But in a way he sometimes found it quite a comfort: the very fact that life was so inescapably absurd. It absolved. It cancelled out. It rendered unimportant.
It assisted you to laugh.
Supposing he were suddenly to say: “You know, my two lads met an angel behind Tiffany’s the other night.”
“Just hope she made a man of them!”
“Not that sort. The kind you read about in bibles.”
“Christ! Is it glue-sniffing your lads are into, or drugs, or just old-fashioned alcohol?”
He tried it out, as he was drying from his shower. The other man was large and nearly every inch of him from the neck down, with the exception of his hands, was covered in tattoos; you might, from the back, have thought him fully dressed.
“Terry? What do you think to miracles?”
“Dunno.”
Josh found the word discomfiting. The ones which followed were even more stupid.
“The wife’s sister went to one of them healing services. There was a man with one leg shorter than the other. Well, Rosie swears she saw that leg grow. She says she saw it. And when the bloke got up—they’d had the poor sod kneeling at the altar—he tripped and bloody nearly fell. Because the fucking leg which had the built-up shoe now made the other leg seem shorter!”
“I don’t believe it,” answered Josh.
The man just shrugged, amiably. “No reason why she should have lied.”
“Perhaps she’s got a good imagination?”
“What, Rosie? She couldn’t imagine the yolk in a hard-boiled egg. Not without you helping out a bit: giving hints like ‘small’ and ‘round’ and ‘yellow’. She might get it then, if you were lucky.”
“Exactly. She’s obviously open to the power of suggestion. Perhaps the lot of them were hypnotized.”
“Yes. Well. All I’m saying is, you asked a question. Rosie believed it, my missus believed it, so did my mum-in-law.”
For a minute they towelled themselves in silence.
“But if it were true, why didn’t it get into the papers?”
Terry pulled on underpants; so jazzy in design that they became invisible. “People say that papers aren’t interested in printing good news. They only want the horrors.” Then something occurred to him. “Anyhow. Why you asking all this?”
“No reason. I was only thinking I could do with a fucking miracle or so in my own life.”
When eventually he left he was hailed by a stocky man with a flattened nose who happened to follow him out. “Come for a drink?”
Josh hesitated.
“On me, mate.”
Yes, why the hell not? Jimmy could afford the price of a pint and it would postpone, convivially, the moment when he had to go home. He knew that as soon as he opened the door of the flat—even before that, as soon as he set foot inside the block—last night’s walk to Ashby would suddenly make itself felt. The French had an expression for it: joie de la rue, douleur de la maison: something like that.
They went to The Parkinson Arms. While Jimmy ordered their beer, Josh stood just behind him, in almost the identical spot where Simon had stood the night before. He looked about him at the guns, the hunting trophies, the dented suit of armour. They carried their glasses to an empty table.
“Cheers, mate!”
“Cheers!”
“You know something I’ve often wondered about you?” said Jimmy. “You’re not a Scunthorpe man, are you? You talk too posh; I don’t mean it nasty. But you’re educated, like. Why do you live here, then?”
“Don’t you get people in Scunthorpe who are educated?”
“You know what I mean. First time I heard you I thought you must be a vicar or something.”
“God almighty!”
“Straight up! I said that to Dave and he said you must have been defrocked, because all he knew was you was out of work.”
Josh smiled. “I wonder what he thinks I did!” Then, abruptly, the smile got frostbite. He said brusquely, “Well, there’s no mystery. I was a teacher and we came here about a dozen years ago, because the property was cheap…”
16
It had been a mistake, of course, their coming here. Like so many other big decisions in his life. Hundreds.
For instance.
At sixteen he had wanted to study art in Paris. His parents, naturally, had been opposed. He had wanted to go to drama school. His parents, naturally, had been opposed. He had wanted to find work upon a farm: to build his muscles in the open air, to grow to manhood well-nourished on country food, and country lore, and noticing the seasons. His parents…And each time (because he loved them and was not unmindful of a sense of duty and felt a little scared, more than a little scared, of what he didn’t know, no matter how it might attract him), each time he had allowed himself to be influenced by their combined advice. That was his first mistake.
His second came a decade later. He was twenty-six and still a virgin. Dawn was the daughter of a newsagent. He saw her regularly when he bought his cigarettes. They used to chat across the counter. She was pretty, trim, and sympathetic. She never said a lot but she had a nice smile, and the way she looked at him—somehow it made him feel almost tall, big, worldly-wise. She agreed with all his tentative opinions, which burgeoned swiftly underneath her gentle care. She agreed to his requests. He took her to the pictures and walking home across Wimbledon Common asked nervously if he might kiss her. The day had been a hot one. To their mutual excitement they were soon lying groping in the tall grass.
Dawn hadn’t at all set out to trap him but she had often had sexual intercourse and she was used to its being the men who took precautions. It hadn’t occurred to her that Josh was inexperienced. Even when she guided him into her she didn’t notice the absence of a condom; it hadn’t struck her that there’d been no fumbling pause. It was only when he ejaculated, almost immediately on entering, that her first suspicion came.
