by Tim Parks
But did he really want to go upstairs? Did Mary really want to come downstairs for a drink and a chat? And if the house was so beautiful, and the thought of the united family so reassuring, how unhappy must he have been to have left in the first place? Then again, if Mary didn’t really want, and if he also didn’t really want, then why did they keep making these attempts, why did they keep wanting to want?
Thomas paced the garden for a while, then went inside. He really was at a loss now, picking things up and putting them down. An old photograph of Sally on her birthday. A few CDs, things they had bought twenty years ago. He started to climb the stairs, but stopped when he heard whimpering. Kwangjo was snivelling and his sister was whispering to him. Thomas listened. How many times had he listened outside his kids’ bedrooms? Soon there would be the grandchildren, Mary had said. The voices were quietly intense, speaking in a language he didn’t know. What on earth were they doing here? Thomas suddenly asked himself. Why on earth had Mary agreed to have two Korean children here, at this of all moments?
The little boy went on whimpering. His older sister went on comforting. They were sounds full of tenderness and sentiment. But nothing to do with me, Thomas thought. Turning round, he found his car keys beside The Hay Wain, slipped his laptop back in his bag, let himself out and headed for the car.
STORMING THE TOWER
I fell in love with Thomas because he was smart and bright and bushy-tailed, and also there was something charmingly vulnerable and yielding about him. It did not seem to me he had much experience sexually. It did not seem to me he had much experience at all. When I first saw him across the table in St Chad’s it was obvious he was longing for someone to take him over. He had no idea how to achieve the ambitions he had set his heart on and very little idea how to look after himself in general. I got his phone number from Joey, who had the room next to his, and invited him to the cinema. It was a Spanish film with subtitles. Halfway through the movie I put a hand on his leg. Later we went back to my place.
He didn’t know much about sex, but I felt I could trust him. He was quite moral and had old-fashioned ideas. He was shocked that I was still renting a room in my old boyfriend’s flat. I liked that because it was a statement that he wanted a relationship. Thomas didn’t take sex lightly. It seems he had an on and off relationship with an old girlfriend in Bristol, but he had been trying to leave her for years, he said. She was a wonderful person, but not right for him. I liked this too. I liked the idea that I was helping him to break a relationship that was holding him back.
Almost at once we were having a lot of fun. I took a bottle of bubbly round to his miserable room in the college dorm. There was an empty vodka bottle on the floor by the unmade bed and clothes that needed washing. I felt I could help him. We were twenty-two. I liked all this. We were made for each other.
These were good times. We walked all over town. I did a lot of fancy cooking for him. He had no notion of a proper diet. After ten days we were living together and I suppose after a year we knew we were going to marry, which we did, in Bristol, about eighteen months after we met. His father, who was a C of E clergyman, married us. Not that we never argued. We had furious arguments about the most stupid things. Films we didn’t agree about. Politics. I remember every time we yelled at each other Thomas thought the relationship must be over. But I taught him that arguments were just part of getting on. It seemed odd to me he had never realised that. I suppose his parents had been too goody-goody to argue. They kept it all bottled up.
But this is not what I want to write about. Or, I mean, at this rate I would fill the Encyclopaedia Britannica if I told the whole endless saga between the marriage certificate and the separation papers. I just want the essence of it. To explore the ramifications would require more energy than I can muster these days. You might ask if a thing with ramifications – a sort of Gothic castle of a marriage, with cobwebby banqueting halls and secret passages, overgrown rose gardens and spinning wheels with dangerous needles in dusty disused bedrooms – can really have an essence. But I think it can. Or at least a principle that caused the ramifications, that made us start a garden then let it go to seed, or set out a banquet and then leave the wedding cake to rot. And this principle was that Thomas had grown up being a good boy for his mother and then a sinner on the side, and that is exactly what he started doing with me. He couldn’t help himself. He is a pathological case.
