You come home at midnight, don’t explain where you’ve been, rush off to the bedroom, shut the door and make a call. What’s going on?
He is startled by this voice into telling the absolute truth.
I’m trying to find my wife.
For Helen, this is too much. He hasn’t moved past anything.
She’s dead!
Raif looks at her as if she’s pulled off a mask.
But you’re right, she says, you’re still looking for her. That’s why you went to Estonia – to find yourself a new version. You think I don’t know?
Know what?
You met someone while you were there.
Yes, I did, but—
You saw her tonight, says Helen. You told me you were seeing a colleague but it was her.
She is a colleague. She’s here at a conference.
Is his relationship ending because he had dinner with a woman he hasn’t slept with and doesn’t even like? He panics.
She’s fifty. At least.
And that’s supposed to reassure me?
(It had been.)
She’s a colleague. We talked about funding and—
But that’s not how you met, is it?
No, it isn’t.
And she doesn’t know you have a girlfriend, does she?
Did he mention Helen? He can’t remember.
For fuck’s sake, Raif. You don’t even know you have a girlfriend.
This strikes him as true. Helen is shouting now and the more she says, the further his mind retreats. He does nothing as she packs a bag. When she leaves she says – quietly now – that she isn’t angry. He has to stop himself asking what she has to be angry about.
*
He’s alone again – even more so now that Liis’s death no longer accompanies him. The sadness for Helen and Raif is that just as she has confronted the force of his loss, and given up competing with it, he has set it aside. He sits there in the sudden space of his life and it feels alright. He wonders why he ever rushed to fill it. He doesn’t understand that it isn’t really empty. Whatever’s been gathering in him since last summer will now take up its place.
He owes Ava an apology and asks her to meet him for coffee. She has a spare half-hour.
I have to give my paper and sit on another panel this afternoon, she says as she sits down.
He doesn’t pretend to be interested. Now that there is no expectation and it’s clear they won’t stay in touch, she’s a stranger again. He addresses her more formally.
I’m sorry for my reaction to your news about my wife. It was unfair.
I understand why you’re angry. You did not know your wife.
I don’t think I wanted to know her. I could have found out more. It’s not difficult.
No, it isn’t.
But I chose not to.
As if you can live in the dark.
Maybe I found it comforting.
So why not be content to live with her death?
I haven’t been. And I’ve been living with someone. At least I was. She left yesterday.
You seem very calm. Did you not want her?
I wanted her.
You wanted sex with her?
And life. I wanted a life with her. I should do. She’s lovely.
What kind of life do you want?
Could you answer that question?
She laughs.
I have feelings I can’t feel, he says, and I want to be able to.
And you want some wise but sexy woman to come along and make it happen for you.
Something like that.
Neither of them laugh.
So if it’s not the one who’s just left, who is it?
Raif is about to speak of things he has long known but in the way we know other planets.
Ava yawns but Raif has gathered himself.
I met someone else, you see, last summer. And I don’t think I need her to do anything.
Ava yawns once more.
Another boring story, she says.
He thinks this conversation is a liberation when it’s just an opportunity to say things out loud without consequence. But he’s enjoying telling the truth and believes (for this day at least) that it’s not only possible but liberating to live in truth. The truth is obvious if you’re willing to recognise it! He will tell only the truth from now on!
He talks about Iris for the first time.
used, broken, lost
Bringing the girls to stay with her mother should have been a mistake but they’re enjoying themselves. They claim Jean’s attention so confidently that she gives it. What would that have been like? Iris had barely been able to get Jean to look up from her book or away from her mirror but here she is devoting whole days to trips to the swimming pool, the shopping centre and cinema.
One evening Jean gets boxes of clothes down from the attic and offers the girls her make-up bag. They’re sitting in the kitchen. Kate has a gold-and-navy silk scarf knotted at her neck, Lou a cherry-pink one.
Granny’s cool, Kate says. She lets us play with her things.
This pleases Jean.
Your mother used to say cool.
You’ll get tomato sauce on those scarves, says Iris, but they don’t take them off.
Things are there to be played with, says Jean. Used, broken, lost, it doesn’t matter. They’re only things.
The girls are impressed.
Do you really mean that? asks Lou. People say that but when something does get lost or whatever, it turns out they don’t mean it.
Oh, she means it, Iris says.
Jean does not react and Iris, feeling that she’s losing control in some way, proposes a walk.
We could watch the sunset from up on the cliff. Anyone want to come?
No one does.
The house is halfway up a hill, on a steep street of Edwardian villas. Iris’s childhood memories are filled with the leathery green of rhododendrons, ivy and laurel, and those superfluous turrets and high walls of dark, damp stone that look so promising. The houses behind the walls were always smaller and more drab than these might suggest. Most are now B&Bs and Jean has just announced that she’s turning the top floor into a holiday let from the coming summer. The house is a nightmare to heat.
