We wandered through streets, unable to keep our hands off each other. We lay in a bed together naked. All night and for much of the day we lay in that bed calling forth pleasure in each other. We sat at a table, our hands seeking each other, meeting between cups and glasses and plates. Our feet found each other too, on the floor beneath. Even the tips of our shoes sought each other. She kicked off one shoe and stroked my leg with her toes. She didn’t like her feet much, not back then, she thought they were too big and coarse, with stubby toes and thick nails, but she liked using them like hands, she was good at that. She was good at picking things up from the floor with her toes, and liked pinching me with them. She shoved her bare foot between my legs. She felt it do something to me. She noticed red blotches spread across my neck. We got up to leave, to return to the bed, to the hotel room, but we needed to pay first. We stood together at the till, and a young man came over to help, to take the money. She looked at him, she froze, everything seemed to go a fraction slower, she seemed almost to linger as she moved through the sudden sweetness of attraction. The young man behind the counter noticed nothing, making him even more attractive.
But she didn’t know it herself. She wasn’t aware of it until later, when I started to talk about it. Desire does not see itself. She had blinded herself to her own gaze, she couldn’t even remember looking at him afterward. She must have taken him in, registered his presence through her own living, sensate body, this body that continually absorbed impressions, openly and non-defensively, as bodies do. It lasted only a few seconds, but I was in love, I searched her whole being with my gaze, I observed how directed she became, and saw that she blinded herself. She had blinded herself for my sake, I told her. And she could go blindly from me to another. I was the man she loved, in my arms she grew soft and loving, yet she had had lingered, blind under his gaze—a totally random guy.
Without giving it a thought herself. Until I mentioned it. And then she remembered that she had noticed something about him, something she liked. Who wouldn’t be attracted to a tall young man? A man with beautiful hands, tall and lanky, sensuous but gauche, touched by shyness perhaps, or youth, or something else. His heavy yet aimless desire may not have been focused on her, yet she felt it, and immediately she came within touching distance, something in
her changed. As though her attention was caught, as though she listened, sniffed the air, homed in on him.
But it lasted only a moment. It flashed through her, and she didn’t notice it herself, not until later. And even if she had noticed it, she would probably have forgotten it. Random desire flashes through us all, sniffs at everything, changes its mind and shifts direction. Bodies turn to each other, bodies turn from each other again. It happens, there’s nothing more to it, we don’t even think about it, we forget it again. She was simply open, she simply let herself be charmed, she was simply alive. And I was open to everything that happened in her. I didn’t need to observe this. And having observed it, I had no need to talk about it. I could have pushed it aside and left her in peace. It was her moment, she was the one who was touched, or whatever she might call it. It had merely been a kind of light arousal, fleeting.
So couldn’t I have just let it lie? she thought later.
Clearly not.
* * *
—
When we came back out into the street that summer’s day, she felt my hand on the small of her back. A light touch, my voice light and warm too, asking
—did you like him?
and she said
—who?
and I said
—that man in there,
and she looked at me, my face was still blotchy with love and curiosity. I seemed so relaxed and happy, I wasn’t fearful, and so neither was she. She felt relaxed and happy too, there was no danger, we were just having fun, and she said
—Well, he was rather nice.
—I could tell you thought that.
The Story of a Marriage Page 5
