by Tim Parks
I slept soundly in the guest room. Mrs P had three more bouts of vomiting during the night. She had been lucid then, the nurses told me, and calm, but when I went to her around eight she was not speaking and would not speak again; there was a slight squeeze of the hand, perhaps, before ten o’clock, the trace of a smile, maybe, until midday, after which it was left for those friends and family members who came to stand and sit in silence, waiting and watching and listening and wondering whether each quavering breath would be the last until, at last, around 3.20, it was. Half a dozen of us were present, holding our breath to hear if Mrs P was merely holding hers. But when we breathed again, she did not. I had her hand in mine and after some minutes, leaning my head on the bed rail, my eyes, though full of tears, finally focused on the notice on the opposite wall:
Visitors are warned that all doors, including patio doors, will be closed and locked before 10 p.m. in order that the security alarm system can be turned on for the night.
I looked at my watch. That moment was six and a half hours away. It would come. There was no need for faith.
THE WEDDING PLANT
Someone had given them a plant for their wedding. Neither Thomas nor Mary could remember who. It was there with the other presents when they collected them from his father’s house after the brief honeymoon: a slim grey tropical trunk with long thin leaves radiating outwards then drooping under their own weight to pointed tips. The leaves were dark green but edged with a purple red. It was elegant and quietly exotic. They called it the wedding plant.
Thomas looked after the plants. This was partly because, having only to walk to work at that point, he had more time morning and early evening and partly because he loved anything to do with gardening. Both of them felt plants were important. So their window boxes had petunias, fuchsias, geraniums, forsythia and various ivies, while in the flat itself they brought together all the usual suspects: spider plants, a wandering Jew, dieffenbachia, philodendron, a rubber plant, a snake plant and in the bathroom a maidenhair fern in a hanging basket. They needed constant attention. Thomas watered them and sprayed the leaves. The wedding plant seemed to attract more dust than the others and every couple of weeks he would clean it, wrapping each leaf near the trunk in a damp cloth, then pulling the cloth gently towards the tip so that the whole leaf slid through. Afterwards the plant shone darkly.
With the long commute to her job in town, Mary didn’t get so involved, but she seemed to know more. She gave advice. She warned Thomas when a plant needed repotting. She advised him of the existence of stick fertilisers; they had to be pushed into the earth near the trunk and left to dissolve there. Sometimes she chose attractive pots, like the painted wall pots she brought back from a business trip to Greece that he put ivy in. When the wedding plant’s leaf tips turned yellow, that meant it had too much water. When they drooped, that meant it hadn’t got enough. After a while Thomas began to find it all rather time consuming.
Moving down to Bristol a few years into the marriage, it seemed crazy to try to load all the plants in the car. They just took the wedding plant. At this point they had learned its real name was Dracaena marginata, or the Madagascar dragon tree. ‘So easy to keep, it’s hard to kill,’ the book said. They chuckled over that. ‘Not a bad plant to give at a wedding, then,’ Thomas said. But when the car broke down on the M6 they forgot the Madagascar dragon was now lying on its side in direct superheated sunlight. It lay there for hours. Two days later all the leaves had fallen off.
‘Cooked!’ Mary laughed. ‘I didn’t like it that much anyway.’
Thomas, troubled, took the pot outside.
They had a garden now. Or rather, each household in the small block was allotted a patch of the ground behind. They seeded a lawn but it never really took. The thin wire fence between themselves and the open country offered no resistance to an astonishing variety of weeds. At first they worked side by side, on their knees, pulling the damn things out. Mary didn’t want to use weedkiller. But it was no good. So they tried the weedkiller, but now there was hardly any grass. With a child to look after, they didn’t have the energy to reseed. They would just mow whatever came up, take life as it comes. Meanwhile, the wedding plant had sprouted again.