It might rain or it might stay grey for a week. Iris walks up to the cliff, although she’s not going to watch the sunset. It’s where she came with her friends as a teenager to smoke or drink and walk back and forth. The most exciting thing about the town is the two-hundred-foot drop from the cliff to the sea. The eroded edge has started to fall away and the path is now bordered by low wire. Every few hundred yards there’s a cluster of cards and soft toys where another boy (they’ve all been boys so far) drove his car off the road, across the field and over the edge.
She walks on and on, taking no notice of the cards and toys, the ruined abbey or the piling sky because something has shifted. David’s condition has contracted into fact and she has room once again for the idea of Raif. Those months of conversation, that delightful sense of something building. Why hasn’t he been in touch? He doesn’t know about David so where does he think she’s gone? And where is he?
As she crosses one field after another, not bothering to stick to the barely indicated paths, she remembers the couple dancing in The Blue Iris and how, when the man pressed his mouth to the woman’s neck, a ripple had passed through Iris herself. The thought now of seeing Raif causes another ripple.
She is on the edge of a large ploughed field when the storm breaks and she turns back towards the gate she came through, only it isn’t there. The rain is so heavy that the field turns to mud beneath her and she can’t see anything she remembers. Did she come past these trees or those? Why hadn’t she paid attention? When did it start to grow dark? The thunder and lightning are overhead and she looks for somewhere to shelter but the hedgerow is dense and will not let her in and so she keeps walking along the edge of the field until she sees car lights and makes her way towards them, pressing
through the dense undergrowth where she can so that she more or less falls down into a lane that she then follows back to town.
Her mother gives her towels and whisky. Even though Iris has been gone for hours, she’s neither curious nor alarmed.
I’m surprised at you getting lost so easily, is all she says as they sit opposite one another by the fire.
I’m not, says Iris and then – because of the cold, the fright, the whisky – she starts to cry.
Jean watches but makes no move to comfort Iris, which becomes a relief as layer after layer of grief rises. Getting lost in the storm (so easily) was a sign of how much she needed to give way. She cries as if she’s still out there in the dark, in the mud and rain with no one watching, but it is because her mother is there (saying only, occasionally and very quietly, It’s alright) that she can.
At breakfast Jean asks Lou what she’d like to do and Lou shrugs.
That’s just like my mother, says Jean. That shrug. Just like her.
No it’s not. It’s David, Iris says.
Just like my mother, Jean persists.
Am I just like her, Granny? What was she like?
She was quiet, says Iris. Not like you at all.
They’ve got similar looks as well.
She was your granny, wasn’t she, Mum. What was she like?
I don’t really know.
Nonsense, says Jean. You adored your grandmother!
What happened to her?
Lou has asked a question that Iris has felt unable to ask her entire life. Your grandmother is quiet because something happened to her. She saw a terrible thing. She stands up and starts to clear the breakfast away, wanting and not wanting to hear what her mother might say.
What happened to her? Jean ponders. She died, didn’t she? She got old and she died.
Like you will?
Yes, my sweet. And you too.
Iris watches her daughters receive the clear truth. They finish their cereal, fetch their swimming things and set about the day apparently undiminished.
When they were arranging this visit, Iris assumed that she would be seeing a lot of her brother. Jason lives nearby and teaches at the school they both attended.
Jason comes to lunch and Iris is surprised to find that the girls remember him well. They play board games with him all afternoon and where Iris would never so much as put her hand on her brother’s arms, Kate and Lou scramble over him when he pretends to be asleep on the floor. They hug him.
What are you doing tomorrow? Iris asks him as they sit far apart on the sofa that evening watching the news. We could revisit the haunts of our youth.
Growing up, they’d rarely done anything together.
I’m busy, Jason says. I have things to do.
Jason comes on Saturdays, Jean says. That’s why he’s here today.
Visit us in London, Iris pleads.
I’m busy, Jason says. And I’ve seen London. We take a school trip there every year. Why did your husband leave you?
He had a stroke, she says. You come to London? Every year?
The next morning Lou has more questions.
Granny, why did Grandad go away?
Because I asked him to.
Did he get another wife?
No, not that. It was never that.
Couldn’t he have come back?
No, my love.
Why not?
I didn’t want him.
Iris wishes she could say it like that – I didn’t want him. She’d like to be as frank as her mother but not as truthful, no. Mum, why won’t you come to the school play? Because that sort of thing bores me. Do you like my haircut? Not really. Perhaps if she’d been more direct with Raif, they would be something by now. He had reached out and touched her face and what had she done? Asked if she should leave. And he’d said yes. Perhaps it was best that the thing had fizzled out after all.