But first things first. To start with, Thomas just needed to learn to dress better, wash better, shop better, eat better. He had no idea how to buy a second-hand car or find a flat to rent. One car he bought stopped in the rain with my parents in it on the way back from the station. Another lost its bonnet when Thomas was driving it away from the guy he’d bought it from. All of a sudden the bonnet just flew up and over the car. We were lucky there wasn’t a cyclist behind, waiting to get killed.
Thomas let people walk all over him. His boss at work. His parents. One example will do for all. When he got his first job in Manchester we had rented a place from an old Hungarian and his wife in Moss Side. They were gloomily religious with little Madonnas and photos of the Pope all over the place, but about as miserly as folks can be. Basically, we just had the upstairs of the house, they the downstairs, with no real separation between us. This meant they had total control of our heating, the cost of which was to be included in the very steep rent. Of course they scrimped. Even when the heating was on, you shivered. When it was off your only chance was to keep a hot-water bottle on your lap under a mountain of blankets. Then in early May these two old skinflints announced they were off to Majorca for their annual holiday, and since all controls to the boiler were in their kitchen and since their kitchen and sitting room would be locked, for privacy, the heating would be off for two weeks.
I remember it snowed in Manchester that year on May the first. ‘You’ve got to go down and tell them we won’t accept it,’ I told Thomas. He hated any kind of confrontation. He just didn’t have the stomach for it. Still, he went. I suppose I shamed him into going. Needless to say, he didn’t get anywhere. ‘They won’t budge,’ he said. ‘But you’ve only been at it five minutes,’ I protested. ‘You can’t give up when you’ve barely started.’
Our landlords were leaving at seven the following morning. They had a taxi booked for the airport. ‘Set the alarm for six and go down and simply demand that they give us access to the boiler. It will be freezing at six. They can’t say no.’
Actually it was freezing all night. We slept under at least four blankets. This was before everyone had quilts. The crazy thing was that the person who would suffer most without the heating was Thomas. He always had frozen feet. But he was more worried about confronting these old Eastern-bloc bigots than dying of cold.
We woke at six. Down he went, shivering, and in just two minutes he was back. ‘They absolutely won’t leave us the keys for the heating,’ he explained. ‘They say it would ruin them. Can you believe they’re filling their suitcases with tins of luncheon meat. To take to Majorca!’
I threw off the blankets, rushed downstairs in my nightdress and told those old crones I was going to lie in the street in front of their taxi and make a scene they would never live down. How could they surround themselves with Jesuses and Marys and treat us like this?
They looked terrified; they were two bent and stooped old scrooges who spent the days in their kitchen sitting by their Aga, as if we were in one of those Tolstoy stories where peasants sleep on the stove. ‘And don’t imagine I won’t, because I will!’ I yelled. ‘I’m even looking forward to shaming you. I’m going to scream my head off.’ It was ten to seven and raining heavily. They gave us the keys to the house. For two weeks, while they had miserable weather in Majorca, we roasted.
Thomas loved to tell this story. And others like it. At dinner parties with his friends. He was proud of me. Yet the more the story got told, the more I sounded slightly eccentric, bizarre, even a loose cannon, and what he never realised was that I had to be like
this to make up for his being such a wimp, such a good boy, and such a sneak too. It would be the same throughout the whole marriage. I decided when we moved and where we went. I found the house we rented, then the houses we bought. I haggled over the prices. I decided when it was time to have a child. Not because I was bossy. The picture he would paint to his friends of a henpecked man having affairs because he was pushed around at home was absolutely false. Simply, he couldn’t decide; couldn’t even decide who he was, I think. He didn’t know what he wanted. Twenty years into this marriage, one of his friends said to me, ‘You do realise Thomas is having an affair, don’t you, Mary?’ I denied it out of loyalty. When I told Thomas, he said, ‘With friends like that, who needs enemies?’ ‘But is it true?’ ‘Of course it isn’t,’ he said. ‘For Christ’s sake!’