This was an exciting surprise. Thomas had dumped the plant in the corner of the garden beside the compost. Cleaning up, in spring, he saw that the bare trunk had two sprouts on it and brought it back into the house. ‘The wedding plant is not dead!’ he announced, on settling it in a new pot. Now, rather than one trunk radiating leaves, there were two fresh new trunks sprouting from the withered older one and turning upwards alongside it, so that eventually two umbrellas of leaves hung down. ‘We’re multiplying, Goat!’ Mary cried and opened a bottle of bubbly.
The leaves of the Madagascar dragon, a neighbour warned them, are poisonous to cats and dogs. Learning this, Mary worried that the plant might be toxic for the children too; they were at the toddling stage. She would gladly have got rid of it. But Thomas had allowed a vague symbolism to get a grip on him. He moved the plant to inaccessible positions. He kept it in the spare room where he sometimes worked in the evening. But though the wedding plant survived, it would not flourish as it had before. This was something to do, Thomas thought, with the way the two new shoots had come out of the trunk in diametrically opposite positions, so that whichever way you stood the plant in relation to the light, one of the two was always at a disadvantage. Thomas turned it round regularly, but this only seemed to cause confusion. The two trunks were getting a little twisted, as if chasing away from each other around the old trunk. With the second child sleeping badly, Mary had far too much on her plate to worry about such trivia.
Over the years there would be blight to deal with, and infestation. Sometimes the leaves turned brown. Once there was mealybug and on another occasion there was scale. Thomas followed instructions from gardening books and applied the appropriate treatments. The plant seemed determined to survive, but refused to thrive. Once, repotting it, he found a large black grub among the roots and dug it out with a fork. Perhaps that was the problem. He trimmed the roots and gave the plant fresh soil and fertiliser, but it made no difference. The wedding plant languished on, in the spare room, out of the reach of cats and dogs and children.
They moved north again, to just outside Manchester. The children were big enough now for Thomas and Mary not to have to worry about poisonous leaves. But the plant had grown too gnarled and wizened for them to want to show it off in the new sitting room with the new furniture. ‘It makes you sad just to look at it,’ Mary laughed. She didn’t understand why Thomas didn’t just chuck the ugly thing away. He found a corner for it in the lean-to greenhouse and tried to remember to water it from time to time. Why had he let the plant assume this special importance? But once you had fallen into that trap, how could you reverse the process, especially when the marriage did seem to be in much the same state as the Madagascar dragon?
When exactly did the wedding plant die? Thomas couldn’t have said. Some years later a therapist asked the same question. Or rather he asked, ‘When was it exactly you both realised your marriage was in rocky waters?’ Some such metaphor. Neither had really known how to answer. In an email Mary told him, ‘I knew I should have left you pretty soon after Sally was born. You gave me such bad feelings. But how could I do that with a newborn baby in the house?’ Absurdly, reading this message, which dated the crisis far earlier than he would ever have thought possible, Thomas could not help remembering that that was when the wedding plant was out in the cold by the compost heap.
I will never give a plant as a wedding gift, Thomas vowed. Very occasionally, though, the fact that he cannot recall actually seeing their wedding plant dead and cannot remember having removed it from its pot and placed it in the composter, or simply in the bin, starts him wondering whether perhaps that Madagascar dragon isn’t still alive somewhere, in a place neither he nor Mary knows how to find.
WHEREOF ONE CANNOT SPEAK
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��s fanciful, because he was gay, I know, but I always wondered whether it wasn’t the female orgasm that prompted Wittgenstein to say, ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’; to make a point, that is, with those bossy italics he loved, of saying that we mustn’t say anything about the things we can’t, technically, know anything about; we mustn’t shoot our mouths off, so to speak, us men, in the dark. And in fact, so far as I’m aware, Wittgenstein never did say anything about the female orgasm.
But when did people ever accept that a can’t is a mustn’t? And isn’t the injunction superfluous, since if we really can’t, logically we won’t, and hence don’t need the mustn’t. Or rather, we might speak of something, we might suppose we’re speaking of the thing whereof we cannot speak, but, logically, it won’t be that thing we’re speaking of, will it, since we can’t? In any event, the truth is that my friend Thomas went through a phase – our tennis days – when almost the only thing he talked about, or wanted to talk about, or imagined he was talking about, was the female orgasm, though maybe what it was all really about in the end was something entirely different.
