A Personal History of Thirst

by John Burdett

  “Of course I do, Oliver. About five months before I met you, I represented a shoplifter in Bow Street Magistrate’s Court. Plea in mitigation.”

  —

  By the time I left the woodshed, Eleanor and Tom had gone. I found Daisy in bed under a huge eiderdown, with a reading light on. She lay on the side nearest the window, which she had opened to let out the fumes from her joint. The look on her face was quite different from the one she had worn most of the day. The cool deliberation with which she was betraying Hogg’s hospitality made her look ten years older. The girlish wish to please was nowhere in evidence.

  I had nerved myself for a row. “Are you still angry?”

  She looked at me coolly. “Come to bed.”

  I undressed and slid in beside her, relieved that her hand sought out mine and held it.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Oh, I wasn’t that mad. I didn’t want to be the fall guy for you two streetwise cynics, that’s all.”

  Her voice was steady, calm, very womanly. Sometimes the dope took her that way.

  “I wasn’t making you a fall guy. I—”

  “Shhh! Don’t worry, be happy.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “You’re marvelous sometimes. Generous—”

  “No. I’m just a dumb American woman. I think in embarrassing clichés, I don’t make any effort to grapple with the real, dirty world, therefore I’m not qualified to talk. When I do talk it makes you cringe. I’m also a hypocrite, because I suck up to people like Hogg. Right?”

  “Don’t, Daisy.”

  She continued, ignoring me. “But supposing you’re right, my ideas are clumsy, naive, I use the wrong words, there’s no precision in my thinking, I’m not streetwise, but supposing the words and the ideas aren’t that important because, hey, I’m not in a murder trial, I’m only trying to communicate with you. Suppose it’s the feeling behind the words—the perception, if you like—that counts. I guess I feel strangled because you use your intellect all the time to put me down when I simply want to share my vision, my feelings, with you.”

  I tried to answer, then realized that I could do so only by using my intellect in exactly the way she described.

  “Okay, suppose that.”

  “Then wouldn’t that make you the fool?” Her hand was playing carelessly with my flaccid penis. She tugged it on the word “fool.”

  “Yes.”

  “So d’you understand a little what it’s like most of the time to be a woman?”

  “If you tug any harder, you’ll turn me into one.”

  The laugh caught her as she was inhaling. She started on a long dope-smoker’s cough that made her double up. I hit her with my open hand.

  How frail her back, naked, while she coughed her heart out.

  “It’s no good; I’ll have to get a water pipe,” she said when she had recovered. “So what did you two boys talk about after I left?”

  “What do two working-class boys talk about?”

  “Women and football.”

  “We left out the football.”

  “Well, did you find out if he’s having an affair with Hogg?”

  “No, he’s not. If Hogg had the courage he’d make a pass, but he hasn’t, so there’s nothing left but middle-class innuendo, a lot of untapped libido, and some mildly sadistic power games.”

  “Oliver said all that? Doesn’t sound like him.”

  “Not in so many words. He said Hogg’s a cunt. Cockney is a very economical dialect. And then the apron sort of said it all, didn’t it?”

  “It could have been innocent. French chefs wear aprons.”

  “Thirst will be thrilled to know that.”

  Daisy drew on her joint and leaned round to blow the smoke out of the window, both breasts resting against the cold ledge for a moment. She got back under the covers.

  “Brrr, it’s cold. So tell me something, wise one.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Why do you and Oliver dislike Hogg so much? It seems so cruel. He at least really believes that he’s helping Oliver. And he quite likes you. He was really mad when you connived at the joyride—he thought you’d lost your mind.”

  “Exactly, that’s your answer. He hasn’t got any balls.”

  “But that’s just working-class machismo.”

  “Not quite. Beaufort has plenty of balls, but he’s hardly working-class. I bet Beaufort, Q.C., would have enjoyed that ride.”

  She turned around to lie facing me in a fetal position, a reliable signal for a change of persona.

  “So Hogg hasn’t any of these, you think?”