One evening the girls appear in trailing floral maxi dresses they’ve taken from the trunk of clothes.
Take a photo! they command.
Your mother liked to have a photo taken when she dressed up too, Jean says.
Show us! Show us!
Oh, I threw all that sort of thing out years ago.
The girls nod as if this is the most reasonable thing they’ve ever heard.
a switch
Two people say yes and enjoy a time of undescribed connection. They find a reason to talk and perhaps to meet but neither acts. Time passes and the connection fades. When they meet again they’ve forgotten that this other person had once been such a powerful idea that they might have given up a life to be with them. What had they imagined this person to possess? The switch has been turned off as abruptly as it was turned on. Neither wants to remember how susceptible they once were. It’s embarrassing.
Even if these intensities take years to resolve, we can recover from them if they go unnamed. Otherwise we carry them around like a black box, busy with its invisible work.
Many of the objects in the museum’s collections explain themselves. The fire is lit here, the steam builds here, the piston lifts, the wheel turns. This lever raises this arm, which presses this button. How does a museum interest its audience in a black box? Even if it were opened, what would they see? The caption on the wall explains the power of this object and so we stop to contemplate a small black box. We believe in it without needing to open it. What else is there to say?
This particular box is a switch that was used in the city’s first internet exchange. It was made in 1994 and so is neither new nor old but it is obsolete. Its only function now is to represent one of many steps rapidly taken. It was made in the year of the Superhighway Summit, a year in which the Channel Tunnel opened and there was much talk of nuclear disarmament. The city’s drive was towards connection and dialogue, as fast and multi-directional as possible. To connect and connect and connect, never resting or completing, like those who move past one lover to the next, fulfilled at the point of first touch.
blossom
Raif is walking home under a pale-pink sky. It’s the time of year when the days seem abruptly extended and the light of eight o’clock is not yet taken for granted. The quieter streets have their cherry trees, crab apples and magnolias now in blossom through vanilla to magenta. Something is softening.
He arrives at his flat, where the jolt of Helen’s absence is softened by fresh thoughts of Iris. He does not doubt that she is where he left her – on the bridge in that lemony light. They were about to hold hands. He doesn’t want to think about meeting her at the funeral. She saw him with Helen. No wonder she didn’t get in touch. (Has he forgotten the three missed calls?) And she said her husband had MS, only she doesn’t really think of him as her husband any more. She was saying that for Helen.
Raif opens windows, puts on music and writes to Iris. It’s been four months since they were last in touch. He knows now what he is moving towards. Not Helen and not the memory of Liis. It is Iris. He has her in place.
How are you?
It’s all he writes and it goes through Iris like a spear. She makes herself wait ten minutes before she replies.
I don’t know. You?
In blossom, he writes, and then deletes it and starts again. A lot has happened. Sorry not to have been in touch.
Likewise, she replies.
These brief lines are so appealing. They could only be written by two people sure of their call on the other’s attention.
I’d like to see you.
How about next weekend?
Dinner on Saturday?
Sure.
Who says what doesn’t matter. They are back walking off the bridge in the lemony light, the people around them no more than murmur and shadow, nothing tugging at or encroaching on or obstructing their delicate becoming.
practical momentum
For Iris, receiving these few words from Raif is as exciting as his fingertips touching her cheek. She experiences such a punch of desire that her body folds. At the same time she�
��s reminded of meeting him with Helen after the funeral and her face burns. She’s folding and burning, opening and closing.
Raif has placed Iris in front of Helen, whom he tried to place in front of Liis. This is a form of practical momentum. There is so much to get past in order to love that we must arrange things, including the lover, in as helpful a way as possible.
As we watch Iris and Raif turn towards each other again, we can see all the reasons they’ve done so. They will never say I am here because I’m lonely or disappointed. Because I need comfort, sex, to be held, not to fall. Because I’m tired. Because when I was ready I already knew you were a possibility. They should not be ashamed. These are all aspects of how love becomes possible. They are what creates the unforced space love depends on. Iris and Raif didn’t have that space when they were walking off the bridge. They needed something to slow them down and it has.
They should know by now that we never feel one thing at a time. Having accumulated so much, how can we? The tissue of feeling can be prised apart into layers that are easy to define but not to reconcile. So we travel its surface, striving to feel whatever can be called right or good or reasonable.
history
Iris and Raif are about to step out of all that’s been happening and meet – for dinner in a restaurant that’s borrowed a tall narrow house which, over two centuries, has been divided, boxed in, bricked up, broken open and restored while its value has plummeted and rocketed. In six months’ time the developers will move in but meanwhile its dilapidations are recast as virtues: the bare wooden boards of the uneven stairs, the stained plaster walls scattered with islands of old wallpaper.
In the City of Love's Sleep Page 18