I knew he was lying. At the same time, I think I wanted him to lie. I wanted to believe he was the good boy, the innocent boy he had been when we met, the boy I could rely on. All the same, an idiot could see that something had changed. He wasn’t frank any more. So maybe here we are getting close to the principle behind the Gothic castle of our marriage with its endless bits added on to make it liveable when really it should have been pulled down years before. I confronted the world for Thomas, who was incapable of confronting it. But I couldn’t confront him, and meantime he presented the world with a completely false picture of me.
Of course the main addition to our life were the children. Two wonderful children. I loved Thomas as a father. His good-boy character was positive in that department and perhaps all the stronger for not knowing who he was in others. Yes, I reckon it was a relief for Thomas to be a father and to know what a father’s responsibilities are, and it was a relief for me to love him as a father and see him doing what a father ought to do. I think he loved me as a mother, too. So two splendid new wings were added to our castle. And who is going to bring down a stately home they have just added to, who is going to confront a husband when they have just had a child, are completely vulnerable emotionally and, above all, economically?
To sum up, then: he was proud of my spirit, but found marriage inhibiting. I loved the father he was, but he humiliated me. We still loved each other, I think, maybe, but he wanted to be shot of love; his only problem was that if he left me it would look like he had behaved badly. Thomas was obsessed with whether people thought of him as good or bad, whereas I really couldn’t care less. I couldn’t give a damn. It doesn’t matter to me what people think. I just want to understand what happened, or understand a little better.
So, to have done, I’ll go straight to the moment that keeps coming back and back in my mind, the moment that decided it all, that pulled away the foundation stone, I reckon, which is also the moment I least understand: when he insisted we go to see a therapist.
I was suspicious from the start. It seemed to me this was a card he was playing with the kids. The kids knew now that he had had an affair. Let’s leave aside the details. It certainly wasn’t me who told them. Now, proposing therapy, he could present himself as good again, as the guy who was trying to solve things. In fact, when I resisted, the kids pressed me to go. He had scored a point.
I went but I was angry. If he wanted to get the marriage back together he could take me on holiday or just be nicer in general. Not to mention the money. Here was a guy who was generally tight with money, paying a fortune for this therapist who worked in tandem with another therapist who was going to ‘observe’ us from behind some kind of two-way mirror. I was only going because if I didn’t the kids would say I was in the wrong. In the car on the way he said, ‘You’re wearing muddy shoes.’ I said, ‘So what? I just took the dog out.’ He said, ‘You might as well just announce out loud that you don’t want to be there. You’ll dirty their floor.’ ‘Good,’ I said. ‘They’re being paid enough to employ a cleaner, aren’t they?’
The therapist tried to be a mix of uncle, priest and friend. He had a strong Liverpool accent. I found him creepy. He refused to condemn Thomas for having affairs. Needless to say, Thomas did some crying to give the impression he cared. Thomas has this thing that if he presents himself as overwhelmed by his problems, above all overwhelmed by the impossibility of making up his mind about things, then people will take pity and forgive him. He always breaks down in tears. It’s not very helpful.
The therapist went out to consult the woman observing from the other side of the mirror in the wall. He was a long time coming back and I thought probably they wanted to watch us on our own to see how we reacted to the first part of the session. I said how dingy the furniture was, what a miserable decor in general. How were you supposed to cheer up a relationship in a sad place like this?
When he came back I told the therapist I had given Thomas all the freedom any man could possibly ask for; perhaps he had had a dozen mistresses, I don’t know, there was no lack of opportunity. So I couldn’t see what more he was asking of me. Then the therapist said maybe freedom wasn’t what Thomas wanted and of course Thomas immediately nodded and said no, it wasn’t, and I realised then that the two of them had ganged up against me and it wasn’t worth going on.