  “Right.”

  “But you have.”

  “Unless that’s Scotch mist you’re playing with.”

  “Don’t feel like Scotch mist to me, big guy. D’you want to talk dirty for a while? This dope is starting to make me horny.”

  19

  Thirst sank to the bottom of my mind like a brick in a pond.

  Daisy did not mention him or the weekend at the vicarage for a long time, either. When memories were unpleasant or even mildly disturbing, she had a way of deleting them en bloc, like someone who shreds awkward files. We talked less, sought out activities that required companionship rather than intimacy.

  Walking, for example. Daisy and I were not great ones for exercise, but we liked to stroll. One of our favorite destinations was to Hampstead Garden Suburb, where a Society for Impecunious Gentle Women had let Daisy’s mother a flat at a low rent after her discharge from hospital.

  There was a solemn ritualistic aspect to our visits as a couple. We’d make a point of walking over Hampstead Heath and through Kenwood, across the Spaniards Lane, then down Wildwood Road to the Suburb—a leafy London stroll full of health, freshness, and false innocence (a book called The Sex Life of Plants was still a favorite with alternative types like Daisy).

  We often discussed moving to a larger, unfurnished flat as soon as we could afford it.

  “You know what I would really like, Jimmy? A deep-blue ceiling with clouds! Have you noticed how ceilings are always so white and boring? That’s because they’re designed by men, who don’t have to spend so much time on their backs. I bet there’s a statistic that shows women have to stare at ceilings fifty percent more than men do. Hey, Jimmy, daffodils!”

  I stared myopically at the yellow trumpets half buried in foliage and quoted from a poem my father had loved to listen to my mother reciting:

  “For a breeze of morning moves

  And the Planet of Love is on high,

  Beginning to faint in the light that she loves

  On a bed of daffodil sky.”

  Daisy embraced me. Perhaps it was the sharp breeze that made her eyes fill with tears.

  “I know I’m difficult, but I love you, Jimmy. Don’t let me go, will you, whatever happens?”

  As we took a path that emerged at the top of a hill where Kenwood began, I can’t say that I paid much attention to the evidence of an awakening earth. Spring always hits me from the inside. What I felt was an agonizing yearning and a recurring premonition that I would lose her. This thought alone had the awful capacity to drain me of energy, as if the surface tension of my ego had been punctured. Sometimes I thought she did it on purpose, as if she was able to drain my vitality. It had the effect, sometimes, of making me want to get away from her.

  We sat down by automatic reflex on a bench under a horse chestnut tree. It was still early enough in the year for it to have huge blossoms that stood upright like pyramids and changed the aspect of the tree. In some lights it looked as if it were on fire.

  “Isn’t it funny the way we’ve never made a decision about it but we always sit here?”

  “Daisy, what did you mean just now when you said, ‘Don’t let me go, will you’?”

  “Oh God! You’re not going to read something sinister into that, are you? It’s a beautiful day, James. Don’t let’s spoil it.”

  “Well, you did say it. Doesn’t it
have a sinister ring? As if you’re tempted to get up and leave?”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “What did you mean, then?”

  She sat with her back straight, hands together in her lap. In her long flowered skirt and a light woolen sweater, she resembled an English country schoolteacher. Thanks to her British mother, the Home Office was processing her naturalization application without too many hiccups. With an accent nowadays that only intermittently reflected her roots, she had blended into the landscape better than most immigrants. And over the past few months she had finally been taking an interest in her students. She was teaching literature to sixteen-year-olds at a polytechnic. She liked the exuberance of the boys, with whom she had a bantering relationship, and was good at playing older sister to the girls. She was surprised by her success. The polytechnic had its problems, and many teachers who were supposed to be good did not survive there. Daisy, who took up assignments on the assumption that sooner or later she would be sacked, probably for absenteeism, found herself respected and admired.

  I took her hand, half knelt beside her.

  “Daisy, I wish I could stop this gnawing at my guts, but I can’t.”