Even then she wasn’t angry, merely reassuring. She covered well her disappointment. On subsequent occasions she made sure he wore a sheath, but by then, of course, the damage had been done. A few weeks later, just as he was beginning to feel bored by her lack of intellect and her insipidity, albeit admiring insipidity, she found out she might be pregnant. Janice was on the way.
Dawn wasn’t a religious girl (to tell the truth, she said, she’d never really thought about it) yet from the first she held out stubbornly against abortion. He didn’t need to marry her but she was determined to have that baby. She wanted that baby. She loved it already and nothing was going to stop her.
This wholly unexpected show of obstinacy, this evidence of incipient character, this clinging on in faith and devotion to that tiny life inside her, part of his own life, an embryo created by his own sperm—in some way all this moved him. Her charm became renewed. He wasn’t in love but she was a goodhearted girl, she was endlessly compliant (except in that one instance), she looked up to him, she was thoroughly domesticated; and she enjoyed sex—was bringing on his own performance wonderfully. She would almost certainly become a good wife and a good mother. He didn’t really care that he was marrying beneath him.
His parents did. They tried repeatedly to make him change his mind. They pooh-poohed his suggestion that there were certain codes of honour, codes which to some extent he genuinely believed in. For the first time in his life he opposed their opposition, intractably.
That was his third mistake.
The fourth one was again to do with his career. He’d increasingly disliked his ten years in insurance, and as soon as he left his parents’ house and set up home in Camden Town he informed Dawn that he was going to look for something else; which she considered eminently sensible. Flushed with independence, and with only the occasional, easily suppressed shiver of apprehension, he handed in his notice at the Prudential. That wasn’t the mistake. The mistake was this: that after several months of inquiry, indecision and delay, he ended up in teaching. Vaguely he had thought that he might enjoy going off to college an
d continuing with his education. (He did.) Vaguely he had thought that he would meet lots of interesting and cultured people in secondary-school staffrooms, to offset the dearth of any stimulating talk at home. (Lots? Well, no, he didn’t.) Vaguely he had thought that teaching was a worthwhile job, full of long-term rewards and incidental satisfactions. (For some, no doubt, it was.) But well before the end of his first year Josh felt exhausted and demoralized: idealism all withered, like the second scattering of seed in the parable. By then, however, Janice was nearly four years old and Dawn was about to produce Billy. It was not a moment to consider training for some other job, even if he had known what other job to train for.
Four years after that, their rent went up, considerably. In any case, the flat was getting far too small; their third child was a lively toddler. Josh saw advertised a teaching job in Scunthorpe, one of the many in various parts of the country. Happened to mention it, without enthusiasm. Dawn, though, grew instantly excited. She had a married cousin living in that area and knew he thought most highly of it: lovely countryside, lovely people, lovely vegetables (the best he’d ever tasted), and not too far from Lincoln, not too far from York. (Her excitement seemed disproportionate, Josh told her; she herself couldn’t fully understand her feeling of certainty.) Though the prospect of finding Dawn’s relations all over the place held out small inducement to her spouse, something else enticed him more: the discovery that he could buy a house up there, comparing like with like, for roughly a sixth of the price being asked in Camden Town. Josh had a hankering to own his own house, become a man of property. Part of this hankering was due to a cherished dream of which he spoke to no one. He hoped to retire early. Very early. Perhaps at forty. (He was thirty-four now. Supposing he had to spend another thirty-one years teaching parts of speech, and composition, and comprehension—and Oliver Twist and Treasure Island—to a load of kids who were even more bored by the whole affair than he was; and most of whom, he guessed, referred to him as ‘Weedy Heath’ behind his back, judging from the few who brazenly whispered or even called it out in the playground and the classroom? Sixty-two more batches of end-of-term reports! Well, he couldn’t face it; he would rather kill himself, quite literally!) And owning the few square yards on which you lived, your own demonstrable patch of territory, would clearly confer a sense of security. One day he hoped to write some novels. In the meantime, with only a small mortgage and the lower cost of living which almost certainly went with it, his six-year plan was practically a reality. No longer just a dream.
He found that suddenly, like Dawn, he had a very strong hunch about it.
And to begin with, the novelty of being in a new place and of having their own home to do up and improve certainly rendered life more enjoyable. But after a few years he had to admit he was missing London; and Dawn, uncharacteristically, began to complain about the difficulty of making ends meet; about the children not getting proper holidays or enough decent clothing and footwear. Unhappily, Josh hadn’t risen far in his profession.
Yet he devised two ways of making the family budget stretch. He gave up smoking; and, unbeknownst to Dawn, he started betting.
Soon he was heavily in debt.
In 1976, finding it increasingly difficult to keep up repayments to the building society, not to mention repayments to the bookmaker, not to mention repayments on their many hire-purchase commitments, Josh put down their name on the council’s housing list. He told his colleagues he didn’t approve of people becoming slaves to their possessions.
In 1978 they moved to their present flat. For four nights running Dawn cried herself to sleep, because she’d had to leave her garden.