Our tennis days lasted about eight years. Tuesday evenings. Not our salad days. More our stewing forties. Thomas had a girlfriend – a string of girlfriends, to tell the truth – and was childishly eager to talk about them. Or rather, about sex with them. It was as if, for this interval of his life – and it was a phase that had a definite beginning and a very definite end – the secret and mystery of everything, of all the things Wittgenstein ordered us we must not shoot our mouths off about, had been concealed and condensed in the experience of sex, and sex itself condensed and concealed and, as it were, ciphered in the female orgasm, in the absence of which Thomas was always anxious that sex hadn’t really happened, that life wasn’t really happening; and basically the old chestnut that Thomas just couldn’t stop seeking to crack was: how could you ever know if she has or she hasn’t … come – and if you can’t know, how can you ever be sure that sex, transformative, visionary sex – the kind one no longer had with one’s wife – has truly taken place?
At first I couldn’t understand why confirmation of orgasm was such an issue for Thomas, since surely what mattered was my friend’s – more tennis partner than friend, since we never met in other circumstances – own experience of the embrace; I don’t mean, crassly, his physical pleasure, his orgasm, which I took for granted, but, more generously, his broader sense of a shared satisfaction in the whole exchange, hence mutual gratification, mutual gratitude.
Shouldn’t that be enough?
Later, however, over beers in the tennis club bar after bashing the ball back and forth for an hour or so, I began to appreciate that the question of female orgasm had to do with Thomas’s sense of guilt. In bed with his wife, on the now rare occasions they made love, it hardly crossed Thomas’s mind to worry whether this long-suffering woman, mother of his children, had achieved orgasm; he assumed from certain textbook signs that she did, and was thankful for it. But when he had a girlfriend on the go, it was important for Thomas that something beautiful, even sacred, should occur; otherwise the transgression involved in cheating on his wife (cheating was his word, never mine; he hated cheating his wife, he said) was merely squalid. So female orgasm, or rather his belief that something extreme and beautiful had happened – because rightly or wrongly Thomas had come to feel that female orgasm was supremely beautiful and even sacred – became essential to him.
But how could you know?
You couldn’t, I told him.
Thomas found this hard. There was a woman, girl rather, for Thomas rarely went for women more than half his age, who almost never came. Who made it clear she hadn’t come. Who expressed her frustration that she hadn’t come. Who let him know that she was close to coming, but then felt all the more let down when she didn’t, who wept, even – I’ve lost it, I’ve lost it! – but then occasionally did come and shouted loudly and covered him with grateful kisses. Thomas – we usually drank lager after our efforts on the tennis court – very much appreciated this scenario, which I have to confess I personally would have found wearisome to a degree. He appreciated, he said, the importance the girl attached to orgasm, her striving for it, her evident honesty in admitting that she hadn’t got there and even in criticising him for her failure to get there, since one of the problems, Thomas freely confessed, was that the dear thing became so agitated if she got anywhere near that he just couldn’t hang on and hence, inevitably, lost his umph. And again he appreciated, he said, her happiness and gratitude when it did happen, or when she said it happened – he worried that she might sometimes fake it to encourage him, as it were, to convince him she wasn’t a lost cause – shouting so loud, etc.; he liked, that is, or felt at home with, the notion that on this occasion at least their illicit antics had been blessed, while on other occasions they hadn’t, in which case the penitential atmosphere that her frustration created seemed the right feeling for him to take back to the family hearth, usually at one, or two, or even three o’clock in the morning.