  “Gnawing at your guts? That’s an odd expression! Very dramatic.”

  “I just don’t know where I am with you, who you are anymore.”

  “You’re not going to start with that cliché again, are you? Nobody knows who they are.”

  “And you can live with that?”

  “Look, James, I put up with a lot from you and I sacrifice a lot. I do it for what we’ve had, and—and what we’ve got. But what I can’t have is you worming yourself into my soul for reassurance all the time. It’s so suffocating.”

  In my pocket I twisted a handkerchief around my index finger until it hurt. “I don’t know what it is you sacrifice. You’re not the sacrificing type. I work three times as hard as you, pay twice as much rent, and still do my half of the household chores. What is it that you sacrifice?”

  She looked away. “You couldn’t handle it if I told you.”

  “Don’t get superior; tell me.”

  She spoke a word softly that I could not make out.

  “Pardon?”

  “Polygamy. Women are basically polygamous—it’s only childbirth and male paranoia that have kept us cooped up for five thousand years. The revolution is here, I’m afraid—you can’t stop it, James. But I sacrifice my polygamous nature for you. I castrate myself, I suppose.”

  I stood up, feeling as if my stomach were collapsing. “You’re selfish,” was all I could find to say. She set her mouth grimly.

  “I want to go now. My mom’s expecting us. Are you coming?”

  —

  I was fond of Mrs. Hawkley (she had refused to change her name after the divorce, despite pressure from Daisy). I found our visits to her flat soothing. She liked me, too, and let me know that she thought I was a good influence on Daisy. I knew that she worried about her and that the worry had increased lately, just as Daisy had become more attentive. Her mother was Daisy’s project of the moment.

  She’d been disturbed by Daisy’s new fad for narrating her sexual fantasies, although little by little Mrs. Hawkley seemed to confuse them with her own. I had an idea that on her good nights Daisy’s mother rode to sleep clad in a silver spacesuit on a pink elephant, while in the middle distance Martians raped Belle Époque courtesans who looked like her daughter.

  I think she was relieved that I had no delusions about her. I spent too much of my working life with the so-called underclass not to be able to read the signs. On every visit there was a new dent in her old red mini. In her flat the wallpaper was stained by splash marks from bouts with the nightly demons. Wire coat hangers on every doorknob held panties and old sweaters. The cupboard under the sink was full of empty red-wine bottles. As we sat on her mother’s sofa sipping department store red wine (Daisy smoked a joint, her mother smoked a fag), Daisy would bring up that good old staple of civilized conversation, her clitoris.

  “Was yours like this, Mum, at my age—I mean, really. It’s like some hot little animal down there.”

  Mrs. Hawkley, the fag in her mouth pointing down at the avalanche of ash which had stained her old red sweater, smiled in fond and sozzled remembrance of the bush fires of her youth.

  “I think so, dear. It’s a while since I’ve seen mine. I think it’s gone into hibernation.”

  The shock of having made a joke (I broke into surprised laughter; Daisy made a face) precipitated a coughing fit. The tobacco tar of decades churned with a sound like an old bus going up a hill. Her lived-in face, which medication, red wine, and nicotine had restructured over the years, imploded in the fight for breath. Daisy put a pretty young arm around her, patted her back.

  “Isn’t she fantastic? Isn’t she just the best mom? Aren’t women just great to survive at all—to carry on in spite of everything?”

  “Gone into hibernation.” Mrs. Hawkley repeated her joke as she surfaced from her battle with the monsters of the deep, winked at me in a way that always infuriated Daisy (“She still sees men as the source of authority”).

  “Mother Courage, that’s what she is. You have to have guts to survive seventeen years with a psychopath.”