After that first session Thomas seemed pleased with himself. He had his virtuous cap back on. Maybe he saw the £250 as some kind of penitence. It irritated me to think of that cash going to waste when there were so many other things to spend it on. What can I say? I didn’t see any improvement in our relationship over the following weeks. Essentially, Thomas kept out of my way and I returned the compliment.
At the second session, the therapist asked how we had reacted when our love started to stall and we lost direction. I said I had frequently invited Thomas to come away on holiday with me up to the Highlands. The therapist asked Thomas why he hadn’t agreed to these holidays, and Thomas said because I was always inviting him to places I knew well and he didn’t. Places where I had family. Instead he had invited me to India, which would be new to both of us. I began to explain that I had no desire to spend my holidays sweltering in impossible heat and confronted with abject poverty. Then I stopped. There was no point in going on. I wasn’t saying what I really felt and I wasn’t talking about what really happened between us. ‘I’m going,’ I said. ‘I don’t need this.’
I stood up. It was good to see the therapist taken by surprise and Thomas with the wind falling out of his virtuous sails. ‘If he wants me,’ I said, ‘he can storm this tower to win me back.’ And I walked out. Back home, in the kitchen, Thomas came from behind while I was cooking and said, okay, he’d be happy to come on a holiday with me to the Highlands. He put a hand on my shoulder and tried to turn me to face him, but I said it was far too late for that stuff now.
There it is, then. That was the therapy. And what I don’t understand about it is what really happened then, when I stood up in the therapist’s gloomy office and said that stuff about storming the tower. The fact is I didn’t know whether Thomas really wanted to get things going between us again, or whether he was just waiting to be told that the marriage couldn’t be saved and he wouldn’t be criticised for leaving. If that was the case, why did I play into his hands as I did? Did I do it on purpose? And what does it mean to say you did something on purpose if you don’t know if you did? What kind of purpose is that? I also don’t understand why, when I walked out on the therapy, giving him the moral high ground and the signal he wanted, he didn’t walk out on me right away. Why wait two miserable years more? Then why did I say those words about storming a tower? Could I really imagine him on his knees with his arms round my legs? Or buying flowers for me every day? Did I even want that? And why was I a tower he had to storm? Why didn’t I offer a garden he could discover?
I couldn’t. I acted how I had to act. He always wanted me to be someone else, but I am who I am. I did what I did. I couldn’t change who I was.
So why do I regret it? Or do I? Does it ever make sense to regret the things you feel you have to do?
Does it make sense to want things to make sense, when all that
really matters is to set your mind at rest?
Perhaps the truth is that when you live with someone who doesn’t know who he is you pretty soon lose your own identity too. You have to retreat into a tower to feel you’re anyone at all. You have to say: if you want me you’ll have to become the kind of hero who can storm a tower, instead of a wimp who doesn’t …
Thomas stopped. After a long pause he put his pen down. He was getting nowhere. Mary remained a complete enigma.
Perhaps you had better stick to your own side of the story, he decided.
WINNER
People are successful or they are failures. There are no two ways about that. If you apply for a job, for example, you either get it or you don’t. And if you get it, you either do well at the job, or you don’t, you make a career of it, always on the rise, or you get stuck in some paper-pushing backwater. These distinctions are very clear. Who would dispute them? In Thomas’s family it is good to be successful. He and Mary are agreed on that. They met at a good university where they were considered high achievers. They were high achievers. Now their children are expected to do well at school. Not that Thomas and Mary are obsessed. They don’t want to make monsters of their offspring with cramming courses and trying to get them into top schools. They want them to be normal. It is simply expected that whenever they do something, they will do it well. Play the piano well, do their exams well, write good essays, play smart football, tennis, hockey, etc. Not that they are punished or ever would be if they didn’t do well, having given of their best. Thomas and Mary are not slave drivers. They are not unkind. But inevitably there would be a certain disappointment, if only in sympathy, as it were, with the child’s disappointment. Who doesn’t want to be successful? The truth is, Thomas and Mary find it hard to think of themselves and their children, individually or as a group, as failures.