All this was discussed back and forth at great length at a tennis club on the outskirts of Manchester. Eventually I formulated for Thomas what I hoped was a sensible response to his perplexity: might it not be, I suggested, that precisely his anxiety that she orgasm, once transmitted to his girlfriend, made its occurrence unlikely, however great the affection and technical know-how he lavished on her? He wasn’t convinced: there had been, he reminded me, the previous girlfriend, the oldest of the tribe, pretty much his own age, whom he had actually left, at least in part, because she reached orgasm so loudly and above all so immediately as to make him feel superfluous. This annoyed Thomas considerably. Barely was penetration achieved, or not even, and there she was yelling and thrashing and orgasming. Apparently. Though how could you believe it, when really he had offered nothing to make it happen? He very much preferred the travails of the younger girl.
‘Thomas,’ I put it to him, ‘it seems to me perhaps that when betraying your wife you have to believe that the beauty you contribute to creating – your beloved’s, er, ecstasy, supposed ecstasy – cancels out the transgression you can’t help feeling guilty of. All this instead of just enjoying it. So why not stop the futile worrying and have a good time? Maybe it will help you get on with your wife better.’
Thomas listened carefully, but protested I was on quite the wrong track. It was more complicated than guilt, he said. Rather it was anger that life had forced him into a position where he had had to assume the baddy’s role, since domestic life had become so painful he really didn’t see how he could live without these adventures. And within this scenario, he had got it into his head, however irrationally – into his blood and bones, even – that only female orgasm could … heal him. Of that anger.
After making this grandiose statement, he began to talk technical, almost like a doctor exploring possible clinical treatments. He talked clitorises and G-spots and condoms and pills and jellies and sex toys, girls who came this way, if they really did, and girls who came that, if their cries and whispers were to be credited; with long and loving cunnilingus, a finger eased into the anus perhaps, or with deep and vigorous penetration, her knees maybe forced back almost to her silky hair. Thomas warmed to these descriptions, leaning excitedly across the table as if he needed to persuade me – and, together with me, himself, of course – of the transformative power of what had occurred, as if his world could be declared radically changed in all its premises thanks to the achievement of female orgasm.
Meantime it was important, I noticed, that I nod my head regularly in acknowledgement, to keep him going, as it were, to keep him believing in what he described; but in the end, invariably, he would sit back and sigh. Had she really come? He didn’t know. And naturally, he said, he would feel stupid actually asking. Asking a woman if she had really come was tantamount to accusing her of faking, or alternatively to letting her know you felt insecure. Neither of which was exactly the case. He just wanted to
know that the experience had been special, otherwise he felt somehow wrong, or perhaps weak was a better word. Anyway depressed, not good.
‘You should stop having affairs,’ I told him. ‘And sort out your marriage.’
That was impossible, he said.
Then there was Sylvia.
I should say that I had reached a point where I felt our tennis days were coming to an end. Thomas was unfit, he was drinking too much, yet he could never bear losing and often contested the most obvious calls. I was wearying of this, although I always felt an affection for Thomas that even now I can’t explain. He lived intensely, his unhappiness was genuine, and the person who suffered most from his misbehaviour was always himself. At the same time, with his second and youngest child now in his mid-teens, the marriage that had troubled but also formed him for so many years was clearly reaching its end.
‘Sylvia is a complete mystery,’ he said, some weeks after the advent of this new flame. He was radiant.
Sylvia was twenty-two years younger than Thomas. She worked in the same company as him, but not in his division. They had known each other on the most casual terms for three or four years, but only recently dated. I have no idea at all what she feels, he said. The two met on Fridays, cooked together at her place, something neither of them knew how to do, danced to stuff she pulled up on YouTube, another activity neither of them had any proficiency in, and after some resistance on her part – three Fridays, to be precise – made love.
Here was the novelty. It was not that Sylvia came or didn’t come, that she struggled, or overperformed, faked, or expressed frustration, or resignation. She simply didn’t seem interested in the question of orgasm at all. Any attempt to discuss her pleasure or his, or indeed any of the techniques and tribulations of sex, produced nothing but indulgent smiles. She couldn’t care less. It was as if she wasn’t properly aware that there was such a thing as female orgasm, or if she was, she made no attempt to isolate it from the embrace in general, or indeed the embrace from the dancing, or in the end the dancing from the cooking and the walking home and long drive from centre to suburbs.