  “Don’t talk about your father like that.” Mrs. Hawkley turned to me. “Her father is a good man, brilliant. It was my fault it all went wrong. I misled him.” She leaned forward conspiratorially. “I knew how to play the lady, you see. And him being American, he didn’t understand that I was really just an ordinary English lass. Until after we were married, that is. I was young and stupid. All I wanted was to visit America. I would have given anything to get there. I was that generation: America was the answer to every problem, the promised land. We had one of those whirlwind romances. I was surprised he stuck with me as long as he did. I was no good at all for his career. I’m hopeless at dinner parties. He deserved better than me.” She took a long draw on her cigarette. “Daisy always sees everything upside down. I’m not strong, I’m weak. Anyone can see that.”

  “No, no, that’s just male programming.” Daisy’s face hardened with zeal. “That’s what they make you think, that’s what they’ve done to us—they’ve colonized us.”

  “Oh, is that what it is? And all the time we used to think we were colonizing them, taming them and bringing them to heel. That’s what I thought when your father went down on his knees and asked me to marry him. But I wasn’t good enough, I know that.”

  “No, no, you’re wrong.” Daisy wrung her hands.

  “But I don’t think we were as horny as you, dear—is that the right word? I don’t think we ate as much meat. Our fantasies were all different, too. We didn’t have any Martians then, we had formal dances and romantic walks by ornamental lakes, and we would never dream of talking to a gentleman about our private parts, not even after we were married. We would never have called that liberation. For us, liberation was what Mahatma Gandhi wanted for India.”

  “Exactly,” Daisy said. “It’s the same thing.”

  Mrs. Hawkley looked perplexed. “They talk like Daisy at therapy. Everybody tells me to come out of my closet. I suppose they mean sex, but I only think about sex when I’m drunk, so I tell them some of your stories. Samantha, the therapist, was very pleased with me, she said I was definitely getting more in touch with myself. They all liked the Martian in the silver spacesuit. They said I should write it down and sell it to the BBC. They said I may have genius.” She snorted and coughed. “So you’d better tell me a few more, or they’ll think I’m having a relapse.”

  Daisy shook her head. “What am I going to do with you?”

  She held her mother by the shoulders and rested her forehead on hers. The sudden touch of love made Mrs. Hawkley tearful.

  “I don’t know, dear—sometimes I’m that lonely I could die.”

  “How can you be lonely? You’ve got us.”

  “I’m lonely because I want a man, Daisy; can’t you understand?”<
br />
  —

  Daisy would come away from such visits full of concern for her mother’s spiritual welfare. She had an evangelist’s certainty that her mother would be saved if only she would accept Daisy’s worldview.

  “Do you think she understands what I tell her?” she would ask me.

  20

  He reentered our world by one of those coincidences that, on reflection, seem to have been precipitated by an unconscious act of will in some coven of the mind.

  The walk back through Kenwood from Daisy’s mother’s house was a ritual. Our route led down the grove of rhododendrons, past the turning that led to Dr. Johnson’s Summer House, out into the open in front of the great manor house, down the carefully landscaped hill to the ornamental pond, into the dense little wood of holly and oak, out onto Hampstead Heath and across to Roslyn Hill.

  When I replay the old videotapes of memory, it seems to me that it was not only the route but also we ourselves who were fixed in a state of suspended animation, two blindfolded lovers standing still while the moving scenery (the rhododendron grove, flowering or wilting, the ornamental pond with lilies or without, the trees with leaves or bare) rolled by us.

  Hindsight can provide a magical clarification to states of mind that were deeply perplexing at the time: although we didn’t know it, we were waiting for him.

  Then one day in late autumn of 1977 we came across Eleanor Merril-Price standing outside the manor house in high leather boots and loose sweater, as if she were the mistress of it. As we approached her, she gazed upon us with a bemused expression.

  “How very odd! Do you know that you’ve just missed Oliver? He came for a walk with me and we had lunch. Now he’s gone back to his studies. We were talking about you two, the beautiful Daisy and her mysterious dark knight.”

  “His black clients call him a white knight,” Daisy said, smiling up at her like a flower.

  “I knew you lived somewhere in Belsize Park, not far from us,” Eleanor said. “I kept meaning to get your address from James Hogg.”