(Following this move, Josh took no further interest in any scheme of decoration; he left both choice and application to his wife and daughter. The flat in Camden Town and the house in Cliff Gardens had been full of bold effects, a daring use of colour more eye-catching than cosy. Now it was Dawn’s taste, modified only slightly by Janice’s, which, after fourteen years, reasserted itself. Josh thought it supremely fitting, but knew he had no right to put this into words, to a council flat in Scunthorpe. Well, anyway—who cared?)
In 1979 he had a brief affair with one of the fifth-year girls at school. He didn’t make her pregnant; for one thing, he had long since been sterilized. But she boasted among her friends about her latest conquest; and then boasted to her mother. Ten minutes afterwards her father was on the telephone to the headmaster’s home. The following morning Josh was sent for after assembly. (He remembered, for some reason, that the hymn had been, ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways.’) There were raised voices in the study. Josh left the school at five minutes to ten.
Strangely enough, he had never even fancied the girl—well, not greatly. She was a cocky bit of baggage, far inferior, both in looks and personality, to anyone like his own Janice. And even before he took her to the woods the first time he had known he wouldn’t be able to rely on her discretion. He had hardly been unaware of the risk he was taking.
But at least, thank God, it never came to court.
Naturally he didn’t tell Dawn the true reason for his ‘resignation’—what mistake were we on by this time? But she discovered it, anyway. In the first place one of the local newspapers somehow got wind of the incident and in the second she received an anonymous phone call: a woman: “I just thought, Mrs Heath, that you ought to know…”
“Well, it was partly your own fault, in any case,” he screamed at her at last. (The three children were huddled in the kitchen of the thin-walled flat.) “I thought you used to enjoy sex. It isn’t me that’s changed!”
Dawn had a minor breakdown. (Up to now, he had never looked after her so attentively; she had never shown less interest in his looking after her at all. But as if to compensate, the children, despite their knowledge, responded to him warmly and with a mutely sympathetic affection that was truly, as he realized even at the time, the one thing he’d been allowed to salvage from the wreck.) Yet it was less due to his own ministrations that she finally recovered, or to the doctor’s, than to those of the vicar in Crosby. St Matthew’s wasn’t the nearest church to where the Heaths lived. None of them, indeed, would ever have had much reason to pass it: Frodingham Road was long and the far end of it frankly rather dreary. Added to which, St Matthew’s was in a side street and anyone who didn’t live nearby might have remained in ignorance of it for ever. Anyway, Dawn hadn’t set foot inside a church since she was married, and even then it was her parents who’d insisted upon that. (Though heaven knew why—they certainly hadn’t followed it through, regarding christenings for the children. Nor had Josh’s parents. Well, they in fact had terminated all ties, together with any hope of an inheritance.) But in recent weeks Dawn had turned into an aimless wanderer and Mr Apsbury had found her sitting with her head down, sobbing, all alone in the nave on a Wednesday afternoon when “but for the grace of God, my child, the place should really have been locked.” Mr Apsbury was silver-haired, rail-thin, close to retirement—and to death. He was gentle, encouraging, a good listener. Dawn explained why she had been sobbing, left almost nothing out; no other half-hour in her life had been so full of her own words. Throughout her recital Mr Apsbury saw much evidence of God at work. More to the point, he made Dawn see it, too. “We clearly found each other at the right time,” he told her. When, over two hours later, after several cups of tea in the old and rambling vicarage across the road, she eventually went home she walked back to the Precinct without noticing traffic or traffic lights or even the two boys on roller skates who were infuriating the few others on the pavement—and she was smiling, beaming. Josh seriously thought, to begin with, that she was drunk. She kissed him, she hugged him, she kissed and hugged the children. She praised the tea he had cooked, told him he was both a good cook and a good husband. She apologized for her long, long period of apathy, declared herself to be as great a sinner as anybody caught in adultery but swore that a miracle had now occurred and that the five of them we
re going to be the happiest, most united family in the world. Josh then wondered briefly, and almost as seriously, whether her mind had slipped across the border into madness. There at the supper table, over the baked fish and the mashed potato and before her three embarrassed children, she freely forgave him, forgave him everything, and humbly besought his own forgiveness and the forgiveness of them all.
That night she allowed, even encouraged, Josh to make love to her because she wanted to be generous in every way she could.
He didn’t much enjoy it.
In most other areas her generosity survived the time when inevitably her exhilaration left her and was replaced by something steadier.
Furthermore, within a fortnight the children had all been baptized and she and they were being prepared for confirmation. Since the reverend gentleman would soon be leaving Scunthorpe—a fact which desolated her when first she heard it—and the four of them were the only candidates, the course was an abbreviated one. Josh once told her that her renewed withdrawal from sex was a way of getting back at him for not sharing in her belief and for not being so accommodating as their children. He privately allowed, however, that if this were so, it was probably unconscious. She took her religion with almost frightening gravity. “Thou shalt not be recalcitrant!” he informed Janice on one occasion in her mother’s hearing after some minor misdemeanour. Dawn was exceedingly put out. She said that he’d been making a mockery of God and Moses and the Ten Commandments.
Such Men Are Dangerous Page 9
